The wheel has turned again. And again. Although this installment of New Year, Old Year is a full year late, I’ve already explained my growing reservations with this recurring retrospective, so there’s no reason to belabor the point. Instead, here we are, on the precipice of revisiting the titles I considered the best of 2021. What did I get right? What did I get wrong? The answers may surprise you.

Or they may not. Who can tell. Not me. Either way, we’re doing things a little differently now. Rather than dividing everything into binary right/wrong categories, it seems more helpful to look back on each title in turn. Because sometimes I got things right and wrong at the same time. Nuance, y’all.

Day One! Make Something!

Best Week 2021 followed on the heels of a two-year global pandemic. A global pandemic that has not, in fact, been resolved, but apparently we have decided to collectively forget about all that. The underlying theme of my lists was survival advice, and the mere act of looking back at the trappings of the whole thing — the daily titles, the snippets of internal dialogue, the sheer desperation in my voice — speak to a frayed mental state. Nice.

Day One was about the games that let us build something. An acceptable enough framing after so many of us learned how to bake sourdough.

The biggest misstep in that framing, however, was Magnate: The First City. Not because it didn’t let us build something — it did — but because of the (deliberate) cynicism of the enterprise. Magnate has carved out an odd space in my mind. Despite the overall quality of its gameplay, it remains burdened by a few niggles. It’s overproduced, and my feelings have only curdled further on stacks of plastic miniatures. It’s also rather mathy, with all those stacking bonuses that aren’t always readily visible. As a rule of thumb, if a game requires a calculator, I’d better be punching numbers that get me to the moon. Magnate is still a good game, but it neither fits the intended tone of the day’s list nor leaves me fully satisfied that its immense production is quite as harsh a critique of capitalistic excess as it would like to believe.

Another title that leaves me somewhat fuzzy is Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road, albeit for reasons that are perhaps more meta than they ought to be. This, for me, remains the high-water mark for Fabio Lopiano. Both of his later titles that I’ve played, Autobahn and Merv’s more explicit successor Sankoré: The Pride of Mansa Musa, lean more into the systems complexity, resulting in puzzle boxes that see players wrestling against the game rather than with it. Merv stands out as an unfulfilled promise, a halfway point between interesting action selection and sense of place that Lopiano’s followups simply haven’t made good on.

Want more mixed feelings? I’m also waffling on Imperium Classics/Legends. Years back, I chatted with a young game designer about the possibility of assembling a large-scale 4X civilization game behind the mechanical veneer of a deck-builder. Imperium pretty much does that, and a few of its touches are downright insightful. Shuffling unrest into your deck? Perfect. At the same time, Imperium sure knows how to overburden itself. Multiple decks, an overcomplicated market, lots of downtime between turns… there’s a reason I’m not going to play the sequel, Imperium: Horizons, with more than two players. To some degree, Horizons is the stress test for the system. Will it hold up? Stay tuned.

Here are the easy ones: Faiyum and Brian Boru remain incredible. I would call them overlooked, but it would be more accurate to say they’ve been buried beneath an avalanche of new releases. Revisiting them is like catching up with an old friend over brunch. Faiyum in particular is a strong contender. If I had to do it all over again, it would have been the number-one pick on this list.

Which, of course, tips my hand on Oath somewhat. Last month I hauled it out again to teach to a friend. Unlike most titles, which stick in my head well enough that a quick skim of a cheat sheet will refresh my memory, Oath necessitated a full reread. Once internalized, the experience still grazed the sublime. Minus the irritating combat rules, that is. Those would benefit from some reworking, and seem emblematic of the design as a whole. Whatever the reason, Oath stands in contrast with other Wehrle gigs like Root, Pax Pamir, and even John Company, which boast thematic integrations that makes them run far more smoothly than their complex rules would indicate. They’re intuitive. Oath is many things: fascinating, thrilling, aggravating, three or four thesis statements on historiography. Intuitive it is not. I think it would still qualify for this list. But it should be knocked back a few pegs.

Whew. That’s enough for a whole article. But we’re only one-fifth finished! On the next page, we’re talking about survival.