Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.
What's keeping me grounded in our current pandemic? Board games, for one. But I'm not reaching for the latest and the greatest at the moment; I've found myself reaching for shorter titles that don't melt my brain, and I've been digging deeper into my collection for those criminally underplayed treasures. In part that's because I've been playing with family rather than a gaming group, but—and perhaps you know the feeling—it's also because I can't concentrate on a two-hour strategy fest when the world feels like it's on fire.
I've enjoyed digging up some older titles during this time, and I've been reminded of how terrific some of them are. When I played Sanssouci with my 13-year old daughter, for instance, we had such a blast that we immediately played it again. And Keltis—what a gorgeous presentation, even if you do have to order it direct from Germany and download an English rules translation from BoardGameGeek.
Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.
Sagrada is one of the best dice-drafting games on the market. It makes excellent use of the inherent randomness of dice while still providing copious opportunities for strategic thinking and long-term planning. It’s also a visually appealing game, easy to learn but displaying more depth the more you play it—especially by making players think about how early choices may restrict their options later. And it’s about building stained-glass windows. Delightful.
These days, there’s a digital version of Sagrada out from Dire Wolf Digital, maker of several of the best digital board game adaptations on the market (including 2019’s Raiders of the North Sea and Yellow & Yangtze, which were both on my list of the best board game apps of 2019).
