There are a few games that make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside just thinking about them. I am always happy to bring them to the table, and they usually don’t generate negative interaction or hurt feelings. Also, they usually have a light rules set and offer you some thinking and planning without frying your brain.

Games that let you build a whole new world

Carcassonne was the first ‘modern’ boardgame I played. As such it was one of the first, if not the first, boardgame I bought. Players draw tiles from a facedown stack and then add it to the central tableau that (re)builds the city of Carcassonne. There are castles to put knights in, roads to put robbers on, pastures to put farmers in and cloisters to put monks in. When one of these buildings or features is finished (with the exception of the pastures, they are only scored at game end and in a way that confused me in my first couple of plays), you get to retrieve your meeple, score some points and on a later turn turn that meeple yet again into a knight, robber, monk or farmer. As all players expand the same city, there is room for some blocking, but even so, the joy of seeing this city grow by far outweighs possible blocking from opponents.

A few years ago, I traded away my copy of regular Carcassonne and got a used copy of the winter edition instead. I love winter, so the snowy landscape brings even more joy to my heart.

Carcassonne doesn’t hit the table often, but it will never leave my collection as I’m sure it will find its way back to our table someday, and it is a perfect gateway game to introduce new gamers or non-gamer family members and friends to the hobby.

Similar to Carcassonne, players use tiles in Akropolis to build a whole new city. But contrary to Carcassonne, in this game it is every player for themselves: you will each build your own city. Tiles consist of 3 hexagons and come with 0 to 3 different districts on them. Each district has a different way of scoring at the end of the game, while the grey tiles represent quarries that will provide you with stone when you build over them. Yes, that’s right: you can build up as well as out! Tiles at higher positions are worth more points. Back to the stone: stone is the currency you use in the drafting of tiles: the first tile in the line is free to take, but if you want to draft a tile further down the line, you need to put a stone on each tile preceding it.

The game has basic art, but the districts with their different colors make for a colorful patchwork to admire at the end of the game.

Games that bring you back to nature (and animals)

There are quite a few games with a theme around animals and nature. And I admit, I have a soft spot for those themes. It doesn’t have to be all fuzzy or with anthropomorphized animals like in Everdell or Creature Comforts (those generally have the opposite effect on me), but I really like games with somewhat realistic artwork around nature or animals.

Meadow is a such a lovely game in every way. First of all, staring you in the face when you take the box in your hands: the art is just gorgeous. Seriously, just look at it:

Meadow is a card game in which players build their habitat from the ground up – literally, as you will start with cards of terrain types, like grass, rock etc. The recent expansion (Downstream) adds water as a terrain type and loads of water animals. Your tableau can be up to 10 cards wide. Cards are drafted from a central display that changes as the game progresses. On top of the ground cards you build your habitat, probably starting out with little bugs and wurms, working your way up to small critters, little birds before bringing in the birds of prey and predators. Each card brings one or two icons to your habitat. Also, each card lists one or more icons that this animal or feature (because you can also add houses and trees to your habitat) needs in order to survive in your habitat. To add a card to your tableau, it will need to cover up one of the icons that it needs, to indicate that it has access to what it needs to thrive. This makes from some tricky choices, as you move up on the food chain with bigger animals that will often generate more points, but then you cover up other cards making their icons unavailable for other creatures and features you might want to add. It is a balancing act of growing your habitat while coving up all these icons and still making sure you have everything at hand to keep growing that makes this a relaxing and rewarding game.

This game reminds me a bit of Meadow, so I’m listing it here because if you love Meadow and want something with somewhat similar mechanisms that plays in a shorter timeframe, comes in a tiny box and uses less table space, Codex Naturalis might be worth checking out. It also has a drafting mechanism and you build a personal tableau with those cards. Some cards have no cost to be added to your tableau and offer you resources (represented by symbols) you will need to play gold cards. These are cards that will give you points, but they have a cost to be played – a combination of symbols that need to be visible in your tableau when you play the card. These symbols are in the corner of the cards, so one card can have a maximum of 4 symbols, but not all do. Also, the card can have up to four corners that can be covered by another card. When adding a new card to your tableau, you have to cover at least one corner of another card. Just like in Meadow, this might make useful icons unavailable for the rest of the game – or at least until you add another card with that symbol to your tableau.

Just like Meadow, the combination of a little puzzle, card drafting and beautiful art make this a perfect game when I want something relaxing.

Ecosystem. Yet another game that has you drafting cards (but not from a central tableau, the drafting here is 7 Wonders style by passing a hand of cards to the next player) and build a habitat, or rather ecosystem, with the drafted cards. This time you will build a 5x4 grid. There are 11 card types, most of those are animals like wolves, bears, eagles, bees – but there are also landforms like meadows and streams. Each of the 11 card types scores differently at the end of the game – for instance the fox doesn’t want to be adjacent to bears and wolves, and those wolves score depending on how many of them you have in your ecosystem (majority type scoring).

Puzzly games

Azul.  An abstract game with tactile chunky tiles. Players draft tile from a display of ‘factories’ following one simple rule: you can only draft from 1 factory, and you have to take all tiles of the same color/design that are in that factory. Those tiles then get placed on your player board to fill a pattern. It is simple but it is a wonderful and beautiful design.

Patchwork. Let’s make a quilt! The 2-player game by Uwe Rosenberg that made polyominoes a thing. This game also has drafting (I’m starting to think it is the drafting that relaxes me): players draft polyomino tiles, representing patches of fabric, from a circular display. A spool marker indicates the starting point. On your turn you can take on of the 3 tiles in front of the spool. A tile has a cost in buttons on it and a time indication, this tells you how many tiles you have to move your player marker on a separate board. The player that is behind on that track gets to take their turn, so you could play a few turns in a row if you take patches that don’t take a lot of time. The patches have to be placed on your player board, filling up a 7x7 square. You will try to have as little open spots as possible at the end of the game.

I enjoy the puzzle of the polyomino tiles and the balancing act of the tile drafting: do I take a cheaper tile so I can go twice in a row, or do I grab that really expensive one? I got the Polish edition because it has such beautiful patterns on the patches.

Nova Luna. Another tile laying and drafting game of Uwe Rosenberg that shares some elements with Patchwork, like the drafting mechanism. In this game the tiles are just square, no polyominoes, and each tile has an order for you to fulfill – basically the colors of tiles that tile needs to have adjacent to it. A tile can have 0 to 3 orders on it. Whenever you fulfill an order, you get to cover it up with one of your discs. You will race the other players to be the first to place all your discs.

Flip/roll-and-write-or-put-cubes-out

That's pretty clever! (aka Clever!) There is something satisfying in rolling a few dice and then crossing of boxes on a sheet of paper, especially if you can chain some combos – it’s like an endorphin fest! Also, if you play this often, you will see a clear upward trend in your scores.

While Clever is basically themeless, Voll Perplant adds just a sprinkle of theme to the flip-and-write genre. Also, there is a lot of variability in the small box, as you get 4 or 5 different sheets to play on, each representing the metro grid in a big city.

The cards you flip tell you how many stops you can cross off of one metro line on your map and if you can skip previously crossed of stations (this is important because if you bump into a station that was already crossed off in a previous turn, you have to stop – unless the card allows you to skip those). If you are the first to finish a metro line, you get bonus points.