Top Ten Designers with free-to-play games on Yucata (and my favorite Yucata game by each)

boardgamequest.com:

I love playing games online and while Board Game Arena gets a lot of love these days, one of the best places on the entire internet is the game site called Yucata. Yucata was created by Kay Wilke, a.k.a. Sparhawk, but he now shares the duties with a group of dedicated volunteers. Yucata, which has maintained its ethos of never charging anyone for access to any game for over 20 years, has an amazing lineup of awesome Euro games. It is a German website, but it is available in a complete English translation at https://www.yucata.de/en/.

To help you find your perfect “I gotta play that” Euro game for Yucata, I’ve identified my Top 10 Euro designers on Yucata and ranked them in terms of my enjoyment of their entire body of work. Plus, I give you my favorite of their games on Yucata.

Michael is probably best known these days for Azul and I recently reviewed another of his classics, Sanssouci, which he designed with his frequent collaborator, Wolfgang Kramer. Of the pair’s many excellent games, my favorite on Yucata is The Palaces of Carrara, a tile placement/set collection masterpiece. Players acquire different valued Italian marble via a cool spinner mechanism (where you sometimes help your opponents more than yourself), aiming to fulfill six different cities’ demands. Finishing a project for a city gets you points, but also one of the items you need for set collection goals that vary from game to game. Other Yucata games designed by Kiesling, Kramer, or both include Nauticus, Renature, Torres, Vikings, Hacienda, and Kramer’s best-known game without Kiesling, El Grande.

Dorra is an old-school Euro game designer like Kiesling and Kramer, with a design C.V. stretching back to the mid-1990s. He’s probably best known for the