Another favorite for beer and games night at my house, LORDS OF WATERDEEP (published by Wizards of the Coast) is a really fun fantasy board game for 2-5 players. In this game, you play a faction in the medieval fantasy city of Waterdeep, vying for control by deploying agents and hiring adventurers to increase your influence.

This is a fairly easy game to learn and offers enough variability that it’s extremely re-playable. The basic gist is you deploy agents to get resources to complete quests, which earn you victory points and sometimes more resources. Intrigue cards give you special capabilities and ability to put the screw to the competition. Players can also build buildings that offer special resources but charge rent to the owner for their use, adding another dimension.

I really like this one, as it’s complex enough to be challenging but simple enough you can roll through it without a lot of mental juggling. One of those games whether you win or lose, it’s always a good time.

From Stonemaier Games, WINGSPAN is a terrific engine-building board game for 1-5 players aged 10 and up. This game has earned a jaw-dropping 5,300 reviews on Amazon with an average 4.9 rating. I played it last night for the first time and found it lived up to the praise. It was loads of fun.

In this game, you and the other players are bird enthusiasts tending wildlife preserves, where you’re hoping to attract a variety of species of birds to live in habitats. In each turn, you can take one action, which is gain food tokens from a bird feeder dice tower, lay eggs, draw new bird cards, or play a bird card on a habitat.

It’s the kind of game that’s kinda complicated until you play a round or two, and then it all comes together. Gradually, you build an engine that starts producing real points. More food, more birds with different capabilities, more eggs.

I really enjoyed this one. The production quality is charming–the eggs, bird houses, the facts about real bird species on the cards–and the birds have such unique capabilities that no two point-generating engines you build are likely to be the same. The competition is also pretty stress-free, as other players can’t mess with you. You’re really playing against yourself and against them at the end, when all the points are counted up.

Overall, WINGSPAN is a fun game that is competitive but also not competitive, with a really strong charm factor.

One of my favorite forms of procrastination is to lose myself in a good civilization-building strategy game, and Northgard is currently my top pick to turn off my brain for an hour or two. In this game, you control a clan of Vikings that is settling on a new continent and competing with other clans doing the same. While winning the game is satisfying, simply surviving this brutal game is its own form of victory.

You start out with a few settlers foraging for food. Build a scout camp, and you can assign a worker to reveal more map tiles. Build a wood camp to get wood, or your people will freeze. Build farms, fishing huts, and hunting camps, or they’ll starve. Build mines, so you can improve all your buildings. Build markets and trading posts, so you can sustain your buildings and buy things. Build mender’s huts, so you can heal your wounded and stave off plague. Build towers and train different types of warriors, or wolves, draugr (Norse zombies), and other players will mercilessly tear you to shreds. Stock up on everything because winter is coming, maybe even a blizzard, which will rapidly deplete your supplies. Did I mention everything in this game is trying to kill you? This new continent is wonderful, but it really doesn’t want you there.

The game is easy to learn and play but difficult to get good at, as you have to precisely manage your resources, from manpower to basic necessities to land. Each land tile on the map holds only so many buildings you need to build to grow and survive, so your clan is under constant pressure to expand. Plus you’ll keep finding map tiles you really want, which offer fertile land or iron or stone or easy ability to defend. This pressure to grab land puts you into natural conflict with the other players, who will be raiding you anyway but are now fighting with you over important resources they need. It’s a brilliant part of the game. Speaking of wars, the other players will all have a specialized skill their clan possesses, such as the Raven clan, which hires mercenaries to attack your coastal provinces and plunder them, or Wolf, which earns happiness for having a big army and gold for every one of your warriors they kill.

If you’re into gaming and enjoy strategic civ-building games, check it out. I highly recommend it as a really fun and challenging game in the tradition of games like Rise of Nations.

Recently played DEAD BY DAYLIGHT, a multiplayer game that captures the terror of slasher horror movies.

The game combines competitive and cooperative gaming. As one of four survivors, your job is to find a series of power generators and repair them. As the monster, your job is to hunt the survivors and mount them on a handy meat hook as a sacrifice to your dark god.

I played the game several times as both a survivor and the baddie, and had a great time doing each. The survivors and monster have different capabilities and advantages, but overall it’s really hard for the survivors. No matter, it’s one of those games where it almost doesn’t matter if you win or not, it’s all about how you play and how much fun you have. The monster is genuinely scary, it’s like being in a horror movie. When I was the monster, I particularly enjoyed sneaking up behind my friend John and starting up the old chainsaw, laughing maniacally as I did so.

Check it out if you’re tired of watching movies and want to be in one for a change.

Here’s a video I found on Youtube that shows an example of game play: