Board

Ubongo is a competitive puzzler, a blend of Blokus and 'Take It Easy!'. Each player draws a unique random mini board with set of puzzles. A caller rolls a six-sided die to determine, via an index, which puzzle the players must solve individually, under a one minute sand timer. The games rewards players who solve the puzzle faster by giving them priority choice on victory point gems.

The puzzles are like tangrams in which the player fits three or four pieces from a twelve identical polyomino pieces into an outlined shape. There are thirty-six double sided boards with six puzzles on each side, totaling 432 different puzzles.

Korner Entertainment "ported" the boardgame to Win, Wii, DS, PSP, PS3, and iOS. It is the same game with addition of a solo campaign mode where you solve puzzles versus various villains for gems.

'Take It Easy!' is bingo improved or Euro bingo by Peter Burley. Burley took bingo (arguably a game because there are no meaningful choices) and added risk management and real choices. Each player gets their own a hex shaped board divided into smaller hexes. The designated caller picks and announces a random hex tile and other player play that tile. Each player can place the called tile onto any open space trying to line up high value rods. Each tile has three color rods that go in three directions. When you connect the same color rod across the board you score the value of the rodss. So if you manage to connect four orange rods, value 8, across your board, then you earn 32 points.

The difficulty lies in that each tile has three rods; when you match one color rod, two other colors may mismatch and you have to decide which colors you want to score and which ones you want to sacrifice. Like bingo, there is no player interaction because your board does not influence another player's board. Hence 'Take It Easy!' can accommodate unlimited players as long each player has their own set of tiles and board and be ear's reach of the caller.

Since over 500,000 copies have sold, multiple digital implementations of 'Take It Easy!' exits. The best are the iOS and Facebook app by Zabu Studios.

Donal X. Vaccarino took the randomization mechanics of his game Dominion and applied them to a territory-control boardgame, Kingdom Builder. Kingdom Builder is a territory-control game in same vein as Knizia's Through the Desert or Kramer's Hacienda. The innovative mechanics are the goals (scoring) and the power-ups, which are randomly generated, making each game drastically different. A strong strategy in one game may be impotent in another, depending on the variable power-ups and goals.

The game begins by randomly selecting and joining four quadrants to form the board. Then the Builder (scoring) cards and the Special Action (power-up) tiles are randomly selected. Builder cards declare what and how scoring works. For instance, The Miner card declares that settlements (your tokens) adjacent to mountains generate one victory point; while the Oasis Special Action tile declares that if you have a Oasis tile, you can place one additional token on desert terrain.

Cashflow Web Game is a digital "port" of the $200 Cashflow 101 boardgame and the $100 expansion, Cashflow 202. As we mentioned in our review of Cashflow 101, it is wildly popular and it's "...easier to find people to play Cashflow than Catan or Puerto Rico." The online game is same as the boardgame except for some game balance fixes. There are some poorly balanced stock cards that allow you to buy stock at below trading ranges, and it is obvious that one should buy as many shares as possible. The web version has a cap on how many shares one can purchase in a transaction. Furthermore, you can only have a maximum of three children, the most cashflow draining event in the game. The Cashflow 202 expansion adds stock options, shorting, and other advanced financial instruments.

Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game (Civ) is a cardboard port of Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution, a shortened and streamlined version of Sid Meier's Civilization, designed primarily for consoles. If you played any version of Sid Meier's Civilization franchise, you know 90% of how the boardgame works. The boardgame is so similar to the videogame, I won my first game using the same strategy I use in Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution.

Each player gets a unique civilization with special powers and a home map tile. The rest of the board is procedurally generated by shuffling map tiles and placing them face down. The world map scales depending on the number of players and at the largest, with four players, the world consists of 4x4 tiles which are further divided into 4x4 spaces per tile. The map is intentionally small to encourage interaction among players. There are no oceans but different permutations of map tiles can create large lakes or long rivers. When a unit reaches and edge of a face down tile, it can flip the tile face up to explore it.

Chicago Express is a railroad operations and investment boardgame with zero luck, for up to six players. It is a simplified and shortened, 60-minute version of the the classic 1830: Railways & Robber Barons (1830) boardgame by Francis Tresham. Like 1830, the stock market model is simplistic, but it simulates supply-and-demand and market-cornering elegantly. The premise of both games is that you play a railroad tycoon financing the western expansion of historical American railroad companies in the 1800s.

In the Year of the Dragon is, in essence, a game about planning for catastrophe. Each player represents a provincial governor in Ancient China; during set-up, you lay out the catastrophes, one per turn, in boxes at the bottom of the board. The first two turns are "peace," meaning nothing bad happens; two turns will be "celebrations," at which time players with large number of fireworks score victory points; but on the other eight turns, bad things happen. On some, you must pay tribute to the emperor, and lose servants if you cannot meet his demands; on others, the Mongols invade; on others, drought occurs; and on others, plague.

7 Wonders is a wondrous game that scales well from three to seven players that we reviewed earlier.

Jeff Till released a fanware of 7 Wonders. Till's 7 Wonders fanware is functional but minimalistic, having few options and feeble AI. However it is free and it will give you chance to demo one of best games ever.

Tetsuya Miyamoto has done the impossible: He has made math addictive. Miyamoto believes in "The Art of Teaching Without Teaching" and created KenKen, ("wisdom squared" in Japanese), to fool children into solving unnecessary math problems. KenKen raises math abilities: Miyamoto's students enter Japan's top middle schools and dominate national math competitions. The rules are simple. As stated on kenken.com:

The Mines of Zavandor is an excellent business sim boardgame. The premise is that the great and wise Dwarven king Zavandor is retiring and is looking for a successor. Zavandor is holding a contest via a procession from the mountaintop into the twisty caverns that lead to the Coronation Chamber, at the bottom depths. Along the procession, candidates must amass gems to hire laborers, buy wealth-building spells, and buy victory point-​generating shrines. The contender with the most victory points when the procession reaches the Coronation Chamber will be crowned the next king.