Economic games – For Sale: learning about Math, Money & Markets (3Ms)

Economic games are about generating income in some way and trying to be the player with the best finances at the end of the game. Economic games usually include some form of market system, which could be straight-up stock trading but could also include trading between players or buying and selling from a central market. Economic games encourage players to manage a system of production, distribution, trade, and/or consumption of goods. The games usually simulate a market in some way.

For Sale is a quick, fun game about buying and selling real estate. During the game's two distinct phases, players first bid for several buildings then, after all buildings have been bought, sell the buildings for the greatest profit possible.

In each round of this first phase, one card per player will be revealed and placed in the center of the table. Players will then have an auction to determine which card will be collected by each player. Players start by placing a bid in coins on the table where others may either raise or pass. Players take properties with lower values depending on how they bid and the winner will take the highest valued property. When all properties have been sold the phase ends. In the second phase, players will try to sell their gained property for money. Like the previous round, one card per player is placed in the center of the table. In this case, instead of using coins, each player now selects one of their property cards and places it facedown in front of them. When all have chosen, they are simultaneously revealed and the highest numbered property card takes the highest valued money card and this continues in order until the lowest property card takes the lowest valued card. Continue this until all the properties have been sold. The player with the highest total wins the game.

For Sale is quick, but yet always filled with tense decision and an occasional brutal resolution in the second phase. In the first phase, you try to get the best cards you can while trying to save your money. With the “must raise” auction, it feels like there is a bit more luck in the bidding phase – sometimes it works out based on where you sit in turn order. In the second half, the game is as much about what cards you have as it is about reading your opponents. Trying to foresee what cards people will play can help you maybe sneak a high money card for a measly small property. It’s like poker in the sense that there’s playing the value of your cards and the player across from you. Great economic and tactical game!

#strategygame #strategicplanning #learnbydoing #economicgame #ExperientialLearning @JJFSThinkLab

Economic games – Century Spice Road learning about Math, Money & Markets (3Ms)

Economic games are about generating income in some way and trying to be the player with the best finances at the end of the game. Economic games usually include some form of market system, which could be straight-up stock trading but could also include trading between players or buying and selling from a central market. Economic games encourage players to manage a system of production, distribution, trade, and/or consumption of goods. The games usually simulate a market in some way.

In Century: Spice Road, players are caravan leaders who travel the famed silk road to deliver spices to the far reaches of the continent for fame and glory. Players are competing to earn victory points by trading in spices (represented by cubes) for Point Cards. The game will end in the round when a player has taken their fifth Point Card, and at that point the player with the highest score will win. The main part of the game is centered around acquiring cubes or converting them using the Merchant Cards.

Century: Spice Road is tense, addictive, and incredibly fun. This is a phenomenal family-weight strategy game which is easy to learn and teach. The theme is not really strong but the gameplay offers interesting decisions from the first turn. You need to build a hand of cards to efficiently acquire, upgrade, and convert spices cubes. So the question becomes which Merchant Cards you need… and at what price. You’ll need cards that work well together, but you also need versatility to adapt as new Point Cards come into the market. Despite that depth and interesting decision space, gameplay is extremely fast-paced around 30-45 minutes. Try it to improve your strategic and tactical planning abilities!

Economic games – Power Grid learning about Math, Money & Markets (3Ms)

Economic games are about generating income in some way and trying to be the player with the best finances at the end of the game. Economic games usually include some form of market system, which could be straight-up stock trading but could also include trading between players or buying and selling from a central market. Economic games encourage players to manage a system of production, distribution, trade, and/or consumption of goods. The games usually simulate a market in some way.

Power Grid is a game with network building and a fluctuating commodities market. The objective of Power Grid is to supply the most cities with power when someone's network gains a predetermined size. In this game, players mark pre-existing routes between cities for connection, and then bid against each other to purchase the power plants that they use to power their cities. However, as plants are purchased, newer, more efficient plants become available, so by merely purchasing, you're potentially allowing others access to superior equipment. Additionally, players must acquire the raw materials (coal, oil, garbage, and uranium) needed to power said plants, making it a constant struggle to upgrade your plants for maximum efficiency while still retaining enough wealth to quickly expand your network to get the cheapest routes.

This is like a mathematical min-max simulation and by all accounts should be extremely boring! Somehow, the interactivity at the market phase with the strategic planning at the route planning stage makes this a very fun and enjoyable game even for those who dislike math! Try it and see it for yourself, Power Grid is another one of the evergreen modern classic games that is well loved by many!

Economic games – learning about math, money & markets (3Ms)

These games are about generating income in some way and trying to be the player with the best finances at the end of the game. Economic games usually include some form of market system, which could be straight-up stock trading but could also include trading between players or buying and selling from a central market. Economic games encourage players to manage a system of production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods. The games usually simulate a market in some way.

In Catan (formerly The Settlers of Catan), players try to be the dominant force on the island of Catan by building settlements, cities, and roads. On each turn dice are rolled to determine what resources the island produces. Players build by spending resources (sheep, wheat, wood, brick and ore). The island is made up of randomly placed hexagonal tiles which makes every game different unlike a printed map. A turn consists of playing a development card, rolling the dice, collecting resource cards based on the roll and position of houses, turning in resource cards. If a 7 is rolled, the active player moves the robber to a new tile and steals resource cards from other players who have built structures adjacent to that tile. Points are accumulated by building settlements and cities, having the longest road and the largest army (from development cards), and gathering certain development cards that simply award victory points. When a player has gathered 10 points, he announces his total and claims the win.

Catan has won multiple awards and is one of the most popular games in recent history due to its amazing ability to appeal to experienced gamers as well as those new to the hobby. It is considered a modern classic and has singlehandedly brought many people into the board game industry. So if you want to teach your child or staff how to strategize resource management and have fun learning abstract concepts, Catan is a great choice!

Are you able to rule the island of Catan?

TGIF - learning about climate change with Minecraft

It’s Friday again, so let’s look at what’s interesting around the world. From C/net, we see that Australia is teaching children about climate change, like forest fires and erosion ,through the use of Minecraft. The Australian Department of Education has given schools free access to Minecraft to create curriculum to teach these topics to great effect. The programs also allowed the kids to create and build solutions to geographical issues like erosion, pollution, urban planning and more. An Australian insurance company also launched a Minecraft mod game called Climate Warriors, a free interactive game designed to teach children as young as 7 how to protect themselves and their homes from bushfires.

We at ThinkLab laud these great efforts to gamify learning but we ask why should children have all the fun? We can also use Minecraft to learn new ideas and concepts for adults and be more open to using games and gamified techniques which have already proven to be not only engaging to all age groups but also helps learners in internalising the concepts and learning from them.

https://www.cnet.com/news/features/how-minecraft-is-teaching-kids-to-face-the-threat-of-climate-change

Days of Wonder game of city building and strategy – Quadropolis

Each player builds their own metropolis in Quadropolis but they're competing with one another for the shops, parks, public services and other structures to be placed in them.

In each round, players first lay out tiles for the appropriate round at random on a 5x5 grid. Each player has four architects and on a turn, a player places an architect next to a row or column in the grid, claims the tile that's as far in as the number of the architect placed, places that tile in the appropriately numbered row or column on the player's 4x4 city board, then claims any resources associated with the tile.  After four rounds, the game ends. Players can move the inhabitants and energy among their tiles at any point during the game to see how to maximize their score. At game end, they then score for each of the six types of buildings depending on how well they build their city.

Quadropolis is easy to learn, yet it offers interesting choices, and a good strategy is necessary to win. The innovative mechanics combine with a fun theme to create a high-quality, family-friendly game. There are numerous paths to victory, and different players do well with a variety of city designs. The building types seem well-balanced, with players win with an emphasis on public service buildings to an interlacing of parks and tower blocks. So if you want to hone your strategic planning skills or improve your inner architect abilities, this is the game for you!

Build your own city with Quadropolis!

Days of Wonder game of action & history – Memoir ‘44

Memoir '44 is a historical board game where players face-off in stylized battles of some of the most famous historic battles of World War II including Omaha Beach, Pegasus Bridge, Operation Cobra and the Ardennes.  Each scenario mimics the historical terrain, troop placements and objectives of each army. Commanders deploy troops through Command and Tactic cards, applying the unique skills of his units -- infantry, paratrooper, tank, artillery, and even resistance fighters -- to their greatest strength.

This is not your typical war game with hundreds of pieces and multitudes of tactical and operational decisions to make that take hours to play. By design, Memoir ‘44 was created to be played by non-gamers and can be completed within 30 minutes. The game mechanics are simple but still require strategic card play, timely dice rolling and an aggressive yet flexible battle plan to achieve victory. In addition to the large, double-sided game board, Memoir '44 includes 144 amazingly detailed army miniatures - including historically accurate infantry, tanks and artillery. Memoir '44 is designed for 2 players but easily accommodates team play.

What we like about the game is it is more of a historical game than a war game using a scenario heavy approach in the game. You can create your own scenarios to play of course. And with the Command cards you use for actions, it is unlike Risk or the more complex Axis and Allies where it’s all about your combat units and the luck of the dice. So enjoy this miniatures (so nice to look at the game pieces on the map!) game with plenty of strategic decisions where you can learn a thing or two about an important time during mankind’s past.

Days of Wonder game of fantasy & land grab – Small World

In Small World, players vie for conquest and control of a world that is simply too small to accommodate them all. Small World is inhabited by a zany cast of characters such as dwarves, wizards, amazons, giants, orcs, and even humans, who use their troops to occupy territory and conquer adjacent lands in order to push the other races off the face of the earth. Picking the right combination from the 14 different fantasy races and 20 unique special powers, players rush to expand their empires - often at the expense of weaker neighbors. Yet they must also know when to push their own over-extended civilization into decline and ride a new one to victory! At the end of your turn, you score one point (coin) for each territory your races occupy. You may have one active race and one race in decline on the board at the same time. Your occupation total can vary depending on the special abilities of your race and the territories they occupy. After the final round, the player with the most coins wins.

It may sound like the game Risk to some, but this is a much more strategic game with no luck whatsoever as combat is handled not with dice, but with the number of units you deploy plus the unique combination of characters used and their special powers. This leads to a lot of strategic decisions of how to best employ your resources to gain land and also the delicious tactical push and pull of when to expand or go into decline to get the most money! So if you want to train your mind to think more effectively like maximising your resources and talent capabilities, this is the game for you!

Small World from Days of Wonder

Days of Wonder game of planning & trains - Ticket to Ride

Days of Wonder publishes top-quality, family-oriented board games that are easy to learn and fun to play. Their name is derived from the "sense of wonder" experienced where as children you first fell in love with playing games. In 2004, Days of Wonder became the youngest publisher ever to win Germany's prestigious Spiel des Jahres, the world's most coveted game prize, with the launch of its best-selling Ticket to Ride board game series.

With elegantly simple gameplay, Ticket to Ride (TTR) can be learned in under 15 minutes. Players collect cards of various types of train cars they then use to claim railway routes in North America. The longer the routes, the more points they earn. Additional points come to those who fulfill Destination Tickets – goal cards that connect distant cities; and to the player who builds the longest continuous route. The tension comes from being forced to balance adding more cards to your hand and fear of losing a critical route to a competitor. Since its introduction and numerous subsequent awards, Ticket to Ride has become the epitome of a "gateway game" – simple enough to be taught in a few minutes, and with enough action and tension to keep new players involved and in the game for the duration. There are now more than twenty over new games and expansions in the TTR series!

TGIF - Scratch the Wordle itch without going online

So Wordle has taken the world by storm and you have probably played it. It’s a fun game word guessing game which is the beautiful baby borne out from the 70’s game Mastermind and the old logic word game Jotto.

Daddy Jotto and Mummy Mastermind gives you a beautiful bouncy Wordle!

If you are worried about Wordle being bought by the New York Times and want to play something similar, there already are many articles that share similar online word guessing games. Here’s one good article and here’s another.

If you rather play something more analog or prefer a tactile feel to your games, here’s our recommendations for a Wordle replacement. These games are arranged from simple to a more strategic word game:

Bananagrams

Banangrams is a simple word tiling game where everyone simultaneously races to arrange their own intersecting word grid. The first to use the most letters in the shortest time wins. But with word tiles, you can create your own word game, and you are not limited to 5 letter words!

Codenames

This is one of the most popular card games out now but it is not a word guessing game but rather a word association game. Codenames is a team-based game where a 5 x 5 grid of randomly selected words will be placed for team members to choose. The first team to choose all the right words win. Doesn’t sound too complicated except that the member giving out clues can give clues of several words if they are closely related so as to find all the words quicker (e.g. people 3 - referring to 3 word clues relating to people). One of the words on the grid is an “Assassin” and if chosen, that team will immediately lose. It's intelligent without being smug, just complicated enough to allow strategy without being bogged down and best of all guaranteed to bring out the laughs.

Paperback

At its core, Paperback follows the classic deck-builder formula; each turn, you draw a hand of five cards from your personal deck and use them to buy better cards from a common deck. Where Paperback deviates from this is that your cards are only worth anything if you can spell out a word with them. Each card has one or two letters on them, while each deck starts with five valueless wild cards that can be used as any letter to facilitate your wordsmanship. Using these, you’ll gradually improve your deck as you fill it with more expensive letters that will then net you more and more money on future turns. The ultimate goal is to earn the most Victory Points. This is a tantalizing premise for anyone that enjoys a good strategic word game.

Paperback is probably the thinkiest game out of the 3 but this clever little card game is so much more than the sum of its parts. Not only is it delightfully illustrated and organised, but it’s also an excellent introduction to deck-building mechanics for newcomers to modern board games. So if you want to scratch that Wordle itch, check out these games that you can play competitively or cooperatively with multiple people.

Bananagrams , Codenames and Paperback … these are the analog Wordle games!

Dr. Reiner Knizia - designer of strategic & fun games (Age of War)

Dr. Knizia is perhaps the most prolific board game designer of all time with 700 published games . He is a German game designer who has a PhD in mathematics.

Age of War

Age of War is a push-your-luck dice game set in feudal Japan. Fourteen cards laid out on the table represents Japanese castles, worth different numbers of points, ripe for the taking. Capturing the most points is the aim of the game, with points being awarded per castle, as well as by completed sets of colours. The castles all have different criteria to match on their cards, comprised of different rows of different dice symbols (archers, cavalry, samurai and swords).

Each turn the player rolls seven dice and, upon seeing the result of a roll, must choose which castle to attack. You may reroll and try to fill the other rows of the castle or till you run out of dice. If you have claimed a castle, you put it in front of you. The castle is now owned by you; however, it is not safe until the full-colour set associated with that card has also been collected by you. Before the final colour is collected, any player can try and take that castle from you by rolling one additional samurai along with the criteria to capture the castle. This is where the player vs player action comes in.

Yes, it is a dice game, but it is also a game about warfare in Feudal Japan and this theme does actually come across when playing. If you want to feel like Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, this is the game for you! The dice rolls are waves of troops you are sending to attack the castle, if you are unsuccessful at gaining ground then you lose troops (dice). If you are successful then you can send another wave. This adds drama to an otherwise regular dice game. The uniqueness of this game is the excitement  with player vs player warfare when someone tries to take back the castles. For a game that has only a few components, it is hugely replayable and loads of fun.

Become Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai by playing Age of War!

Dr. Reiner Knizia - designer of strategic & deep thinking games (Battle Line)

Dr. Knizia is perhaps the most prolific board game designer of all time with 700 published games . He is a German game designer who has a PhD in mathematics.

Battle Line

One of the best games for two people with a short time window. The premise is delightfully simple. Shuffle a deck of six coloured suits containing numbers 1-10 and place a row of nine pawns across the table between you and your opponent. Then take turns laying down a single card from your hand in front of one pawn, and then drawing another, attempting to slowly build up sets of three cards on your side of the line that will beat whatever your opponent builds up on the same pawn on the opposite side. The winning side is determined in poker style: sequential numbers in the same colour is best, then a set of three of the same number in different colours, then any three from the same colour, etc. First to win five pawns, or three adjacent pawns wins. And that’s pretty much it. Except that it isn’t. That absurdly simple set of rules hides a wide ocean of absolute agony as you desperately try to make the best of your hand whilst attempting to hide your intentions from your opponent. Start to put down your strongest set of cards too early and your opponent will know where to put his big guns in response. Wrongly guess the chance of your getting a good set of three cards from likely-looking pairs you’re holding and you’ll be left with a half-played formation that will win precisely nothing. The game strikes a fantastic balance between the subtleties of timing, the demands of strategic planning and the luck of the random draw.  It is utterly compelling for the entire length of its 20 minute play time.

For another dimension of thinkiness there is a second deck of tactics cards. These are cards that allow you to break the rules of the game in fundamental ways. For example, there are wild cards to add to your formations, or a card that allows you to fight over a particular pawn with four rather than three cards. They add more conundrums with endless strategies and plans in front of you.

Don’t be fooled by the war theme, it’s more cerebral than it seems!

Dr. Reiner Knizia - designer of strategic & deep thinking games (Through the Desert)

Dr. Knizia is perhaps the most prolific board game designer of all time with 700 published games . He is a German game designer who has a PhD in mathematics.

Through the Desert

This game is part of Dr. Knizia’s legendary “Tile-laying Trilogy.”  For those who love having a central, shared, interactive space where players contribute to building things up (usually with tiles) in interesting ways, Reiner’s work is arguably the greatest of all time within this genre.  With Through the Desert, players are actually placing out two plastic camels instead of tiles on the board.  You’ll start with a single camel in each colour and from there you’ll expand your camel clusters. A camel must be placed next to a matching one in your collection and not next to one controlled by your opponent. Mechanically this ensures you can always distinguish who owns which camel. Experientially, it means you can block your opponents from where they want to go. So where do you want to go? Well, to the places that get you points! Sprouting from the desert sands like little point oases are the watering holes, each netting you a tile worth points. A more subtle approach involves lassoing a great patch of land by surrounding it in a string of (identical) camels. Players at the edge can use the edge of the board, letting them grab even bigger areas, others can use the mountain.

Let’s take a minute to appreciate how elegant and clever this scoring system is for giving you direction and options. The randomly valued waterhole tiles and the oases create clusters of attractive, high scoring regions. There are almost always spots with two 3-point tiles next to each other, or close by an oasis. So with the lasso mechanic, this actively encourages you to find regions where there are few camels, so you can loop off as much of the board as possible, and feels very different to the points grab behaviour in the high camel density areas. Now you have mechanically different reasons to be in all areas of the board which creates interesting decisions. The depth that arises from these simple rules is also because of the other players. You are racing to the best spots, to carve out your areas of desert and make them the biggest areas. But you can’t defend everywhere at once. You need to constantly evaluate where your opponents can reach, what you most need to defend this round, what you can afford to sacrifice. It’s easy to see but not easy to work out.

Look at how pretty the pastel camels are!

Game designer for strategy & deep thinking - Dr. Reiner Knizia

Dr. Knizia is a full-time game designer who has a PhD in mathematics and has previously worked in the banking industry till he was 40. He left banking and had his first published game in 1990. Today he has published more than 700 games! He is the world's most prolific game designer and has many global licenses to his games such as Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Disney, Star Trek and Star Wars.

The doctor’s work has won so many awards and nominations that it requires a dedicated webpage just to keep track of everything. His work ranges from simple, colorful children’s games to sprawling, thinky strategy games, and everything in-between. But if there’s a common thread that runs through his games, it is creating an easy to understand game, but with a second level of depth. He is particularly notable for his auction and tile-laying trilogies. Let’s look at some of his games that can help us activate our strategic thinking and planning minds.

Modern Art

Players act as museums and take turns auctioning off pieces of art by playing a card from their hand.  If another player buys the card, then the auctioneer receives all the money, yet the auctioneer can decide to buy it for themselves and lose that money to the bank.  And money is the crux of the game, because whoever has the most at the end wins.  The only reason you’ll want to buy art is if you expect to make a profit on it at the end of each of the four rounds.  But a specific artist’s work is only as valuable as the group determines them to be.  The more one artist’s work is auctioned off in a round, the more valuable their paintings become to own. Modern Art is a highly interactive experience of players tossing burning matches into several haystacks of opportunity and then scrambling to douse certain stacks with gasoline while smothering others with water depending on personal incentives.  This clever yet simple premise never fails to entertain, and it’s made all the more fun by the fact that there are four different types of auctions that players participate in throughout the game.

TGIF – Tips, Goodies, Info & Fanfare for casual Fridays

Welcome to another Friday! Let’s talk about productivity today. With the current global pandemic still raging on, most of us are working from home, hybrid or an alternate in-person office arrangement. Needless to say, our work and personal lives have never been so thoroughly disrupted. So can we still use the same metrics to define what productivity is?  Is productivity about how much time we spend in the office, the number of emails you sent or even amount of “work” done?

Here’s a good read below from HBR about why we should change our approach to defining what productivity is today (well-being, collaboration and innovation) and as leaders, how we can get this done in our organisations. Enjoy!

Let's redefine productivity

Abstract strategy game to improve critical thinking - Patchwork

In Patchwork, two players compete to build the most aesthetic and higher scoring patchwork quilt on a personal 9x9 game board. On a turn, a player either purchases a patch or passes. To purchase a patch, you pay the cost in buttons shown on the patch, move the spool to that patch's location in the circle, then advance your time token on the time track a number of spaces equal to the time shown on the patch. You can place the patch anywhere on your board that doesn't overlap other patches, but will probably want to fit things together as tightly as possible to score more points. If your time token is behind the other player's, you take another turn; otherwise the opponent goes.

In addition to a button cost and time cost, when you move your time token past a button on the time track, you earn "button income“ – sum number of buttons depicted on your personal game board, then take this many buttons from the bank. When a player takes an action that moves his time token to the central square of the time track, he takes one final button income from the bank. Once both players are in the center, the game ends and scoring takes place. Each player scores one point per button in his possession, then loses two points for each empty square on his game board. The player with the most points wins.

Besides looking very quaint, Patchwork will give your brain a great workout, a la a sophisticated Tetris. Quite a few considerations of a typical minmax game by minimizing the cost of patches to make the maximum value of your individual quilt with an element of time thrown in. Should I pick something which leads to more money now but will delay my future actions or pick something less valuable now but I get to have more actions later – what should you do?! This gem of a game is designed by none other than the great Uwe Rosenberg who has created the highly revered Agricola and more recently New York Zoo. His games span both highly complex and strategic to lighter fare. So if you want to try your hand in developing a better critical thinker, try Patchwork!  

TGIF – Tips, Goodies, Info & Fanfare for casual Fridays

Welcome to Friday! We like to do something fun this Friday as per our mantra to share oddball things or news that matter to us. So to start off, we would like to share one of our favorite guilty pleasures on tv called Rick and Morty. It is an animated comedy series about an alcoholic but brilliant scientist (Rick) who invented an inter-dimensional portal gun which he uses frequently to bring his grandson (Morty) as his sidekick on crazy sci-fi adventures. Although it may look like The Simpsons or Ren & Stimpy this show is strictly NSFW and if you are WFH, please be careful and don’t let young kids see it! It has won 2 Primetime Emmys and many animated awards, the past 5 seasons has an AVERAGE score of 94% on Rotten Tomato and 9.2 on IMDb! Our personal favourites are Seasons 1 to 3 where the world building and short adventures are a masterclass of creativity and storytelling.

Dan Harmon, one of the co-creators, is well known for producing and creating Community (2009 - 2015), an American sitcom which has received critical acclaim for its acting, direction, and writing, as well as its use of meta-humor and pop culture references, often paying homage to film and television clichés and tropes. Harmon has mentioned that Rick & Morty was an inspired parody of the movie Back to the Future. The most recent seasons of Rick and Morty are getting even more meta with a stronger interconnected story ala the Marvel cinematic universe. So if you enjoy sci-fi and have a deep appreciation of all things meta, give Rick and Morty a shot. The shows are available on numerous streaming platforms but you can watch it for free on the adult swim website https://www.adultswim.com/videos/rick-and-morty which it first premiered.

Rick & Morty with Doc Brown & Marty McFly … any similarities?

Abstract strategy games to improve strategic planning - Quoridor

The abstract strategy game Quoridor is deceptively deep for its simple rules. Quoridor is played on a 9x9 game board where 2 to 4 players move their pawn to the opposite end. The first player to do so wins! It sounds like checkers but unlike checkers, each player has walls which they can place to impede the other player from achieving his goal. Quoridor received the Mensa Mind Game award in 1997 and the Game Of The Year in the USA, France, Canada and Belgium so it has a strong pedigree.

The original game pieces are classic and look gorgeous although we have seem plastic knockoffs with the same game play in many toyshops. It’s really the brain burning planning that really brings out the strategic thinking and careful planning that many people enjoy, particularly how the walls are used defensive or even offensively and can create an interesting looking game board at the end of each session. Definitely one to try if you enjoy games like checkers or chess. Check out the video below on how to play in only one minute!

Abstract Strategy Game - Onitama

Onitama is a two-player, perfect information abstract game with a random starting set-up. On a 5x5 board, both players start with five pawns on their side, with the main pawn in the middle.

Each player has two open cards that each display a possible move for any of her pieces. There is a fifth card that cannot be used by either player. On a player's turn, she chooses one of her cards, moves one of her pieces according to the chosen card, then replaces the card she used with the fifth card. The other player then chooses one of his cards, moves accordingly, and exchanges that card with this fifth card — which is, of course, the card the first player just used. Moving onto one of the opponent's pawns removes that pawn from the game. Taking the opponent's main pawn, or moving your main pawn into your opponent's main pawn's starting space, wins you the game.

The interesting twist to this game is the person who wins, uses the card you last played to beat you! This is a delightful medium weight strategy game that is easy to play yet hard to master. Not only are the game pieces nice to look at, but it also has a strong replayability with different cards and their varied moves - no two game is the same. Try playing this game instead of chess to boost your strategic thinking prowess!

Onitama game components - looks like a classic game!

Abstract Strategy Game - Santorini

Wouldn’t it be nice to travel with restrictions again? And who wouldn’t want to go to the beautiful sun-kissed beaches of southern Greece with amazing sea views dotted with romantic traditional villages of white and blue? If you cannot physically go, you can still immerse yourself in Santorini by playing the game!

Santorini is an accessible strategy game, simple enough for an elementary student while providing in-depth gameplay for hardcore gamers to explore. The rules are simple. Each turn consists of 2 steps of EITHER moving one of your builders into a neighboring space OR constructing a building level adjacent to the builder you moved. When building on top of the third level, place a dome instead, removing that space from play. To win, either of your builders reaches the third level, simple. But not so fast, to give the game some additional crunch, the game also includes variable player powers – where each player has unique powers layered over the game, which can fundamentally change the way the game is played.

If you really look at how gorgeous the pieces of the game is, you might just lose yourself in the beauty of the game. It is a thinky and wonderful game that is suitable for most ages. Try it to improve your cognitive abilities, strategic thinking and planning thought processes!

Can you tell which is the game and which is the actual Santorini game?