2024, The Board Gaming Year of “It’s Alright”?

I have been thinking about the following on and off for a while now: what was the year 2024 as a whole like when it comes to new releases? Was it good, average, bad? And what are the outstanding games we’ll still be playing many years down the line?

Perhaps it’s just me, but it seems 2024 consisted – to a surprising amount – of releases that worked well mechanically, but didn’t instil any enthusiasm to play them over and over again. There would be hype for an allegedly new classic on the horizon, excitement building up for a couple of weeks or months, and after release it would be out of the spotlight again quickly. Case in point: of all the games I bought at SPIEL Essen 2024 (or ordered online afterwards), the only ones I would really be missing if I hadn’t bought it would be Kingdom Legacy, a 140 card game that comes in a tiny box, and Tranquility: The Ascent, also a card game. There was no game where I would say it’s outright bad or broken. Just a lot of “That was alright, don’t think we need to play it again”.

On the one hand, this is a good sign. It shows that our hobby has reached a level of maturity where a large number of designers are able to take proven mechanisms and combine them in a new way or add some other little sprinkle on them to make them their own and result in a functioning game. At least I seem to have played less games this year where upon first play some fundamental issue immediately surfaced. It still happens, but seemingly less so than previous years. Also the number of very bad rule books went down.

On the other hand, 2024 reminds me of the movie industry: things get predictable and boring. Alright, here is another Euro with a tight economy, a low amount of turns, either a worker placement or action selection mechanism, and add on top a theme that might have functioned as an initial inspiration but is so loosely interwoven into the mechanisms that it can easily be replaced with a number of alternative themes instead. Where 2022 was a year of many outstanding games (think Heat, Carnegie, John Company 2nd Edition, …) and 2023 a strong follow-up (e.g. Hegemony, Evacuation, Horseless Carriage), 2024 feels like designers and publishers were playing it safe. Or maybe COVID-times with people stuck at home resulted in more playtesting and refinement applied to each game and we’re now back to normal again?

The Games That Stood Out This Year

When I try to think back about what my favourite new gaming experiences have been this year, my thoughts immediately go to Antiquity (originally released in 2004) and Indonesia (2005). I didn’t see this one coming at all and was totally taken aback about how hard both games hit me. Every play was different, with every play we discovered something new, and every play emphasised for me how good it can feel to have real player interaction in games. Not the watered down “you have picked up the card I wanted” kind of way, the “oh gosh darn it, why the heck did you have to do THAT?!?” kind of way. 😀 If you would ask me which game I would play ten times in a row right now, back to back, it would be those two.

Antiquity feels to me like a mixture of a city builder and a mini-civ game. You’re sending out workers to harvest resources that allow you to build buildings that give you completely new powers. A harbour allows you to use water to extend your area of control, a market to suddenly be able to trade with other players, and so on. There are so many brilliant ideas in this single game – like players choosing their own win condition during the course of the game or how each hex can basically be only used once, organically getting players to move in on each other’s territory – it’s just amazing. The big issue is that it’s really hard to find a copy where you won’t have to pay an arm and a leg for. On the other hand, it’s about the same money as a kickstarter all-in pledge and you get so much more game for the same money.

Indonesia on the other hand is one of the cleverest economic games I’ve ever played. Players pick up company deeds, either for producers of various goods or the shipping companies that can move said goods to nearby cities. This game is all about evaluating what a company might be worth and manipulating demand. Through a brilliant merger mechanism, companies often change hands multiple times in a game and it’s always tricky to say who got the better end of the deal there. Indonesia has a surprisingly short rule set for the depth of complexity that ensues, but you still get a 3-4h meaty play out of it every time.

A 2024 release I also would love to play way more often is Rise & Fall. Similar to the other two games, it has a short rule set, is all about player interaction, but in this case also has a gorgeous table presence. In Rise & Fall, each turn you activate all your units of one type to spread out over the shared landscape and control majorities of territories. Units can transform into cities to produce more new units, into ships to move over the seas, into merchants that generate points by trading, etc. This game looks cute – especially in the fancy screen printed crowd funding edition – but is rather an abstract positional power play of cutting off other players and finding opportunities to generate more points than others. It’s all about location, location, location, and there is no catch-up mechanisms or guardrails to protect you. The base game by itself already feels like a classic that will be good for many plays but the deluxe edition comes with dozens of stretch goals that will likely keep the game fresh for a long time.

Speaking of classics: I’m not a train gamer, but this genre of games seems to yield a lot of games that warrant repeated plays. I played my first 18xx game this year (which was 1830) and now have learned 18xx is definitely not for me. But I also finally picked up a copy of Age of Steam Deluxe Edition (2019, original from 2002) and this game is slowly growing on me. It’s a quintessential train game in the sense of “build tracks and deliver goods”, but before actually playing it I wouldn’t have imagined how tight this game is. At the start of your turn you have to figure out how many shares (basically loans) you might need so that at the end of the turn after you might or might not have managed to generate income you’ll be able to pay the bills. There is tons of player interaction, others getting in your way or “stealing” goods you had relied on being able to deliver yourself. It’s also a system in that there are hundreds (no kidding) of maps that all alter the core gameplay in some way and therefore keep the experience fresh. I still got the feeling the more straight forward Steam Power will be more my jam, but I understand now why Age of Steam is THE ONE game for many people.

Another classic I picked up this year was Iwari Deluxe Edition (2020, basically a deluxified re-skin of 2000’s Web of Power). It’s an abstract area majority game that has a super simple but elegant mechanism: each turn you can play up to 3 cards to place up to two pieces in a single region. That’s all you do. Placing tents helps for scoring points in a region where placing totems is more the long game as they are scored only at the end of the game. Both are interconnected by a rule that says there can only be as many totems in a region as there are tents of one color. This simple mechanism greats a giant case of “if I place here, I open up a possibility for you but put pressure on you in that other region”. It’s another case of a common theme for me this year: games with short rules and lots of emerging situations! I’ve really come to appreciate games this year that don’t need 30+ pages of rules to create complexity and depth.

Those That Give Me Hope

There are a few games that came out this year that I really enjoyed but where it’s not clear for me yet how much staying power they have in the long run. Just this week, I finally received my copy of Creature Caravan and so far, I’m pleasantly surprised. Looking at images and playthroughs, I had assumed a game with such a high degree of multiplayer-solitaire wouldn’t be for me, but so far we’re having a great time with it. It’s a tableau builder where your caravan of refugees picks up new members to give you new action spaces for your dice to place in. Every turn you have just 5 dice and have to figure out how to make the most of them. There is literally no interaction of players on the map which feels odd, just on some shared markets. But for some reason I can’t put my finger on just yet, all the individual creature cards that reference traits of other cards totally work. It reminds me a bit of Fantasy Realms although it’s less about finding specific cards but more creating good groups (e.g. “I need 3 more magic creatures”). Luckily there are enough ways to churn through a good amount of cards to always be able to figure out some combo of creatures.

Another recent acquisition for me is Leviathan Wilds, a giant-climbing, crystal-bashing co-op game. Again, it’s too early for me to tell how much staying power it will have in my group, but this game does a lot right: a large number of different scenarios all with their own new tweaks to the mechanisms, simple deck generation by combining a character and a trait (and the associated cards of both), nice visuals, gameplay that encourages supporting other players on their turn, etc. As a solo game, it hasn’t really grabbed me, but it feels like a great game to take out from time to time when my play group wants to play something more casual in-between. I can totally see why it might even be game of the year for a lot of people lucky enough to get their hands on a copy.

A case of not-for-me-but-perhaps-for-you is SETI. I think in a year with few stand out titles, this has a good chance of being game of the year for a lot of people. There is lots to like here, the spatial puzzle of when to launch probes in the rotating solar system being my favourite. But the economy is super tight and it can happen that another player can screw up your multi-turn plan with a single action. If you like games like Arc Nova or Terraforming Mars, this will be right up your alley. For me though, it just felt too frustrating and mechanical. Like all the mechanisms work great, but I didn’t have any memorable moments or stories to tell once I finished playing.

And finally I’ve already written about I, Napoleon and Kingdom Legacy before. Both solo games I had a lot of fun with … but only for a limited time. So I would currently add the caveat for them that their staying power will largely depend on whether or not the respective designers manage to add more replayability with the planned expansions.

Hopes for 2025

It will be interesting to see how 2025 will turn out. For one thing, I have the feeling the interest in crowd funding projects will continue to decline as more and more people have gotten burned by things that looked good on paper (or in renders) but turned out to be sub-par gameplay when actually playing them. Or retail editions coming out before pledges are fulfilled. We should be able to look forward to a number of interesting projects to be fulfilled in 2025 though: The spiritual successor to Hegemony called World Order is probably top of my list, a visually updated Indonesia 3rd edition, Steam Power, Galactic Cruise, Wehrlegigs’ Molly House.

One thing I would hope for but am not sure if it will happen is that games will focus back on creating memorable moments. So many of the new releases have basically become math problems that stay interesting while figuring them out, but lose all their attraction once done so. A few years back, I would have happily optimised away on a new Euro, but by now I want each play session to do something different. To have some situation arise where the play group can later say “do you remember the time when …?”.

I also would assume we’ll be looking more and more back to the classics of previous years. There are so many great games that can be picked up on the secondary market or are freely available in retail, it will be difficult for new games to be more than a temporary blip on the new/hype cycle. Sure, gamers will always be interested in exploring new games, but maybe the new-as-in-released will turn more into a new-for-them? Or doing expansions / new maps for existing games will get more interest again? I’m probably just getting too old for the FOMO-cycle and I’m more valuing how much fun I really had when I got a game to the table. After all, the most valuable resource we have is the time we spent playing with friends. Why play a new, likely mediocre game when you already have one you know is amazing on your shelf?

Let me know in the comments: What has been the standout game in 2024 for you? Did I miss anything? And what are you looking forward to in 2025?