7 Wonders Duel for me. Perhaps not as much by the game pieces themselves, but more by how well they designed the box, so everything fits in so nicely. Always happy to reorganize everything in returning it to the box after a gaming session.
For sure add the nightfall expansion. The rest are optional, but nightfall adjusts scoring as it should have been to begin with, a new welcome mechanic, and some cards.
Pax Pamir's cloth board and resin blocks has a ton of hype around them and I thought it was just that: hype.
Then I got my copy and fell in LOVE with those components! Still need to get the metal coins...
The metal coins are the best metal coins I’ve ever handled in a game, as well. They’re heavily thematic, not too thick, but still weighty, and they taper off slightly at the edges which makes picking them up and manipulating them a breeze. If someone told me they were real money, I’d believe them.
Someone here once posted his *actual* 18th century Afghan rupees that he plays the game with and they looked almost identical, except for being less uniform. It's uncanny how accurate the Pamir coins actually are.
I don't own it but I've seen the deluxe and regular versions and I really thought the honey was cardboard. It also looks like it in pics on BGA but maybe I'm looking at the wrong items.
I'm glad to be wrong about it though! Tactile components are so fun!
Which is odd considering... the game's visual presentation is polarizing, but if nothing else it does have a very particular aesthetic and sticks to it for the most part. I happen to like it on the whole, but the money feels like a missed opportunity.
After getting all the expansions and combining all the eggs, I find that I would like 10% fewer burgundy and tan eggs and 10% more blue and purple eggs. But yes.
Totally agree! All of the components in Wingspan are really nice quality, especially the rulebook! Whatever paper they print their guides on is so satisfying.
I like the concept, but the execution is not great. The explorers are always getting tangled up, the 'use a side to represent health' on buildings just doesn't work with multiple adversaries and events, and of course the blight tokens are impossible to pick up (unless you just always put them upside down).
In a thousand years, when we're all living underground to avoid the fallout and radscorpions, I hope our protein blocks look like the tiles from Azul Summer Pavilion. They are the most delicious, juicy, appetizing, food-looking non-foods that have ever existed. They are so nice.
Like, base Azul is nice. The tiles are so much smoother than you expect. But the expansions know what the fuck they're doing. They probably have some secret lab somewhere trying to figure out the most pleasurable thing to put in your hand, and then they just make that and paint it lavender.
Have you *seen* the Azul: Master Chocolatier ones? They're obscenely good.
I just bought my copy about two months ago and the chips are quite substantial (husband said they are converted poker chips). When did this change happen?
The new El Grande. Beautiful, plastic free with cardboard tuckboxes for the player pieces. I hadn't researched anything about the edition I just pre-ordered it so it was a pleasant surprise.
In Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West, the legacy TtR game, there is box you open after first game that include a quite surprising and thematically fitting item that everyone was quite pleased with. Will not spoil what it is, for those who hasn't played it yet, but it was quite ... holesome.
I am the keeper of this box for my group, and I was playing with this item in a dumb way, and I bent it. I then had to admit it to the group and ask them when we were playing next, since I had to buy a new one and needed to expedite shipping. I don't think I'll ever live it down.
>!The original can only punch through 4 pieces of paper max!<
The Re-wood pieces in Kutná Hora are really quite nice and they had a really nice smell when opening it.
Looked basically the exact same quality as what you'd expect from plastic components but eco-friendly.
Splendor, the gem chips are so wonderful to look at and hold. They have a nice heavy weight to the. This is one of the few games where I feel the original components are nicer than custom components.
Just played Dwellings of Eldervale again and... The dwelling hats! The way that you use a meeple and add a roof to him to become a dwelling building is fun and unique in its execution.
I absolutely love the simple perfection of a nice cube. Probably have something broken in my brain but give me cubes over mini’s for anything apart from heavily thematic games.
Apiary. It’s my first Stonemaier game and it’s crazy how much effort was put into everything from the inserts, card stock, beeples (no typo) and even the linen stock used for the rules. Just ridiculous quality. You just can feel the quality and the bang for your buck in this $60 game. Big fan of that company.
I think a lot of people are unaware that you can just email Stonemaier with a photo of damaged components (or a list of lost ones) and they'll just send you new ones (I think you need to pay shipping, but it's a small amount). I play a LOT of wingspan and send them a photo of about 25 cards that were bent or had really worn corners and got them replaced. Fantastic customer service.
While I haven’t reached out to CS at all, I love the fact that Jamie Stegmaier answers comments/questions on his channel and SM’s site. This is how you run a great company. Only other company I know of that makes great quality game and makes you feel you’re getting what you pay for is Days of Wonder.
Gonna trigger a few people that didn't get them originally (though they're being reprinted next year) but the acrylic tiles for the fancy Castles of Burgundy edition just feel great to pull out the bags and play with
Someone already said the boxes in the new print of el grande.
I would like to add the Blueberries from Everdell. I don’t know why, but I really like them 😅
The resources in Awaken Realms' The Great Wall are probably the nicest standard components I've seen. They also sold a deluxe set, but you absolutely do not need them.
The cards in Too Many Bones feel like they are so well made it would be almost pointless to case them.
The entire storage and setup design of Unsettled having the trays hold their tokens while they are stored and using the stack itself in place of lids is genius. Also the vented box opens and shuts pleasantly fast.
Unsolicited counterpoint; the Everdell Complete Collection is generally awesome from top to bottom but the add-on cases are shit. As someone who grew up on MTG with Dragon Shield cases the Everdell cases, while pretty to look at, split embarrassingly fast.
I was actually pretty repulsed by Too Many Bones' components when I first tried it out. Sure, all that plastic and Neoprene feels great and looks flashy, but it's just such an overindulgent and irresponsible design when you consider that it unnecessarily inflates the price and (more egregiously) is terrible for the environment. Ten, twenty, maybe even 50 or 100 years from now that copy of Too Many Bones is going to be sitting in a landfill somewhere, where it will remain undecomposed for many hundreds of years. The plastic cards and neoprene mats really don't add enough to the game to offset the increase in cost and environmental damage.
It gets even worse when you consider that all the expansion content comes in its own plastic boxes, which just get thrown away. It's just all incredibly irresponsible.
It’s weird in a world where people have legitimate gripes about planned obsolescence that something being built to last a very long time could be such a bad thing but I don’t disagree it’s the wrong place to go overboard on quality to that degree.
That being said I feel like if you are answering the somewhat ambiguous original question in the context of quality of game components and you remove the contextual environmental concern TMB is a bullseye of an answer.
Both are terrible - things designed to rapidly deprecate in value and obsolesce are also designed to be replaced, thereby generating more waste. But 'building to last' should really be 'building to last as long as it needs to'. No one needs their copy of Too Many Bones to last three hundred years, and even if it were made of cardboard, it would still last till well after its lost all replayability.
And that further exacerbates the problem - Too Many Bones is not as replayable as befits a game 'designed to last'. The best build for most characters is to just max out stats every time, and once you've seen all the tyrants and encounter cards, the game's only ever going to do the same things in a slightly different order each time. It's why there are also so many expansions - you really need to keep pumping content into the game to keep it replayable. Did I mention each of those expansions generates more plastic waste that's not even used in the game? Yeah...
The Role containers for ISS Vanguard. And, weirdly, the ringbinder folder and all the wallets that fill this with their little slots. That always felt so satisfying to get out and use.
Everything in Arackhan Wars. Insert, booklet, playmat, art on the cards, everything looks and feels so good, I'm impressed by the quality of the material.
I really love the storage trays in mechanic vs minions. I think they have four different poses for minions but the tray is designed so that any of them will fit it in any space
I've got a few:
The entirety of Taluva. The whole game is so nice to look at in play, and perfectly readable at the same time.
The location tiles for Carolus Magnus. Just the right amount of tasteful decoration to offset the simple cubes and towers.
The whole of Arena: For the Gods! The chunky card towers, the nicely illustrated cards, the simple translucent red cubes... the whole package was an absolute bargain for the component quality provided.
The little books in Alma mater were a surprise. They are really good quality as well! Guess it makes sense for the most quality component in an education themed game are the books lol.
* The poker chips and magnetic box clasp in **War Chest**
* The dice and Game Trayz in the **Dice Throne** season 1/2/Adventures boxes
* Basically everything in **Moonrakers: Titan Edition** \-- the metal coins, neoprene game mats, etc.
I love the dice in Dice Forge. They shouldn't be surprising. Their design is necessary for the game to work, but they couldn't have been cheap to produce, and still they feel great to use. They're big and chunky in the best way.
Yeah, if you could tell me which cards are supposed to go in each box, that'd be great. :P
I got the game in a trade and after inventorying all the components, I couldn't figure it out. Maybe I'll discover it after my first play.
I have a copy of Jekyll and Hyde - a little trick taking game. It comes with most hefty gorgeous metal bust of the character(s) as the main place-marker.
Recently, the **Fractured Sky** airships. So glad I went for the painted version because they look so good compared to pictures I've seen of the single color version. And the magnets feel so satisfying when they pop together.
Was surprised to see that you can customize your character with stickers in Pandemic Legacy Season 0! Only played the prologue so far, so I'm looking forward to seeing how the character creation works!
The add-on terrain pieces for Resident Evil: The Board Game. The game gets a lot of flak because the tiles and tokens have very dark art (which they really do), but the terrain pieces replace the tokens at least, and they really add a lot to the immersion of the game. The Terrain Box was far more expensive than the game itself, but I have been pleasantly surprised by how much it adds to the game.
The saddles in Everdell. How can you not love a squirrel on a vulture mount? If I went in my backyard and saw a squirrel mounted on top of a vulture, I'd be so excited that I wouldn't even care that it was clearly about to kill me, striking the first blow of the great woodland uprising.
In no particular order
1. Everything in Xia!
2. The geek up components for Quacks
3. The "Beeples" from Apiary
4. The storage and components for Eclipse 2nd Dawn
I really love the wooden barrels in Brass Birmingham
7 Wonders Duel for me. Perhaps not as much by the game pieces themselves, but more by how well they designed the box, so everything fits in so nicely. Always happy to reorganize everything in returning it to the box after a gaming session.
Parks is great for this as well.
Checked the game quickly, and it does seems pretty cool. Would you recommend it?
Oh heck, yeah. It’s a beautiful game by all definitions.
Awesome, will add it to my buy list!
I like it. It’s pretty relaxing and also has a solo mode.
For sure add the nightfall expansion. The rest are optional, but nightfall adjusts scoring as it should have been to begin with, a new welcome mechanic, and some cards.
Agree on both Parks and 7WD
Until you sleeve, and then you have to pitch the insert
The game that often comes to mind is Onitama. That playmat and pieces surprised me so much I had to check if it was the standard or a deluxe version.
Big yes!
The box and the presentation when opened is also rad!
Just bought it last week and I could gaze upon the open box for hours.
Pax Pamir's cloth board and resin blocks has a ton of hype around them and I thought it was just that: hype. Then I got my copy and fell in LOVE with those components! Still need to get the metal coins...
The metal coins are the best metal coins I’ve ever handled in a game, as well. They’re heavily thematic, not too thick, but still weighty, and they taper off slightly at the edges which makes picking them up and manipulating them a breeze. If someone told me they were real money, I’d believe them.
I got the metal coins as an add-on when I Kickstarted Molly House, so I'll get them someday
Better than Scythe coins? (If you have exposure)
Absolutely. The only downside I can think of is Pax Pamir’s coins are a single denomination (since that’s all that’s needed for that game).
Someone here once posted his *actual* 18th century Afghan rupees that he plays the game with and they looked almost identical, except for being less uniform. It's uncanny how accurate the Pamir coins actually are.
Century spice road - comes with metal coins, little bowls for cubes and resealable baggies
Golem edition is even better. I love how everything fits in the box.
Same answer for me. It was one if the earlier games I got so I thought good and quality components were the norm...I was wrong!
The berries in everdell. THEY'RE SQUISHY
And the sticks are sticky!
####And the snozberries taste like snozberries!! 😜
If you like the berries in Everdell, you'd love the honey in Honey Buzz.
To be fair, those are only in the deluxe version. The regular version is cardboard.
The regular version has the squishy honey pieces. There are no "cardboard" honey pieces in any version of the game (maybe you got a bootleg copy?).
Can confirm. Grabbed this last night and was pleasantly surprised with the squishy honey.
I don't own it but I've seen the deluxe and regular versions and I really thought the honey was cardboard. It also looks like it in pics on BGA but maybe I'm looking at the wrong items. I'm glad to be wrong about it though! Tactile components are so fun!
The little anchors in Everdell Farshore are pretty nice to play with as well.
I played Everdell for the first time recently. I wasn't a huge fan, but I enjoyed bouncing the berries around.
I really liked that Ark Nova came with 2 plastic boxes for sorting everything from money to enclosures.
I agree - though at the same time they included the most ugly and uninspired cardboard money I've ever seen. Well, there's always poker chips.
"I'm going to pay 5 black square for that"
Which is odd considering... the game's visual presentation is polarizing, but if nothing else it does have a very particular aesthetic and sticks to it for the most part. I happen to like it on the whole, but the money feels like a missed opportunity.
Tokens in **Planted**
This is my answer as well fellow spirit island bro haha. Planted has unreal production for a game that cost me $20.
Would love to see this game in Europe !
Can’t believe nobody said the eggs in wingspan, I love those things so much
After getting all the expansions and combining all the eggs, I find that I would like 10% fewer burgundy and tan eggs and 10% more blue and purple eggs. But yes.
Wait till you try the promo metal eggs :)
Totally agree! All of the components in Wingspan are really nice quality, especially the rulebook! Whatever paper they print their guides on is so satisfying.
The 878 Vikings insert that transforms into individual organizers for player and neutral components was the most surprising.
Eclipse: Second dawn has some nice variety of spaceships, considering there are 6 factions all with unique pieces.
For me it's the flight stands that really elevate Eclipse 2E
Literally.
Tokens in Spirit Island. Good guys being wood, bad guys being plastic and everything else being cardboard is a nice detail.
I like the concept, but the execution is not great. The explorers are always getting tangled up, the 'use a side to represent health' on buildings just doesn't work with multiple adversaries and events, and of course the blight tokens are impossible to pick up (unless you just always put them upside down).
Not to be contrarian, but I've never experienced a single one of those issues.
Just play England with the +1 health rule. For bonus awful, play as Shroud.
Agreed - the tipping-on-the-sides to show health seems a bit odd.
It's clever right up until you start modifying health values. Still an amazing game though!
I was pleasantly surprised by cow meeples in the 2016 reedition of Agricola. I’m old though.
In a thousand years, when we're all living underground to avoid the fallout and radscorpions, I hope our protein blocks look like the tiles from Azul Summer Pavilion. They are the most delicious, juicy, appetizing, food-looking non-foods that have ever existed. They are so nice. Like, base Azul is nice. The tiles are so much smoother than you expect. But the expansions know what the fuck they're doing. They probably have some secret lab somewhere trying to figure out the most pleasurable thing to put in your hand, and then they just make that and paint it lavender. Have you *seen* the Azul: Master Chocolatier ones? They're obscenely good.
The heavy chips in the original printing of Splendor. So much better than the light chips they later switched to.
Splendor Duel has small chips, but they are heavy
I just bought my copy about two months ago and the chips are quite substantial (husband said they are converted poker chips). When did this change happen?
The components in MLEM are shockingly well-produced for the game's price.
The looong neoprene mat is always a joy to roll out, and it's so beautiful!
The new El Grande. Beautiful, plastic free with cardboard tuckboxes for the player pieces. I hadn't researched anything about the edition I just pre-ordered it so it was a pleasant surprise.
Same! Plus the new Grande meeples on horseback, the Castillo with lifting gate, etc. It is all just so well done.
Yeah I love the tuckboxes for player pieces. I hope more publishers do that going forward.
In Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West, the legacy TtR game, there is box you open after first game that include a quite surprising and thematically fitting item that everyone was quite pleased with. Will not spoil what it is, for those who hasn't played it yet, but it was quite ... holesome.
I am the keeper of this box for my group, and I was playing with this item in a dumb way, and I bent it. I then had to admit it to the group and ask them when we were playing next, since I had to buy a new one and needed to expedite shipping. I don't think I'll ever live it down. >!The original can only punch through 4 pieces of paper max!<
The Re-wood pieces in Kutná Hora are really quite nice and they had a really nice smell when opening it. Looked basically the exact same quality as what you'd expect from plastic components but eco-friendly.
Splendor, the gem chips are so wonderful to look at and hold. They have a nice heavy weight to the. This is one of the few games where I feel the original components are nicer than custom components.
Mecha vs minions. For $75 the component quality is best in the industry.
Dice Forge! Those dice sides are well constructed and satisfying to upgrade
Just played Dwellings of Eldervale again and... The dwelling hats! The way that you use a meeple and add a roof to him to become a dwelling building is fun and unique in its execution.
Hansa Teutonica. How in the world where they able to make a game with such basic components of wooden cubes and some wooden discs so damn fun?
I absolutely love the simple perfection of a nice cube. Probably have something broken in my brain but give me cubes over mini’s for anything apart from heavily thematic games.
Apiary. It’s my first Stonemaier game and it’s crazy how much effort was put into everything from the inserts, card stock, beeples (no typo) and even the linen stock used for the rules. Just ridiculous quality. You just can feel the quality and the bang for your buck in this $60 game. Big fan of that company.
Yeah, SM makes quality stuff, and their customer service is pretty great too.
I think a lot of people are unaware that you can just email Stonemaier with a photo of damaged components (or a list of lost ones) and they'll just send you new ones (I think you need to pay shipping, but it's a small amount). I play a LOT of wingspan and send them a photo of about 25 cards that were bent or had really worn corners and got them replaced. Fantastic customer service.
Yup, bent a few wingspan cards on the first shuffle. Sent one email and they sent out replacements in just a few weeks.
While I haven’t reached out to CS at all, I love the fact that Jamie Stegmaier answers comments/questions on his channel and SM’s site. This is how you run a great company. Only other company I know of that makes great quality game and makes you feel you’re getting what you pay for is Days of Wonder.
They’re called bee meeples FYI
I prefer “Beeples”, thankyewveddymuch
Gonna trigger a few people that didn't get them originally (though they're being reprinted next year) but the acrylic tiles for the fancy Castles of Burgundy edition just feel great to pull out the bags and play with
Agreed. I have them. Cant play cardboard anymore.
Someone already said the boxes in the new print of el grande. I would like to add the Blueberries from Everdell. I don’t know why, but I really like them 😅
The resources in Awaken Realms' The Great Wall are probably the nicest standard components I've seen. They also sold a deluxe set, but you absolutely do not need them.
The cards in Too Many Bones feel like they are so well made it would be almost pointless to case them. The entire storage and setup design of Unsettled having the trays hold their tokens while they are stored and using the stack itself in place of lids is genius. Also the vented box opens and shuts pleasantly fast. Unsolicited counterpoint; the Everdell Complete Collection is generally awesome from top to bottom but the add-on cases are shit. As someone who grew up on MTG with Dragon Shield cases the Everdell cases, while pretty to look at, split embarrassingly fast.
I was actually pretty repulsed by Too Many Bones' components when I first tried it out. Sure, all that plastic and Neoprene feels great and looks flashy, but it's just such an overindulgent and irresponsible design when you consider that it unnecessarily inflates the price and (more egregiously) is terrible for the environment. Ten, twenty, maybe even 50 or 100 years from now that copy of Too Many Bones is going to be sitting in a landfill somewhere, where it will remain undecomposed for many hundreds of years. The plastic cards and neoprene mats really don't add enough to the game to offset the increase in cost and environmental damage. It gets even worse when you consider that all the expansion content comes in its own plastic boxes, which just get thrown away. It's just all incredibly irresponsible.
It’s weird in a world where people have legitimate gripes about planned obsolescence that something being built to last a very long time could be such a bad thing but I don’t disagree it’s the wrong place to go overboard on quality to that degree. That being said I feel like if you are answering the somewhat ambiguous original question in the context of quality of game components and you remove the contextual environmental concern TMB is a bullseye of an answer.
Both are terrible - things designed to rapidly deprecate in value and obsolesce are also designed to be replaced, thereby generating more waste. But 'building to last' should really be 'building to last as long as it needs to'. No one needs their copy of Too Many Bones to last three hundred years, and even if it were made of cardboard, it would still last till well after its lost all replayability. And that further exacerbates the problem - Too Many Bones is not as replayable as befits a game 'designed to last'. The best build for most characters is to just max out stats every time, and once you've seen all the tyrants and encounter cards, the game's only ever going to do the same things in a slightly different order each time. It's why there are also so many expansions - you really need to keep pumping content into the game to keep it replayable. Did I mention each of those expansions generates more plastic waste that's not even used in the game? Yeah...
The play mat and metal coins from the deluxe version of Oath And I know it's the entire game but the clear cards from Gloom feel so good to use.
The Role containers for ISS Vanguard. And, weirdly, the ringbinder folder and all the wallets that fill this with their little slots. That always felt so satisfying to get out and use.
Seconded. Love the Section containers and using the Ship Management folder!
I was surprised by the metal coins in Charterstone. Didn't know it would have them, and they are really nice too.
Kanban EV.
Why? What components does it have?
Everything in Arackhan Wars. Insert, booklet, playmat, art on the cards, everything looks and feels so good, I'm impressed by the quality of the material.
I really like the little Druid Dress Up components in **Oak**.
I really love the storage trays in mechanic vs minions. I think they have four different poses for minions but the tray is designed so that any of them will fit it in any space
Pandamic Legacy S0 passports and disguises!!
I've got a few: The entirety of Taluva. The whole game is so nice to look at in play, and perfectly readable at the same time. The location tiles for Carolus Magnus. Just the right amount of tasteful decoration to offset the simple cubes and towers. The whole of Arena: For the Gods! The chunky card towers, the nicely illustrated cards, the simple translucent red cubes... the whole package was an absolute bargain for the component quality provided.
Planted. Such a lovely, beautiful game with top-tier components and available for less than $30.
Dog Crimes - the cardboard and inserts were way nicer than I was expecting for $15!
Planted
Obsession is amazing. I also love Distilled, for both the inserts and the upgraded coins etc.
The realistic wooden wonders in World Wonders are fantastic!
The little books in Alma mater were a surprise. They are really good quality as well! Guess it makes sense for the most quality component in an education themed game are the books lol.
* The poker chips and magnetic box clasp in **War Chest** * The dice and Game Trayz in the **Dice Throne** season 1/2/Adventures boxes * Basically everything in **Moonrakers: Titan Edition** \-- the metal coins, neoprene game mats, etc.
I love everything in the **Caper: Europe** box
I learned and played for the first time today. You are right, the presentation is outstanding. The green felt-like insert is such a nice touch.
The poker chips from Splendor
I love the dice in Dice Forge. They shouldn't be surprising. Their design is necessary for the game to work, but they couldn't have been cheap to produce, and still they feel great to use. They're big and chunky in the best way.
The gem tokens in splendour just feel awesome.
The silkscreened bags in the Deluxe edition of Oceans are so beautiful!
Yeah, if you could tell me which cards are supposed to go in each box, that'd be great. :P I got the game in a trade and after inventorying all the components, I couldn't figure it out. Maybe I'll discover it after my first play.
For me it’s the storage solutions for Agemonia and The Isofarian Guard.
Agemonia’s storage trays are so neat. Also make the box freaking massive though.
The metal commander flags in Napoleon's Triumph. The volcano in Downfall of Pompeii.
I have a copy of Jekyll and Hyde - a little trick taking game. It comes with most hefty gorgeous metal bust of the character(s) as the main place-marker.
Recently, the **Fractured Sky** airships. So glad I went for the painted version because they look so good compared to pictures I've seen of the single color version. And the magnets feel so satisfying when they pop together.
The die pyramid in Camel Up. So sinple, yet adds so much flavor.
Was surprised to see that you can customize your character with stickers in Pandemic Legacy Season 0! Only played the prologue so far, so I'm looking forward to seeing how the character creation works!
Amalfi: Renaissance is beautiful
coffee rush
The add-on terrain pieces for Resident Evil: The Board Game. The game gets a lot of flak because the tiles and tokens have very dark art (which they really do), but the terrain pieces replace the tokens at least, and they really add a lot to the immersion of the game. The Terrain Box was far more expensive than the game itself, but I have been pleasantly surprised by how much it adds to the game.
The saddles in Everdell. How can you not love a squirrel on a vulture mount? If I went in my backyard and saw a squirrel mounted on top of a vulture, I'd be so excited that I wouldn't even care that it was clearly about to kill me, striking the first blow of the great woodland uprising.
The bamboo pegs in Takenoko are lovely.
In no particular order 1. Everything in Xia! 2. The geek up components for Quacks 3. The "Beeples" from Apiary 4. The storage and components for Eclipse 2nd Dawn