Last year I wrote a blog to cover the 2015 Golden Geek
Awards and was able to comment on a number of the games that did well, however
this year it seems I’m yet to play a lot of 2016 releases. Nevertheless, the
2016 Golden Geek Awards definitely give me a list of games to aspire towards
playing during 2017, plus a few good games to reflect upon too.
2016 is predominantly the year of
Scythe, winning the Board Game of
the Year, Artwork & Presentation,
Solo Game, Strategy Game and Thematic
Game categories. TO my shame, I am yet to play Scythe – it’s really high on
my list but no-one I regularly game with owns it and I think there’s a risk it
won’t be the right game for us. Nevertheless, two things strike me about the
awards it won. Firstly, winning both Strategy and Thematic categories is
awesome in showing that strategy games don’t need to be theme-less and dull.
Secondly though, I feel like Mechs vs. Minions was robbed for Artwork and Presentation. Although I understand that the business decisions are
different for Riot games when making Mechs vs. Minions, there’s no
denying how high quality the game is in every aspect, right down to the
inserts.
Speaking of Mechs vs. Minions,
it took home the award for Best Co-operative Game, beating strong
competition from games that have both seen huge popularity in 2016. As the only
game I’ve played in the category, it’s obviously my current pick of the three,
but on its own merits, Mechs vs. Minions
is a pretty unique cooperative game, combing fantastic quality, with
programming mechanics and a great bite-size campaign that just keeps you
wanting to play more.
Codenames Pictures also
took home two awards for Best Family Game
and Best Party Game. For me, the
party game award is probably justified as there actually weren’t a lot of big party
games this year. However, it is a sequel and for me I prefer the original, even
though I know a lot of people think the opposite, enjoying the complexity in
the pictures in this new version. However, for family games, I’m really not
sure a party game is what I expected to see as the winner and I was pretty sure
Quadropolis would win this category.
I have a love hate relationship
with the winner of Most Innovative Game:
Captain
Sonar. I loved my first turn based game and had to rage quit my second
game played in real time mode. Nevertheless, I really respect the design and so
think it’s innovative, as well as super thematic – really embracing the
submarine theme and turning Battleship into
something that has the promise of a really satisfying game of cat and mouse.
And finally, in terms of the
categories I can comment on is 7 Wonders Duel: Pantheon, the winner
of Best Expansion. We don’t play a
lot of expansions, but this is one that has hit our table on a couple of occasions.
It definitely lifts the base game to become something more complex, but it’s probably
an expansion we’ll play with every time.
As stated at the start, I still have a long way to go to try
and play some of the major releases from 2016. These are the other highlights
on my radar from the BoardGameGeek awards;
Clank! was nominated in
the Best Card Game category, although
from my understanding it’s definitely a mixture of board and card game, with deck-building
mechanisms and dungeon crawl theme. Any deck-building game with this much
popularity is a game we need to play!
Star Wars Rebellion isn’t
on my list of games to play, but I’m sure that one day it’ll be a game
that Amy is keen to try since it seems to encapsulate the Star Wars universe so
well. Very long confrontational two player games are not the sort of thing that
works well in our house so maybe we’ll need to try before we buy at a
convention in the coming months.
Mansions of Madness: Second
Edition is a game I’ll get the chance to play next month. I’m pretty
sure that a streamlined, app driven Cthulu game will be great for us, but since
our copy of Eldritch Horror still
hasn’t hit the table I’d like to try before I buy with Mansions of Madness.
Terraforming Mars has
risen up the BGG ranking so quickly, that I’m pretty convinced it’s not all
hype. However the time it’s taken to come back into print has probably been increasing
my envy of the people playing it. It’s a theme I’m sure we’ll enjoy and
definitely one we need to seek out when it’s back in stock.
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