2024 Holiday Tabletop Game Guide

From family-friendly fun to complex strategy for seasoned gamers, in this podcast, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner shares his annual gift guide of tabletop games, card games, and board games. Whether you're shopping for a casual game night or looking to challenge your game-loving friends, these recommendations are strategically timed to help you make this holiday season unforgettable.

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David Gardner: Few people may love games more than I do. Hey, some people don't even like games at all. If that's you, I suggest you skip this week's podcast. Come back later this month when we'll be playing a different game that you may like, as it involves the stock market, that is, of course, the Market Cap Game Show. That's a game we all can play. It's coming back in two weeks' time for the 2024 closeout. Anyway, if you don't like games, take this week off. Hey, wait. You still listening? Excellent. In that case, thank you for suffering a Fool gladly, as I endeavor this week to share with you my top recommendations from the world of tabletop games, card games, board game recommendations, strategically timed, as I do every year, as early as possible in December, so you might have time to put one of these under someone else's tree to spice up your families or your own life. It's my annual Games, Games, Games podcast, Volume 6, only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to this week's Rule Breaker Investing. Arguably, a misnomer for this particular podcast. There's not a lot of investing going on in this week's podcast. Now, longtime listeners know we spend a third of our time here on investing, a third of our time on business, and a third of our time on life. If you think about the Motley Fool's purpose statement to make the world smarter, happier, and richer, you can map those to those three zones I just talked about. The third of our time spent on investing makes us richer. That's spent on business in our professional lives, makes us smarter, and the third of our time spent on life. Well, I sure hope, has been making you happier because that's a big reason I do what I do from week to week. If you're getting richer and smarter, but not happier, that's going to create some problems.

One antidote might very well be, then finding things that spark joy in you to bring out the happy. What I try to do here at least a third of the time in this week, it's our annual effort to spark joy for you and your family and loved ones around the game table. Now, I first started doing this in 2017. Back then, it was the gift giving special. I had a bunch of fellow Fools on talking about how they give gifts around this holiday period, some creative thoughts there. I just right in the end of that podcast, stuck in a games list in that gift giving special of 2017. Then a year later that December, I interviewed Richard Garfield here. Richard, the designer of Magic The Gathering, one of the great all time games, and a wonderful interview. At the end of that podcast, I just put in a list for recommendations for holiday games.

Then in 2019, to close up this shaggy dog history, for the first time, I just explicitly came out of the gaming closet on this and went Games, Games, Games. That was the title of the podcast, which is why this week is called Games, Games, Games Volume 6. It's my annual holiday guide to some of my favorite recent tabletop games, board games, and card games, word games too. I'm changing up the format a bit this year. In years past, I've had a longer opening in which I explain how much I love BoardGameGeek. My second favorite website, how I use its ratings, and also how I love the app, BG Stats, which is an awesome download on the App Store, BG Stats for Board Game Stats, which enables me to log a lot of the games I play, which I do.

It generates all kinds of crazy fun stats. I can tell you right now how many different games I've played so far. In 2023, I've played 76 different games 321 times. I've done that in 21 locations with 44 different friends, playing 13% of my overall collection. November, for the record, was the month I played the most games, and Wednesday was the day, it turns out that saw the most games played for me, our most common player count in the games I played was four players, but that's probably more than you need to know about me, anyway. But you might enjoy knowing things about you. Yeah, the BG Stats app and BoardGameGeek are just insanely great tools for serious gamers. If you want to hear more about that, listen to the first 15 minutes two years ago, 2022, Volume 4, where I talk more in depth about how to use those. Before we get started with Volume 6, I should mention, of course, this is the sixth in my annual series. If you're interested in hearing about more games than just the 13 that I'll be featuring this podcast, the previous five episodes in this series are all distinct and all contain fresh recommendations for games that if you hadn't come across them before, I think you'll enjoy. Now, our format, this year, I'm going to re lead off with I-C-M-Y-I, which I'll explain shortly, I then feature 13 games which are organized from the lightest to heaviest.

From games you can play with families and kids and people who say they don't play or in some cases, even like games, they'll play like the ones I cover here at the start. But then as we go through the episode with the 13 games, we're going to increasingly go deeper into longer, richer, more complex games. We start casual, then we go deep by the end of this episode. Now, if you love tabletop board and card games, you're going to enjoy I hope the whole episode. But if you're just in for a few gift ideas, feel free to hop off the train anywhere along the line. Stop listening to this podcast whenever I get you more in depth than you were desiring. Yes, this is a buy and guide, if that would be helpful for you.

Here, this first week in December, the games I'm featuring, I have painstakingly double check to ensure they are available. I actually had to knock a couple off the list because if you can't buy it on Amazon or your favorite games e-commerce site, then I don't want to talk it up here. I don't want to get you amped up for a game you'd enjoy playing or giving as a gift, and you find it sold out everywhere. I've pre-checked the 13 featured games, and they're all a happy click away for you. I also hasten to add that the foremost games philosopher living today is Thi Nguyen who operates out of the University of Utah, and I've had him on this podcast a few times now, the most recent being authors in August of this year. If you love games, and you're just coming across this podcast for the first time, I think you might really love our conversation. If you just Google N-G-U-Y-E-N. That's how you spell Nguyen and Rule Breaker Investing, you'll find our conversation. With that said, let's get started. Des, appropriate music, please.

I first want to represent a short list of classics. This is especially for new listeners and new gamers, because I think each of these is a classic, so it deserves a look right up front. I've talked about each of these before, which is why it's a short list. If you're not a gamer, but you like games, and you want to give a gift or have good times with family over the holidays, I recommend my ICYMI list. That's, of course, Internet speak for in case you missed it. These six games are all utter classics. If you haven't played all of them or even any of them, I highly suggest you just start here.

Maybe you don't even need to listen to the rest of the podcast. Here they come in no particular order, Crokinole. Crokinole which is a dexterity game where you flick discs into the middle of a circular wooden board that has little pegs in the middle you can ricochet off of. You're trying to leave your discs in the middle for points and knock your opponents out. Crokinole, a longtime game of Canadian origin, fantastic game. Just One is number 2 here, the simplest, maybe the simplest best word game of all. The person whose turn it is doesn't know the clue word. Everybody else does. We try to help that person by giving them a clue that we've come up with to help them guess their word. But the trick is that your clue to help them cannot be the same as mine or anyone else's. Otherwise, we cancel each other out, and our poor friend has to make the guess with much less to go on. This is a cooperative, very fun game Just One. The third ICYMI, I want to highlight is Phrase Party. Now, this started as a game called Catchphrase, which was sold in stores. It had cards, or you had a gadget that spat out words.

But really, in the age of the smartphone, it's become a phenomenal free to cheap app, called Phrase Party. You're given a word, and as quickly as possible, you need to give clues. You're looking at your phone, seeing the word, and your partner who can't see your phone needs to guess the word you're looking at. You're giving rapid fire clues, and then it's hot potato. As soon as your team gets it, you pass the phone to the person to your left. Meanwhile, the timer keeps ticking on the phone, eventually, it goes, and whoever's holding it loses. This is a fantastic game.

I may have played Phrase Party more than any other game over the last 10 years, and this plays an infinite number of people. If you have 24 people around at Thanksgiving or holiday table, you can play 12 teams of two or eight teams of three. It is a phenomenally accessible, fun word game. I have three more for you So Clover!, Telestrations, and Tissue. So Clover!, first of all, another word game, it's my favorite in recent years. It's a bit more complex than Just One, which I just explained for you. You're linking two words. Let's say basketball and fire. Two unrelated words, and you need to figure out a clue for your friends that will unite those two words and help them guess that you were looking at basketball and fire. I thought about this for a while, and I didn't come up with a good answer, and then my talented producer, Des Jones said, "David, what about heat?" I agree, Des. That's great a great clue because the Miami Heat are, of course, an NBA team so basketball on fire.

Maybe you say heat and your friend gets it. It's a cooperative game, So Clover!. We're all working together, and we can make it increasingly puzzly by mixing in additional cards. I won't explain anything more than that. There's sometimes a temptation on the Games, Games, Games podcast where I start talking about the rules of a game, and I realize we're going too deep. We need to stay higher levels, so suffice it to say that So Clover! is a phenomenally good word game, and it is a classic, in my opinion. The last two, as I just mentioned, Telestrations and Tissue, completely different games.

Telestrations, I hope you've played this game, but if you haven't yet, think of the telephone game. Remember where you say a word or a line and whisper it to the person next to you, and then they try to do that to the next person, it comes all the way back around to you, and it's very different from what you initially whispered? Well, think of the telephone game, but with pictures, drawing pictures. Telestrations is a hilariously great game. Then Tissue is a richer, more complex four-player card game. If you've ever played a partner's game like the Game of Bridge, Tissue is one such game, and it is a fantastic card game, like the Game of Bridge, which I also love, that you can master your whole lifelong and play with many people. Crokinole, Just One, Phrase Party, So Clover!, Telestrations, Tissue, ICYMI. With all that said, game number 1. Now, I want to remind you, these are all organized from light to heavy, so this is the very lightest.

In fact, on BoardGameGeek, any users of the site are invited to come in and give a rating. You can say how much you like a game, and of course, all the games have ratings like 8.8 or 7.2, etc. You can also say how heavy you think the game is. For example, how long does it take to teach or to learn? How complex is it? How many different mechanisms are going on within that game? Is it a light game or a heavy game? BoardGameGeek rates all games on a 1-5, one being totally light and five being totally heavy rating. I'll be giving the weight of each of these games. Remember, they're going to amp up over the course of this podcast buy and guide, and the first one is a 1.01. This might be the lightest game in creation. It's called That's Not a Hat. That's Not a Hat was published in 2023 by Ravensburger. It costs about 10 bucks online.

I'll try to list the price of each of these games for those interested. This game plays 4-8 players, so it's a larger party game, and it is an hilarious game of memory and bluffing. You have a card down in front of you, so does each of us, and maybe you've got a banana, and you then flip it over and pass it to me and say, "Here you go. Here's a banana." I take it from you, but I have to leave it face down. I already have a card in front of me that's face down, so I need to remember, I have a hat in front of me. You just gave me a banana. I pass one of those on to the next person, and I say, "Here you go. Here's your banana." Now, on their turn, they have to decide, do they want to accept my card? Is it a banana? Have I remembered it right? Am I bluffing? Or do they want to challenge and say, that's not a banana. As we flip it over together, we see I'd pass them the hat, not the banana.

I might not have even remembered myself that it was a hat, not a banana. This is the way the memory game of That's Not a Hat works. It is a perfect mix of chaos and hilarity. Players are half bluffing their way through the game and half hilariously forgetting what the card in front of them was as they pass it to you or me and make a certain claim. It is a standout party game. It's perfect for creating laugh out loud moments. That's Not a Hat is game number 1 on Games, Games, Games Volume 6.

Again, 10 bucks. Ten bucks on Amazon. Onto game number 2. This one isn't much heavier. It's a 1.07. The name of the game is Medium. Medium was published in 2019. Not every game on my list came out in the last 12 months. Sometimes I discover games a few years later, or I just want to bring a game back. I'll be doing that a little bit later this episode, and remind you of it, even if we talked about it before. Sometimes a great expansion comes out and makes an old game fresh again or even more interesting. Well, the game of Medium is just what it is. It came out five years ago, greater than games is the publisher. It costs about $20 online. Medium plays 3-6 six players, best of all. It's a telepathic connection game, where you and your partners, sometimes opponents, look to find a medium word between two words or thoughts. It's a little bit like our basketball and fire example from So Clover!. It's a simpler game than So Clover!. Let's see if I can make this real for you. You're going to play a card. You play music. Face up. I, as your partner, look at my hand and decide to play cat.

We have cat and music sitting there between us. What we're going to do is we're both going to think quietly for a few moments. What is a word that connects cat and music, kind of like basketball and fire? What is a word that connects cat and music? Can I think of the exact same word that you, my partner are also thinking of? In fact, let's play the game together right now. I've said cat and music. I'm thinking of a word right now. Dear listener, I hope you'll come up with a word right now. Maybe we'll get this together. If we do, you should definitely tweet this out on Twitter X or social media @rbipodcast. I'm @davidgfool on Twitter X. If you say the same word I did, I'd love to hear from you about this. Here we go. This is how the game works. You just count down 3, 2, 1. Then at the exact same time, you both say the word you have in mind. Here we go. Cat and music, 3, 2, 1. Meow. Well, if you said meow, then we just matched and we score some points. If you didn't say meow, then we take my meow and your word, and we look for a new middle, we replay a quick round and try to find the next medium word between those. If this sounds like fun to you, you're probably a word games person. I am, too.

Medium is really delightful. Again, like very light games, 1.07 on BoardGameGeek, this is a very inexpensive gift, a cheap but lovely gift for friends or family. This holiday season, Medium is Game Number 2. Meow. Let's go on to game number three, which is Scout. The card game. It's a shedding game. I'll explain that in a second. The weight of Scout on BoardGameGeek is 1.36, so we're a little bit less light here, but this is a card game published in 2019 by Oink, as in pigs, Oink games. It costs $25 on most online sites. Scout plays three to five players. I first mentioned two years ago in 2022 in Volume 4, but back then, it wasn't that easy to find. I think I remember saying, "Sorry if you can't find it. In time, more of them will be printed."

Sometimes very popular games that surprise the publisher with their popularity, especially from smaller publishers can sell out fast, and all of a sudden, nobody can find the game. Well, Scout is very much purchasable today and a very popular game, especially for people who enjoy what I was calling earlier shedding games. Shedding games are games, I don't know, like crazy eights, where you're trying to get rid of your hand. You're trying to be the first person to get all the cards out of your hand. It's circus themed, Scout. You're scouting other people's circus acts, but this is the most paste it on theme I probably have ever seen.

The theme means absolutely nothing to this wonderful game, but here's what happens as you play Scout. You pick up your hand of cards dealt to you, and all the cards are one through 10. There's a bunch of cards, but you pick up your cards and you cannot rearrange your hand. You have to maintain the exact sequence from left to right of the cards in your hand, but there's a trick to this because every single card has a number at the top, which you're looking at, let's say, a seven, but also a number, a different number on the bottom.

Let's say it's four on the bottom. As you pick up your hand, you can't rearrange your cards, but the one thing you can do before you start playing is flip your hand upside down and play the other side of the cards with a different set of numbers. Every one of us takes a moment before we start playing this shedding card game to decide, "Do I want to play right side up or upside down? Remember, you cannot alter the sequence of cards in your hand." You're really just trying to play stronger tricks, and you're playing with runs or sets, a run like a 1, 2, 3, like a straight or sets, maybe like a 3, 3, 3, 3, 3. You're trying to play stronger tricks than your opponents. Your hand, let's say, includes a two, three. You lay down 2, 3 on the table, you're trying to get rid of it. I have a higher run. I match you with a two card run a 4, 4. I grab your 2, 3 from the middle of the table. That becomes a 2.2 card trick for me, worth two points at the end of the hand. There's my 4, 5 sitting there.

Then the next person after me decides they can't or don't want to beat my 4, 5, so they scout, which means they pull one card from either end of whatever's sitting on the table. Let's just say that next player, I had a 4, 5. That player takes a four. Because that person unbeknownst to me, was looking at a hand sequence of cards where they had a two next to a three, next to a five, they've taken that four so they can insert the four between the three and five, and all of a sudden, when it next comes around to them at the table, they're going to have a 2, 3, 4, 5 they can lay down and probably win a trick. There's a little bit of the rules of scout and how the game works. It's really innovative, really replayable. You tend to play one hand per player. In a four player game, we'll play four hands. Takes about 30-40 minutes.

Usually, the winners going to have something like 25-30 points. Somebody might even be negative. It is a lot of fun and really replayable. Part of the reason I'm talking about here in 2024 is because since this game came out five years ago, I've played it a lot over the last five years. That's why I want to highlight it for you, Game Number 3, Scout. Let's keep moving up the weight ladder. We're going from 1.36 now to 1.98. This is a solidly light to medium game, no longer just light games like that's not a hat. This game also came out this year, 2024 from publisher Libellud. The game is Harmonies. Harmonies costs about $35 online. It plays 1-4 players. Harmonies is a tile laying game. There are groups of three tiles, little trios of tiles in the middle of the table. Maybe there will be one group will have a blue water and two yellow ones, fields.

You can pick up the blue and the two yellows, and you're now going to need to build them into your own ecosystem, the board in front of you, where you're building out a little habitat. In our example, you took two yellows and a blue, and you need to arrange them on the grid in front of you. Now, in addition to the tiles that you're drafting, you're also drafting and obtaining cards. Full of delightful animals, whimsical artwork, showing an otter or a heroine. The cards are showing you the pattern you're trying to make with those colored tiles you're laying down in your ecosystem. For example, if you had two yellows in a blue, maybe you'll lay them out in a line.

Yellow, blue, yellow. Then you look at a card that's in front of you that you've drafted that you've been playing toward, and you notice that if you can create a yellow, then a blue, then a yellow, you've attracted, sure, an otter or a heroine, which will give you points. You are drafting tiles and then trying to match sequences and patterns on the cards, the lovely animal cards that you're trying to pull into your harmonious habitat. This game is if you're a gamer and you listen to me in the past, you might have heard about Cascadia, which similarly is a lovely game full of habitats and creatures. It's a little more complicated than Harmonies. Harmonies is a quicker to play.

Cascadia plays about an hour, and there's a lot more points to count up and score. Harmonies plays more like 40 minutes, and it's much more abstract. It feels more chess like or backgammon like, as opposed to a game with lots of cards, points, and filling up a table. Harmonies, for a lot of my friends who like Cascadia, they've actually shifted their attention to Harmonies because of its more chess like abstract nature. Both of these games are great games. I played both of them a lot this year, but Harmonies is the new one this year, and Harmonies is Game Number 4 on this year's Games, Games, Games. On to Game Number 5. Game Number 5 has a weight of exactly 2.00. It's a light to medium game that came out this year, as well, from Stonemaier Games, one of my favorite publishers, Jamey Stegmaier, one of the founders of Stonemaier Games, has been on this podcast. It was years ago. I should have him back sometime soon, but I really appreciated Jamey and his work as a publisher, finding great games like Wingspan a game we'll talk about a later. In this case, Stamp Swap, which is a 2024 release from Stonemaier Games.

The cost, if you try to buy it online, around $40 today. By the way, you'll notice as we go from lighter games to heavier games, the prices tend to go up as well. Often, there are more components, more rules, more concepts. Again, gamer games usually are much more expensive than lighter, especially word simple card games. Understandably, this game is now the most expensive of the five I've talked about so far at $40, but it's going to get a little bit richer than that, going forward. Stamp Swap plays 1-5 players. That means you can play it solo.

By the way, I may have mentioned that about Harmonies, as well. I don't know if I skip that or not, but Harmonies plays 1-4 players, which means these games, a bunch of games these days, have capacity, have facility to be soloed, to be played just by yourself. I enjoy doing that, especially sometimes to learn a game. Before I'm going to teach Stamp Swap to friends, I sometimes set it down on the table, use the solo rules, and learn the game that way. Of course, a lot of people, when we're playing a video game, which is something I enjoy doing as well, that's often pure solo. You're just sitting there playing against the game. Increasingly, that is working its way into board games and card games, as well.

A bunch of games featured this year, play one player, if that's you. Stamp Swap is one of them takes about an hour to play. This is another drafting game. In Harmonies you are drafting habitat tiles. In Stamp Swap, yep, [inaudible] is a plenty, you are drafting stamps, but the way you draft is kind of fun. It's an I cut you choose framework. You might have five different stamps in front of you. You're going to need to separate them into two piles. Maybe you two more expensive ones in one pile and three cheaper ones in another. You've just cut your pile in two, and then I, as your opponent, choose which of those I want to take and acquire. It's kind of like swapping stamps, trading stamps. I've never been to a stamp convention, but the theme of this game is a weekend stamp convention, and it has that I cut, you choose drafting framework. Now, the stamps themselves lovely and they have both colors on them, as well as themes. You might have a blue space stamp, and you want to get all the space stamps.

You're looking at a yellow space stamp that I've cut for you. You might take that in order to add to your space theme, because maybe you have a particular scoring goal to acquire as many space stamps as you can. We both know that. So as I cut my piles, I need to think about who's going to be drafting what from me. That's a lot of what's going on with Stamp Swap, but it's not because after you acquire your stamps from me or a friend, when somebody takes one of your two piles, you actually get the other for your collection, so that's another dynamic to the game.

Anyway, you then lay out what you acquired on a tableau grid in front of you. There's a spatial tile laying aspect to this drafting game, I find it very engrossing. This game has lovely aesthetic appeal. Often, Jamey Stegmaier's games do. It features 165 uniquely illustrated stamps, 15 of them have a gold foil because they're rarest stamps. This is just a well made strategy game. I don't even like stamps that much, but I like Stamp Swap, and I bet you will, too. Kind of like Harmonies. These are now strategy games we're talking about. No more silliness with telestrations, or that's not a hat. We're now into light to medium strategy games, and let's move forward then to Game Number 6. Again, six of 13. Game Number 6, if you're a Lord of the Rings fan, I am, too. I bet you're going to love Lord of the Rings Duel for Middle Earth. This game just came out in the last few months. It's a 2024 release. It costs $35 online when I checked.

This one plays just two players. This is a two player only game that takes less than an hour. This is a very hot game. Often Lord of the Rings branded merchandise still does pretty well these days 25 years after those movies started coming out on the silver screen. There are, of course, probably more Tolkien and Lord of the Rings fans today than in any other point in history. It's one of those franchises that kind of grows. Rings of Power on Amazon streaming has become the most expensive television show ever made. There's a lot invested in Middle Earth, and this game is one example.

If you're a Lord of the Rings fan, I know you're going to like this just for that very reason alone, but this game features card drafting, mainly. You're drafting one card after another, from a tableau between the two of you. Of course, one of you is Sauron and the forces of Mordor, and the other is representing the Fellowship, Frodo and Sam, and the effort to destroy the one ring. Those are the two obvious opponents in this game, but you're both commonly drafting cards from the same pool as you build out a tableau in front of you. There's a number of interconnected systems that I'm not going to explain here on this podcast because we're not going to go into the rules anymore than I am here, but I'll just mention, for example, there's a quest for the Ring track. As you draft some of those cards, if you're playing Frodo and Sam, you're racing toward Mount Doom.

If you're the bad guys, you've got the Nazgul and you're tracking Frodo and Sam and trying to catch them. In fact, this game can end in a few different ways, which is always interesting to me. This game can sometimes end very suddenly. Word to the wise. This game is modeled on an earlier game called Seven Wonders Duel. Now, Seven Wonders is a game I know I've talked about in the past on this podcast at some point. Not going to speak to it here, but Seven Wonders, the base game which played up to seven people, got released separately in a two player version that is very highly reviewed, very well liked, called Seven Wonders Duel. What has essentially happened here is they've taken the guts of that game and re themed it along Middle Earth and called it Lord of the Rings Duel for Middle Earth.

It's like Seven Wonders Duel if you already know that game, except now, of course, you're playing on a map of Middle Earth, and by the way, you're also playing on a map. Seven Wonders Duel has no such thing. You're just drafting cards and trying to set, collect, and score points, but here for the Middle Earth game, after you grab a card, that may very well influence the map of Middle Earth that you're competing on the board between you. This game is totally replayable. It has many interesting decisions. In fact, one of my favorite ways of thinking about what makes a strategy game great. Stick with me here for a moment, is the number of interesting decisions that you're getting to make over the course of an hour. This game takes, actually, not quite an hour, less than an hour, but how many interesting decisions where if you do this, it matters this way, and if you do that, it matters that way, and interesting decision. Games that have lots of interesting decisions. In fact, I've taken it down to an interesting decisions per minute ratio.

David Gardner: Those, in my mind, are the best games. The best strategy games, the best designs are lots of interesting decisions packed into a small time frame. Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle Earth is one such game, which is why it is so very hot on BoardGameGeek, the side I've mentioned a number of times this podcast.

They have a listing of the hottest games at any given moment. This is regularly in the top 10 from one day to the next here these last few months. Yet, good news, it's very obtainable. It's not sold out, it's in high supplies. Well, I bet it will be, if it sounds like your game. Let's move on from game number 6, The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle Earth. Let's go to a totally different theme. Yet, almost the same weight, 2.05 on the weight scale, the game is Sky Team. This game was published last year 2023. The publishers Scorpion Masque, this is a Quebec, a Montreal based publishing company. Sky Team retails for around $30 online and like our previous game, Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle Earth, Sky Team is a two players only game.

So especially if you're in a couple, if you have a partner, you enjoy games together, both of these games will be delightful for you. This is very different from the previous one, though. The playing time for this game on the box is listed at 15 minutes. That's right. This game is a game played in a hot minute, well, 15 of them. Anyway, and also, in contrast to the Lord of the Rings game, this is a cooperative game. So you and your partner are playing together and one of you is a pilot, and the other is the co-pilot and you're at the controls of an airliner, and your goal is to work together as a team to land that plane in different airports aroud the world under different stress conditions. This is actually a dice game. Each of you starts by rolling your dice.

One of you rolls blue dice, the other rolls red dice, and then you will be placing them on the game board, slots reserved for a certain dice, maybe the number of pips on the die. You can only play it there, not over there. So you're strategically deciding where to place your dice. But here's the catch, no verbal communication. You may not exchange any word, you can't give anything away to your partner as you work together. This is not exactly fanatically true. I'm very grateful that pilots and co-pilots can actually communicate in the cockpits of planes across the world. But in the game of Sky Team, you may not. Now, you're going to be playing in different airports to give you new and greater challenges. In fact, you can play through from the simple scenario that teaches you the game at the start, and you can get very complex and very stressful with bad weather and other things that change how you're going to be playing your dice.

Speaking of dice, part of the fun of this game, is the unpredictability of the dice rolls. First of all, you don't know what you're about to roll. You roll them behind a screen. You partner cannot see what you've rolled. You can't see what your partner rolled. So the unpredictability of the dice rolls causes you to sometimes take some real risks here or there. You're going to place your die, let's say, to adjust the plane's speed, then I on my side, maybe as your co-pilot am going to play a die to set the flaps of the plane and without speaking, we have to ensure that our actions align to maintain proper descent and balance as we try to land this plane together. Obviously, this game is ideal for pairs who are seeking a quick relatively intense, interesting, decision filled, cooperative game that emphasizes teamwork and non-verbal communication. I see that there's at least one recent expansion out for this game just a year later that can add additional scenarios and interests for people who fall in love with Sky Team. If it sounds like this might be your game, well, I hope it works out well for you.

That's game number 7. That means we have five left and we're going to keep getting you still with me here? Gamer. We're going to keep getting deeper, more expansive, and more complex, although I'll keep my descriptions pretty high level. So let's move on to game number 8. This is probably my favorite game played this year. It actually came out in 2023, but I and my game night mates all played this throughout 2024. The name of the game is Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West. It's published by Days of Wonder. It retails for $99.0 online, and its weight is 2.56. So we're now stepping up to solidly medium weight games.

Now, some of you will know Ticket to Ride. Maybe you've played it 100 times. It's a very replayable game. You can play the app version of it these days. People play it online. Some people have played this game thousands of times and Ticket to Ride in brief is a train route connection game. So let's say you've got the map of the United States and you're given a card at the start. I don't know you have this card, but it says you need to connect Los Angeles to Philadelphia. So you start grabbing cards and then laying down trains and trying to go west to east and connect Los Angeles to Philadelphia and all of a sudden, there I am in Omaha in the middle of the country and I've actually blocked you. I may not have even known that I was blocking you, there are other ways to get from Los Angeles to Philadelphia than going through Omaha, but that's the game of Ticket to Ride. You're trying to connect routes toward certain cards given to you as goals, and you're scoring points. If you don't accomplish your goal, you actually have to deduct the points of the cards, the train routes that you didn't finish. So that's the game of Ticket to Ride. It's been out for around 20 years.

This is one of the games that doesn't just sell in geeky game stores, but sometimes in Barnes and Noble, you'll see it in Walmart. This is a big, popular seller relative to most of the games you're hearing this week, but have you played Ticket to Ride Legacy? Legacy games, some serious gamers will know this many have not come across this concept. I'll briefly explain. A legacy game is a game where you play it once with your friends and what happens at the end of that game changes and affects the next play session. So game number 2 is inherently changed, altered, sometimes made more interesting because of what happened in game number 1. Perhaps you won the game, game number 1. So I start with an extra pawn or an extra die or some extra money.

Then there's this new area of the map that we've just unlocked in game number 4. So we're all changing our strategies based on new mechanics that are showing up. Since we're talking about Ticket to Ride Legacy, you can imagine you've got an evolving map. In fact, it's said in the 19th century, you're a railway company. You're expanding your network across North America, going from the East Coast initially out to the West. It's a 12-game campaign.

So you're playing the game 12 times and each time, what just happened affects what happens in future. Therefore, you've got infinite variety, how your group played Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West might be radically different from the outcomes I got with my group. As you might imagine, there's a narrative going on here. It's a very thematic game. It's beautifully produced. You're going to be adapting, exploring new strategies as new mechanics pop up in games 2 or 7 or 11. New mechanics keep happening, so the game keeps changing, complexifying, getting more interesting. Stories build up. You remember what I did to you in game 5 and now we're in game 8, and you're going to get revenge. There's a lot of fun that's baked into legacy games, and Ticket to Ride Legacy is just one example. There have been a number of legacy game releases in recent years. The very first one was Risk Legacy.

The classic game Risk turned into a legacy format. That's still purchasable out there. If you love Risk, you might love Risk Legacy. We love Ticket to Ride Legacy. You need to be able to play it with a steady group of people. It's going to be an hour or two each time, which means 12 times over the course of months or a year, a year in our case, you're going to need to find time to meet together and play the next game in that campaign of your legacy game. So you're going to want to be consistent, but if you can manage it, it's memorable. It's delightful for all. This is not the only legacy game I'll be highlighting this year. I'm about to highlight another. Now that you understand the legacy game, I hope you see the interest and the innovation. In fact, it was Rob Daviau, as a game designer, first dreamed up the legacy format and brought out risk legacy, not to brag here, but since I have a lot of great game designers on this podcast over the years, Rob Daviau is someone else, you could listen to me interview years ago, as we first talked about legacy games.

A number have come out since then, including this 2023 release by Days of Wonder of Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West. I guess I should add one more thing here. You might wonder, well, am I paying $90 to buy a game that you can only play 12 times? That doesn't add up. I think the good news is, first of all, we fully felt that after 12 games, we'd gotten our $90 worth. Heck, $90 is taking a family of five out to see a movie these days and that's just two hours.

So from my standpoint, I don't think legacy games have to justify infinite replayability to be worth their while. But this game, like a bunch of other is playable after you finish the campaign. In fact, you've got your board marked up. Maybe one of the cities has been named after whoever won the game and you've got stickers making this city more valuable than if it didn't have stickers. You've got a unique game board that you've built up over 12 sessions and then you can go back with nostalgia and interest and replay just a regular game of Ticket to Ride on your own homebrew board. So that's part of what's happening with legacy games. Yes, you're initially playing for a limited campaign that I find when done well is totally worth it and yet you can go back and continue to play that game forever as risk or Ticket to Ride, or what have you. From game number 8, we amp it up from a weight of 2.56, we amp it up a little bit more to 2.73. This is the other legacy game that I've loved so much that I want to highlight for you here. Game number 9 was released in 2019 initially by Dire Wolf Games.

It costs about a $100 online today and it's Clank Legacy acquisitions incorporated. If you just remember the Clank Legacy part, you've got it. This game plays two to four players. It's best with four. By the way, I hope I mentioned this for Ticket to Ride Legacy, but that plays with 2-5 players. I would probably say four is best for both of these games. But back to Clank Legacy, you already understand legacy games. I don't need to re explain that. But Clank Legacy, of course, initially came out years before as Clank in the same way that Ticket to Ride then later became Ticket to Ride legacy. Clank is just a wonderful Deck-Builder of a game. If you've ever played a game like Dominion, there are a whole bunch of Deck-Builders today.

These are games where essentially you start with a small deck of cards that you play from and part of what those cards do for you is they buy you additional cards, cards that are sitting out in the middle that anybody could purchase, you're buying those cards with your cards and when you buy those cards, you put them in your discard pile and then once you run out of your deck, you shuffle it all up and you're building a unique deck to go through, in this case, the game of Clank, which, by the way, is all about enabling you to descend into a dungeon and pull out treasures and, of course, victory points.

Before, there's a press your luck aspect. There's a timer in this game before the big bad dragon wakes up, gets mad, that everybody's taking its treasures and fries everybody still hanging around. So there's a timer element where you are racing down to acquire treasures in a dungeon and then racing back out before it all blows up. That's what happens in the Deck-Builder game of Clank. Now, of course, part of what your cards are doing is they're letting you move around that dungeon, move fast or do different things as you move, but you're also buying more cards with that deck of cards.

So again, that's the Deck-Builder aspect and Clank Legacy introduces an entire story framework and a very rich set of additional mechanics that keep popping up from one game to the next. I think this game also has 12 campaign games baked into the Clank Legacy box. So it's similarly about a dozen games you'll be playing with friends. Again, probably the same friend group, people who enjoy a Deck-Builder. I'm somebody who enjoys a Deck-Builder. I've been highlighting games like Dune Imperium in recent years, Lost ruins of ARNAC.

These are all wonderful strategy games that are employing deck-building mechanics to create delight and strategic interest for people like me. Clank Legacy is one such game. Again, you can play your own copy when you finish this game. Before I move on to game number 10, I should mention a couple of things about Clank Legacy. First is that if you've never played Clank at all, I wouldn't suggest you get Clank Legacy. I would totally suggest you just buy Clank, which is out there in stores. That's the game that's going to help you understand whether you're going to like or love this or not want to spend time or money on Clank Legacy.

So best practice here, definitely play Clank first and if you do, you should probably buy the Clank Catacombs version, which came out just a couple of years ago. I've talked about it before on My Games, Games, Games podcast, but that adds an element of unpredictability to the map that you're building out as you play each session of the game. Each time you play the game, the dungeon will change because you're building it as you go. It is a delightful version of Clank. So there's Clank the original, Clank Catacombs which I totally recommend and then, of course, Clank Legacy, which is game number 9 of this podcast. Yet, there's a second game coming out. As I mentioned, Clank Legacy, what I've been talking about the last few minutes, is a 2019 release. I just got notice that Clank Legacy 2, which I pre ordered, I think it was kick started, is shipping to people who backed it a few years ago just this week. So if you find yourself loving Clank and then Clank Legacy, you should know there's even a legacy 2 version coming out for mega fans.

Let's move on to game number 10. This one is about the same weight as Clank Legacy. This one, it's a 2.79. This is also a 2024 release. It's also from Stonemaier Games, who publishes Stamp Swap that I mentioned earlier. Wyrmspan. Wyrmspan spelled with a W-Y-R-M. Wyrmspan costs $65, if you want to try to buy it this month online and it's like Wingspan but with dragons, it plays one to four players. Many people, many longtime Rule Breaker investing listeners will know that I've been chatting up the game Wingspan for years now. In fact, I first talked about it five years ago, I think I've had Elizabeth Hargrave, its designer on this podcast. In fact, it was just last year, November 1, 2023, if anybody wants to my conversation with Elizabeth in her design of Wingspan, which is a phenomenal strategy game, a mega seller that features 170 birds illustrated on cards. Ultimately, those cards all have special abilities. It's a card driven engine building board game. You're bird enthusiast seeking to discover and attract the best birds to your aviary, and you need to gain food tokens. You lay colorful eggs. Again, hundreds of unique bird cards. Wingspan itself has been expanded a number of times. I've got all the expansions. I recommend each of them.

Wyrmspan is a stand-alone game. As I already captured it earlier, it's as simple as this, it's wingspan, but with dragons. Now, there are a few additional mechanisms that add some complexity to the original Wingspan formula and also streamline the game. Therefore, I would say add interest, probably improve that was the goal, on the original classic design. The original classic design is a generationally great beloved game that technically didn't need probably to be improved by Wyrmspan but I think Jamey Stegmaier at Stonemaier Games and I would add myself, as well, I would say, both of us would think some people, while they like birds, some people really like their dragons. So refaming it with dragons, adding in some more mechanisms and a little bit more complexity, and some streamlining is what Wyrmspan is all about.

I totally recommend this game. It is a weightier game. If you're still listening to me at this point on this week's podcast, I know that you're into at least medium weight games and yet, we're about to amp it up into three heavyweights to close. Game number 11 has a weight of 3.33. So we're now above medium weight to medium too heavy. This game first came out in 2016.

The game is Terraforming Mars. This is one of my very favorite games. I've played this dozens and dozens of times. It takes about an hour to learn. It takes about three hours plus sometimes to play and yet, I find myself loving it all the way through. Now, I'm not here to promote Terraforming Mars itself. What I'm here to do, especially for Terraforming Mars fans who may not know this is to highlight the release of a really meaningful expansion to the game that came out just recently, just a few months ago. Before I go there, let's just table set on what this game is about. You're a corporation. Each of you 1-5 players, each of you is a corporation. The game is set in the 2400s. About 400 years from now, we're on Mars at this point, and we're trying to make it habitable. We're Terraforming Mars. We need to add some oxygen into its atmosphere. We need to try to get some water down, return water to Mars, and we're also going to need to lift the temperature up. We're going to need to make it warmer. These things are all true in real life.

One day, humanity, may well Elon Musk, may well Terraform Mars. This game imagines what might be happening 400 years from now. Each of you is a for-profit corporation competing against each other. You're all cooperatively Terraforming Mars, but you're being scored against each other in a very competitive game to see who adds the most value. If I were to look down the mechanics that are just baked into this game, I'm going to have fun and read these alphabetically. There are 16 game mechanics happening in Terraforming Mars. They're listed this way on BoardGameGeek. I won't explain these. I'll just run through them real fast,16 different mechanics baked into Terraforming Mars, Closed Drafting, Contracts, End Game Bonuses, Hand Management, Hexagon Grid, Income, Set Collection, Solo/Solitaire Game, Tags, Take That, Tech Trees/Tech Tracks, Tile Placement, Turn Order Progressive, Variable Player Powers, Variable Setup, Victory Points as a Resource.

Those are the 16 different mechanisms all packed into one box of Terraforming Mars. Yes, we are now in the medium to heavy range of games, and I really love Terraforming Mars. I played it a lot over the years, and yet, I've never taken more interest in it than I have probably the last couple of months because of the set of expansions that came out in 2024 briefly. There's one that adds more prelude cards, which are cards you play with in setup to set up the game. You set up yourself with a unique starting position and so it enriched the diversity of those cards. The second thing, especially for solo players, I don't really solo this game. I much prefer playing with players, but a pretty brilliant system called an autumn system where you're playing against the game, you're playing against a little set of cards and a system of rules. For people who love to solo games, there's a brilliant solitaire version that came out in this year's expansions.

But the one I really want to highlight, and I'll explain it briefly here is the milestones and awards expansion to Terraforming Mars. In brief, I've already spoken about it years ago on this podcast. It's a board game. You have a big board in front of you, and it's one side of Mars. As you develop it and your corporation expands, you're dropping down greenery. You're building some cities on Mars. The map effloresces with water and green and cities and items of interest and yet hardwired to that map that you're playing on is a set of goals. Near term goals, first one to do this, first one to build three cities. First one to add a few oceans. Near term milestones are hard wired.

The same five are always there on that game board and similarly, there are five end game awards that players fund, like a venture capitalist funding an award, basically setting all the players in that game to be playing toward a specific end game goal. Again, it's always the same five. You have hardwired on the gameboard, the same five milestones and the same five awards every single time you play until now, because the milestones and awards expansion gives you 35 milestones and 35 awards.

Before you play each game on the game map, you randomize five different ones to play with, both milestones and awards. You have 10 different goals that change from one play session to the next. The combinatorial possibilities, the number of ways this game could be played has now become infinite. If you draw at random 10 possibilities from 70 choices, that is a gigantic number of possibilities. Anytime you play a game with milestones and awards, randomized, you're probably the only play session, the only group that will ever play that particular version if you've drawn it at random. I will just say milestones and awards is a great reason to return to Terraforming Mars, if you'd played it years ago and hadn't come back.

If I'm describing everything for you for the first time, I would say, just buy the base game, like Clank, experience the base game, but realize there is this new opportunity. The chase for victory points is no longer hardwired to the map you're playing on, milestones and awards is brilliant. Game number 11 is Terraforming Mars with its new expansions. I realize I neglected to mention the prices for these. Each of those three expansions is priced separately. Let's do that real quick. That group of prelude two cards, I see is $25 on Amazon.

The Automa the one that lets you play a very intelligent solo game is $35 on Amazon. The milestones and awards, the best of all, is the cheapest of all $14.99, as I see it right there on Amazon. You might need to search on Amazon for stronghold games to find these. It's very much there, but when I did my initial click in, I couldn't find it. If you're really looking for it, you'll definitely find it. I hope you'll find those same prices and have a heck of a lot of fun with Terraforming Mars in all of its many varieties. Let's move on to our final two games, the heaviest of all Game number 12 is Arcs, A-R-C-S. Its weight is 3.39. I realize I didn't really capture the weights so much for Terraforming Mars, but you should know it's basically the same, 3.33. These games are both heavy to medium. Arcs is from Leder Games and I need to mention right up front, it is a 2024 release. I've enjoyed playing it several times this year. I highly recommend it. It costs $60, but it's not on Amazon. This is more of a boutique game from a boutique publisher. It's Leder Games, and leader is spelled L-E-D-E-R, no A in leader. If you go to ledergames.com, if you'd like to buy Arcs, you need to go there. You're not going to find it on Amazon.

Arcs plays 2-4 players, and it's a Sci-Fi game. It's set in outer space. One of my favorite living game designers, a designer of more complex games, Cole Worley. Some of you may have played Root, which is his smash hit. This is his follow up years later to Root in some ways. This is a game that blends brilliantly a few different mechanisms. I'm not going to explain them all or list them alphabetically as I did for Terraforming Mars, but I'll just say that you're playing cards from your hand as you look over a map of space that you're trying to take over, it's an area control you're looking at your hand, and you're playing cards much like a trick taking game.

If you play a two in that suit, I would need to stick with that suit and beat your two maybe with a four in order to win the trick. It's a form of trick taking, but the cards themselves also have the actions on them that you can take on the board, things like expand or attack or improve your economy. The actual action you'll be taking on that game turn keys to the card that you're playing in a trick taking format. As you might imagine, the lower a card is, the more likely it is to lose the trick because it's a two, not a seven. But it's also more powerful action.

The lower cards have more powerful actions. What you have here is you have card play over an outer space area control map and with a lot of additional interest that I can't explain here. But you can imagine a medium to heavy game has a lot going on. I do want to mention the cards that you're playing during that trick taking round are also going to determine a third thing, not just who wins the trick or what action you can take. You can also use them to choose how we'll score this round of the game. The cards you play are also determining what will be scored at the end of that round. We call that an ambition within the game.

What are the ambitions? I would just say hint hit, timing is everything when it comes to deciding how you'll be scoring that round and which card to play. There are 100 wooden ships, and agents. Agents are little meeples that can go out there and acquire cards for you, abilities for you over the course of the game. This game is incredibly replayable. It has a deep and rich expansion, which I'm not going to speak to here. But if you get into Arcs, please know that you have quite something waiting for you in the form of its mega expansion, which adds a whole near legacy aspect to the game. But I'm just here speaking about Arcs, the Plain Jane $60 game that if you find yourself interested, you can buy from ledergames.com on their website. This game plays 2-4 players. Now, thanks for hanging around with me all the way through. You must be a gamer. Let's talk about the weightiest game for Games, Games, Games Volume 6. If you're still around, you might enjoy Civolution. Civolution blending a civilization game with evolution, the name Civolution.

This game comes from one of my favorite game designers, Stefan Feld, the designer of great games like Castles of Burgundy, many others, especially people who enjoy European games, European worker placement games, European dice games. Stefan Feld is a genius, one of our great living designers, those types of games. Civolution is the game that has just hit the market, 2024 from deep Print Games. I have to admit I did not find this game on Amazon. It certainly will get there, but as this is a new release, it's not as available. But if you're still listening to me, and if you're still that interested in this a deep game, then go over to Miniature Market, which is one of the game sites I use to buy games when I can't find something at a price I like on Amazon, and you will find Civolution being sold at miniaturemrket.com. The weight of this game is 4.22, which means Civolution is a medium heavy to heavy Euro style game that uses a dice selection mechanism that's going to trigger actions on your board in front of you and your board in front of you is basically like a tech tree.

This game is a sandbox. This game has infinite possibilities. It'll play out very differently from one game to the next, based on how you develop your tech tree, based on the actions that you're with the dice that you're rolling, and then the map that you're trying to take over, since this is a 4X expand exploit triggering actions on again, a tech tree like structure. The dice that you roll are going to determine in some ways, what you start to specialize in, how your civilization works differently from mine.

You're going to put unique cards into play from one game to the next, they'll be different. There are tons of strategies and paths to victory. Each time you play, you're going to only explore a fraction of the possibilities that this remarkable game system and its many cards will provide. That is in a nutshell, Civolution. I want to warn you, it's going to take about an hour to two hours to learn and/or teach others this game. This is only for people who really want to learn this game and once you get playing, and I found this very engrossing, but you should also know our play sessions lasted up to five hours as we played this remarkable heavy game Civolution from Deep Print Games and designer Stefan Feld. Again, $88, I count at Miniature Market for those who are interested. There we have it. That is my heaviest game to talk about with you this year, one that you should only put under the tree of somebody who really loves games.

They probably have a number of Stefan Feld games, etc. They have no problem with worker placement, dice manipulation, all drafting and other aspects that go into this game, seeing cards you've never seen before, from one game to the next, it is a very rich system, and it is very demanding, both in terms of time and interest. There you have it from, light, lightest to heaviest.

I'll quickly summarize just the names of the games. Number 1, was That's not a Hat. Number 2, Medium. Number 3, Scout. Number 4, Harmonies. Number 5, Stamp Swap. Number 6, Lord of the Rings Duel for Middle Earth. Number 7, Sky Team. Number 8, Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West. Number 9, Clank Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated. Number 10, Wyrmspan Dragons. Number 11, the Terraforming Mars expansions. Number 12, Arcs and Number 13, Civolution.

Let me say one thing in closing. I love games and many a time on this podcast, I've talked about losing to win. It's one of my big themes in life. It's really important. I love games and yet, even though I own hundreds of them, people think probably that I'm really good at them, but I'm not a particularly good gamer. I regularly get beaten by people of all ages. I'll teach a new game to somebody. I've played it for years, and they'll beat me in the first game that we play together. Winning and losing is not such a big thing to me and I also love cooperative games. I've mentioned many of those over the years, including, for example, Sky Team. You and your friends or family playing a cooperative game.

Other games, cooperative pandemic. Speaking of pandemic, we just lived through one, but that's also a wonderful game system that's cooperative. There are so many cooperative games these days. They didn't even exist in my childhood. Cooperative games, wonderful legacy games. We've talked about all of those even in just this episode. But the three games that I love most, which in their own ways involve a lot of losing, too. But I'm trying to get better at them every day. I hope you are, too. Through this podcast and through the Motley Fool, the games of investing, business, and life. I've always thought of investing as an amazing game, and I love keeping score, and we've done that together with all the five stock samplers picked over the course of years now, all the stocks that I picked for The Motley Fool for three decades, investing. What a beautiful game and business, game number 2. I'm so pleased and delighted.

I would say blessed to be an entrepreneur, somebody who's created a business. I love investing in other people's businesses, as well, and that's what we do as investors. But the game of business will always be infinitely interesting to me, maybe you, too. But darn it, life. Life, when thought of is a game, where you can keep score and the big secret is, it's a co-op. It's not a dog eat dog, competitive game, unless you want to play it that way. Really, what happens in business every day, buyers shake hands with sellers and transact with each other. We're all helping each other in a cooperative game of life.

Now, if you've ever played the Game of Life, which by the way, was put out by Milton Bradley in 1960, some of you may know this, it's not such a good game. If you know, it's got the little cards, the pink and blue pawns and a big spinning wheel. That's not a good game. But the game of life, the one I love talking about in this podcast, is. Those are the three games I love most, and I hope I'm helping you get better at each of them. Well, I guess it's not too early to say it, is it? Happy holidays. Fool on and game on.

John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. David Gardner has positions in Amazon and Walmart. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon and Walmart. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.