Great Things Come In Small Packages - The 13 Best & Smallest Games I Own

hey i'm alex radcliffe from board game co and this video has nothing to do with zombicide i mean despite the box over here this is nothing to some side in fact if you saw the thumbnail or the title for this video you know it's already about the best small games i own i haven't figured out the exact title we'll figure that out because it was going to be called the 10 best small games i own the 10 tiniest best games i own except it's no longer 10 and none of those titles are particularly amazing we'll figure out the details later but this has nothing to do with homicide the reason zombicide is on the table is because i was going to do a video on the 10 best smallest games i own and then the problem is i couldn't narrow it down 10 i wanted to go with at least 12 and even that that's with ignoring all the button shares because button shares really deserve their own category speaking of which i will be doing a full video on a whole bunch of button shy games and how they rank for me but then i realized that it was almost more amusing if i made them all fit into a box so if i put these all into a zombicide box and stored all of them in here well this is basically where i'm at in terms of a travel collection that's very very very worthy of paying attention to at least in my opinion this is not the same thing i did a travel bag video recently this is not the same thing this really is the 10 best smallest games i own that fit into a zombicide box maybe i'll title with that you know how much game can you fit in how much game does zombicide have how much game how much can you really get out of 600 with a zombicide i don't know i'll think of the tail later let's go ahead and dive into this time sams as usual down below i'm just gonna start pulling things out of this box in terms of what i think is the best combination of size to game that you can get out of a variety of different games these are all fantastic experiences that i highly recommend for the most part the price point on these are going to be very affordable very reasonable the nature of smaller boxes as they often are associated with smaller price points and so let's start start going through them by ignoring all of the button shy games i have over here i have a few button shots i have we're going to ignore we're going to ignore sporopolis we're going to ignore food chain island we're going to ignore rove we're going to ignore skulls of sublet and we're going to ignore circle the wagons and when i say ignore i mean i've talked about most of these games plenty in the past and i will talk about them extensively in a full round of video of button shy games that i've played some that i like some that i don't like but i don't want to overdo it and i don't want to talk about these too much so just what i will do is i'll go through my favorites of these i'm pretty sure the order is going to be skulls of sudbury being my favorite button shy game to date followed by circle the wagons being an incredible experience followed by sprawl opolis being such a good game that really holds up although rove rove is a solo puzzle that is going to be a strong contender for to overtaking spallopolis over time and then finally food chain island my least favorite of these five but strangely comforting and a lot of fun to actually go through this little solitaire puzzle of well basically managing the food chain again we'll go through these more in detail in another video i couldn't not include them in this category but they're also going to be well getting their own category more so more so it's probably the wrong terminology there from there i'm going to do another bit of a throwaway over here this is going to be specifically my version of love letter specifically the hobbit a love letter of the hobbit a print and play version of love letter and it's my throwaway because i don't actually love love letter i do find love letter to be a good game that gives you a good degree of game for the size it has and i have my tokens i have my cards and honestly the tokens i can proxy with really anything else love letter is a classic for a reason love letter has become a modern classic with like seven million different versions and spin-offs of how it goes the basic idea of the game is playing cards trying to to be the last man standing so it's because you take out the opponents you try to go through uh narrowing down to get to the princess as a typical love letter but this game's a little different than the way it works and the way it uh applies in terms of the theme that this one has on top of it but overall i like love letter i haven't played in a while but it's a good game that i consistently bring with me when i have that aspect of a group that will that'll work with uh and because it's because of the sheer size this takes up nothing at all and so it's well easy to jump to easy to to toss in a box or whatnot but from there let's go into my actual picks over here the actual games that i narrowed down as far as picking the best of the best as far as small box games i tried to avoid the general two-player cosmos side-sized boxes things like jambo uh paris uh seven wonders duel while amazing in their own rights i have too many of them that would become eligible for this list if i included them and so for the sake of not having too many games i i made that the cut off and i think the biggest box i probably have here is probably gone sean clever which we'll get to soon enough but let's start with ghost of christmas a fairly recent addition to my small box collection of games ghosts of christmas i have a full review of this one it's a fantastic trick taking game trick taking as a genre is a genre that i theoretically don't like i say theoretically because within this box over here i already have two trick-taking games so maybe maybe i do like it and i am on a bit of a journey to try to see more trick-taking games and whether they work for me or don't and i have definitely found that trick taking i definitely dislike i definitely don't dislike it as much as i thought i disliked it and i'm finding some real gems that i'm incredibly appreciative of while also finding some that are merely okay in fact now that i think about it claim is another two player trick-taking game that would arguably be in this box except i have the big box version of it which definitely definitely doesn't fit here but goes to christmas it's trip taking plays well with three and four players uh i think it only plays b and four players only plays in three and four players but plays well at both those player counts and it gives you this aspect of playing tricks into the past present and future giving you a whole new spin on the trick taking genre while maintaining a lot of classic aspects such as predicting your bets betting on what your bet will be and trying to lock things in there although because it has those simultaneous tricks it also has a bit of a mind game of trying to potentially shift the the dominant suit of a trick as you go through it incredibly accessible game it sounds complicated when you explain to people but it's very easy to pick up and teach it's very easy once you get in that first round it's incredible it's just such a good game this has become one of my new favorites as far as small box games and we do have a few well newer favorites here just because of the nature of i do tend to be biased towards newer stuff and to that end we also have radlands now this is another one that has a big box and a small box i will be getting my hands on the big box but for right now i have the small box and i'll probably keep it because it's just so travel accessible that this will probably be my go-to for travel and this one will not this one the bigger box of radlines when i get it will probably be my uh well go-to for keeping on myself over here but radlands is a two-player game self-contained from roxley games that gives you first of all gorgeous art gorgeous theme but gives you a lot of variety and tactical planning as you go through a two-player lane battling base battling system as you play down your bases and then try to basically take down your opponent's bases before they take down yours you're gonna be doing that by playing cards to your actual grid over here you'll be playing events that you'll be managing you're gonna have your selected starter bases that will all have their own unique abilities and then you have cars that you can be discarding for their actual value over here you can be trashing cars effectively for their top corner that has a little bit of a quicker effect you don't have to earn the resources to pay for but you don't get as much out of it but then knowing when and how to apply those when it's useful to be able to get that extra point of damage to accelerate event a little further there's a lot of strategy and tactics in radlenz definitely has become one of my new favorites a new classic in my collection from there going to an older one a very very older one and we have a good mix of party-ish or lighter gateway all these different categories in this box you can really get a lot of game in this box we have friday friday's gonna be my go-to solo game one that has just stood the test of time we have sprawl opolis we have row we have other solo puzzles but friday is likely i think friday might be my first solo game i ever played and once you count the the category of modern design and not you know playing solitaire with a deck of cards possibly it was space hulk death angel the card game possibly either way when i first got into solo games friday and space hulk were two of the first ones and i decided solo gaming was not for me fast forward a few years and i started playing other solo games including spirit island which is the game that got me into solo gaming the way i look at it now i mean solo game is not my default but it's certainly my my immediate backup and i enjoy diving to solo experiences friday is incredible it is still the test of time it's one that i i tend to pull it out and get a few bouts in and then you know put it away and start diving back into it you know a year later or not so it's in that kind of rotation of i slightly forget about it and then i remember how much i enjoy it and pull it out and play it but it's a deck building game which you're trying to weed your deck from the get-go you're trying to be mindful of your deck trying to intentionally lose and be able to curve to cull the cars in your deck that will hurt you as you try to basically survive you're dealing with escalating threats of these these cars and be coming at you and ultimately you're trying to take down the pirates at the end of it it's a solo game your goal is to survive and there's a point scoring measure i usually focus more on the survival but it is a game that if you play it enough and you're good enough that you can actually survive you will want to escalate to that point scoring aspect because you can score a lot of points if you play this well and you can keep escalating the difficulty throwing more and more hazards more and more aging cards into your starting deck friday is a phenomenal game from friedman free's solid solid experience from there we have possibly the smallest game once you exclude button shy which is herbaceous specifically the pocket edition from pencil first games herbaceous is a game that i i reviewed the original the bigger box version a while ago this is basically a game of trying to well pot your herbs you're basically going through a bit of a sequence of laying down cards and and trying to gather the herbs at the right time before your opponent takes them because you only have four plotting actions the entire game but being mindful of letting those herbs build up but then your opponent will take them first it's a little bit of a push and pull of trying to figure out what they're going to do what you're going to do i find it has the most control and tenseness at two or three players in terms of i think it's a four up to four players yeah it's a one to four player game two and three is where i find the most the best balance of control and tenseness of a little bit of chaos because other players can mess with you but enough control that you know what's going on at four tends to be a little bit more chaotic and not my go-to but the basis gives you a lot of pushing your luck but pushing your luck not against the system but pushing your luck against other players phenomenal experience and speaking of pushing your luck against other players we have no thanks no thanks is the definition of pushing your luck against other players because no thanks is a game where you're going to be saying no thanks you're going to be basically having these these cards in the game numbers from 3 to 35 although some of them will be taken out of the game randomly before the game begins which has a bit of an interesting twist or challenge there as you try to figure out what is and isn't in the game and that's important because every time the card enters the table you have the opportunity of taking the card or saying no thanks taking the card though is negative points basically every time you have a card it's negative points or it's both points and points are bad for you so you don't want to have those cards so if you take that 27 you're getting 27 points and that means you're 27 points away from winning because you want to get as close to zero or negative as possible in the game the balance is whenever you don't take a card you have to give in a chip the chips are all worth negative points to you and so you want to be mindful of you're giving up your negative points which are good in order to not get the giant chunk of positive points which is bad the fun of the game comes from the fact that once you have that 27 you can start messing with other players you see if you have a string of cards you only count the lowest number in that string if you have 24 25 26 27 you're only losing 24 points but it also means that when the 25 comes out and you have the 24 you can milk it for all it's worth forcing other players to keep putting negative chips in the pawn which you will gather when you take it you are pushing your luck against other players you're trying to see how far you can push them how far how much can you get out of the other players before someone else eventually caves and just takes the car themselves denying you all those negative points and possibly becoming a contender for other cars in that sequence a phenomenal game one that has been in my collection a very very very long time right alongside colorado colorado is another one that has been in my collection a very very long time the two of them are made for they fit so nicely on the shelf standardized box sizes and all of that but colorado from rio grande games is a game of well pushing your luck against other players this is clearly a theme with these small box games colorado is a game of pushing your luck against other players you're gonna be laying down these cards into these various rows and you're trying to get cards that'll be good for you but the problem is some colors are good for you some are not and that will be determined as you gather more cards you're going to score for your three highest performing colors and every other color is worth negative points which results in this little bit of a puzzle because every single turn you either take a row or you add a card to another row but that means the players after you might take that row instead so it's a constant balance of trying to set up the rows in ways that are good for you but bad for your opponents because if it's good for you and your opponents they'll take them first and so you're trying to be mindful of that you push it a little too far and you'll inevitably end up taking too many cards some of which won't be good for you but you always want to go just a bit further so you're pushing your luck against other players you're pushing your luck against the system and you're hoping you can score as efficiently as possible in colorado fantastic game it has a big brother and a bigger system in terms of zoo loretto i personally prefer the the cleanliness and the smoothness of colorado fantastic small box game from there we have kraken lock and poker royal cockroach poker royal the royal version of cockroach poker which has kings and royalty and i honestly it's my go-to to the point that i've gotten rid or i'm getting rid of cockroach programs double check i may not have gotten rid of it yet but cockroach broke was leaving my collection because this one simply does it better to the point that i don't even play the original caucus broker at all anymore even with new players this is a bluffing game it's not pushing your luck it's bluffing it's bluffing the other players as you try to sit there and say i have a look at this look at this card i have a rat i'm putting this rat on the table and i'm passing it to you and the player has a choice they can look at the card and they can pass it to somebody else or they can call you on what you said so you know we'll have another player looks at and says i i don't believe you but i'm going to look at it all the same and he's lying it's actually a cockroach and you have this aspect of pushing cards towards other players lying and developing a narrative as you go a narrative that will escalate and develop once players start building up cars in front of them you see cockroach poker is a game which has one loser you don't win you just hopefully don't lose in order to not lose you have to not be the player who has four cars of the same type four cars are the same well insect cockroach bug whatever it is in front of them as you go through the game and so once a player starts building up two or three rats in front of them suddenly there's a different incentive on the table as far as trying to shove rats towards that player and always trying to through subterfuge or through directly telling the truth to them just you know here's a rat and they have to choose to call you or not or pass it to the next player it's a little bit of a fun game of bluffing and lying that develops as the board develops it is great for laughs every single time amazing experience one of my go-to's as far as small box games and if i want another party experience but with a whole different shine to it we have one night ultimate werewolf this is just a day break box but we have both systems in here when ultimate world will host a large degree of player account some of these games do cap out at smaller player accounts when i ultimate were elf is definitely not going to be one of those this one plays three to seven players and i would say arguably it's best in the five to six player range but plays well at seven as well and so you want to kind of lean into those higher player counts at three it's good but not not great i think it really needs four to even start seeing the full shine of it and just gets better from five to six and then a little bit of a taper off as you get to the chaos of seven but when i ultimate world daybreak is a fantastic party game of lying to each other of hidden roles it's not bluffing the typical sense but it certainly does have lying so same same spin but different genre and it's a game which you're going to have a role assigned to you and you're going to start going through a night phase where you act out the specific mechanics of your role maybe you're going to be mixing up other players maybe you're going to be robbing somebody else's role maybe you're going to look at your card before the night face is over and then after that one night it is called one ultimate world day break after all or when i open my world but after that one night you'll go ahead and start going through the process of figuring out who you are and which team you're on you see the werewolves are the baddies in this game the werewolves are aligned and they're trying to make sure that they win that they don't get executed by the villagers once those seven minutes are up you have time downs you can adjust the timer but generally six to eight minutes is around and you're trying to figure out how to accomplish your goals your goal to be very clear is to win to win as a single entity you want to win the game it may happen to me that other players are on your team but you don't want to play that way and the reason you don't want to play that way is because you don't actually know what happened during the night this is a game of figuring out of discovering what happened along the way and adjusting your playing to accommodate around that if you simply pursue it as simple as well i'm a world so i need to pursue world objectives you will lose you need to pursue the game as a bit of a mindset of i was a werewolf am i or am i not still a werewolf and can i tease that truth out from other players can i get to a point where i know the threads of truth where i know what happened in the game and if you can figure that out if you could control the narrative then you can also control the lies that work the lies that make sense within the greater construct of everything else because you want to tease the truth and deliver truth but also deliver the lies necessary to win as well necessary i wanna alter my world is a fantastic game great for laughs great for strategy and has held up my collection just fine over time and then we have our roland right that's pretty clever gunshot clever one of the largest games in this box over here i would say the it's marginally bigger than one element we're off daybreak you can see that over there but it is tied for the crew mission deepsea as far as a box that's falling off the table as far as the box eyes over here but we'll talk about that's pretty clever first that's pretty clever gunshot clever is my favorite of the that's pretty clever system there's doppled so clever twice as clever there's clever cube they have other iterations this one's so far my favorite from the iterations it's the purest it's the cleanest it does a great job but it's basically interlinked roland right fantastic game fantastic experience in which you're going to be rolling dice and then assigning them to various tracks and there's five different tracks and they're trying to cascade bonuses from one track to another to score as many points as possible and it's it's fascinating to me in the sense that i've had games where you scored just over 100 points and call it a day and then i've had games where you score 300 plus points something about the way you cascade your tracks the way the dice roll the way you can play around with the various bonuses you require and the degree of efficiencies you can get the differences between a good game and a bad game and that's pretty clever it is phenomenally amazing it's not my favorite roll ride ever but it certainly is my favorite roll right within the box size that you see over here uh hadrian's wall in my opinion does it better but hatred as well as a bigger box this is amazing accessible a great role might have stuck around for a long time that i have the other versions as well this was this this one just happens to be my favorite from them which brings me to the crew mission deep sea this one has replaced the crew for me this one has replaced the basic the the base version of the crew although that's partially because i do have some geek up sets from board game geek in this bag over here so i have the tokens i would need to be able to play the basic crew rules as well but this is basically a trick taking cooperative experience the the crew is the original game they came up with mission deep sea which gives you more nuanced missions more interesting choices as you go through the experience as you go through the game but it's cooperative trick taking you're going to be trying to figure out how to make sure the right player wins the right trick at the right time and or with the right cars there's all kinds of cars that will give you different incentive structures as far as how you play the game but the basic idea is it's trick taking and you're working together with limited communication you can't save the cards you have in your hand you have minimal amounts of communication you have tokens you can play that kind of say this is my only pink card or whatever it is but there's a minimal amount of kind of communication as you go through the experience but you have to work with that amount of communication and escalating levels of difficulty as you gather more and more points with objectives of things you have to go for in order to win together it is fantastic it is the game that that is the first game that broke that i don't like trip taking mould followed by ghosts of christmas followed by a whole new renaissance of me trying to find more and more and having some wins and some losses along the way but that's the crew mission deep sea we have three left to go three left let's go ahead with tranquility the odd one out the one that is the hardest to fit into this zombicide box if that was your objective of fitting a whole bunch of games into zombie side boxes that by the way is why i have a zombicide side box instead of other boxes because the thickness over here allows for this to fit in versus normal smaller boxes did not in any case tranquility tranquility from board game hapa the board game hub this was picked up by lucky duck games they have tranquility the ascent coming out as well which i'm very excited for but tranquility is a cooperative game of laying down cards in a pattern laying down cards there's various modules to mix up the the difficulty or the the various things going on but the basic idea is you have cards numbered one through eighty and you're gonna be laying them out in a bit of a grid you have to go in an ascending order while being mindful of also placing the start and the finished cards as necessary the challenge is as you place cards next to other cards you have to discard the cards so basically the very cards you need to play are also the economy that you are sacrificing every single time you play something that first game you might think you have it under control and you might find that you lose it as it hits the end of the game that second game well if you start adding in expansions that make it more difficult you might find again that it starts becoming a bit of a balance you could you could master the base game i would say the base game is easy enough that you can master it no problems but then you start mixing in the various expansion modules the rocks that will get in your way the various ocean tentacles that will start getting rid of cards you've already played the modules add to the difficulty and you'll have to be more and more precise with how well you place your cards with how well you communicate again without actually communicating but how well you are mindful of each other's moves and plans and tactics so you discard the right cards because once you discard a card it is gone forever it is calming it is peaceful it is amazingly fun to go through it i have really been enjoying tranquility from well board game hub and lucky enough games which means we have two more two more that are actually featured in another video on small box two player head-to-head games but we have hana makoji hanumakoji which is one of my favorite two-player head-to-head games and one that really holds up there's i mean i have a whole bunch of games in the genre but honestly i'd get rid of a lot of them if it meant i got to keep hanumakoji i still need to play geisha's road i haven't dived into that one yet that's the newer version of it but han mikoji has a fantastic game of trying to basically go for a bit of a tug of war over the various geishas in the row you're gonna have gaseous numbers two through seven you're trying to score either four geishas or a certain number of points worth negations before your opponent does it's a game you can win in a single round but far more often you end up going towards two or three rounds i find two is the most common number for me but what happens is once you move into the second round you're trying to again vie for control over the gates if you haven't yet won but this time anything you've already won is kind of half locked in meaning a tie would benefit you and ties are frequent enough in the game that it becomes a huge part of the strategy the reason the game is so good is because of the i cut you choose mechanic and the way it's implemented in the game you have four action tiles in the game each action tile is going to give you some way of managing the cars in your hand one of them will put aside a secret card that will help you one of them will get rid of two cards and the other two are i cut you choose the different versions of putting down cards from your hand and having your opponent make choices you get to pair things up you get the edge to a certain degree but ultimately they make the decision and trying to give them the decision that they will choose something that makes the most sense for them but is lacking the information in the context of other things you know of other strategies you're going for if they're the cards in your hand or the cards you set aside of the cards you discarded trying to set up the game in such a way that your opponent makes an inefficient decision just because of the fact that they don't have the same information you have that is how you win in hanumakoji it is a fascinating puzzle i love it every single time it's just one of my really go-to recommendations as far as straight-up amazing two-player games and then lastly speaking of straight up amazing two-player games we have air land and c specifically the critters at war version it's just cuter and cuter is worth you know everything in this in this game but basically critters at war is the the cute version of airliner c it's a two-player game of having 18 cars total you have 18 cars total and then it's about how you play those cards you see each player is going to have six of those 18 cards so i have six you have six and the six that are not in play and once you start playing the game a few times you start to learn all the cards all the aspects of the various cards you'll be playing with and that leads to an interesting decision space of knowing what's coming of knowing what can mess with you of knowing how you can fight with your opponents and how they'll fight with you as you fight over well air land and sea the three lanes of battle the three there's another term the three the three theaters of war that's what they are and you're gonna be trying to win in airline and sea you have to win each one in two of those three lanes to win the round and then the part of the game that is amazing in addition to knowing the 18 cards in addition to knowing how you plan around those the thing about this game that gets me every single time is the fact that you can withdraw whenever you withdraw you lose less points you lose fewer points or your opponent gains fewer points so a pure hard and fast victory if you go down to the end fighting is gonna be worth six points to your opponent and you only need 12 points to win which means your opponent can win the game twice and they can win and that's cut throat and devastating and you will lose quickly if you ever have that happen what happens far more frequently if you're playing this game correctly is you never actually go all the way to the end at one point or another you withdraw the earlier you withdraw the fewer points your opponent gets and so it's all about those tactical aspects of the game of trying to see how they're going to go forward trying to predict what your hand is like whether you have a chance of winning of knowing the cards you have of knowing the cards they've already put down the table and trying to make a a good decision a a tactical decision that you would have to make as a leader of battle with you know anthropomorphic animals or whatnot but trying to make those decisions as far as when to withdraw and when to devote all your resources the players who devote all the resources time and time again and just think that they always will win are the ones who always lose at airland and see it as a tactical game both in the gameplay and then knowing when to fold and that's basically all the games that i could fit into a zombicide box that will in my best games that are tiny boxes i have more that are eligible for this genre i tried narrowing it down to basically 10 i got to like 13 and then i threw on like five button shy's to round it out in any case until next time i'm alex radcliffe from board game co the thumbnail for this video is going to be interesting because i do have this zombicide box and anyone seeing the smallest games in my collection with this uh zombicide box on the side they're gonna be like wow that board game co guy really doesn't know when to shut up about zombicide that's fair that's fair honestly in any case until next time have a good one

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Id: Sjhnt9qvj0Q

Length: 25min 45sec (1545 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 23 2022