I recommend it. Its biggest downside is the playing time; a three hour game is not unusual.
Oh, also Arboretum. That’s a good one, delightfully stressful.
I would only consider it a downside with slow players. I played it twice a couple weeks ago at DiceTowerCon with almost all new players and we were still around 3 hours. With experienced players it could easily be less unless at least one is the type of player that agonizes over every move. Luckily, none of the players I played with were like that. Some of them did take extended bathroom breaks, but that wasn’t as bad for some reason. If you have a consistently slow player it might only turn a 2 3/4 hour game into 3 1/4 hours, but it will feel like exponentially more time since you’re doing nothing while waiting for your turn.
What I dislike about it, however, compared to the fairly similar Terraforming Mars, is that it is less immersive since the effects on the animal cards take a real or even metaphorical characteristic of the animal you are buying and make it have a real effect on your zoo. Having an owl will not literally make your zoo more insightful.
But other than that, while I am not going to buy it right away, if I were in a gaming group that wanted to play it, I’d choose it over many others.
My sister is visiting with her four year old granddaughter. So this week, I’ve been playing a lot of Candyland.
I was wrong about this, we played 3 games, yesterday was our fourth game of Charterstone. I’ve now won the last 3 out of 4 games (I’ve just lucked into different winning strategies each game), but the inherent balancing mechanisms are going to make that streak super hard to maintain. I don’t think it’s a big spoiler, but to be safe:
Summary
the game grants something extra to everyone but the winner of any particular game, that gives them a benefit at the start of the next game. These benefits are cumulative, so everyone has 3 starting benefits over me. Not going into details about what those benefits might be.
Played a new to us game that I actually bought last year but we just never played it until this week: Fantasy Realms. Highly recommended. The entire game is just a deck of cards and you can teach the rules in literally thirty seconds. The complex part is the scoring because every card has its own scoring combos but there is a publisher supported app that will do it for you. We found it was a great game to play on week nights where the set up was just suffle and start playing. It is very random but since a game takes 15 minutes, if you have a bad draw you just play again.
There is a Star Trek rethemed version which I have but we have not played and looking at the rules and cards I think maybe it ups the complexity just a bit too much but I will know better once we try it. There’s also a Marvel retheme which I know very little about but I would definitely recommend the original.
Thought I would list my top five games that were released or became widely available in 2022:
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Tenpenny Parks. A fun park building game with great art and components.
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Massive Darkness 2. A huge dungeon crawler with tons of minis but the base box is not a campaign (which I like as I don’t normally like campaign or legacy games) and every character has its own mini game that plays differently.
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Ark Nova. A super popular game about building a zoo. It is really good.
These next two are basically interchangeable as 1-2:
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Mosaic. A large civilization building game but with relatively easy to learn rules and quick turns.
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Carnegie. An odd duck of game that isn’t like any other I have played but has really interesting strategy and decisions on every turn.
Your numbering makes my head hurt. 
Hmmm, we’re always behind and can’t do a best of 2022 yet (we have Ark Nova and Ready Set Bet, for example, but haven’t gotten to them). Carnegie is on our “2022 games of interest” as well…we do have a long list of 2022 games we want to try, we’ll get there eventually.
ETA: I might count Scout as “widely available in 2022” since the 2019 edition was a Japanese-only Oink game, and it’s been impossible to find until recently. And Scout is our new favorite filler game, replacing No, Thanks and For Sale…
What I have played this week:
Dune Imperium - I usually do pretty well with this one but I got trounced this time.
Endless Winter - First time playing this and I was expecting to do poorly but I ended up winning.
Streets - A very tight game. The final scores were 89, 90, and 91. I was the ninety.
Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria - I did pretty well but another player pulled ahead with endgame bonuses.
G.I. Joe: Critical Mission - A co-op game. We managed a last second win.
If we’re doing recent plays, here’s our December:
| Race for the Galaxy | 41 |
|---|---|
| Hanabi | 7 |
| Village Green | 5 |
| Schotten Totten | 4 |
| Above and Below | 3 |
| SCOUT | 3 |
| Yokai Septet | 2 |
| Alhambra | 1 |
| Concordia | 1 |
| Cubitos | 1 |
| Fort | 1 |
| Heaven & Ale | 1 |
| Railroad Ink: Deep Blue Edition | 1 |
| Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: The Thames Murders & Other Cases | 1 |
| Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza | 1 |
| Terraforming Mars | 1 |
| Titan | 1 |
| Wingspan | 1 |
Sorry about the numbering. I think it’s a bug in Chrome for Android. It looked normal when I typed it I swear
Yeah I am behind on games also. I did a top five because I didn’t play enough from 2022 to do a top ten.
You played Race for the Galaxy forty-one times in a single month? How many times have you played it overall?
Oh, good question, that’s the one stat I port over from Board Game Arena, the rest are live plays.
And I’m not gonna tell you how many, because I started right before Covid, and it’s an embarrassingly large number.
I played Blockbuster a couple times over the holiday, and found it really fun. The concept is to get your team to guess the movie on the card, either via a quote, a single word, or non-verbal acting.
~Max
January plays…
Played several new games recently:
Lacrimosa. The theme is interesting and doesn’t quite work 100% where you are patrons reminiscing with Mozart’s widow about your dealings with Mozart so she will pick you to fund the finishing of his last requiem or something. Either way the game is a really good Euro game with amazing components.
Tiletum. You are merchants in medieval Eurzzzzzzzz The theme is nothing but this is great game that is easier to teach and play than you expect.
Oak. A worker placement game where you get to dress up your little Druid meeples. How have you not bought this already?
Clank Catacombs. We have Clank and Clank in Space so I resisted getting this but finally gave in and we liked it very much. Since the board is made by tiles you pull one by one it is more random than Clank but that is fine for us.
Starship Captains. This is Not Star Trek the game. It’s a little short (the game should really be one round longer) but the puzzle of using your crew was fun and the ship boards and the Red Yellow and Blue crew figures have a great toy factor.
A lot of Earth lately. A fair amount of Applejack.
Does anyone else here play on Board Game Arena?
I play regularly – mostly async with folks I know (currently playing 6 games) – about once a month I play live with some college friends.
I’d be up for a async game (easier to coordinate, esp. with folks in different time zones) with other dopers. Agricola? new TTA? Russian Railroads? I’d play most any medium/medium heavy game.
I’m N9IWP on BGA (and yucata.de)
Brian
I have played a few good games since my last post:
Revive. A Eurogame with really great components (a neat dual layered machine board) and asymmetric powers with the theme of repopulating the surface of Earth thousands of years after an apocalypse.
Earth. A snappy engine building game with hundreds of different cards. This got a lot of hype and I didn’t like it as much as some but liked it a lot.
Space Station Phoenix. This had a few minutes of hype last year and then disappeared but it is really good. It’s interesting because you start the game with several ships that provide abilities but gradually scrap them to build pieces of your station which provide different abilities of their own and are the key to winning. It’s very different from most games and I enjoyed it.
Autobahn. A really tight game where you semi cooperatively build up Germany’s highway system but you have competing interests. Money and points are very tight. If you like that sort of thing you should give this a look.
I also played Rise which I wanted to like more than I did. It has a really cool action selection mechanism tied to a so so game of going up tracks to trigger other tracks. It was not bad but we found it kind of average.
Forgot about two other games:
Votes for Woman. A head to head historical game about passing the Nineteenth Amendment. It plays like an Area control war game and has a good solo mode.
Star Wars Deck Building Game. It was fun but kind of harmless. If you are familiar with deckbuilding games you know 90% of the rules going in. A good way to get a friend who likes Star Wars to try a modern board game.