Nidavellir

A bidding game where your coins improve by being spent badly, which takes most people two full games to accept.

You are recruiting dwarves into a battalion to face a dragon. Each round you bid coins across three taverns, and the clever part is what happens to the loser: the lowest bid gets to upgrade a coin, permanently. So overspending early wins you a dwarf, and underspending wins you a better economy. Both are correct and you cannot do both.

Serge Laget's design won a stack of awards and sits high on the Dice Tower's all-time list, mostly on the strength of that single tension. Forty-five minutes, two to five players, and the scoring for each dwarf class works differently enough that you are never doing the same maths twice. Age 10 and up, though the arithmetic rewards a bit older.

Perfect for: Someone who likes an auction game but has had enough of pure money-counting.

2-5 players | 45 minutes | Age 10+