Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here —and let us know what you think.

What do we do on the Ars Orbiting HQ to while away the lonely holiday hours? Play board games, of course. And the last 18 months were high-water marks for the hobby, throwing out innovative, beautiful titles on a near-monthly basis.

Here, we've rounded up a few of our favorites from 2015 (with a few late 2014 titles sneaking in for good measure). These are the new games that we most enjoyed this year—and we hope you'll find something new to try, too.

Mission: Red Planet (Second Edition)

Designers: Bruno Cathala, Bruno Faidutti, and Steven Kimball

Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games

Players: 2-6

Price: $36.90

Admit it: you would secretly love to launch a private army to Mars. Mission: Red Planet lets you do so, along the way sabotaging the rockets carrying other fighters and explorers, redirecting opponents' ships to unimportant patches of Martian soil, taking over Phobos, and just generally running riot in your quest to exploit the Red Planet's hidden resources.

Fantasy Flight's 2015 reboot of Mission: Red Planet streamlines play and reimagines the artwork to tremendous effect (rather than wooden cubes, your astronauts are plastic spacemen, each carrying your flag, while the "board" that makes up Mars is a huge four-piece circle). Played over 10 rounds, the game's hour-long playtime flies by thanks to a mix of role selection and area control mechanics.

On each turn, you select one of the roles in your hand and perform its action—filling up a ship on Earth, redirecting an in-flight rocket, sending troops from Phobos down to Mars, fighting, researching the planet, etc. You won't be able to use that role again, though, until you play the "Recruiter" role, which burns one of your 10 rounds each time you use it. The key is playing the right role at the right time in order to benefit most from the three different resource acquisition rounds interspersed throughout the game. Terrific fun for everyone from advanced kid players up to gamers, though perhaps slightly too heavy for total gaming newbs.

-Nate Anderson

Splendor

Designers: Marc André

Publisher: Space Cowboys/Asmodee

Players: 2-4

Price: $39

Most Euro-style board games operate on the idea of players building an “economic engine.” You start with nothing and by collecting resources, you buy items that give you more resources, which lets you buy better things, which gives you even more resources—until you’re running an unstoppable point-generating machine. Splendor takes this immensely gratifying gameplay loop and pares it down to something even your grandmother can enjoy.

On your turn, you’ll collect gems from a common supply in order to buy cards from a central market. (The gems are represented by heavy poker-style chips that are absurdly satisfying to hold and play with.) The cards give you permanent gems that act as discounts on future purchases. You’ll work your way up through three tiers of ever-more-expensive cards to buy cards worth more and more points. The first person to 15 points triggers the end of the game.

Of all the smash-hit tabletop games released in 2014, Splendor is probably the one with the most staying power. It’s dead simple to teach, but it has enough strategy that seasoned gamers can happily play alongside noobs. It takes about 30 minutes to play, but it’s as fulfilling as many longer games. When I introduced the game to my Friday night game group, we didn’t play anything else for about two months. Splendor is an instant modern classic.

-Aaron Zimmerman

Roll for the Galaxy

Designers: Wei-Hwa Huang and Tom Lehmann

Publisher: Rio Grande Game

Players: 2-5

Price: $44

Man, I love dice. They represent one of the great joys of board games: tactility. Scooping the little cubes up, tumbling them in your hand, sending them clacking across the table—dice are just fun to play with. But dice can be problematic in strategy games due to their inherent randomness. That's why I love Roll for the Galaxy; the game does dice right.

Roll for the Galaxy is essentially a streamlined, dice-game version of the modern classic card game Race for the Galaxy, but it’s decidedly not Race for the Galaxy: The Dice Game. That is, it’s not a dumbed-down snoozer or Yahtzee-aping cash-in like some dice-game versions of other board games tend to be. It's also a much easier game to teach to newcomers than the notoriously arcane Race (although it’s not what I’d call a “gateway game,” and you may have a bad time if you try to introduce it to non-gamers).

Roll’s mechanics are a bit too complicated to fully explain here, but the game essentially has you collecting dice and laying tiles to create the best civilization in the galaxy. A hidden action selection mechanic (similar in many ways to Race, Puerto Rico, and San Juan) drives the gameplay, and you need to pay attention to what your opponents are doing to make the most of your turns.

And here’s the best part: your dice, which represent workers in your empire, provide you with flexible options and a fun mini-puzzle to solve every round. There are always ways to mitigate the luck of the roll and bend the dice to your will. If you play well, the dice nudge you and give you constraints; they don’t hamstring you with “better luck next time” disappointments.

Roll for the Galaxy is highly replayable, fiendishly addictive, and very quick to play once everyone knows what they’re doing. And it comes with 111 colorful custom dice and rocketship-themed dice cups to roll them in. Buy this game.

-Aaron Zimmerman

T.I.M.E Stories

Designers: Manuel Rozoy

Publisher: Space Cowboys/Asmodee

Players: 2-4

Price: $42

When people talk about 2015 being a banner year for board games that seek to transcend "board gaming," they usually point to T.I.M.E Stories and to Pandemic: Legacy. Here at the Ars Orbiting HQ, we've got our copy of Pandemic: Legacy but are waiting until the New Year to really dig in. (It is... a serious time commitment.) But we did get T.I.M.E Stories to the table—and are glad we did so.

T.I.M.E Stories combines role-playing with lavishly illustrated cards to let teams of adventurers puzzle and fight their way through wildly varying stories. The included first module, Asylum, involves a 1920's "mental health facility" in France, deranged doctors, mythical beasts, cannibalism, drugs, abominations of nature, and temporal rifts. It's a "one and done" affair; after beating Asylum in three or four hours, you won't go back again soon.

But those three to four hours make for some great group gaming. It's not perfect—see our full review for the flaws—but there's no need for a dungeon master, the artwork is fantastic, and the card-based "location" system provides unique information to different party members as they explore the grounds (and caverns beneath the grounds). And when you've solved the main puzzle, you'll feel like you accomplished something.

With more story modules in development (and one already for sale), T.I.M.E Stories looks like the launch of a successful new gaming system that could be influential for some time to come.

-Nate Anderson

La Granja

Designer: Michael Keller and Andreas Odendahl

Publisher: Spielworxx/Stronghold Games

Players: 1-4

Price: $40

La Granja is an exceptionally Euro-y Eurogame, with all the requisite trimmings—an inoffensive farming theme, unflashy art design, sensible wooden bits, tons of hieroglyphic-laden tokens, and a non-confrontational take on player interaction. If you’re itching to slay dragons or shoot down Star Destroyers, look elsewhere. But if you, like me, get unreasonably fired up about pushing around cubes and building efficient economic engines, stick around—I’ve got a game for you.

Many board games can best be described as “Game X, but with pieces of Game Y and maybe a bit of Game Z.” Board game designers, like creators of all stripes, are constantly iterating on each other’s ideas. La Granja proudly wears its influences on its sleeves, even calling out its predecessors on the last page of the rulebook: industry giants like Stefan Feld and Uwe Rosenberg, and other games like Carl Chudyk’s classic card game Glory to Rome. All these elements come together to create a tight, cohesive experience.

The gameplay centers on La Granja’s 66 multi-use cards. Your personal player board has cutouts for you to slot the cards into, and the cards do different things depending on where you put them. Take the card to the right, for example. If you slot it into the left side of your board, you’ll produce grapes. Slot it into the right and you’ll expand your farm, giving you more income and cards at the beginning of the round. Slotting it into the top will give you a resource goal to work toward, and slotting it into the bottom will give you a special power. Each option is great, making every decision wonderfully excruciating. You start the game with four cards, which essentially amounts to 16 different options you have to weigh against each other.

There’s a lot more to the game, including a cool dice-based resource selection phase and an area majority battle that players wage on the main board. But it all comes back to those cards. La Granja is a puzzle in the best of ways, and I absolutely love it. It also plays well solo—and don’t let anyone tell you that playing a board game by yourself is sad.

-Aaron Zimmerman