Episode 29 – 60 minutes or less
After looking at games you can play in 30 minutes or less, Antoinette and Oliver each present 12 games that play in 60 minutes or less. The categories are the same as last time and we’d love you to play along by commenting below:
- co-op games
- dice games
- word games
- dexterity games
- card games
- area control games
- tile games
- deduction / hidden information games
- resource management games
- party games
- strategy games
- most unusual games
SPOILER – You can see Antoinette and Oliver’s picks right at the bottom of this page.
Intro Music: Black Moons by The 126er on YouTube
Games List
In order of appearance:
- Aeon’s End
- Jaws
- Deep Sea Adventure
- Raja of the Ganges
- Spell Smashers
- Scrabble
- Hardback
- Hangman
- Jenga
- Catacombs & Castles
- Klask
- Flick ‘em Up
- Flick Fleet
- Flip Ships
- Magic the Gathering
- KeyForge
- Project Dreamscape
- Oaxaca
- Roam
- Above and Below
- Near and Far
- Sleeping Gods
- Eight-Minute Empires
- Concordia
- Castles of Burgundy
- The Hanging Gardens
- Q.E.
- Time Stories
- Keyflower
- Viticulture
- Quacks of Quedlinburg
- Wits and Wagers: Vegas Edition
- Bruges
- On the Underground: London/Berlin
- Canvas
- Root
- Wingspan
WARNING!! SPOILERS BELOW!!
Antoinette’s 12 Games
- co-op game: Aeon’s End
- dice game: Rajas of the Ganges
- word game: Spell Smashers
- dexterity game: Flipships
- card game: Magic the Gathering
- area control game: Concordia
- tile game: Castles of Burgundy
- deduction / hidden information game: Time Stories
- resource management game: Keyflower
- party game: Wits and Wagers (Vegas Edition)
- strategy game: Bruges
- most unusual game: Root
Oliver’s 12 Games
- co-op game: Jaws
- dice game: Deep Sea Adventure
- word game: Hardback
- dexterity game: Catacombs & Castles
- card game: Project Dreamscape
- area control game: Roam
- tile game: The Hanging Gardens
- deduction / hidden information game: Q.E.
- resource management game: Viticulture
- party game: Quacks of Quedlinburg
- strategy game: On the Underground
- most unusual game: Canvas
co-op games
Aeon’s End Represent, as I’m told the young people say. I’d also put in a bid for Flash Point again, for the longer setups that don’t fit in 30 minutes, but my main call here is V-Commandos, coop tactical WWII action. Again there are short game options, but it’s at its best with a mission on three or four separate terrains, with teams combining and splitting apart as their skills are needed.
dice games
I’m not sure I really know any dice games that last this long. So I’ll go for Rallyman GT, which stretches the idea of dice game a bit, but the manufacturer insists on describing it as “roll and move”. (It really isn’t!) It’s a vicious game of speed management, overtaking and blocking, and I love it.
word games
I’ve enjoyed Hardback though not hugely, but my pick here is Ondra Skoupý’s Letter Jam. Not the same if you’re not in a pub, though, and it helps a lot of everyone has roughly the same vocabulary size.
dexterity games
Haven’t played any in this time bracket.
card games
Not Magic for me, but Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn is very clearly “Magic done right”. (Including none of this “you don’t know what you’re paying for” nonsense.)
area control games
Alien Frontiers can work if the players are fast-moving; one problem here is that because of the way dice are rolled you can’t plan your turn until your turn actually starts. But I’ll go for A War of Whispers, which feels like a half-hour game and has lots of room for treachery. (There’s just one flaw, which is that if several players end up with the same order of kingdoms it can degenerate into non-competition. I’m working on a setup solution to fix this.)
tile games
I didn’t mention Project L last time so I’ll mention it now; it’s on the 30 minute boundary depending on how fast people play. Draw puzzle tiles, fill them in with your limited supply of bits, upgrade your bits to do bigger puzzles.
deduction / hidden information games
Time Stories worked really badly for me, partly because with all of time and space to choose from they picked “creepy asylum” for the first mission and dug into lots of harmful stereotypes about mental illness. Ho hum. The only one in my collection which fits here is The Resistance, which I also had in the sub-30 minute episode.
resource management games
Tricky, but I think I might go for Grifters, less of a deckbuilder and more of a handbuilder. You send your criminals off to do cool crimes, but they then have to hide out for several turns before you get them back. Not as interactive as I might like but good fun.
party games
I think Quacks is quick enough to teach, at least with the basic books (which is the only version I’ve played so far). I would absolutely recommend the resin bits available from BGG. But if you can have that, I can have Mysterium: simple rules, easy to work out how it fits together. Concept would also work.
strategy games
Quite a few here in my collection: Steampunk Rally, Whitehall Mystery – but my pick today is Ghost Stories (the original version not the new generic-fantasy Last Bastion), which is both ferociously hard and very cooperative. (If I wanted to teach boardgamers to work together, this is a game I might choose.)
most unusual games
I don’t think I have anything particularly unusual here, so I’ll go for Captain Sonar, a game that I _particularly_ haven’t got to play lately.
tableau builder
I admit I have relatively little love for Wingspan: I mean, sure, it doesn’t get anything offensively wrong in terms of game mechanics, but it has a total thematic disconnect (you could re-skin it to any other theme and not lose anything) and as tableau-builders go it has little else to offer. I’m concerned that people may meet it as their first modern boardgame, be very bored by it, and wander away without checking out the better alternatives.
I’ll go for Parade, though: a common tableau and a perverse scoring system which I love.