View the rest of my favorites here.

AZUL

One of these days I’m taking a day trip to Portugal just for the advantage it affords me in this board game.

SPLENDOR

Trading your way up from five gems to five hundred just to appease Europe’s biggest shitbags is a better history lesson than any book I read this year.

QWIXX

I could take a Qwixx aperitif before every board game night for the rest of my life and be content. Most of my favorite games are those where players spend most of the game challenging themselves rather than their neighbors. Qwixx is a chill time, a game built on a tenuous foundation of luck that allows for a more competition-in-name-only atmosphere. Each round feels more like a puzzle to be solved than a hand to be won, at least until the very end when someone does inevitably… win.

POINT SALAD

If investing followed Point Salad rules, I’d be a gazillionaire.

RAISIN D’ARGENT: WINGSPAN

2023 was the year I considered getting really into birdwatching. I had a whole plan to learn the names and calls of all the birds that frequented my balcony. In pursuit of this noble goal, I watched one whole video about upper Midwestern bird calls. After a year of effort, I can now proudly identify exactly as many birds (robin, cardinal, bald eagle up close) and as many bird calls (zero, I keep forgetting the famed eagle call actually belongs to a hawk) as before. To my good fortune, absolutely no knowledge of bird culture is necessary to succeed in Wingspan, an engine-builder that makes me feel like a bona fide naturalist. That I’ve lost nearly every game I’ve played is unrelated to my ornithological credentials.

RAISIN D’OR: SAGRADA

Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia basilica has been under construction for 141 years. I don’t see what the hold-up is. I put together at least twelve stained glass windows this year alone.