Game Corner: My Favorite Games of the Year

Five of my Favorite Games of the Year (Or Glen realizes he’s addicted to clever action selection systems.)

According to BGStats, I played 40 games that were “new to me” in 2023, which seems a reasonably great number. I figured I’d try and take 5 that I really enjoyed and share them with you. I have all my own biases, plus it can be hard to get certain games to the table in a particular year, so some of these may have technically been released in 2022.

So, five games I really loved in 2023:

Ark Nova, with a special nod to Marine Worlds expansion

Ark Nova arrived in 2022, but I didn’t get to play it till the winter EsCon of 2023. It’s a game of the competing interests of making your zoo stay in the financial black, while also trying to do ecological and scientific good.

Heavy-middle weight tableau building, with a clever action selection system, and it gets compared to Terraforming Mars, where you’re trying to synergize icons and projects and where your animals will be housed in your zoo.

Notably, the Marine Worlds expansion adds just enough new — special powers added to action selection, and more control on the icons — the latter of which fixes one of the bigger gripes I had overall of feeling of unfairness.

Three Sisters

Arriving in 2022, then immediately going out of stock. Its name comes from a Native American technique of growing pumpkins, beans, and corn together (the three sisters) — it’s a roll and write about gardening.

On the more complex end for roll and writes, much of the strategy is figuring out which tools you’ll invest in (seed spreaders, labels to sell things at the farmers market), and seeing if your strategies prevail over your neighbors’ strategies. It is cute and clever, but it sneaks up on you how it can feel dense and heavy while feeling simpler with the complexity derived from trying to decide if investing in rain barrels rather than beekeeping, rather than learning lots of rules.

Barcelona

First: the game is gorgeous. Second, what I’m learning about myself is I like clever action selection systems.

It’s the late 1800s, you’re building out the new section of Barcelona with tons of migration arriving, and the new Modernisme style is all the rage. Each turn, you deposit newcomers to the city, which is a grid, and that grid determines which two (sometimes three) actions you take each round, depending on where on the X and Y axis you deposit your arrivals.

There are a lot of actions, and this game gets complex, but the complexity doesn’t come from non-intuitive rules, but from figuring out how all the actions can chain together and where and how to build out your end game scoring and multiply points where you’re strongest.

Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game

For the initiated: it’s basically better Star Realms.

Now, for those not: It’s an easy-to-learn, shorter, head-to-head deck builder for two.

Play the Rebels or the Imperials, the first person to blow up three of your opponent’s bases wins. Bases determine your hit points and a special power. There’s a general supply of Rebel cards, Imperial cards, and common cards you buy from, you buy these cards to add to your deck and improve your deck to try and beat your opponent’s bases.

Plays in 15-30 minutes, it improves on what made Star Realms cool, while also giving you an Episode IV/Rogue One-centric experience.

I have pulled this out at a lot of conventions during the humdrum of waiting for everyone to come together, and I’ve had multiple nights for 3-4 plays, because it is short, but delivers a great burst of drama and tension.

Scholars of the South Tigris 

This is probably my game of the year. It’s the heaviest and most complex of all of them. A dice bag building game with an (ahem) unique action selection system where you pick one of four actions based on the number and/or color of the dice.

Taking place during the Islamic Golden Age, you’re translating documents from other languages into Arabic; so your time is spent Traveling to collect them, Recruiting Translators, Translating documents, and Researching new science. 

Some of these actions require dice of certain colors or certain numbers — like if I’m researching engineering, I need a Red die, and the higher I can get the die (or dice), the more I may be able to research, but hiring a translator I only need a die (or dice) of certain values, while finally choosing a document to translate requires only a color — but its a non-primary color, like purple or orange, so I may need a red and yellow die, for example, to get orange.

If that sounds rough, it’s just the start. One of the best parts of the game is figuring out how to put all the pieces together, and then making the whole thing work. It’s a really beautiful game in a series of beautiful games.

What about you? What were some of your favorite games of the year? Jump into our Discord server and share yours with us!