Top 21 (or so) games I played 2015

These are the silliest of games that still count as proper games. They manage to balance the ammount of complete bonkerness and interesting enough decisions.

Incan Gold is an excellent push your luck game by Faidutti and Moon from 2006 (reimplementing Diamant from the year before adding, basically idols, and... more interesting... components.)

Incan Gold

Colt Express was the Spiel des Jahres winner this year. Released at Essen 2014, but I only got to play this late in 2015. Excellent chaotic romp of a game. Light hearted and silly, but a lot of fun!

Colt Express

One step up in... seriousness... we have the party games. These are, of course a slightly different category.

Mysterium is, as many has said, a really clever mix of Dixit and Cluedo. Fascinating.

Mysterium

Small games -- both in time and space, but not necessarily in depth...

Seiji Kenai of love letter fame strikes again with his Lost Legacy series. The Lost Legacy: The Starship variant is the one I have played the most and it is really impressive how much game has been packed into those 16 cards. I think I even prefer this, ever so slightly deeper one, to Love Letter. (Although, as always, it depends on the crowd.)

Lost Legacy: The Starship

Another game that packs an impressive punch with few components is Welcome to the Dungeon by fellow countryman Masato Uesugi. This game is played with 13 cards and 6 tokens and has a fascinating twist on the bluffing and push your luck genre...

Welcome to the Dungeon

Games for, well, two players. Only.

7 Wonders: Duel is 7 Wonders for two -- borrowing from mahjong and... pyramid patience. I really enjoy the addition of the game ending criteria of war and science that looms through the sessions and that it still feels like a drafting game. Most excellent.

7 Wonders: Duel

This re-edition of Baloon Cup with the authors original theme (and some minor rules changes) has been the go to game for two player sessions in our house-hold. Simple rules, but deep enough choices. Piñata.

Splendor was one of my favourites back in 2014, so I was looking forward to this new game by Marc Andre -- Barony. Where his previous hit simplified the tableau builder, this one is a simple and elegant game of area control.

Barony

Runner up #5: Abyss

Wow. This is the game I have played the most in 2015. A deep deck-builder that fits in the palm of your hand and plays in about 20 minutes. Perfect for lunch breaks. (It could/should also have won the 2-player game of the year, I guess...) Star Realms

Star Realms

I played a very late prototype of Automobiles at Messe Essen 2015. A bag-builder with seemingly lots of replay-ability. It borrows elegantly the notion of waste (rebranded as wear here) from the first game in this AEG-"series"; Trains. Looking forward to play this more when it is properly released.

Automobiles

A board game based on a video game, based on another video game, heavily inspired by a 8-bit video game from the 80s -- and it plays great! This is another game I played for the first time in Essen Spiel'15, and I liked it enough for it to come with me home... Super Motherload

Super Motherload

Viticulture is another game I kickstarted back in 2014, and it arrived as a nice late January 2015 present. Admittedly, I haven't played it enough times to know if it will stand the test of time (like, sadly, most of the other games on this list), but the few times it has gotten to the table has been great. Everything is top notch - from the streamlined rules that leads to tight competitions, via the clever thematic integration, to the beautiful, beautiful components. (I have the upgraded coins from the kickstarter campaign!)

Viticulture

A slightly lighter, and older, representative of the genre is Stone Age. This has been on my list of games to play for a long time, and after testing the excellent iPad version I decided to introduce it to my gaming groups. And it was great. A perfect way to introduce both gamers and non-gamers to the worker placement games genre, methinks.

Stone Age

Wordless murder mystery solving has never been more interesting. Great, challenging (actually, as challenging as you want due to the system of difficulty levels) fun! Mysterium

Another game I encountered at Spiel'15 - a nerve wrecking coop game with a first world war theme. The amazing illustrations are by the late great Tignous. (I guess if I would have a best visuals award this would be on the list - along with Mysterium. And Abyss.) The Grizzled

The Tuscany: Expand the World of Viticulture expansion mixes things up in the Viticulture world, but most importantly (for this category) it introduces an automata you can fight. This works surprisingly well even though it is just a deck of cards that states what positions the "AI" blocks each turn and a given goal of 20 VPs to beat. 

I introduced this game to the kids over Christmas, and it worked wonder. "A magic trick" as my five-year old would say when the ghost he has made advance past the goal line turns out not to be his so that he has inadvertently made his little sister win. The players start out with normal player markers that advances on a simple enough stairway in a race to the top, but if anyone's dice-roll shows a ghost a marker of choice turns into a anonymous ghost. Unless there are no regular markers left, then you'll swap two ghosts! If you are unfocused for two seconds your game turns completely random, but great fun nevertheless. Especially via the eyes of humans with one digit ages.

This game is slightly more strategic, but still recommended from four years and up. It resembles the grown-up Carcassonne in the sense that you construct a medieval landscape tile by tile, but scoring is replaced by a race to get rid of your meeples by closing roads and tile-laying itself is simplified by the fact that all tiles fit together. Still, there are some strategic choices to make and interesting decisions to take. My First Carcassonne

So, this year I decided that it would be useful to crown one game as my "Game of the Year", and that is:

Voila. Congrats. (Not by a landslide, admittedly, but still. Great game!) Viticulture

So much hype! BGG #1 these days! (Of course there is a very strong bias here, since players that don't like vanilla Pandemic won't play and rate this follow-up. Still! #1!) So many best of 2015 awards. (Like the BGG Awards 2015 (published this week) where it won all four categories it was nominated.) Can't wait to play Pandemic Legacy! (If I can convince a group of people to play the same game (at least) 12 times...)

Evolution: Climate is one of my kickstarter projects this year, so I'm looking very much forward to test it when it shows up -- hopefully some time after the summer break.

Also, for reference, here's my list from 2014.