After Settlers, After Ticket to Ride, After Carcassonne…

The holiday shopping season is upon us and one of the common questions we’re running into this season is what board game we would recommend to someone who already has Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride. We’ve been asked this so many times, in fact, we decided to put our recommendations on our Web site to help you with your holiday shopping.

Here they are: Power Grid, Puerto Rico, Acquire, Fresco, Forbidden Island, and Dominion.

Aqua Romana

NOTE: This game is currently out of stock at our distributors, which means we don’t have copies in our stores and we can’t order it.

Aqua Romana is a German-style board game for two to four players. Players assume the role of experienced architects and use workers and master builders to build aqueducts that supply water to towns and cities during the age of the Roman Empire. The winner of the game is the architect that has accumulated the most points by building the longest aqueducts.

Players begin with a reservoir, a source for the water that will be carried in the aqueducts they build. A worker is placed on each exit of the reservoir. As an aqueduct is extended from this exit, the worker will move along the aqueduct’s length. Once an aqueduct is finished (described as “closed” in the game instructions), points are scored for the length of the aqueduct and the worker is removed from the game. This means each player has a limited number of workers, and thus the number of aqueducts they can build is also limited.

Introduction to German-style Board Games

If your household is like mine, chances are you have closet space or cupboard space set aside for a collection of board games. At my house, our cupboard has the classics Scrabble, Monopoly, Trouble, Pictionary, Yahtzee, and Battleship. We also have no less than a half-dozen decks of playing cards, and a selection of German-style board games.

German-style board games are a class of tabletop games that, generally speaking, have simple rules, short to medium playing times, emphasize strategy, downplay luck and conflict, and usually keep all the players in the game until the very end. Germany produces more board games per capita than any other country, but the style of the German board game has been adopted by other countries, thus board games designed with the same principles in mind are often refered to as German-style board games or European-style board games.

The degree of strategy involved in playing these games can vary, but, in general, German-style board games are designed for everyone– meaning the beginner and the expert board gamer (and everything in between).

With this primer in German-style board games in mind, I give you a list of five such board games that would be a welcome addition to any board game closet or cupboard. The games are listed in no particular order.