Jamaica is a fantastic game. It’s dripping with cartoon pirate theme, and it’s my favourite race game. Jamaica is really easy to learn, and it’s a great first step on the ladder of modern hobby games.

It’s a pretty simple game of playing cards in combination with dice, and there are loads of little cheers and groans as battles are won and lost. Every game I’ve played comes down to the wire, and win or lose, everyone will have fun. Play a card, move forwards and backwards, fill your hold with treasure and food, and engage in nautical battles with the other players – it’s all really good fun.

More recently we’ve seen games like Flamme Rouge and Rallyman: GT, and while they’re both great, neither of them have the same charm and universal appeal as Jamaica.

Jamaica also has one of the best box inserts in any game. I’m not saying you should buy a game based on its insert, but it’s a very satisfying game to set-up and pack away.

Cosmic Encounter is bonkers. Absolute craziness. Three-to-five of you will sit around a table and assume the role of an alien race. On your turn you’ll be targeting other players’ planets and playing cards face-down. They might be attack cards, they might not be. You might have told that person you’re not attacking, but secretly, you are. You back-stabbing turncoat.

Alliances are formed and broken, promises with the strength of tissue paper are tested, and people you’ve trusted for years suddenly become the sneakiest, least-trustworthy people you’ve ever known. Cosmic Encounter is a riot from start to finish, and one of the only games I’ve played where a joint victory – through dealings and alliances – is a perfectly viable and desirable outcome.

Each alien race has some kind of crazy power, which usually completely subverts a normal rule, and there are 50 different aliens in the base game box. That’s a huge amount of variety. Then you’ve got six expansions, each adding in at least 20 races. If you want to, you’ll never play the same game twice. Quite how the designers managed to balance them all, I’ll never know, but they have.

The whole game revolves around the interactions between the players, and games can vary in length from an hour to more than two, but with the right crowd, there’s nothing quite like Cosmic Encounter. Strategy and Euro game fans might find the style of game jarring, but it really is worth trying.

Dominion, the grand-daddy of deck-builders. So many games have come since Donald X. Vaccarino unleashed Dominion onto an unsuspecting public, but few have come close to the pure deck-building brilliance.

Dominion was one of the first games I bought, and I still play it now. Every single week I play it with my brother and some friends, and we’re still not bored. The theme is skin deep, but it just doesn’t matter. The simplistic Action, Buy, Clean-up (ABC) gameplay loop is fast and easy, and every single person I’ve introduced the game to has grasped the idea inside their first game.

There are 26 different decks of action cards included in the game, and you’ll use a combination of ten of them in each game. The variety in the setup means you need to approach each game slightly differently, and it keeps the game feeling fresh for a long time. Cycling through your carefully-crafted deck is really satisfying when you find cards that work well together.

Dominion has had a ton of expansions over the years, and for the most part they’re all great. Even without any additions, the base game has a crazy amount of replayability. Don’t just take my word for it, there’s a thriving scene at the official online implementation here, and I’m currently beta testing a really good official Android app.

Dominion is here to stay, and if you like deck-building games, you owe it to yourself to play it if you haven’t already. And if you haven’t played it already – why not?!

The oldest game in this list, 6 Nimmt! is a must-have. A small box with 104 numbered cards is all you get for your £10(ish), but the game you get for that money is worth so much more.

Choose a card from your hand and play it face-down. Your opponents all do the same. All of the cards get flipped and added, lowest-to-highest, to the row with the next-lowest number. If yours is the sixth card in a row, you pick the other five up, and the number of little bull head icons on the top of your collected cards are subtracted from your starting score. Some cards are worth more bull heads than others, and those are the ones you’re trying to avoid.

That’s it. That’s the entire game right there, but playing it so much more nuanced. when all four rows have four or five cards in, and you’re waiting to see the revealed cards, the tension is fantastic. The groans from people when they realise that they’re going to be picking up cards are matched with laughter from those who just got away with their risky play. There’s proper scope for strategy, which is surprising at first, given how simple the game seems.

It’s a brilliant game, and it scales really well. It’s one of the few games I could name that I find as much fun to play with any number of players from three to seven. If you want to try before you buy, you can play it on Board Game Arena right now, for free!

How many of you expected Troyes here? How many of you have played, or even heard of Troyes before? Pronounced ‘twah‘, Troyes is one of the best examples of a classic German-style Euro game. The differentiation, for me, is that Euro games nowadays really fall into that category of multiplayer solitaire. People are doing their own thing, and there’s very little direct interaction. If your exposure to Euros has been games from the last few years, you’d be forgiven for thinking that’s how they’ve always been, but it’s not the case.

Troyes is ruthless. You’re trying to get your workers into the three main areas of the board, but with three or four players there simply isn’t room for everyone. The solution? Barge someone out of their place. And you know what? They can’t do a thing about it. All of those workers you’ve squeezed into each area give you dice to spend on actions in the next round, so what do you do if you get strong-armed out of your spaces? Simple, buy your opponents’ dice and take them from them, and once again, they can’t do a damn thing about it.

Some people are genuinely shocked the first time they play, especially if they’ve been brought up on the friendlier Euro games like Lords of Waterdeep or Ticket To Ride, because it’s so interactive. It’s not just a game about bullying your way to victory however, each of the three areas can win you the game, plus your own secret objective, and there’s a big variety in the way the game is set-up each time you play.

Troyes is another game you can play on BGA right now, and if you enjoy it, it’s still in print. You can pick it up at your favourite games shop for around £40. It sits up there with Hansa Teutonica as one of the best examples of a proper ‘screw you’ Euro game.

This is the oldest game on my list, and it’s a game I still play today. Lost Cities is a Reiner Knizia (Tigris & Euphrates, My City, Ra) classic, where each player can decide whether or not they want to embark on an ‘expedition’ and start laying down cards of a colour on their side of the board. The cards in each of the five suits run from 2 to 10, and each card you play must be higher than the last one played in that colour. The catch is that whenever you start a colour, you start on -20 points, and have to work back up to zero before you start scoring points.

In true Knizia fashion, there are just too many options, and with five colours between two players, someone’s going to get tempted to start a third. It’s a really personal little duel, and I take no end of delight in watching someone start a run of a colour, knowing full-well that I have the 9 and 10 of that suit in my hand. Add to that the multiplier cards which (if you choose to use them) have to be played before you start a run, which will multiply your points – or negative points! – and it’s a brilliant example of pushing your luck.

Lost Cities is an classic, and I’ve had a copy in my collection for longer than I can remember. You can pick it up for less than £20, and it’s great.

4. Jaipur (2009)

Space Cowboys

Jaipur, by designer Sebastian Pauchon (Jamaica, Yspahan) is a card game about trading fabrics, spices and precious gems, hoping to become the Maharajah’s personal trader. You’re both buying cards from the central market, then selling them to earn tokens, which in turn add to your final tally in deciding the winner.

I bought Jaipur in 2010 originally, and played it to death, then bought another copy. It’s safe to say it’s a good game. “F*$king camels” is a phrase you might come to know after a few games, as camel cards are worth nothing, but can be used to trade for goods. If there’s nothing you want from the market, you can pick up all the camels, but there’s something frustrating about having a handful of camels.

Jaipur is really easy to learn, and it gets increasingly tactical as you play it more and more with the same person. You start second-guessing what the other person’s strategy is, and trying to decide what you want to do. Diamonds and Gold are worth a lot, but there’s less of them than leather. Quality, or quantity? The more you play Jaipur, the better it gets.

It’s only around the £15-20 mark, so really it’s a case of whether you have a good reason not to buy it.

3. Targi (2012)

Kosmos Games

Andreas Steiger might not be a designer whose name you recognise, and that’s because other than Targi, he’s got no other games credited to his name. But in Targi, he made a game that most other designers would have been delighted to create. It’s a game about trading dates and spices, and expanding Tuareg tribes in the desert.

I’m a massive fan of Targi, and I recommend it to just about anyone who talks to me about getting something small, but deep. The board, as such, is a grid of cards, and through clever worker placement you simultaneously claim resources as your own, and try to deny your opponent the thing you think they want.

It’s deliciously tactical, and it’s full of difficult decisions on every turn. Deciding whether to go for something you want, or just blocking your opponent, is agonising at times. It’s such a simple game to play, and I always find it amazing how deep a game Andreas managed to cram into a few cards and chits. If you want to get your Euro game fix in a package that’s cheap, and small enough to take to the pub one night, Targi is an essential purchase. At less than £20, you’d be mad not to.

I wrote a full review of Targi last year, which you can read here.

2. Watergate (2019)

Frosted Games / Capstone Games

Watergate is an asymmetric tug-of-war game set during the height of the Watergate scandal in the US. One person plays as the Nixon administration, the other as the press of the Washington Post. Both players have different goals, and use their dual-use cards to swing momentum towards them, gain initiative, or to uncover evidence. The Post try to use the evidence to connect two informants to Nixon, while he tries to remove evidence and swing popular opinion irreversibly .

It’s designed by Matthias Cramer (Rococo, Glen More II Chronicles), and I love the agony of choice you get on every turn. Your deck of cards gets recycled, like in most other games, but instead of playing a card for its value, and moving evidence or momentum in your direction, you can play some as actions. Some of these actions are really powerful, but might see the card removed from the game. Deciding when to take those actions can really feel like make-or-break time.

The back and forth is fantastic, and the balance of trying to move evidence and momentum onto your half of the board, and trying to complete the spatial link puzzle on the other side of the board is so much fun. Even if the idea of politics in a game bores you to tears, I strongly urge you to give Watergate a try. You can pick it up for a shade under £30.

I wrote a full review of Watergate last year which you can read here.

1. 7 Wonders Duel

Repos Production

My Number One spot goes to the spin-off from the original 7 Wonders game – 7 Wonders Duel. Duel took the formula established in the original game, which worked best from four to seven players, and boiled it down to a two-player game. Antoine Bauza (Takenoko, Hanabi) and Bruno Cathala (Five Tribes, Kingdomino) made a brilliantly balanced game with multiple routes to victory.

7 Wonders Duel plays in about half an hour, and the players create a tableau by purchasing cards from the display, boosting the resources available, and building those famous Ancient Wonders of the World. At the same time there’s a track depicting military strength, and tokens to claim marking scientific supremacy. If you do well enough in either of those areas, you can trigger a win before the game even ends. So while you’re building your own tableau, you need to keep an eye on your opponent, lest they sneakily build an all-conquering army. Denying someone a card is often as important as claiming one for yourself.

The way the cards are laid out in each of the three ages, with some ‘locked’ by those on top of them, and some face-down until they’re unlocked, adds a nice level of strategy to the game. No two games are the same, and it’s really easy to teach the core concepts of the game. I’ve played 7 Wonders Duel a lot of times now, and I still enjoy each game as much as I did before. It satisfies that Euro-loving part of me that loves to see a tableau of resources come together, in a similar way to Splendor.

You can grab 7 Wonders Duel for around £20, and if you ever play games with one other person, you really ought to be playing this one.

Ishtar: Gardens of Babylon (2019)

Designers: Bruno Cathala, Evan Singh
Publisher: Iello
Art: Biboun
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 45-60 minutes