I’m continuing my alphabetical look at my game shelves with a few favorite games that start with “L” in my collection.
Little Circuses
In Little Circuses, players are laying tiles representing attractions in a circus that’s visiting different cities. They spend several “days” in each city. On full days, they’ll be able to build a tile and activate an attraction, but on half days they’ll have to choose one or the other. Attractions are activated by moving a spotlight token from one tile to an adjacent one, then taking the actions depicted at the bottom of the tile. However, the previous tile becomes closed until your circus moves to a new city. The goal is to thrill your audiences and, well, get the most points, of course.
I really enjoy puzzling out the best way to lay out my circus tiles to ensure that I don’t have to revisit a closed tile (and get no actions) before the next city. But also figuring out how to make that path make sense — attracting new visitors, entertaining them, and then kicking them out for points or coins in that order. Fair warning: the game was printed with a mistake in the rulebook and the player’s starting boards, so this would not be a top game for me if we hadn’t found the errata.
The LOOP
The LOOP is a cooperative game where players take on the role of time agents sent to repair the timeline and destroy Dr. Faux and his duplicates. The cadence of the game follows many co-ops where bad things happen at the beginning of a player’s turn, then the player takes actions to mitigate the bad things and try to achieve goals, and finally there’s some clean-up before the next player’s turn. One unique thing is that you have a chance to re-use cards in your hand by “looping” (thus the name). Oh and there’s a cube tower!
Even with the “normal” co-op trappings, I love The LOOP. It’s a tense game where you need to keep the time rifts and duplicates in check while also trying to complete goals like making a loop in Dr. Faux’s era or surrounding him on a turn. The looping mechanism is really clever. Not all cards can be looped, but when you loop, you’ll reset all the cards of a “suit” of your choice. This means that you can end up re-using ALL the cards in your hand, and those turns feel so good. I also love the art on the cards, which has a lot of humor.
Lost Ruins of Arnak
In Lost Ruins of Arnak, players are exploring an island with ancient ruins and terrifying guardians. It’s a deck-building game where the cards can be used for their ability or for their travel value. As you place out your archeologists, they’ll get resources that can help you buy new cards, overcome guardians, and move up a research track.
I’ve found that I quite enjoy deck-building games that use the cards to interact with a board, like this (or Clank, as another example). This is another game that at the end of the first round you wonder how you’re going to get anything done in the game, but then by the end you’re chaining things together and you’ve make way more progress than you though possible. It’s just a satisfying experience.
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What are your favorite games that start with the letter “L”? Or is there one from my list that you love or are hoping to try? Let me know in the comments!