Buying Guide

Is Concordia Worth Expanding? Salsa, Venus, Solitaria, and the Map Packs Ranked Concordia is one of those games that keeps aging like it has a private cellar in Rome. It sits at 8.08/10 on BGG from 45,172 ratings, carries a 2.99/5 weight, and holds BGG rank #29. Published in 2013, it plays 2-5 players in about 100 minutes. All of that tracks. Sit down with it and you get a razor-clean economic game where every card matters, every colonist movement hurts a little, and the final scoring still makes new players blink twice. ...

Are the Azul Sequels Better Than the Original? Look, calling these “expansions” is already a little bit of a cheat. Azul, Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra, Azul: Summer Pavilion, and Azul: Queen’s Garden are standalone sequels, not bolt-on modules. You do not shuffle them together. You do not create some cursed mega-Azul. Each one is its own box, its own ruleset, its own answer to the question: what if Azul, but different? ...

Theme Park: Nature & Wildlife Board Games The cozy end of board gaming There’s a reason nature games keep blowing up. They look inviting on a shelf, they’re easier to pitch to non-gamers than “industrial-era canal economics,” and the theme actually does work at the table. Animals, plants, habitats, migration, sunlight, ecosystems. These aren’t pasted-on ideas. They naturally become mechanisms. Look, when a game asks you to build a forest, attract birds, or balance a habitat, your brain gets it immediately. You don’t need a 15-minute lore dump. You just start playing. And that matters. ...