If you have read our article; 16 Best Smartphone Apps That Pay You money 2018/2019, you probably would have found fun and entertaining ways to earn money using your mobile phone.
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There are many game apps to win real money advertised on the internet, but only a handful are realistic enough even to enable you to cash out quickly. That is why we have compiled a current list of our top 3 iPhone and Android apps that pay you money.
Earn Money apps are now more popular than get paid to sites as you can earn money while on the go and not limited to using a desktop device. The best money making apps allow you to make some extra cash for beer money.
This post shows you the 17 best smartphone apps that pay you money 2021 and includes both the top Android and iOS apps. The countdown is based on app reliability, the ease of use and the money making potential.
17 Best Smartphone Apps That Pay You Money 2021
17) Cash For Apps
Cash For Apps is a good stable app that pays you to install apps. When you install apps advertised on Cash For Apps offerwalls you can then delete them once you are credited points.
300 points on this app are worth $1 and points can be exchanged for gift cards for stores including Amazon, CVS, eBay, Target, Starbucks, Google Play and many more.
You can earn bonus points by referring friends, however as it is only limited to app downloads, the earnings potential will not be as good as other apps in our list.
The app is available from the iOS app store and Google Play store. If you have one account on either and have a device from both, they will be synched.
16) Ebates
The Ebates app is a good earning app for anyone loves to shop online. Ebates is one of the best cashback.
Ebates will give you $5 to sign up so that is a great reason for you to download this app on to your smartphone.
You can get paid for shopping at any of the 750+ approved shops including Microsoft, Sephora and Etsy.
You can also earn money by referring your friends to use this free earn money app.
15) cashKarma Rewards & Gift Cards
cashKarma is a popular app that will pay you for downloading apps, signing up for free trials and watching videos. For paid video views you get 1 point per video view and you can watch 50 per day.
You can redeem points for PayPal cash, Amazon gift cards of $5 and $10 amounts.
With cashKarma, you get rewarded to check in to the app daily and there are other bonuses when you achieve milestones.
There is a referral system to help you earn more points by having your friends sign up.
14) App Bounty
App Bounty has over 5,000,000 installs and over 100,000 5 star ratings on the Play Store. The way the app works is mainly by downloading and installing other apps. There are also offerwall offers for you to earn credits which you can exchange for gift vouchers.
The app is international in its reach so if you are from outside of the US, you can also benefit from downloading the app.
Overall the app is good and the payments are reliable. On the downside it can seem like forever to build your credits up.
You can swap credits for gift cards from iTunes, Amazon, Steam and more. This is one of the best apps that pay you money.
13) Make Money And Free Gift Cards
The Make Money And Free Gift Cards app makes our list for the first time! Over 30,000 reviews and most of them positive.
Over the past year a lot of apps have been removed from the Google Play Store for being scams and the fact that advertisers are no longer paying good money. As a result the quality of the apps are now better and actually pay you.
Make Money And Free Gift Cards say that you could reach your first cashout within 2 days!
12) Tapporo
Tapporo remains one of the elite rewards and money making apps. Consistently in our top 5 list, Tapporo is one of the oldest and reliable apps that you can find on the Google Play Store. This app was even listed in our 2015 list of best money making apps.
Based on the web version, Tapporo.com, they offer some of the best referral rates of $0.60 per sign up. If you have 100 friends, there is $60 free cash for you!
The high referral reward rate is one of the reasons we love this app. It can be a little difficult to earn money other than that however, it is easily one of the best apps that you can download that will earn you cash.
Rewards include PayPal cash, Amazon vouchers, mobile accessories and more!
11) Storm Play – Earn Free Bitcoin, Ethereum & Storm (Was Bitmaker)
Do you want free Bitcoin or Ethereum? Bitmaker Free Bitcoin, now renamed Storm Play can help you get free cryptocurrency. The app was built initially by cakecodes but has since been sold. This app pays you blocks which can then be exchanged for Bitcoin (This was satoshi before an update in March 2017). You must do a number of different tasks like answer surveys, install games and more to earn blocks.
The payout is low so you get paid on Fridays when you reach the threshold (this keeps changing depending on cryptocurrency trading prices. Remember to receive Bitcoin, you must have a Bitcoin wallet and a separate wallet if you want to receive Ethereum. You can find Bitcoin wallets online and easily sign up to them.
Recent updates have made this app worse. We had at number 2 on the best apps that pay you, but no longer!
10) Survey Mini
Survey Mini features in our run down for a second year. It is a survey app, however it is best if you are living in the United States. The app is available to both iOS and Android users.
How you get paid is by visiting local places where you have been to and you will receive surveys based on your experiences at those locations.
If you love going to restaurants, shops or visiting local attractions then you could benefit from using this app
You can receive rewards from Survey Mini for free food, discounts and points for gift cards for the stores that you visit.
9) Ibotta
Ibotta is one of the oldest apps on the Google Play and Apple App Stores.
The way that Ibotta works is that you get cashback based on purchases that you have previously made. Overall it is a reliable app and is used by millions to earn cashback on purchases that they make online.
US users can enjoy taking advantage of free coupons for top online stores.
8) Make Money Earn Free Cash
We said in 2016 & 2017 that Make Money Earn Free Cash had a lot of potential and it still has. Now with over 1 Million installs it is one of the most popular get paid to apps on the market. Last year the app was rated on the Play Store at 4.6 and in 2021, it remains the same.
There are numerous ways to earn however it can be slow and tedious. The rewards are earned by watching videos, filling in surveys and taking advantage of free trials.
PayPal is the only option to cash out your rewards, which for most is a good thing.
7) App Karma
App Karma makes it debut on our top paying apps list. With App Karma you can earn daily rewards easy by using your smartphone. With over 1 million installs, it is easily the most popular app that you can download for free from the Google Play Store. There is also an iOS version of the app also available for you to download for free.
List Of Real Money Card Game Apps 2020
Gift cards are available worldwide and not just for the US making this app appeal to a global audience. When you redeem your rewards, App Karma give you 5% of the points back to you!
Rewards include Amazon gift cards, PayPal cash, Starbucks vouchers and Google Play gift cards.
6) Earny
Earny is a free app that pays you when price drop on purchases with a price guarantee.
Earny works to claim money back on purchases made on:
- Online shopping
- Travel bookings
- Credit card purchases
Instead of having to make claims on previous purchases, Earny scans best prices based on receipts that you have scanned.
5) CashPirate
Cashpirate is one of our favourite apps. It has been consistently in the top 5 in past years, however, the app and its payouts remain reliable. At the start of 2016 we were earning $15-50 per month and this still remains the case. We have never had any problems with payments ever! We are not affiliated with this app and just telling the truth!
With this app, you can earn PayPal cash, Bitcoins and Amazon Vouchers. The minimum payout is $2.50 PayPal cash.
Points are earned in this app by downloading new apps and completing offers.
You earn by watching videos but the number of videos available for you to watch is now limited. The referral program is probably the best of all apps as you get 10% of your referrals earnings and 5% of the referrals referrals earnings.
The interface of this app is extremely dated when compared to others.
The reason it is remains on our top 10 list is the fact that Cash Pirate does pay on time when you request. We have never had any bother regarding payments from CashPirate.
Click here to download and use referral code OANTJM
4) GiftPanda – Cashback Shopping
GiftPanda is an earning app where you get paid to:
- Play games
- Download apps
- Get paid to Shop online
- Refer friends
The app is moving towards becoming a cashback app for those who shop online often.
GiftPanda is an app created by the team at Aye-T Studios who have also created CashPirate.
3) Swagbucks
Swagbucks is one of the best apps that you can install to make money. This is one of the best apps that actually pays you. You can sign up to their website and earn money by going surveys, playing games, shopping online and more.
The rewards range from gift cards and much more. If you want to get paid by Paypal, this is also an option available to you.
2) American Consumer Opinion
American Consumer Opinion, also known as ACOP, is the best iOS app that pays you, however, it is only available on Apple devices unfortunately.
Should the developers extend to Android, which it is likely that it will eventually, it will certainly be a contender to be the best paying app of all.
ACOP are a leading survey panel and are known as one of the best paying survey sites for people in the US, UK and Canada.
The app has a decent interface and is straight forward to use. You will get alerts when you get an invitation to participate in a survey.
American Consumer Opinion are quick to pay when you get to the payout threshold. You can choose a variety of rewards upon payout, however PayPal is the best choice as it is cash in your pocket.
We did a review of the survey panel, see this post for details of ACOP that pays you cash.
1) Mintos
By far the best way to make money with your smartphone is to use the investment app Mintos. Mintos is a European P2P investment platform that offers an average return of 12% on investments.
A winning strategy here is to use money you earn from using the other apps listed above and investing those earnings with Mintos.
If you invest as little as $100 each month with Mintos you will end up with $1267.57
with a profit of $67.57. If you consider compound interest and invest the same every month, you will earn $4517.57 profit by year 7.
There are not many apps available that can make you rich, however, Mintos is one that has the potential. Of course there is risk involved with any investment but with Mintos there is a 99% buyback guarantee with the investments and by using money you earn using other apps, you minimize your own personal financial risk.
That is the run down of the 17 Best Money Making Apps 2021. We recommend that you download most of the apps in the list above to maximize your chances of earning cash with payouts on a weekly and monthly basis.
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I’ve been getting so many requests for recommendations fortwo-player games this week that I decided to pull the list I’ve added to thebottom of my annual top 100 rankings and make a separate post, with some updatesfor things I’ve played more recently and a few games on which I’ve changed myopinions as well.
1. Jaipur: Full review. Jaipur is my favorite two-player game, just as easy to learn but with two shades of additional complexity and a bit less randomness. In Jaipur, the two players compete to acquire collections of goods by building sets of matching cards in their hands, balancing the greater point bonuses from acquiring three to five goods at once against the benefit of taking one or two tokens to prevent the other player from getting the big bonuses. The game moves quickly due to a small number of decisions, like Lost Cities, so you can play two or three full games in an hour. It’s also incredibly portable. The new app is also fantastic, with a campaign mode full of variants. Complexity: Low.
2. 7 Wonders Duel. Full review. Borrowing its theme from one of the greatest boardgames of all time, 7W Duel strips the rules down so that each player is presented with fewer options. Hand cards become cards on the table, revealed a few at a time in a set pattern that limits player choices to one to four cards (roughly) per turn. Familiarity with the original game is helpful but by no means required. There’s a brand-new app version out from Repos this fall. Complexity: Medium-low.
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3. Carcassonne: Full review. Carcassonne brings ease of learning, tremendous replayability (I know I use that word a lot here, but it does matter), portability (you can put all the tiles and meeples in a small bag and stuff it in a suitcase), and plenty of different strategies and room for differing styles of play. You build the board as you go: Each player draws a tile at random and must place it adjacent to at least one tile already laid in a way that lines up any roads or cities on the new tile with the edges of the existing ones. You get points for starting cities, completing cities, extending roads, or by claiming farmlands adjacent to completing cities. It’s great with two players, and it’s great with four players. You can play independently, or you can play a little offense and try to stymie an opponent. The theme makes sense. The tiles are well-done in a vaguely amateurish way – appealing for their lack of polish. And there’s a host of expansions if you want to add a twist or two. I own the Traders and Builders expansion, which I like mostly for the Builder, an extra token that allows you to take an extra turn when you add on to whatever the Builder is working on, meaning you never have to waste a turn when you draw a plain road tile if you sit your Builder on a road. I also have Inns and Cathedrals, which I’ve only used a few times; it adds some double-or-nothing tiles to roads and cities, a giant meeple that counts as two when fighting for control of a city/road/farm, as well as the added meeples needed to play with a sixth opponent. Complexity: Low/medium-low for the base game, medium with expansions.
4. Imhotep: The Duel. Full review. A truly great re-imagining of a larger game for two players, one that forces more interaction between the two of you so you don’t feel as much like you’re playing parallel solitaire. Players place their four meeples on the 3×3 grid that allows them to take goods off of the six boats, three on one side of the grid and three on the adjacent side, and place them in the four spaces on their personal boards, each of which scores in its own way. Several of those spaces create competition for specific tiles, and the boards have two sides so you can mix and match between the more or less interactive sides. There are also blue tiles that give you bonus actions and for which you may particularly want to battle your opponent when they appear. Complexity: Medium-low.
5. Patchwork: Full review. A really sharp two-player game that has an element of Tetris – players try to place oddly shaped bits of fabric on his/her main board, minimizing unused space and earning some small bonuses along the way. It’s from Uwe Rosenberg, better known for designing the ultra-complex games Agricola, Le Havre, and Caverna. Go figure. And go get it. Complexity: Low.
6. 7 Ronin: Full review. An asymmetrical two-player game with a Seven Samurai theme – and when I say “theme,” I mean that’s the whole story of the game. One player is the seven ronin of the title, hired to defend a village against the invading ninjas, controlled by the other player. If the ninjas don’t take the village or wipe out the ronin before eight rounds are up, the ronin player wins. But the ninja can gain a decisive advantage in the first four rounds with the right moves. It’s very clever, the art is fantastic, and the theme is completely integrated into the game itself. It also plays in about 30 minutes. Complexity: Medium-low.
7. Wingspan. Full review.The only game to which I’ve given a perfect score of 10 since I started reviewing games for Paste five years ago, Wingspan is one of the best examples I can find of immaculate game design. It is thoroughly and thoughtfully constructed so that it is well-balanced, enjoyable, and playable in a reasonable amount of time. The components are all of very high quality and the art is stupendous. And there’s some real science behind it: designer Elizabeth Hargrave took her love of bird-watching and built a game around the actual characteristics of over 100 species of North American birds, such as their habitats, diets, and breeding habits. The European expansion is now out as well. Wingspan won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2019, which it more than deserved, making Hargrave the first woman to win that honor as a solo designer and just the second solo woman to win any Spiel des Jahres prize. It’s a marvel. Complexity: Medium.
8. Watergate. Full review. It’s a pure two-player game that pits one player as Nixon and the other as “the journalists,” each with a unique deck, where the latter player tries to place evidence tokens connecting at least two witnesses to the President, and Tricky Dick tries to block them. It’s fun, incredibly well-written, and a real thinker. Complexity: Medium.
9. That’s Pretty Clever. Full review. From the mind of the designer of The Mind, Wolfgang Warsch, That’s Pretty Clever (original title: Ganz Schön Clever) is a roll-and-write game where you roll six dice, each its own color, and can choose one die per roll to score on your sheet. The player sheets have five areas matching five of the dice colors, with the white die a wild, and each area scores in a unique way, with the potential for bonuses like the power to check off a box in a separate area for free. It’s also a great solitaire game, where 200+ is a solid score and 300+ is some Hall of Fame type stuff. Complexity: Medium-low.
10. Targi. Full review. Moderately complex two-player game with a clever mechanic for placing meeples on a grid – you don’t place meeples on the grid itself, but on the row/column headers, so you end up blocking out a whole row or column for your opponent. Players gather salt, pepper, dates, and the relatively scarce gold to enable them to buy “tribe cards” that are worth points by themselves and in combinations with other cards. Some tribe cards also confer benefits later in the game. Two-player games often tend to be too simple, or feel like weak variants of games designed for more players. Targi isn’t either of those things – it’s a smart game that feels like it was built for exactly two people. Complexity: Medium.
11. Baseball Highlights: 2045: Full review. I was floored at how much I enjoyed this game; it is baseball-themed, but it’s really a fast-moving deckbuilder where your deck only has 15 cards in it and you get to upgrade it constantly between “games.” The names on the player cards are all combinations of names of famous players from history – the first name from one, the last from another, like “Cy Clemens” – except for the robots. It’s not a baseball simulation game, but that might be why I liked it, because it was easier to just let the theme go and play the game for what it is. It’s down from previous years as I’ve found the replay value is limited, even with the expansions. Complexity: Medium-low.
12. Silver & Gold. Full review. Phil Walker-Harding is some sort of genius, with Imhotep, the Sushi Go! series, Bärenpark, Gizmos, and this all hits under his name, with the Adventure series he co-created with Matthew Dunstan still on my to-play shelf. Silver & Gold is a polyomino flip-and-write game where there are just eight shapes to choose from in each round, with seven of them displayed in random order (the eighth isn’t used), and players fill in those small shapes on the larger ones on their two objective cards, using dry-erase markers. You score for finishing shapes, with three small bonuses available each game that do usually end up mattering in the final score. It’s portable, easy, lightly strategic, and undeniably fun. Complexity: Low.
13. The Mind. Full review. The Mind may drive you crazy; I haven’t beaten it yet, playing with several different people already, but I still find it really enjoyable and something that nearly always ends up with everyone laughing. This Spiel des Jahres-nominated game has just a deck of cards numbered 1 to 100, and in each round, every player gets a set number of cards dealt from the shuffled deck. All players must play their cards to the table in one pile, ascending by card number … but you can’t talk to anyone else, or even gesture. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. Complexity: Low.
14. Stone Age: Full review. Really a tremendous game, with lots of real-time decision-making but simple mechanics and goals that first-time players always seem to pick up quickly. It’s also very hard to hide your strategy, so newbies can learn through mimicry – thus forcing veteran players to change it up on the fly. Each player is trying to build a small stone-age civilization by expanding his population and gathering resources to construct buildings worth varying amounts of points, but must always ensure that he feeds all his people on each turn. I introduced my daughter to the game when she was 10 and she took to it right away, beating us on her second play. Complexity: Medium.
15. Ticket To Ride: Full review. Actually a series of games, all working on the same theme: You receive certain routes across the map on the game board – U.S. or Europe, mostly – and have to collect enough train cards in the correct colors to complete those routes. But other players may have overlapping routes and the tracks can only accommodate so many trains. Like Dominion, it’s very simple to pick up, so while it’s not my favorite game to play, it’s my favorite game to bring or bring out when we’re with people who want to try a new game but either haven’t tried anything in the genre or aren’t up for a late night. I do recommend the 1910 Expansion< to anyone who gets the base Ticket to Ride game, as it has larger, easier-to-shuffle cards and offers more routes for greater replayability. I also own the Swiss and Nordic boards, which only play two to three players and involve more blocking than the U.S. and Europe games do, so I don’t recommend them. The iPad app, developed in-house, is among the best available. The newest expansion, France and The Old West, came out in the winter of 2018, with two new rules tweaks, one for each board. I’ve ranked all 18 Ticket to Ride boards for Ars Technica. There’s also a kids’ version, available exclusively at Target, with a separate app for that as well. Complexity: Low.
16. Splendor: Full review. A Spiel des Jahres nominee in 2014, Splendor has fast become a favorite in our house for its simple rules and balanced gameplay. My daughter, now eight, loves the game and is able to play at a level pretty close to the adults. It’s a simple game where players collect tokens to purchase cards from a 4×3 grid, and where purchased cards decrease the price of other cards. Players have to think long-term without ignoring short-term opportunities, and must compare the value of going for certain in-game bonuses against just plowing ahead with purchases to get the most valuable cards. The Splendor app, made by the team at Days of Wonder, is amazing, and is available for iOS, Android, and Steam. I also like the four-in-one expansion for the base game, Cities of Splendor. Complexity: Low.
17. Agamemnon. Full review. An absolute gem of an abstract two-player game, with very little luck and a lot of balancing between the good move now and holding a tile for a great move later. Players compete to control “threads of fate” – connected lines on a small hub-and-spoke board – by placing their tokens at the hubs, but there are three different types of lines and control of each is determined in its own way. The board has alternate layouts on the other side for infinite replayability, but the main board is elegant enough for many replays, because so much of the game involves outthinking your opponent. Complexity: Low.
18. Dominion: Full review. I’ve condensed two Dominion entries into one, since they all have the same basic mechanics, just new cards. The definitive deck-building game, with no actual board. Dominion’s base set – there are ten expansions now available, so you could spend a few hundred dollars on this – includes money cards, action cards, and victory points cards. Each player begins with seven money cards and three victory cards and, shuffling and drawing five cards from his own deck each turn, must add cards to his deck to allow him to have the most victory points when the last six-point victory card is purchased. I don’t think I have a multi-player game with a smaller learning curve, and the fact that the original set alone comes with 25 action cards but each game you play only includes 10 means it offers unparalleled replayability even before you add an expansion set. I’ll vouch for the Dominion: Intrigue expansion, which includes the base cards so it’s a standalone product, and the Seaside expansion, which is excellent and really changes the way the game plays, plus a standalone expansion further up this list. The base game is appropriate for players as young as six. Complexity: Low.
List Of Real Money Card Game Apps 2019
19. Small World: Full review. I think the D&D-style theme does this game a disservice – that’s all just artwork and titles, but the game itself requires some tough real-time decisions. Each player uses his chosen race to take over as many game spaces as possible, but the board is small and your supply of units runs short quickly, forcing you to consider putting your race into “decline” and choosing a new one. But when you choose a new one is affected by what you stand to lose by doing so, how well-defended your current civilization’s position is, and when your opponents are likely to go into decline. The iPad app is outstanding too. Complexity: Medium.
20. Battle Line: Full review. Reissued a few years ago as Schotten Totten – same game, different theme, better art, half the price right now. Among the best two-player games I’ve found, designed by Reiner Knizia, who is also behind a bunch of other games on this list. Each player tries to build formations on his/her side of the nine flags that stand in a line between him and his opponent; formations include three cards, and the various formation types resemble poker hands, with a straight flush of 10-9-8 in one color as the best formation available. Control three adjacent flags, or any five of the nine, and you win. But ten tactics cards allow you to bend the rules, by stealing a card your opponent has played, raising the bar for a specific flag from three cards to four, or playing one of two wild cards that can stand in for any card you can’t draw. There’s a fair amount of randomness involved, but playing nine formations at once with a seven-card hand allows you to diversify your risk. The iOS app is among the best as well. Complexity: Low.
21. Samurai: Full review. I bought the physical game after a few months of playing the app (which, as of November 2019, is still not updated for the newest iOS version), and it’s a great game – simple to learn, complex to play, works very well with two players, plays very differently with three or four as the board expands. Players compete to place their tiles on a map of Japan, divided into hexes, with the goal of controlling the hexes that contain buddha, farmer, or soldier tokens. Each player has hex tiles in his color, in various strengths, that exert control over the tokens they show; samurai tokens that affect all three token types; boats that sit off the shore and affect all token types; and special tokens that allow the reuse of an already-placed tile or allow the player to switch two tokens on the board. Trying to figure out where your opponent might screw you depending on what move you make is half the fun. Very high replayability too. Fantasy Flight updated the graphics, shrank the box, and reissued it in 2015. Complexity: Medium/low.
22. The Castles Of Burgundy: Full review. Castles of Burgundy is the rare game that works well across its range of player numbers, as it scales well from two to four players by altering the resources available on the board to suit the number of people pursuing them. Players compete to fill out their own boards of hexes with different terrain/building types (it’s like zoning) by competiting for tiles on a central board, some of which are hexes while others are goods to be stored and later shipped for bonuses. Dice determine which resources you can acquire, but you can also alter dice rolls by paying coins or using special buildings to change or ignore them. Setup is a little long, mostly because sorting cardboard tiles is annoying, but gameplay is only moderately complex – a little more than Stone Age, not close to Caylus or Agricola – and players get so many turns that it stays loose even though there’s a lot to do over the course of one game. I’ve played this online about 50 times, using all the different boards, even random setups that dramatically increase the challenge, and I’m not tired of it yet. Complexity: Medium.
23. Morels. Full review for Paste. A 2012 release, Morels is an easy-to-learn two-player card game with plenty of decision-making and a small amount of interaction with your opponent as you try to complete and “cook” sets of various mushroom types to earn points. The artwork is impressive and the game is very balanced, reminiscent of Lost Cities but with an extra tick of difficulty because of the use of an open, rolling display of cards from which players can choose. The app version is also very good. Complexity: Low.
24. Ingenious. Full app review. Ingenious is another Reiner Knizia title, a two- to four-person abstract strategy game that involves tile placement but where the final scoring compares each player’s lowest score across the six tile colors, rather than his/her highest. That alters gameplay substantially, often making the ideal play seem counterintuitive, and also requires each player to keep a more careful eye on what the other guy is doing. The app, which I owned and reviewed, is now gone from all app stores, because of a trademark dispute (and maybe more). Complexity: Low.
25. Azul. Full review. The best new family-strategy game of 2017 and winner of the Spiel des Jahres, Azul comes from the designer of Vikings and Asara, and folds some press-your-luck mechanics into a pattern-matching game where you collect mosaic tiles and try to transfer them from a storage area to your main 5×5 board. You can only put each tile type in each row once, and in each column once, and you lose points for tiles you can’t place at the end of each round. It’s quite addictive and moves fairly quickly, even when everyone starts playing chicken with the pile left in the middle of the table for whoever chooses last in the round. Complexity: Medium.
26. Cacao. Full review. A simpler Carcassonne? I guess every tile-laying game gets compared to the granddaddy of them all, but Cacao certainly looks similar, and you don’t get to see very far ahead in the tile supply in Cacao, although at least here you get a hand of three tiles from which to choose. But the Cacao board ends up very different, a checkerboard pattern of alternating tiles between players’ worker tiles and the game’s neutral tiles, which can give you cacao beans, let you sell beans for 2-4 gold pieces, give you access to water, give you partial control of a temple, or just hand you points. One key mechanic: if you collect any sun tiles, you can play a new tile on top of a tile you played earlier in the game, which is a great way to make a big ten-point play to steal the win. Complexity: Low.
27. New Bedford. Full review. I adore this game, which is about whaling, but somehow manages to sneak worker-placement and town-building into the game too, and figures out how to reward people who do certain things early without making the game a rout. Each player gets to add buildings to the central town of New Bedford (much nicer than the actual town is today), or can use one of the central buildings; you pay to use someone else’s building, and they can be worth victory points to their owners at game-end. The real meat of the game is the whaling though – you get two ships, and the more food you stock them with, the more turns they spend out at sea, which means more turns where you might grab the mighty sperm whale token from the bag. But you have to pay the dockworkers to keep each whale and score points for it. For a game that has this much depth, it plays remarkably fast – never more than 40 minutes for us with three players. Complexity: Medium.
28. Welcome To…Full review. I don’t know if it was the first flip-and-write title, but Welcome To… was the first one I encountered, and I think it’s spawned a few imitators because it’s so good. In each round, there are three cards from which players can choose, each showing a house number and one of six colors; each player chooses one of those three houses to fill in and takes the benefit of that particular color. The goal is to fill out as much of your own ‘neighborhood’ as you can, scoring points for clusters of adjacent houses, for providing green space, for adding pools to certain houses, and more. It’s simple to learn and has huge replay value. Complexity: Low.
29. Everdell. Full review. This was my #1 game of 2018, just edging out the legacy game Charterstone. Everdell takes the worker placement and resource collection mechanic of Stone Age and adds what amounts to a second game on top of that, where the buildings you build with those resources actually do stuff, rather than just giving you points. Players build out their tableaux of cards and gain power as the game progresses. Some cards grant you the right to build subsequent cards for free; some give resources, some give points bonuses, and some do other cool things. The artwork is stunning and the theme, forest creatures, is very kid-friendly. The game also crescendos through its “seasons,” with players going from two meeples in the spring to six by game-end, so that no one can get too big of a lead in the early going and new players get time to learn the rhythm. It’s quite a brilliant design, and consistently plays in under an hour. Complexity: Medium-low.
30. Gizmos. Full review. Phil Walker-Harding’s engine-builder plays very quickly for a game of this depth, and doesn’t skimp on the visual appeal – the ‘energy tokens’ you’ll collect to buy more cards are colored marbles, and they’re dispensed by what looks like a cardboard gumball machine. The engine-building aspect is a real winner, though, as it’s very easy to grasp how you’ll gain things from certain cards and how to daisy-chain them into very powerful engines before the game ends. Complexity: Medium-low.
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