This weekend a few of my friends and I got together for a two day blowout where we did pretty much nothing but eat, drink and play board games.

As is always the case when this particular group gets together, we had a blast. There was too much food, probably too much alcohol and absolutely too many board games crammed into too little time.

In other words, a pretty damn good weekend.

Of course, we are here to talk about the games.

The cool thing about this particular weekend was that we played almost exclusively new stuff. Games that, for one reason or another, had been sitting on our collective radar but had never actually made it to the table.

So this list is effectively a collection of first impressions. Some good, some bad and, as you will soon discover, some that landed squarely in the great kingdom of “it was fine.”

Here we go!

Star Wars Outer Rim

We kicked things off with Star Wars Outer Rim, a 2019 Fantasy Flight Games release that has picked up some notable accolades over the years, including a Golden Geek nomination for Best Thematic Board Game.

This one has been on my must try list for quite a while, so when it finally hit the table I was genuinely excited to give it a go.

In Outer Rim, each player takes on the role of one of the many rogues, scoundrels and bounty hunters floating around the Star Wars universe. You have characters like Boba Fett, Han Solo and, naturally, one of my all time favorite smugglers, Lando Calrissian, who I immediately snatched up.

Nobody else was getting Lando.

The game itself is a competitive adventure game in which you travel around the Outer Rim delivering cargo, hunting down bounties, taking jobs and trying to avoid, or occasionally confront, patrols belonging to the various major factions. All of this earns you fame, which is effectively the game’s victory point system. Get enough fame before everyone else and you win.

Pretty straightforward stuff.

The production, as you might expect from Fantasy Flight Games, is completely over the top. There are cards everywhere, piles of tokens, character sheets, ships, markers and enough gorgeous Star Wars artwork to wallpaper a small apartment.

Visually, the game absolutely delivers.

The gameplay itself is a little harder to pin down.

I would describe it as unique and interesting, but not particularly groundbreaking or deep. In fact, underneath all of the cards, tokens, characters, abilities, and various moving parts is actually a fairly simple game.

It is simple in that wonderfully overcooked Fantasy Flight Games sort of way.

There is a lot going on, but that does not necessarily mean there is a lot going on.

Outer Rim is clearly designed primarily as an entertainment experience rather than some deep strategic puzzle, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of decisions to make and certainly opportunities to play well, but at least in our game, luck played a pretty significant role in determining how things ultimately shook out.

I won, for example, and while I would love to sit here and explain how my brilliant tactical mind and mastery of intergalactic smuggling carried me to victory, the reality is that Lando caught some very fortunate breaks.

Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good.

The game was also a bit too long for what it was. Again, this is something I have come to expect from Fantasy Flight Games. Outer Rim has enough going on to keep you entertained, but not quite enough going on to justify how long it takes to reach the finish line.

That said, I had fun.

I would certainly play it again and I think there are still plenty of characters, ships, jobs and strategies I would be curious to explore. I do suspect, however, that Outer Rim has a relatively short shelf life. This does not strike me as the sort of game you are going to pull out twenty or thirty times and continue discovering new layers.

It’s a fun Star Wars adventure game with great production values, plenty of theme and enough randomness to produce some memorable moments.

It was entertaining. It looked fantastic. I won.

It was… fine.

World Order

Definitely the highlight of the weekend and, judging by the reaction around the table, I suspect not just for me.

World Order comes from the same team that gave us the absolutely fantastic Hegemony, so expectations were pretty damn high going into this one. It did not disappoint.

In fact, I would argue that it exceeded my expectations in just about every way.

In World Order, each player takes control of one of the major powers of our modern world, China, Russia, the United States or the European Union, and then proceeds to do what major powers do best. Compete for influence, manipulate everyone around them and generally make the world a worse place in the name of national interest.

You know, geopolitics.

Mechanically, World Order is effectively a card driven deck builder, but describing it that way really undersells what is going on here. Deck building is the engine that makes the machine run, but wrapped around it is resource management, area control, economic competition, political maneuvering and a mountain of player interaction.

This game is a well of asymmetrical strengths and weaknesses, clever plays and wonderfully vicious gotcha moments.

Like Hegemony, however, the real magic is how perfectly the mechanics capture the theme.

You genuinely feel like you are engaged in this constant geopolitical tug of war where everything you do affects someone else. Every action feels meaningful, every play creates an opportunity for someone to respond and every mistake feels like an opening your opponents can exploit.

It doesn’t take long before this turns into a competitive grudge match.

Exactly as it should.

There are also so many clever little ways World Order tweaks familiar deck-building concepts to fit the game. One of my favorites is incredibly simple. When you purchase a new card, rather than putting it into your discard pile as you would in the overwhelming majority of deck builders, you put it directly on top of your deck.

That sounds like a tiny change. It isn’t.

It means that every card you purchase is effectively a card you are buying for your next turn, essentially planning your next move. You are not just improving your deck at some vague point in the future. You are making a strategic decision about what you are going to be able to do next.

This becomes even more important because World Order is an incredibly tight game. You play six rounds and, in each round, you play just four cards. Do the math.

You effectively get 24 actions in the entire game.

That is not a lot of time to establish global economic and political dominance.

Worse yet, there are only two scoring rounds, which means timing is absolutely everything. You can’t simply build some magnificent engine and assume that eventually it will pay off. Eventually may be too late. You need the right cards, in the right place, at the right moment and you need to understand exactly what everyone else is trying to accomplish while you are doing it.

That creates an enormous amount of tension from surprisingly few actions.

The production also deserves some praise, not because it is extravagant, but because it is incredibly clean. Almost everything you need to understand the current state of the game is right there on the board. Who controls what, where influence is building, where the money is flowing and where the next fight is likely to break out is all immediately visible.

The only truly hidden information is the cards in your opponents’ hands and even that mystery only goes so far.

World Order is a highly deterministic game. Luck exists, naturally, but this is very clearly a game that rewards good planning, good timing and, perhaps most importantly, understanding what the other players at the table are trying to do.

I absolutely loved it. There are games you play once and think, “Yeah, that was pretty good.”

Then there are games where you finish and immediately start thinking about what you would do differently next time.

World Order was very much the latter.

Without question, one of the best games I have played all year.

Meeples and Monsters

Released in 2022, Meeples and Monsters seems to have fallen between the cracks of the board gaming world, which is a little surprising given the caliber of its designer, Ole Steiness.

This is the same guy who gave us sleeper hits like Champions of Midgard, Altay: Dawn of Civilization, another really clever game that seems to have largely fallen through the cracks, and the visually stunning Deep Rock Galactic.

That said, after playing Meeples and Monsters, I kind of get it.

There is quite a bit of Lords of Waterdeep DNA here, but Meeples and Monsters is a considerably simpler worker placement game, lighter and executed with far less flair.

In Meeples and Monsters, you collect and upgrade heroes, whose various strengths and abilities you use to fight monsters and score points. As the game progresses, increasingly powerful monsters appear, eventually leading to final showdowns with end-game bosses. Manage your little army of wooden heroes better than everyone else and, presumably, you walk away with the most points and win the game.

The theme is actually quite fun, built around the gag that your heroes are literally wooden meeples. It is colorful, bright, very easy to learn and there is something inherently satisfying about upgrading your little wooden adventurers and sending them off to murder monsters.

The problem is that there really isn’t a tremendous amount to think about.

Unlike Lords of Waterdeep, where you are constantly weighing different options and trying to figure out how to squeeze the most out of each turn with a fair amount of player interaction, Meeples and Monsters has a tendency to present you with several options where one is very obviously better than the others.

Here are the things I can do. That one is clearly the best. So I do that.

Next.

The fact that it’s a worker placement game where after you place your workers down you remove them, means that blocking actions isn’t a thing, so there is considerably less interactions if any at all between players.

That is really the issue with the game. It is not that there are no decisions to make, it is that too often the game effectively makes the decision for you and it really doesn’t have much impact on the other players.

The main gimmick is that the heroes you have available for this worker placement game are drawn randomly from your bag. Part of the strategy is building the contents of that bag so that the heroes you draw work together and support whatever strategy you are pursuing.

In theory, that should create an interesting puzzle.

In practice, I think there is just a little too much luck involved in what actually comes out of the bag.

As a result, much of the game felt less like I was deciding what to do and more like I was drawing meeples from a bag to discover what the obvious best move was going to be that turn.

Draw your meeples. Look at the board. Spot the obvious move. Execute it.

Occasionally you might have two choices that are equally appealing and you actually have to stop and think about what you want to do, but those moments were the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time the game felt strangely scripted, despite the fact that the script itself was being randomly generated by whatever came out of your bag.

That is not necessarily terrible. There is something pleasant about the whole experience. You are upgrading heroes, killing monsters, getting stronger and watching increasingly ridiculous creatures appear on the board. The game moves along nicely and there is enough going on to keep everyone engaged.

It just never really challenged me.

Meeples and Monsters was fine, but I can understand why it disappeared under the radar despite having a recognizable designer behind it. This is certainly not Ole Steiness at his best.

I do think there is an audience for it, however.

If you have younger kids who are ready to move beyond basic family games and into proper hobby board games, I could actually see Meeples and Monsters being a pretty great step up. The colorful presentation, fun theme, straightforward decisions and constant sense of progression would probably go a long way with that audience.

For my group? It was fine.

Cascadia: Landmarks

Cascadia was the only game in our lineup that I had actually played before, but this time we added the Landmarks expansion and bumped the game up to five players.

Cascadia is, by just about any reasonable measure, one of the premier board games of 2021. It’s sitting pretty in the 61st spot on the 100 games of all time on BoardGameGeek list as of this writing and has collected awards from just about every place you can collect an award from.

At this point, I think it is fair to call Cascadia a modern classic.

I’m a pretty late bloomer here. I only played it for the first time this year and, apparently, I am considerably less impressed with it than the rest of the board gaming world.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Cascadia is a very clever puzzle game. There are plenty of interesting decisions, it moves at a brisk pace and there is something genuinely satisfying about watching this little ecosystem slowly come together in front of you.

When you pull off exactly what you were trying to do, it feels great.

For me, though, the whole experience is just a bit too benign.

We are all sitting around the same table, supposedly playing a board game together, but really everyone is off in their own little corner playing their own private game of Cascadia. The entire scope of player interaction basically boils down to someone taking the tile or animal you wanted.

You bastard. Then you move on with your life.

It reminds me quite a bit of Wingspan, which falls into a similar category for me. Everyone is technically playing the same game together, but most of the time we could probably erect little privacy screens around our play areas and it wouldn’t dramatically change the experience.

I’m just not a huge fan of games like that.

That said, I completely understand why so many people are.

In Cascadia, the basic premise is that you are placing habitat tiles and populating them with wildlife, trying to arrange everything into particular patterns that score points. Each turn you select a habitat tile and an animal token and add them to the growing puzzle in front of you.

At the end of the game, whoever has done the best job putting all of this together scores the most points and wins.

What keeps the puzzle fresh is that the wildlife scoring conditions change from game to game. You randomly select scoring cards that determine what arrangements of bears, salmon, elk, hawks and foxes you are actually trying to create.

It is simple, elegant and very easy to understand.

The Landmarks expansion adds another layer to that puzzle by rewarding you for building sufficiently large connected habitats. Put together enough of a particular terrain type and you can place a landmark, which gives you access to additional scoring opportunities unique to you.

It is certainly interesting and gives you one more thing to consider while constructing your little wilderness.

I’m just not convinced Cascadia needed it.

For me, one of the game’s greatest strengths is how clean the original puzzle is. Landmarks adds another decision point and another scoring consideration, but I’m not sure it actually makes the game better. It makes it more complicated, certainly, but those are not the same thing.

I suspect this expansion makes considerably more sense for people who play Cascadia all the time. If you have played the base game twenty or thirty times and know its puzzle inside and out, adding another layer probably gives you exactly the sort of additional complexity and variety you are looking for.

For someone like me, who is going to pull Cascadia out once in a long while, I think I would rather just play the base game.

Ultimately, I walked away with pretty much the same impression I had the first time.

Cascadia is clever, polished, easy to teach and beautifully paced. I completely understand why people love it and I certainly wouldn’t object to playing it again.

It’s simply not the kind of board game that gets me excited. I liked it. It was…

You guessed it.

Fine.

Hamlet: The Village Building Game

The last game on my list is Hamlet: The Village Building Game, which is a clever little puzzly game about, as it says right there on the tin, building a village.

Who says board game names need to be complicated?

This very colorful and incredibly busy game has players collectively constructing a village out of awkwardly shaped tiles, connecting buildings with roads and creating a network through which resources can be transported.

The ultimate goal is to use those resources to construct the central building of the Hamlet, the church. Once completed, your humble little Hamlet officially becomes a Village and the game ends.

Apparently all that separates a Hamlet from a Village is a church. Who knew?

Along the way, everyone scores points for their participation in this increasingly chaotic group construction project, with each player trying to make sure that their contribution to civic development is considerably more valuable than everyone else’s.

Of all the games we played this weekend, I think Hamlet was the only one besides World Order that really got my attention.

There was something going on here.

The village is technically a shared construction project, but everyone is naturally trying to shape that village to benefit themselves. You want roads going where you need them to go, resources available where you can reach them and buildings entering play that support whatever little economic empire you are trying to construct.

That creates some surprisingly interesting interaction because when you add something to the village, you are not simply improving your own position. You are changing the board for everyone.

Sometimes that means helping yourself. Sometimes it means accidentally helping someone else.

Sometimes it means putting something somewhere specifically because you know it is going to be a pain in the ass for one of your opponents.

Now we’re playing a board game. There were also clearly layers here that a single play did not fully reveal.

Certain buildings, for example, do not produce resources at all but can score you a considerable number of points. Building them, however, means making sure you can actually get the required resources to the right place. That requires planning your routes, understanding what resources are available and making sure you don’t stretch yourself too thin trying to accomplish everything at once.

There is a surprisingly delicate balance to all of this.

You need to pay close attention to which buildings are available, where resources are being produced and how the growing network of roads connects everything together. It is very easy to get ambitious, overextend yourself and suddenly discover that what looked like a brilliant plan two turns ago now requires you to spend several turns recovering while everyone else happily gets on with scoring points.

I did that. More than once.

That is probably what I liked most about Hamlet. When I made a mistake, it generally felt like my mistake. I could look back at what I had done and see where I had overextended, failed to plan properly or misunderstood how the village was developing.

That immediately makes me want to play again.

I also suspect there is considerably more strategy hiding underneath the colorful presentation than we uncovered during our first game. I came away thinking about different approaches I could take, different ways I could manipulate the village layout and, most importantly, things I would do differently the next time it hits the table.

That is usually a pretty good sign. I liked Hamlet.

It was clever, interactive, pretty to look at and had enough going on beneath the surface that I genuinely want another crack at it.

So after an entire weekend filled with games that were mostly some variation of fine, Hamlet managed to climb a few notches above that.

Not World Order good. But definitely better than fine.

Conclusion

This was a really fun-filled weekend; the truth is that even when games aren’t blowing your mind, it’s hard not to have a good time surrounded by friends.

I will say, however, World Order was the unquestionable king of the hill this weekend. It was a robust, clever, and deeply interactive game that really triggered an unquenchable urge to get it back to the table as soon as possible!