Notebook Nations

Notebook Nations takes the big empire-building game, the kind where one session can eat a whole afternoon, and shrinks it down to fit in an evening. It has a hand-drawn, doodled-in-the-margins look, so it feels more like a storybook than a spreadsheet.

How it works

Each player leads one of several asymmetric nations. You grow your territory across a shared map, gather resources, and choose between science, culture and conquest. It’s a proper 4X game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate), squeezed down so it plays out in one sitting.

You can set a game up to run short, medium or long, so it fits the time the group actually has.

What makes it interesting

Big strategy games can be intimidating because they run long and involve a lot of fiddly bookkeeping. Notebook Nations keeps the interesting part, the choices about how your nation grows, and cuts the parts that make people’s eyes glaze over. The hand-drawn look also stops it feeling like a “serious” strategy game, even though the decisions are real.

Best for

Families and mixed-age groups who want more strategy than a party game, without the hours a full-scale empire builder takes. It plays well with two, but it’s at its best with four at the table.