Re: Re: 2018 Meeple Choice Awards - Final Results

 Let me be the first to make a disqualifying suggestion against allowing this new BGG entry: 
The Castles of Burgundy (with expansions) (2019)
 to be included next year.

As to this years top 11. Newton, and  Blackout : Hong Kong left me kind of flat. Decrypto is fine. The Mind.. is not for me, but I have no qualms about people liking it.   I really enjoyed Underwater Cities and voted it in my top 3, and I just left Teotihuacan off my top 3.  I felt really weird voting for Quacks and Just One, but darn it, I enjoyed them more than anything else released last year.  Okay, maybe I liked Ganz Schon Clever better *as an app* but not as much as a multiplayer live game..  I can see liking Root and Brass: Birmingham a LOT with a group dedicated to playing them.  
As a reference:
BGG 10s Bridge (Matchpoints, IMP Teams -- 8.5)  and Through The Ages, both storiesBGG 9s Navajo Wars, Dominant Species, Terraforming Mars
I will be posting my top 10 party games sometime next week. Spoiler Alert: I am not a fan of Codenames or social deduction games.
peace,
fritz -- seemingly writing in a larger font than that used by the prior poster complaining about small font.


    On Sunday, June 30, 2019, 09:23:07 AM CDT, [email protected] [spielfrieks] <[email protected]> wrote:  
 
     
Thanks, Simon.  Like you, the results this year matched my tastes extremely well.  There were five 2018 games I rated as "great" and all of them--Game of the Year Blackout: Hong Kong, Teotihuacan, Newton, Coimbra, and Key Flow--got nominations.  Gugong, my #6 game, just missed by one vote, but my next five games--Forum Trajanum, Underwater Cities, Brass: Birmingham, Decrypto, and That's Pretty Clever--all made the list.  That's 10 of my top 11, not too shabby.  The only other game I ranked highly, Krass Kariert, fell two votes short during the preliminary round.

As for the winning games, I played Quacks for the first time last week (both because its MCA success made me more curious and because it was now available for play).  It's decent and achieves what it sets out to do, but it isn't a game I'll be seeking out.  There's lots of decisions to be made and they feel like they should matter, but in the end, I'd much rather be lucky than good.  But all those decisions, plus its nice catch-up mechanism, makes me understand its popularity.
Teo is excellent.  Managing your dice-workers and their routes around the rondel is very challenging and there's tons of variety with the moveable action boards and the different techs.  Its gone over very well with my group and is yet another example of the remarkable games we've seen over the last few years from Italian designers (Newton and Coimbra are further examples).
As I mentioned earlier, Brass: Birmingham felt more like an elaborate expansion to me than a truly independent game, but I can see its appeal.  Still, I prefer the original game of Brass.  I found I missed the dynamic of the Cotton Mills and the Ports, with their scope for temporary alliances.  But the biggest negative factor was the graphics, which we all found to be extremely dark, making the game much harder to play than it should have been.  It continues to amaze me that publishers seem to be exclusively creating games for those with 20-year-old eyes, what with increasingly dark artwork and unnecessarily tiny fonts.  OTOH, I did appreciate the player mats in Birmingham, as it made working with the Industry tiles easier.  If Brass: B had a champion in my group, I'd enthusiastically play it and no doubt learn to love its intricacies.  But right now, if someone suggests a Brass game, I'd opt for the older one.