Second Chance Review

Your first game of Terra Mystica probably ended something like this: you picked a faction because the name sounded cool, spent forty-five minutes unsure whether your terraforming wheel was facing the right direction, accidentally formed a town in round five without meaning to, and finished with a score you could not explain. Someone at the table said “I think we misread the cult track.” You all nodded. Nobody was sure. ...

BGG Rank: #11 | Rating: 8.34 | Weight: 4.07/5 | Players: 1-4 | Time: 90-120 min | Age: 13+ Your first game of Spirit Island will probably end in defeat. Not narrow defeat - total, bewildering collapse. The Invaders will spread faster than you expected, your Power cards will feel like they don’t quite connect, and somewhere around the third Ravage phase you’ll realise you’ve been misreading a key rule for the past forty minutes. ...

Your first game of The Castles of Burgundy probably felt like this: you stared at a player board covered in coloured hexes and tiny symbols you couldn’t read without squinting, someone spent ten minutes explaining what silvers do, you placed tiles in the wrong regions twice, you lost track of what your dice were even supposed to accomplish, and when scoring came around, someone had quietly built an enormous ship empire while you were busy decoding the iconography. ...

Your first game of Agricola probably went something like this: you stared at a hand of seven occupation cards you didn’t understand, spent six rounds desperately collecting wood while your opponents built fences, forgot to plan for the first harvest, took two begging cards worth negative six points, and finished with a score that made you wonder why anyone would voluntarily subject themselves to this. You’re not alone. Agricola has earned its nickname - Misery Farm - for a reason. But there’s an equally strong consensus among the hobby’s most experienced players: this is one of the greatest board games ever made, and it only reveals itself after you stop drowning. ...

Fair warning: your first game of Brass: Birmingham will probably be terrible. Not the game itself - the game is extraordinary. But your experience of it? Confusing, frustrating, and almost certainly full of rules you got wrong. You’ll finish your first play with a nagging sense that you did something illegal in round three, that the scoring made no sense, and that maybe the 83,000+ people who own this thing are all sharing one massive delusion. ...

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. ...