World-Building Games to Build a New Year With
New year, new you, new world. Or, at least you’ll be building a new world to play in every time you sit down with these world-building games.
Now that it’s the new year, we’re all manifesting better versions of ourselves. Well, we’re thinking about building up new habits and goals. Okay, well we’re at least playing games where we get to build new worlds every time! That’s close enough, right? I think it’s close enough. Resolutions are a lot of pressure, and we deserve to have some fun.
1. Catan
Catan is the one of the ultimate games in building a different map every time you play, and one of the most popular board games out there. While the map building is part of set-up and not an active part of gameplay, it still makes for an experience where every game is different and features a slightly different world. Build your towns, trade your resources, and try to build the longest road in the world in this competitive but also sort of cooperative board game about living on a secluded island. Oh, you already own Catan? Well, this one is portable.
2. Kingdom
Kingdom is a tabletop RPG about building communities. And it can be any community. Build a wild west town or a space port or anything in between. As the game progresses, characters are met with crossroads and choices to make, some of which may change their community forever. Your little community is up to you and in your hands… But also sometimes these games get away from us and end up taking turns we didn’t expect.
3. Carcassonne
In Carcassonne we’re not building a world as much as a beautiful French countryside and series of cities. It’s a competitive world-building game, so while everyone is working on the same map, everyone’s interests and goals are at odds. Carcassonne is strategy game without some of the animosity of other competitive games.
4. Planet
Literally build a world with Planet. This is a more science inspired game as you put together worlds on 3D cores by arranging landscapes, ecosystems, and habitats in an effort to make the most successful and populated planet in the universe. With physical worlds to hold and lots of magnetic continent tiles to place, this game also has a very cool hands-on element that not a lot of games capture.
5. Microscope
Microscope is a very big, very small game. It encourages you to explore epic histories over the course f a single afternoon. The game doesn’t have to be played in chronological order, and sessions can jump back and forth in time to just look at the moments that interest you and push the story forward or see how past actions shaped the future. And this is also an RPG where you can build a civilization and zoom out to see its rise and fall, or zoom in and see the individual people who live there.
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