“Are the stars unfamiliar here?” she asked, and the sky grew suddenly dark, the star’s patterns alien and exotic. “This is the Wandering Sea. The gods have brought you here, and you must wake them if you wish to return home.”

And so starts your epic journey into the world of Sleeping Gods. Set in 1929, Sleeping Gods is a 1-4 player co-operative open-world campaign game in which you take on the role of Captain Sofi Odessa to help her and her eight crew members navigate and explore the strange waters of the Wandering Sea in which they have become lost on board their steamship, the Manticore. Tasked by the gods to seek out and recover totems hidden throughout this strange land in order to wake them from their slumber is your only chance of returning home. To do this, you will need to utilize the strengths of your crew to overcome numerous challenges, explore the vast map while meeting new characters and gaining quests, and of course fighting monsters of all shapes and sizes along the way. Are you ready for an adventure?

If you’re familiar with designer Ryan Laukat’s previous story book driven games Above and Below and Near and Far, then you will have a general idea of how the two main concepts of this game work. Above and Below introduced the idea of taking an action to go on an “adventure” where you would read a story snippet from a large book of stories that would usually present you with a choice and/or a challenge that you would have to overcome and then get rewarded or punished based on the outcome. Near and Far added the concept of an atlas on top of the story book. The atlas was a book of maps with each game taking place on one single map. By exploring the map you could reach spaces that would give you the story encounters like in Above and Below, but this time the stories were connected and provided an over-arching narrative campaign. Over the course of this campaign you would eventually play on all of the maps of the atlas.

Sleeping Gods takes this another step further by opening up the atlas completely for the players to explore how ever they see fit. The atlas is really just one giant map condensed down into a bunch of smaller maps in book form. If you reach the edge of a page and want to keep exploring you just flip to the indicated page in the atlas and continue forward.

I enjoyed my plays of Above and Below, but over time found that the most fun part of the game was the story encounters, causing myself and others I played with to more often than not focus on taking that action even though most times it wasn’t the best action to take on any given turn. It felt somewhat disconnected from the “game” itself, leaving you to decide whether or not you cared more about winning, or having fun. Near and Far improved on this problem by making you actually seek out specific spots on the map in order to take part in these story adventures while at the same time making the narrative more specific and cohesive to the individual players and overall gameplay. Sleeping Gods proves this formula could be improved upon even further by bringing the story encounters front and center while still offering interesting auxiliary mechanics that support the stories instead of the other way around. You guys. I think Mr. Laukat finally nailed it.

GAMEPLAY

A campaign of Sleeping Gods begins with a short tutorial that quickly introduces you to the main structures of the game and the world it’s set in, and then just like that….it sets you free. Literally. As you sit there staring at your little steamship miniature floating in the open water of the beautifully illustrated opening map, you realize, I can go anywhere. There are no rails here. The world is your oyster as they say. And that my friends, is an exciting concept for a board game. The rulebook suggests that you spend some time exploring the locations of the opening map pages to bolster your crew before heading out too far, but look at you, you’re an adventurer! Go adventure! Okay, maybe we shouldn’t be too overzealous, but you get the point.

A turn of Sleeping Gods consists of three steps. In step one, you will take a quick worker placement action aboard your ship that will help you maintain your crew and resources. Throughout your journey, your ship may take damage locking out action spots on the ship board until you have had a chance to repair them so all choices may not always be available to you.

In step two, you will draw a card from the event deck that acts as the timer for the game, as once you go through the deck three times the campaign comes to an end. The event deck is stacked so that the events start off mild, sometimes even giving you a boon, but gradually get more and more difficult as the campaign progresses. This difficulty comes in the way of increasingly more difficult choices and challenges that require you to commit a number of your nine crew members to participate in the challenge by contributing one of their respective stats (strength, perception, cunning, etc..), drawing a card from the game’s fate deck, and then adding those numbers together to see if it is able to beat the indicated challenge number. It is here that the game first lets you know that even if you fail, you’re going to fail forward. Meaning, you will always get the outcome of the choice you choose, but you may get a little banged up along the way if you fail, and even then gives you opportunities to mitigate those failures. Each crew member that participates in a challenge will take a fatigue token that will exhaust them once they have two, thus disallowing them to participate in further challenges until they are able to remove one or more on future turns. Characters with two fatigue tokens are also less effective in combat. Striking that balance of when to over-commit to a challenge to insure complete success, or when to just allow the negative impacts to occur so that you will have crew members available for later is a constant decision you will be making on your adventures that keeps the interesting choices coming quickly in every facet of the game.

The first two steps of a turn resolve very quickly bringing you to the final step where the meat of the turn takes place. In this final step you will perform two actions from a choice of four: Move, Port, Market, and Explore. The maps are littered with hundreds of locations to explore as well as icons denoting markets and ports, so taking a move action is all about getting to one of these locations on the map and interacting with it using one of your other available actions. The distance your ship is able to move on any given turn is again determined by committing a number of crew to the move action and adding that number to a draw from the fate deck (more on that later) forcing you to once again make a decision on how far you want to go, and just how much you are willing to commit.  Ports are literal life savers as they allow you to get your crew rested up after particularly difficult encounters and challenges, and markets allow you to peruse the local wares, spending your hard-earned coin to buy powerful new weapons, recipes, and gear that are vital on your adventure. But all of this of course is in service to the Explore action where you choose any location adjacent to your ship, and then read an encounter from the story book. These encounters will present you with even more difficult choices to make, challenges to overcome, towns and villages to explore, puzzles to solve, quests to obtain, and enemies to defeat.

Speaking of enemies, the combat in Sleeping Gods happens to be one of the most unique and interesting aspects of the game. Upon coming across a combat encounter you will be instructed to pull a number of specific enemies from a large deck of enemy cards, shuffle them, and then lay them out side by side. These enemy cards each contain a grid with various icons scattered across the spaces of the grid.  These icons indicate things such as enemy health, enemy attack damage and special abilities, and even special attack bonuses that you can pass on to other crew members when they attack if you are able to cover up that space of the grid with damage. To do this, you will choose one of your crew members to perform an attack, taking note of their attack number, and then draw a fate card to add to that number. If that number defeats the enemy’s defense number, then you inflict damage. For each point of damage you inflict you get to cover up one of the enemy’s grid spaces all in an effort to cover up every space that contains its’ health to ultimately defeat it. But that’s where the tricky decisions come into play. If you are not able to outright kill the enemy on any given attack, which is usually the case, then it gets to perform a counter attack. If you’ve left spaces uncovered on the grid that add to the enemy’s attack damage number, then you may be in for a world of hurt when they start punching back. One good strategy that the game allows is to choose to attack the weaker enemies first, and then use your damage points to inflict splash damage on adjacent enemies that are much tougher to hit. These little combat puzzle decisions are crucial to your success, as making the wrong choices will have you licking your wounds at the nearest port if you’re not careful.

Hidden away in all of these quests, challenges, and combat encounters are of course great rewards that will help you take down more difficult challenges further along the horizon, but most importantly you will find totems. Totems are your key to returning home and will greatly increase your overall final score, so getting as many of these as possible is your ultimate goal. The game even provides you with a pad of large campaign tracking sheets that have a map of the entire world on the back so that you can keep notes of where you’ve been and where you need to go in order to track down these elusive artifacts.

Some other important aspects of gameplay include the aforementioned fate deck and adventure cards. The fate deck replaces dice, in that you will draw the top card from this deck anytime you are attempting to overcome any type of challenge such as skill checks or combat. After drawing, you will refer to the number in the top left corner of the card adding it to the skills and attributes of the crew committed to the challenge. These cards have dual purposes though. Not only are they used as a draw deck, but you are also able to hold a number of these in your hand, paying money to equip them to your crew giving them additional skill attributes and special abilities, or you can also discard them in a pinch if it has a particular skill icon you need in order to overcome a challenge. This simple mechanic gives the players even more choice and luck mitigation opportunities, as you can purposely withhold low numbered cards from the draw deck in order to tilt fate in your favor. However, the higher numbered cards usually contain the best abilities, so equipping them to your crew may be the best way to go, but at the cost of removing a 5 or 6 from the draw deck. Tough choices indeed.

Adventure cards give players even more options, and there are a TON of them! These cards are generally given as rewards and are unique special items such as new recipes to recover your crew on the fly, or characters you’ve met that wish to assist you in your endeavors. You start the game with four basic adventure cards shared amongst all players, and over the course of the campaign as you discover more, they will gradually accumulate giving you a wealth of back-up options when things get rough. That is, if you are able to pay the cost of activating the card by way of one of the most important resources of the game, command tokens. These command tokens can also be used to activate the abilities of the captain and crew, or to jump in and assist on another player’s turn, so it’s always wise to keep a few command tokens on hand when and where possible.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Wow. Sleeping Gods is one incredible board game. I am in awe of just how much love and care was put into creating this fully realized world and its’ inhabitants. Once I learned the rules of the game and put it on the table, I just couldn’t stop playing. I went through my first campaign run in four sessions that took roughly 12-14 hours, and when I was done, I wanted to do it again. That’s saying something. Notice how I said first campaign. That’s because running through the campaign only once barley scratches the surface of what this game has to fully offer. There are around 75 totems to track down and find, and on my first campaign I found seven. There are also 13 different endings based on your performance and choices! Remember how I said the game gives you a world map to take notes on earlier? Yeah, you’ll want to make sure you do that, as all of your knowledge carries forward to your next run. I do wish I was able to carry forward a few physical assets from my first campaign outside of just knowledge, but based on your final score you’ll also unlock additional cards that will have a direct impact on all future campaign runs, so maybe as those cards begin to stack across multiple runs it won’t be as big of an issue for me. All told, you’re sure to get hours upon hours of gameplay out of this single box.

It is worth mentioning that I played my first campaign run purely solo, and have started a second run two player. The game says it plays up to four, but I don’t think that would be ideal. All crew members are always in play regardless of player count, so all you are really doing is divvying up the crew among players. Because of this it’s absolutely seamless for players to drop in and out. All you have to do is flip the ship action board to the proper side based on player count, and either take back control or split up crew members again evenly, and go. I was initially worried at the prospect of managing eight different crew members, but since each crew member isn’t taking its’ own individual turn, but rather the player is just deciding which crew members to commit to certain challenges or combat attacks at any given time, then it’s really not hard to manage as you are essentially just quickly looking at their respective icons, and maybe one or two equipped abilities. Honestly, I wouldn’t really want to play this with more than two players as I think it would slow the game down a bit too much due to the possibility of a lot more discussion on what to do and where to go to next, who has what ability, etc.., whereas when you are playing by yourself you can quickly scan everything in front of you to make a decision and go with it.

This game gave me the closest feeling yet to playing an epic open world video game. In fact, it most closely reminded me of one of my favorite video games of all time, The Legend of Zelda: Windwaker in which you spend a large portion of the game sailing the open seas, stopping off at islands, receiving and completing quests from numerous and quirky characters, solving puzzles, and fighting monsters. Sound familiar? But, I have to say while the gameplay is fun and engaging, the real star of the show here is the writing. It’s just so well done and such a delight to read! The world and characters jump off the page, and as you get deeper and deeper into the game you will start to recognize location names, characters and races you’ve spotted or come across previously in your travels.

The encounters and quests themselves can vary wildly, always keeping things fun and exciting. Some encounters may ask you to fetch a specific item or go find and kill an enemy, others will present you with tough choices without knowing what the outcome will be, while still others will present small puzzles to solve. I always found the encounters engaging, and was excited to find out what my next interaction would bring. All of this of course is supported by the always beautiful art of the amazingly talented Ryan Laukat. Every map, character, and item card is unique and lovingly illustrated bringing his oceanic world to life, and it’s a world I look forward to exploring to its’ fullest in the weeks and months ahead.

If you are looking for an adventure style game that will whisk you away with its charm while still providing tough decisions, management of resources, and challenging adversaries, then you really can’t go wrong with Sleeping Gods. Ryan Laukat and Red Raven Games have really outdone themselves this time, and I can’t wait to see what worlds they take us to next!

The post Review: Sleeping Gods appeared first on Unfiltered Gamer.

“Initially formless, the mindscape of Cerebria arises from the Origin. But nothing can exist forever unnamed and untamed. Two opposing forces – Bliss and Gloom – emerge to shape the world in their own image. As they spread their influence throughout the Realms, they build the identity, leading it through Revelations that have a lasting impression on Cerebria. Which will dominate, Bliss or Gloom? The ultimate outcome is up to you.”

Over the years Mindclash Games have become known for their highly produced, uniquely themed, and deeply strategic euro-style games. In their first game, Trickerion, you were an illusionist building and creating your own bag of magic tricks to perform in a contest with other fellow magicians in hopes to win the magical Trickerion stone that would grant the bearer real magical powers. In probably their most well-known game to date, Anachrony, you were thrown into the middle of a futuristic apocalypse trying to prepare your faction for the impending doom by gathering resources through clever time-travel and exploration of the harsh land using giant mech suits. And now, with Cerebria: The Inside World, a team-based, objective-driven area control game where players take on the role of opposing spirits of the cerebral mind in an effort to form and build an identity (think Pixar’s Inside Out), Mindclash Games have proven once again that they will continue to deliver games with themes that are a far cry from your standard euro fare. So will Cerebria leave you in a state of cerebral bliss, or dismal gloom? Let’s take a closer look.

GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW

In Cerebria, players will take turns performing up to three main actions and/or several free actions, gaining willpower, essence, and ambition in an effort to invoke and manipulate emotion cards on the board that will allow you to take control of frontiers and realms of the mind, ultimately triggering revelations that will score the players points based on shared and hidden objectives known as aspirations. I know I just threw a ton of vocabulary at you there. Cerebria is one of those games that wants to push the theme so hard that It often goes out of its’ way to change common gaming terms into others that fit the theme better. So it’s important to take note of that based on your preference.

Each player’s spirit board contains five actions to choose from in addition to five actions that are indicated around the perimeter of the game board. On top of these choices are three free actions on each respective team board, if your team has the required ambition tokens to trigger them, as well as one major free action called “absorb”. The absorb action allows you to pull willpower, the main resource used to pay for actions during the game, from one of the five central pools of the main board. Each pool gives you an additional bonus based on which pool you’re pulling from. These pools are actually part of a rotating platform that you turn immediately after taking willpower, thus changing the landscape of the board for future turns of all players. If during your absorb action you happen to empty one of these pools completely, then you will immediately trigger a scoring round known as a revelation. Timing when to make this happen is a critical part of the strategy of this game, as you usually want it to occur if you are ahead in at least one of two objectives that you are working towards. If you hesitate too long, then you can guarantee that the board state can and will change dramatically by the time it’s your team’s turn again. So, if you’ve been keeping track, that’s a total of 14 different actions you can choose from each and every turn!

The five actions of the player boards will essentially allow you to move, add your own cards to the board or remove opponent’s cards, fortify locations that are not controlled by the other team by placing down fragments into fortress locations, and if playing the advanced game, upgrade cards to stronger versions much like evolving a Pokémon. This is first and foremost an area control game, so having more cards on the board that are stronger than those of your opponents is what you’re shooting for, but it’s where you have those cards that’s key as the board is split among 10 different regions known as realms and frontiers. Controlling a realm will net you a discount on that realm’s respective board action, whereas controlling a frontier will allow you to grab more willpower from an adjacent pool when doing an absorb action. The objectives you are trying to accomplish in order to score points usually have to do with controlling frontiers or realms, or having specific card placement and/or card strength, so getting as many cards as you can onto the board and keeping them there will greatly improve your odds over the course of the game as the objectives change.

But there’s even more to these five player actions. Before taking an action you can choose to discard a card from your hand to upgrade the action you are about to take, or unlock one of the five actions you hadn’t had access to previously since at the beginning of the game you only start with a maximum of four actions unlocked and available to you. These upgrades of course make each action much more powerful by providing the players with even more options to consider, and if you have chosen to play on the ‘B’ side of the spirt boards then each player’s upgrade paths for their actions are asymmetric in many cases. It’s also worth noting here that each spirit has their own special ability power that is unique to them, allowing experienced players truly asymmetric characters to explore.

The five main board actions on the other hand, are a bit more straightforward and are usually used to give yourself a much-needed resource, more cards, or to add strength to a card already on the board in order to flip control of a region to your favor. Just like all actions though, these main board actions cost willpower, so controlling realms to get that discount is a big deal in many cases.

Let’s talk more about the cards for a bit. Each card usually has multiple power levels with each card usually coming into play at level 1 and gradually increasing in strength should the player pursue that course of action to a max level based on the card. If the total power of all of your cards is greater than that of the other team’s in a given region, then you control that region. Pretty simple right? What’s tricky is that the realms and frontier regions overlap, and there is one space of every frontier region that overlaps into two realms allowing that card to add its’ power level to both unless the other team has a card adjacent to that card essentially blocking it out of the realm. But that’s not all. Each card also comes with an ability listed at the bottom. These abilities are either triggered as soon as it comes into play, or in some cases offer a passive ability that will constantly be in effect until it leaves the board.

All of that is well and good. You’ve played plenty of area control games in your time, although maybe ones that don’t sound quite so complicated, but what you really want to know is, “What in the world is that giant orange and purple obelisk shooting up from the middle of the board like the Tower of Isengard?” Glad you asked. This tower is known as the “identity”, and is one of the two main score trackers in the game. When scoring is triggered each team will add a number of their team’s fragments to the identity based on if they were able to win one or both of the current round’s objectives. In addition, these plastic fragment pieces are used on the board as fortifications in realms, and if a team is able to time a revelation scoring just right by emptying a pool of willpower that is adjacent to one of their fragments, then that piece also gets added to the identity. These pieces come in two sizes worth three or five points. If one team is supposed to add a fragment of a certain size, but doesn’t have one, then a capping piece is added to the identity worth four points, thus completing this mind’s identity, and ending the game.

There are two other ways for the end game to be triggered however. The first is if the common objectives run out, and if playing the advanced game, the second is if one team is able to reach 20 or more points on a secondary scoring track that they are able to earn points on outside of scoring rounds. These points are awarded if they were able to make specific things happen during their turn. The more of these you’re able to do on a single turn, the more points you score. Advancing on this track will also net the player bonuses when reaching certain thresholds.

FINAL THOUGHTS

If you haven’t gathered, Cerebria: The Inside World is a complex and intimidating game that will require multiple plays to get just the basic game’s intricacies down. There is a lot going on and a lot to think about multiple turns in advance with systems upon sub-systems. Before my first play I watched several videos in addition to reading the rule book just to feel confident enough to put it on the table and start playing. As hinted at previously, this process was very much hindered by trying to navigate all of the game’s thematic terminology. Terms such as ambition, intentions, aspiration, and emotions come at you fast and furious, and keeping that all straight is a game in and of itself. Add on top of that the time it takes for setup, which is a very time-consuming process when you factor in the building out of each player’s respective starting decks. The basic game tries to help with this by providing suggested starting decks, but even with this assistance, finding and locating these cards out of a very large deck is quite the time suck, so I would highly recommend keeping these cards separate over the first several plays to make the setup that much quicker.

With all of that in mind, this is a game that for most groups is probably going to have a hard time finding the table often due to the sheer amount of work involved, especially in groups with inconsistent players. When the game does hit the table, you will quickly be reminded of just how much iconography the game wants you to be responsible for knowing and remembering. These icons are spread across all of the team, player, and main game boards as well as the emotion cards, and will more than likely cause you to have to pause the game many times as you look up the icons in the reference section of the rulebook. The game does provide a very well-done reference sheet for the emotion cards, but I wish the same would have been provided for at least the spirit board asymmetrical powers and upgraded actions as finding and flipping to the appropriate pages of the rulebook was an additional constant hassle.

But once you get passed all of that initial investment, you will find that Cerebria does offer a very interesting, deeply strategic, and tactical game. A game that If you are a player who enjoys levels upon levels of choices, quickly changing tactics, and take that style of play, could very possibly end up being a game you love. Once you have the suggested basic game ruleset down (trust me on this, I strongly recommend you start with the suggested basic game on your first couple of plays even if you are a seasoned gamer) the game offers multitudes of additional variety that will add additional complexities to the game. Meaning that if you do love this game and want to dive deeper, it will have very long legs for you. Every team and player board has two sides to play on, one more complex than the other. There’s also an additional way to score points outside of the central identity tower, scoring you bonus points if you are able to chain together certain effects during a single turn. And as mentioned previously, each team has a very large deck of cards in which to build a deck of 16 cards out of before the game even starts. If you don’t have a group to play with then solo and co-op rules are also given, pitting you against an AI system that acts and feels like a real player allowing you to hone your strategies outside of group play.

Cerebria is a constant game of tug-of-war. Managing the always tight resources to pull off a turn that can see you take control of strategic points on the board that will then put you in the lead on multiple objectives, and then timing that up just right with the triggering of a revelation scoring round is an intriguing puzzle. By my third play I was finding that these tactics were really starting to click for me, but what I found odd is that even on turns where I did extremely well by nabbing both objectives and completely shutting my opponent out, I still wasn’t enjoying myself as much as I thought I should be, and I’m not really sure why that is.

Maybe it’s due to the fact that the turns feel very mechanical in nature; bump that guy down here, put a card into play there, great my team is in control everywhere it needs to be so let’s trigger scoring now that I know I’m winning both objectives. I feel like some of the excitement is taken away when you know you are winning and you make the scoring happen, rather than like in most games where you are trying to get all of your ducks in a row before the game triggers scoring. So, it’s a novel idea, but one I’m just not sure fits with my preferred play style.

Or, maybe it’s because at times the combination of the common objective paired with my team’s hidden objective just happened to play right into scenarios that we were already winning or could be winning with one or two simple moves already set up from the round before, and that didn’t feel very exciting or earned either.

Or, maybe it’s because to pull off these wildly successful turns comes solely at the detriment of the opposing players without them ever getting a chance to react. This includes ending the game as most times the game will end without all players getting an equal number of turns. Cerebria is a surprisingly mean game. If you are playing well, then you are constantly knocking the other team’s cards out of contention, and trust me, it’s not easy to get these cards set up, especially later in the game when empty spaces to place your cards come at a premium and the resources are still tight. If you are on the losing side of that battle then you have to sit there and watch as the identity tower grows ever taller with nary a block of your team’s color contributing to its’ height. A constant in your face reminder of just how poorly you’re playing, and that honestly didn’t feel great when on the winning side either as I could just feel the other team’s frustration and sense of defeat permeating from across the table.

Cerebria very much reminded me of another game that I finally got over my trepidations to play this last year called Feudum. It too had a very complex and intimidating ruleset with loads of thematic terminology and sub-systems, several of which could probably have been streamlined or done away with completely, but surprisingly left me with totally opposite feelings. After finishing a game of Feudum, win or lose, I was smiling from the fun I had just had, and couldn’t wait for another chance to rise to the challenge of exploring and understanding the plethora of different avenues to victory the game had to offer. Whereas Cerebria, even with the knowledge that there were more options to add to the gameplay, left me feeling less and less compelled to play again after each successive game. Heck, I may even go so far as to say that Cerebria may in fact be the better game between the two. But is it the more fun game? For me, the answer is obviously no. But for you? For you, Cerebria may just trigger an entirely different set of emotions.

WHAT I LIKED

• Unique theme
• Very nice brightly-colored art and overall production quality
• Interesting strategic and tactical gameplay

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE

• Overuse of thematic terminology made learning and understanding the game more difficult than needed
• Too many icons to learn and remember
• A little too complex for the amount of fun you get in return
• Very take-that driven

The post Review: Cerebria: The Inside World appeared first on Unfiltered Gamer.

This list comprises of my 5 favorite games that even though they are considered “old” in the ever-growing board game landscape, still call-out to me loud enough to find their way back to the table while also holding a place in my personal top 50 board games of all time list. Another interesting note about the games on this list is that 3 out of the 5 are currently in the top 100 on Board Game Geek, 1 is in the top 200, and 1 is within the top 500. This tells me that these games still resonate with a large number of gamers out there despite their age.

So, without further ado, on with the list!

#5 – Camel Up

Year Released: 2014
Current BGG Rank #411/#475

Winner of the 2014 Spiel des Jahres, and with good reason, Camel Up is just so much fun to play. Every time this game has hit the table with new players, even the skeptical ones, it never fails to have them smiling from ear to ear by the time the game is over, and then asking to play it again right away as most games are a breezy 30 minutes or less.

In Camel Up players will be betting on various stages of a camel race. The game is broken up into legs of the race with each leg ending once each camel has moved. This movement is triggered by players revealing colored die from the central pyramid that match a particular-colored camel in the race, and then continuing in this way until at least one camel has crossed the finish line. The players’ goal is to try to figure out which camel will be in first place at the end of each leg of the race, ultimately trying to correctly guess which camel will win the race, but also which camel will come in last place. Sounds simple, right? Well, yes it kind of is, but let me tell you that these camels surely have a mind of their own as they will be jumping on top of one another and carrying other camels on their backs with them all in an effort to cross the finish line. If a stack of camels crosses the finish line first, then the camel on top of the stack is the winner. Add on top of that the players laying down modifier spaces onto the race track that will affect the camel’s movement by either giving them extra spaces to move forward or causing them to move backwards, and it’s any man’s…ahem, I mean camel’s race!

Players turns are very simple, choosing either to make a camel move by revealing a die, placing a bet, or laying a movement modifier onto the racetrack in hopes to give their favored camel that slight edge. The easy to explain rules and turn structure on top of the wacky racing theme, makes this game easy to put in front of almost anyone and guarantee that they will have a good time, but on the other hand offers just the right amount of light strategy to satisfy even the seasoned gamer as well.

With a flashy new reprint in 2018 that added updated graphics and components in addition to a few new mechanics (watch out for the crazy camel!), Camel Up is an absolute winner!

#4 Raiders of the North Sea

Year Released: 2015
BGG Rank: 90

Raiders of the North Sea is the game that solidified Garphill Games and designer Shem Phillips as a publisher/designer to watch out for with every new release. Releasing as the middle game in a three-game theme-related arch, Raiders of the North Sea puts the player in charge of Viking warriors who gather up a crew of hardened Vikings to raid, pillage, and plunder settlements to the North!

Designer Shem Phillips’s games have become known for how they are able to take the standard worker-placement style mechanic, and add just enough of a tweak to the formula to make something that feels new and interesting. In Raiders, this comes by way of placing a Viking worker on an action spot on the board, carrying out the given action, and then in many cases picking up a Viking worker from a different action spot on the board and carrying out that action as well. This creates some very interesting decisions as the worker pawns come in different colors and each action spot on the board may require a specific color of worker to activate. While putting your higher-powered workers out on the board allows you to take the action you want, this inevitably leads to your worker now being available for another player to pick up! With these actions, players will be collecting gold, plunder, and other resources, as well as cards that form each of their respective crews needed to go on raids that will ultimately net the big point scores, but you have to keep a constant eye on your opponents as they just may be working up to the same spot you are, beating you to the punch and taking the plunder (and points) for themselves! In addition, the flow of the game is usually fairly quick as the place a worker/pick up a worker mechanic is just silky smooth in its’ implementation delivering a game that is fast-paced, strategic, and fulfilling by the end.

Raiders of the North Sea has been such a hit since its’ initial release that it was given two expansions adding even more Viking goodness to the mix, and then just this last year a full on re-skin called Raiders of Scythia that included all of the additions from the expansions as well as some other tweaks allowing gamers who missed it the first go-around the complete package all in one shot.

If you enjoy worker placement games, and have not given this one a shot, do yourself a favor and give this one a go!

#3 Orleans

Year Released: 2014
BGG Rank: 24

Orleans is such an unassuming looking game. One glance at the cover or back of the box, and you will think, oh this is just another one of those dry euro games with tracks upon tracks that I’m pushing my cube up. While that assessment is not entirely untrue, what Orleans adds to the mix makes it such an enjoyable and unique experience that it is a game that my family and various game groups keep coming back to again and again.

The hook of Orleans is its’ innovative “bag-building” mechanic. Think deck-building, but rather than a deck of cards that you are slowly building up over the game, you are instead adding workers such as farmers, merchants, knights, and monks to a bag that you will then be drawing blindly out of at the beginning of each round. Once these workers are drawn players will then simultaneously assign these workers to various action spaces on their own personal player boards that require different combinations of worker types, and then take turns carrying out these actions one at a time until all players have passed. These actions will allow you to do a plethora of different things, such as adding a new building with new actions spaces to your player area, moving your player piece along roads or waterways on a communal map collecting resources and establishing trading posts along the way, or moving up on one of the tracks allowing you to gain the benefit of that track and adding a new worker to your worker pool. The bag-building mechanic just works so well by making the turn-to-turn decision of having to determine what combination of workers you have drawn to use where, in addition to the tension it adds since you never know if you will draw that one specific worker type out of your bag that you really need to carry out a particular action. Also, much like in deck-building games Orleans allows for you to take an action to cull your bag of workers to get rid of worker types that you have too many of or are not using in your overall strategy. These culled workers are sent to another shared board that players are competing over to get additional benefits. So even when taking this culling action you are getting something in return, and not just wasting a turn.

The base game of Orleans in itself is such a wonderful game that I have played and enjoyed many times, but the game continued to receive support after its’ release with some truly fantastic expansions that added to the game without adding complication. The most notable of these expansions being a fully cooperative version of the game that is very challenging, but still keeps all of the fun of standard Orleans intact.

Orleans is a really, really good game, and that is why it has held on to its’ very high ranking on BGG even after 5+ years on the market. Orleans is a game I highly recommend, and will play any time it’s brought to the table.

#2 Cyclades

Year Released: 2009
BGG Rank: #180

Set in the theme of Greek mythology, in Cyclades players will be bidding for the favor of a particular god at the beginning of each round to determine what action they will be able to take on their turn. Gaining Ares favor will allow a player to move their ground troops and build fortresses, Poseidon allows for movement of sea forces and building of seas ports, Zeus gives the player priests and temples, Athena provides worshipers, philosophers, and universities, and lastly Apollo increases the player’s income.

It is this bidding phase that ultimately sets Cyclades apart from any other game I have played as madness and hilarity inevitably ensue. All money each player currently owns is secret, Good players will try to keep track of how much money they think their opponents have, and use that knowledge to ultimately outbid them to win the favor of the god they want, or to make their opponent spend more money than they’d really like to so that they can exploit them on later turns. The way this works is that let’s say you bid six coins on Ares, but then another player comes and bids 7 this bumps you off of the Ares bid track and you then have to immediately make a bid on a different god’s track. The only way you can get back to bidding on the Ares track is if another player outbids you on your newly choses bid track. This results in a raucous bidding and bumping cycle that goes around and around the table, each player pushing one another to see just how far they are all willing to go to get the action they desperately want until everyone has decided that enough is enough, paying out their final bid, and then carrying out the winning bids of each god in turn.

Really, that one phase of the game is truly the game, but then you get to see those actions you have placed the winning bid on carried out on the board itself by allowing you to shuffle troops, carry out battles, and gain key areas of land that will help you to achieve your overall goal of building and controlling two metropolises. Add on top of that the ability to summon monsters that will usually come on to the board for one turn under a player’s control, causes havoc and then leaves, and you have a game that is just truly entertaining from start to finish.

Many will say that this game was made even better with the release of the Titans expansion, which allows for less restrictive movement in addition to players being in each other’s faces sooner and more often. I can’t really argue if that’s what you’re looking for, but there is just something about the base game of Cyclades that forces you to decide when and where to win the bid of the god that will allow you to pull off that calculated attack at just the right moment that makes me still prefer it slightly over its’ successor. Either way, you can’t really go wrong with whichever flavor of Cyclades you prefer.

#1 Eclipse

Year Release: 2011
BGG Rank: 51

Ah, Eclipse. How I love thee. This is a game I discovered fairly early on in my descent into the board gaming hobby, and yet it still holds its’ place at the top of not only this list, but as my favorite game of all time. Eclipse also quickly captured the love of my game group, and is the game that we finish off each and every year with a play of.

As I mentioned in my #2 selection with Cyclades, games that involve moving troops around on a map, rolling some dice, and then seeing what you have left after the dust settles is one of if not my favorite styles of games to play, and Eclipse is no exception. Yet, Eclipse adds on so many more layers to that basic concept that you will rarely have a turn where you are not doing something exciting and fun. Eclipse is known as a 4X game (eXplore, eXand, eXploit, and eXterminate), and it does all of those things really well. You may decide to explore and uncover a new sector of the galaxy that could reveal any number of things such as new planets that are ripe with resources vital to your faction’s economy. discoveries that could give you a leg up on your opponents, or even ancient alien civilizations that you will have to overcome and defeat if you want to gain control and the benefits of their sector of the galaxy ultimately expanding your galactic empire. You may decide to research new and developing technologies that usually come in the flavor of adding new parts to your galactic space fleet thus allowing you to have totally unique ships to that of your opponents, and exploiting their ship’s weaknesses. Or perhaps you feel you’ve built up long enough and are ready to move into your foe’s territory to exterminate them and take what’s rightfully yours! However, whichever path you choose, you better be sure that you are keeping a close eye on how quickly your empire is expanding, because hidden behind the veneer of this epic battle space game is a euro-style resource management system that forces you to decide when to keep pushing forward, or when to call it quits and hold out for the next round. This is a fine balance, and a crucial decision, because quitting too soon may result in the other players swooping in and taking a piece of space you really need, but pushing too far will result in you being spread too thin and not being able to move forward or react in the following round like you may need to.

You will often here Eclipse compared to another epic space game known as Twilight Imperium, and while they do share many similarities, they also feel like very different games to me. Eclipse is more about managing that resource balance to expand your empire, while Twilight Imperium focuses more on a political intrigue mechanic that has players voting and implementing various new rules throughout the game. Twilight Imperium often gets mis-labeled as a 4X game, when in truth it really only owns 3 out of the 4 of the Xs needed to be qualified as a true 4X game since exploration is not really present which is one of my favorite elements of Eclipse. Add to that the fact that a game of Twilight Imperium will usually last 7-8 hours while Eclipse can be done in about 3-4 and I just really prefer what Eclipse brings to the table over Twilight.

Eclipse truly owns the right to be known as an epic game, and it’s in that thrill of discovering what’s underneath that hidden area of space, building out your ships to be completely and uniquely different from that of your opponents, or finding that balance of how to best use your unique faction’s powers against your enemies that makes Eclipse a game that I want to come back to again and again, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

…And That’s a Wrap!

So there you have it folks, my top 5 games that are at least five years or older. I’m always excited when one of these games hits the table, which is why all of these games are also still ranked within my top 25 games of all time. What games that are considered “older” do you still love despite their age? Let us know in the comments!

The post Top 5 List: Games Older Than Five Years appeared first on Unfiltered Gamer.