This is my suspicion even of New Zealand, except that NZ has stronger deck building mechanics and the course of play proceeds a bit more leisurely allowing you to wander in and out of strategies than the original does. I still like NZ but the original is just much simpler to set up and great even as is.
I have played some games lately.
Brass Birmingham seems really great even after just the sole two-player game my partner and I played. The way it models an economy is actually so fascinating and really reaches a weak strategy gamer like myself, which I think says a lot. I would love to play this with 3 and 4 players.
Concordia Venus is something my partner and I really enjoy and frequently play, but I was able to play this with three people last week and found it equally fun. I suspect you really got to be familiar with the maps so that you don’t accidentally pick a too tight or too open map for the amount of players you have. I still haven’t had a really tight game of this yet. Usually the map we’re on just lets one of us take off into their own corner for the most part. I gotta pick one that really bunches us up next, because the promise of this game is really apparent, and even if it’s relaxed it’s still a lot of fun.
I played six-player Lords of Waterdeep for a work thing and it made me reconsider if I really like worker placement games all that much. I don’t know. The game is not that fun in general or interesting to me. But I suspect three is really the best number for almost any worker placement game I can think of. Six is way too many and makes rounds take foreeevvveeeer.
Sea Salt and Paper is a small $12 set collection card game by Bruno Catthala, who I admire for his work on my favorite two-player game Raptor! This is a delightful card game. The art is slight but nice to look at. The sets you collect and then play from your hand have interestin abilities that let you fish through two discard decks or draw more cards or steal one from another player. It’s the kind of game where everyone is eying everyone else’s play area, which is always a blast. Big recommend.
Isle of Cats was also something I played at a work thing and enjoyed. The art is really nice and the quality of the components surprised me. It’s a mulitplayer tetris puzzle with personal scoring objectives, so I imagine it would be really simple to teach and play well with mixed groups. It did with ours. I wouldn’t buy this but I’d play it.
Everdell was a gift I got last year and took a long time to get around to playing. I didn’t think I would enjoy it. But there is some fun engine building. I built a jail that would let me invite animals to my city for free whenever I imprisoned one of my citizens. So I kept jailing carrier pigeons and really got ahead with this funny strategy. The final squeeze was when, instead of a pigeon, I threw a queen card I had into the prison to invite a King to my city. Felt pretty dramatic once I put it into that narrative form. I’d play more fo this for sure, was surprised that I liked it.
Now from my collection I want to play more Ark Nova, Dune Imperium, Castles of Burgundy, and Dune: Imperium.
