5 Board Games we think you should Try this Week!

Sick of your current board game collection and looking for some new games here are 5 games you should try to play this week.

We have featured games like, Feudum, Sagrada and Terraforming Mars But are there any great games you would have prefered we included leave your suggestions in the comments below.

Feudum

After half a decade of reviewing board games, and another two of playing as many as I could get my hands on, I’ve finally found it. The most complex, complicated board game I have ever encountered.

Feudum is a medieval, economic fantasy game for up to five players. Explaining even the gist of this monster’s rules accurately would take a stout pamphlet. So please allow me to just straight-up butcher them: Using a hand of cards, you’ll take turns by picking four of 11 possible actions to send six types of pawns across a complex, fantasy board to spread influence and domination, collect a dizzying array of goods (from saltpeter and rosary beads), defend and develop your new holds, and jockey for influence in six separate guilds—each of which function with cascading effects that may require a supercomputer to effectively preplan. The winner? Most points at the end. Oh, also there’s blimps and subs.

Exhausted yet? If not, then this is the game for you! Feudum is a complex, challenging undertaking you will not soon forget.

Sagrada

In Sagrada, you and up to three friends compete to design and craft historically marvelous stained-glass windows.

The basic mechanics underlying Sagrada are elegant in their simplicity. Each round, someone grabs a handful of multicolored six-sided dice from a bag and rolls them. Then, players take turns drafting and placing the die like shards of stained glass onto a personal 4×5 grid “window,” making sure to follow the game’s simple placement rules: Dice of the same color or number can’t ever touch. As your window fills up, these restrictions can become absolutely crippling, so foresight is a must.

Best of all, Sagrada is one of the extremely few games with a single-player mode (an increasingly popular trope for board-game designers) that’s actually worth your time. Visually arresting and endlessly replayable, Sagrada is certainly the best puzzle game in a while.

Terraforming Mars

In Terraforming Mars, you and up to four friends take turns buying and playing cards that construct cities or enact terraforming projects on a hexagonal map of Mars. Each terraforming project has a planetary effect, and will give you a special bonus—for example, allowing you to produce resources like titanium faster, or lowering the cost of future projects. It’s by chaining those bonuses together to form clever bonus-earning engines that you’ll earn the most victory points and win the game.

But you have to work fast; the game ends when everybody’s terraforming projects have done three things: raise the atmospheric oxygen level to 14 per cent, up to the planetary temperature to 8 degrees Celsius, and lay down all nine ocean tiles. If you’ve ever read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, you need this game.

Photosynthesis

The concept behind Photosynthesis is so simple, it’s brilliant. Each player places two trees in a hexagonal, game-board meadow. As the sun rotates around the meadow’s six edges, your trees soak up sunlight. Unless they’re behind and in the shade of other trees. You spend your sunlight like a currency to grow your trees taller; thereby collecting more light and making a longer shadow to cast on your opponents. Or you can spread and grow seeds to make more trees. To gain points, fell your giant trees faster than your friends. That’s it.

Because of its sheer logicality, Photosynthesis is an absolutely perfect game to lure in folks new to the world of modern board games. Veteran gamers will find much to love as well. Sure, flora aren’t known to be the most cutthroat of life’s kingdoms, but you can revel in touches of nakedly competitive meanness as your shadows smother you opponent’s ill-laid shrubs.

Captain Sonar

“Frenzied” doesn’t even begin to explain this game. In Captain Sonar, you and seven friends helm two submarines in a real-time elusive battle to the death. (Ignore the box, only play with eight players.) Imagine a full table of two teams of four, separated by a long cardboard shield. Both teams’ Captains are frenetically shouting directions as quickly as possible to evade drones and mines across a 15×15 grid studded with islands. The Engineers are pleading to let their ships surface to heal the damaged weapons or sonar systems; the Radio Operators are hungrily searching for areas of the map that match the enemy Captain’s orders, which they’re tracking with a felt marker, a clear plastic sheet, and a map.

Finally, with a raised fist, the game stops as one team’s Captain, at her first First Mates’s suggestion, fires a torpedo, crashing into the opponents submarine to the chorus of heavy groans from the losing players. Buy Captain Sonar, and you will play it whenever you have eight players at the ready.

So what are you waiting for make sure you pick up a copy and give these games a shoot we are sure that they will not disappoint.