Five Board Games to Pass Time During La Niña.
As the warmer months start to approach, trees blossom and the Vitamin D kicks in for 4 extra hours in the day. All your friends want to go for picnics, there’s no parking around Coogee Beach, and the number of business-related lunches you’re being asked to attend has skyrocketed. Exhausting. Plus it’s meant to be raining all Summer anyway. La Niña? Yeah, I’ve met her.
For some of us, this season also represents more time in the day allergies make your whole face feel way too big, and the uber home from the pub is $32.75 you wish you had saved. Is it so wrong to still wanna hang inside once in a while? How on earth do you convince your friends there’s anything left to do there?
Well maybe now’s the time to get everyone in on board games, a trend that has seen a strong emergence through lockdown, and that continues to power on with the force on those 1000 suns you keep forgetting to apply every-day sunblock for.
We all know the classics, but there’s only so many times you get hit with a Draw 4 or owe someone money ‘cause they have a hotel on Trafalgar Square. How do you up your board game…game? Here are five options ranging from “piss-easy mate” to “I gotta watch a tutorial for HOW LONG to get it?” that you should try.
Settlers of Catan:
Difficulty Level: Easy-as, good for board game rookies
Let’s kick off with a bit of a softball. Catan is a great game for people who say they hate board games. It involves the right balance of luck and strategy, making it one anyone can play, understand, and win whether it’s their first time or their 100th.
The structure is fairly simple: build settlements on the board to collect resources, and in turn use those resources to continue to build throughout the board until you reach the victory conditions (that is the points you need to win, for anyone who thinks this article is already getting a bit geeky on the lingo).
The game follows uses simple mechanics - dice rolls and cards and won’t take all day to get through. Sure, you might get a little frustrated that the dice don’t roll your way, but soon enough you’ll be chasing that Longest Road and everyone will be jealous of your huge collection of sheep cards. Baa!
Catan has decent replay value and the expansions add extra players and some funky rules if you start to feel adventurous.
Wingspan
Difficulty Level: Sounds harder than it is, easy to pick up once you’re playing.
Players: 1-5
Game Time: Around 60 minutes for a 4 player game
Ok let’s up the ante a bit. We talkin’ birds. Lots of them. And do they lay eggs? Heaps.
Wingspan is a truly beautiful piece of work by American game designer Elizabeth Hargrave. In Wingspan, you collect various resources (food, eggs, birds) to build out a flock of feathered flyers who in turn have their own special skills and points values. As you work through the game, the trick is to balance everything you need to achieve goals and score points. Once all the rounds are finished, whoever has the most points wins! Simples.
The rules can seem a little complicated at first, but ultimately once you understand how to set up the board every card tells you what it does, so it’s pretty intuitive. The base version of the game comes with 170 different bird cards, each with it’s own beautiful artwork and fun bird fact (it’s not in the rules, but if you don’t read the fact every time you play the bird you’re not doing it right).
It has a huge amount of replay value and involves very little negative interaction with the people you’re playing with. Infact, many cards you will play will help yourself and your fellow bird collectors, so it has a cute communal aspect many board games tend to lack. If you prefer to avoid conflict in your day-to-day life, this is the game for you!
To top it all off, it’s also available to purchase on the Switch if the IRL setup feels a bit laborious.
Inis
Difficulty Level: Relatively easy to pick up, but will take a few games to really get the hang of how to win.
Players: 2-4 (the expansion will get you to 5, and wouldn’t recommend with less than 3).
Game Time: Give yourself 60-90 minutes with 4 people.
Ready to get frustrated with your friends? Great. Awesome. Same.
Let’s get into Inis, a boardgame “deeply rooted in Celtic history and lore” that is a little like Risk, but caffeinated.
You and your combatants play as chieftans battling it out to become the Brenn (boss) of Inis, a board which expands as the game goes on opening up new spaces to strategically compete for. The aim is to hit one of three different victory conditions, so the ways everyone is trying to win can vary significantly - you gotta keep your eyes open and your wits about you.
The game utilises a card-based system to perform actions. Most of the cards in your hand change up every round, meaning you need to be selective in how you plan to maneuver, and how you plan to intervene in everyone elses ability to succeed. The best part? Similar to uno, if someone is about to win they have to take a Pretender Token announcing their imminent victory. Then everyone else gets a shot at bringing them down and keeping their own chances alive. It can make for some compelling moments towards the end of each game, and isn’t for the thin-skinned.
Sound tense? It can be, but of all the games in this list it probably rides the best line between strategy, randomization and replay value, and frankly is super underrated.
Inis can be a bit complicated to start but like Wingspan, each card is clear on its rules so the game can be picked up quite quickly. If you like to plan, see your plans burn in front of you, and then pivot on the fly, this is one you should try.
Nemesis
Difficulty Level: Definitely one you’ll need the rule book on hand for, and a few games under your belt to get comfy with.
Players: 1-5
Game Time: 60-120 minutes
Love the movie Alien? What about Alien 2? (Alien 3!!?!??! I dunno man). Anyway, for copyright purposes this game DEFINITELY isn’t a board game based on this franchise *wink*.
Nemesis is a bit more ‘role playing’ than the other options on this list - a space survival game that will place you simultaneously alongside and against the other players.
You and your party awake on an abandoned ship in the middle of space, each with a variety of public and private objectives you need to complete to win. The public objectives are typically treated as if you are all working together, which you often will have to to survive. The private objectives? Well that’s where it gets a bit hairier, as each person on the ship has their own plans for success that MIGHT actively work against what everyone else is trying to achieve. It makes for a wild experience as you try to figure out everyones motives.
Oh and did we mention there are aliens on board? Yeah, actually quite a lot of them. And they ain’t friendly. This is a major component of the game, but mostly just represent roadblocks to stop you bringing the ship back to life or jettisoning it straight into the sun (whatever floats your characters boat).
The best way to play Nemesis is to feel more like you are in a movie, rather than playing a board game. Every moment is better as a storyline than as a win or a loss, with some players able to just get to a space pod and escape the game completely without technically winning or losing (great for that friend who always needs to leave early).
Nemesis is also on the pricier side of this list, but you’ll see why when you open the box. Over 500 components comprise the whole thing, including some extremely cool character and alien models.
Twilight Imperium
Difficulty Level: It’s definitely complicated but the juice is worth the squeeze.
Players: 3-6 (with every additional player, the tension really ramps up though)
Game Time: Notorious for it’s long playing time, so clear your schedule. Anywhere from 4-8 hours is realistic.
Twilight Imperium is monolithic and definitely requires a board game callous to get into - it’s a self-decribed “large scale space opera” after all. Cool, right?
You and your mates will pick one of a variety of races each with a very specific set of skills, tech capabilities, etc, that can vastly change the way you approach playing the game. The level of detail put into each individual race is pretty unique and super satisfying, especially when considering most board games have a fairly flat way of approaching differentiating ‘armies’. This means that multiple playthroughs can feel quite different depending on who you choose. You might go all out warfare, or just slither your way through trading goods in the background.
Once you’ve chosen your race you’ll battle it out for space supremacy by developing a fleet of ships, occupying planets, developing your technology and scoring victory points to secure the win. Be warned though, at a point through the game we enter space diplomacy (told you it was cool!!) and the rules can suddenly change, often to disadvantage the current points leader.
It’s a topsy turvy ride, but it makes for an extremely dynamic game that has you engaged the whole way through. And that’s saying something given a game can last all day.
Obviously from the above it feels like the game can be a lot, and we would recommend watching a How To video on YouTube before getting in to it (which may even take 40 minutes by itself). That said, there’s a good reason why Imperium is rated so highly on Board Game Geek - you ride highs and lows throughout and it takes just one play-through to be hooked.
