Innovation (4th Edition)

I'm hard-pressed to think of a game that packs more game in such an affordable little box. Innovation is fantastic--unpredictable, chaotic, creative--and yes, swingy. After dozens of plays I still often can't tell whether a loss or win was down to my skill or lack-of. But I do feel I'm getting better, and more importantly: I'm not sure there's another game in my collection that I enjoy more when losing.

Enough said.

Carl Chudyk master of multi use cards best game still in print

Innovation is fantastic. There's a lot of game here, and what may seem like an unbalanced luckfest at first reveals itself over multiple plays to have plenty of depth and rewarding tactical play--at least when you play at two players. Adding more players makes the game state more chaotic and difficult to keep track of, and can even wildly change how good some of the card abilities are; luckily, the included team mode variant cleans up a lot of the chaos. This game is surprising and unique, and even after 200 plays the base game keeps spitting out card combinations that surprise me.

Also it's basically a heavily abstracted civ-building game that fits in your pocket and this is a major plus.

In all, while I would absolutely say Innovation is not for everyone, every board gamer should definitely give it a few tries since there's really nothing else quite like a game designed by Carl Chudyk.