Board Game Top 100 (2024) Part 11 (76-75)

#76 Cosmoctopus

Cosmoctopus is one of those games that was much higher on my list, but that I manually moved lower because Julie and I have only played this once. In Cosmoctopus players are playing cards from their hands and collecting cards from a central market all in the interest of gaining the favor of their cosmic deity the great Cosmoctopus. This favor is represented by these purple tentacle pawns. The first player to collect 8 tentacle pawns is the winner. 

Resources to buy cards are obtained through a worker movement board in the center of the table. This board is made up of a 4 by 4 grid of cards each showing some different benefits, key among these are gaining the resources to pay for cards, and the actions to buy the cards. Some cards have immediate benefits, while others create ongoing effects and stay in front of you to form a bit of an engine. 

Cosmoctopus doesn't do anything new, but it is a solid and entertaining entry in the worker placement, resource management, engine building genre of board games with a wacky theme that has tentacles. This makes Cosmoctopus my 76th favorite game of all time.

#75 Welcome To … Your Perfect Home

In Welcome To … Your Perfect Home cards are flipped representing numbers and actions. Each turn all players choose a number and action from the cards flipped and mark these on their personal score sheets. This is a roll-and-write variant known as a flip-and-write because instead of rolling dice and recording the results, you flip cards from a deck (or decks) instead.

Players all act at the same time. On your score sheet, you have these rows of streets and on each street are houses. Your goal is to give these houses each a number, but like any other street, the houses must be in ascending order. The actions on the cards make some houses more valuable or enable you to manipulate the numbers. There is also one area that you can mark if you just can't place a number.

At the end of the game, the player who has built their neighborhood the best (earns the most points) wins the game. Welcome To … Your Perfect Home is an easy game to grasp, but actually has quite a bit going on. It's a really engaging type of roll-and-write game. It is challenging multiplayer solitaire, and because everyone is playing at the same time, it can handle any number of players. Welcome To … Your Perfect Home is my 75th favorite game of all time.

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Board Game Top 100 (2024) Part 10 (78-77)

#78 Long Shot The Dice Game

In Long Shot The Dice Game players roll dice to move horses around a race track. During the race you can use money earned from rolls to buy horses and then enable those horses to move when a different horse's number is rolled, increasing their chances of winning. You can also place bets on your and other horses and use special powers to move some horses further or other horses back. Long Shot The Dice Game is fast and fun and it's my 78th favorite game of all time.

#77 Targi

Targi is a two-player only game. Each player has three pawns that they are able to place around the outside of the game board which is a five by five grid made up of cards. When you place a pawn on the outside of the board it gives you a resource or other special benefit. And at the row and column intersection where your pawns meet you gain a card to add to your tableau. You should get two things each round. 

You can't place your pawn directly across from one of your opponents pawns or across from a special pawn which I think represents a tax officer, because this pawn travels around the board as a counter for the game, and each time it reaches a corner of the board you have to pay taxes. Your tableau is a three by four grid and creates your own little camp of different locations that will provide you victory points and other special powers.

Targi is an awesome, tight and challenging two-player worker placement game. Once the tax collector makes it all the way around the board, the game is over and scores are tallied. The player with the most points is the winner. Targi is my 77th favorite game of all time.

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Board Game Top 100 (2024) Part 9 (80-79)

#80 Quadropolis 

Quadropolis is a city building game where players place tiles that represent different sections of a growing metropolis. Players place residential areas, shopping areas, power plants, parks, harbors and utilities. Scoring is based on how your areas are placed in your town.

Power plants provide power and residences provide population. Every tile has to have power and a resident in order to be active and be scored. Excess population represents overcrowding and counts against you. Excess power represents pollution and counts against you. Balancing these factors is part of the game's puzzle.

Building tiles are drafted using numbered pointers that allow players to select a tile so many steps inside a row or column. You must then place that building tile in your city in a row or column matching that same pointer. This unique method of drafting and then placing your tiles adds an additional layer to Quadropolis that elevates it above other drafting based games.

Before it became the "Sims" there was a computer game called Sim City. Quadropolis feels to me like Sim City the Board game. If that sounds cool to you then Quadropolis might be a good game for you. For me, Quadropolis is my 80th favorite game of all time.

#79 Gingerbread House

Gingerbread House uses domino type tiles that stack on top of each other. The tiles show types of gingerbread cookies. As you cover up cookies with tiles, you earn those cookies into your supply. Cookies are traded for cards showing different fairytale characters. You have to have the right treats to attract the specific cards that you want and these are worth points which will help you win the game.

Additional scoring objectives can be won by completing levels of your house. These objectives might reward you for collecting fairytale characters of a specific type of building up your gingerbread house in a particular way. Leveraging these bonus objectives is the key to victory.

Gingerbread House is a light breezy tile laying / tile stacking game. The art on the tiles and on the fairytale character cards is gorgeous. The theme is that you are all witches like the one from Hansel and Gretel and you are using your Gingerbread House to lure these various characters to you in order to eat them. It's morbidly funny and makes the game just that much more charming.

Gingerbread House is a great game, and it's my 79th favorite game of all time.

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Simply6 RPG from EnWorld Review

What follows is a short review for "Simply6" from ENWorld Publishing. My goal is to put a really awesome RPG that you may not know about on your radar.

Simply6 is a rules light universal RPG designed to cover most any type of traditional RPG play experience. The types of experiences where one player is the referee, narrator, or game manager, and two or more other players are the protagonist characters in a shared story.

This one is pretty light and looks perfect for quick one-shot sessions when someone is unable to attend your regular weekly game session. The game offers a long list of traits as things you are good at like: Fighting, Thievery, Perception, Knowledge, etc. You pick a few and invest a few dice in them.

By default, most actions see you rolling 3 dice and trying to hit a target of 10. If you have invested in an ability then you will have more dice and you will be able to hit that target of 10 more easily. But that target can go up, especially in combat where the higher level a monster is, the higher you will have to roll to hurt them.

Players start with 3 dice to improve abilities but can't spend all three on one ability. Your level is equal to the number of extra dice you have. So, a brand new character is 3rd level. Your hit points are equal to your level, so new characters will have 3 hp. Most equipment is assumed, some will grant you extra dice when rolling to do things, but most is handwaved as something you will have when you need it.

There is a page about magic, but it doesn't seem like a viable option for a one-shot. Maybe if a group was planning to play a short campaign using Simply6 they could have a magic using character. Magic doesn't start with the initial 3 dice that all other skills get. So, magic skill has to be built up from 0. That's going to require a few sessions.

There are two sample adventures included with Simply6. A fantasy adventure with an interesting twist, and a zombie apocalypse type adventure. I really like the fantasy one and might run it some time.

Simply6 is really well laid out and easy to understand. It's a great example of a rules light, accessible universal toolbox kind of system and one that is worth a look.

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Adventurous Fantasy RPG from Dawn Fist Games Review

What follows is a short review for the fantasy RPG, "Adventurous" from Dawn Fist Games. My goal is to put a really awesome RPG that you may not know about on your radar.

Adventurous is written to be an introductory level game for players new to fantasy role-playing games. Within this context, the experience that it seems to deliver is very similar to one that a player might experience when playing Dungeons And Dragons for the first time. All the character classes sound like Dungeons And Dragons character classes, and all the powers and abilities of those classes have (for the most part) a focus on combat options. This is not a knock against the game. I think that it succeeds in everything that it's trying to do. It's just an observation.

While Dungeons And Dragons may inspire the contextual nature of Adventurous, the game system is very different. The game uses six-sided dice exclusively. I feel this was a smart choice for a game aiming itself at new and "non" players. Almost everyone can find standard six-sided style dice laying around somewhere.

The book spends a few pages up front going over the game system. Players roll a number of six-sided dice depending on an Attribute score. 5's and 6's on the dice indicate successes. A single success is known as a weak success, while two or more successes are a strong success. If two of the dice that contribute to a strong success are 6's, then you have a strong success with benefits. The player who rolled the double sixes gains an Experience Point, and if they don't already have it, the party gains Momentum. (More on that in a moment.)

A weak success is good enough for most things like making an attack or climbing a wall, but if the task is something that is impossible to do without specific training like reading a magical script or picking a complex lock, then a strong success is needed. In combat weapons do damage based on your level of success. A weapon's damage might be listed as w3/s6. This means that the weapon inflicts 3 damage on a weak success and 6 damage on a strong success.

Adventurous has its own version of Advantage and Disadvantage. If you have Advantage in doing something you simply add an extra die to your roll. If you have Disadvantage at doing something you take one die away. These effects can cancel each other out, but they don't stack.

In place of 5E's Inspiration, Adventurous has Momentum. A party gains Momentum when any player rolls double sixes. Momentum is a toggle value like Inspiration. You either have it or you don't. But unlike Inspiration, this is a party resource. Anyone can spend it, and then a roll of double sixes from any player can restore it. Neat! Momentum lasts until the party rests in any capacity. When you slow down and take a break, you lose momentum. Makes sense.

Characters have five attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Willpower, Knowledge, and Charisma. 1 is the lowest any attribute can be, and 5 is the highest. Five is the highest value possible even with magic effects and modifiers. Players will never roll more than 5 dice.

The first step of character creation is to choose your character's race. Your choices are Human, Elf and Dwarf. The options here are pretty slim, and they are also purely aesthetic. A player's choice of race has no mechanical benefit. Personally, I really like this. It sees players making a choice based solely on role-play, and I think that's a good habit to get into. Also, it means that if a GM wants custom races in their game as player characters, this is super easy to do. I can play that Holstaur that I've always wanted to play.

Following Race, the player must choose a Class for their character. There are eight Classes to choose from: Warrior, Rogue, Wizard, Paladin, Hunter, Cleric, Warlock, and Druid. Each class has a sort of "signature" special ability. And then every class has an "at will," an "encounter," and a "daily" power. One of each. 

Each level after 1st players gain one new special ability but there are only 4 such abilities per class, and max level in Adventurous is 5. This seems perfect to me for an entry level RPG, or for experienced players looking for a good low stress option for a short campaign. 

The game book includes rules for exploration, hirelings and social encounters. It also includes a bestiary and various examples of treasures, mundane, magical, and cursed. There's even an example campaign setting: the Westlands. This setting is both small in scope and light in details. This is just the kind of thing that I like to see. I like a loose framework to get me started that I can then build on. The Westlands are perfect for this.

The game book doesn't include a sample adventure, but there are some good ones available from Dawn Fist Games on their DriveThru RPG page. I like Adventurous a lot. This is a great game to just jump into and start playing. For beginners and for seasoned gamers looking for a comfort food RPG experience Adventurous is awesome!

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