Board Games

@judgyweevil Tokaido. The movement system is simple, yet defines the strategy of the entire game.

The game is a journey game, along a path. On your turn, you can move forward as far as you like, letting you claim whatever location you like. But the next turn always belongs to the person positioned in the rear most position along the path. And that means the person in the rear can keep taking turns until they are no longer in the rear.

Jumping forward is a risky move, because you are giving your opponents the chance to keep taking turns until they catch you.

So each time you take a move, you end up weighing those elements. It's strategic, yet elegant in its simplicity

The way Gloomhaven did the road and city events.

Just a bunch of cards with a choice, and depending which characters are playing you get an outcome with a boon or misfortune. Afterwards the card might get removed and replaced by an other card to continue the little background plot (depending on the card and the choices made).

Legacy games. Just the concept that results from one game carry over to the next. The first legacy game I played was Gloomhaven. The giant map with stickers is a really fun way to mark progress.

Hanabi, with its 'face your cards the other way' concept.

How the turns are determined in Nova Luna. It's always the person who's token is last who goes. As long as you're last you can keep taking turns. When you pass another player's token, your turn is over. Everyone is always able to see the turn order and you can (try to) calculate when your turn is and which tiles will be available to you.

This isn't mechanical really, but I really like the glass tokens in viticulture, because they allow you to see through them to see the value of the grape beneath the token. They're also satisfying to use.

Relatedly, I also like the way that the Dark souls board game has you track health and stamina: your character card is a thickish board that has square cutouts that represent your stamina and health bars, and then you put little cubes in the slots as you take damage or use stamina. I mostly like this because it feels satisfying. The board game itself isn't too great mechanically imo (when managing the enemy "AI", we would often joke about how it would be cool if there was some way to automate this clunky way of managing the enemies. Some computerised system perhaps...). When I played Gloomhaven a while later, I remember thinking that it felt mechanically similar to the Dark Souls board game, but far better executed.

I feel like I surely have better answers for your question, OP, but I can't think of them right now. But thanks for such an awesome question; I'm looking forward to reading other answers. I am also likely to try playing some solo Feast for Odin because of you; I've played it once, with friends, but I also have it as a mod on tabletop simulator, so I can try it there.

The deck building without reshuffling in Aeon's End. It sounded so strange at first, but as we played the game, we noticed how well it worked. You have to really think about when is a good time to buy spells, how you can make sure you can get a big burst of energy now and then, etc.

The way the threats escalate in Pandemic from the infection deck and how periodically you increase the threat and then add all the places that have already been infected back to the top of the deck so they're coming right back at you.

In wingspan it's neat how since the turn marker pieces are also used for end of round score markers, each round the game gets shorter just by scoring the previous.

I don't seem to know the other games people are mentioning, so not sure how fitting this is, but Nefarious. I've introduced multiple people to the game and it never takes long. The core rules are simple, turns are simultaneous and quick, the games are short.

The actions you can take are simple enough that the cards in your hand include the details (with the caveat that I know the polish localized version).

The twist is, well... The twists. Every game you draw and reveal two twist cards that change the game rules, keeping things interesting.

As a bonus, I like the simultaneous turns. The actions you can take are represented by cards, and at the start of the turn everybody places an action card face down, and they are revealed simultaneously. No turn order, less waiting, more action, and a nice element of intrigue of trying to predict what the other players will play on a given turn.

Innovation.

The splay-of-cards mechanism to show a larger number of icons required for supremacy of actions.

Elegant and can be game changing.

You can try out an online game here.

Scout is the only card game of which I know that prevents you from reordering your private cards in your own hand!

I'm not sure about clever necessary but I find the simple "play cards to convert cubes into other cubes" of Century: Spice Road surprisingly fun and addictive.

In Unearth, the goal is to have enough points via die rolls on a card when a threshold is met to win the card. So higher rolls are generally better.

But, if you have poor luck, and roll below a 3, you get a little token that lets you buy other cards.

If you have the world's worst luck, and never roll above a 3, there's a good chance you can win the game through those other cards!

I like that you can switch out the faces of the dice in Dice Forge.

I like Mastermind - the pegs are really satisfying to place