7 Wonders

Catan is the game that cracked open the hobby for more people than any other title. The hexagonal tiles, the dice, the trading, the “I’ll give you two ore for a wheat” - it’s embedded in a generation of board gamers. BGG rank #620, weight 2.28 out of 5, rated 7.09 across nearly 130,000 votes. Not the most acclaimed game on BGG, but possibly the most important one. But Catan has a ceiling. The luck can feel punishing. The trading degrades into kingmaking. The robber loses its sting after a hundred games. And at some point, you find yourself wanting something with more teeth - or just something different that still scratches that same itch. ...

You’re holding five cards. You need one. But the person to your left - the one building military - also needs one of these cards. Do you take what you need, or burn what they want? That’s card drafting in a single moment. And it’s why, three decades after the mechanic entered the mainstream, designers keep coming back to it. Card drafting is simple enough to explain in ten seconds (“pick one, pass the rest”) but deep enough to sustain thousands of plays. ...