• You‘re bluffing (competitive auction/bluffing/set collection)
• Bohnanza (competitive trading)
• The Crew (cooperative trick taking)
• Hanabi (cooperative set collection)

I see a pattern of games mentioned here! What do you call games like theme hospital? I’d love to skim a few recommendations for these kind of games that let you hire different employees to run parts of your business.

Sounds great, thanks!

Awesome suggestions, thank you.

Lord, what have you done

Your suggestions are great, thank you! What’s still missing is a game that let’s you hire people with different skills and watch them do their stuff (Theme Hospital, maybe? There have to be better examples nowadays!)

A close example could be Game Dev Tycoon I played for a while. But unfortunately you really had to micromanage every step.

Cool, thank you so much! DF is on my list but the graphics … 😅

FTL is so insanely good!

Solo: Marvel Champions (but now I’m gettig into Arkham Horror LCG)

with friends/pub: The Crew - Mission Deep Sea

with friends: Dominion

with my children: 5Minute Dungeon

• Wavelength (team based guessing game)
• Ready Set Bet (horse race-themed betting game)
• Cartographer (everybody tries to draw a map, it‘s not that interactive though)

could be a good start!

I wrote 3.5X-lite because it looks like you explore new planets and technologies, expand on them, exploit them and fight against other players…? Ofc we‘re not talking about Twilight Imperium here, that’s why I wrote „lite“ but I‘d love to see New Frontiers giving me a feel of that. I could be totally wrong, I never played it, only saw the pics on bgg.

I‘m admiring Hero Realms atm. The app version looks much better than Star Realms, but both are great games!

That‘s some great advice, thank you so much!

And yes, I own Res Arcana and love it! After that, when I bought Terraforming Mars Ares Expedition people compared it to RftG. This Lehmann guy (and his silly BGG pic) often times pops up, when I research interesting games. Today in a podcast people praised Jump Drive what convinced me to take a deeper look into Lehmann‘s games.

Thank your for your awesome writeup, BigilusDickilus. If you had to choose one, which would you pick? They all sound awesome!

Initially I prefered Jump Drive to play with my wife and kids. The RftG design looks a little bit outdated. But your description made me reconsider, they sound great.

On the other hand New Frontiers could be the 3.5X-lite space themed game I‘m looking for (I‘m considering Gaia Project, but it doesn‘t have fleets, Eclipse, but it is too heavy, Tiny Epic Galaxies is too light, Warp‘s Edge is too expensive and not available in German, … sigh).

First time Machi Koro 2! I just love these games with setups that differ every time you play and that let you choose your own strategy.

I want Startpage to be my default search engine.

The solo games I always come back to:

• Arkham Horror LCG
• Marvel Champions
• Hero Realms (digital version, if that counts 😅)

Only about one game in a year? You own around 30? That indeed sounds like a refined collection. If you find the time you should post one of those „This is my collection“ pics! I‘d be interested!

Port Royal: People recommended it for me and my son since we love Bohnanza and were looking for something with more variability. I got the Big Box for 14€ and it’s great! Easy to learn, exciting push of luck, a little tableau building, coop mode, vs mode, campaign mode,… neat little game!

Arkham Horror LCG: Just awesome.

For Sale: Played it in a pub. Super exciting and take that auction game. The game was over in 5–10min and I couldn’t develop a proper strategy, but we liked it.

As someone who loves the idea of the Xhaven games but doesn’t have the time to play them, this looks awesome!

Also Mint Knight/ Mage Lite (=tiny Mage Knight) deserve to be mentioned when we talk about tiny games here.