First plays: The Palaces of Carrara....

One of my favourite lighter strategy games from the last couple years was Kramer and Kiesling's perfectly-tuned Asara.  Asara is a worker-placement, majority game which slickly used cards for the placement making it feel deceptively different.  What stuck with me was just how amazingly well all the overly familiar mechanics in Asara fit together - it was like everything had been playtested 1000s of hours to create that perfect experience.  I feel the same about my all-time favourite game The Princes of Florence, also co-designed by Kramer, although PoF is a much heavier experience.

The latest game from K&K (I like that!) is called The Palaces of Carrara and was up for the Kennerspiel des Jahres award this past year.  And after a couple of plays I'm happy to say it's just as magical as Asara.  Familiar mechanisms meld together in familiar ways and yet everything feels intentional and fresh.  Carrara combines a clever decreasing market for blocks which are bought to let you build buildings.  The buildings are then scored in various ways to get players more money and victory points.

The board and the stone wheel

And everything has been seen before but in this game it all clicks together so damn well!  The players choose when and what they score reminiscent of Dorn's classic Arkadia and the "coins to resources to buildings to points" has been done again and again.  But the game plays so smooth and quick that it doesn't matter and after the first few turns of my first game strategies and plans were already starting to emerge in my mind.  And included with the game are advanced rules which will give the game endless replayability - a set of cards which determine the endgame conditions and probably should be included as soon as everyone's tried the game once.  We haven't tried them yet but I think it will be a necessity from here on in.

Player's building and scoring mat

Anyways, only played this a couple times so far but I think the depth will be endless once we bring in the endgame cards.  And the feeling while I'm playing every time I get a great deal from the revolving market on expensive building blocks is the same feeling I get from a great find at Winners - SWEET!

Very much looking forward to exploring this gem.

Best of 2011...

As always, I definitely did not play even a tenth of the multitude of games that those lucky people over at Opinionated Gamers get to play so my choices are totally coloured by that.  As well, due to living in Canada, many a game that I finally played this year may have been a 2010 release.  Deal with it.  Maybe just consider these the favourites of the games that were new to me this year. 

So without further ado...

Best New Game of 2011 - Mammut, by Kristian Amundsen Ostby (Queen)

My favourite game this year earns its status for playing so completely and wonderfully different than any game I own.  In Mammut, players are cavemen determining how to share the spoils of a hunt.  The hunt is composed of 31 tiles, of varying values and importance, and each player in turn can take as many of them as they want from the spoils in the middle or all the tiles from one other player.  The key is that if you take the tiles away from someone else, you have to return at least one back to the center (they were being "too greedy!").  This back and forth of stealing and returning continues until everyone has tiles.  The round then ends and a scoring occurs similar to Knizia's classic Ra.  4 or 5 rounds and the game is finished.

This game is brilliant, loaded with strategy, and helluva lot of "take that" nastiness.  No other family game this year has made me think so differently about how to play well.  For more details, see my full review here.  Or just go out and buy the damn game.  It's wicked, tense, strategic fun.

Second Place Favourite - Asara, by Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer (Ravensburger)

This one may come as a surprise to you (it sure did to me).  It also may be from 2010 but I don't care.  When I first read the rules to this, it seemed like there wasn't a single original mechanic.  And maybe there isn't.  But after playing it I found the game so well-balanced, so interesting, and so easy to explain, it's worth every second.  On paper, it's just a worker-placement game about building the tallest towers in five different colours.  But it's gorgeously produced and the worker-placement is cleverly handled with cards where players must follow suit to take certain actions after others.  It's an extremely fun family strategy game that is super-tense right through to the finish.  Kramer invented Princes of Florence, one of my all-time greats, and his masterful touch is quite evident here, although Asara is a slightly more relaxed affair.  But only slightly.  A very, very pleasant surprise.

Runners-up -

Airlines Europe, by Alan R. Moon - It's a quicker, slicker version of Moon's Union Pacific/Airlines system and the tension in the game sneaks up on you.  Imagine Acquire meets Ticket To Ride and you're starting to get the idea.  But you gotta play it with the flight ban rules which can be found here.  It adds some nastiness and clogs the board up quite nicely.

Fauna, by Friedemann Friese - Definitely my favourite party game this year and it was republished in English this year by FoxMind Games.  This is a trivia game about animals - where they live, what they weigh, how tall they are - where you can win points by still being close to the answer and not exactly on it.  Sounds dry but it's actually shockingly fun.

Black Friday, also by Friedemann Friese - Once you get past the god-awful ruleset and make sense of how to play, you'll find yourself immersed in one of the cleverest stock market simulations ever put to board.  It's tense and strategic but still chaotic and a bit number-crunchy.  Maybe not for everyone but my math friends and I love it.

Mord Im Arosa, by Alessandro Zucchini - I love this game of dropping cubes in a tower and listening to which floor they fall to.  It's simple, hilarious, and nasty.  This is the most enjoyable game I've played all year and also one of the cleverest.

Water Lily, by Dominique Ehrhard - This little race game was brought to my attention at Origins this past year and I'm glad we picked it up.  It's a very simple race game that's made quite tricky by the memory element of the scoring.  Excellent, suspenseful, and so quick.  It's also one of the nicest productions I've seen in years where the box becomes the board.  Just lovely.

(Aside:  I haven't played my copy of A Few Acres of Snow yet but it may jump on this list pretty quickly.  Deck-building, Canadian history, and Martin Wallace - sounds like an amazing combo.)

First plays: Asara and Uluru...

I've played some excellent Euros so far this year that have all felt pretty fresh and original - the fantastic Mammut, for example, or the hilarious Mord Im Arosa.  Now I think I can add two more to the list: Asara, a gorgeously produced game from the team of Kramer and Kiesling who brought us the great Spiel des Jahres winner Torres, and Uluru, a quick and clever puzzler from the previously unknown Lauge Rosendahl.


Gorgeous, gorgeous board requiring a large table


Asara is an exceptionally fun game about building towers.  Big towers.  The largest, in fact, in each of the five colours available.  Asara is also a game that when described in detail sounds rather dated and unoriginal.  I mean, if I were to try to categorize it, I'd have to to say it's kinda like a worker-placement game but with majority scoring similar to older games like El Grande or even Manhattan.  Yeah, sounds like every other German game from the past ten years.  But that really doesn't do it justice as it is actually a very tight, easy-to-learn design, combining hand and money management, turn order, and set collection in such a balanced way that it feels exactly like it was created by master designers (and it was).  Asara strikes such a fine balance between tension and fun in about the perfect length of time that it seems to me to be an excellent choice for both families and gamers.  Oh, and add to that production values from Ravensburger that are out of this world and it's no wonder Asara was nominated for the 2011 Spiel des Jahres.

Uluru is a different beast altogether:  a fast thinky game about birds sitting around a table who have very specific wishes about exactly where they want to be placed.  Seriously.  You remember those logic puzzles with the grids where you suppposed to determine the placement of each character according to a rather opaque set of clues?  Yeah, well, this is the board game version with a timer.  Players flip a card for each the eight coloured birds determining what each bird wishes - you know, things like sitting right beside the blue bird or at the opposite side of the table as the black bird or to even just sit at the table altoegther.  The sand timer is flipped and everyone has a very short amount of time to make all their birds' wishes come true.  Stones are handed out for wishes unfulfilled and at the end of the round, the player with the least stones wins.  In theory, it all sounds very dry and logical, but in practice the pieces are so pretty and the rounds so quick that the game is quite light and enjoyable.

And I'm awful at it. Just awful. But I'd play it again in a second.

Click on the picture to see that the left player has fulfilled every bird's wish.  The player on the right, however...