With the 2024 Olympic Games about to start in Paris, here’s a great selection of newer board games to help get your group in the French groove. They run the gamut from a beautiful two-player tile layer to a tense block wargame fueled by deception, a crowdfunded tactical creation to a historical, multiplayer area control adventure. No matter where you’re at in your tabletop journey, France has something to offer.
Or, you know, you can always pull out that Stefan Feld classic The Castles of Burgundy (any edition works), and immerse yourself in tile, dice, and point-salad glory. Its new edition packs in the glitz, too, giving you a collection showpiece that’s actually playable with just about anyone.
Now, on to the newcomers!
Tiles for Two
Two players, a pack of tiles, and lovely artwork makes a recipe for a great time. Paris: La Cité de la Lumiére (José Antonio, Abascal Acebo) tasks you with illuminating the City of Light with clever tile placement in this two-player delight.
At the start of this half hour, eminently portable affair, you’ll choose to either place tiles, which include your color, streetlights, your opponent’s color, or a mix of both, or add a tile to your stockpile to use later. You’ll want to get your color around as many streetlights as possible, because, in phase two, you’ll alternate adding your buildings to those tiles. If your buildings get more glow than your opponent, you get the win.
What makes Paris: La Cité de la Lumiére such a pleasant pick-up for a small box two-player offering is its artwork and color (no beige or sad-faced europeans here) coupled with tactile, tactical gameplay. Much like Patchwork, your turns fly by but are never dull, as the small decisions are all crucial. There’s no ‘rest’ turns to pick up a hand or passing to end a round. At the same time, the game’s tidy length and happy vibes keep the mood bright: you’re not destroying your partner. The opportunity for aggressive tile drafting and blocking is there for those who want a more take-that experience, but it’s easy to sit back and enjoy building up your slice of the city.
When you’re ready to bump up the challenge, expansions exist to add novelty to the game, though neither are necessary to enjoy this one.
Paris: La Cité de la Lumiére is packed with fun choices, beautiful, and perfectly paired with a bottle of Bordeaux to wrap up your game night.
Building The City of Love
Let’s stay with the buildings for a minute. In 2020’s Paris (Michael Kiesling, Wolfgang Kramer), you’ll construct many of the city’s famous landmarks, scoring as you go. It’s a mid-weight euro paired with an instructive and pleasing theme and amazing components. You’ll literally see Paris grow as you play, placing tiles denoted with theaters, apartments, and icons like the Eiffel Tower. As you build up those neighborhoods, you’ll be able to move your ‘key’ from place to place, gaining resources to construct better buildings.
Some of those buildings let you advance on a bonus track, getting special landmarks, cash, or sweet, sweet points. Nabbing those spots before your
opponents adds area control strategy to the game, with Paris turning more cutthroat as the second half begins and resources get tight. You’re lured in with its great, chunky components and ‘building the city’ vibe and find yourself, suddenly, knives out in a phone booth. A compelling shift in a first play becomes strategic fodder in the games that follow, as everyone—and Paris is best at 3-4 players—plans ahead to time their scores, their blocks, their control of the city.
Paris was a crowdfunding title, so it can be a bit hard to find, but if you’re on the hunt for an area-control euro with an excellent theme (particularly if violence isn’t your thing), then it’s worth giving this one a long look.
Napoleon Vs. The World
It’s hard to avoid Napoleon when searching for games set in, with, or about France, but 2023’s Napoleon’s Conquests (Bruno Lamotte) occupies several rare niches at once, which makes it a standout. A 3-5 player almost wargame, Napoleon’s Conquests sees one player stomping around as the titular emperor, while everyone else drives other countries jockeying both to survive and emerge from any alliance as the overall victor. That’s right – we’re combining one vs. many, a bit of Diplomacy-style social deduction, and the core mechanism of worker placement in a simulation-adjacent stew.
Delicious.
What makes Napoleon’s Conquest work is the individual objectives for the allied countries. Because Russia and Britain have their own secret goals, it’s not just a 
couple hours of everyone bashing Napoleon. Instead, the other players will have to find incentives to work together, or even ignore each other in pursuit of their own ends, which is about as historical as it gets. Napoleon’s Conquests isn’t a simulation wargame: all this interplay and looser rules means you’ll get ahistorical outcomes, but that’s part of the fun here.
The turn-by-turn play involves placing your ‘advisor’ on an action space, giving you a bonus (cash, morale, etc.) and allowing you to play a card in the category matching your space. These cards give you specific points to spend moving forces around, recruiting new ones, or telling Napoleon he’s ugly and, thus, lowering French morale. As in most worker placement games, blocking is key, and you’ll be stressing about getting to the spots that match your cards, all the while hoping France is going to go sock somebody else instead of you.
Ultimately, Napoleon’s Conquests might be best described as a more historical Axis and Allies with fewer dice and more euro-style mechanics. You’ll be moving armies, engaging in simpler battles, and trying to decide the fate of Europe with or without the help of your friends. There’s more depth and complexity here than in that classic title, but if you’re looking for a historical, multiplayer wargame, then Napoleon’s Conquests is as unique and engaging as it gets.
World War One, Dynamically Done
Across the wide world of wargaming, block wargames occupy a special niche for their ability to create ‘fog of war’, or keeping information hidden while still on the board. This is done with the so-called blocks, which orient towards their owning player, displaying info just to them and not to the opponent on the other side (versus straight counters with all their stats visible to anyone). Fields of Despair: France 1914-1918 (Kurt Keckley) supersizes this element by boosting the range of blocks all the way from zero to twenty, adding uncertainty and placing more value on reconnaissance and bluffing. Even enemies sharing the same space won’t be revealed unless you make the effort.
Fields of Despair brings these blocks to a strategic level game, with air and naval combat represented, along with economic and technological factors. Much of this is also tracked behind a screen, keeping more of your schemes secret from your opponent. All this uncertainty might seem unusual, but it brings a unique, invigorating tension. Surprises await on most turns, and springing an utterly unexpected move on a flabbergasted enemy is about the best thing in gaming.
Another thrilling element Fields of Despair brings is a dynamic scoring system that does a nice job replicating the migration of combat in WW1. You’ll start
the game out with several rounds of mobile war, after which the classic trench warfare and scoring begins. You’ll count the hexes Germany controls in France as the early rounds end and that becomes the baseline. More than that number in later rounds equals points for Germany, less than equals points for the Allies. It’s simple, but ensures every game is going to be different.
Lastly, Fields of Despair represents an entire WW1 experience playable in a single (long) day, or shorter depending on your chosen scenario. This isn’t a 10,000 hour game, and its mounted board and quality GMT Games production ensures you’ll enjoy the time spent with it.
If you’re looking to dig into a different style of wargame, one that embraces devious play amid a broad, strategic scope, Fields of Despair: France 1914-1918 is worth diving into.
France: Games and Good Times
It’s perhaps not a surprise that there’s plenty of board games set in France (and Paris, specifically). That’s to our benefit, though, as with the games above, you’ll have enough entertainment to accompany any Olympic event, even the marathon.
Just don’t forget the wine and cheese.
