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.)

A review of Fauna...

Okay, everyone, who wants to play a trivia game about guessing the weight, height, length, and natural habitats of various wildly obscure species of animals? Oh. No one? Right. Well, what if I said this animal trivia game was invented by Friedemann Friesse, the brilliant man behind Power Grid, Black Friday, and other modern classics of Euro-gaming. And maybe I should also mention the gameplay bears some similarities to that other great trivia game Wits and Wagers. Would that convince you? Still no? Perhaps you should read on and learn more about what I think is one of the most enjoyable trivia games to ever be published.  And it just happens to learn you tons about animals while you play it.

The version of Fauna we have been lucky enough to play is the latest from Montreal game company FoxMind and is the English-language version of the original German game from 2 years ago. The components are simple, excellently produced, and do exactly what they need to do. The board and cards are well-illustrated and I really can't complain about anything. This is a high-quality production of the kind you'd expect from Days of Wonder or Queen. The rules booklet, too, is quite well-done and covers a lot considering how simple the game really is.

This is an easy card?!?!?

So how does it work? Well, players have six betting cubes and play a series of rounds until someone reaches a pre-determined amount of points dependent on the number of players. Every round starts with a new player and an animal card is revealed by that player. Well, really only partially revealed as the top half of the card shows a picture of the animal and states how many areas on the board are the natural habitat for the animal and whether you can bet on it's weight, height, length, and/or tail length. The bottom half contains all the answers to these questions and so stays hidden until the end of the round. Once players know what they're betting on, each person in turn places a cube either on the map where they think the animal resides or on one of the squares corresponding to wight, height/length, or tail length. This goes on until all players do not want to play any more betting cubes and have passed. And then the answers are revealed and this is where the real cleverness begins. 

Every player who placed a cube in the correct natural habitats of the animal score points (more or less depending on how rare the animals habitats are) and the players who are in a region adjacent to one of the natural habitats almost always score points as well.  Similarly, players who guessed the right characteristics score big points and those adjacent to the correct answers on the scales also score some points.  So it seems like you should just throw down all 6 of your cubes in as many spots as possible, right?  But here's the tricky part - any cubes which don't score (on or next to a correct answer) get taken away temporarily and you only get one back at the beginning of every round, given that you'll always have a minimum of 3 to bet with.  Oh, nasty.  So now one wants to be a bit more careful with their betting cubes as they could lose half their cubes on a rather obscure animal on one turn and then not have the cubes to bet when they know all the correct habitats of the animal in the next round. 

So what seems like a rather childish game of animal trivia ends up turning into a tight little game of pushing-your-luck, betting wisely, and still knowing a bit about animal biology.  It's not deep but with 4 or 5 players (the sweet spot, in my mind) a player has to decide the most important places to bet before the spots get taken by other players.  The tension in choice can almost feel a bit like during the worker placement phase in Caylus, although much, much less painful.  So there is some strategy to the placing of the bets but knowledge plays a factor as well.  The game has the same lovely feeling that Wits and Wagers gives, of not needing to know every answer to be able to play well.  In fact, you can often bet cubes close to the "smart" player and score at least for adjacency points.  Of course this backfired in our last game when the world traveller amongst us had us all convinced that jaguars roam the savannahs of Africa and we all ended up losing our cubes (they reside mainly in South America, dontcha know!)  She was thinking of cheetahs.

Honey badger don't give a #@%$!

I can't say enough about this game.  I've played it a few times now and every game has been a lot of fun.  The rules are simple, the betting and revealing of answers is suspenseful, and you end up learning more then you ever needed to about the common garden snake.  There are two levels of difficulty (obscure vs. RIDICULOUSLY obscure animals) although we haven't bothered with the tough ones yet nor will we anytime soon.  I have had one or two people not so impressed with the game due to the trivia aspect so this may not be a hit for everyone.  But if you like Wits & Wagers or random trivia or even just the occasional episode of Planet Earth, I think you will love this game.  It only takes about 45 minutes, plays great with up to 6 players, and it's a total joy and if I had my way, it would be in every classroom across the country.  It's the type of game with major mass-market appeal that actually deserves to be flying off the shelves of every department store because it's so good.  And it's definitely one of my top games so far this year.

On The Horizon: Fauna (in English!)

Friedemann Friese has become one of the most prolific (and eccentric) game designers alive today.  Luckily for us, his games, whose German titles always start with the letter 'F', tend to be extremely good designs and have become some of my favourites - Power Grid (Funkenschlag), Black Friday (Freitag), and Famiglia are just a few. 

Well, a couple years ago Friese made a trivia game Fauna about betting on facts about animals, specifically on where they live and how big they are.  Like Wits & Wagers before, in Fauna you can win without knowing the exact answers but scoring for playing strategically and guessing close to the answer.  Fauna has been quite well-received but suffered from a bit of a translation issue (who wants to play a trivia game in a language they don't know?)  The great news is that FoxMind, a Canadian game company based out of Montreal, is bringing the English version to us.  Looking forward to it.