Board games have come a long way from happy roll and move festivities. Many of today's board games feature peaceful art, soothing themes, and components so pleasantly tactile that you feel like you should be sipping herbal tea while playing. But don't be fooled—sometimes this soothing aesthetic is a disguise for mechanics designed to unleash the most diabolical version of everyone at the table. These are the kinds of games that smile and offer a pleasant theme while quietly sharpening the knife behind their backs.
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Here are five board games that look wholesome and tender, but beneath their soft exteriors lie mischievous, friendship-straining mechanics that would make even the most die-hard Eurogamer blush.
Wing-span
“The peaceful builder of the bird sanctuary,” they said.
Wing-spanThe pastel colors and gorgeous illustrated bird cards can make players feel guilty even thinking about strategy.
But when the real game kicks in, players soon realize that beneath the bird sanctuary exterior is a cold, competitive engine builder.
While the player focuses primarily on building his own sanctuary, he can also tame his opponents in a number of ways, such as looting food that someone else needed from a bird feeder, or dipping into the card tray for a bird that would benefit the opponent's strategy, even if it will only be used as prey for one of your birds of prey.
Wing-span it gives players fewer moves each round, which can lead to an intense final round of deep strategy, with players placing birds, laying eggs, and trying to further upset their opponents, especially if they've devised their opponent's bonus cards.
Patchwork
Blankets, buttons and knives behind the back
Patchwork challenges two players to compete against each other to create the best patchwork quilt. Players take turns spending buttons to buy patches and then trying to get the best fit Tetris-like shapes together to fill their board as much as possible at the end.
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Like Wing-spanHowever, there are several ways to negatively affect the other player's strategy. Such blocking tactics include taking the patches an opponent needs from the shared pile in the center, racing to get bonus patches before they do, and competing for a single 7-point special token that rewards the first player to fill a 7×7 square on their quilt.
Takenoko
A zen garden that wreaks strategic destruction with a cute panda
The first thing that stands out Takenoko is a work of art bursting with color and charisma before players stare at pieces of Bamboo, Gardener and Panda. The game places players in a Japanese imperial court and tasks them with cultivating the land, irrigating it, and growing bamboo. However, this is easier said than done as the 2-4 player game gives players many ways to defeat their opponents.
In addition to battling to place power-up tokens in the desired pattern and preventing their opponents from doing the same, players can also use Panda to chew bamboo, literally eating up their opponent's progress while earning glances at the snack bowl.
Carcassonne
Passive countryside building or aggressive tile warfare?
Carcassonne is a tile-placing game based on the historic French town of the same name, famous for its double-walled medieval fortress and acres of green fields.
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In the board game, players draw a random tile from a stack and place it with the intention of creating roads, farms, cities, and more in some expansions to place their meeples on one of the tiles in the formation to claim it. Over time, the tiles will form beautiful rolling hills and colorful medieval towns begging for life.
Placing a meeple on a field doesn't mean the entry city or field is built around it forever, though, because while opponents can't put meeples on a formation like the opponent, they can put two meeples on their own formation and then merge it with the opponent's to create an even bigger formation that they control, taking the opponent's points and seeing a huge unit boost for their own game if they can hold the endgame.
Arboretum
Botanical blood bath
A game about creating spectacular garden paths can't be reckless, can it?…
Dan Cassar Arboretum contains a deck of 80 cards with ten different suits, each representing a type of tree. Players take turns placing cards to create their arboretum, aiming to create sequences of cards in ascending numerical order. The key to scoring is that a sequence of a suit only counts if the player holds the highest value of that suit at the end of the game. This creates a strong hand management component: players must carefully decide which cards to play, which to keep, and which to discard in order to maximize their scoring potential while preventing their opponent from completing high-value routes.
Each turn, players draw two cards from either the deck or discard piles, then play one card into their Arboretum and discard one. Strategic placement and discards are critical as discarded cards are visible to all players and can be taken by opponents to use or block sequences. Arboretum is a game of careful planning and optimization that soon descends into each player calculating who has betrayed them and by how much.
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