2024’s Rollicking Year Continues. In this piece, we look at some of the great games to come out between April and June of 2024, covering several different genres, because why limit yourself to one corner of this amazing hobby when there’s so much good fun out there to enjoy? Here are the best games of Q2
Robin Hood Fights a Duel, No Tights in Sight
For gamers of a certain bent, GMT’s COIN (COunter INsurgency) series has long been an ideal asymmetric battleground. Divergent win conditions, card-driven gameplay, and a chance to dig into the meaty character of your faction in games like Fire in the Lake, Cuba Libre, and Pendragon make COIN great fun for folks who like things a little different.
A Gest of Robin Hood (Fred Serval) streamlines and translates the COIN system (here called the Irregular Conflicts Series) from a four to five player affair into a two-player, one-to-two hour long duel. You’ll have Robin Hood on one side and the Sheriff of Nottingham on the other, chasing each other with hidden movement mechanics.
As Robin Hood, you’ll be trying to organize peasant revolts and rob the Sheriff (and King John) of his gold. Your Merry Men will assist, plotting those raids
and carrying them out with the help of some dice. The Sheriff’s goal is just as clear: get that gold to the king and let Robin rot in a prison cell where he belongs.
Every turn offers you a simple choice between playing cards or doing a simple action, like recruiting more Merry Men or raiding to capture the same. Instant wins (and losses) can happen, something that might sour a longer affair but that serve as storytelling juice for a game as short as this one. It also makes flubbing a key dice roll less painful: random luck hasn’t cost you the next three hours of your life, as Robin’s failed robbery is all played out by lunch time.
Where A Gest of Robin Hood shines is in that all-important gateway role, bridging your favorite playing partner from the familiar Euro or dungeon-crawl environs into wargaming’s rich world. The rules, mechanisms, and strategies here aren’t simple, but don’t require crunching a hundred tables or parsing COIN’s thornier tangles. Instead, you’ll chase each other about the woods, having a blast while building a foundation for a whole new gaming world to enjoy.
Ancient Rome and Wargaming, The Dynamic Duo Returns
While technically a 2023 crowdfunding title, Onus! Traianus (Luis Álvaro Hernández) received its retail release recently and deserves more notice. A tactical wargame set in the Roman world, Onus! Traianus offers the environmentally friendly twist on plastic miniatures by turning them all into cards instead. You’ll be pushing these cards around playmat (or tabletop) battlefields, wheeling your cavalry around in flanking attacks, pushing the center with your barbarian hordes, or setting your javelins up front for a thinning strike.
This is a mass battle game, where you’ll have full armies taking part in historical battles, specifically during the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, during the reigns of Roman Emperors Hadrian and Trajan. Gameplay involves dice, unique abilities, morale, on-field generals, and a surfeit of unit traits that capture the variety of the ancient battlefield.
What really drives the turn-by-turn action, though, are the cards in your hand and the excruciating decisions they present. At the top of each card are activation options to spend on your turn, like all your mounted units or your archers. At the bottom are events you can use during combat to add bonuses. 
Playing a card for one removes it for the other, so you’ll have to constantly wage which way to go. As a way to represent the difficulty of managing armies in that era, the card activation mechanic meshes theme with good gameplay, while also helping to keep turns shorter in battles with huge numbers of units.
And those grand clashes are doable without the investment a miniatures game requires. You could get Onus! Traianus and all its expansions for less than the cost of a single faction army in a larger miniatures wargame, no painting or assembly needed. Plus, war elephants. Who doesn’t like war elephants?
Still, what brings Onus! Traianus into its own (for me, anyway) are the campaign and scenario books, letting you dive into ancient-era campaigns complete with ongoing choices as you and an opponent march from conflict to conflict.
If you’ve an interest in Roman military history and the many varied factions that made up their world, Onus! Traianus is your gateway to a grand adventure.
Rebuilding History With Garphill Games
Continuing the card play + worker placement trend is Ezra and Nehemiah (S J Macdonald, Shem Phillips), with a similar feel to titles like Lost Ruins of Arnak and Dune: Imperium to ancient history. You and your other players will leverage a ten card deck apiece over three rounds, each containing six turns, to rebuild the city of Jerusalem. There’s a bevy of resources to manage and tight competition for spaces that provide powerful rewards like extra workers or a bonus card drawn in hand.
Like Garphill Games’ earlier titles, including the West Kingdom series, careful planning yields strong rewards, but the worker placement here is tight enough
for other players to muck up your plans. Ezra and Nehemiah avoids the ‘we’re all playing in a big sandbox’ trap without direct, knives-out interaction, keeping everyone at the table engaged yet happy.
This tight-knit gameplay combines with the literal build-up of the destroyed city, as pristine wall tiles cover up damaged versions beneath, battered gates are fortified anew, and resources begin to flourish. The game itself tells a story beyond the victory points, a neat touch that adds to much to the table appeal, critically important in a genre with so much competition.
Ezra and Nehemiah isn’t a simple game. High scores all but require repeat plays to learn the ins and outs of your character’s deck to plan across rounds. This depth makes Ezra and Nehemiah replayable time and time again, but newcomers to Garphill Games’ style might be better served with Architects of the West Kingdom as a warm-up. For those who’ve enjoyed the South Tigris series, though, this is a natural next step and worth adding to your collection.
Pickup And Deliver, With Worms
The Dune setting is home to some great board games, but none, so far as I can remember, let you ride the worms to deliver much-needed goods for profit. Sand (Ariel Di Costanzo, Javier Pelizzari) does exactly that, ditching Dune’s politics and warfare to offer pick-up and deliver instead.
Sand scaffolds its premise with a broad array of interrelated mechanisms, including dice-driven actions, unlocked abilities through successful deliveries, and . 
. . Composing songs? (They’ll increase your fame, getting you extra cash for your deliveries). All this puts an emphasis on strategy, with strong play making the most of limited actions.
Those actions come in packs of three, each set delivered in a similar trio of morning, day, and night, to grant a total of nine actions per round. After each round, you’ll toss out another objective-granting Mission card, with the game ending when that deck empties. Every action you take is powered by a colored dice, with higher numbers boosting their action to better results. While there’s some ability to adjust your roll, leaning into the luck factor will help you appreciate Sand and reduce the impact of dreaded analysis paralysis.
Sand matches its chewy gameplay with a great production. Dual-layered player boards make tracking actions, resources, and scoring easy. The vibrant art brings Sand’s world to life, with colors popping across the board and chunky tokens. Solid player aids reference pages in the rulebook if more detail is desired.
If there’s a knock against Sand, it comes with the rulebook, which is a tad disorganized for a game with this many moving pieces. There are, however, numerous how-to-play videos and articles out there to clean up any confusing bits, letting you get right to riding your worm and earning that sweet, sweet cash.
A Great Year for Boardgaming
So far, 2024’s proving another banner year for board games across virtually all genres. It’s kinda what you’d expect with the hobby expanding, and it’s part of what makes writing these pieces so rewarding. There’s so many neat, creative experiences to dive into – even just with these, you have Robin Hood and his Merry Men blended into a tense, engaging wargame, sandworms used as delivery drivers, and two dramatically different and unique looks at ancient history. It’s an embarrassment of riches, y’all.
As ever, titles like these go in and out of stock frequently, so make sure to leverage that ‘Want List’ and get notified when a game you want comes back into the store. Mine just keeps getting bigger and bigger…
