For the first time this year, I decided to include last year’s ranking as part of the general information about a game. I did this out of curiosity, of course, and also to make it easier to plagiarize my past self. Writing 100 blurbs in a week is a pain in the ass, especially if I expect to inflict some of you with any of mygame design expertise and/or so-called humor.

Exposing these numbers, of course, exposes something else, namely that I’m a massive fraud. I mean, look at these numbers. How did Genotype drop 66 points in a year? Am I just making shit up as I go along? The answer is yes. Every one of us making a list like this is just pulling this shit out of our posteriors, and then spoonfeeding it to you and calling it content.

In all seriousness, this year I probably made 20-30 versions of this list in PubMeeple, refining and refining. Some games got richer on replays. Some games had warts exposed. New games made older games feel dated or obsolete. And tastes change. So anyway, I’m pretty confident that this year’s list is a very comprehensive and accurate list of the best 100 board games ever made.

Not like last year’s list. That list was obviously crap and should be nuked from orbit, just to be sure.

One final highlight is that this section of the list has the highest percentage of new or non-repeating games out of all the sections. Apparently, the 70s is where I put games I want to park the new cars before I take them for extended drives.

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80. Genotype: A Mendelian Genetics Game

“Grab a trowel and breed pea plants on your way to become a master geneticist.”

Released: 2021
Designer: John Coveyou, Paul Saloman, Ian Zang
Players: 1-5
Estimated Time: 45-90 minutes
Last Year: 14

For my money, Genotype is the best legume-growing simulator on the market (sorry, Bohnanza, it’s true). In this game, you play as scientists trying to discover the secrets of hereditary traits, mimicking the famous experiments of legendary scientist Gregor Mendel. The game is incredibly reverent to the subject matter, and a lot of work goes into capturing the feel of turn-of-the-century science and naturalism, and the whole feel is frankly a lovely and wonderful experience if the period or the science is attractive to you.

But this isn’t just some educational game. The mechanics are novel and interesting. 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.

Genotype is not a heavy game, but it is just a tad too heavy to slap in front of non-gamers. However, if you have a table full of gamers who like the history of science, this is a great medium-weight experience to put in front of them.

79. Rush Out!

“Heroes try to escape the dungeon while the Sorcerer uses his magic to stop them. “

Released: 2021
Designer: Thomas Dupont
Players: 3-5
Estimated Time: 20-30 minutes
Last Year: 64

Most real-time games are, to be blunt, hot buttered ass. They’re chaotic. They’re frequently frustrating. Real-life issues such as table placement, lighting and assets being within board reach of everyone are real issues. You can’t really stop and ask a rules question, and it’s easy and common for people to cheat, accidentally, because no one is paying attention to what you’re doing, and people frequently lose track of what they’re doing.

There are two exceptions to this rule. The first is a little coop game called Fuse (which has appeared on prior lists), where players role dice and then grab dice to try to accomplish missions in front of them. It’s clean, it works, and its easy to be sure everyone knows what’s going on.

Rush Out! improves upon this by turning it into a one-versus-many experience. One player plays as the dark wizard, trying to cast spells to slow the enemy. The rest of the players can complete dice patterns to try to attack him. And the game comes with additional modules that makes the game more intricate and complex, but there’s no need for any of that if you don’t want to add them.

If this sounds intriguing to you, you might want to check out Shut Up and Sit Down’s review of the game, which turned me onto this delightful title.

78. Hamburg (formerly Bruges)

“Build your influence in Hamburg while avoiding threats.”

Released: 2022/2013
Designer: Stefan Feld
Players: 1-5
Estimated Time: 60-90 minutes
New to List

Recently, my favorite designer Stefan Feld released the City Collection, where he revisited some of his old designs, gave them a new theme in a new city. This has given me a chance to revisit some of his older designs that I never got a chance to play the first time around. By far, the high part of this experience has been Hamburg, which is adapted from his classic game Bruges.

The magic of this particular title is the unique use of multi-use cards. At the start of every turn, players draw up to 5 cards (there are 5 colors but they can draw whatever cards they want). On one side these cards represent buildings that you can build. But these cards can also be used for fuel for different actions. As an example, you can ‘sell’ any color card you want for the value of the die of the same color that gets rerolled each turn. Which creates some unusual tension – yes, you may want to build the pink building in your hand, but the pink die is a 6 and everything else is a 2 or lower, and you need a lot of money NOW.

I love Hamburg. I do note that it is a little pricey for what it is, and I also should note that many people feel the art in Bruges is superior. Just something to consider if you see it on sale out there somewhere.

77. Horrified

“Classic movie monsters terrorize a town! Can your team stop them in time?”

Released: 2019
Designer: Prospero Hall
Players: 1-5
Estimated Time: 60 minutes
Last Year: 87

A lot of games have tried to copy the classic, groundbreaking game Pandemic but Horrified is among the best to do it. Players each play heroes – each with unique abilities, of course, who are trying to stop Universal monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man) from…. doing evil shit, I guess. Each monster has unique special abilities, and the game comes with six of them. Each game has 2 (or 3, if you like a challenge) monsters to defeat, which can be mixed and matched to add more depth and replayability.

Horrified succeeds again by having simple mechanics interact with relatively complex rules for your boss monsters – something we saw back with Marvel United. It’s incredibly easy to teach and learn, and the classic Universal monsters have …. universal appeal (get it? Haha, I kill me).

I should note that I did manage to get my hands on Horrified: Greek Monsters at BGG.con. Mechanically…. well, it’s the same game only with a greek coat of paint. Each of the new bosses has a new, mechanically different monster – which was good and appreciated, and shows how flexible the underlying system actually is. However, I think the core box has more Universal appeal (Hahaha, I kill me) and feels more… well, horrifying… and should probably be your first choice unless you or someone in your playgroup is a big ol’ Hercules fanboy.

76. Tamashii: Chronicle of Ascend

“Become an outsider and fight against Ascend, a cold AI, that rules over the world. “

Released: 2023
Designer: Kamil ‘Sanex’ Cieśla, Robert Plesowicz, Łukasz Włodarczyk
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 60-180 minutes
New to List

Tamashii is an epic, sprawling cooperative Cyberpunk-themed game, where players must work together to solve mission scenarios, each of which are different. To do so they’ll need to explore the city, do a lot of hacking and occasionally swap to jack into more powerful host bodies.

The core mechanic that drives all of this is the hacking minigame. This is the core conflict resolution mechanic in the game, from swapping bodies to engaging in combat to solving the various scenario puzzles, players must slide tiles around on a grid to form certain patterns. This system is surprisingly resilient and interesting, and provides a good analog to the player activity of ‘hacking’.

I got Tamishii on Kickstarter because I fell in love with their absolutely gorgeous Cyberpunk miniatures (and a growing realization I had no games with any good Cyberpunk miniatures, gorgeous or otherwise). What I got is a great, albeit relatively heavy, game. I only have one knock on the game, and that is that, for a coop scenario-based game, you can’t really help each other. As an example, when you’re attacked by a ‘monster’, it happens in your own cyberspace, and you must fight (i.e. hack them by building their pattern) alone – others can do very little to help you. A little odd, but if you can accept that as just part of this cyberpunk reality, you’ll have a great campaign game on your hands.

75. Blokus

“Fit your tiles on a shared board with not enough space for everyone.”

Released: 2000
Designer: Bernard Tavitian
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 20
Didn’t Appear Last Year (Appeared on Previous Lists)

Blokus is very close to the perfect game to pull out for your non-gaming muggle friends. It’s so simple the rules could fit on a notecard. The tetris-y pieces are attractive and tactile. It’s capable of great depth and surprising viciousness. And you can usually pick up a copy at Target for $20.

The rules: (1) You have a set number of game pieces, representing every possible shape of squares between 1 subsquare and 5. (2) Your first piece must go in a corner. (3) Every subsequent piece must touch one of your previously placed – but only on a corner (no two faces of your two pieces can be orthagonally adjacent). (4) If you can’t place a piece, you’re out, and your score is the number of subsquares you have left.

You will be SHOCKED at how fast this game will get your mother-in-law to tell you to go fuck yourself in the best possible way.

74. Woodcraft

“Grow trees, gather wood and other materials, craft items and build the best workshop!”

Released: 2022
Designer: Ross Arnold, Vladimir Suchy
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 60-120 minutes
New to List

There’s a point which I may have to just accept that I’m becoming a Vladimir Suchy fanboy. He’s designed my favorite heavy games in the last few years. His bread and butter is interesting action choosing mechanics. We’ve already seen him once on this list (with Praga Caput Regni) and we will see him again.

Woodcraft follows in that mold of interesting action selection mechanisms. Players play as carpenters. They’ll collect dice of various colors (representing various strains of wood) and will use tools to manipulate those dice (splitting one die into two with a saw for example) to get the numbers they need. They can even plant trees (i.e. low level dice) and grow them into the numbers they need.

The action selection mechanism is the gem of this experience, though. That central sawblade is the core mechanic. The actions that players can choose are one of those little slivers around the sawblade. Rarely used actions end up getting bonuses if they aren’t picked, making them more attractive. Popular actions end up getting frozen out and being unpickable after a bit. The end result is a Eurogame that is complex, dense but unique and deeply rewarding.

73. QE

“Bid ANYTHING to bail out companies, but just don’t bid the MOST!”

Released: 2019
Designer: Gavin Birnbaum
Players: 3-5 players
Estimated Time: 45 minutes
Last Year: 99

A simple auction game with a simple premise – you can bid whatever you want. You play as a country who has the ability to literally print money. But whoever prints the most money plunges their country into a deflationary death spiral – and automatically loses.

It works like this – one player chooses an asset, and names a minimum bid. Other players – who are trying to chase certain asset classes for scoring REASONS – may then bid anything that’s higher than that amount. Whoever bids the most wins. But at the end of the game, all the successful bids are tallied, and whoever printed the most money recieves a score of zero.

72. Terror Below

“Avoid & defeat gigantic critters while collecting their eggs in this campy game!”

Released: 2019
Designer: Mike Elliott
Players: 1-5
Estimated Time: 45-60 minutes
New to List

It seems like every year, I have at least one ‘this game is MOVIE in a box’ game. Star Wars: Rebellion is ‘Star Wars in a box’. Firefly: The Game is Firefly in a box. Nemesis is ‘Aliens in a box, and also please no one tell the lawyers at 20th Century Fox we exist, thank you’. All are excellent games who have appeared on previous versions of this list.

This year, I thought I’d go with ‘Tremors in a box’, also known as ‘Terror Below’. Players will compete to kill worms and collect eggs in a government test site in the Nevada desert. Players will need to scavenge for weapons, only pick fights they can win, and occasionally work together – even though this is not really a coop game.

Also, it would be great if no one tells the lawyers at Universal Studios this exists.

71. Bad Company

“Build your own gang, complete heists and escape the police.”

Released: 2021
Designer: Kenneth Minde, Kristian Amundsen Østby, Eilif Svensson
Players: 1-6
Estimated Time: 30 minutes
New to List

Once upon a time, there was a game called Machi Koro, where each player builds a tableau of cards in front of them. Players take turns rolling dice, and get rewards based on the tableau they’ve built on that number – but you also get rewards based on what other players roll as well! This was quickly aped by other games, including Valeria Card Kingdoms but the high water mark for years has been Space Base which last year came in on this list at a rosy 26.

But this year, the group has been more likely to reach for Bad Company, for a couple of reasons. The first is that Space Base literally has a killer combo with a ‘I win’ card that everyone at the table hates – except for that one guy who always manages to pull it off. The second is that the theme of Bad Company is decidedly more fun, and the absurd visual design of your tableau of gang members being represented by infinitely tall stacks of cards (see image) as you further expand their stacks.

Will we stick with Bad Company over Space Base? I think so, but I gotta tell you, Mr. I Win Combo is eager to switch back.

This year’s list has a lot of shakeups, and this section of the list sums it up pretty well. Two new titles in this section, and a lot of downward motion in the list, including two games that peaked in the twenties last year. I think this is because 2023 was a VERY good year for board games, and in many cases the new games coming in are taking the ‘spot’ of one of these older games as a superior alternative. I’ll be sure to call that out if it happens, but hey, you wouldn’t want to read the same list twice in a row anyways, right?

Previous: 100-91

90. Steam Up: A Feast of Dim Sum

“Experience an unforgettable taste of dim sum and leave with the fullest stomach.”

Released: 2023
Designer: Pauline Kong, Haymen Lee, Marie Wong
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 40-60
New to list

Whenever my friends and I go to a game convention, and it gets late at night and we’re all too tired to digest a long rulebook, for some reason we always devolve to playing lightweight games about food. They’re usually fast to learn, have cool table presences and are fun and quirky to boot. This year, we probably played half a dozen of these lightweight games, and the clear winner was Steam Up, a game about fulfilling orders and collecting Dim Sum steamer baskets. Sushi Go! Spin Some for Dim Sum was also well regarded. In retrospect, maybe we were just hungry.

89. Lords of Waterdeep (w Scoundrels of Skullport expansion)

“Deploy agents and hire adventurers to expand your control over the city of Waterdeep.”

Released: 2012
Designer: Peter Lee, Rodney Thompson
Players: 2-5 (6 with Expansion)
Estimated Time: 60-120 minutes
Last Year: 40

Lords of Waterdeep remains the best entry-level Eurogame on the market. It’s simple and a fast teach. It starts with a simple board of options, but the ability for players to build new buildings allows more complexity to be added at a place where newer gamers can easily absorb it. And the D&D Ameritrash coat of paint can convince an RPG player to give this game a shot whereas a game about farming turnips may not do so.

Lords of Waterdeep is also persistently on the list because, with the Scoundrels of Skullport expansion, it’s one of the very best options for ‘oops, 6 people showed up to game night and 2 of them aren’t heavy gamers’. The expansion adds some high risk-high reward gambits for more experienced gamers to take advantage of, but casual gamers can safely avoid them. And the core of the game is still fast and streamlined – even with 6 people, turns move fast. And finally, there’s just enough asshattery to keep things interesting without making this a ‘take that’ game that can turn off newer gamers.

88. Mercurial

“Control the chaos of your elemental dice to craft new & unknown spells.”

Released: 2023
Designer: David Goh
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 45-90
New To List

I won’t lie, I’ve only got one playthrough of Mercurial under my belt, but I really dug it and can’t wait to get it on the table again. It’s an engine-building game, where you’re trying to use your engine to assemble recipes to complete missions. The art is gorgeous, the game is simple, and yet there’s multiple paths to victory that all seem equally playable.

In many ways, it’s a more complexified version of Century – an absolute stone-cold classic that just missed this list (no lie, it came it at #102). Normally, I frown on complexifying fillers – as I pointed out with Las Vegas, if you make a filler long or complicated, you’ve probably lost track of why that game is being thrown on the table. But in this case, while this game is definitely bigger than a filler, the new stuff being added is interesting and suggests that this design space has a lot more space to explore.

87. Bunny Kingdom

“Adorable bunnies build cities, harvest carrots, and go on missions to be ‘Big Ears!'”

Released: 2017
Designer: Richard Garfield
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 40-60
Last Year: 91

The basic formula is simple: mixing a card-drafting system of a game like 7 Wonders with the territorial control of Acquire. Most of the cards simply allow players to claim a set of grid coordinates – and the key to the game is assembling contiguous territory. And because the map is so visible, there are tons of wonderful decision points – whether to draft a card that moderately helps you, or to hatedraft a card that MASSIVELY helps your opponent. But not all cards are territories – there are also additional secret goals and other rule-breaking effects you can draft.

If I had one knock on this game, it’s that the scoring phases are far more obtuse than the rest of the game and really gum up the works. But if you have one guy who can quickly figure out that math, it’s a quick, fun game with a great table presence. I mean, look at those bunny meeples!

86. Dune: Imperium

“Influence, intrigue, and combat in the universe of Dune.”

Released: 2020
Designer: Paul Dennen
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 60-120 minutes
Last Year: 56

Dune Imperium is a worker placement game with a layer of deckbuilding set in the world of Dune. The most common phrase used when talking about the game is ‘knife fight’ and that’s not inaccurate. The game is a mad sprint to 10 points, and every single point is precious and often won or stolen by a razor’s edge. Games are not long, but they are frequent intense – you’ll want to follow Dune Imperium with something lighter to cool people off.

Both of the expansions are good, although I prefer the Rise of Ix expansion for the new leaders. That said, this year also marked the release of a new version of Dune Imperium called Dune Imperium: Uprising. I haven’t personally played Uprising, but the general vibe I got when I asked people about it that it’s ‘better, but not better enough to replace the original’. So if you don’t own Dune Imperium yet, you might consider Uprising, but if you do, you probably don’t need to make the switch.

85. Unfair

“Create thematic fun parks, hire staff and attract guests galore!”

Released: 2017
Designer: Joel Finch
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 50-125 minutes
New to List

A simple tableau-builder where you try to assemble a theme park by building rides, attaching improvements to them, and hiring staff to run them. The interesting thing about Unfair is that each game is assembled out of four theme park ‘themes’, and their expansions are to simply add more of those themes. As an example, this year’s expansion allows you to add attractions with Comic Book, Hacker, Kaiju and Ocean themes. Each of these themes has different rule tweaks and focuses, so mixing and matching 4 of the available themes (out of the 12 now available) means each game is going to feel different from the last.

The game has a reasonable amount of ‘take that’, which may turn off some users. If that’s the case, I should let you know that they released a version without the take that called Funfair. I haven’t played that variant, but I can’t imagine any reason why it wouldn’t work.

84. Vagrantsong

“Six trainhoppers hop aboard a ghost train and must work together to escape.”

Released: 2022
Designer: Matt Carter, Justin Gibbs, Kyle Roawn
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 4
Last Year: 29

Just thematically one of the best games on the list – each player plays as a hobo on a train, but it turns out the train is haunted. As such, players will need to take part in tactical ‘combat’ in order to help each ghost find peace. It’s a wonderful vibe, it’s got a beautiful art style, a crazy original premise and the components are awesome.

If I had one knock, it’s that there’s more rules ambiguity than there should be. The designers have promised that they’ll improve this in the next edition as part of the Kickstarter for the next expansion. If they deliver on this, it’s very likely Vagrantsong shoots way up the rankings next year.

83. Jekyll vs Hyde

“Will you maintain balance or give in to darkness in the battle of Hyde and Jekyll?”

Released: 2021
Designer: Geonil
Players: 2
Estimated Time: 30 mins
Last Year: 33

I’m not going to lie, this is here because as a designer I am utterly tickled that they managed to solve the problem of a two-person trick-taking game. Each player has a hand of 10 cards (and 5 are randomly discarded so you don’t fully know what your opponent has). There’s also a mechanic where the ‘trump’ card can be shifted as the game goes on.

But it’s the scoring that’s really novel. Dr. Jekyll is trying to pursue balance – he wants to win as many hands as he loses. Dr. Hyde is trying for the opposite – he wants to either win all the hands or lose them all, and progress on the score track is determined by the difference between the two. It’s an incredibly simple premise and yet creates a devilish problem for users to solve.

82. Praga Caput Regni

“Wealthy citizens of medieval Prague organize building projects to gain king’s favor.”

Released: 2020
Designer: Vladimir Suchy
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 45-150 minutes
Last Year: 21

Praga is a very heavy Euro, and it’s got a lot going on. It’s a presentation, whether it’s the wall and cathedral stands, the action crane wheel or the cute little bridge. You’ll work with all of these to gather resources, build walls, complete the bridge, construct buildings and advance technologies.

The beating heart of Praga is the action crane wheel. This is a round game construct that contains beige tiles. Each tile contains two actions the player can perform – the player chooses one of those. However, each tile is on a wheel which spins around, and lines up with bonuses on the inner circle of the wheel. On top of that, tiles may have costs or bonuses on the outside. This rewards you with bonuses if you choose a tile that hasn’t been chosen in a while (shown as blue in the picture above) and penalties if you chose a tile that has been recently chosen (shown as red). The net result is an action system that lets you take any action tile – if you’re willing to pay the cost.

Praga Caput Regni is just a heavyweight of a heavy Euro, which combines beautiful presentation, deep strategy and a very novel core mechanic. Just a great grab if you like the heavy stuff. Also, how many of you noticed that this is literally the same blurb I cut and pasted from last year? I promise I won’t do it again. Probably.

81. Furnace

“19th century capitalists manipulate the market and manage their industrial empires.”

Released: 2020
Designer: Ivan Lashin
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 30-60
Last Year: 67

Furnace is an engine building game, where players bid on machines that will helpfully let them acquire and convert the resources they need to achieve their goals. Each player has 4 bid tokens, from 1 to 4, that they place on the card they want to win.

The twist is that, on any card for auction, whoever comes in second ALSO gets something, usually in the form of some resources. Which creates some incredibly interesting design wrinkles – you might bid low, HOPING someone outbids you, only winning the card you didn’t want by accident. It’s a freewheeling, lightweight engine building with a ton of social asshattery, much of it accidental (which is often the most hilarious kind).

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Keep checking back as I try to get as much of this done before we get too knee-deep in the Christmas season!

Every year, I prepare a top 100 board game list around this time. I like to do it at this time so that both of y’all that go on and read this content might use it to inform your Christmas shopping. The side effect of all this is that I’ve managed to add a time-intensive and stressful project with a relatively hard deadline on top of all of the other looniness that is the Christmas season. It is very possible I am a masochist.

As with the last couple of years, I have used PubMeeple‘s ranking engine to do the bulk of the sorting. If y’all think my list is ass, that’s fine, go and make your own!

100. Castles of Mad King Ludwig – Collector’s (Colossal) Edition

“Satisfy the king’s whims by building the best fantasy castle, now with more options.”

Released: 2022
Designer: Ted Alspach
Players: 1-5
Estimated Time: 60-90
Last Year: 83

Castles is inspired by a real life king, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who (depending on who you ask) lavishly spent to build a series of increasingly ridiculous castles. Players, serving as architects, will draft rooms and try to assemble them in ways that completes certain mission goals. The result is that each player will finish the game with a uniquely wierd and wonderful castle. Why, exactly, is the Love Grotto attached to the Butter Room? Why, indeed.

This is a very good game that manages to cling to the bottom of the list because of the Colossal Edition of the game, which is… stupid big. Each piece in this edition is twice as large as in the original, which results in wonderfully large castles and also a gaming experience where three people can BARELY fit a game on a large dining room table. Still, if you’re looking for a ridiculously awesome – albeit pricey – table presence, here you go.

99. Unsettled

“A cooperative survival game in the bizarre and wondrous reaches of deep space.”

Released: 2021
Designer: Tom Mattson, Mark Neidlinger
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 60-90
Last Year: 54

In Unsettled, players crash land onto an alien planet, where they must work together in order to find their way off. The mechanics are relatively simple – players can explore and scan, mostly, to find what they need to get off that rock – but the physics of each planet is different, and therefore the puzzle on each planet you find yourself on is completely different. Left relatively unsaid is that it’s pretty weird how your crew keeps crashing into planets.

One thing that really stands out in Unsettled is the writing. Normally, writing in board games is either very dry or very generic. Unsettled is… funny – unafraid to be cheeky and even point out the core absurdities of the game’s central premise. Which is important — a mission-based scenario system works so much better if players are eagerly looking forward to unlocking the next story nugget in the narrative.

98. On Tour

“Plan the best tour route for your band across the USA or Europe.”

Released: 2019
Designer: Chad DeShon
Players: 1-8
Estimated Time: 20 minutes
Last Year: 79

A simple ‘draw and write’ game where you take numbers that are drawn and place them on a map of the US. While trying to accomplish other placement goals for those numbers, at the end of the game, each player will draw a route for their band’s tour bus, where all numbers on their planned route are in ascending order. The best route wins.

The “… and write” genre was huge just a couple of years ago, and as such I considered more than a dozen when making this list. The allure of ‘… and writes’ has fallen quite a bit, though. This is the only pure ‘… and write’ to make the list. Hadrian’s Wall came close, but frankly is too heavy a game to scratch the filler game itch that you want from a roll and write experience.

97. Yedo

“Clans scheme and plan to complete missions in the city of Yedo.”

Released: 2012
Designer: Thomas Vande Ginste, Wolfe Planke
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 120-180 minutes
Last Year: 59

The general flow of Yedo will seem familiar to anyone who likes Lords of Waterdeep – you are the lord of a mighty clan in imperial Japan, and you complete quests by assembling all the quest requirements, which are mostly acquired by sending off your ninja workers to get what you need. There are some spicy design twists as well, such as a wandering watchman who will shut off worker placement options. There are also a wide slew of action cards, divided into categories. This allows you to tailor the experience to be more or less aggressive and/or ‘take that’.

Yedo has stubbornly been on my list a long time. It’s a gorgeous game that is simple to teach and is easy to dial up the complexity if you want a longer or more complex and interactive game. That said, part of my fandom is that I got my hands on the Deluxe Master Set, which takes the production values of the whole experience to eleven.

96: Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Annihilageddon 2 Extreme Nacho Legends

“The Battle Wizards are back in the most RADICALLY sorcery-slinging sequel ever! “

Released: 2022
Designer: Cory Jones, Erik V Larsen, Ben Stoll
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 45-60 Minutes
New to List

Epic Spell Wars is a fairly basic deckbuilder, where players draw from a shared deck and assemble their own deck of cards to try to go to war with other players. Fans of Dominion will surely see the similarity, although there are some key differences. Epic Spell Wars is about direct warfare and attacking each other, for starters. Also it’s full of…. penis jokes.

Epic Spell Wars is not for everyone. To truly enjoy this, you need to be able to have, at least temporarily, the sense of humor of an 11-year-old boy. As an example, the ‘curse’ effect in the game is a ‘limp wand’. Get it? Heheheheheheheh. Still, if you can lower your mindset to this level, it’s very silly fun, and also for some reason the primary currency of the game you can get a nacho chip tokens.

And yes, that giant obnoxious trophy in the picture is a prop from the game.

95. Maglev Metro

“Efficiency is the key to rebuilding the city transit with maglev tech. “

Released: 2021
Designer: Ted Alspech
Players: 1-4 Players
Estimated Time: 60-90 Minutes
Last Year: 60

In this game, players will work together to try to build a subway system. Each player plays as a subway line, and are given a bunch of translucent hexes with subway routes of one color. Each player will try to build their own unique lines to try to complete personal objectives as well as try to guide passengers home to their destination.

Maglev Metro‘s strength is its unique board presence and the tactile feel of the plastic pieces – there are tons of train games, but none that use this aesthetic, which ends up being a pretty damn good representation of a modern subway map. It’s a good and interesting puzzle, and the Maglev Maps expansion, which is a tad on the pricey side, still manages to add new twists in interesting ways.

94. Nothing Personal

“Blackmail. Bribery. Crime. Negotiations abound-but only one can be the next mob boss.”

Released: 2013
Designer: Stephen Avery, Tom Vasel
Players: 3-5
Estimated Time: 120 Minutes
No Ranking Last Year (appeared in previous lists)

In this game, players control a mob family, and each player is attempting to manipulate their way up a social heirarchy so they can be the mob boss. Along the way, their goons will encounter a wide variety of roles, which can impact their odds, but the brunt of the game is political – players wheeling and dealing with each other to manipulate their way into position.

Nothing Personal is the best – and I believe most recent – game in what I call the ‘social heirarchy’ game, a genre pioneered by the classic Kremlin and improved upon by the roman fowl game Chicken Caesar. These games have created some of the best pure social gameplay I’ve ever seen, but in the decade since Nothing Personal came out, the entire social genre has really shifted over to lighter social deduction games like Coup, Ultimate Werewolf and The Resistance. Which is fine, I guess, but all of those really require larger groups and aren’t really my jam.

93. Blood Rage

“Ragnarök has come! Secure your place in Valhalla in epic Viking battles.”

Released: 2015
Designer: Eric M. Lang
Players: 2-4 Players
Estimated Time: 60-90 minutes
Last Year: 27

Blood Rage is a fine mix of deckbuilding and area control, as players jockey to win battles on a game board that is crumbling beneath their feet. It’s simultaneously a meaty and satisfying experience while somehow also being fast, streamlined and well-balanced. The presentation is beautiful and the miniatures are wonderful.

Blood Rage is on the top 10 lists of just a ton of the sort of people who make lists, nearly a decade after its initial release. Many consider it to be the best game that Eric Lang has ever done, but we’ll see him again on this list a couple of times. In fact, one of those times is very, very soon.

92. Las Vegas/Las Vegas Royale

“Win the payout from various casinos by placing the most dice on them. “

Released: 2012
Designer: Rudiger Dorn
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 30
No Ranking Last Year (Appeared on Previous Lists)

Las Vegas is a simple enough game that you don’t even need to buy the game, you just need a handful of dice and paper money. Players roll dice, and then choose all of the dice with the same number and place them on a single casino with a matching number. At the end of the round, whoever has the most dice on a casino claims that casino’s money, but if two people are tied, they are ignored and the money goes to the third place finisher.

Las Vegas is just an ideal filler game – incredibly fast to teach, incredibly easy to play, incredibly quick to finish. It’s highly interactive with a lot of asshattery and yet the games are fast enough you don’t care. The premium edition (Las Vegas Royale) is good, too. It increases the production values nicely. It does also add some additional complexity to the game which, frankly, is okay but unnecessary. If you slap Las Vegas on the table, you’re probably doing it because you want the simplicity of the core experience.

91. Marvel United

“Cooperate as Marvel Heroes to stop the Villains’ master plans! “

Released: 2020
Designer: Andrea Chiarvesio, Eric M. Lang
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 40 minutes
Last Year: 90

I told you we’d see Eric Lang again! Marvel United is a simple card-based coop experience, where each player plays a single hero with a simple and unique 12-card deck of cards. They’ll try to use a simple set of actions to defeat the villain’s plan.

I originally bought all of Marvel United because the chibi-style Marvel miniatures seemed ideal to improve my miniature painting skills, but was ultimately impressed at the surprising depth in this simple game. The hero abilities aren’t as unique as perhaps they should be, but the villians are – each villian is a fundamentally different puzzle for players to solve and it’s truly impressive how this simple ruleset was stretched – and continues to stretch.

If you decide to get into Marvel United, you don’t need all of it, but do focus on finding the boxes that have villains. There’s more coming, soon – in 2024, they’ll be releasing basically ‘what if’ variants of their heroes in a Multiverse-themed kickstarter expansion event. And while I don’t know why, I do know that Spidergeddon (their Spiderverse-themed expansion) is getting rave reviews from those able to get a play of it at their local game conventions.

Elon Musk’s reign running Twitter has been a cavalcade of failure ever since he walked into Twitter HQ carrying a sink, but even by the very low standards set so far, last week was quite the sight to behold. Let’s review, shall we?

Let’s start at the beginning. Twitter’s pretty broke. Don’t just take my word for it.

Twitter is ‘skipping rent payments’ broke. Twitter is ‘not giving out promised bonuses‘ levels of broke. Twitter is ‘being sued for $500M of unpaid severance‘ levels of broke. Twitter is a ‘do we really need a Trust and Safety team‘ level of broke. Twitter is ‘who needs parental leave?’ levels of broke. Twitter is ‘do we really need to pay Google or Amazon for cloud servers and other services‘ levels of broke.

Between the headcount loss of engineers to try to get costs down and some of the decisions above, Twitter is technically limping at best. At the beginning of the month, Twitter users were limited to reading only 600 posts a day – not exactly what you want for your advertising based business! Things are back to normal again – or at least, not quite this absurd.

How Twitter got here is quite convoluted. When Elon took over, he announced that he’d try to convert Twitter to be primarily a subscription business (called Twitter Blue), to make it less dependent on ads. To do that, he’d retire the old blue checkmark system given to celebrities (colloquially called the ‘legacy checkmarks’) and sell them to everyone instead.

But nobody wanted to pay for Twitter. As of February, only about 300K accounts signed up for Twitter (Twitter has about 200M Daily Users so call it a 0.15% conversion rate). After legacy checkmarks were retired, only 12000 out of 400K legacy accounts switched to Twitter Blue. It was such a fiasco that Elon ended up giving BACK blue checkmarks to notable celebrities – many of which then urgently stressed to their fans they didn’t pay for it and never would!

Advertising has plummeted because Advertisers are highly skeptical. Big advertisers like Coke, Jeep, and Wells-Fargoo have stopped advertising, and users are now served wall-to-wall ads for Cheech and Chong’s gummies and various wish.com caliber crap.

All of this has been made worse by the fact that Elon burdened Twitter with about $13B worth of debt that has to be paid off. Twitter was a tight margin business previously that flirted with profitability before acquisition. The destruction of the advertising base combined with these huge interest payments dramatically changed this calculations to be a massive whiff. Twitter is – as Elon said in the first tweet above – not cash flow positive, and not even close.

Which made it all the more surprising when last week a bunch of blue checkmarked Tweeters reported getting informed they were getting big payouts from Twitter, in the $20K range.

When pressed upon it, Elon stressed that the payouts were based on ads that were served in replies to their threads to other verified members, stressing that content to free users was easy to manipulate. And let me just say, it sure is funny that the CEO of a business based on serving ads to an audience that is 99.8% non-subscribers is saying that any metrics including those numbers are untrustworthy and shouldn’t be counted! Wonder how the advertisers feel about this!

This is also funny because a core promise of Twitter Blue – and indeed the primary benefit for most users – is that you won’t see very many ads! So Twitter Blue went from the feature that would make ads unnecessary to the service and where subscribers wouldn’t see very many to one where Blue users MUST be shown ads in order to succeed!

Also, if you think this sounds like a pyramid scheme or an MLM… yeah, kinda does! It’s a transparent attempt to goose blue subscriptions with the promise that you, too, could be getting $25K checks instead of being one of the greater fools shelling out $8/month.

But wait, it gets better. Over on Bluesky, Parker Molloy noted that one particular power user was kind of pissed off.

CatTurd2 is a MAGA diehard with 1.8M followers, who was banned by the old Twitter regime before being reinstated when Elon took over. Despite being an unqualified garbage person, the esteemed Mr. Turd2 is an endless source of amusement to me, given that he constantly complains about being treated unfairly by Elon’s twitter DESPITE BEING ARTIFICIALLY ALGORITHMICALLY BOOSTED. So it would be easy to say this was just Catturd being … turdlike. But no, another person in Catturd’s circle of MAGA doofuses did a little research and discovered that, no, it wasn’t a systematic thing, just checks sent out to a handful of handpicked posters — mysteriously, posters that interact with Elon a lot.

Hey, remember when the whole point of selling blue checkmarks was because the old way was rife with cronyism? I love irony! Anyway, Taylor Lorenz for the Washington Post confirmed this, essentially, saying that contributors collecting money would need to undergo human review. The same article interviews various former Twitter employees who want to stress that it all sounds like a BS marketing stunt.

So out of the people Elon handpicked to get cash payouts, who got paid? Well, for starters, the world’s most notorious sex trafficker.

Media Matters did a bigger roundup of those who announced they were receiving payouts, which includes 9 accounts that got paid out – all of which are right-wing and/or anti-woke commentators. Two others (the Krassenstein brothers) are token left-leaners, but also are suspected fraudsters who were banned from Twitter for literally the sort of platform manipulation Elon claims is bringing down the service (Elon brought them back when he took over).

While we don’t know about anyone who HASN’T tweeted their earnings, it’s still pretty notable that 80% of the people we know Elon picked echoes his antiwoke (read: racist, sexist homophobic and transphobic) worldview. If you want to make money from Twitter, be a right-wing and/or anti-woke influencer who regularly takes a shit on marginalized minorities. All of this is especially interesting given that the audience that Elon bought leans left by a 2 to 1 margin.

That’s right. Elon is literally paying conservatives to torment, start fights with and drive off his core audience.

As an aside, one of the reasons Advertisers were fleeing Twitter was because their ads were, in Elon’s new regime, appearing directly above or below some terrible shit. Advertisers should be aware that this is no longer about their ads appearing next to white nationalist posts, but rather that their ad money will go directly into the pockets of – almost exclusively – sex traffickers, racists, transphobes, vaccine denialists and January 6th defenders. If you advertise on Twitter, you fund hate. Directly.

So what’s next? Well, that’s easy. Elon has promised to massively increase these payouts. But as you consider these promises in mind, remember…. Twitter doesn’t have any money, and has no interesting new revenue pipelines coming.

All of this feels very much like a publicity stunt to try to keep their key influencers from leaving and to convince anyone that Twitter Blue is still a good idea. But why would they feel the need to do that? Gee, that’s a real puzzle.

As a parting gift, please enjoy CatTurd remaining super mad.

Concerning.

It’s been about nine months since Elon Musk spent $44 billion dollars to shit the bed harder than it’s ever been shit on before. In that time, there hasn’t been a serious competitor to Twitter’s claim as the premier western microblogging service. Sure, there was Post. Mastodon. Spill. Spoutable. Hive. And most recently, BlueSky. But none set the world on fire. There are a lot of reasons why, but a huge part of this is because none of them had existing tech stacks, and as such none of them could hit quick critical mass. As one example, Blue Sky is still invite only, and even then hit major load when Twitter had major technical issues.

All the same, if one were Elon Musk, one could perhaps conclude that despite all of these tiny little clones, Twitter was very safe. Maybe his users actually did love what he was doing. Maybe he could find a path to profitability.

About that….

Over the Fourth of July holiday, Elon and company had their worst days yet running the service. Through some combination of bad tech and not paying their bills, most Twitter users were limited to only reading 600 posts a day – an amount that a moderate Twitter user consumes in one trip to the shitter. The day after the holiday ended, Meta (formerly Facebook) launched Threads, a microblogging service meant to directly compete with Twitter. And so far, it’s launch has been a couple of orders magnitude larger than the other clones – in 24 hours. A few notes:

1. Threads hasn’t won yet. It is very hard to dislodge someone’s social media presence, and Twitter was – before Elon – the default social media network for celebrities, corporations and the press. In particular, the people who seem to have the most people letting go of Twitter are the people who found it incredbly useful to do their job – the media. They will probably cling to Twitter until the lights go out.
2. And yet, Facebook was uniquely positioned to this fight. What does Facebook have that BlueSky doesn’t have? Well, for starters, an infrastructure that can handle throwing 30 million users on it on day one. This dramatically increases the chances that Threads can hit an early critical mass. If a significant portion of that 30 million users sticks around, Twitter could be fucked very quickly.
3. Meta was also able to leverage preexisting networks. One of the roughest things about starting on a new social media site is that you start with an empty feed and friends list. On Mastodon and Blue Sky you can get around that with tools like fedifinder but you have to be fairly technically savvy to know that. Meta, on the other hand, was able to preseed most people’s friends list with their Instagram contacts, which meant anyone with an Instagram account started with a lively list. The impact of this simply should not be underestimated. If Threads becomes something, this will be a core reason why.
4. Meta needs a win as much as Elon does – and have the cash to chase it. Meta just spent more than 30 billion dollars trying to build the Metaverse and pulling the plug. But they do have money in the bank, and a lot of it – they have about $40B in the bank and make about $100B a year. Meanwhile, Twitter’s money making capacity was absolutely annihilated both by Musk’s purchase and his poor leadership. Mark Zuckerberg needs a win to get back in Wall Street’s good graces and erase the stink of the last few years. If Threads keeps showing signs of life, expect Zuck to push his chips all-in.
5. Meta is betting big on ‘Friendly’. A huge part of the destruction of Twitter was Elon’s abandonment of community management in order to embrace a view of ‘free speech’ that ensures that everyone’s post is full of white supremacists, homophobes and antivaxers at all time. By comparison, the message put out by Zuck and other Threads employees over and over again was ‘friendly’. Do they mean it? Who knows. Remember, Facebook has evolved into a right-wing echo chamber that is still a major reason why people think vaccines don’t work and Trump won the last election. But it does at least tell you what Facebook’s market research tells us is Twitter’s core weakness.

6) Threads also appears to be taking an aggressive stance against misinformation. Given that misinformation is something that has absolutely blossomed under Elon’s management, this is also almost certainly a reaction (and a smart one) to that.

7) When you first go to Threads, the first thing you notice are the celebrities. My first foray into Threads put Tom Brady and Eva Longoria on top of my feed. Other celebrities were actually talking. There are two important takeaways from this. The first is that celebrities were here and at least experimentally active — one can’t help but remember how Elon has been treating celebrities like actual dog shit on Twitter for quite some time, and so it’s not surprising that celebs are more than eager to try alternatives. But even more significant and important is that, in this environment, you know who celebrities are. In my last Twitter article, I talked about how one of the bits of magic of pre-Elon Twitter was knowing you were rubbing elbows with real stars. That is completely absent in post-Elon Twitter, as Elon was happy to sacrifice that in order to coax $8 bucks a month out of CatTurd. I said it was a mistake before, but it wasn’t until I went into threads that I realized HOW much of a mistake it felt like. Twitter seems small and provincial now, especially since the biggest ‘celebrities’ that talk are right-wing asshats you want to block reflexively anyway.

8) And the advertising situation is very different. Elon’s bad decision-making has utterly destroyed their advertising revenue – their only significant revenue stream. A year ago, I was seeing ads for Acura and Jeep. Now, they’re an embarrassing cornucopia of weed gummies and cheap dropshipped bullshit that even wish.com would be humiliated to stock. Threads doesn’t really have any advertising yet – I wouldn’t expect to see any for a while, while Threads tries to gain a foothold (they have cash to burn to keep your feed clean for a while). But what they do have are brands – and major ones like McDonalds. You can almost feel their joy in knowing their posts won’t be adjacent to white supremacist bullshit and antivaxer crap. I know it seems stupid, but even the commercial angle of Threads feels significantly less cheap.

9) ‘The everything app’. One more weird thing: one of the huge things driving Twitter into the ground is Elon Musk attempting to reinvent Twitter into an ‘everything app’. He already has pushed hard into video (with absolutely hilarious results) and is also pushing hard to advance a payments business and do things like book restaurants and order Taxis. Humorously enough, Facebook already tried that – and ended up with an enormous pile of bloatware that is underused and complexifies the user experience. I strongly suspect that Threads will remain simple and clean, kind of acting as a throwback for the company, and Twitter will look even shittier and more unfocused as a result.

I’m not sure I’m going to permanently entrench on Threads – I’ve been more at home on Bluesky, frankly, and I’m taking a wait-and-see approach to yet another new social media network. Also, let’s be frank, Meta has not exactly been a benevolent force for good tech-wise. They probably helped Trump get elected, they destroyed countless media outlets with fake stats that pushed to video, and Facebook is one of the primary vectors of antivax and other right-wing quackery in the world.

That being said, Elon Musk took a beautiful thing and destroyed it, so I’m pretty okay with at least rooting for Threads to drive Twitter closer to bankruptcy. And frankly, it brings a tear to my eye that about 30 million Twitter users and counting agree with me.

I saw that the next Destiny 2 expansion is going to be a mostly underwater zone called Season of the Deep, which prompted this as a response, which most experienced designers saw and agreed with.

I routinely do lots of job interviews and I ask a lot of lead designer/creative directors what's the worst mistake they ever made and you'd be shocked at how many say 'not killing the underwater levels when we had the chance'. https://t.co/O3X4erHmJB

— Damion Schubert – @ZenOfDesign.com on bsky (@ZenOfDesign) May 15, 2023

For what it’s worth, this goes back years, and I’ve heard this from at least 3 different candidates referring to 3 different projects, two of which were MMOs, and not to name names or anything but one of them was talking about his experiences working at a company years ago that rhymes with ‘gizzard’, so we’re not talking about companies that are short on cash or world-class talent. Still…

Continue reading

It’s been about 48 hours since Elon killed legacy checkmarks in an attempt to convince people, but hopefully especially celebrities, to make the switch. How’s it going?

Of the 420,000 legacy verified blue checks, about 320 signed up for Twitter Blue and around 290 got rid of Twitter Blue as of about noon today, @travisbrown told me today.https://t.co/rGfgXXVjtR

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) April 21, 2023

Oh.

Well then! Let’s talk about why this is such an awful and in retrospect obviously avoidable catastrophuck.

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The blue checkmark first came into existence on Twitter not as a status symbol, but as a legal defense mechanism for the fledgling social media network. In 2009, a baseball manager named Tony LaRussa sued Twitter after a parody account that pretended to be him made some incredibly bad taste jokes. The lawsuit was dropped, but the checkmark would emerge within its wake. Eventually, a full team at Twitter was hired to be responsible for verifying that celebrity accounts were actually controlled by actual celebrities.

This direction proved to be rocket fuel for the fledgling network. Not only did it provide legal protection, it also created a sense that you could hobnob with and talk shit to actual celebrities. On Twitter, you could hang out with Stephen King, Bette Midler, Trent Reznor, Edgar Wright, Chrissy Teigen, William Shatner, Tony Hawk, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Lebron James… the list went on and on. Some were more prolific Tweeters than others and plenty of celeb accounts were actually heavily sanitized corporate accounts managed by some social media lackey, but still… Twitter was a place you had ACCESS to the biggest stars in the world. And more importantly, in many cases — you knew it was actually them. And it was free.

The news and sports media formed a parasitic nature with Twitter during this period of time. Twitter is a great place to sniff out leads, and that level of direct access to reporters is great. Throughout the 2010s, it was incredibly common to see bylines at the end of web articles giving the reporter’s twitter handle. Or the twitter handle of an ESPN talking head show up on screen during their show. This, of course, sent all their viewers to Twitter so you could tell Skip Bayless directly to his (virtual) face that you thought he was full of shit.

But a funny thing happened on the way. Actual verification has a manpower cost, and Twitter had to draw arbitrary lines over who got considered for it. Where that line was was blurry and ill-defined, and frankly not terribly consistent. There was some amount of Twitter employees sneaking friends in the back door. And there were lots of ‘people who snuck in’: a writer who did a 6-month stint at Buzzfeed but were now posting out of the back of their van to their 6K followers might have a blue check. Meanwhile, Gail Simone, one of the truly great modern comic writers as well as one of Twitter’s most playful and prolific tweeters with 200K followers, never got one.

Along the way, the Blue Checkmark started to be associated with STATUS. The blue checkmarks were the sign that you had, somehow, ‘made it’. It was wildly coveted- I admit even by me. And so when Elon Musk was forced by the Delaware Court of Chancery to honor the contract he signed to buy Twitter for a wildly overpriced $44 Billion dollars and he needed to increase revenue fast, he stumbled upon and clung to the idea of SELLING that status.

The problem is that status isn’t why the blue checkmark was important . And because he didn’t understand it, now the status associated with the blue checkmark is roughly as desirable to wear as a dead fish found in the anus of a rotting skunk.

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The core of Elon’s idea was to juice up Twitter Blue, a very early Twitter experiment first launched in 2021. It was very nascent and at that point not terribly useful, with features like an improved the bookmarking system and a 30 second window to undo a tweet. It was something like $5. Almost nobody bought it. Most Twitter used just didn’t NEED any of that.

One group that DID seem to buy it were cryptobros, for a reason that’s hilarious in retrospect: it was one of the only places on the web to display your NFTs in a place that muggles could see them. A Twitter Blue subscriber had the ability to choose an NFT from a crypto wallet to be their profile, and it would advertise to the world that they were the sort of person to drop 4 figures on a JPG because of the unique hexagon portrait shape. It was dumb.

But it does make one wonder if the fact that Elon surrounds himself with the sort of silicon valley libertarian cryptobros that loves NFTs is somehow a factor in the stupid decisions that were to come. Maybe not, but one way or another, Elon became convinced that selling subscriptions was the way to save Twitter.

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I’ve worked in subscription-based design for most of my career. Particularly, the time spent on Free-to-Play (F2P) Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs) is instructive here. Most F2P MMOs in fact do have a subscription-tier – a mode where they get certain advantages over free players, usually in the form of convenience or reducing tedium.

Those who count beans love subscriptions because they are relatively reliable predictors of future revenue. Sure, things like selling lootbox content might temporarily dump some money in your coffers, but you never know when they’re going to catch the player’s imagination. By contrast, if you have a million people paying you ten bucks a month, you can be pretty sure you’re going to get about $10M a month for at least the next few months.

The goal when designing a subscription service for a F2PMMO is to make it so that, if you’re going to spend money in a F2P game, the best value is that subscription. MMOs have a nice suite of features that you can use to upsell an MMO player into a subscriber. You can offer faster levelling, more inventory space, earlier access to features, more frequent opportunities to teleport home, and faster mounts as examples. MMOs tend to embrace selling convenience and reducing tedium in the USA and other Western markets because most game audiences here reject games where you can straight-up buy power advantages. In Asia, selling power is yet another tool they have in the toolbox.

A subscription HAS to have value because subscriptions ‘stack’. Every digitally connected person on earth has multiple subscriptions running, and they directly compare the ongoing costs with all the other subscriptions they have. How many MMO subscriptions will one person pay for? How many streaming services will a customer keep active at one time? And so on and so far.

In this competitive landscape, if you’re hoping to hit big numbers, it becomes absolutely vital to offer a subscription service with high tangible value and also to never piss off your customers so much they think about hitting that ‘unsubscribe’ button. Because they’re only going to support so many subscriptions at one time, and every service is competing for those dollars.

With all the above in mind, let’s take a hard look at Twitter Blue and its rollout.

You can do long-form posts! (Most people rarely need to do this – hell, the majority of Twitter users almost never tweet – and if they do, a tweetstorm is fine). You can post 1080p video! (Most people will never post their own videos at all) You can use italics! (Who cares?) You can edit tweets! (Only its weird and cludgy) You can show your NFT profile pic! (How very 2021 of you).

The one thing that’s of moderate interest to your average user is having your tweets be ranked higher than that of other users. But if everyone subscribes, this becomes a non-feature! If everyone is special, then no one is!

All of this is on the roadmap to Elon’s vision of Twitter as an everything app, but the truth of the matter is that this is simply not a very compelling suite of features. The most charitable thing you can say is that it would only appeal to power users – the sorts of content creators who are creating longform articles and videos. Put another way, Twitter’s subscription is far less useful to the average user than Youtube Premium, a fantastic value that nonetheless very few users subscribe to, as a percentage of the userbase.

Let’s put aside the fact that Twitter’s longform writing is lightyears behind competitors like Substack, and their video and streaming is lightyears behind YouTube and Twitch, or that charging money to the passionate people who were previously generating free content for you is insane. The fact of the matter is that it’s obvious that around 99.999% of the Twitter population has no real need for this suite of tools. Elon probably realized immediately that he’d need another angle to goose sales among the rank and file.

He decided they were selling STATUS.

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The problem is that STATUS is not what the blue checkmark is about. It’s about AUTHENTICITY. It’s about knowing that if Stephen King tweets something, it’s actually coming from Stephen King. And that authenticity has the runoff effects of providing LEGAL PROTECTION to Twitter as well as a sense of ACCESS for Twitter users.

This is all, obviously, pure upside for Twitter. Beyond legal protection, it created that sense that you were rubbing elbows with celebrities, and that if a news outlet says something, it’s actually coming from that news outlet.

But a lot of people confuse this need for AUTHENTICITY for STATUS or even ENDORSEMENT. As an example, I think that Michael Knowles is an absolutely loathesome toad of a human being, but I also think it’s important that anyone like Knowles, Ben Shapiro or Alex Jones to be verified if they have an account, because it advances the cause of free discussion and debate greatly to know that the person you’re angry about actually said whatever they said.

But Elon needed to MAKE it about status. And so he did. And in doing so, absolutely destroyed the status value of the blue checkmark.

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Every social media site is a bit of an echo chamber, and they all have their own political lean. In the case of Twitter, the audience has always leaned left, by which I mean Twitter has always been a political universe where a bulk of the population believes not just that Bernie Sanders walks on water, but also things like unions are universally good, all cops are always bastards, landlords are universally scum and that racism and transphobia is bad. Upwards of 69% of Twitter’s most active posters were left-leaners and most of them consider Joe Biden to be far to the right of them.

Which is why it’s even more mystifying that, upon purchasing Twitter, Elon got hard at work declaring war on that 69%.

In just a few months, Elon has directly boosted voting for GOP candidates, encouraged transphobia, mocked combating racism, boosted insane right-wing conspiracy theories and warned of the dangers of birth control and abortion on an appearance on Tucker Carlson. He’s also banned several left-wing activist groups based on an obvious right-wing ops, while simultaneously welcoming back actual white supremacists and neonazis.

Needless to say, the 69% that made up the core of Twitter’s audience was not amused. This is kind of like buying a fine restaurant, and then serving the audience giant piles of poop on a silver platter.

The end result is that support for Elon’s efforts became a culture war thing, where support for Elon was a support for right-wing extremism. Elon’s big-name early adopters are a collection of some of the biggest garbage people on the face of the earth. Ben Shapiro. Matt Walsh. Charlie Kirk. Ian Miles Cheong. Mike Cernovich. CatTurd. James O’Keefe. Andy Ngo. And, of course, Elon himself.

That’s the club you’re announcing you’ve joined if you put a blue checkmark next to your name. You’re no longer announcing you’re in a club with Steve Martin, Eve 6, Selena Gomez, Malala Yousafzai, Bill Gates, Cheech Marin, Aaron Rodgers, Bette Midler and Mark Ruffalo, none of which are verified now. It’s now a club whose most visible members are among the most divisive, racist, transphobic, anti-science, conspiracy-spewing jerks on the planet. If not to everyone, then certainly to the bulk of Twitter’s young, mostly progressive audience.

The blue checkmark is now a virtual MAGA hat.

At some level, Elon realizes how bad this looks. As such, he’s visibly given free verified access to stars like Jason Alexander, Stephen King, Ice-T and Lebron James, even after they made it clear they don’t want it.

Which has resulted in Elon’s sycophants harassing these celebrities for ‘not being willing to pay $8’ when the money was never the issue. The issue is that nobody wants to be associated with them.

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The ironic thing is that more people verified would be very good for Twitter. It would help protect Twitter legally. It would let you know quickly if you were actually hobnobbing with stars. It would mean more people were attaching their opinions to a persistent identity, which would probably reduce trolling and generally being shitty to each other.

If Twitter charged a ONE-TIME fee of $20 bucks, and spent that money actually verifying that people were who they said they were, a ton of people would likely sign up for that. Actual verification is useful, not just to the speaker, but to other users and most importantly Twitter itself. It would make Twitter a place where disinformation was less free-flowing. It would make Twitter a great place to do citizen journalism. It makes it much easier to fight ban evasion! All of this is good!

But the current verification model is too expensive, and doesn’t verify a damn thing beyond that you have a working credit card number. So instead what we have is that a hundred bucks a year buys you a seat in the Elon Musk fan club, and attaches a symbol to your profile that is roughly as popular as leprosy.

And don’t even get me started on how Elon expects Journalistic outlets to pay orders of magnitude more, despite the massive amount of free content and traffic those outlets drive to Twitter. It’s probably just a coincidence that I see Twitter handles on TV shows and in journalistic bylines a lot less than I used to.

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Can this tailspin be corrected? Hard to say. At its core, Elon will fail unless he embraces these core principles:

1. Actual verification is so important to the foundation of Twitter’s appeal that whatever they can do to maximize number of verified users is good.
2. Depending on verification to be the revenue engine that monetizes Twitter is therefore counterproductive and doomed to fail.
3. The actual feature list of Twitter Blue is something that only hardcore content creators should or do care about, and will never have mass appeal.
4. Verification that isn’t verification isn’t shit.

I’m personally pessimistic that Elon will figure these things out and actually correct Twitter before it runs out of money, and even if he does the right thing, he will then have to overcome huge cultural opposition to the fact that he made Twitter Blue an absolute poisoned brand.

So until then, enjoy how Twitter puts all the Blue Checkmark reply guys at the top of a thread’s replies, as it makes it much easier to block them.

So here we go: the definitive list of top ten board games in the world, as of right this moment. All those other games I’ve listed before? They’re all crap. Fuck you, game #11, you didn’t cut the mustard. Here, this list here, is the good shit.

But you know, if you’re actually interested in the older entries, here they are:
 100-91 90-81 80-71 70-61 60-51 50-41 40-31 30-21 20-11

Like many gamers, I had quite a backlog coming out of the pandemic, so this year I put special emphasis on playing lots of new games and evaluating them, and it shows in the results. Roughly 30% of the list is new blood, which is very high, but frankly the list had gotten somewhat stagnant in recent years, and so a shakeup was in order.

The top of the list isn’t as fluid as the rest, though. Only two new games in the top that I’ve never listed before, although as we will see, one of them is a variant of my former #1 game of all time…

On to the list!

10. Architects of the West Kingdom

Released: 2018
Designer: S J Macdonald, Shem Phillips
Players: 1-5
Estimated Time: 60-80 minutes

It’s weird to not think of Shem Phillips as an up-and-coming design talent. His breakout hit, Raiders of the North Sea (an excellent title that fell off the list this year), put him on the map and since then he’s released about a game a year. All of them solid. Most of them bangers. We’ve already seen one already (Paladins of the West Kingdom).

The thread that connects Shem’s games is to reinvent the worker placement mechanic in interesting and creative ways. Architects is his best title. In most worker placement games, when you place a worker, you take an action and no one else can go there. As an example, you might go to the lumber mill, take one piece of wood, and then noone else can go to the lumbermill until a game mechanic makes you move or remove your worker.

In Architects, anyone can go to the lumber mill, even if someone’s there. More to the point, you can go to the lumber mill, and not only are you not prevented from doing so, but the strength of the action is based on how many dudes you’ve got there. As an example, placing your fourth dude on the lumber mill will get you four pieces of lumber.

That’s a lot of lumber! Such power is not without it’s downsides though. Clump up your workers too much, and they’ll be a tempting target for your opponent. They can place a worker to arrest all of your workers in a single location and send them to jail. They’ll end up getting rewards for their efforts, and you’ll need to waste a turn busting them out of prison. This press-your-luck mechanism transforms simple worker placement into a very different kind of game entirely, one with a lot more interactivity, and one with a lot more risk vs reward evaluation.

As an aside, Shem’s newest game Wayfarers of the South Tigris currently sits on my gaming table unplayed. Itarrived too late to make this list, but looking it over, it looks very likely that something’s going to have to be bumped out to make room for it next year.

9. Gùgōng

Released: 2018
Designer: Andreas Steding
Players: 1-5
Estimated Time: 60-90

Some games are basically solitaire – your game interactions don’t affect other people very much. Some games are highly interactive, and the pinnacle of that experience are games with a high ‘take that’ factor (or ‘fuck you’ factor, if you’re less PC about it). This game is a different animal entirely – it is a game where players are very highly likely to accidentally screw over their opponent’s plans. As a result, some of the funniest game nights I’ve ever had have centered on games of Gugong.

The premise is simple. There are seven action spaces around the board, and each action space has, at any given time, a card on it representing a gift with a number from 1 to 9. Each round, you’ll have a hand of (at least) four gift cards also with a number.

This game attempts to reflect a period of Chinese history that was rife with corruption. The government outlawed bribes and gift giving, and so instead corrupt merchants got around that with gift exchanges – you give a government official a gift more valuable than what he has, and take his card. And so it is here. Want to take an action where the gift card is a 7? You’ll need to play an 8 or a 9. Have a 1 in your hand? It will only beat 9s. To make matters more complex, the card you pick up will (almost always) be worse than you placed down, and won’t be playable until next round.

The thing that makes this fiendish, of course, is that you’re constantly messing up other people’s plans. My 7 is perfectly fine for placing on that 4-spot. But that option disappears if you drop an 8 on it before my turn comes around. This is one of those games where you need to get in the mindset of not getting too attached to your plans, but if you can get into that mental headspace, Gugong can be uproariously fantastic.

8. Pandemic Legacy: Season 1

Released: 2015
Designer: Rob Daviau, Matt Leacock
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 60 minutes

I honestly don’t get too many campaign games. Frankly, myself and those at my table would prefer to see a variety of games than stick to one week-over-week, and in many campaign games, the game doesn’t really unfold and stretch its wings until you get a few missions in. Which is challenging because if the first games don’t grab you, the table is going to be reluctant to bring it to the table again to go deeper. This doesn’t happen in Pandemic Legacy.

Right out of the box, before anything else happens, you’re playing Pandemic, the 2008 granddaddy of cooperative gaming with virtually no gameplay changes, so you know it’s good. Early on, though, a card will tell you to pick up another card in the game and– destroy it. And so you rip it in half. And if your group hasn’t played a campaign game before, they’ll audibly gasp.

The rest of the game will be modified as the game goes on, adding new complexity, player roles and challenges. There are places in the rulebook to add stickers as they’re unlocked. In the box, there are 8 smaller boxes with new game components to add as the game unfolds. There are marks next to each city on your board that you cross out when a city gets overrun – too many marks and the city is permanently destroyed for the rest of the campaign. And the story itself is very dynamic – with both triumphs and… let’s just call them ‘unexpected setbacks’.

Since Season 1 has been released, there have been two more released. Scuttlebutt says that Season 2 more radically invents the formula, where Season 0 is a prequel set in the cold war and in general is less adventurous but better reviewed. I haven’t played either yet – my attention for campaign games went to another game this year — as we shall soon see.

7. Lost Ruins of Arnak

Released: 2020
Designer: Elwen, Min
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 30-120

Arnak is a “worker placement+deckbuilder” game, an unusual and relatively new game genre that’s enjoyed some success. We’ve already looked at another one on this list – Dune Imperium – and there are many who believe that Dune is the superior game. I’m here to tell you these people are wrong.

Dune is excellent and a worthy addition to any game library, especially if you love sci-fi involving gigantic drug-addled invertibrates. But Arnak‘s Indiana Jones’ inspired theme is criminally underexplored in board games, and really sings here. Dune is slick and glossy. Arnak is a huge, gaudy visual feast. Dune is simple and streamlined. Arnak is more fiddly, and offers more varied, interesting and thematically appropriate paths to victory.

The gameplay conceit is simple – you’re trying to find the titular Lost Ruins. To do so, you’ll explore lots of random locations, which results in adding new action spaces on a board. New worker placement games added to a board is a game mechanic I always love, as it always creates a new dynamic puzzle for people to react to. They’ll also be accruing resources and acquiring new cards, in hopes of making a deck that allows them to explore deeper and gain greater efficiencies.

In all seriousness, you can’t go wrong with either game. But to me, Dune is an excellent snack, whereas Lost Ruins of Arnak is a sumptuous feast.

6. Yokohama

Released: 2016
Designer: Hisashi Hayashi
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 90 minutes

Yokohama has an intimidating board presence. More than a dozen game boards are laid out in a pyramid-shape meant to represent the sleepy village of Yokohama as it is on the cusp of becoming a major Japanese city. But don’t be intimidated. The game is far simpler than it looks, and underneath all this cardboard is a finely tuned game design machine.

The core game concept is borrowed heavily from Istanbul. On a players turn, they will start by either dropping three workers (little meeples) on three different locations – or alternatively dropping two workers on the same location. Then they move their big meeple (representing the head of their company) to any location, assuming they can trace a path of workers between their start and final location.

The strength of the action where they land is based on the number of pieces of wood in their color where they land. This includes their chairman as well as any workers they placed. But it can also include houses and warehouses they build. Want your game plan to really lean into fish and tea? Well, build houses there, and all your actions in those spots immediately become more powerful.

Yokohama was my number one game last year, and I have a hard time seeing it fall out of the top 10 anytime soon. It’s just too good of a core game design, and while heavy, one that will keep me fascinated for years to come.

5. Beyond the Sun

Released: 2020
Designer: Dennis K Chan
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 60-120

Beyond the Sun is basically “Skill Trees: The Game” and if that description appeals to you, you probably should just go over to Amazon and order it right now.

The centerpiece of the game is a massive skill tree. Players start with basic technologies, which act as prereqs for other, better technologies. When players advance to a skillbox that is as of yet undiscovered, they choose between two technologies which will go into that skillbox. Other players can, later on, unlock the technology you discovered.

Skillboxes offer you a variety of upgrades to your experience, including persistent effects, but also including new worker placement locations, which are more powerful than the basic ones all players have access to later in the game. But because this is a worker placement game, two players sharing the same tech means sometimes they’re fighting for the same space, which encourages you to unlock new technologies no one has ever seen before.

On a smaller board to the side is a tiny little galaxy map, with a handful of galactic locations for players to fight for. Ultimately, your skill tree advances lead here, to players building ships and traversing the galaxy, with the purpose of adding these zones to your empire – and earning not just special bonuses but also the victory points they represent.

If I had one complaint about the game, it’s that it feels a little dry. The core board is basically a string of boxes, and the player boards (shown above) definitely favor functionality over aesthetics. But that’s never slowed down anyone’s appreciation for Beyond the Sun. If you like fiddling with skill trees, this game will sing to you.

4. Champions of Midgard

Released: 2015
Designer: Ole Steiness
Players: 2015
Estimated Time: 60-90 minutes

Champions of Midgard is a midweight game that combines basic worker placement with the dice-chucking of an Ameritrash combat game. It’s relatively simple for its weight class, easy to teach, and rarely exceeds that 90 minute playtime.

On a player’s turn, they’ll place meeples to earn various resources, such as wood, food and gold. But the most important resource a player can earn are dice – these represent your viking warriors and your boat can hold eight of them. There are three colors of dice, each with different sides to them that represents different offensive and defensive abilities.

After the worker placement phase, players will divide up their dice to attack monsters that they’ve called dibs on. If you kill monsters, you can get big rewards – but the dice are random, life is fleeting, and you’re always a couple bad rolls away from calamity.

Champions of Midgard is a fantastic game, and relatively easy to get to the table. Some players don’t like the randomness of the dice, though, and while I don’t agree, the Valhalla expansion solves this nicely. Not only does it add three new kinds of dice, it also rewards you with chits when your vikings die, that can be traded for benefits. Benefits so nice that sometimes the right move is to send your Viking clan straight into the meat grinder.

3. Whistle Mountain

Released: 2020
Designer: Scott Caputo, Luke Laurie
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 60-90 minutes

Whistle Mountain is a new entry on the list, and definitely the highest all-new game to do so. Coming in this high is pretty impressive, which gives you an idea of how much I like this game. I love this game.

By now, you’ve probably noticed that I like worker placement games. Well, this is a worker placement game on five bags of crack. It’s a game where players create the placement opportunities themselves, and where the game state constantly destroys them.

The center of the board is a large grid. On that grid, you will slowly build scaffolding. As the scaffolding develops, they will slowly add rooms to the scaffolding.

Your ‘workers’ are three airships. One takes one space, one takes two, and the last takes three. Airships can only be placed in certain locations, but they gain all the benefits on the tiles (scaffolding and rooms) that their airship is adjacent to. Your big ship could potentially touch more spaces, but your small ship is much better at taking advantage of tiny spaces.

To make matters more challenging, once your careful stack of machinery and scaffolding gets above a certain height, the valley begins to flood. Flooding will cover up the lower levels of scaffolding, which means that old locations get wiped off the map.

Whistle Mountain is not a casual game and I wouldn’t drop it in front of everyone. But if you have a gaggle of seasoned gamers who love surfing on the edge of chaos, Whistle Mountain is really hard to beat.

2. Clank Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated

Released: 2019
Designer: Andy Clautice, Paul Dennen
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 90-120 Minutes

This is the other new game on my list, but since it’s a tweak of one of my top games of all-time – Clank was my number one game a couple years ago – it only kind of counts. I knew I’d love it as soon as I saw the box, I just needed to be willing to commit to the campaign.

The basic Clank formula is largely unchanged. This is a deckbuilder with a board presence, where players are trying to explore a dungeon, grab the shiniest bauble they can find and get out. The complication is that they’ll make noise along the way (‘clank’), which is represented as cubes. Occasionally the dragon attacks, at which point cubes are pulled out of the bag. If your cubes are pulled, you take damage.

The core formula of Clank is perfect, and one that is appreciable by both hardcore and casual gamers alike. Part of the reason its so great is that Clank accelerates so smoothly. The end of almost every game is entertaining as hell, everyone tries to make a mad dash out of the dungeon before being barbequed by dragon fire.

Clank: Legacy expands on this with the usual fare, of course. As players adventure, they’ll add new cards to the market to buy, or add stickers to the deck, or add new rules to the rulebook and game components to the box. But the real charm of the game is the writing.

Clank: Legacy partnered with Penny Arcade to help flesh out the writing, and the result is a god damned treat. In this new Clank world, adventuring is a corporate enterprise, complete with helicopter bosses, annual reviews, and corporate espionage against a rival firm. And every game design decision in the campaign just works masterfully to support this vision.

I’m always reluctant to give out too many details in campaign games, as I don’t want to scuttle the surprises. But a great example is that a few missions in, the game adds a new resource called Interns. What are interns good for? Mostly, for throwing in front of monsters to soak damage for you. And as a bonus, when an intern dies, he gets thrown in the dragon bag, and could be drawn instead of a player cube. Which strongly incentivizes the whole table to hilariously farm interns and throw them into the meat grinder.

Clank! was already a great game, but Clank: Legacy takes it to the next level, because lighthearted tone of the game and the Penny Arcade writing go together like peanut butter and chocolate. If you have a gaming group that loves absurdity can commit to the whole campaign (about 10 games), definitely recommended.

1. Great Western Trail

Released: 2016
Designer: Alexander Pfister
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 75-150 minutes

Great Western Trail is Alexander Pfister’s opus, a nearly flawless game about driving cattle from Texas to Kansas City. Also, it’s got meeples with little cowboy hats.

The basics are simple. A player has a hand of cards (that happen to be cows). They want to end up in Kansas City with the best hand of cards possible – which happens to be unique high value cows. They’ll cash in those cows, earn victory points, and be sent back to Nowhere, texas to do it again.

The path from Nowhere to Kansas City has many stops. A player can move up to three spaces each turn. Each space that they stop on has different actions they can take, such as adding new cows to their deck, building new buildings to stop at that are more powerful, unlocking new victory cards, and so on.

But each of these stops ALSO offers rewards – usually cash – for crappy cows. You want to get these cows out of your deck anyway. So using these spaces not only gains you benefits, they also provide an opportunity for you to weed through your deck to get those high value cards you want to find before you get to Kansas City.

Great Western Trail is a great game straight out of the box, but it really cements it’s #1 status with the addition of the Rails to the North expansion (pictured above). This adds a new vector to the game, where players can try to build houses to connect railroad towns beyond Kansas City. It definitely makes the game heavier – and players who are overwhelmed may opt to ignore this secondary board entirely – but it adds another gameplay vector and also loosens up some tight spots in the game balance that players often stumbled over early in the game. Definitely recommended as well.

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And that’s it for this year’s list! Be sure to check back next year, when I defy my better judgment and do this all over again!

Also, please do leave a comment here if you read this far – tell me what I inspired you to buy, or what I forgot to rank. Making lists like this is pretty high effort, and it’s good to know it’s reaching people. See you next year!

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.

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

This year had an unprecedented number of new games added to the list, and no more is that more evident than this part of the list. Only 5 games in this section are retreads from a previous year, and one of those actually is a Second Edition of a game whose first edition fell off the list years ago. The last couple years have just been utterly fantastic for new, interesting and novel board games of all types, sizes and weight classes. Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta gamer.

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

30. Underwater Cities

Released: 2018
Designer: Vladimir Suchy
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 80-150 minutes

In the not-too-future, all of the best real estate has an ocean view. In Underwater Cities, players will compete to build new settlements at the bottom of the sea, by building an interconnected series of domes. To do so, they’ll need to harvest kelp, gather resources, and science the shit out of everything.

The key design innovation is the action selection system. Every turn, players activate an unoccupied space and play a card to go along with it. Both the card and the space have actions on them, but they only get to do both things if the colors match, meaning that players need to carefully manage their three-card hand to get optimal benefits and deal with other players blocking where they need to go.

Underwater Cities also has a tableau building element to it, and due to its slightly-heavier-than-average weight class, is likely to appeal to fans of Terraforming Mars – although ‘build your own atlantis’ is likely not as sticky a theme as Mars, even though both have a strong scientific undertow to their themes. Still, it looks much better on the table, and everyone always loves the little domes that make up their drowned suburbia.

29. VagrantSong

Released: 2022
Designer: Matt Carter, Justin Gibbs, Kyle Rowan
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 45-120 minutes

It’s Hobo Ghostbusters.

VagrantSong is a cooperative, story driven game where you and your fellow Drifters are travelling across the country in a train, which it turns out is haunted. Your hobo gang will need to work together in order to help these lost spirits find peace – before the haunting spirits trap you into an existence of eternal torment.

At its core, VagrantSong is a campaign-based tactical game. There are roughly 20 scenarios for the players to play – arranged in a campaign, and each one centers around a different ghost which has a different AI and/or set of rules for players to adapt to. Meanwhile, the players themselves will be moving their pieces around the board, and trying to solve the puzzle before everyone in the party loses their humanity.

There’s a lot to like about VagrantSong – although I should stress the rule book could definitely be a lot cleaner. But one of the things to really call out is its charm. The art is a wonderful cartoony style that is represented throughout the game, including on the acrylic standees for both your characters and the ghosts. And the writing is funny, witting, charming and occasionally dark – as you’d expect. The end result is a tactical game that feels very DIFFERENT than the typical swords-and-sorcery or sci-fi fare that most tactical games aspire towards. And different in a good way – VagrantSong feels far more accessible than others in the same genre, despite how unusual the theme is.

28. Caesar! Seize Rome in 20 Minutes!

Released: 2022
Designer: Paolo Mori
Players: 1-2
Estimated Time: 20 minutes

The days of the Roman Republic are coming to an end, as Julius Caesar maneuvers in order to name himself emperor and gain absolute power and become master of the known world. If you happen to be Caesar, that sounds pretty good. If you’re the other guys, not so much.

Caesar is a light two-player game. On each player’s turn, the player has two military strength tokens to choose from, and they’ll choose to place one of them on an open border spot These tokens are themed (for example, you can only place navy tokens in the water) and are split in value – you might give 6 military to one province while adding 0 to the other (as shown in the sea in the image below).

Once provinces are completed (all border spots are filled), the player who completes the province takes the orange token inside, which is a bonus token that grants special powers. Then the player who has the most power in the province takes control of it by placing an influence token on it. The first player to place all of their influence tokens wins the game.

The thing I like about the game is the simplicity and the deviousness of the split token values. A strong military presence in one area will often necessitate leaving a dilapidated presence in its neighbor, meaning that every token placed is forcing you to make harsh decisions about what to fight for and what to concede to your opponent.

This is my top-ranked two-player game, although I confess I don’t play as many of these as others. But the deep tactics, quick playtime and small form factor make this particular game a delight. If the idea of this game appeals to you, you may want to look into Blitzkrieg! as well.

27. Blood Rage

Released: 2015
Designer: Eric M Lang
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 60-90 minutes

In Blood Rage, you play a clan of Vikings to get together with other Vikings and do viking things. You know, drinking ale, taking long boat rides, knitting warm wool sweaters, a hefty side order of pillaging and, of course, Ragnarok. The end of time is upon you, and it’s the last chance for your clan to to prove their mettle and secure their place in Valhalla.

Blood Rage is a ‘dudes on a map’ game combined with a card drafting/deckbuilder. There are three rounds, and in each round, players will draft a hand of 8 cards. With that hand, you’ll be armed to take your turn and advance your clan’s glory: invade the map, move your troops around, and summon mighty beasts to fight for you.

Eric Lang is one of the finest board game designers on the market, and two of his other games (Chaos in the Old World and Marvel United) are already on this list. He’s the king of finding new ways to reinvent the classic ‘dudes on a map’ formula, and Blood Rage may well be the pinnacle of his design efforts.

26. Space Base

Released: 2018
Designer: John D Clair
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 60 minutes

It’s not easy being an intergalactic parking lot attendant.

Your little armada consists of twelve ships, representing the numbers from one to twelve. On each turn, you’ll roll dice and choose to activate them seperately – as an example, if you roll a 3 and a 4, you can opt to activate two ships (in the 3 and 4 stardocks) or just activate the 7 ship instead. Each ship, when activated, grants resources or other effects. Sometimes, these effects chain in delightful ways.

What makes Space Base good is how it keeps you engaged on other player’s turns. When you decide to replace your ‘7’ ship with an upgrade, you take your old 7 ship and stack it under the ‘7’ slot. Now, whenever someone else rolls, you’ll activate that card. Now, these flipped benefits are decidedly lesser than what the unflipped ships – but you can stack several cards under one number and gain the benefits of ALL the cards you stacked. It’s very common to get to a situation where other players’ turns are more productive than your own!

Space Base is not the first of its genre. It builds upon concepts already seen in similar games like Machi Koro and Valeria: Card Kingdoms. But this general formula is a winner – especially if you like easy-to-teach games where everyone is engaged on every turn, and so far Space Base is the best iteration of that format.

25. Western Legends

Released: 2018
Designer: Herve Lemaitre
Players: 2-6
Estimated Time: 60-90 minutes

About as pure a sandbox game as you’re likely to find in the board game space. Do you want to be a cowboy? An outlaw? A lawman? Poker ace? Run a brothel? Prospect for gold? Scrub the latrines? You can almost do it all.

On top of simply moving around the map and performing these thematic actions to earn Legendary Points that will win them the game, players are also dealt poker cards at the start of each turn. These cards all have effects that can offer new actions or otherwise break the rules for the game. Or players can save them up to assemble for a hand of poker in the saloon. Player actions may also result in them getting on the wrong side of the law – which offers short-term gains but may also offer big scoring opportunities for other players who continue to wear the white hat.

Western Legends is a beautiful, thematic experience and one of those that’s great out of the box, but the expansions just continue to add new activities for players to do. If you want to play a game that’s more about just being in a world instead of trying to beat it, Western Legends is for you.

24. Cascadia

Released: 2021
Designer: Randy Flynn
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 30-45 minutes

A simple yet compelling tile drafting game, where each player is trying to build their own thriving ecosystem in the Pacific Northwest.

The mechanics are quite simple: each turn, players will draft one bit of land, and one animal token that has been paired with it. Each piece of land can support up to three different kinds of animal tokens, but only one animal can find their home there.

The ultimate goal is to place these animal tokens in your personal park in such a way that they match certain patterns that score points – deer like to stick to herds, bears in pairs, and hawks alone. And yet, the scoring specifics of each are randomly chosen from a deck of cards each game, adding more variability to the game, which helps keep the game fresh.

Cascadia simple, fast to teach, and fast to play – a great little filler game that’s also easy on the pocketbook. There’s a good reason why it’s one of the hottest games in its weight class.

23. Mansions of Madness (Second Edition)

Released: 2016
Designer: Nikki Valens
Players: 1-5
Estimated Time: 120-180 minutes

The original Mansions of Madness was a great game with huge flaws. An enormous ‘dungeon crawl’ where one player played a Dungeon Master character who controlled the monsters and the rest of the players would play investigators trying to figure out what was going on, and put a stop to it. The game came with a number of different scenarios that played quite differently from each other, and plenty more were available via an app.

The game was not without it’s problems, most notably that game setup was a terrible slog and scenarios were kind of frail – it wasn’t uncommon for the DM to miss a step and break the whole game, something that wasn’t uncommon enough.

The Second Edition fixed that, by replacing the need for a player to run the game with an app. The app handles setup, tracks all the hidden variables to progress the scenario, and manages the AI for the enemies hunting players down. This, of course, means that all players get to play (although one still has to be savvy enough to manage the app). The end result is one of the best story-infused dungeon-crawl sorts of experiences on the market, and probably the best Lovecraft game you can get as well.

22. Cryo

Released: 2021
Designer: Tom Jolly, Luke Laurie
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 60-90 minutes

While flying across the galaxy, your colony ship got into a nasty squabble over the remote control in the officer’s lounge, and as a result, your ship ended up crashing into a frozen backwater on the ass end of the universe, and even worse, the crew has split into four angry factions who hate each other and have vowed never to send each other Christmas cards ever again. As the leader of one of those factions, you need to get your population under the surface of the frozen planet before the sun sets, because frankly everyone forgot to bring thermal underwear.

Cryo is a fairly simple worker placement game, but with a twist. Your workers are drones you can to various clover-shaped worker spaces across the board, and the drones can access any adjacent space. Given that most spaces have at least two drone docking points next to them, it means you have multiple access points to get to the same locations — and blocking others from those locations takes more effort and planning.

The other thing that I really like about Cryo is the slick, colorful presentation. While most sci-fi themes have opted more for a dark, metallic, realistic presentation, the art of Cryo hews closer to a graphic novel aesthetic, which means it really feels like something you haven’t seen before. Overall a solid, excellent eurogame on the lighter side of Eurogames.

21. Praga Caput Regni

Released: 2020
Designer: Vladimir Suchy
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 45-150 minutes

Charles IV has been elevated to be not only the King of Bohemia, but also the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, and he wants to transform the city of Prague into a city of glory that is a testament to his reign. And yes, he’s a wasteful megalomaniac of the highest order, but as an architect, you approve of his grand ambition as it is very good for the family business.

Praga is a very heavy Euro, and it’s got a lot going on. It’s a presentation, whether it’s the wall and cathedral stands, the action crane wheel or the cute little bridge. You’ll work with all of these to gather resources, build walls, complete the bridge, construct buildings and advance technologies.

The beating heart of Praga is the action crane wheel. This is a round game construct that contains beige tiles. Each tile contains two actions the player can perform – the player chooses one of those. However, each tile is on a wheel which spins around, and lines up with bonuses on the inner circle of the wheel. On top of that, tiles may have costs or bonuses on the outside. This rewards you with bonuses if you choose a tile that hasn’t been chosen in a while (shown as blue in the picture above) and penalties if you chose a tile that has been recently chosen (shown as red). The net result is an action system that lets you take any action tile – if you’re willing to pay the cost.

Praga Caput Regni is just a heavyweight of a heavy Euro, which combines beautiful presentation, deep strategy and a very novel core mechanic. Just a great grab if you like the heavy stuff.

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Whew – only 20 more to go! Stay tuned this weekend as we make the final push!