Trails is the small-box sequel to Parks, taking the same theme and look but simplifying the mechanics and the goals for a shorter and easier-to-teach experience. All data on player count, age ranges, and play time come from Boardgamegeek. There were some games that just missed this cutoff, like Red Cathedral (released in late November of 2020), that would have made the list otherwise, but I have to cut it off somewhere. One note: I considered any games that were first released in the United States from Dec.
I’ll get to them soon, but there are only so many game nights in a year. There was such a flood of new titles at the end of this year that I haven’t been able to get through everything I wanted to try-the pandemic hasn’t helped matters either-so I’ll mention a few games in my review stack that might have made the cut if I’d had more time to play them: Oath, Dinosaur World, Equinox, Iberian Gauge, Islands in the Mist, Trails, Subastral, and more.
If anything, it seems like we had more new games than usual coming out in the second half of 2021, which, if that’s true and not just my perception, is probably why this was the hardest year ever for me to choose which game to rank number one on this list. Supply-chain problems and an ongoing pandemic couldn’t hold back the tabletop world, which tried to reestablish some level of normalcy this year, between the return of major conventions like Gen Con and PAX Unplugged and a more typical release schedule for new titles.