Ars Technica’s ultimate board game gift guide, 2021 edition

Our massive guide is back—let us help you pick a game.

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[frostdillicus]

Man....every year it's basically the same damn games you guys recommend. Besides a few obvious new entries like TMAP and Furnace this list is almost identical to what it was last year.

Yes, I know, a lot of them are good games but the reality is a that a lot of good games have been released since the games in this list came out. Failing to mention most of them just seems kinda lazy too me...

No, it's a buyer's guide, and this isn't for novelty, it's for solid gameplay, which simply doesn't change year to year for board games. I would appreciate MORE boardgame articles/videos, but this one is fine for what it set out to do.

And you could at least make some suggestions? Pax Pamir? Imperial Struggle? Root? Scythe? Dune? Undaunted? Cascadia? Spirit Island?

I haven't played these new games, but they have buzz, but are they even appropriate for Christmas gifts? Will they stand the test of time? Can you even buy them?

Not who you are asking, but if you like coop strategy games I can't recommend Spirit Island enough. Contrary to what the author here says, the game is not crushingly difficult. You will probably lose your first few playthroughs, but that's just cause you're learning. The base difficulty shouldn't be any issue for an intermediate board gamer. Now, if you ramp up the difficulty you can and will get destroyed.

As for replayabillity , since we got the game it is our staple game when we have people over for gaming. It's not mentioned in the article, but the game has a 2nd expansion that arguably has more content than the original base game. I have my favorite spirits, but even after probably 100 games there are some I still haven't tried, and many more I still haven't really figured out how to play.

TLDR: Spirit Island is great. If you like coop strategy it is absolutely worth picking up.

 

[frostdillicus]

Man....every year it's basically the same damn games you guys recommend. Besides a few obvious new entries like TMAP and Furnace this list is almost identical to what it was last year.

Yes, I know, a lot of them are good games but the reality is a that a lot of good games have been released since the games in this list came out. Failing to mention most of them just seems kinda lazy too me...

No, it's a buyer's guide, and this isn't for novelty, it's for solid gameplay, which simply doesn't change year to year for board games. I would appreciate MORE boardgame articles/videos, but this one is fine for what it set out to do.

And you could at least make some suggestions? Pax Pamir? Imperial Struggle? Root? Scythe? Dune? Undaunted? Cascadia? Spirit Island?

I haven't played these new games, but they have buzz, but are they even appropriate for Christmas gifts? Will they stand the test of time? Can you even buy them?

Not who you are asking, but if you like coop strategy games I can't recommend Spirit Island enough. Contrary to what the author here says, the game is not crushingly difficult. You will probably lose your first few playthroughs, but that's just cause you're learning. The base difficulty shouldn't be any issue for an intermediate board gamer. Now, if you ramp up the difficulty you can and will get destroyed.

As for replayabillity , since we got the game it is our staple game when we have people over for gaming. It's not mentioned in the article, but the game has a 2nd expansion that arguably has more content than the original base game. I have my favorite spirits, but even after probably 100 games there are some I still haven't tried, and many more I still haven't really figured out how to play.

TLDR: Spirit Island is great. If you like coop strategy it is absolutely worth picking up.

Is there a decent getting started guide for that? I picked it up a couple of months back and my group bounced hard off it barely making it through the initial setup. The manual didn't really help in clarifying any of our questions and left us feeling like the only way to learn to play was to have someone who already knew how to play.

I think we had the advantage of my wife and I working through it in a duo which is probably easier than a larger game. The game definitely gets significantly more complicated the more players you add, not because it gets more difficult but because there is just much more "bad shit" about to happen.

I'm not really sure how we learned to be honest. It's been such a long time. I think we just stuck to very simple spirits, played with the alternate rules that make the game easier at first, and just took our time. Sorry I can't be more help.

Edit: This thread on the official forums has some spirit starter guides for the base spirits that are helpful.

 

[frostdillicus]

Man....every year it's basically the same damn games you guys recommend. Besides a few obvious new entries like TMAP and Furnace this list is almost identical to what it was last year.

Yes, I know, a lot of them are good games but the reality is a that a lot of good games have been released since the games in this list came out. Failing to mention most of them just seems kinda lazy too me...

No, it's a buyer's guide, and this isn't for novelty, it's for solid gameplay, which simply doesn't change year to year for board games. I would appreciate MORE boardgame articles/videos, but this one is fine for what it set out to do.

And you could at least make some suggestions? Pax Pamir? Imperial Struggle? Root? Scythe? Dune? Undaunted? Cascadia? Spirit Island?

I haven't played these new games, but they have buzz, but are they even appropriate for Christmas gifts? Will they stand the test of time? Can you even buy them?

Not who you are asking, but if you like coop strategy games I can't recommend Spirit Island enough. Contrary to what the author here says, the game is not crushingly difficult. You will probably lose your first few playthroughs, but that's just cause you're learning. The base difficulty shouldn't be any issue for an intermediate board gamer. Now, if you ramp up the difficulty you can and will get destroyed.

As for replayabillity , since we got the game it is our staple game when we have people over for gaming. It's not mentioned in the article, but the game has a 2nd expansion that arguably has more content than the original base game. I have my favorite spirits, but even after probably 100 games there are some I still haven't tried, and many more I still haven't really figured out how to play.

TLDR: Spirit Island is great. If you like coop strategy it is absolutely worth picking up.

I will definitely second this. My husband and I typically only play fantasy co-op campaign games (Gloomhaven and similar) because we don't feel like there's enough reason to play a game over and over again if there isn't a story unlocking new things along the way. Spirit Island broke this mold. There were weeks where we were etching out as much free time as we could to try out different combinations of spirits or play old favorites. Each game is totally different even with the same spirits, because you never know what abilities you're going to get when you learn new powers, and some of the major powers can fundamentally change the gameplay.

In tutorial mode it's pretty easy, we caught on quickly and love to share it with friends (since most of our games are campaign-based, it's become our favored one-off game to play with guests), but it scales up in difficulty to a ridiculous degree if you enjoy that kind of thing. We typically don't, and it's easy to keep the game from spiraling out of control, with spirits marked on just how complex they are and clear guides on how adding different scenarios, maps, and adversaries affect the difficulty. There are some spirits we won't even touch because of how complicated they are, especially from the second expansion Jagged Earth, yeesh. I have trouble wrapping my brain around them.

We didn't actually end up enjoying Branch and Claw very much, and tend to play without the events and extra tokens entirely unless we're playing a spirit that utilizes a certain type. Jagged Earth, though? It adds two more players, letting you make the map even bigger, with options on how to arrange the map pieces in different ways to add extra layers of complexity, and new scenarios that might as well be totally different games. It just boggles my mind how much customization there is over the base gameplay, such that you could play this one game for years and still never do everything.

We used.to despise the events and there are still some of them that make me want to flip the table when we get them, but overall they add more than they detract in our opinion. Without events, even with the alternate Jagged Earth rules for not using them, beasts are almost entirely useless. Yes, you can have Fangs or Many Minds in the game to help with that, but they just have almost no impact. Events also give you a lot more reasons to keep Dahan around because many of the events make them incredibly useful.

If you haven't given the events a serious try recently I would. There is also a eratta that the first event card that would be drawn should be buried instead of used. First turn events just made the game too swingy in the developers words. They could make the game stupid easy or impossible depending on the event. It makes the game feel way more balanced because by the time you get your first event you can probably handle it.