Games Worth Playing

This time we have some classic games, some casual games, some strategy games, and a bonus list of game expansions.

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This video was recorded on Dec. 6, 2023.

David Gardner: Few people may love games more than I do. Some people don't even like games at all. If that's you, I suggest you skip this week's podcast. Come back later this month when we'll be playing a different game that you may like as it involves the stock market and that is, of course, the market cap game show. That's a game we all can play. It's coming back in two weeks time for the 2023, close out. Anyway, if you don't like games, take this week off. Wait, are you still listening? Excellent. In that case, thank you for suffering a fool gladly. As I endeavor this week to share with you my top recommendations from the world of tabletop games. Card game, and board game recommendations, strategically timed as I do every year, as early as possible in December. You might have time to put one of these under someone else's tree to spice up your family's your own life. It's my annual games, games, games podcast, volume five, only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to this week's Rule Breaker Investing. Arguably a misnomer for this particular podcast. There's not a lot of investing going on in this week's podcast. Long time listeners know that we spend a third of our time here on investing, a third of our time on business, and a third of our time on life. If you think about the Motley Fools purpose statement to make the world smarter, happier, and richer, you can map those to those three zones that I talk about. A third of our time spent on investing makes us richer. That's spent on business, in our professional lives, makes us smarter, and the third of our time spent on life, well, I sure hope, has been making you happier because that's a big reason that I do what I do. If you're getting richer and smarter but not happier, that's going to create some problems. One antidote might very well be then finding things that spark joy in you to bring out the happy. What I try to do here at least a third of the time, and this week, it's our annual effort to spark joy for you and your family around the game table. Now, I first started doing this in 2017. Back then, it was the gift giving special for Rule Breaker Investing. I had a bunch of fellow fools on to talk about how they give gifts around this holiday period, and some creative thoughts. I just right in the end there, stuck in a games list in that gift giving special of 2017.

Then a year later that December, I interviewed Richard Garfield here, Richard the designer of Magic the Gathering, one of the great all time games. A wonderful interview. At the end of that one, I just put in a list for recommendations for holiday games, and then in 2019, for the first time, I just explicitly came out of the gaming closet on this and went games, games, games. That was the title to podcast, which is why this week is also games, games, games, volume five. It's my annual holiday guide to some of my favorite recent tabletop games, that's board games and card games. Now I'm changing up the format a bit this year. In years past, I've had a longer opening in which I explained how much I love Boardgamegeek.com, and how I use the ratings from that site, and also how I love the app BG stats. That enables me to log a lot of the games I play, which generates all kinds of crazy fun stats. Like I can tell you how many different games I've played so far in 2023. That would be 119 different games played in 17 locations, with 52 different players playing 21% of my overall collection.

July was the month I played the most games, and Sunday was the day that saw the most games played and our most common player, a count was four player games, but that's probably more than you need to know about me anyway. But you might enjoy knowing those things about you. The BG stats app and BoardGameGeek are just insanely great tools for serious gamers. If you want to hear more about that, listen to the first 15 minutes of last year's games, games, games podcast where I talk more about those and how I use them. Before I get started on our new format this year, I will just reiterate that this is the fifth in my annual series. If you're interested in hearing about more games than the 25 or so games, I'll be mentioning this podcast.

The previous four episodes in this series are all distinct, and all contain fresh recommendations for games that if you hadn't come across them before, I think you'll enjoy. I still do. The format This year I have a new opening section. I'm calling it I, C, M, Y, I. Some of you will recognize that acronym. I'll explain that shortly. I then cover my two traditional sections, casual games and harder core strategy games. Altogether, that'll make a podcast and perhaps a buying guide if that would be helpful for you here this first week in December. Also for the games I'm featuring, I've double checked to ensure they are available. I absolutely do not want to get you amped up for a game you'd enjoy playing or giving as a gift. It's sold out everywhere. I've pre checked the 15 plus featured games this week, and they're all a happy click away for you. With that said, let's get started, Rick, appropriate music please. Well our first section, a new section this year. I'm calling I, C, Y, M, I.

Those of you who are Internet aficionados, I know you're out there, you probably recognize that as the acronym for, in case you missed it, I, C, Y, M, I, in the English language, and I thought to include this section because in past years there's a little bit of the cult of the new in me. I'm often about what are the latest greatest games, and I'm going to be doing that again this year. But I decided, let's not forget the games that I might have played the most and continue to play most often. That's why I wanted to lead off with six games, all of which I've played dozens, if not hundreds of times with my family. I've in many cases, not thought to include these in the past because they weren't the hot new thing. They were just a total classic, a game that I deeply love. In case you missed any of these games, I think each of these is an incredibly worthy pastime. It's a wonderful way to pass the time. I especially emphasizing games here that can be played with families, sometimes larger groups of people, games with low rules overhead, which means nobody has to keep their nose stuck in the rules manual on page 11.

Looking something up, these classic games are so playable and so replayable, I would be at fault if at some point I didn't mention them. Let's go through the six, I, C, Y, M, I, classics in alphabetical order. The first one is Crokinole. Now for every game I mentioned this episode I'm going to mention it's rating on BoardGameGeek. BoardGameGeek rates games from 0-10. The greatest game of all time, will be like an 8.8. There's no way among thousands and thousands of voters to score a perfect ten. As it seems like you can do sometimes on Amazon reviews or movie review sites, but on BoardGameGeek people are a little bit more discriminating. It's very hard to get an 8.0 which is what Crokinole has scored. This is a game that plays two or four people. It plays beautifully head to head or in pairs.

Crokinole, many of you will know this game. I hope many of you will know each of these in case you missed it classics. But for those who don't, it's a dexterity game. You need to have a Crokinole board and you're going to have a number of discs and you're going to flick them with your finger into the center of the board. It's an octagonally shaped board. There's some little posts that you can hit and ricochet. Ultimately, after we each shoot 12 discs of our respective colors into the middle, you're trying to leave as many of yours in the middle as you can. It's like shuffle board in a way you want to score with as many discs as you can. This game was first developed in 1876, most likely from Canada, by the way, where the earliest known board was made. It is a phenomenally fun play it over and over a game. I love Crokinole. If you haven't played it, you're going to need to find a board. The better made board the better. Often these are wooden boards, beautifully manufactured boards. You can find them out there on the Internet. I am a huge Crokinole fan and that's why it's number one here for my, in case you, Mystic Classics. Number 2 is the game just one. This game came out only a few years ago, it has taken the gaming world by storm, it is an incredibly light game.

BoardGameGeek also rates games based on their weight, where one means it takes 30 seconds to learn and anyone can figure it out and five is the exact opposite. A game with a weight of five has 143 page rule books with lots of rules exceptions and it takes 14 hours to learn and 29 hours to play, that would be the perfect weight of five, the perfectly nearly unplayable games. So for these, in case you mystic classics, we're going with very low weight games. Just one is a 1.04 on the 1-5 scale. If you've never heard of this, you have a holiday gathering of 4-7 people coming up, here's your game. Now one thing I don't do on games, is start explaining the rules to games. We'd never get through a list of a buyer's guide if I explained every game. But I'll just say it's a word game, It's cooperative, and you're trying to help somebody figure out the clue word they're trying to guess and each of us has to think of the best clue we can come up with to help our friend guess the clue word. But as we share with each other what clues we've decided on, Rick, if you and I have the same clue, we actually have to erase ours.

Because if you match somebody else's clue, both of your voices go silent and the person guessing has less to guess with. You're sitting there trying to think what would be a great clue for, let's say ping pong that not everybody else would select like paddle or net. What would be a great clue that would help my friend figure out it's ping pong but not be shared with somebody else in which case we'd both have to erase our clues, that's just one all ages invited, no one needs to be a gamer, fantastic class game. In case you missed it, Number 3. This one first came out a few decades ago as a traditional board game, it's called catch phrase, but these days I think of it as an app. The app is phrase party and I think I paid $1 for this app, I don't know if you've played catch phrase or phrase party before, but if there's a small cost on the App Store for this, let's say 1, 2, or 3 dollars, I would say that's among the best 1, 2 or 3 dollars I have ever spent. This is a word game where you're trying to give clues to your partner, you can't name the word itself, you need to give them clues to guess what the word is, like the old game password. But there's a hot potato aspect. With your iPhone beeping, counting down, it starts to beat more and more rapidly as you get near the buzzer that's going to end the round. You should not be holding the iPhone in your hand when the buzzer goes off so it's a hot potato password clue game. This is a game that plays infinite numbers of players with infinite number of teams. You don't need to have any player limit to play Phrase Party. We've played it at a large family gathering with 24 people, 12, two player teams. You could go six, four player teams any which way, you could even have odd numbers if you like. This is a timelessly playable game, it might close off a late night or be an opener phrase party on the App Store a total home run. Let's go to ICYMI game Number 4. This is another word game, this is another cooperative word game. I should put it in a quick word about cooperative games.

A lot of people, when they think about games, they just think it's a competitive game and some people don't like that competition maybe they had a mean uncle who always beat them at something, or an older sibling who never let them win. They think, well, I don't like games because they're competitive, I'll probably lose. But in the last couple of decades, a very important development has happened in the world of tabletop and card games and that is the oncoming, we might say, unstoppable flood of cooperative games where you and I are playing together. We're playing usually against the game itself. Again, a lot of people who are gamers hearing me right now, you're nodding your head, you know about all those cooperative games out there and there's some great ones and I'm about to mention another one right here with so Clover. But there are also a lot of other people who don't play games as often and don't realize that there is such a rich assortment of cooperative games that mom or dad can play with their kids, that you can play with your friends. Some of them are very challenging, some of them are lighter. Clover, I, C, Y, M, I, number four is one such game. It's a 7.6 on BoardGameGeek, its weight is a 1.1 which means it's a very light game. It plays 2-6 players all ably. And in this game, again, not explaining the rules, but the core concept is that you have a number of cards on your green clover-shaped board and the juxtaposition of the cards forces you to try to come up with a clue that other people are going to be able to guess. Let's just pretend one of the words is baseball and the other word is drama. You have to sit there and think, what would be a one word clue that will help my teammates, it's a cooperative game, figure out that the two words that are juxtaposed on my board are baseball and drama.

Everybody is doing that, actually, four times, sitting there quietly for 10 minutes or so, looking over their board, laughing sometimes at the incredibly difficult contortion you'll have to go through with your brain to figure out how you can come up with a single word clue that will help people realize that those two words are the clue words. Anyway, so clover, it's a pun on, so clever. But the clover shaped green, four leaf clover boards where you write on them with erasable pens from one game to the next, make it a fitting theme. It also has the ability as a game, to make it infinitely more difficult. I won't explain why, but once you start thinking you're good at the game, you can start making it more difficult by throwing in additional cards and making it harder and harder. It infinitely levels up with you and your group as you wish, this is a wonderful game. I did feature it last year on my games, games, games Volume 4. But I want to pull it back this year because it really has reached, to me, classic status. I don't want anyone to miss this game if they're looking for a good holiday game. We're down to Numbers 5 and 6 as we close out the in case you missed it section.

Number 5, these are all alphabetical. I'll summarize them at the end of the section, but number five is Telestrations, specifically the 12 player party pack version which you should be able to find on Amazon or wherever you like to shop for Games. It's a 7.7 rated game on BoardGameGeek, it's a 1.1 weight. This is a game where the old game of telephone meets Pictionary. So you'll be given a word and you'll have 60 seconds to draw it. Then without saying anything, you simply hand it to the person to your left, everybody passes clockwise and that person looks at your picture and tries to figure out the clue word that inspired the picture that you knew that you used to write the picture, and they try to guess what the word is and then they pass that on to the next person who looks at the word they just chose and draws a picture and it keeps going around the table. One person draws a picture, the next person tries to name it and so like that old game telephone, well, stuff can get lost in the communication, in the ether, in the in between moments. So Telestrations ends up being an absolutely hilarious experience for, I would say six to 12 players. I do like the 12 player party pack trying to fit in as many people as possible. Sure, I guess it's competitive, I think you do score the game, but really you're going to be laughing your way through 45-60 minutes of a game with friends and family. Telestrations is Number 5. And Number 6, probably my most played family card game. Our kids grew up playing this game, they're all in their mid to late '20s now, so they know it really well maybe you do too, but I don't think much of the world knows about Tichu, T-I-C-H-U, it's BoardGameGeek rating is 7.6. This is another game that's been around for decades. This is specifically a four player partner's card game, kind of like the game bridge. It's a partnership four player game. You're trying to rid yourself of your hand. It has a passing phase early where you pass a card to each of the three people around the table, including your partner so there's a little bit of sharing there.

There's a 56 card deck, it's like a traditional 52 card deck, except it has a Chinese theme to it and four special cards that you can't find in your standard poker deck. And we've played this dozens of times over the years, people of all ages, family members. Again, this is a game that just plays four, it is a partnership game. Of all six of these games, this is the weightiest, most thinky games. This is a game more appropriate for people who really like Gin Rummy, let's say or maybe even bridge trick taking games or set collection games, but maybe a little bit more complicated one step more than that. So this is a game for card players. It is, in case you missed it, a classic. Let me close out this section then by summarizing these six games in order, alphabetically. Crokinole, just one, Phrase Party, So Clover, Telestrations and Tichu. If I've already given you four or five more games than you've ever heard of before, you probably could stop listening right now because the reason I front loaded this list of six is if you're not already familiar with all of these and you're looking for a good game to enjoy for your family or friends, especially during the holiday times but with these games over and over through a cold winter or summer days at the beach, these games are all classics. I love them each, and I hope you will too. Well now it's onto the casual games section. I have five for you this year. Typically, these games take 30-60 minutes to play. Someone's going to need to read a rule book, but the rule book might just be four pages.

These are accessible games. For each of them, I'll mention the BoardGameGeek rating and the appropriate number of players for the game. Let's get started. The first one alphabetically is Cat in the box. This game came out last year on BoardGameGeek. It's a 7.6 rated game. Its weight is 2.01, so we just went through six classic games, all of which have a very low weight, very light games. This game is a little bit thinkier. This game is a trick-taking game. Now, if you've played games like spades or bridge, you know how trick-taking works. Somebody plays a card, everybody else has to follow suit. This game, by the way, plays, well it says 2-5 players in the box, but we really would prefer it with 3,4 or 5. But yes, it's a trick-taking game for 3, 4 or 5 players and the hilarious premise based on Schrodinger's cat, the hilarious premise. When I teach the game to others, I like to veil this part of it and then surprise them. The hilarious premise is that every one of the cards in the deck which has a number on it, and there are four suits, by the way, the yellow, red, blue, and green suit four suits. But the surprise is there are no colors on any of the cards.

The card will be like a three or a five, but they're all black. Even though you've just taught the players that there are four suits, the yellow, the red, the green, and the blue suit. By the way, red is always trump for trick-taking gamers. The premise of this game is the first thing you do as you pick up your hand is you're going to be telling others how many tricks you're going to be winning with this hand. That's common to some other trick-taking card games. But then as you play out the hand, you actually make a claim that that seven you just played is blue. It's yours to claim because you're playing the seven and you're telling them that it's blue. In fact, you mark on the scoreboard that you just played the blue seven, which means nobody else can play the blue seven. You just played the blue seven if somebody else has a seven in their hand. Well, that would have to be the red, yellow, or green seven. It couldn't be the blue seven because you just played the blue seven. It goes around like that until typically somebody near the end of the hand doesn't have anything left in their hand that they can legally play without creating a quantum anomaly. Like they're down to a seven and all the sevens are played. They can't claim it's a seven, 'cause all four sevens have already been played. They lose the hand at that point and any tricks they take were scored against them. I won't explain the scoring system, but I hope you get the brilliant premise of this innovative trick-taking game, which is that there are no colors on any of the cards, but they're all parts of suits and you name them as you play them. If that sounds like your kind of card game, I hope you'll love it as much as we do. When you play three players, you play three hands, four players, four hands, five players, five hands. It takes about 45 minutes. Cat in the box.

Of course, like any good card game, highly replayable. Let's move on to game number two in the casual category. This game is challengers. It's one of those, kind of like Yahoo. Remember when Yahoo, the Golden age of Yahoo. Yahoo is still out there, but when they were a public company and who doesn't remember that, you couldn't just spell it Y-A-H-O-O. It always had the exclamation point, the bane of how many copy editors on the Internet, you had to put the exclamation point at the end of Yahoo to make it Yahoo and Challengers is similar. Challengers technically has an exclamation point at the end of the game title. It is a 7.1 on BoardGameGeek. This game came out in 2022, and yet it's mostly been played here in 2023. It won the prestigious Kennisidsyars many, especially Essen, where there's an amazing October games fair every year. If you like board and card games, you should at some point make the pilgrimage to in Germany. But they also give what many people consider to be the most prestigious prize, the Oscars of Board Gaming. The Spildsyas and the Kenispildsyars. The Spildsyas is the Game of the year for families, more casual gamers. Then the Kenispidsyars. Well, Kennispil translates something like connoisseur game, I think, into English. But these are supposedly the more complicated, more gamery games that win. The Kennisidsyars, well, challengers won this year. It's a capture the flag card game, it has two phases. In the first phase, you start out with a little deck of cards and you can draft a few new cards into it. You can choose fun characters.

You might get a wizard, or an alien, a cat, a gangster. They'll have a number on it, a power, maybe a special ability, a kraken. You'll draft a few cards into your deck to make it unique, and then during the second phase of the game, the match phase, you will show up at a table where one of your opponents is sitting there with the deck they've just drafted. And you will kind of like the card game war, very simple. You'll just peel cards off the top of each of your decks back and forth until one of you captures the flag. I'm not going to explain it any more than that, but one of the elegant aspects of this game is that it's basically a tournament game. You should be playing challenges with 2, 4, 6 or 8 players. I don't think I'd play it with two the more the merrier here. Let's pretend you've gotten 6 or 8 people together. Part of what they get is they get a little card that tells them which of the fields they're going to be playing on for each of the rounds of the game, each of the eight rounds. You move around to different tables and see who's opposite you. It's all designed right there in the game box. You don't have to come up with your own brackets with pencil and paper, it's done for you. It organizes your gaming group into a tournament showing up at different venues. As you continue to improve your deck over the course of the game, try to make more fans, which is what points are in the game. At the end, two of you will be left and you play a face-off match with everybody else watching. It is a delightful inventive game. In fact, challengers just got its first expansion. In the same way that a game like Dominion, for those who know Dominion, the Classic Deck Builder game like Dominion comes out. People like it.

Then the first expansion comes out with some new cards. The same rules, but some more variety. Well, that's exactly what just happened to Challengers. It's new expansion. Challengers Beach Cup is also out there and available. You could probably just start with Challengers, but if you find yourself thinking, yeah, I've seen some of these cards before. Well, you could then buy Beach Cup, which adds more variety and a little bit more complexity, which is welcomed in this game. Challengers is my casual game number two. I should say it differently, Challengers with an exclamation point onto game number three, casual category Forest Shuffle. This game has hit the ground running here in 2023 when it was published. It's also played on board game arena. A lot of people who enjoy online games will go to BGA these days and play games like Forest Shuffle. It's the same game that you can get in a box, but you can also play it online. I've talked some about board game arena in years past. If you want to hear more about it, you can listen to my games, games, games from last year. But suffice it to say that Forest Shuffle has had a brilliant debut. Whether it's the card game that I'm speaking about or the online version, they're the same thing. This is a Tableau Builder, so what you're doing is you're acquiring cards and playing them out in front of you. It's a forest theme, so you're going to want to acquire some trees. But then some of the animals or wildlife, for example mushrooms that surround trees and forest, you're going to start to acquire those cards and where you place them above that tree, like in the canopy of the tree, below that tree, beneath it in the roots or to the side of it where animals might live.

Where you place cards relative to the ones already down on your Tableau changes how they function and how you play and score. This game is extremely replayable. You'll not go through that big draw deck in any given game. That means every game you're going to see some cards and see some new ones. You're going to have to rethink your strategy. You can't come to forest shuffle. I mean you should know this from the name. You can't just come to the shuffle with your pre determined strategy and the way you play the game every time, like musical chairs, it shuffles things up for you and you're going to have to figure out your strategy with each passing game. This is the game by the way. It says 2-5 players on the box. It's considered best with two. Just could be a good couples game. But certainly plays 2,3, and 4 very ably. The BoardGameGeek rating for Forest Shuffle is a 7.5. Its weight is a 2.1 for those keeping score at home. A lot of modern game design and Forest Shuffle is a good example of this streamlines the rules and the play of the game in a way that's very elegant. When it's your turn playing for a shuffle, you have a choice. You're either going to draw two cards to your hand, or you're going to play a card from your hand by paying the cost and then putting it into play. Even though this is a little bit more of a weightier game than the ones I've mentioned previously, this is a very accessible game. Especially people who know what I mean when I say the phrase Tableau Builder, you're going to know what's going on with this game, but for most of the rest of us, you're just playing cards out in front of you. You keep building your hand, and you're building out your strategy, your forest to try to make it the most valuable. An excellent family game Forest Shuffle is game number 3. Onto casual game number 4. This one is a sequel to a game I mentioned a few years ago, which I really loved.

That was My City by Reiner Knizia. Which had you building your own city and your opponents building their own cities. Trying to build the most value into your cities as you lay down polyomino tiles. Polyomino just describes multi shaped dominoes. If you think of dominoes and how people traditionally line up the five with the five and make the dominoes fit into each other. Well, polyomino games have tiles that are different shapes, more interesting shapes, more Tetris like. That's what my city was. It was you laying out a Tetris like city, trying to score better than your opponents. It was and is a legacy game. Now that's the first time I've used that phrase this year. I've spoken about it in years past. But a brilliant new innovation in the world of modern board gaming are some of those games are legacy games. Which essentially means that when you play the game once, whoever wins and whatever happened in that game will affect the next game played. Usually by the same people, maybe right after finishing the first or maybe on another game night. But you continue to play through a campaign where every game affects the future of how you're playing that game. You keep results. You can't win the whole thing on any given night. But on any given night you can win that game within the overall campaign. So legacy games and there are a number of brilliant ones and My City is one of them. Let's now get to game number four, casual games this year, My Island. Ryo Kinesia has come back knowing how much people loved his My City game. Which by the way, they each have 24 episodes. So 24 times you'll play the game. That may sound like a lot to some people, but this game takes about 20 minutes to play. In an hour or so, you can play three, and that would be one eighth of the game, so 24 episodes. What happens is you keep unlocking new things and they are in envelopes. You're not sure what's going to come next. But there might be some new rules or some new components. The game gets richer and deeper as you play. My Island is a little bit more interesting.

My City was using square tiles. My Island uses hexagonal tiles. More sides, a little bit more complexity, more variety. We have played halfway through our version, my family of My Island. We're having a great time with this game. So even though I don't know how it ends, I'm predicting it ends happily. I don't think I'll win with my score right now. But I'll still really have enjoyed the experience. My Island can't recommend that highly enough. Obviously, if you're somebody who listened to me a few years ago, got played and enjoyed My City. While My Island is waiting for you for your next legacy experience. Let's move on to the fifth and final casual game. This one's a little bit of an odd duck in the sense that Quacks of Quedlinburg has actually been out for five years. So here I am, the Johnny Come lately, finally having played it for the first time myself in 2023. I'm quite confident that some of you listening to me are like Dave. Wait, you're only just now playing Quacks of Quedlinburg. You're introducing this on your 2023 games, games, games, volume five podcast. We've played this for years. It has multiple expansions already out. I'm here to say, you're right, I agree with you. It is a good game. It was worth expanding. It plays two to four players, probably best with four. We're all quack doctors making potions and how we make potions in the game of Quacks of Quedlinburg. That's the quack part. Quack doctors. Well, the new concept is bag building. A number of games have this mechanism.

Wonderland's War, a game I featured last couple of years, had this same mechanism. But what you're doing is you are pulling from a bag tokens of different colors that have different scores or meanings as you lay them down on your potion mat in front of you building your potion, there's a press your luck aspect to this game. That's really fun, really enjoyable, because some of those, the white ones, they're called cherry bombs. In the parlance of this game, if you draw too many of those your whole potion explodes and you won't be scoring fully that round. As other people who were a little bit more patient and didn't push their luck too far do get to score fully that round. You keep building out with more ingredients, adding more little tokens into your bag. Then pulling out of the bag round after round. This is an excellent game. It has well earned its popularity. I've enjoyed playing it in 2023, and I know I'll be playing it in the years ahead. So I thought, let me feature this one this year, Quacks of Quedlinburg. Let me summarize now our five casual games. Here they are, again in alphabetical order. Each of these is really completely different from the others. So I hope there's something for everyone in this Motley mix of five casual games. Cat in the Box, the Trick Taking Game, Challengers, exclamation point, the Capture the Flag tournament game, Forest Shuffle, the Tableau Builder, My Island, Reiner Knizia's latest tile lang legacy game. And finally Quacks of Quedlinburg the Bag Builder. There are five excellent casual games that will bring much joy if you manage to wrap one of those up and put it under somebody's tree this year and, get to play it with them as the ultimate gift. Let me mention before we go on to our strategy games that there are a couple of games I did not include here because they're not easily available, but they're great. So I mentioned them because they'll become more available in 2023. Sky Team. Sky Team is a wonderful two player cooperative game, very thematic. You're landing a plane together. One of you is the pilot, the other is the co pilot. You'll be placing dice. It's a worker placement thing where you're rolling dice and then placing them at the right moments.

Making sure your plane is evening itself out, not tipped too hard to the left or right as you approach the runway. This is an unavailable out of stock game right now by Hashet Games on Amazon, but I'd look for it in 2024. Especially if you have a spouse or partner who enjoys games and you'd enjoy landing some planes together. By the way, you unlock a lot more in that game. You learn the basics, but then it throws a lot more challenges at you. Some Razzmatazz, it's a cool game. Then the other one I wanted to mention in passing is Ticket To Ride Legacy. Ticket To Ride Legacy of course, many people hearing me right now may well have played Ticket To Ride at some point. That's the 2004 Alan Moon game that has you connecting cities with rail lines. Trying to achieve certain ambitious connections and patterns known only to you. As every turn you either lay track or acquire more cards that will let you lay track. Trying to connect certain cities together. A lot of us probably have played a No Ticket to Tide very accessible. Well, it was turned into a legacy game this year with Alan Moon, the original designer, and two star designers of legacy games joining him, including Rob Davio, who I've had on this podcast in years past. Ticket To Ride has been turned into a legacy experience. This one is also very hard to find right now. It might even have a three figure price like $100 not $10. Keep an eye out for it if it sounds interesting to you.

But I'm not featuring it because it's just not that available right now. Let's now move on to the strategy games portion of this podcast. This is for the gamers out there. If you're a gamer, if you fancy yourself as I do a gamer, and that word has a positive connotation. You enjoy playing games that last more than an hour. You enjoy reading rule books that might be 20 pages long. You love teaching games to others. You're looking for a good strategy game. I've got four for you this year. These games typically take at least an hour, sometimes more than two hours. For me, what defines a great strategy game. If I tried to reduce it to cold numbers. It would be the number of interesting decisions that you make over the course of the game session. In fact, if you want to turn it into a ratio to me, the greatest games have a high number of interesting decisions that you make per minute. That would be the mathematical ratio that I would use to find what I consider to be the greatest strategy games. You're making lots of interesting decisions packed into the time that you have. I have four for you this year. Some of these are not particularly deep or long. But they are more strategic and that's why they're in this section with these four, let's go alphabetical once again. Number 1 is Apiary, and that game is from Stonemaier games. Jamie Stegmaier who's been on this podcast before his wonderful publishing company Apiary released this crazy themed game, just this fall. In a far distant future, humans no longer inhabit Earth, the cause of our disappearance, by the way, unknown. But our absence leaves a void. It has to be filled by another sentient species.

Over the span of untold generations, one species of the humble honey bee evolves to fill that void. They grow in size and intelligence. They've become a highly advanced society. Does this sound geeky? They call themselves Melifera, and they have made substantial technological advances in addition to the technology they adapted from our ruins, up to and including space travel. The theme of apiary is bees in space. Now the actual premise under the hood of the theme of this game, you have a real economic simulation. It's a worker placement game. You each have one of 20 different factions. You have sort of variable player powers that you're playing with. What you're doing is most of all your tile laying, you are acquiring tiles by paying up for them. I'm not going to explain the rules of this game. You're going to need to read and enjoy them on your own. Enough for me to let you know that this game, which is an 8.0 on-BoardGameGeek, and just came out a few weeks ago, is very much available. More serious gamers probably have already heard of this game. If you have, and you're wondering if it's good, I'm here to tell you, yes it's very good. We really enjoyed playing it over our Thanks-gaming holiday in our family, so I highly recommend it. By the way, it plays 1-5 players and that means it has a good solo mode. It's probably best with three or four. But Apiary thumbs up in the strategy games category. Let's move on to strategy game number 2. That would be Heat Pedal to the Metal. This game actually came out more like a couple of years ago, but it's a racing game that doesn't use dice or other traditional ways of, I don't know flicking that racing games have been designed. This uses hand management. This is actually a card game. You're playing cards to move your car forward across lots of different tracks. You get upgrades for the car that you're running.

There's a whole championship system built into the game where you can play a whole racing season in a single night. The game throws weather, road conditions and events at you. But at its heart, it is a very streamline, very stripped down, lighter weight card game, but over a racing board. Especially racing fans are going to enjoy this game. This game is constantly near the top of the most popular games on BoardGameGeek. It is rated at 8.1 its weight by the way, 2.2 so a little bit weightier like most racing games, Heat Pedal to the Metal is best with larger numbers. It does play one to six and yes, this one also has a solo mode for solo gamers, but like most racing games, it's going to be best with five or six. Really have enjoyed this one a lot more to explore. Heat Pedal to the Metal from Days of Wonder, the publisher. All right, let's move on to strategy game number 3. We've enjoyed Sagrada Artisans this year. It's based on the 2020 game I featured in volume 2 of Games three years ago. That was Sagrada. Some of you I hope, bought it and have played it. It invokes of course the Sagrada familiar cathedral in Barcelona, that masterpiece by Antoni Gaudi, which by the way is the largest unfinished Catholic church in the world. It's a cathedral. It should take forever to build. It doesn't take forever though, to play Sagrada, which is a dice drafting game. These beautiful translucent dice in six different colors. You're rolling them and then you're drafting a couple to build out your own stained glass window. You have a pattern that you start the game with, different from mine, different from the other players around the table.

I'm describing right now by the way, Sagrada, not the artisans game I'm about to recommend for strategy game number 3 this year. But Sagrada from a few years ago, a beautiful dice drafting game by the way. It got a few expansions. If you're a Sagrada fan you might enjoy those. But this year the legacy version of Sagrada came out, Sagrada Artisans. Will your family stained glass legacy stand the test of time. That's the way some of the marketing language for this game goes. Sagrada Artisans, you're going to compete as rival families. But of course, this will be done over a number of game sessions. It's a legacy game, so in a sense, over a number of decades or eras, just like the real construction of cathedrals takes, it's a campaign where you're going to gain powerful abilities, unlock new tools as you're playing, that are unique to you. You carry them through the campaign and beyond. You're drafting dice, just like in Sagrada. But in this case, you're actually coloring the spaces. You have a coloring book, each of you has your own coloring book, coloring your stained glass window. Does this sound like a crazy, inventive creative game? It is a 2.0 weight game, that means it's not particularly weighty. But again, this whole section, the games I'm featuring here, are most appropriate for people who really do know games like this and when enjoy reading the rules and understanding it. But it is a beautiful game. It plays two to four. It works for all player counts. I highly recommend Sagrada Artisans, another game that we're deep into haven't finished yet, but I've enjoyed it so much. It's an easy recommendation from me for strategy games for this Games Games Games episode of 2023.

Well, let's move on to the fourth and final strategy game I'm featuring. This is Wild Tiled West. It's a pun on Wild Wild West, except it's a game. It's Wild Tiled West. It's a tile laying game. It's a 7.6 rated game on BoardGameGeek. Of all the games I've mentioned here, it's the weightiest, but still not that weighty. I've actually gone with lighter strategy games this year. Maybe I'm starting to show my age. Maybe I like simpler games where I don't have to read 37 pages of rules and go down to paragraph 10.8.3.4 for the rules exception in the war games that I've played many a time in the past. Anyway, this is a little bit more of a stripped down strategy game. This is from Paul Dennen, the designer of a couple of other fantastic games I've mentioned in years past, Clank and then Dune Imperium. By the way, cue by brief rant on the designers count topic. A lot of people when they grow up, they look at a cover of a book and they see a novelist, might be a non fiction writer that they admire, and that, that person's name is on the cover of the book and so you know who wrote the book and when they write another book, you're like, I'm really looking forward to the next JK Rowling book. Well, I grew up in an era, I'm 57 years old today, in an era where they did not put the name of the designers on the game box. It was just Parcheesi or Monopoly. But somewhere about 30 years ago or so, this probably started in Germany, where so much advanced thinking around games has happened.

They started to put the name of the designer, the person who'd written not the novel but the game, who designed the game, they put that on the cover of the box and that's why these days I say things like that's a Riner Knizia game, or in this case, Wild Tiled West, that's a Paul Dennen game. You start to realize as a gamer that just like signing a painter's name to a painting or a novelist's name to a novel, the same great artists produce and create games and it's worth seeing who made what and finding the name of the designer on the game box. The world started getting a lot smarter for gamers a few decades ago when we started to acknowledge who the designers were and give them name credit on their boxes. That's why I'm mentioning in this case, that Paul Dennen, who did such a great job with Dune Imperium, one of my favorite games. For those who have played it, especially those who like Dune, I'm often hearing it's like their favorite game of all. Paul Dennen came back with it's a Western themed lighter game, polyomino to use that word I used earlier, a drafting game of tiles of different shapes where each player is building out their Western town. It's of course cowboy themed. You've got four rounds of dice rolling to see which tiles from the grid in front of everybody you can draft and then build into your towns. There's a bunch of different scoring systems going on in this game and pass to victory. I hope I haven't made it sound overcomplicated because it's pretty accessible. It is a 2.7 weight, but there are many games I bet you fellow gamer have played that are more complicated than Wild Tiled West. We just have had a lot of fun with it. It's not a legacy game, it's just a one-off but you can play it over and over as we have throughout the fall since it came out in the summer.

Wild Tiled West strategy game recommendation number 4 from me. Let's go ahead and summarize then the four in the strategy game category. They are alphabetically, Apiary: Bees in Space, Heat: Pedal to the Metal, a racing game with a hand of cards. Sagrada Artisans, the legacy version of the brilliant stained glass window dice drafting game Sagrada Artisans. The last one just mentioned, Wild Tiled West. Now since you're still listening, I've got a bonus for you. I want to mention, we'll call this the stealth section of this podcast. This is especially for gamers who've bought some of the games I've talked about over the years or maybe have just loved games as I have over the years and played as many as I have. I want you to know about games that are follow ons from previous versions of games. In other words, expansions that I really admire but I'm going to focus specifically on follow ons to games I've mentioned in past games podcasts. I've cued up a few of these for you. I'm just letting you know basically there's a great expansion out for this game that I loved a few years ago that you might have too and in case you didn't know about this expansion, well, that's what this section is doing. Cascadia, another great tile laying game. Cascadia, I mentioned it just a couple of years ago. Cascadia just released its Cascadia Landmarks Expansion. If Cascadia was getting a little same for you, if it felt a little too light, a little too comfortable or predictable, if you were looking for more, well, you're going to get more new scoring cards, so some variety in scoring. Also, it'll now play five and six players. If that sounds of interest to you, Cascadia Landmarks, we played it over thanks gaming and loved it.

Definitely, check that one out. Another one I have to recommend is Ark Nova: Marine Worlds. Ark Nova was my game of the year last year and this year saw the release of its first expansion, which was Marine Worlds. Now, the star of this expansion are the action cards which create an asymmetric experiences, let's say your version of the action that drafts more cards to your hand will be different from my version of that card. Meantime, my version of the commonly held action card that builds new enclosures around our zoos, this is a zoo themed game, my version of that action card will be different from yours. There's asymmetry now happening, a few other things in that brilliant expansion, but that's the star. Definitely want to mention to you, Ark Nova: Marine worlds, we love Ark Nova and we love Ark Nova: Marine Worlds. A couple more, Everdell, a game I discussed in volume 2 in 2020. It had a streamlined reissue. This is not an expansion. This is a reissue called Everdell Farshore. It's a little bit more elegant, it ties up some loose ends. It's supposed to be a little bit smarter. For those who may have heard about Everdell and think I'd like to play that some day, maybe just start with Everdell Farshore because it's a reboot. Then one other I'd like to mention, and that's the Lost Ruins of Arnak, a game I spoke to a few years ago. Just an outstanding worker placement game that combines also deck building. It's like Dune Imperium, I'm not going to explain why, but we're near the end of this podcast. But if you're a gamer, maybe you know what I'm talking about. It combines worker placement with deck building. If you already have the game, I think you're going to want this outstanding expansion, which is the missing expedition because it enables you to play cooperatively with a friend or solo in more of a legacy campaign format which is not how Lost Ruins of Arnak started, but it has now been integrated into lost Ruins of Arnak with this outstanding expansion, the missing expedition. So high recommendation for that as well. Well, I'm pretty gamed out right now, maybe you are too. I guess I just want to say one last thing in closing having now looked over about 20 plus game titles, all very different games from each other, but every one of which I esteem, I have played, and I've really enjoyed and I hope that you will too. Let me just say this is my standard closing, I do this once a year, that I love games.

Obviously, many a time on this podcast I've talked about my theme of losing to win. That's one of my big themes in life. I think it's really important. I love games and yet even though I own hundreds of them, people think probably that I'm really good at them, but I'm actually not a particularly good gamer. I regularly get beaten by people of all ages. I'll teach a new game to somebody I played it for years and they'll beat me in the first game that we play together. Winning and losing is not such a big thing to me. Maybe that's why I like cooperative games, which I mentioned earlier so much because that way we win or lose together. You can't beat me in a cooperative game. But let me say that the three games I love most, which in their own ways, involve a lot of losing too, but I'm trying to get better at them every day, I hope you are too, through this podcast and through the Motley Fool are the games of investing, business, and life. I've always thought of investing as an amazing game. I love keeping score, and we've done that together with all our five stock samplers over the course of years now. Business, I'm so pleased and delighted, I would say blessed to have been an entrepreneur.

To be an entrepreneur is somebody who's created a business. I love investing in other people's businesses and that's what we do as investors, but the game of business will always be infinitely interesting to me. That's a topic we talk about on this podcast too and darn it, life when thought of as a game where you can keep score and the big secret is it's a co-op. It's not a dog eat dog competitive game out there, life, unless you want to play it that way. Really what happens in business every day, buyers shake hands with sellers and transact with each other. They both win. We're all helping each other in this cooperative game of life. Now, if you've ever played the Game of Life, by the way, I'm thinking of the Milton Bradley or Parker Brothers' version, the Game of Life that's not such a good game if you know that one with little cards and the pink blue pawns and a big spinny wheel, that's not a good game. But the game of life, the one I love talking about in this podcast is. So those to me are the three greatest games that I love the most. As much as I love my card and board games, and we've talked about them this week, the three games I love the most, investing, business and life, and I hope I'm helping you get better at each of them. Well, I guess it's not too early to say it then, is it? December 6th-ish, happy holidays and fool on and game on.