Best Week 2023! War By Other Means!
“Wargame” has always been a wonky category, and as more board games experiment with systems and modes of expression, it only grows flimsier. To wit, today we’re looking at the best titles of 2023 that blur the boundaries of the genre, whether by covering war-adjacent topics or by using card-driven mechanisms traditionally at home in conflict sims. These are the year’s best board games about war… by other means.
Best Week 2023! Puzzle Time!
According to some folks, a puzzle is a game with only one solution. Fortunately for those of us who don’t take such an essentialist approach, dwelling in a deterministic universe means that everything has only one solution. Hence, every game is a puzzle!
Okay, maybe not. Today we’re applying a broader touch. These are my favorite games of 2023 that are all about combinations and solutions; games that feel like puzzles even if they don’t meet certain thresholds. These are the best puzzles and puzzle-alikes of the year.
Best Week 2023! Tricksy!
2023 is the year I learned to love trick-taking games, a process chronicled in my series This Trick-Taking Life. As you can probably imagine, there were a number of contenders for today’s list. Quite a few favorites were left out, including some that were simply too old to qualify. What follows is therefore an imperfect cross-section of a genre that may as well have all been new to me this year, but one that yet reflects my newfound affection for one of our hobby’s oldest genres.
Best Week 2023! Making Memories!
Not every game is meant to be replayed endlessly. Some are valuable for the experience they provide in the moment, generating memories that stick around long after everything has been stuffed back into the box. Which is why this second day of Best Week 2023 is all about the year’s best board games that provided exceptional impressions rather than demanding session after session.
Best Week 2023! Family Stuff!
You know what Space-Biff! has always been about? Family. Okay, it’s more often about board games. So consider today a synthesis. These are the past year’s best board games that I played with my extended family or nine-year-old. They’re light, they’re fluffy, and there’s a good chance they contain anthropomorphic animals in some degree of peril.
Flippin’ Heck
Round these parts, we mostly know Steven Aramini for his 18-card wallet microgames, fare like Circle the Wagons, Sprawlopolis, and Ancient Realm. Now he’s set up his own imprint, Write Stuff Games. While its inaugural title is rather compact, it’s downright massive compared to a wallet game. It’s also one of the best flip-and-write games I’ve played. Ever.
Once More Unto the Omen
Omen is an old friend. I first wrote about John Clowdus’s masterpiece eleven years ago, and swore off repeating that review more than once. We’ve been through good times (the Olympus Edition) and shaky times (the eventual glut of Kolossal spinoffs). I once alienated my brother-in-law by trouncing him a little too thoroughly. When my daughter’s appendix ruptured, I grabbed the first thing off the shelf on my way out the door. Dusty and well-worn, it was Omen I spent the night shuffling, drafting deck after deck, doing anything to keep my mind occupied.
Clowdus recently bought back the rights to Omen. Now he’s rebuilt the game from the ground up. New art, new style, tighter focus. It’s a different experience, in some ways. That’s no surprise for a game that’s always shifted with the times and Clowdus’s evolving design sensibilities. I can’t wholly assess whether it’s the best incarnation of the series; we’ve grown old middle-aged together. But I think it’s great, the work of a designer who can’t quite leave his masterpiece behind.
Age of Blunders
In 2019, a video game named Age of Wonders: Planetfall came out. It was the fifth entry in the Age of Wonders series, a crossbreed of Civilization and Heroes of Might and Magic, and the only non-magical entry thus far. It has since been supplanted by Age of Wonders 4, the sixth entry in this increasingly inaccurately-numbered series.
Now there’s a board game adaptation of this four-year-old video game.
Why? Why is there a board game? I couldn’t tell you. Nor could I tell you why Stepan Opalev, the game’s designer, chose to adapt a series famous for its 4X openness by designing a tableau-builder. Apart from the in-game models that have been ported over as illustrations, Age of Wonders: Planetfall doesn’t capture the first thing about Age of Wonders: Planetfall.
Wingnut Spanner
Brett Sobol and Seth Van Orden seem to have enjoyed Wingspan. Or maybe they didn’t, and that’s how Raising Robots came to resemble Wingspan with the action selection system from Race for the Galaxy. So it goes. Board games are more often about recombination and iteration than they are about innovation. Raising Robots iterates by adding as many icons as possible.
That’s unfair. It also innovates by making me worry about free will.
Space-Cast! #33. Gab on the Clocktower
How much work goes into a successful social deduction game? If Blood on the Clocktower is anything to go by, a whole lot. Today we’re joined by Steven Medway, designer of this long-awaited game about the improper use of timekeeping apparatuses, to discuss unreliable identities, player elimination, and how chaos fosters memorable stories.
SPACE-BIFF! 