This year we’ve been going with Pandemic: Iberia as our preferred version to explore. It’s a nice variant of the base game (no legacy or anything) which adds the ability to build railways to zoom around the board and to use cards to place water tokens that will kill off future cubes. Which introduces decisions each turn re holding off fixing things now to save actions later. I like that you now have to build a hospital using a city card in a colour before you can cure that colour, and that city is where you must cure it. That makes things tougher. With these extra card uses (hospital, water, zipping from port to port), you now have to pay real attention to how may cards remain in each colour and quickly get on top of who’s collecting each and who’s building the hospital. Some we win, some we lose. One game was famously won on the last action of the last turn with no cards remaining, one of the colours down to its last cube, and only one outbreak left. It’s very likeable. It doesn’t quite knock off Pandemic: Rising Tide as our favourite of the base game variants though.

Otherwise, new games I’ve played recently include …

ARCS (2024): Rank 310, Rating 8.3

Each round you draw a hand of cards and on a turn a trick is played out which determines the default action (suit) for that turn and whether a scoring objective is set (usually by someone foregoing a later turn by playing an extra card, but it’s worth it). Actions are usually to lay claim to cards or amass/move units on the board, which is a Hunger Games (part 2) clock style setup, where proximity from one arc to another is shortened by movement though the middle bullseye. The resources being scored are tight and once apportioned you’ll need to move and fight for them. There’s no point turtling because you can never hold off in a multi-player everyone-can-reach-you area control game. The real game is seizing initiative enough to guarantee the things you’re strong in are being scored. The game is slowed down by the complicated card effects which get turned over enough to stop the game regularly and that’s the real downside, even though they’re needed to elevate the game from just being about board control. The digital scoring (this rather than this for this round) drives the board shenanigans. The game is clever and it works, but it’s too easy to miss out on any given round for me and I came to dread the drag of constant new card acquaintanceships.

Rating: 7

BOTANICUS (2024): Rank 4119, Rating 7.7

Nice mid-weight Euro, taking actions to move along reward tracks and fill your tableau with plants that meet your VP conditions. Each round provides a new set of actions, with each action having a different power level. Like Kingdomino, actions this round will be taken in order of who took the least to most powerful actions last round. In an improvement, you can still do the same action as someone else but without bonuses (and you’ll now beat them in turn order). You can see all the actions for future rounds, and as everyone’s usually doing different track strategies (that’s a green thumb’s up), you can plan for when you want to be going first and when it doesn’t matter. This is the game. It’s very playable but without being gripping, and it mostly overcomes its Euro abstractedness (I’ll admit it’s a sigh finding out plants are generic “plants” that grow from “level 1” up to “level 4” though).

Rating: 7

CASTLE COMBO (2024): Rank 2575, Rating 7.5

Draft a card, place it in your personal 3×3 grid. Each card provides an immediate effect (get money or discounts) and an end-game score effect. After everyone’s played 9, score your cards in the usual manner (having icons, adjacencies, locations, etc). Some spice has been added by having 2 drafts that provide an extra decision on whether to spend a VP to move to the other draft or to scrap the lot in the current draft and hope for better, and you’re often choosing between good-now and good-later effects. These decisions keep you invested in the result but, as usual for the genre, most of the time you’ll end up blaming bad drafts.

Rating: 7

HARD QUIZ: THE GAME (2020): Rank n/a, Rating 6.9

Trivia game played in multiple rounds, each round a different format. One player reads the questions, the others compete for VPs that differ based on each question’s difficulty. It’s fun in the way all trivia games are and gets points for finishing in 10 minutes (giving the opportunity to play again with someone else the reader) but loses points for having a fastest-to-the-buzzer round (for those who don’t enjoy speed games).

Rating: 6

HARMONIES (2024): Rank 200, Rating 8.1

Take contracts that show patterns and then collect stones to repeat those patterns on your board. It’s reminiscent of Azul in the stone collection and of creating Japanese gardens in the pattern repetition. It’s all rather Zen-like as long as you remember not to take contracts using the same coloured stones as your RH neighbour who’ll beat you to them. Hope to pick up new contracts that auto-score using patterns you’ve previously created (the sure-fire way to success). Additionally create standard base patterns for supplemental end-game scoring. Balancing all that provides quite a lot to think about but you can plan when it’s not your turn so the game moves at a perfect pace. Everyone I’ve played with has thoroughly enjoyed the harmony.

Rating: 8

LETS GO! TO JAPAN (2024): Rank 922, Rating 7.8

Harking back to the 10 Days In Europe suite (in that you’re building a travel itinerary with cards) but jazzed up for modern meatier gaming tastes. Here the cards are split into two main categories (pink Kyoto and blue Tokyo) and there are penalties if you swap between them too many times. There’s a draw-and-pass mechanism and you end up building a sequence of 3 cards in each of 6 days, matching icons where you can and eventually settling on the card in each day with the best end-game scoring effect for what you’ve collected. It allows you to build and then search and provides plenty of ‘ahh, the perfect card just fell into my lap” moments. The game whizzes along in a light and friendly way but still provides plenty to think about and hope for. Having toured Japan last year, I also loved how the cards brought it all back to life – loved this theming. But … it drops a point because it takes as long to score the game as it does to play it.

Rating: 7

RACCOON TYCOON (2018): Rank 876, 7.3 – Drover

It’s not as horrible as the name, theme and art might suggest, but it’s not great either. You play cards which give you resources and drive up the prices, and later sell those resources for money (which drives down the prices). Use the money to buy buildings for game-winning super-powers (especially if there’s only one such in the draft and the replacement is a dud because there’s no flushing mechanism) and ride it all the way home. Also use the money to win auctions for the VP cards. The auctions end up feeling similar to Power Grid – it gets driven up such that if you win this, you won’t win another until you get more money, which drives up the auction price even more. And there are lots of auctions. Too many to be enjoyable. Too repetitive.

Rating: 6

STAR WARS: OUTER RIM (2019): Rank 198, Rating 7.7

It’s your typical FFG thematic romp. Lots of cards, lots of effects, lots of card turnover, and therefore lots of reading to see if the new ones are useful (which slows the game down a bit more than you’d like). You can take game-play in different directions according to your predilections which adds to the appeal. The main thrust is pick-up-and-deliver around the neat outer rim arc board to earn money to buy things and earn VPs. Or you can go bounty hunting for money with lots of dice-rolling combat. It was fun and thematically rich but there was just a bit too much downtime and you couldn’t plan much due to the card turnover.

Rating: 7

Thoughts of other Opinionated Gamers:

Mark Jackson:

• Let’s Go To Japan is one of my hits from 2024… enjoyable as a solo game or with a group of folks playing. Scoring is long but it’s where you see if all of your careful (or not-so-careful) planning pays off.
• Star Wars: Outer Rim picks up speed after a couple of plays – and really starts to shine when you (in typical FFG fashion) add the Unfinished Business expansion. Especially good for Star Wars fans – like my boys and I.

Larry:  I’m also a fan of Let’s Go to Japan.  The production is superb, the theming is great, and the game is quite interesting.  There’s actually a good deal to explore for how to score well, but it’s still fun to play while you’re getting there.  Very good middleweight.  I like it.

Lorna: Three of my hits from 2024 here.

• Harmonies is a great filler or easy after work game. Fast set up, easy rules but some interesting play and the card art is adorable.
• Let’s Go To Japan was a surprise hit for me. I like the card drafting and theme, again fairly simple play make it easy to turn to for a fast game.
• Botanicus is nice straight forward Euro, worker placement

Dale:  Lets Go To Japan is one of my favorites from last year. The theme and the art is just great; it really reminds me of my trips to Japan.  The scoring length doesn’t bother me too much.  Botanicus is also another one that could make keeper status.  It really doesn’t do anything new, and heck, it would have felt at home in my 2010 game collection – but it’s solid and just works well.