2021 in Board Games!

This year has been another frustrating one with a real life pandemic continuing to dominate our lives. Despite all of this, board games have kept coming out and keeping us sane while we’ve been at home, coming back from work or even online! So, today we take a look at some of the games that have been taking the hobby by storm this past year, from hyped up releases like Descent: Legends of the Dark, all the way to unexpected hits like The Initiative!

Let’s start by taking a look at one of the bigger board gaming releases from this past year, Ankh: Gods of Egypt! In Ankh we have another big ‘dudes-on-a-map’ miniatures game from CMON in similar vain to Rising Sun and Blood Rage before it. Ankh continues the fighting and controlling areas aspects from the previous big box games, but adds new twists to it. Not only do we have a new theme here, Egyptian Gods and lands, but the largest attraction of Ankh is the ‘Merging’ mechanic. This new feature combines the powers of the player in last place with another, allowing them to stay in the game rather than be eliminated outright! If you’re on the lookout for another beast of a multiplayer war game with beautiful miniatures and several expansions, Ankh: Gods of Egypt could be one for you to grab!

Quest is a social deduction game that released this year and you might recognise it a little! If you played The Resistance or The Resistance: Avalon you’ll be pretty familiar with Quest and it’s core idea – you’ll be dealt secret roles of Good and Evil, debate on who to send out on quests, and hopefully succeed in them! This new game comes with 25 different characters (meaning copious amounts of replayability!) and an intriguing Director’s Cut mode! If you’re looking for a party game to play this coming year, check out Quest!

Speaking of reimplementation of popular games, Unfathomable released this past year! This uses similar gameplay mechanics to Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game with hidden traitors and sabotaging creatures abound! This game takes place in Fantasy Flight Games’ Arkham Files series and puts them on the SS Atlantica. However, unspeakable horrors are ready to hamper the ship’s journey, with one or more players secretly being human-Deep One hybrids. Will the humans fend off the Deep One invasion or will Mother Hydra and Father Dagon sink the SS Atlantica and all of those on board? If deduction and adventure are your bag, Unfathomable could sail you away!

The Initiative is a cooperative adventure board game that also contains code-cracking and a campaign! If you’ve ever seen the film, Jumanji, The Initiative is like a spy version of that with kids starting the game off by buying an old board game about cracking codes (with glorious comic-style pages to delve into!). In game, you control both the kids as well as their spy alter egos, navigating the missions ahead of you, unfolding the story and solving the puzzles put in your way! If you’re on the lookout for some nice cooperative, story-based games this coming year, playing The Initiative could be one of those resolutions!

And finally, we come to the biggest box of them all, Descent: Legends of the Dark. This app-driven dungeon crawler from Fantasy Flight Games follows previous outings like Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth, Star Wars: Imperial Assault, and Descent 2^nd edition and further refines the combination of app and board game into one massive experience! We have beautiful miniatures, stunning 3D terrain pieces, sprawling boards and adventures to journey on, all wrapped up in the usual FFG polish! The Descent gameplay this time around focusses on flipping your cards around to give your characters new abilities, interacting with practically everything on screen, and rolling dice to defeat the cabal of enemies who stand in your way! Descent: Legends of the Dark is certainly an experience, and this is just Act 1!

Of course, there were many more board games that came out this past year that we could talk about and gush over, as well as several expansions for games that were already amazing! If you’ve loved playing board games this year, despite the circumstances, then let us know what your favourites have been over on our socials! Until then, have a happy new year everyone!