I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a publisher have more of a bottle rocket year than DVC Games. Home to the design collective Jasper Beatrix — which thankfully avoids the pitfalls of the now-defunct Prospero Hall by offering actual attribution — DVC Games has established itself as a cradle of innovation. Even when their individual titles riff on the familiar, they’re undoubtedly riffs, jazzy little grace notes that bring their own interpretation to the genre.

Which is to say, this is the tightest focus ever featured in Best Week. These folks deserve the plaudits. Just take a look.

#6. Karnak

Designed by Jasper Beatrix. Published by DVC Games.

Like a lot of the titles on today’s list, Karnak is sorta many things. Sorta a stacking game. Sorta an area control game. Sorta a cutthroat contract game. It’s all of those things and none of those things. It’s what you get when a child-pharaoh demands a cool plinth with a rockin’ statue, then changes his mind and instead wants a bunch of sideways pillars over a river. Why? Because the brat is nine years old, that’s why.

In practice, Karnak is a little uneven, although its unevenness is also no small part of its charm. What, you expected the god-king to be consistent? Pshaw. Stacking together strange monuments, only to repurpose some of them into new edifices while others are ossified thanks to obnoxious priests, that’s just how it goes when you’re an ancient architect. No aliens required.

Review: Most Select of Board Games

#5. Medusa’s Garden

Designed by Phil Gross and Jono Naito-Tetro. Self-published.

The only title on this list not strictly published by DVC, Medusa’s Garden was nevertheless crafted and developed by the Jasper Beatrix crew. I suspect the form factor — a deck of cards and a hand mirror — prevented its inclusion as a boxed release. Picture this: a social deduction game, but with none of the pressures that accompany most social deduction games. Instead, it’s presented as a duel between two players: Perseus, who wants to deliver a swift chop to Medusa’s neck, and the famous gorgon herself, lurking among a garden of stone statues, determined to crumble them before Perseus can ruin the party.

A perfect convention game, then, one that sits halfway between performance art and logic puzzle while never once failing to be hilarious. And all that when over half of its participants have the simplest goal of all: stay very, very still.

Review: Nebulae, Medusae… Crownae?

#4. Scream Park

Designed by Jasper Beatrix. Published by DVC Games.

I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to tableau builders, but I contend that ninety percent of the things have no idea why players want to build these spaces in the first place. It isn’t only the brain-tickling pleasure of arranging icons in proximity; it’s the possibility of exploring that space.

Scream Park is a love letter to seasonal haunted houses, and what it understands is that we don’t only want to build the things — we want to get scared silly along with their visitors. That’s why each round concludes with a VIP guest, somebody we as curators must fear in our own right: a fire marshal, a gang of birthday brats, an internet influencer looking to dunk on our subpar effects. We build the space for maximal fright, rejiggering the components from last year’s leftovers, and try to sell this season’s guests on the illusion. It’s silly and satisfying as only a perfect tableau-builder can be.

Review: Fear Factory

#3. Pacts

Designed by Ben Brin. Published by DVC Games.

Pacts is emblematic of this publisher’s whole deal. Designer Ben Brin takes a concept, in this case “I divide, you choose,” jettisons what makes the mechanism tired in every other setting, and gives it new life. There’s nothing here we haven’t seen before, strictly speaking, but every edge has been polished to its finest shine. Or sharpened into a stake, perfect for driving through your opponent’s skull.

Set in Ireland of legend, Pacts has it all. Strange creatures, devil’s bargains, and a surprising number of ways to get ahead. With all the cruft subtracted from the design, what remains is a pared-down but rich experience, a fantastical conflict that occupies less than half an hour but contains enough drama for a game five times its size and duration.

Review: Cutting the Cottage Pie

#2. Signal

Designed by Jasper Beatrix. Published by DVC Games.

If you’d asked me back in March, I would have insisted that Signal would be one of Best Week’s #1 games. Based on first contact fiction — squint a little and you can see the grainy target-cam footage of Arrival — Signal is a cooperative effort between one alien and a crew of translators. Between those two groups and a whole lot of failed experiments, the rules of the alien’s language emerge one line at a time. It’s translatorpunk, to fall back on the trope of slapping -punk onto the back end of an otherwise ill-suited descriptor.

What makes Signal work so well, though, is the sheer variety on display. There are dozens of aliens in the game, each with their own rules. Some want pieces placed in relation to one another; others stack pieces, or use pieces that shove other pieces, or deploy pieces that transmogrify into different colors. The rules are myriad and ever-changing. And it’s up to you to deduce their meaning.

Review: A Desire for More Cows

#1. Here Lies

Designed by Jasper Beatrix, Jakob Maier, and Bobby West. Published by DVC Games.

At a glance, Here Lies is perilously close to Signal. One player takes the role of an aging detective recounting decades-old cold cases. (In one scenario, a millennia-old cold case!) Everybody else gathers round to try and figure out the solution. It’s a blend of locked room mystery, Encyclopedia Brown short stories, and Sherlock Holmes serials.

But what sets it apart from every other detective game is that Here Lies refuses to present one more logic puzzle. Instead, it’s a chance to get creative. You’ll play hangman, draw a picture, summon a snippet of dialogue, or test your vocabulary with some word association. As new evidence trickles onto the table, you’ll draw unexpected conclusions that bring the group inexorably closer to the truth. It’s perhaps the most striking of the Beatrix collective’s titles, a brilliant summation of a design ethos that evokes the game’s literary inspirations while sidestepping the tropes of every board game that came before it. When I first sat down to dig into the box’s contents, I had no idea I was holding a quiet revolution in my hands.

Review: Here Lies Every Other Detective Game

Okay, so there’s a real problem on our hands, because I want you, the reader, to give me your own recommendations. But this is the narrowest topic ever featured in Best Week. So perhaps share your own top publisher of the year, complete with examples? Who opened your eyes to new possibilities over the past twelve months? Go wild.

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