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Our own fair isle is the home of much history and culture that can be used as a board game theme. I have assembled a merry band of bloggers who are keen to share with you their picks that they think represent the United Kingdom best. We have only highlighted 5 here and we would love to hear from you which are your favourites.
The Adventures Of Robin Hood – Tom Harrod
Are you a fan of tales of folk and lore? Robin Hood is right up there among the most well-known of English protagonists. It makes sense then, that we include The Adventures of Robin Hood in our round-up of board games based in England!
The Adventures of Robin Hood is a co-operative game for 2-4 players, by Kosmos Games. It comes from designer/artist Michael Menzel, who also brought us Legends of Andor. You’ll play as one of four characters: Robin himself, Little John, Maid Marion, or Will Scarlet. The action takes place on a giant board, spanning the breadth of Sherwood Forest to the outskirts of Nottingham and inside the castle, itself. This is almost like a ‘living’ board, because its actual state can change. You discover secrets that lie under every rock, so to speak. (In some cases, I mean that in the literal sense, as I’ll explain later on!)
This is a narrative series of adventures with multiple paths for you to explore. Each scenario tasks you with a mission to tackle, such as helping Little John escape the hangman’s noose. How do you want to attempt this? When your character’s disc gets drawn from the bag, you decide what to do on your turn. You travel around the environment using a meeple-to-meeple movement system. You can move anywhere you like – albeit, obeying real-life obstacles. You can’t pass through, say, a castle wall! How will you get around it? That’s the challenge!
Whatever space you end on, you check its number and a companion book narrates what happens in that space. Many of the spaces have flaps/doors that you can open, revealing something different underneath them. This creates an interactive map of sorts, which reacts to the consequences of your actions!
I don’t want to give too much more away here, since, y’know, spoilers! But rest assured, there’s a lot of game to discover, plus an expansion pack: Friar Tuck In Danger.
Clans Of Caledonia – Victor Rios Faria
Caledonia was the Latin name used by the Roman Empire for the region north of the River Forth in what nowadays is Scotland. It has subsequently been physically separated from the rest of the Great Britain by the Antonine Wall during the occupation of Scotland until the 4 th century AD. Fast forward about 1.500 years, Clans of Caledonia takes place during the 19th century, during a period of transition from agricultural economy into an industrialised one in Scotland.
Clans of Caledonia is a strategic economic game for 1-4 players where you lead a traditional Scottish clan into their glory by producing and trading goods. In order to collect the most glory and be declared the winner, players will spread their clan workers around the map to exploit forests and mines, raise crops, breed sheep and cows and convert their outputs into industrialized products. They will also hire merchants and improve their shipping fleet to engage in better trading opportunities and increase their reach within the territory. All this productive process is a means to the final goals of completing exporting contracts and competing for round scoring goals that will give clans glory.
Each of the 9 clans present in the game comes with a historical background, representing traditional Scottish families, and their special abilities reflect what they were known for at the time. It enriches the theme with a good piece of history, and only sums up to the exchange market and exportation contracts that are at the core of the game.
Clans of Caledonia is a magnificent masterpiece that outstands for its simplicity yet enormous amount of strategy and player interaction. It has just enough asymmetry to make strategies vary from clan to clan without overcomplicating the learning and the variable set-up also contributes to its replay value. The game is one of my top-10 all-time favourites that will never leave my collection.
Village Rails - Favouritefoe
I love Village Green which is a game about competing to be the best village in show. It represents the outwardly pleasant but inwardly cut-throat world of countryside competitions. It’s The Archers meets Gladiator haha. So when I heard Village Rails was being published, I got very excited!
Village Rails is again set in the bucolic English countryside. But instead of vying for the best in show, we are competing to plan and build the most well connected 12 card railway system steaming over hill and dale. It is a game replete with route building, card drafting, and resource management.
On your turn, you lay track cards in the hope of connecting places shown on the top and left hand border of your player space. You draft these cards from those available and each card along the line costs progressively more than the previous one. The money you spend on your card gets added to the cards you pass over in favour of the one you took. Once a track completes you will score it based on the terrain type and the features that show along it.
Terminus cards will also reward you with money for finishing a line. If you have pushed your luck and purchased any Trip cards for that line along the way, these will give you bonus points depending on whether you have satisfied the criteria. Once everybody has completed their 12 card grids, the player with the most points wins!
Village Rails is a small box game that is easy to learn but tricky to master. With such a small network to build, each choice is loaded with tracky trade-offs. We love route building games and the artwork in this game is sweet and evocative of Yorkshire portrayed in the original Postman Pat series. Plus with each session lasting around 30 mins at two players, there’s always time to catch a train rolling along the Village Rails!
Snowdonia - Panto Pete
Snowdonia, by Tony Boydell, is an excellent choice for a UK feature theme because not only is it one of the few games firmly fixed on Wales but it has heaps of variations covering other parts of Britain (and further afield!).
The actual railway was constructed in 1896 and was based on a cleverly engineered design that saw a rack and pinion system overcome the challenges set by the steepness of Yr Wyddfa, the highest mountain in Wales. Tony’s cleverly engineered design was produced in 2012 and gives you a set of interlocking worker placement decisions to make to overcome your own challenges. Furthermore, Snowdonia has been designed to be extremely flexible providing the basis for many alternative Scenarios.
The basic board shows a plain horseshoe of track on a beautifully painted backdrop of Snowdonia showing the seven worker placement zones, the weather and bonus contractor cards, Stock yard and Excavation and Track-Laying rates plus the Pub where the workers wait between jobs drinking their Gwrw! The cleverness lies in that the numbered stations and track sections are added by cards played on top and different decks give different locations. Similarily there are dozens of Engines, which give various buffs, to vary the basic Snowdon stable.
The flavour, then, is turned up to max, as is the game itself with interlocking mechanics that mesh together perfectly. For example, the order in which players place their workers will not necessarily be the order in which their actions are resolved. Also you can play your workers in teams so one can clear a site and another build on it.
The Snowdonia: Deluxe Master Set provides a huge range of material over 350 playing pieces, 100 trains, 36 Scenarios and Mini-Expansions and a Solo Mode.
So why not scale the peak?
Brass Birmingham - Sophie Jones
Brass Birmingham is a heavyweight, strategy game which tells the story of the industrial revolution. This might not be the hottest topic in English history, but it was a game-changer as it brought the UK into the modern era. Much like history, this boardgame was a game-changer too, as it climbed its way to the number 1 spot on BGG, toppling Gloomhaven.
Over the course of the game, players become an historic figure from the industrial revolution, and use cards to build canals or railways. These routes will help build and sell goods to the market. In turn, these business decisions will fill player coffers with coins. At the end of the game, the person with the most victory points wins. The game is played over two stages: the canal and the railway era. These eras break up gameplay and give you a chance to shift your strategy.
What makes Brass a challenge is trying to make money without giving too much coin to your rivals. This game will have you at the table for hours as you traverse a network of trade and resource management.
I love Brass Birmingham for its beautifully crafted components and player interaction. Each move you make is bound to give money to another player but in turn aid you as well. There are layers of strategic depth to unravel. This game is a piece of English history; it showcases the advancement of trade and its impact on the country’s geography. The rulebook biographs the historic figures you play as and their societal impact. Considering smog and machinery don’t paint the brightest picture, Brass Birmingham is a nail-bitingly enjoyable game. If you want to explore the UK’s rich and industrial past, look no further than this behemoth of a strategy game.