Regular readers probably know I play a lot of board games. Games are games! I mean of course they’re not all the same, but they all tap into the primal need to play, to connect, to learn. So when my wife and kid planned to be away for a week in early July, I planned as well.

Over the course of six days I had eight attendees come and play a total of 15 games. That is so much board gaming, far more than I’ll ever do at an actual for-pay convention. But it was all in the comfort of my own home, with folks I know. It was also entirely on me to teach the vast majority of these games.

Here’s what we played! If you’re looking for a list of heavy-ish-to-quite-heavy board games that’ll break your brain and fully engage every synapse, I recommend all of these.

Euthia: Torment of Resurrection

This sprawling adventure game from Steamforged Games and Diea Games is sort of an analog Diablo. Huge map that’s drawn from a curated stack of tiles, tons of minis, and very cool, weird characters who advance into real powerhouses. My favorite of this genre is Vlaada Chvaitl’s Mage Knight, but that one is a huge brain burner. This is more beer-and-pretzels, which you know…there are downsides. And upsides! You can’t be too mad when the dice ruin your plans.

Our scenario took four players about six hours to play through. Pretty epic! There are probably 20 scenarios and I’ve only played five or six of them. This table hog can’t be a regular draw but it’s a romp each time I can get it out.

Gaia Project

This sci-fi sequel to Terra Mystica is a bit abstract, nonviolent, and complex. It’s a point salad thing, where you’re trying to expand the reach of your space empire while advancing your technological mastery all while scoring within random, arbitrary goals drawn at the start of the game. It’s super replayable, which is great.

I added the Lost Fleet expansion, which features weird, fussy new races to play and four space hulks floating out on the map ready to be exploited. I do love a tightly designed eurogame! But I’m not great at the ruthless efficiency with which you need to play them.

Rolling Heights

John Clair has become one of my favorite board game designers. I learned about him via Edge of Darkness, the second of his “card crafting” games (the first was Mystic Vale, which I have yet to play somehow) in which you slot partially printed see-through cards into a card sleeve. It also has a cube tower that randomly distributes dropped plastic cubes across three different “courtyards.” He repeated the trick with Dead Reckoning, a fantasy pirate game with some legacy elements, and Unstoppable, a solo or two player cooperative game about beating one of three big bads through ever more elaborate combos.

Rolling Heights from AEG continues Clair’s toy-intensive approach by giving us rolling meeples in various colors. You earn them by completing little buildings on a map. By the end of the game you’ve got a literal city of highrises! Very cool. Not super hard.

Dwellings of Eldervale

This is the fantasy prequel to a sci-fi favorite of mine of the past year, Andromeda’s Edge. There are eight magical elements of which a random subset will be present in each game. You are trying to build little dwellings all over a growing map while avoiding or defeating great huge monsters. I’ve got the Legendary upgrade for the game, which adds huge critters on their own big stands that double as speakers. That’s right, they roar and screech as you move them around the map. Absurd, very fun.

Andromeda’s Edge is 80% the same game as Dwellings but also longer and more elaborate. I think I like AE better, but I can play Dwellings of Eldervale in a much shorter period, like 2 or so hours.

Black Rose Wars: Rebirth

I played this bad boy back to back twice in one day. Black Rose Wars: Rebirth from Ludus Magus Studios is a combination deckbuilder and area control game, with different Avatars of the Black Rose Lodge serving as the primary variable. There’s this magical lodge, see, and the magi have gathered to try and rebuild it. And kill each other, maybe, while doing it.

Because I almost always go all-in, I’ve got a great huge box of baddies and their supplemental materials to add to the game. You never add it all at once! But just one big bad with a new school of magic, a couple new magi, and special rules are complicated enough.

Cyclades: Legendary Edition

This re-release from Open Sesame Games of a Bruno Cathala classic arrived recently and I’ve been trying to find its sweet spot. First tried Cyclades with two players, which was really two teams and too much to think about for our first game. The second attempt was with three players, better but a little dull. Four was terrific and probably the perfect player count.

In Cyclades, you’re bidding to gain the favor of one of several gods. There’s a string of gods, each providing a specific set of actions (Poseiden gives you ships and a way to move them, Zeus gives you priestesses, Hera gives you heroes, Ares gives you troops and so on). There are also big monsters you can bring into play for a while, and heroes to lead your armies around. The map is big and colorful, with a great table presence, and there are a ton of big beautiful Greek mythology monster models. Your goal is to build three metropolises either by combining smaller buildings or cashing in a bunch of philosophers. Eventually you’ll go to war! But only for a little while, because rebuilding your forces is hard.

Expeditions

Set in the Scythe universe, this Stonemaier Games creation is basically a worker-placement game on a map. With giant robots. It’s gentler and smoother than Scythe proper, with each player running their giant robot around completing quests, getting upgraded, tracking down meteorites, and then bragging about all those things.

Plays pretty quick, doesn’t have any fussy mechanical edge cases to think about. Just a smooth, good time in about 3 hours.

High Frontier

I have been singing the praises of High Frontier for years now. It is…big. Very big. Maybe the biggest physical game you will ever experience. It sits in my mind alongside Magic Realm as a grail game far outside the normal bounds of production, play time, engagement and investment. One does not play High Frontier casually.

In High Frontier, you’re basically just trying to get a rocket built and sent into space. Once you can do that predictably, then you’re surveying a huge array of space objects, everything from asteroids to moons to comets to, occasionally, whole ass planets. If you can make that work, then you move on to industrializing in space. That lets you build even fancier ships, which let you go further into space. Ultimately you’ll have your faction’s big space station hurtling into the void to orbit Callisto or something, building a gigawatt thruster in a secret lab on a comet somewhere or emancipating your robotic workforce.

It’s huge, detailed, frustrating, exquisitely researched. Big For All Mankind and The Expanse vibes! Even if I only get to play High Frontier a couple times a year I see myself doing it until I die.

Age of Steam

My favorite train game, Age of Steam from Eagle-Gryphon Games has just enough going on to feel very much like you’re running a shipping empire without getting drowned by too many small details. You build out a rail network and improve your company’s income by shipping goods between cities. There’s some press-your-luck in how many loans you’ll take out to make the company run, some take-that in shutting other players out of cities. All good stuff. It’s lovely and middling-chill.

Heat: Pedal to the Metal

This Formula 1-style racing game from Days of Wonder was new to me! I’ve played lots of Formula De, and sort of hate it for how random all the die-rolling can be. In Heat, you’re doing many of the same calculations except you’ve got a hand of cards to manage. Hit the turns too fast and you blow through your reserve of Heat! And then you spin out. Games are fast, like 30 to 45 minutes, and just a ton of fun. Probably I should be thinking about adding easier, not harder, games to the library just like this.

Planet Unknown

This polyomino tile-laying game from Adam’s Apple Games has players trying to fill planetary maps as quickly as possible, which in turn makes five different tracks advance (civilization, water, biome, tech and rovers). Tons of pattern-recognition and pattern-completion, totally simultaneous play via a central spinning Lazy Susan filled with the tiles, low-key competition to achieve goals. The back sides of the planets and corporations introduce fun asymmetry, and you can add supermoons with their own satellites if the asymmetrical game isn’t interesting enough. Spouse and I have played this like 20 times, and it’s always fun to introduce new people.

Traders of Osaka

Another new-to-me game. This one from AEG was my reminder that games still come out of plain old game publishers, and not every game is an overproduced crowdfunded table hogs (still my favorite genre). Small footprint, plays in about 30 minutes. You’re building up hands of cards big enough to “buy” sets of cargo in four colors, which advance the ships matching those colors on a very short map. Sometimes those ships sink! And sometimes you can sink the ships where your opponent has a bigger payout than you do. I don’t have nearly enough of these quick play more-than-a-filler family friendly fillers.

(Not a game I own and we played and put it away so quickly I didn’t get a nice shot.)

Teotihuacan

More than once I’ve gone all-in on a deluxe version of a game that got republished in some sort of “final authoritative version.” Cyclades was one of them, Teotihuacan is another. This heavily modular game is pure eurogame worker placement, with your workers running around a board either gathering materials, spending materials, or loading up on cacao to pay workers to do those things. You build an actual pyramid in the middle of the board, which is just charming as heck.

Teotihuacan has about a dozen modules you can introduce to the game, of which we’ve added maybe six or seven? I just love this format; Glen More is another one like this. Very clean, very precise, long-ish but open to having its tempo manipulated, not contentious while keeping some interactivity.

Rise and Fall

Last game of the house con has become one of my favorites of the year. Rise and Fall starts by building a 3D map out of layered tiles. You start with the oceans, then lay plains on top of that, then forests, then mountains and glaciers. The table presence is absolutely stellar, with little screen printed super-meeples assembled out of parts. There are tiny wagons and ships!

As you play, you’re trying to expand your presence on the map and achieve goals, mostly by being the first to build everything of a meeple type: all the cities, all the ships, and so on. This in turn leads to everyone having to discard a card that allows them to actually control one of their unit types!

Lots of tempo manipulating, puzzling out the most productive order of operations (have my miners mine now so I can build cities later, which in turn allow me to build more miners and upgrade them and so on).

There are two modest additions to Rise and Fall and I play with them both now. One adds a little asymmetry to each player, another is a set of weird locations or monsters or whatever that show up. In our game, we had floating cities, a psychic monastery, and a huge waterfall.

Some Takeaways

I felt so weird and burned out after a week of teaching and competing at this pace. Brain felt overfull, because I’m the main teacher-of-games here and of course I’m playing stuff mostly out of my own collection. This was, honestly, more board gaming than I ever get at a convention. Usually I’m running five or six slots of RPGs, not a dozen competitive board games. That much RPG work leaves me moisturized, unbothered, in my lane. But a week of board games? So wrung out. I’m not sure if this says something about how my own brain is wired and trained, or points at some fundamental difference in the kinds of experiences. Lord knows there’s not a lot of relevant conversation happening at a board game table.

I might do this again! But it would be a four day thing at most.