Cascadia (led by Rachel P)  2022 Randy Flynn designed tile-laying and token-drafting puzzle game featuring the habitats and wildlife of the Pacific Northwest that won the 2022 SdJ. Players take turns building out their own terrain area and populating it with wildlife. Players start with three hexagonal habitat tiles (with the five types of habitat in the game), and on a turn they choose a new habitat tile that’s paired with a wildlife token, then place that tile adjacent to their other ones and place the wildlife token on an appropriate habitat. (Each tile depicts 1-3 types of wildlife from the five types in the game, and players can place at most one round wooden token on a habitat.) Four tiles are on display, with each tile being paired at random with a wildlife token, so players must make the best of what’s available — unless they have a nature token to spend, so that they can pick their choice of terrain and wildlife. Each wildlife type scores VPs differently. Players score VPs for both wildlife types and for their largest contiguous terrain types – with a bonus if their group is larger than the other player’s.

Cities

 (led by Sean)  2024 drafting collaboration between prolific Australian designer, Phil Walker-Harding and Bostonian Dr Steve Finn. The game is played over eight rounds. Each round, players use their workers to collect 1 scoring card, 1 city tile, 1-2 feature tiles, and 2-4 building pieces. City tiles are made up of park spaces, water spaces, and building spaces. Building pieces are placed on building spaces of the same color to form buildings, which can be 1-4 stories high. Whenever a player fulfills an achievement, they place one of their wooden rings on the achievement board. At the end of the game, players add up the points they have gained from all of their scoring cards and achievements. We played in the New York City setting, with public rewards for skyscrapers and Central Park.