Snowflake Challenge 2026: Day 5 Challenge

[brokenmnemonic]

Top 10 Challenge.

The category(ies) you choose are up to you. You can give top 10 Fics you read last year, the top 10 songs to create to, the to 10 guest stars on your favourite show, top 10 characters in your favourite book series, top 10... well, you get the idea.

Can't think of 10 of anything? That's okay, 10 is just an abstract. It's totally up to you.

So... I like boardgames, and I was struggling to think of something to post about, so when something for one of my games arrived in the post I decided to go with boardgames. I'm not sure that makes a lot of sense but it's been along week.

These aren't in any particular order because I don't want any of my games to think I like them less than the others.

1. Flash Point: Fire Rescue

I'm a little sad I didn't know this game existed when it came out via Kickstarter, but I ended up backing a fair number of the expansions on Kickstarter. The premise is simple; up to six players get to play firefighters trying to keep a fire at bay long enough to get all of the people and pets out of the building. If too many people get caught in the fire, you lose. If the building collapses, you lose. And with the expansions, the buildings become more challenging, gaining stories and new hazards. Oh, and with the right expansion you can fight fires on ships and submarines. It has options for scaling the difficulty up, it has specialist fire fighters you can play (including a rescue dog) and it quick to learn. Some of the specialist characters are stronger or weaker than others, and I don't tend to view a win as a win unless you've confirmed that all the pets are out and safe, but this is one of my most-played games.

2. Arkham Horror (2005 Edition)

Arkham Horror's a big box game with a big board, a stack of expansions, and typically a playtime of at least a couple of hours. The concept is simple; gates to where the elder beings like Cthulhu are trapped are opening around the fictional city of Arkham. Find clues to seal the gates before to many open, and something world-ending crosses over ... or defect that something in a final battle. If you don't, welcome to the end of the world.

Wrapped around that simple concept is a lot of gameplay. Clues spawn on the map, and with enough you can seal a gate. Gates spawn on the map and spit out monsters, while random events make life more difficult for the Investigators. The players each control an Investigator, with the big box expansions adding more Investigators to choose from. Investigators have different strengths, weaknesses and abilities. Different locations present different problems to solve and sometimes ways to help the Investigators out, but those challenges can injure you, drive you insane or give you knew problems to deal with. You can't seal a gate without entering it and travelling through the otherworlds, which pose their own challenges.

The expansions add lots more options - personal quests for characters linked to their histories, otherworldly beings that can help or hinder you, new towns and locations, new monsters, new items and spells... the game is basically a combination of a race against the clock and a Roleplaying Game, but in boardgame form. I like this enough I ran a number of games via Play By Forum on boardgamegeek.

3. Mysterium

This is a game I struggle with but keep playing because I love the concept so much. One of the players runs the game, while the others play characters; the premise of the game is that a ghost is trying to communicate to the players who committed a murder, and where, and how. There are two catches; you only get 7 hours (turns) to solve the clues... and the clues arrive as abstract images, akin to things glimpsed in dreams. THe artwork is gorgeous and frustrating in equal measures...

4. Aeon's End

I'm including Astro Knights in with the Aeon's End series of games, because it uses the same mechanic. In Aeon's End, you play characters from an underground city named Gravehold that survived the end of the world. Mysterious rifts opened on the surface of the world, from which monsters emerged, overruning the surface. The survivors in Gravehold learned that the energy of the rifts could be manipulated via certain types of gems, and repurposed as beneficial spells - and your characters have the ability to do that. You work together against the game to try and seal the rifts that open near Gravehold, defeating the powerful monsters trying to emerge from them. It took me a couple of plays to work out how things in the game work, but now I have several versions of it, and thoroughly enjoy playing. Expansions add more characters, spells, items, monsters and scenarios, adding a lot of variety. Astro Knights is a sci-fi version of the game, where your characters are trying to defend planets from hostile threats that include giant space monsters and hostile AI-powered robots.

5. The Dresden Files

Based on the books this book involves you playing your way through a number of novels in the Dresden Files series of books by Jim Butcher. The base game contains the stories for half a number of the novels, and the expansion packs add more stories and more characters. Each game features several types of card you have to work your way through - obstacles, monsters, cases and bonus cards. Each characters has a deck of cards from which you draw a number at the start of the game; the cards are broken down into clues that go towards solving cases, attacks that go towards defeating monsters, and cards that let you overcome obstacles or take beneficial cards from the board. Each character also has a unique once-per-game special action they can take. During your turn, you'll either use your unique action, play a card (paying the mana cost for it), pass, or discard a card to put mana back into the pool, trigging a small bonus unique to your character each time you do. To win, you have to reach a point where the number of foes on the board is less than the number of cases you've solved. If you don't do that before running out of possible actions, you have one last chance - a final showdown. This is quick to learn and quick to play, and the digital version of it is a faithful recreation of the game. This is a game I always bring to local game nights as it goes down well, not that I get to go to many game nights these days, sadly.

6. Stone Age

I don't enjoy many competitive games, but I do like Stone Age. Up to four players can play; each of you is a stone age tribe, expanding and developing. Using your meeples, you gather resources such as wood, clay, gold and food - with limited spaces available for gathering - and construct tools, build huts, and breed more people in the Love Shack. There are a number of different ways to trigger the end of the game, and cards you draw give you bonuses for certain types of endgame scoring; your score is based around such things as the number of tools you have, the number of people you have, the number of cultural or technical advances you've earned, the number and quality of huts you built, etc. One of the things I like about this is that even if you have a bad turn, you can always put people onto gathering food, and that can give you an advantage in a later turn when other people need to hunt for food, leaving the resource gathering spots open...

7. Zombicide

I've lost track of how many editions of Zombicide there are, but I backed the original game on Kickstarter and some of the expansions, and I always have fun playing this game. The players each play a character trying to escape from a city undergoing a zombie plague. The game comes with a number of tiles that make up vamps in various configurations depending on the scenario, complete with loot stashes, locked doors, and lots of zombies. Every turn more zombies arrive on the map, and as the difficulty increases more dangerous zombies appear, culminating in abominations, which are almost indestructible. Each map has conditions you haev to satisfy - items you need to find, like keys or maps - which you have to gather, and then you have to escape the map. Complete several scenarios as a part of a campaign to get your characters out of the city to safety.

One of the things I like the most about the game is that all of the characters are different, with different abilities and a choice of skills you can buy as upgrades. However, the more zombies you kill and objectives you find, the more experience you get... and as you level up, the game difficulty increases. When it comes to fighting zombies, the game offers you stacks of possible weapons, from humble frying pans and baseball bats up to chainsaws and machine guns, although searching for items can also spawn monsters. Suffer too many wounds, and your character dies...

The other thing I really like about the game is how the company has added rafts of characters inspired on characters from tv and movies (and when I say inspired, some needed to have the sculpts change before going into production because they were too obviously certain characters). If you like throwing buckets of dice while quoting movie/comic book/tv show lines as your character dual-wields chainsaws while moving around on roller skates, this game's for you.

8. Drum Roll

I'm pretty bad at Drum Roll, but it's still a game I enjoy. It's a game where every action counts and you're on a strict clock, and the biggest reason I'm bad at it is that I'm not good at working out the best combination of actions to take. However, I love the concept of it. The players are all competing circus owners, trying to draw the biggest audiences and earn the most money - and the best reputation - during a year-long touring session. That year involves you spending a number of turns preparing and then putting on a show; once a set number of shows have been performed, you total up your points to see who won. You can plan in advance for the type of show that you know the next location will like, as those are displayed in advance - but with five different types of performers to recruit and each location preferring just 1-2 of those, and limited time to recruit and train your performers, you're never going to be the best circus at every show.

Managing your circus is a constant juggling show (pun intended) - there are various types of resource you need to manage, including money. Money lets you recruit new acts, upgrade aspects of your circus (like adding refreshment stands), resources let you upgrade your performers, but you only have so may actions you can perform - and setting your ticket prices is one of those actions. The better your performers are, the more you'll earn from a show - but at the end of the game, only acts that've retired count towards your point score.

And I have to admit that one of the things that amuses me is that the acts are divided into different types - clowns, acrobats, animal acts, and so on - and one of the acts you can recruit if you're lucky enough to find them in the deck is juggling monkeys. Which Victorian-era circus owner doesn't love juggling monkeys?

9. King of New York

Another of those rare competitive games I enjoy, King of New York (and King of Tokyo) both have an excellent theme; you and the other players are giant monsters stomping around destroying the titular city while you power up, gain abilities, and fight the other monsters to see who'll be king of that city. Or the burning remains of it, at least. With clear links to the Godzilla movies and similar titles, this is a pretty quick romp around where the only losers are those who can't get out of the city fast enough...

10. Shadows Over Camelot

This is one of a small number of semi-cooperative games I've played, and one that I really enjoy. The players are each playing one of the knights of the round table (including Arthur), trying to stave off the threats that could being an end to Camelot and Arthur's vision of a unified, peaceful kingdom. Like co-op games like Pandemic, each turn things get worse, and you're often fighting just to try and keep up, let alone get ahead. There are several powerful artifacts you can quest to recover that can help you - such as the Holy Grail, and Excalibur - but obtaining them escalates the threats. Saxon invaders besiege Camelot, their efforts steadily increasing, while black knights and other challenges steadily add to the pressure. Worst of all, there's a chance that one of the members of the round table is a traitor - and that chance increases the more of you there are playing.

Each knight has a different special ability of one kind or another, and as with games like the Dresden Files, each turn you have a limited number of actions. Will you sacrifice health to prevent bad events from happening? Will you spend your turn defeating a catapult, knowing that you're only slowing the inevitable? Will you draw cards, in the hopes that you can help complete a quest? The only real way for players to get an advantage is to try and use the big quests, as every knight taking part in a quest when it's completed gain rewards, but joining a quest means risking other quests becoming more difficult or even impossible, and all the while the siege of Camelot continues...