Dude! Take Your Turn!
A Gaming Life
Friday Night Shots – Liking Low-Rated Games
Hey there!
It’s the weekend again, and I really appreciate you stopping by every week just to chat board games.
Or to chat about anything, really.
Actually, that’s not totally true, but it is nice to see you!
Let me pour you a drink and turn the music down. Really, who put all of that bagpipe music played by music students who are failing their courses onto the jukebox?
That must be the morning bartender…
Anyway, a few weeks ago we chatted about playing low-rated games on BGG.
I won’t go into all of the stuff about BGG ratings and all of that. We talked about it then and you can go back to refresh yourself if you want.
But tonight, I want to talk about low-rated games that I’ve not only played, but actually liked!
Yes, I want to go into the weekend on a positive note.
Before we begin, I’m not talking about expansions, even standalone expansions.
I’m talking about full games.
Again, let’s count down from #5 to #1 from highest to lowest rated.
Dice of Crowns (Thing 12 Games) – BGG Rank: 8911
My wife and I had the pleasure of playing this with one of the designers (and a man I’m happy to call a friend), Sean Epperson, at Dice Tower West in 2020, right before the pandemic really hit.
It’s a simple little dice game, but it’s tons of fun.
The old king is dead, and players are vying to become the new king!
Each player takes turns rolling 7 dice. You keep crowns and daggers.
Scrolls are given to a rival for them to roll. If they roll a crown, they get to keep it for their next turn. If a dagger is rolled, they can choose who gets it (even the currently active player, in which case they can’t reroll it).
A skull or scroll is returned to the active player.
Then the active player can reroll all skulls and scrolls if they wish.
Three crown dice gets you a crown token (it takes 3 tokens to win!). Three daggers ends your turn (and you can’t claim a crown token if you get three daggers)
Five skulls also gets you a crown, but that’s a lot of dice!
Play then continues clockwise with the next player rolling all available dice (minus the daggers/crowns that have been given to other players).
First one to three crown tokens wins!
This is a really light game, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun.
It’s too bad it’s so lowly-rated on BGG, but I think it deserves higher than that.
I’d definitely play it again. To me, it’s better than Zombie Dice!
Which is ranked 2,416.
Dreaming Spires (Game Salute) – BGG Rank: 9968
This is a game I haven’t played in a long time, so maybe if I played it again, my rating might go down.
But I remember playing it twice and thinking that while it was fiddly, it was actually kind of fun.
Sadly, both of my plays of it were less than a month before I started this blog, so I don’t have any references to it here.
Essentially, you are leading an Oxford college to prominence from the medieval era to the modern.
I barely took any pictures of it!
There were definitely some issues with it, but overall I did like it.
Whether it was the puzzle aspect of building your college (you are trying to match coloured shapes on the edges in order to build up reputation in those colours) or whether it was the neat history of the event and character cards, I’m not sure.
I do remember the scoring being very weird.
I wish I could describe the game more, but I just have very little memory of it.
I’d like to try it again, just to see if I need to adjust my rating!
Embark (Tasty Minstrel Games) – BGG Rank: 10,033
We go from a game I barely remember to one that I reviewed!
This is a cute little game that takes all of about 45 minutes.
Hey, maybe I should take it to work for our lunch games!
I’ll leave the how to play to the review I linked to.
I have to say that while I haven’t been dying to play this game again, I do remember liking it a fair bit.
I like how you’re secretly allocating your people to the ships you want them to be on, though since loading is done in player order, they may not all get on board!
I like how the strategies can be a little diverse. Concentrating on one or two islands to explore deeply or get a smattering of each island.
It’s not an amazing game or anything, but revisiting it for this post makes me want to break it out again.
Just to see if I still like it.
It’s also famous for one of my favourite pictures of Boneless D. Katt (RIP).
She was always up for playing a game!
Aces of Valor (Legion Wargames) – BGG Rank: 10,636
Another game I’ve reviewed!
This is a nice solo dice-chucker about WWI air combat.
You are doing a campaign for either a French, British, American, or German squadron of fighters.
Campaigns can be short, medium or long (8, 12, 16 missions) so you can tailor it to your heart’s content.
It has an interesting initiative mechanic when you are facing off against enemy planes, where planes act in order but they can only attack/affect the enemy plane with the highest initiative that is still below that plane.
So if Lt. Blackadder has initiative of 12, he can only attack the German fighter with initiative of 10 and not the one with initiative of 9.
The mission map has you moving from square to square until you get to your objective, and then making your way back, rolling for an encounter in each square.
Aces of Valor is a game I liked, but it barely made the cut of a 7.0 for this post. It’s a wonderful narrative game but it’s really nothing but a lot of dice rolls, even more so than many solo games.
But I still like it.
DREIst! (Ravensburger) – BGG Rank: 10,986
This is a small, quick card game that I have no memory of.
I did talk about it in my “new to me” February 2018 post, as we played it twice (yes, it is that quick).
Cards in the game are one of four colours and numbered 1-8.
Each player will have a deck of cards dealt to them and they are trying to play all of the cards from their deck.
You can play either the same number in a column or the same colour in a row, but they have to be in order.
You have a hand of five cards and if you play all five cards, you get to put two of your deck cards on top of another player’s deck!
So there is a bit of take that, but not much.
I don’t remember playing this game at all, but I’m pretty sure we had fun with it.
If I rated it a 7, I must have.
It looks fun, anyway.
Have you played any of these games?
Have you heard of any of them? Well, of course you’ve heard of the two I’ve reviewed…because you read all of my posts, right?
Don’t answer that…
This review brought to you by Freed Earth Hard Tea, the number 162, and the letter Ӕ ӕ
Dude! Take Your Turn! 
Nice approach to low-rated games. Rankings are one thing, what we like can be completely separate!
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I’m sure there are some war games you like that are low-rated too 🙂
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Ooo, a fun one. Here’s how I’m handling this: these are the lowest-ranked things that I’ve given an 8 to on BGG. (I have been pretty stingy with 9s and 10s, and the things I’ve given those ratings to are all in the top 1000 anyway.)
In order going down the BGG list…
Downtown Farmers Market (2022, BGG #5,237) – My favorite new-to-me tabletop game of 2022. It checks a lot of boxes for me; I’m a sucker for food themed games, it’s in a nice place at 16 turns per player, and the fact that players can choose all their scoring goals at the beginning of the game gives it a lot of flexibility in difficulty. It’s been a fantastic game to teach and play with a wide variety of age groups and devotion to hobby games. It must not have done well, though, because Blue Orange has absolutely buried it in the US (they had maybe 10 copies at Gen Con this year), and it got reimplemented in Europe with a sea monster / ocean mapping theme for… reasons?
I carried around my DFM bag from 2022 at Gen Con this year, and Chris Handy (the Pack-O-Games designer) commented on it: “oh, is that a new Blue Orange game this year?” I had to chuckle given that they already barely acknowledge it existed.
Can’t Stop Express (1989, BGG #5,461) – It probably deserves to be this far below Can’t Stop, however, it has been a good game for my growing work group because it seats tons of players, and keeps everyone more engaged with the game during the entire experience. As breezy as Can’t Stop is on BGA, it can kind of drag on the tabletop. (I also have greatly enjoyed CSE on BGA, and I admit that some of its placement here may be biased because I was briefly ranked #1. But I liked it before then. 🙂 )
Food Fight (2011, BGG #7,334) – Part of that era of Cryptozoic Games where they were trying weird stuff and not just churning out DC Deckbuilder rethemes. “What if War, but with instants and synergistic combos” makes it click pretty quickly with new players. This one still gets consistent play at home (pretty breezy at 2P) and at work (seats up to 6 for maximum chaos). The artwork is a little weird and overly gritty for the lightness of the game, but it’s good wacky fun and allows for some interesting player interaction, both in phase selection and in deciding whether you want to try to chase down the leader of a battle or save your bonuses for later in the round.
Junk Drawer (2023, BGG #9,971) – I hope this one gets more play and exposure. It takes good elements from My City (here’s a polyomino and everyone has to deal with it) and Cartographers (four separate public scoring conditions), and sprinkles in a dash of extra decision making (everyone has four 5×5 areas to place in, and in every set of four polyominos, you can only place one in each area, which minimizes people doing the exact same thing all the time). And it’s over in 10-20 minutes. I really like it. I want to play it more, and given how much people liked My City (SDJ short list) and Cartographers (KSDJ short list), I’m surprised it hasn’t garnered more attention.
Envelopes of Cash (BGG says 2022, but it will be a 2023 crowdfund fulfillment, BGG #13,947) – I’d heard about this one on podcasts a couple times, but didn’t have a chance to try it until it hit BGA. My first play didn’t go super well, but on my second play it started to click, and I’ve had an ongoing game or two ever since. I don’t care about sports as much as I used to, but the college football theme is very unusual in board games, so that’s nice. The cards and variable player powers are very well tied in with the theme. The gameplay has a lot of elements that I like, particularly that every round allows for a new set of read-and-react decisions based on the dice (some resources now? or do you build up more for later?), and the available cards for use. And even if you don’t have a good handle on the entire deck, I now feel like there’s always a way for me to get something accomplished, even if it’s not quite what I was hoping for. It’s a similar satisfaction that I get from playing Castles of Burgundy (not coincidentally, I think, since the designer lists Feld as a major inspiration). I ended up late-pledging for this one despite the fact that the playtime is too long for my group; hopefully I will be able to get a couple 2 player games in at work, and the game has a solo mode that I’m looking forward to trying.
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Nice choices! I’d love to play Food Fight. I enjoyed the app before it disappeared. Bounced hard off of Can’t Stop Express, though your reasons for liking it are great.
My cut-off was a 7 score, not 8. If I go to the lowest rated 8 game, that would be Storm Above the Reich from GMT Games (another solo air game that I’ve reviewed here). It’s overall rating is 5951.
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If I lowered my cutoff to 7, 2023 release Penny Black would supplant the first spot. It occupies a similar mental space to Downtown Farmers Market with the tile placement and the choose your own scoring goals, though it isn’t quite as compelling to me.
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One of the lowest-ranked games in my collection is 1848 (Gerhard H. Kuhlmann, Kuhlmann Geschichtsspiele), currently #22,249. The low rank is partially due a low number of ratings, but it also has a pretty bad rating (5.0). I see why people don’t like it – it’s pretty simple in gameplay, but takes a long time, and the rules are rather opaquely written.
I enjoy it, though: I think it’s a pretty clever trick-take-adjacent game, and if you shorten the play time of the basic game according to the “advanced version”, it plays at a very reasonable 15 minutes with two players.
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That doesn’t sound too bad at all!
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I have not quite 900 items in my collection, says BGG.
The bottom 400 or so don’t even have a Geek rating.
The first ten in my collection that do are:
*Kriegspiel (1970) 5.389
Warmaster Chess 2000 (1998) 5.426
Scrimmage: Tactical Professional Football (1973) 5.433
*Strike Force One: The Cold War Heats Up – 1975 (1975) 5.438
*Dixie: The Second War Between the States (1976) 5.441
*Men At Arms (1990) 5.450
*Combined Arms: Combat Operations in the 20th Century (1974) 5.452
Statecraft: The Political Card Game (2017) 5.455
*Risk (1959) 5.456
*World War 3: 1976-1984 (1975) 5.456
I’ve played the majority of them and quite like the ones I have played (with a *).
World War 3 was the first wargame I ever saw, at age 12.
The others I have taken out and admired but never got to the table.
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Looks like a fine collection!
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