It’s the most wonderful time of year! No, not the holidays, but Spiel and all the new releases of eurogames that happen in the late fall. We tried to pick 10, but couldn’t decide and ended up with 12. Go figure. Here you will find 12 games we are looking forward to checking out over the next few months.
Games are listed in alphabetical order. We couldn’t even narrow it down to 10 to make a Top 10 list, so there was no way we were going to be able to rank them too!
Anno 1800
Designer: Martin Wallace
Publisher: KOSMOS
Anno 1800 is the latest release from prolific designer Martin Wallace. We are big fans of the Brass games and London from Martin Wallace and Anno 1800 seems to fit right in with those titles. From what we can tell from the limited information released so far, Anno 1800 is a supply/production chain and tech tree game of satisfying your people with increasingly more luxurious goods.
KOSMOS also tends to publish games that are good with two players which is always a plus for us, and something we prioritize when deciding which games to add to our shelves.
Beyond the Sun
Designer: Dennis K Chan
Publisher: Rio Grande Games
Beyond the Sun is a space exploration-themed game from first time designer Dennis K Chan. In Beyond the Sun, players race to advance their factions in science, economic, military, and commercial technologies to gain VPs. What looks most interesting in Beyond the Sun is how the game evolves as players unlock the tech tree (upgrading) and new action spaces. Players can take different paths, unlocking different technologies and thus having different actions available as the game progresses. It sounds to us like an interesting approach to asymmetric play that we can’t wait to try out.
Bonfire
Designer: Stefan Feld
Publisher: Pegasus Spiele
If you’ve spent some time on our site, you probably have heard about our love of Castles of Burgundy from Stefan Feld. This was the game that hooked us into the hobby and we’ve always sought out Feld games since. So it’s no surprise that we are always excited for his new games. Bonfire has players placing colored tiles onto their player mat to gain more tiles and access to additional actions. Feld games generally tend to work really well at 2 players, keeping his designs at the top of our wishlist.
Carnegie
Designer: Xavier Georges
Publisher: Quined Games
Overall, details are still fairly limited on this one but that’s not stopping us from getting excited. Like Feld, anything designed by Xavier Georges immediately gets our attention. Ginkgopolis, Troyes, and Carson City are some of our favorite games. In Carnegie, players emulate 1800s steel tycoon and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, trying to grow their business by recruiting employees, investing in real estate, and producing/selling/transporting goods. Carnegie appears to feature a follow mechanic wherein the active player chooses an action to complete and the other players may follow. Follow mechanics are always fun because they keep the game constantly moving and it feels like you are always doing something, even when it’s not your turn. But they also tend to feature no downtime, which makes these games hard to play with kids constantly interrupting.
We’re cheating a bit with listing this one, since it’s likely to launch on Kickstarter this November, which means we won’t see it until sometime next year.
CloudAge
Designer: Alexander Pfister, Arno Steinwender
Publisher: Capstone Games
We have a love-not so love relationship with Alexander Pfister games in our house. Generally speaking, the mechanics of games he has designed are stellar and are among our favorites. But there have been some questionable theme decisions in the past that have cast a shadow over what could have been a good game with a different theme or better handling.
Enter CloudAge. The BGG page describes it as a mix of engine-building, deck-building, and resource management (heck yes) with a legacy/campaign style component. Not gonna lie, we couldn’t get down with the theme of Maracaibo enough to explore the narrative further, but what we did play was intriguing. CloudAge also promises to have a unique sleeving/card crafting mechanism which is something not yet seen in heavy games.
Furnace
Designer: Ivan Lashin
Publisher: Hobby World
Furnace is a fast playing, engine building game of capitalist ventures. There are two phases in the game: auction and production. Players place bidding discs on cards and the player who bids the highest gets the card. These newly won cards are then used in the production phase where they can chain together with other card effects to get you a crap ton of stuff. Oh yeah.
We are always cautious with auction games because they so rarely work well at two players. Furnace uses a die to play dummy auction discs to make the two player auction more engaging. The art also looks really cool, which always helps when choosing new games.
Halleratu
Designer: Uwe Rosenberg
Publisher: Lookout Games
The return of Uwe without polyominos (think tetris)! There is still very little known about this game other than it is a return to worker placement, cards, and farming. Uwe games are generally pretty popular with us (especially Sarah) and we tend to enjoy them, so the hope is that Halleratu will be a winner too.
Lost Ruins of Arnak
Designer: Elwen, Mín
Publisher: Czech Games Edition
A combination deckbuilding and worker placement game, say what? We love worker placement games but are just meh on deckbuilding, but the idea of combining these two mechanics is pretty intriguing. Throw in some resource management and they’ve pretty much got us hook, line, and sinker. The art and colors are striking which always bumps up a game for us as well.
Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road
Designer: Fabio Lopiano
Publisher: Osprey Games
Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road comes from designer Fabio Lopiano and we are big fans of his 2019 release Ragusa. In Merv, players move around a 5×5 tile grid board placing meeples on tiles in columns and rows of the board. Players can places houses on their tiles that can then be activated throughout the game. We will have to see how the two player experience will be. It sounds like there is a dummy player involved in the two player game controlled by the active player.
Overall, it sounds like it has some similarities to a game we really enjoyed, with some new twists.
Praga Caput Regni
Designer: Vladimír Suchý
Publisher: Rio Grande Games
Who doesn’t love that feeling of chaining together a bunch of actions? We hope that Praga Caput Regni (translation: Prague, Capital of the Kingdom) lives up to the description as a economic game with a strong chaining mechanism. In Praga Caput Regni, players are building the city of Prague to gain wealth and the favor of the king. Players choose actions from a central “action crane” consisting of 6 options with weighted costs and benefits to gain resources, improve strength, and to build various parts of the city of Prague. Completing construction projects gets player rewards which could lead to some chaining and synergies between actions and cards.
Tawantinsuyu: The Inca Empire
Designer: Dávid Turczi
Publisher: Board & Dice
Tawantinsuyu is the latest release from David Truzii and pretty much anything he designs gets a look from us (Anachrony easily made our top 10 “long” game list). This is a worker placement “do stuff, get stuff game” which is always enjoyable for us. To place a worker, players discard a matching god card but the catch is that the worker remains on the board for the duration of the game. Worker placement spaces are attached to 3 action spaces of which one must always be performed but extra actions are granted to each adjacent worker. Talk about hefty decision making!
It sounds like it has a similar “feel” to games like Tzolkin that force players to carefully weigh how and when to use their workers, and we suspect timing will be everything.
The Red Cathedral
Designers: Israel Cendrero, Sheila Santos
Publisher: Devir Games
The Red Cathedral is an economic Euro with a dice component, seemingly going for that element of luck in a strategy-heavy game. We’ve seen this work really well in some Euros, and not so well in others so we are curious how it turns out in The Red Cathedral. For us, it’s all about how much you are able to react to die rolls to adjust your strategy, which is hard to figure out without playing the game.
This seems like a classic worker placement, resource management economic game with cool artwork and an interesting theme (who can impress Ivan the Terrible?).