Name in Code
He is the winner of the 2016 Spiel des Jahres and the 2015 Golden Geek Award for Best Family Board Game and Best Company Game. It is a card game (there is no board) that is based on the free association of words and is suitable for parties, when you are many and you want to play something that does not last long. It's a bit of a middle ground between Taboo and Minefield.
You play in two teams, the blue and the red, each composed of a team leader as the head of an agency of secret agents and a group of secret agents, precisely. As in Taboo, the team leaders - who never change during the course of the game - must let their teammates guess eight (or nine, if they started first) words, at least one for each turn and using only one other word. Unlike what happens with Taboo, however, the words to be guessed are under the eyes of all, written on 25 cards arranged to form a table: only the team leaders know which to make their teammates guess, based on a "key card" that are the only ones to see.
The cards arranged in 5 rows by 5 columns at the top right are the board; the one at the bottom right is the card that only team leaders can see (Skull Creations)
The particular thing about the game is the mechanism by which you have to make guess words, which will be clearer by using an example. If one of the words to be guessed from a team is "rainbow" and another is "current", the boss can say "light 2" and the players will know that they have to choose the two words on the table that have to do with light. It is essential that the team leader does not make mistakes: if there is also the word "day" on the table, for example in correspondence to the killer, the clue would be misleading and potentially dangerous. In fact, the code name resembles a Minefield because, if the players, by misspelling the word, indicate the one that according to the "key card" corresponds to "the killer", their team automatically loses. For more information, here is a video tutorial and here is the rules.
Age: 14+
Players: 2-8 people (but those of 2 and 3 players are variants, better to be at least in 4)
Duration: 15 minutes
Vote on BGG: 7.7
Cost: on Amazon it costs 20 euros and on IBS it costs 22, as well as on the website of Cranio Creations, the Italian publisher of the game. As in many card games there are "extensions": Visual Code Name (instead of words, cards have images), Adult Code Name (here the words are designed to create mischievous doppisensi) and Duet Code Name (you play all in the same team).
Colt Express
In 2015 this western-themed game won the Spiel des Jahres and the Game of the Year at Lucca Comics & Games. You can play from 2 to 6 people, but if you play in 2 the rules are different than those for 3 or more players. It is set in the desert of New Mexico, in 1988 and players are bandits who have to assault the wagons of a train and fight against each other.
The main feature of this game is that the scene in which it takes place is three-dimensional: each player has his own dashboard, but everything takes place on a cardboard train that is mounted at the beginning of the game and that physically contains the checkers and markers of points (there are also cactuses that are not needed for the game, but enrich the scenery). Also, once everyone has made their own play with one of the action cards at their disposal - choosing for example to throw a fist, shoot or jump from one car to another - the sequence of events is staged with the pawns. Here you will find a short video tutorial and here the rules.
Age: 10+
Players: 2-6 people
Duration: 30-40 minutes
Vote on BGG: 7.2
Cost: on Amazon it costs 27 euros and on IBS 30 euros.
Splendor
Winner of the Golden Geek Award for best family game in 2014 (it is 133rd in the ranking of Board Game Geek), he was also nominated for the Spiel des Jahres in the same year, but without winning. The setting is Renaissance and players are merchants of gems that each hand can decide how to use cards, tokens and tiles to score the most points. Splendor does not have a board, but only cards and tokens and can therefore be easily transported without its box, for example, if you want to take it on the road: but to play you always need a support surface and not too small. The rules of the game are complex to explain but learning them is not difficult, and it is one of those games that you want to make a game after another, according to many: in one of the reviews of Amazon it says that it is "like cherries", precisely. Here is a video tutorial and here you can find the rules.
Age: 10+
Players: 2-4 people
Duration: 30 minutes
Vote on BGG: 7.5
Cost: on Amazon it costs 28 euros and on IBS 30.
Mysterium
Mysterium won the Golden Geek Award for creative direction in 2015 and in fact the first thing that strikes about this game is the care of the illustrated materials and the setting. For the rest it looks a bit like Cluedo and a bit like Dixit: it is suitable for those who love these games but would like to try something new.
The game takes place on Halloween night 1922, in a manor house in the Duchy of Warwik in Scotland, where six mediums meet to shed light on the mysterious death of a man thirty years earlier. The ghost of man still lives there, but he can only communicate with the living through visions. The ghost is interpreted by one of the players who is not allowed to speak for the entire duration of the game, while the others are the mediums who must interpret the visions, i.e. the illustrations of the playing cards: the winner is whoever manages to understand what they mean first, thus revealing the mystery of the ghost's death.
Age: 10+
Players: 2-7 people
Duration: 40 minutes
Vote on BGG: 7.4
Cost: on Amazon and IBS it costs 40 euros.