You tell me: Best (so far) of 2011....

We're almost halfway through the year and I sure haven't played that many of the 2011 releases (So far this year I seem to be buying older games that came out before 2010.)  But of the few I own or have played, here are my favourites:

Runner-ups:

Alien Frontiers - Okay, so this has been out for over a year.  But for awhile it was impossible to grab a copy of this tremendously fun dice-fest.  It can be a little long with beginners, but games are always close and there is always room for clever and nasty manouevres.  And it's got the nicest production values I've seen of any game in the last 5 years!

Airlines Europe - I've mentioned this game many times but the Alan Moon re-do of Union Pacific/Airlines is tighter on turns, simpler to understand, and the shortest in the series by far.  It's subtle and challenging and just fantastic.





My favourite so far:

Mord Im Arosa - This rather silly game of dropping cubes in the top of a tower and listening to where they fall is one of the cleverest, most orginal games to come out in years.  There's tons of interaction and a real risk and reward balance to the game.  But who cares about any of that...  It's just the most fun I've had all year.  A game for anyone and everyone.

What have been your favourite new ones this year?

Games night at the dub....

Another evening of games at UW (Mondays at 7, if you ever wanna join!) and a pretty decent crowd. The usuals got played like 7 Wonders and RFTG, as well as Vegas Showdown. I also managed to badger people into playing the two newbies that I brought: Alien Frontiers and The Secret of Monte Cristo.

My second game of Alien Frontiers was as good as the first and everyone enjoyed it.  It actually moves at a pretty decent clip once everyone knows what they're doing and it kinda has that perfect balance of offering lots of room for strategy and choices without it ever becoming overwhelming. That, and the final score was 7, 6, 6, 5, which is just awesome. 

Great game, loads of fun, and easily one of the best dice games out there.

The Secrets of Monte Cristo, on the other hand, was quite the overwhelming experience.  Not complicated at all but trying to figure out an optimal move....   Oh boy.  We all left kinda scratching our heads but agreeing we wanted to play it again.  I think the best player won, but I'm still not sure. 

It's all a very European experience - area majority, card drafting, and shifting stock values.  The turns themselves are very straightforward but the options are numerous and the strategy quite opaque.  But what makes this game so cool and worth picking up anyway is one of the cleverest turn order mechanisms to come out in a few years - the ball rack action thing.  The game cycles through the actions one ofter the other and the player whose ball is at the bottom of each action row gets to take that action (hand out cards, place treasures in the dungeon, place more meeples, etc.)  They then place that ball at the top of one of the other rows and then wait for their other balls to drop (ooh, awkward...)

It makes for a very interesting little meta-game but I don't think any of us played the timing of it very well.  In any case, quite fun despite the confusion and looking forward to playing this one again.

First Play: Alien Frontiers...

....and yes, it really is THAT good.  Easy-to-explain rules but with what seems a great depth of strategy, mechanics that are as tightly interwoven as classics like Agricola or Princes of Florence, and a back and forth race-to-the-finish feeling that hearkens back to Settlers (minus the mind-numbing endgame).  And just enough die-rolling to keep the game as fun and thrilling as the recent Lords of Vegas.  Brilliant.  Seriously.  It feels like this game was playtested for years and years before the final version was ever even considered.

And don't even get me started on how nice the components:  the board, the dice, cards, rules, and every other single thing in the box.  Top notch.  This one was definitely worth the wait and I can't wait to play it again.  An immediate classic.

In the grand scheme of things....

...it's not that big a deal that my pre-order of Alien Frontiers is taking longer than expected.  I was a little annoyed and wondering where it was this weekend until I read the apologetic response by the company in this thread on BGG.  It looks like their shipment stopped in Yokohama, Japan for a transfer near the end of last week right before the earthquake and devastating tsunami.  Oh.  Right.  Okay, take your time.  I think I'm gonna go donate some money now.  And not just to Japan, maybe to Haiti and New Zealand, too.  And then I'm gonna go home and hug my dog and be thankful that I live in the centre of a very large, stable land mass.  My thoughts go out to everyone affected by these disasters.

Oh, and Opinionated Gamers is doing posts about Japanese games only this week.  Very thoughtful.