Dune

On Arrakis control is an illusion and it took me an embarrassing number of games to actually internalize that. Every other area control game I own has taught me that winning a battle is good, full stop, take the ground and move on. Dune trains that instinct right out of you. Both sides bleed resources in a fight, badly, so a clean tactical win can leave you weaker than the neutral parties who stayed out of it, and you have to relearn when a fight is even worth having.

I had my group over for a six player game a few months back and it ran almost five hours, which I will not pretend is for everybody, but the alliance negotiations alone made it worth the time. Watching two people you thought were locked in agree to betray each other mid turn because the treachery card in their hand suddenly made it worth it, that’s a specific kind of tension board games rarely deliver honestly.

The thing that separates this from a pure chaos engine like some of the other big negotiation games is that nothing is actually hidden forever, everything is theoretically knowable if you spend the resources to find out, so a bad outcome usually traces back to a choice you made rather than a dice gremlin. That’s the difference between a frustrating loss and a fair one, and Dune mostly lands on the fair side even when it hurts.

Six factions, six genuinely different win conditions and toolkits, and the GF9 reprint components are a real step up from what I’ve heard about the older editions, thick cards, a board that lies flat. Setup takes a while and this isn’t leaving my house for game night at somebody else’s place, but for a dedicated evening with people willing to scheme, five stars, no notes.