Heavy Euro

BGG #2, 400+ cards, 2+ hours, and a price tag to match. We cut through the hype and tell you exactly who should buy Ark Nova - and who should skip it.

BGG Rank: #51 · Rating: 8.03 · Weight: 4.18/5 · Players: 2-5 · Time: 120-240 min · Designer: Jeroen Doumen & Joris Wiersinga There’s a very specific kind of board game story that people share in hushed, slightly ashamed tones. “We played Food Chain Magnate. I ran out of money by round four. My friend had six restaurants up and running. I had one. It was serving nobody. I offered to concede but we didn’t even know if that was allowed.” ...

Brass: Birmingham has occupied the top spot on BoardGameGeek for years. Not one of the top ten - the top spot. That kind of sustained dominance is almost without precedent in board gaming, and it creates a specific problem: a mountain of hype that either pulls you in or makes you suspicious. So let’s cut through it. Is Brass: Birmingham actually worth buying? Or is it a game that suits a very specific kind of player that might not be you? ...

There is a quiet corner of BoardGameGeek that most people never visit. It sits just outside the household names - Wingspan, Catan, Gloomhaven - and just below the critical darlings everyone discusses at every game night. This is where Nucleum lives. Nucleum carries a BGG rating of 8.11, placing it among the best-reviewed board games in history. It holds the #131 all-time rank on the world’s largest board game database. And yet it has been rated by fewer than 9,000 people - a fraction of what you’d expect for a game at that altitude. For context, Brass: Birmingham sits at rank #1 with nearly 60,000 ratings. Nucleum is operating at a comparable quality level with about one-seventh of the attention. ...

There are two kinds of heavy Euros: the ones that are hard because they’re complicated, and the ones that are hard because they’re dense. Great Western Trail is the second kind, and that’s why it’s one of the most commonly bounced-off games in the BGG top 20. It’s currently ranked #19 on BGG with an 8.15 average across roughly 50,000 ratings and a weight of 3.69. Not mechanically extreme - Spirit Island is heavier at 4.08, and Food Chain Magnate sits at 4.19 - but GWT is the one people seem most likely to pack up on turn four and shelve for two years. ...