Issue 35: 💎 Five hidden gem board games 💎 plus, Sheepy Time first look

Hello! I hope you had a nice Halloween, if that’s the sort of thing you’re into. We went and saw Soccer Mommy at The Neptune, which was a really nice time, and every bit a reminder that my ears are not as young as they once was.

We’ve been staying in Seattle with friends, and I’ve got to say, the back half of that drive was just spectacular. Autumn is everywhere I look right now, and I really can’t remember a time when that was the case.

To celebrate Halloween, I released a special season of my science fiction short story podcast, Vintage Sci-Fi Shorts. In it, I’m reading stories from the pages of Weird Tales, one of the iconic pulp magazines. They’re a bit weirder and a bit more horror-focused than the usual fare, but they’re still pretty light, all told. Go ahead and give season three a listen, if you’re so inclined!

Five things

• This opinion piece from Dicebreaker was a great read. Rather than describe it for you, here’s one small excerpt that’ll tell you way more than I could: “I’m not here to trash-talk any systems or to say a given system is better than another. Instead, I want to illustrate how something as simple and core as a die roll can change how the player and character relate to each other and the game at hand.” [Dicebreaker]
• I always enjoy a good set of game previews from BGG, and this one is no exception. The design is beautiful — I want to play these nicely crafted wooden games. It’s incredible just how nice some colored wooden blocks can look on a board. [BoardGameGeek]
• I really enjoyed Justin Bell’s in-depth look at tiebreakers over at Meeple Mountain. He’s done quite a bit of research and thinking about the topic. (I, for one, sometimes think we should just embrace ties in competition, but that’s probably the soccer fan in me talking.) [Meeple Mountain]
• Azul is now in beta at Board Game Arena — perhaps an inevitability, given Asmodee’s purchase of BGA, as well as their purchase of Plan B Games. [Board Game Arena]
• I’m excited to talk about this more in the next issue, but this is great from Garphill Games: The South Tigris Trilogy of games is coming. Very exciting stuff, right? We’ve got Wayfarers, Scholars and Inventors of the South Tigris. Additionally, in the Garphill Games Discord, Shem Phillips indicated (or at least I think it was Shem… hmm.) there will be an East Trilogy at some point — but I suspect we’re a few years off from that yet. The West Kingdom and North Sea games are fantastic, and I’m just thrilled for even more games in those great square boxes. [Twitter/Garphill Games]

Photo of the Week: Sheepy Time

My criteria here is pretty straightforward. I’ve considered a game a “hidden gem” if it’s at least two years old and ranked lower than the top 1,000 games on BoardGameGeek.

It’s not a foolproof method for determining a hidden gem, but I like using ranking as a methodology. BGG weighs games with fewer ratings lower, and as a result, you’ll end up with some beloved games dropping down the list, simply because they haven’t been rated by as many people. I’ve added the age condition to account for some of the newness bias that’ll be present, simply as newer games will generally have fewer people rating them, generally speaking.

I’ve also tried to not pick games that are widely known but divisive, because that really defeats the purpose. Finally, I’ve also not picked games that are spinoffs of well-known games, because that also defeats a lot of the purpose for me. I’m trying to talk about hidden gems, not less-popular-spinoffs here. (Although I may end up writing about that some day. It’ll go in the hopper.)

Second Chance

Ranked #2,210; 1.5k members rated

I suspect that Second Chance was largely buried by the avalanche of roll-(or-flip)-and-write games released from 2017 to 2021 (this is not something I’m going to complain about, really), and it remains a really great light and breezy Uwe Rosenberg title.

In Second Chance, players are drawing polyominoes on a grid. Pretty straightforward stuff, really. The twist is that if you ever can’t draw one, you — and you alone — draw a card from the deck. That’s your second chance. If you can draw it on your board, you get to continue. If you can’t, you’re definitely out. I appreciate this twist quite a bit, because it solves one of the trickier parts of the genre What happens if you get something that’s particularly hard to draw on your board? The tension of drawing a second chance card is delightful, and it’s what elevates this game above plenty of others, for me.

Wordsy

Ranked #2,763; 722 members rated

Gil Hova has a number of interesting designs under his belt, and Wordsy is always one I come back to. It’s one of my two favorite word games (Paperback — or Hardback — is the other) and it’s just so clever. In Wordsy, you’re forming words using an array of letters worth varying points, but you’re not barred from using letters not shown — they’re just not worth additional points. I adore that twist on things, because so often when playing word games, my mind drifts to words I don’t have quite all the letters for. In Wordsy, that’s a good thing. Lovely stuff.

On Tour

Ranked #1,102; 3.1k members rated

If you’ve learned anything about me from this newsletter, it’s that I love “-and-write” games with perhaps a bit of obsessiveness. I know I’m not alone in that. They’re so often filled with clever gameplay elements that might not be the focus of a larger game. On Tour is no exception, as it’s a neat little logic-and-mapping puzzle with delightful art. That presentation is something special, and it elevates a relatively simple concept. This is easily one of my favorite roll-and-write games.

Trapwords

Ranked #1,481: 2k members rated

Word games with forbidden words — words that are taboo, you might say — are a genre unto themselves, and Trapwords is a really nice iteration on the theme. It’s team-based, and the forbidden words (the “trap words”) are assigned in secret by the opposing team. When you’re giving clues to your team, you’ll wrap yourself in knots to make sure you give your team sufficient clues to find the right word while avoiding seemingly obvious words to avoid those traps. It’s just a great twist on a classic.

Tribe

Ranked #12,656; 71 members rated

I’m not terribly surprised to see this as the lowest-ranked game on the list. It’s a bit of an odd one, as it’s a dexterity game, and it’s also from Japan. Those two things combine for a game with a low rank and a low number of members having rated the game. Tribe is a game in which you’re placing all number of odd-shaped pieces on top of wooden figures, and while there’s nothing particularly strategic about the game, there’s plenty to enjoy.

Honorable mentions

• #994, Explorers of the North Sea — this is definitely not ‘hidden’ in any sense of the word, but it’s a lovely game and a bit lighter than some of the other North Sea and West Kingdom games from Shem Phillips.
• #970, Tsuro — I really like Tsuro as a lightweight, easy-to-access game. It’s so fast in every aspect, and it’s such a valuable game to bring in situations where you’re playing with several people who might not be as interested in a longer game. It’s only not above because it’s ranked in the top 1,000.
• #952, Hardback — I know I said “no spinoffs,” but Hardback is a great sequel, and this is the honorable mentions section, so you get what you get. Hardback is a spinoff from Paperback, and they’re both great deck-building card games. Huge fan.
• #943, Diamonds — This is a great trick-taking game that includes literal diamonds* (which is to say, literal pieces of plastic shaped a bit like a diamond.) When you can’t follow suit, you take a suit action, which is a really thoughtful way to handle that extremely common situation. It can incentivize the way you play your tricks in a really interesting way.

Thanks for reading Don't Eat the Meeples. You can find me on Instagram and on Twitter. I even started a podcast this year, Vintage Sci-Fi Shorts, in which I read old science fiction short stories from the pages of old pulp and digest magazines.

If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing for free.