One of the fun things about this process is going through old lists I made years ago, and wondering what I was thinking. “Oh, wow, I sure did rank that game high. What was I thinking?!?” I want to stress that that’s because I was young and stupid then. Now, of course, I am old and wise, and this list is, of course, flawless in every way.

I mention it below, but here’s a shoutout to PubMeeple, which has the sorting engine I used to generate this list. You just feed it a list of games (such as from a Board Game Geek account), weed out the obvious losers, and run through your collection and get a nice ordered list. I actually went through it a few times, and averaged the results. A very nice resource, if you like ranking things.

Previous entries: 100-91 90-81 80-71 70-61 60-51 50-41 40-31 30-21

20. Trajan

Released: 2011
Designer: Stefan Feld
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 60-120 minutes

Stefan Feld’s fourth – and highest – appearance on this list, which I suspect is the highest count. Feld’s games always speak to me. Yes, the production values are below the curve and yes, they all tend to be mechanical and the themes tend to be afterthoughts. But those mechanics are almost always interesting, novel and thought-provoking, and as a game designer there are few things I value more.

Trajan is one of Feld’s top two most recognized games (the other, Castles of Burgundy, fell off the list this year). It’s the heaviest of the games I’ve included this year, but also the richest because of a central mechanism – the Mancala action selection mechanism.

Below you can see the Mancala, which are a series of colored markers in 6 bowls. Each bowl corresponds with a different action, as shown on the icon inside the bowl. Every turn, the player will pick up all the markers in a single bowl, distribute them one to a bowl in a direction around the mancala, and do the action of the last location they placed a marker. There’s also a color-matching component to the game, where players can earn bonuses by putting certain colors in the right bowls.

The net effect of this is a devilishly interesting puzzle. Clumping of the pips may limit your options. Planning ahead is essential, but actually really hard to do too far in advance because the pips you place screw up your math. And while this particular part of the game isn’t very interactive, the central board you’re playing over has several resources that players need to compete over. Altogether, a great game mechanically, albeit (like too many Feld games) a tad dry in its presentation.

19. Grand Austrian Hotel

Released: 2015
Designer: Virginio Gigli, Simone Luciani
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 60-120

Probably the single best game that you’re going to be able to find where ‘strudel’ is a core resource. In Grand Austria Hotel, you run a fine tavern/inn combo in the 19th century. Your task is simple – to fill your hotel. Doing so will require you to prepare rooms, acquire coffee, wine and pastries for your guests, feed them, and usher them to their rooms.

The central mechanic that makes this game so interesting is the dice drafting mechanism. At the start of a round, all of the dice are rolled, and put into columns from 1 to 6. When it’s a player’s turn, they’ll select and remove a die, which corresponds to an action that they take. And the strength of the action is based on the number of dice on that action. Because turns whiplash around (the ‘first player’ takes the first and the last die), it creates a very novel action selection game.

Grand Austria Hotel is one of those games that’s pretty meaty but doesn’t FEEL very meaty, as the core theme of the game is pretty simple to understand. The expansion Let’s Waltz is good, but frankly adds more complexity than I want when I slap GAH on the table. I’d probably hold off on that until your table decides whether they love the game or not.

18. The Crew: Mission Deep Sea

Released: 2021
Designer: Thomas Sing
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 20 minutes

The sequel to 2019’s surprise hit The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine changes the setting from the harsh vacuum of space to the bottom of the ocean. The core of the game is the same – both games are campaign-based cooperative trick-taking games – but Mission Deep Sea rethinks how goals are handled to offer more variety, greater replayability – and much more interesting challenges.

The cooperative trick taking portion takes some explanation. Players are working together to take tricks, based on challenges that are assigned to them. But the kicker is that players are not allowed to communicate to each other. Instead, you can only use a token to give some very vague hints about what’s in your hand. Using these limited hints, each crew member must complete some number of objectives.

What makes Mission Deep Sea better than it’s predecessor are the goal cards. Previously, the goals were pretty limited and basic. By comparison, the goals here are complex, and layer on top of each other in ways that are often baffling to untangle. Sometimes, the goals are flatly impossible to accomplish – but that’s somehow okay because the games are so short. In fact, it’s often hilarious when that happens – few games in recent years have provoked as much discussion AFTER a game than The Crew, where dissecting where you failed, why and whether or not the mission was even possible is often a lively discussion.

17. My Father’s Work

Released: 2022
Designer: T. C. Petty III
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 180 minutes

It’s the Victorian age and your dad just croaked. While sifting through his papers, you discover he had grand plans for some… unorthodox scientific experiments. Like building Frankstein’s monster, the secrets of teleportation, or perhaps finding a workable use-case for NFTs in gaming. Grim stuff.

In My Father’s work, you and the other players will continue continuing the legacy of your family. This is a game played over three generations, as each generation tries to build upon the legacy of the one before it. The game drips in flavor, the components are excellent, and it’s a novel and interesting setting.

At its core, the game is a worker placement game, but what’s novel is that the game is app-based, and new game elements are added or removed as the player hits certain thresholds. As the most obvious example, the game-board is in a spiral book, which means that decisions the players make can change the worker placement locations available. If, for example, the table jointly decides to spend some time being benevolent philanthropists, this may result in a new hospital being constructed — which other than being a boon for civilizing your pathetic little backwater, also might be a good new outlet for acquiring corpses for your studies.

I’m usually a little hesitant to embrace app-based games, as it’s not difficult to imagine a reality where the app ceases to function or be available. But in My Father’s Work, it all works very well to create a worker placement game with a very legitimate sense of history and create a novel game setting dripping in atmosphere.

16. Magic: The Gathering

Released: 1993
Designer: Rchard Garfield, Mark Rosewater
Players: 2+
Estimated Time: 20 minutes

The granddaddy of the collectible card game industry is also still the best, due largely to its willingness to change and adapt. Magic is about to hit its 30th anniversary, and it’s still going strong.

I’m not going to delve too much into what makes Magic special. The core mechanics have largely stood the test of time, and every expansion pack has found SOME way to reinvent the game, albeit sometimes more successfully than others. But I do feel like I should note that Mark Rosewater – the current steward of the game – is quite open about talking about how their design team thinks. As one example, here’s him doing a talk called 20 Years, 20 Lessons Learned that talks about all manner of design lessons he’s learned trying to keep Magic alive, evolving and innovative.

15. Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy

Released: 2020
Designer: Touko Tahkokallio
Players: 2-6
Estimated Time: 60-200 minutes

Eclipse is a galactic 4x game where different races – each with different powers – will attempt to explore, colonize and conquer the galaxy. An economic game at it’s core, the novel mechanic in this game is one where each planet you colonize requires upkeep, meaning that larger civilizations also must grapple with greater inefficiencies.

The net result is a game where there are multiple legitimate avenues to win. I’ve seen both small, nimble scientifically focused empires win, as well as behemoth military empires whose focus is maximizing their industrial output to create the most dominating fleet.

Second Dawn is basically a second edition of the very excellent Eclipse (2011). The Second Edition isn’t marked by a ton of rule changes, but mostly is represented by a sharp improvement in internal storage and component quality (better ships, better dice). The difference is big enough to matter.

14. Genotype

Released: 2021
Designer: John Coveyou, Paul Saloman, Ian Zang
Players: 1-5
Estimated Time: 45-90

Who knew breeding pea plants could be this intriguing? In Genotype, you play an assistant to Gregor Mendel, trying to fine-tune the experiments that would lead to his groundbreaking work on trait inheritance.

Genotype it, at its core, a dice drafting game. What makes it unique is that players have the ability to modify what the dice MEAN. If you really need a pea plant where the pod color is yellow, you can jury-rig the pool so that more possible dice roll gives you the result you need. And yet this happens before the dice is rolled, meaning that sometimes your investment in making something more likely whiffs completely.

Beyond this novel mechanic, Genotype has a simply lovely aesthetic to it. It’s got a sense of genuine scientific exploraton merged with a love and appreciation of nature. And while I wouldn’t necessarily slap it in front of non-gamers, it’s also not very heavy, which means it should appeal to a very broad spectrum of gamers.

13. Bloc by Bloc: Uprising

Released: 2022
Designer: Greg Loring-Albright, TL Simons
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 60-120

I got Bloc by Bloc on the strong recommendation of Three Minute Board Game, and I’m glad I did. I mean, I don’t have any other insurrection simulators set in a major first-world city. While it would have hit a little harder back in the BLM days of 2018, it’s still a timely game for the times, which still manages to make this theme charming and fun.

In Bloc by Bloc, players are working together to drive The Man off the streets. Doing so will require teamwork and coordination, as well as a hefty inventory of bricks. The core engine of the game is a diceroll – players will roll their dice at the beginning of a turn, and jointly figure out how to use these dice to result in the most overturned police vans. Along the way, they’ll barracade streets, loot businesses, attend secret meetings, and eventually occupy the blocks (flipping over the tile, and thus bringing color back into the world).

I should note that Uprising is a new edition of Bloc by Bloc, which apparently streamlines a lot of unnecessary rules complexity. I can’t speak to that, having not played the old edition, but it is something for you to keep in mind.

When I do this list, I start by doing several trials on PubMeeple, and frankly, even I was surprised at how high this game ranked in almost every one. It turns out that if I want to play a coop game, this is the one I want to reach for.

12. Everdell

Released: 2018
Designer: James A Wilson
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 40-80 minutes

Everdell is a tableau-building game where you try to get your inner Redwall on. Each player is trying to construct their own charming little village of furry inhabitants. The board presentation is impressive, and the components – even in the base version of the game – are very high quality.

The core of the game is the construction of a 15-card village, which acts as a tableau of powers and effects you can use in the game. Players will place workers to get key resources and claim objectives, but the meat of the game is going to be finding cards that combo together to create effective synergies to leverage.

Everdell is a midweight tableau building game, and an utterly charming little experience to boot. It also has several expansion packs, and each one I’ve tried so far has been very good, albeit they all make the game heavier. Still, this is a game where there’s a good chance that it’ll hit the table frequently, which means that even though the core game is quite good, your players will generally be open to layering on additional complexity.

11. Mind MGMT

Released: 2021
Designer: Jay Cormier, Sen-Foong Lim
Players:  1-5
Estimated Time: 45-75 minutes

Mind MGMT is a one-vs-many hidden deduction game. One player plays a recruiter, trying to go through a city to recruit a whole bunch of new foozles. The other players are trying to stop him. But their clues are weird and partial, and they’ll need to work together to figure out where the recruiter is.

The recruiter has their own board to work from, where they plot their path with a marker. They are given some landmarks on the map, which are valid places they can recruit from (circled in the screenshot below). They then try to secretly visit each of those locations, and every couple of turns, tell the other players how many recruits they managed to get (which maps to symbols they visited), giving the other players tantalizing clues on what symbols they’re chasing and where they might be heading next.

I’m going to come out and say this up-front. The theming of Mind MGMT is weird. Based on an indie comic of the same name, the core conceit is a little hard to explain to the uninitiated. And the art for the game is a tad divisive – it’s apparently straight from the source material, and is seen as evocative and interesting to some, and noisy and distracting to others.

But while I’ve long liked the idea of one-vs-many hidden deduction games, they’ve always been hit or miss. Many, such as Fury of Dracula are excellent but tend to be too long, which can be frustrating in a genre where careful deduction has to be combined with a little bit of luck. Mind MGMT games are much quicker, and also do a much better job of seeding the initial board with clues, which overall makes the experience feel less random and fairer to both sides.

Layered on top of this is a series of modules inside the game that are specifically designed to give one side or the other an advantage. If the recruiter is winning too often, there are new cards that give the rest of the players some incremental advantages. The end result is one that should be able to scale to the dynamics of almost any group.

Almost done! Tune in tomorrow as we wrap this sucker up with out top ten list. Until then….