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Wow, we are almost at clock-turning-back-time! I don’t know about you, but this always puts me in a right muddle. Even though the time officially changes in the middle of the night, I wake up feeling very wonky. Is it 6am? 7am? Have we gone back to 5am? No, hang on, it’s 8am. Or is it? So much so that I have now implemented my own transition into winter, and I decide when my extra hour appears! My husband is a lie-in lover and so he is quite happy to indulge in the government imposed additional sleep. For me, however, gaining an extra hour feels like a bizarre gift. Too precious to waste unconscious. As such, here are 5 games that can be played in this extra hour as a fond farewell to summertime!
FLORIFEROUS
Taking a final turn around the garden before the blooms are gone until spring feels like a suitable antidote to the fast approaching winter o’clock. And so FLORIFEROUS is a wonderful choice. A beautiful watercolour illustrated set collection game, you will be placing your pawn and either picking up blooms or scoring objectives that will give you VPs based on the very flowers you have gathered. There are also public goals that you can complete for additional bonus points. Each card is gorgeous, and the solo mode is brilliant. I don’t know how it does it but the Pesky Crow somehow knows every card you want and swoops in ahead of you to swipe it away!
SAGRADA
Seeing sunlight stream through stained glass is a really mesmerising thing. SAGRADA is an excellent dice placement game where we are creating our own stunning panes inspired by those in the Sagrada Familiar in Spain. The catch is that dice of the same colour and value cannot be placed orthogonally adjacent to each other. So no buddying up 5s or popping two purples next to each other! Snake-style drafting ensures that every player gets the pick of the crop after being last the previous round, and there are tools to help you mitigate the results you roll. You’ll have to pay to use them (and they are only available if you have the required number of favour tokens left), but they can be a really tactical move and get you out of a jam! Again, there’s a super solo mode, and with different difficulty levels, and it is a familiar favourite in our household!
RAILROAD INK SHINING YELLOW
I have been obsessed with Railroad Ink from the very first time I saw someone play the Blazing Red edition on YouTube. It triggered my board game obsession, and so I have only love for this network connecting game about creating railways and highways! Not content with a few meteors or rivers to mix up the game play, the designers came up with a Challenge Edition
that added in a bunch of scoring objectives, not to mention special buildings that trigger extra bonus moves. They also beefed up the solo mode, and released several different versions include the supper summery Shining Yellow edition! The rules of this banging roll and write are simple – each round, you roll the basic dice and the expansion dice. You must then draw the features on the basic dice (connected to an existing feature on your map or an exit) and can draw the expansion dice. The number of rounds changes depending on whether you are including an expansion, and in the most brilliant way, there are never enough turns to do what you want. In Shining Yellow the expansions are super summery – bright yellow and orange featuring suns, cacti, and canyons!
TARGI
It’s hot. It’s dry. It’s the desert. It’s TARGI! If you are hankering for the warmer weather, this could make or break your wish. A tight, tense, strategic 2 player game from KOSMOS this game has one of the most unique worker placement mechanisms. With just 3 workers, you are using them to take tribe cards (which cost goods) and goods cards (to pay for tribe cards!). Your goal is to complete your 3 x 4 tableau with VP boosting cards which provide in game and end game bonuses. What makes TARGI so magical is that you place your tribe members around the edge of the central board (which is also made up of cards). But then you can only take the centre cards which are located where your own workers intersect. You also get the bonuses/actions on the edge cards.! Oh and there’s also a robber who disrupts placement and steals resources and/or VPs from you at various points in the game. It’s a brilliant set collection, resource management, euro-style game that will always warm the fires within you haha!
MY ISLAND
MY ISLAND by KOSMOS the follow up to the absolutely brilliant MY CITY. It’s another Reiner Knizia legacy, campaign game, but this time we are getting hot and sweaty as we build on our very own tropical island! It’s a legacy, campaign style game, so new content is revealed as the game progresses from chapter to chapter. And your boards change permanently based on the decisions you make during each game. Swapping polyominoes for multi-terrain hex tiles, I can’t tell you too much (spoilers are a no-no!), but we really enjoyed playing through the entire game, saving it for our #datenightgamenight every FriYay! And in a strange twist of fate, we played it over the summer last year, ending just as the nights drew in!
We hope these under an hour play time games with a shot of summery vibes help get you through the randomness that is clock-change-day!
