2024 EOFY Toy Sale – Board Game Gift Guide
It’s nearly the end of June, and that can only mean one thing – End of Financial Year Sales! The time of year when most Big Box retailers are rushing toys out the door, to be stuffed in cupboards and garages, left to wait until the end of December when a Coca Cola marketing device surreptitiously leaves them under some blinking LED’s and sparser-every-year tinsel (or is that just my house?).
Lo and behold, the more erudite stores like JB Hi-Fi, Big W, Kmart and even Targét are offering some great deals on Board games in a bid to bring friends, families & a frustratingly worded rulebook together around a table, combating the ever-increasing feelings of anxiety and isolation brought about by the scourge of social media and general 2024 vibes. Let Player2 help you sort the wheat from the mostly recyclable cardboard chaff with this, our EOFY Board Game Gift Guide!
Herd Mentality – 2-20 Players
We’ve sung the praises of Herd Mentality before, but it really shines as a large player count party game across a wide age range. Kids, parents and grandparents alike can have fun trying to ally themselves on a particular answer, because as the title suggests, only the majority answer to a question will score a point. Listing the Best-to-Worst Australian Fast-Food Chains (Shoutout Red Rooster, always the W.O.A.T!) and screaming through your eyes at the people around the table to get it right never gets old. The Mini Version is especially handy for travel, and the Moosic and Moovies version is tailored to those more keen to debate pop culture.
Order a copy of Herd Mentality here and Player2 will keep the lights on another few months!
Chronicles of Avel – 1-4 Players
A tile-flipping, dice-chucking adventure game that’s easy enough for junior primary schoolers to grasp, Chronicles of Avel also has enough going for it to keep older players (and parents!) invested too. With gorgeous components and plenty of replayability, Chronicles of Avel allows 1-4 adventurers to journey across a mysterious landscape in search of precious gear, defeating monsters and building up their cities defences just in time to hold back The Beast, a fearsome foe that flips combat and tile exploration around to a tower defence game in the last few rounds. Great aesthetics and room for creativity with customizable character art makes this a great title for anyone with a budding adventurer in the house. The included components make even naming your character possible via dice roll, so even players who aren’t all about creativity or are indecisive can get underway with a minimum of fuss. A recent expansion, Chronicles of Avel: New Adventures takes things even further with new foes and locations to explore.
Take your friends and family on an adventure by picking up Chronicles of Avel today!
6 nimmt! – 2-10 Players
A perennial favourite, 6 nimmt just celebrated its 30th anniversary and hasn’t lost any lustre over the years. Playing up to 10, it combines some sound mathematically based reasoning with good old fashioned, totally BS luck which tend to make up some of the most exciting moments in large-group boardgaming. The game itself gets wilder the more players you add with the full count of 10 seeing swings of fortune multiple times in a round. While it may take a round or two for some players to wrap their heads around, even the sorest loser is keen for a second chance at victory in 6 nimmt! The new 30th anniversary edition of the game also includes rules for solo play, co-op play and an array of previous promo and expansion cards to switch the gameplay up even further!
No Thanks! – 3-7 Players
While the box itself may not look like much, No Thanks! is a modern classic that plays up to 7 and always elicits a ‘One more game!’ response from any new players I introduce it to. The premise is simple, with players passing around a single card from the deck and deciding if they’d like to take it, or say No Thanks! and pass it on to the next player. The catch is, every pass costs you a chit placed onto the card, and these are limited – the only way to get more chits is to take cards others have passed on. High numbers are bad, and low numbers are good in No Thanks!, so when the 34 card – highest in the deck – is being passed around, it can end up with a lot of chits on it. Watching people greedily calculate whether it’s worth the hit is a blast, as is the moment when someone is out of chits and has no choice but to take the card in front of them. Short and sharp, No Thanks! should be on every game shelf in 2024.
Bohnanza – 3-5 Players
Beans may not be the most exciting theme you’ve ever heard of for a card game, but Bohnanza defies such assumptions. From famed designer Uwe Rosenberg, 3-5 players (or up to 7 depending on the edition you purchase) will plant, harvest and trade beans ruthlessly to make the most money before the draw deck runs out a third time. Presumably inspiring such other excellent card games as Scout and Wind the Film!, Bohnanza prevents players from rearranging their cards in hand at any time – new bean cards always go at the back, and bean cards must be always planted from the front every turn. Fields can only contain a single type of bean and with only two fields to work with, players will be trading furiously from the get-go to maximise their profits rather than strip their fields prematurely because higher yields equals higher dollarydoos. Capitalism may be a drag, but desperately pleading for others to take the useless beans you just drew before they ruin your future as a bean farming magnate has never been so fun!
Player2 can afford to exist on more than just beans if you help yourself to a copy of Bohnanza!
The Crew: Mission Deep Sea – 2-5 Players
Trick-taking has undergone a bit of a renaissance in the past decade due to the success of The Crew and a number of designs coming out of Japan. A style of game familiar to many due to their roots in many regional and traditional card games like Spades, Hearts, Euchre and Bridge, The Crew upends many of the normal aspects of the genre by being a co-operative game in which players work together to complete missions under strict communication rules. Wordlessly smashing through every player’s mission requirement in short order is an amazing feeling and one that will work better for those less interested in competitive play. There are two versions of The Crew currently available with Mission Deep Sea the superior of the two, but Quest for Planet Nine is a good place to start if you have a feeling you’ll eventually end up with both, as it is harder to go back to. For those wanting a similar experience with a different theme and a touch of deduction, the spy shenanigans of Inside Job might suffice.
Archeos Society – 2-6 Players
Unfairly maligned due to the ongoing love for its Out-of-Print predecessor Ethnos, Archeos Society is an excellent game that manages to sing at every player count it offers. Simple to pick-up gameplay – draw a card or put down a set of cards – has a few twists that will keep players engaged the entire time as they venture out on expeditions across six archeological sites in search of the most valuable treasure of all, victory points. An array of different modules and decks included in the box means there is plenty to squeeze out of the game from the get-go. Lovely art from John McCambridge rounds out excellent production from publisher Space Cowboys with an included tuckbox for tokens and player pieces alongside a built-in card divider to keep the various sets of cards separated and ensuring the game can get to the table quicker.
Thanks to VR Distribution and Big Potato Games for supplying Player2 with some of the titles featured in this article. Others were purchased by the writer, much to the continued chagrin of his friends and family.
