I first got the chance to play Lords of Waterdeep at Pax this year and soon realized that I had to have this game. After finally getting a copy and playing it with my wife, I feel like I can finally offer an opinion for the game. The game puts the player in the role of a Lord of the town of Waterdeep. The mechanics of the game could be changed to almost any other theme and would work very well, but the idea of being a Lord and manipulating the goings on in a town of adventurers is very well done.

One of my board game friends recently bought the game Libertalia when it was on sale. We all heard great things about it so we gave it a try this week. The game centers on each of you being pirates on a ship. After randomly choosing your flag color, the youngest person has to randomly select nine cards to use as the starting deck. Everyone has a similar deck of cards with the same numbers (1 through 30).

Even though Bohnanza immediately gives American players the idea that this may be a cowboy themed game; it’s not. Bohnanaza is a point taking card game. Each player is out to try to grow as many of a particular kind of bean in his/her’s field and then harvest and claim their points. Play goes around the table with each person deciding to use, trade, give, or discard the top two cards drawn off the massive pile of beans. The deck is composed of a variable amount of each type of bean.

Flash Point is a unique game of firemen rescuing people from a burning building. It uses a couple of very neat mechanics that I’ll go into in a moment. In Flash Point, you and your friends must use movement points to move into a burning building. Inside the building a series of randomly placed “flash points” become active. These flash points will grow and spread their flames if a roll of the dice at the end of each player round indicates that location.

Viticulture is a resource management game centered on running a winery in Italy. As with any winery you are responsible for growing and harvesting grapes as well as turning those grapes into wine. You are also offering tours to your winery, selling excess grapes, building the structures to accommodate this enterprise and competing with other wineries to make your victory points before they do.

While at PAX Prime last week, I was able to try out many different board and card games including one developed by a local guy Nick Sibicky. The game was King’s Forge. I ran into Nick and his game while looking for a group to play with. After a few introductions Nick explained he was the designer and a little about how the game came about. It’s a simple game to pickup with great mechanics. Cards are used to represent items you are trying to make for the King (who’s recently removed his royal blacksmith).

Arctic Scavengers is a deck building game similar to Dominion with a futuristic survival feel to it. The premise is that you are a leader of a group of survivors of a global ice age in the future. You must build a tribe of people using weapons, food, medicine, and other people. Each turn you can perform a huge list of actions based on the abilities available on each card. The abilities include Draw, Dig, Hire, Trash Cards, etc.

This week I got the chance to play the game Power Grid. The game shows up on a lot of top 20 lists and has been there for a few years, so I was looking forward to finding out what all the excitement was about. The game puts you in control of a power company that is trying to build power plants and provide power to the cities where the power plants reside.

Forbidden Island is a 2 to 4 player game that uses a combination of randomly placed square tiles (representing the island), cards and treasures. The goal of the game is to retrieve the treasures by collecting cards and once you have four of them going to specific tiles to exchange the cards for the treasure on the card. This sounds easy, but there are a few things going against you. First is that the island is trying to kill you and your partners.

Sentinel of the Multiverse is a game I’ve wanted to play for a few months. My friends have been talking about it ever since we played LegendaryMarvel. The game is basically a super hero card game with a card mechanic that involves drawing cards from your own specialized deck and choosing which cards to put into play and when.