Each card has one of six colored symbols and a category. How it’s played: Players pick one of the included decks, and each flips a card faceup in front of them. But if you do get bored with this version (or, more likely, once your game group has memorized all of the cards), there are other editions, including Anomia Party and Anomia X, that add all-new card decks while keeping the same gameplay dynamic. Anomia is also replayable because the rounds usually take less than half an hour and there are almost 100 cards that can come up. Yet in practice it develops dramatic tension as cards are flipped, symbols are revealed, and players race to come up with an answer before someone else does. Mechanically, it’s a simple word- and pattern-recognition game.
Anomia is firmly in the latter category, and I’ve often worried that my more-competitive friends would lose their voices after playing. Then there are games that are so quick, with such engaging energy, that if you play them too late at night, your neighbors might end up filing a noise complaint. Why we love it: Some games require sharp focus, advance planning, and subtle strategy, and this can lead to a lot of intense, furrowed-brow looks around a silent table. The teams switch off doing this until one team has gained 10 points and wins the game.
(To give you an idea, “You think The Phantom Menace is an 85% good movie?!” is something that was furiously yelled the last time I played.) Once they lock in a position, the other team can earn bonus points by betting on whether they’re too far to one side of the target or the other. The other players try to interpret the clue and position the dial’s needle accordingly, which is normally when debates tend to spring up. Next, they give their team a phrase that suggests where on that scale the target is. The psychic gets a secret look at the position of the target and is given a card indicating two ends of a scale (from loud to quiet, good idea to bad idea, and so on). The trick is that they can’t see the target while they move the needle instead, a member of their team acts as the “psychic” who tries to get them to guess the correct position. How it’s played: Players are split into two teams, and each round one team is tasked with moving a dial so that the needle is in the center of a funnel-like target (the closer to the center you get, the more points you score). Whoever collects the most gold (earned mostly by acquiring land) throughout the game wins. This continues for a number of rounds, depending on the number of players. And on their next turn, players pick a new race/power combo to use. As players expand their empires and come into conflict with each other, they eventually run out of useful tiles, which they can then turn over (the game calls this “going into decline.”) The pieces stay on the board and can still accrue points (but they can no longer be used to gain new territory).
Once a player picks their characters, they get a set of tiles representing their troops during their turn they use the tiles to take over land on the board. For instance, if you pick up Wizards with a Flying power, you get bonus gold for occupying magic spaces (the Wizards feature), and you can send your troops anywhere on the board (the Flying feature). Each race is paired with a separately shuffled stack of powers, which modify what the troops of that race can do. How it’s played: At the beginning of the game, every player gets to select a fantasy race to control from a shuffled stack.
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