Month: December 2022

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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

And we’re back! No more ChatGPT experiments, no matter how funny they may be. From now on, when you read a stilted, forced, only-mostly-accurate blurb about a game with an incredibly forced joke thrown in, rest assured, that’s all Damion Magic!

One thing that I’ll say is that this year, I made a real effort to play a lot of new stuff. It hasn’t been easy, as the pandemic limits time to play, as having a couple of munchkins running around that require constant supervision. The dream is that someday they’ll be old enough to play these games with me, but right now, their interests mostly seem to lie in throwing dice at the cat.

On to the list!

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

40. Lords of Waterdeep & Scoundrels of Skullport expansion

Released: 2012/2013
Designer: Peter Lee, Rodney Thompson
Players: 2-5 (6 with expansion)
Estimated Time: 60-120 minutes

Lords of Waterdeep by itself is a great game. A relatively simple worker placement game where you play as one of the mysterious figures who rules Waterdeep from the shadows. Yes, it’s a D&D game, and you play one of the mysterious questgivers. You’ll send agents out to recruit adventurers and earn cash, and then you’ll send those adventurers off to complete quests.

Lords of Waterdeep is very simple compared to other eurogames, so much so that I consider it almost an entry-level game for the genre. But it has more depth than it gets credit for as well. As an example, it’s a worker placement game where the placement options expand as the game goes on. Players can build buildings that offer new placement bonuses, and if other players use them, they get bonuses.

But Lords of Waterdeep really unfolds with it’s expansion pack, Scoundrels of Skullport, which contains two modules that players can opt to play with. The better one is the Skullport Module, which adds a shady underworld element to the game, and new placement options which also have huge costs in the form of a new anti-resource called Corruption. Taking the corruption hit can earn you big rewards, but you need to be wary. As a general rule, it’s important that there’s always someone more corrupt than you!

As an added bonus, the expansion scales the game up to 6 players and, unlike many euro games, it scales pretty smoothly to that number. Turns remain quick, the amount of interactivity is good, and the game still flows at a good pace. It’s actually one of my preferred options when too many people show up for game night.

39. Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest

Released: 2022
Designer: Paolo Mori
Players: 1-6
Estimated Time: 45-60 minutes

Libertalia is a pirate-themed game that is played over the course of three rounds. On each round, players are dealt a hand of six identical pirate cards, each of which has a numerical strength value and a superpower. Over six turns, each player will choose a card secretly. Once revealed, the cards are placed in order of numerical strength and then, one by one, their powers are resolved. From all of these shenanigans, players will walk away from the turn with a single piece of loot.

Libertalia: WIngs of Galecrest is a new edition of the classic board game Libertalia, which was produced by Stonemeier Games, one of the industry’s top production houses. In my opinion, the edition is much improved, largely because of some streamlining and rules refinements. That being said, what you’re more likely to notice is that the realistic-yet-kind-of-creepy art has been replaced by, well, furries. Tasteful, family friendly ones.

It’s also a very lightweight game, that happens to be fun, tactical, easy to teach and easy to get to the table. It’s a great filler-weight game that scales to 6 players, and just oozes charm. Well, if you like furries.

38. Ark Nova

Released: 2021
Designer: Mathias Wigge
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 90-150

Ark Nova is a relatively heavy eurogame that doesn’t FEEL that heavy, largely because of the subject matter – namely, you’re building a zoo. Doing so requires you to build paddocks, acquire animals, improve your reputation and acquire sponsors, and shovel a lot of elephant dung.

The part of Ark Nova that I appreciate is the action engine. Each player has five action cards, laid out horizontally. When you use a card, you execute it, and move it all the way to the end of the line. The trick is that the strength of the card is based on what position in line its at, which means that cards are more powerful the longer you wait to use them. Even better, each of these cards can be upgraded (i.e. flipped over) to a more powerful version of the same ability. But you can’t upgrade them all, so you’ll need to decide what you want your zoo to be good at.

Ark Nova has a significant tableau-builder feel to it – in terms of the animals you draw, which draws comparisons to Terraforming Mars, and honestly if you like Mars and don’t hate animals, you’ll probably love Ark Nova. Ark Nova’s breakout success has led many commentators to suggest that it has ‘killed’ Terraforming Mars. Do I agree? Well, here’s a sneak peek at the rest of the list: Terraforming Mars ain’t on it.

37. Brass: Birmingham & Brass: Lancashire

Released: 2018/2005
Designer: Davan Brown, Matt Tolman, Martin Wallace
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 60-120

Brass was one of the original railroad games, and it was awesome if not ugly as hell, which was not totally uncommon way back in *checks notes* 2007. Still, history was not kind to the games of this era. I mean, look at this.

In 2018, Brass was reprinted with modern production values, and now it’s a sumptuous feast of boardgaming with just an absolutely gorgeous table presence. And of course, the gameplay itself is classic – an economic game split into two halves, where you build first canals and then railways throughout Europe in order to manage an economic empire selling iron, coal and, most significantly, cotton.

The original map for Brass became Brass: Lancashire, and at the same time, they released another version called Brass: Birmingham, which mostly centers upon a map that is much more cutthroat, especially at max players. Look, I’ll be honest – frankly I don’t remember which one I actually liked better. I will say that if you like train games, you won’t go wrong with either one.

36. Kingsburg (Second Edition)

Released: 2017
Designer: Andrea Chiarvesio, Luca Iennaco
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 90-120 minutes

You are a lord, meant to build a small outpost into an economic powerhouse and defend it from omnipresent threats that cross the border. To get the resources you need to build your defenses, you’re going to have to take part in that time-honored tradition – going to court and kissing some nobility ass.

On each turn, players will roll three dice. Then they go in turn order – starting with the lowest role – and each player can place one dice on one noble advisor, who will give them resources or other benefits they can use to build their city. As an example, if you roll a 1, a 3 and a 5, you can hit the 1, 3 and 5 space, but you can also double up dice – you can hit 4 (1/3), 6 (1/5), 8 (3/5) or even 9 (all three). Higher spaces are more lucrative, but at the same time, basically take a ‘turn’.

Most significantly, you can’t go on any space that another player has gone onto before. This turns what seems like a nice, friendly looking game into a knife fight, as players carefully keep tabs on the dice other players and work to deny their opponents their optimal placement locations.

One more thing: while I personally prefer the look of the first edition of Kingsburg, it requires the To Forge A Realm expansion which has a game module that fixes what I consider a fairly critical flaw in the game (how enemy forces are dealt with). This module is included in the second edition (pictured and linked above).

35. Five Tribes

Released: 2014
Designer: Bruno Cathala
Players: 2-4 Players
Estimated Time: 40-80 Minutes

In the town of Naqala, the old sultan has just passed away in an unfortunate accident involving an elephant that no one wants to talk about. You are one of several young sultans jockeying to replace him. Doing so will require some savvy political maneuvering, working to influence fate by maneuvering the five tribes: assassins, elders, builders, merchants and viziers.

The joy of Five Tribes is that it takes classic Mancala gameplay and spreads it across a larger freeform map. On a player’s turn, they will pick up all of the meeples on a single location, and drop them one at a time while moving towards a new location. At the location where you place the final meeple, there must be another meeple of the same color – you then do an action based on that color, where the strength of the action is based on the number of meeples of that color are there. And if the final location is empty, you can then claim it (and its victory points) as your own.

Five Tribes is absolutely a wonderful puzzle that breaks your brain in all sorts of interesting ways. While I adore this game completely, I will stress that there can be a paralyzing amount of choices at times. If your normal gaming crew has players prone to Analysis Paralysis, you might want to be wary of this one.

34. Macao

Released: 2009
Designer: Stefan Feld
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 50-100 minutes

You play as a merchant in Macao, where you’re trying to build a sprawling trade empire. To do so, you’ll need to acquire goods, send out boats, build a wall and recruit the optimal businessmen to grant you powers to help you out. To do that you’re going to need… cubes.

How you get these cubes is the magic of the game. On each turn dice are rolled, and you choose two of them. You’ll gain cubes that are the same color as the dice you chose – but not immediately. You’ll take an amount of cubes equal to the cubes you chose, and put them on your pinrose, which is rotated every turn. As an example, selecting an orange die with a ‘1’ on it will grant you one cube immediately. But selecting the green die with a ‘5’ on it will grant you 5 cubes — 5 turns from now!

This really is one of my favorite board game mechanics of all time. It does a masterful job of forcing you to weigh the value of huge rewards in the future against that of much smaller immediate rewards.

Remember earlier in the list where I mentioned that Stefan Feld, one of my favorite designers, has a penchant for creating glorious games with terrible production quality issues? Yeah, well about that… Macao has production issues a plenty – a dim, dingy board. Color choices guarunteed to enrage most anyone except in the best possible lighting. DIfficult cards to read. And yet, it’s STILL sitting up here this high on this list.

Next year, Macao won’t be on my list because it is being reprinted and heavily modified as Amsterdam, which looks like it will solve most of these issues. My copy should be arriving any day now, but it’s only polite for me to point out that if you missed out on it, Queen Games just put up a Kickstarter so you can still snag it. Grab your copy before it’s too late!

33. Jekyll vs Hyde

Released: 2-21
Designer: Geonil
Players: 2
Estimated Time: 30

Jekyll vs. Hyde is a two-person trick-taking game. Do I have your attention yet?

Each player takes the role of one of two halves of one man’s split personality, with each player trying to dominate the other permanently. How this translates into a trick-taking game is quite ingenious. The game is played across three hands, and in each, Hyde earns points based on the difference between the number of tricks taken by the players – even if Jekyll won more! In this manner, Jekyll is trying to pursue moderation, whereas Hyde is rewarded for either extreme. This simple twist makes the entire game work 2-player, and turns all of your normal trick-taking strategy on its head.

There are several other gameplay tweaks that keeps the game fresh. This includes having only three suits, and having a constantly shifting priority order for which suit trumps which that you can manipulate. It also includes giving each suit a superpower that can be activated by playing a potion instead of a suited card. Overall, what you’re left with is a devilishly interesting two-player game that fits a lot of quirks in a little tiny box.

32. Foundations of Rome

Released: 2022
Designer: Emerson Matsuuchi
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 60-90

Foundations of Rome is a joint city-building game. City lots will be put up for auction, and players can bid to acquire them. Players can build buildings on the lots they acquire, although they need to acquire joint lots in order to build their buildings. Most buildings are unique to players, but there are certain Wonders that players can compete to build first (assuming you have the Monuments expansion).

If this sounds at all like the classic game Acquire, that’s not too far off, although Foundations of Rome is far faster and easier to set up. But it’s WAY prettier and at the end of the game, you have a shockingly impressive facsimile of a Roman city.

It’s a four-player game where each player has a full tray of buildings to construct, and a fifth tray is included to hold the wonders. The end result is one of the physically largest games on my shelf. Now then, shelf space is a finite resource, and as I age I find myself increasingly asking if games (especially large ones) justify the space they take up. In this case, the answer is a resounding yes. Yes, the game is relatively simple and somewhat fast, but those aren’t always bad things, especially when combined with being beautiful and satisfying to play.

31. 7 Wonders Duel

Released: 2015
Designer: Antoine Bauza, Bruno Cathala
Players: 2
Estimated Time: 30 minutes

This is a two-player card drafting game, where both players are trying to develop a fledgling civilization through three ages, along the ways making advancements in culture, military, science and commerce that earn them points or move them closer to winning in a number of ways.

The key innovation here is the drafting pyramid. Straight up drafting (take a card and pass the rest to your neighbor, and repeat) works great at large player counts, but is kind of dumb in two player games. In order to convert the classic 7 Wonders into a good two player game, something would need to fundamentally change – and change it they did. Instead of classic drafting, players draft from a pyramid. It’s incredibly simple – you can only draft a card on the bottom that’s fully exposed, but any card you draft is likely to open up new opportunities for your opponent. And given that the pyramid is half face-up and half face-down, sometimes you know what you’re giving your opponent, and sometimes you’re just praying for the best. Or worst. Whatever.

An offshoot of the highly popular 7 Wonders, this game takes many of the same concepts and simplifies them, making a tight, deep and satisfying two-player experience that’s among the best in gaming. It files off a lot of the rough edges of the original product and simplifies them, all in good ways. To a degree that 7 Wonders Duel seems likely to hang out on top 100 lists for years to come, but the original game is starting to fade from consciousness.

---

And that’s it for this installment! Looks like we’re trending to wrap this thing up either Sunday or Monday night, depending on the need to actually do things like pay attention to my children’s needs during the holiday season. Stay tuned!

Okay, I’m not gonna lie. I have a HUGE presentation at work tomorrow and have been up late trying to get it done but I owed you guys another list segment so… I just had ChatGPT do all the blurbs.

Don’t worry, the rankings are all mine, and I’ll vouch for everyone single one of these. But for the text – well, let’s just say you may want to doublecheck things on Board Game Geek.

If you’re curious, the prompt I gave was “Write a three paragraph review of the board game GAMENAME that includes discussion of a unique mechanic and a joke.” Just for fun, I slipped one of my own reviews in there. See if you can find it!

Look, it’s the slog through the middle part of the list. I’m sure both of you that actually read these don’t care THAT much. Anyway, onto the list!

Previous entries: 100-91 90-81 80-71 70-61 60-51

50. Altiplano

Released: 2017
Designer: Reiner Stockhausen
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 60-120 minutes

Altiplano is a fantastic board game that offers players a unique and engaging gaming experience. In the game, players compete to become the most prosperous village in the Andes region by managing their resources and trading with other players. One unique mechanic in the game is the use of “bag building” – players must carefully manage the resources in their bag, with the order in which they are drawn impacting their ability to take actions on their turn.

Another standout feature of Altiplano is its beautiful artwork and high-quality components. The game board and player boards are colorful and detailed, immersing players in the world of the Andes. Altiplano is also a great game for players of all skill levels, offering a high level of replayability and a variety of strategies to explore.

Overall, Altiplano is a must-play for fans of resource management and trading games. And as a bonus, the game’s unique bag building mechanic means you’ll never have to “bag” out on a turn – unless you’re really struggling, of course. (Sorry, I had to make at least one bad bag-related pun!)

49. A Few Acres of Snow

Released: 2011
Designer: Martin Wallace
Players: 2
Estimated Time: 60-90 minutes

A Few Acres Of Snow is a two-player board game that simulates the struggle for control of North America during the French and Indian War. The game features a unique deck-building mechanic, where players must carefully manage their hand of cards to gain advantages on the battlefield.

One of the standout features of the game is its historical accuracy. The various factions and their abilities are based on real-life events and figures from the war, adding a layer of immersion to the gameplay.

In terms of strategy, the game can be quite challenging. Players must constantly balance their military efforts with their economic development in order to succeed. As the old saying goes, “it’s not easy ruling a few acres of snow.” Overall, A Few Acres Of Snow is a solid choice for fans of history and strategic board games.

48. Taverns of Tiefenthal

Released: 2019
Designer: Wolfgang Warsch
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 60 minutes

The board game Taverns of Tiefenthal is a fun and engaging experience for players. One unique mechanic in the game is the use of “influence” cards, which allow players to manipulate various aspects of the game such as prices and supply. This adds a layer of strategy and deception, as players must carefully choose when and how to use their influence cards.

Another aspect of the game that I enjoyed was the colorful and thematic artwork. The various taverns and characters are well-designed and add to the immersive experience.

One minor downside is that the game can take a bit longer than expected to set up and explain to new players. However, once everyone understands the rules, the game flows smoothly and provides hours of entertainment. Overall, I would definitely recommend Taverns of Tiefenthal to fans of board games and taverns alike. And as a wise old tavernkeeper once said, “A mug of ale a day keeps the doctor away… or at least makes the visit more enjoyable.”

47. Concordia

Released: 2021
Designer: Mac Gerdts
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 100 minutes

Concordia is a strategic board game that challenges players to build a thriving Roman empire. The game’s unique mechanic is the use of resource cards to purchase buildings and recruit citizens. This adds a level of resource management and decision making that keeps the game interesting and engaging.

One aspect of the game that I particularly enjoy is the use of different character cards. Each character has their own special ability that can be used to gain a strategic advantage. This adds a fun element of surprise and keeps players on their toes.

Overall, Concordia is a great game for fans of strategy and resource management. And let’s be honest, who doesn’t want to be a Roman emperor for a day? Just remember to keep an eye on those pesky barbarians – they’ll ruin your day faster than a bad Caesar salad.

Editor’s note: The interesting thing here is that ChatGPT successfully identified the core innovation – the character cards – but managed to describe them in such a way that imparted no useful information at all.

46. Rajas of the Ganges

Released: 2017
Designer: Inka Brand, Markus Brand
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 45-75 minutes

Rajas of the Ganges is a fantastic board game that is easy to learn but challenging to master. One of its unique mechanics is the use of dice to determine which actions players can take on their turn. This adds an element of luck and strategic planning as players must weigh the benefits and drawbacks of each potential action.

Another standout feature of the game is the complex scoring system. Players must carefully balance their resources and actions in order to maximize their points at the end of the game. This can be challenging but also incredibly rewarding when executed successfully.

Overall, Rajas of the Ganges is a great game for both casual and hardcore board gamers. And if you’re feeling adventurous, you can even try playing it with a bag of curry on the side – it’s a spicy treat!

45. Chaos in the Old World

Released: 2009
Designer: Eric M Lang
Players: 3-4
Estimated Time: 60-120 minutes

Chaos in the Old World is a unique and highly strategic board game that puts players in the roles of powerful, ancient gods vying for control over the world. The game’s unique mechanic is the use of Corruption cards, which allow players to gain powerful abilities at the expense of becoming more susceptible to attacks from other gods. This creates a deliciously chaotic balance of power as players must weigh the benefits of gaining power against the risk of being overthrown.

In addition to its unique mechanic, Chaos in the Old World also boasts beautifully detailed artwork and a rich lore that immerses players in the world of Warhammer. The game’s mechanics are well-balanced and provide a challenging and engaging experience for both seasoned board gamers and newcomers alike.

One of the game’s most entertaining aspects is the inclusion of humorous event cards, such as “Mass Hysteria” which causes all players to frantically search for their lost keys. Overall, Chaos in the Old World is a must-play for fans of strategy games and anyone looking to unleash their inner god-like power.

44. Hadrian’s Wall

Released: 2021
Designer: Bobby Hill
Players: 1-6
Estimated Time: 30-60 minutes

Hadrian’s Wall is a strategic board game that takes players back to the ancient Roman Empire. The unique mechanic of the game is the use of Roman numerals on the player cards, which adds an extra layer of complexity to the gameplay. Players must not only plan their moves carefully, but also familiarize themselves with the Roman numeral system in order to maximize their points.

The game itself is well-designed and easy to learn, with clear instructions and engaging gameplay. The use of Roman numerals adds a fun challenge for players, and the game offers a variety of strategies to employ in order to win.

Overall, Hadrian’s Wall is a great board game for fans of history and strategy. Plus, with its unique mechanic, it’s sure to make you feel like a real Roman Emperor. Just remember, “IV” is not the Roman numeral for “for”!

Editor’s note: This is not at all accurate but was too hilarious not to share. Hadrian’s Wall is a very excellent Roll and Write, and very likely the heaviest and best roll-and-write you will ever play. Your standard understanding of Roman Numbers will be fine.

43. Aquatica

Released: 2019
Designer: Ivan Tuzovsky
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 30-60 minutes

Aquatica is a tableau builder where you play merfolk royalty attempting to restore the lost glory of your ancient civilization. It has surprising depth and yet still manages to be relatively simple and accessible. Players will recruit heroes, and use those heroes to try to find and rescue , which makes it easy to get on the table. Also, it has cute little manta ray powerups.

From a design perspective, though, what I like is the mechanic of raising locations. You pay resources, the locations slide into your board, and as you succeed, you earn benefits (and mantas) for your trouble. It’s overall a slick presentation on a tight, accessible little game.

Overall, Aquatica is a great little game that merits more attention, and should be welcome at any board game table. However, since you’re playing as merfolk, I strongly recommend against serving sushi as snacks. Nothing kills a festive mood like cannibalism!

42. Tzolk’in

Released: 2012
Designer: Simone Luciani, Daniele Tascini
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 90 minutes

Tzolk’in is a unique and engaging board game that has quickly become one of my favorites. One of the standout mechanics of the game is the use of a gear system to track player turns and actions. The gears rotate each turn, allowing for different actions to be taken depending on their current position. This adds a level of strategy and planning to the game as players must carefully consider their actions in relation to the gear system.

In addition to the gear system, Tzolk’in also offers a variety of interesting and challenging paths to victory. Players can focus on gathering resources, building monuments, or advancing their religious beliefs, allowing for a personalized and dynamic gameplay experience.

Overall, Tzolk’in is a fantastic board game that offers a unique and engaging experience. And as the Mayans would say, “Tzolk’in, tzolk’in, tzolk’in – it’s all fun and games until someone loses a sacrifice.”

41. Xia: Legends of a Drift System

Released: 2014
Designer: Cody Miller
Players: 3-5
Estimated Time: 60-180 minutes

Xia: Legends of a Drift System is a fantastic board game that offers a unique and immersive experience. The game features a unique movement mechanic where players must carefully navigate their ships through the dangerous and ever-changing drift system in order to reach their destinations and complete their objectives.

One of the standout features of Xia is its dynamic and unpredictable game world. The drift system is constantly shifting and evolving, meaning that no two games will ever play out the same way. This adds a great deal of replayability and keeps things interesting even after multiple playthroughs.

In addition to its unique mechanics, Xia also features a humorous and lighthearted tone. The game includes a variety of wacky and amusing ship upgrades, such as a “cowcatcher” that allows players to plow through asteroids, or a “fog generator” that can create impenetrable clouds of fog to hide from pursuing enemies. Overall, Xia is a highly entertaining and enjoyable game that will keep players engaged for hours.

---

Are most of these reviews accurate? At a glance – maybe about 75%! Actual board game reviewers don’t have anything to fear– yet. Anyway, please join me tomorrow when I will officially be Back On My Bullshit instead of offloading my bullshit to a robot.

Okay, we’re starting to get to some meatier games. That’s a trend that will likely continue, although today’s list is almost completely absent of short filler games. This section of the list also has some games with some of the best table presence on the list, and a reasonable amount of new blood – half of them have never made an appearance on my list before!

I’ve done some version of this list the last few years. Recently, though, my platform has been Twitter. Unfortunately, this year, Twitter has been turned into a raging dumpster fire of cryptospam and white supremacists after its recent purchase by the world’s Most Reply Guy Billionaire, who leadership seems hellbent on a mission to determine how far down the cliff his failures can cascade.

The upside of putting it on my blog is denying him the content, and also acts as a failsafe just in case Twitter explodes like a potato wrapped in tinfoil in the microwave. The downside is that I’m no longer limited to 288 characters per entry, which frankly was an underappreciated limitation now that I’m trying to churn these out.

Anyway, onto the list! Previous entries: 100-91 90-81 80-71 70-61

60. Maglev Metro

Released: 2021
Designer: Ted Alspach
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 60-90 minutes

Train games are nothing new. What IS new a train game where the subway map aesthetic reaches directly into your primal brain. Each player plays as a single colored subway line, and is given a pile of translucent tiles , when stacked on top of each other, provide a startlingly good facsimile of a classic underground map.  And because of these translucent tiles, there’s no problem with train lines that run parallel with each other (somewhat unusual in many train games). 

Maglev Metro is here largely based on its awesome table presence – people see the game and they want to play it.  And for the most part, the game is intuitive and easy to understand (although it’s definitely a game where you’ll do a lot better on the second game once you intuit how scoring is handled).  Still, a solid train game and one that will be better once the expansion with more cities comes out later this year.

59. Yedo

Released: 2012
Designer: Thomas Vande Ginste, Wolf Plancke
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 120-180 minutes

If your idea of a good time is being a Japanese crime lord, sending commands to a crew of ninjas while building up your own estate and collecting a bevy of geishas, Yedo may be the game for you.  It’s a worker placement game very similar in feel to the classic Lords of Waterdeep – players try to accrue weapons and other resources necessary to complete quests, which are used to collect victory points. 

My favorite design innovation of Yedo, though, is the Watchman.  This AI-controlled enemy wanders around the board after all workers are placed, and he will arrest any of your agents that you deploy where he lands.  His path is generally predictable and easy to avoid — USUALLY — but players can acquire cards that can manipulate where he lands, which adds a new level of ‘interactivity’ to the game — and by interactivity, I mean a layer of ‘go fuck yourself’. 

58. Chai

Released: 2019
Designer: Dan Kazmaier, Connie Kazmaier
Players: 1-5
Estimated Time: 20-60 minutes

Chai is a relatively simple game where each player is a tea merchant managing their own personal tea shop.  They’ll spend the game acquiring different kinds of tea (green, black, etc) as well as different kinds of flavoring (milk, honey, vanilla, etc) meant to disguise the fact that most tea tastes like drowned mulch.

Chai makes it on this list due to the nature of the market mechanic, which is simple and sweet.  The market is a tile board of 18 tiles (3 rows of six) that get more expensive left to right. You can only buy one KIND of tea, but you can buy all instances of that tea on the market that touch each other orthagonally. Is there a row of four Mint tiles in a row? You can snap that up – if you can afford it.  But you may well be making a similar opportunity for the next player when the board is fully refilled from your hefty purchase.

Chai is by far the lightest entry in the games we’ll look at, and if I were to describe it in one word, it would be ‘cozy’.

57. Oak

Released: 2022
Designer: Wim Goossens
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 60-90 minutes

Have you ever wanted to play dress up with little wooden meeples?  Well, Oak may be the game for you.  The sell point of this worker placement game is that you can advance your workers – in this case, hippie Druid types – with all sorts of festive adornments – a cape, a lute, a set of sweet deer horns.  Each adornment will give your Druid cool and special powers, which can change how these workers can be placed (and the benefits thereof).

The rest of the game really centers on the vibe – use your druids to acquire resources, recruit wildlife and monsters to help you, expand your hippie drum circle, and climb the great Oak tree.  For some reason, climbing the tree is the best way to get victory points for the end of the game, which I guess means my 4-year-old is just practicing for his future in an ancient Celtic order.

56. Dune Imperium

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

Dune Imperium is a mashup of two interesting genres – worker placement and deck builder.  On a player’s turn, they’ll play a worker and a card.  The cards determine where the workers can go, and the players’ options are limited early on.  You’ll need to acquire more cards, but you’ll never get enough cards – or turns – to be able to do everything, so you’ll need to choose a direction to lean your efforts.  And all of this political maneuvering is done in an attempt to earn victory points, which is mostly acquired by winning battles in a very abstract war game, or kissing political ass.

Dune Imperium is a VERY good game that successfully merges two genres that don’t feel like they should fit together very well, but it’s not my favorite of this emerging genre (as we will see). That being said, it’s also an impressive feat that it’s a relatively simple game, and yet still manages to drip with favor for fans of the Spice Boys.

55. Anachrony

Released: 2017
Designer: Steven Aramini
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 30-120 minutes

This board game is the embodiment of “past me was an asshole, and future me is gonna have some problems.”

Anachrony is an imposing board to look at – a very meaty worker placement game with awesome mechs and a post-apocalyptic theme where your goal is to escape a dying earth before some cataclysmic event (the sun explodes, the waters rise, the McRib is permanently discontinued, something like that).  And just on those merits alone, it should attract the attention of those who like very heavy euro games rich on theme.

But my favorite part of the game is that one of the tools humans have developed to help their escape is time travel.  You can’t go back and kill Hitler or tell Elon Musk not to destroy Twitter, but you CAN go into the future and borrow resources from yourself.  The only trick is you have to return those resources before you get to that point in the future, or Very Bad things happen, and by bad I mean ‘often hilarious but yes, very bad’.

54. Unsettled

Released: 2021
Designer: Tom Mattson, Marc Neidlinger
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 60-90 minutes

Unsettled is a tactical coop game, where you and your crew mates have all crashed onto a planet, and have to figure out how to get off.  To do so, you’ll have to explore the landscape until you can find clues that let you uncover the objectives that provide the means to escape.

The trick, though, is that Unsettled comes with several game modules, and each of them is an entirely different puzzle. While the mechanics of the game are similar, the puzzle of the Ectoplasmic Goo Is Everywhere planet are radically different than the Lightning Storms All The Time planet, and even within those planets, there are different scenarios to further increase replay value.  Every game is a tension of trying to figure out the contours of the scenario, trying to expose everything, but also trying to move FAST because every game has a serious clock.

But Unsettled is on this list for a very unusual reason for a board game – it’s the writing.  Each module has specific moments – very light moments – of narrative and they are the perfect blend of serious, panicked, scientific and silly.  In many games, hitting these narrative moments are a little eye-folly, but in Unsettled they’re a treat every time.

53. Merlin

Released: 2017
Designer: Stefan Feld
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 75 minutes

‘Roll and move’ games like Monopoly are widely despised by the wider board gamers community. Many hate how it feels like players have no control, and wins and losses can be too luck-based. Merlin seems to take these critiques as a challenge, and for the most part, hits a home run.

At the start of the round, players will roll four dice.  On each turn, they will use one of their dice to move to their knight to a new location and do whatever action is depicted on that location.  Thus, at the start of the round, the player will try to find the most optimal order to use their dice to gain more benefits.  Along the way, they’ll also be accruing various power ups that allow them to mitigate the randomness (such as flipping dice).

The primary criticism I have of the game is – like many Euros – the theme is mostly pasted on.  The mechanics of this game are very fun, deep and interesting but also thematically very bare.  If what you want is a great King Arthur experience, you won’t find it here.

52. Lords of Vegas

Released: 2010
Designer: James Earnest, Mike Selinker
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 60-90 minutes

In every list like this, you have to throw in one old game that no one’s heard of just to give it some street cred, just to try to convince people you know all the deep cuts. In all honesty, it’s nice to pull an old game off the shelf and be reminded ‘oh yeah, this game was actually low-key kind of awesome!’

In Lords of Vegas, you will randomly be dealt a property each turn.  After that, you can choose to build or upgrade properties, try to sprawl to neighboring properties, or even merge with another players casino and attempt to take it over.  The end result is a game that turns into a knife fight very quickly.  Down on your luck? Well, then, go to another player’s casino and try to gamble your way out of the hole!

There are several old classic games about building the Las Vegas strip, and this is my favorite.  And I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that there’s a Kickstarter for a new edition that’s up now that includes four new maps to challenge you.

51. Nemesis

Released: 2018
Designer: Adam Kwapinski
Players: 1-5
Estimated Time: 90-180 minutes

Cryo sleep has failed on your ship and you’ve awoken with a start.  You and the crew are hurtling towards the black towards some unknown destination. That’s bad.  Also, the ducts are infested with some sort of alien being that is Definitely Not A Xenomorph. That’s also bad.  You’ll have to work together. Also, someone is probably trying to kill you.

Nemesis is a semicoop game, which is code for ‘game where everyone in general is trying to work together, but also everyone has secret objectives’.  You may have an objective to steer the ship into the sun.  Or you may have the objective to get an egg of the Definitely Not A Xenomorph onto the escape shuttle, where later you can figure out how to get it past customs and, presumably, the lawyers for 20th Century Fox.  Or you may have the objective to kill the player to your left. 

Needless to say, these objectives don’t always play nice with each other.

In all seriousness, Nemesis does a fantastic job of delivering the fantasy and panicked paranoia of living in an Aliens movie. And as an added bonus, almost every miniature you pick up and every card you draw is an opportunity to say ‘How did they not get SUED for this?’

---

Thanks for continuing to tolerate my mindless blathering. Do like a tweet or leave a comment if you have questions or comments. Stay tuned, 41-50 coming soon!

The cool thing about working on a list like this is that you’ll spend a month pushing things up and down the list, be pretty sure that you’ve got a list that you’re proud of, then start writing it and realizing that, actually, you have no memory of how some of these games are played. Then you’ll look closer at the rules and you’ll wonder, “WHY THE HELL DID THIS MAKE MY TOP 100?!” Then you’ll watch a Let’s Play of the game, and suddenly remember, oh, yeah, it’s because of this one killer mechanic.

Fortunately, you’d never be stupid enough to tell everyone about this train of thought, so no one would know that lists like these are bullshit made by fallible humans with groggy memories.

Anyway, onto the list! Previous entries: 100-91 90-81 80-71

70. Eternal Palace

Released: 2022
Designer: Steven Aramini
Players: 3-5
Estimated Time: 60-90 minutes

Eternal Palace is a worker placement game, where you curry favor with the Emperor as you help him rebuild his ancestral palace. Doing so will grant you layers of a painting, which you can then put together on an easel (see image below).

At its core, the game is a dice-based worker placement game (you can only visit the 6 spot by spending a 6 and so on). More powerful spaces require 2 or 3 dice, and there’s a reasonable amount of luck mitigation in the mix. This creates a highly interactive puzzle where you’re both trying to maximize your own gains as well as figure out how to block your opponents.

Still, the real charm of this is the layered painting, which is just fun to compare at the end of the game. Eternal Palace isn’t the only game to have done this – see the much more casual game Canvas for example — but it works well as the vanity and creative anchor for this light Eurogame.

69. Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North

Released: 2019
Designer: Joanna Kijanka, Ignacy Trzewiczek
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 45-90 minutes

Once upon a time, there was a game called 51st State, which was a little bleak but was still considered a great tableau building game. Then the same company released Imperial Settlers, which had a much softer, happier visual style but also covered up a somewhat meaner game. And then five years later, the same studio released Empires of the North.

The general formula hasn’t changed a ton – each game is built around single cards that you can use multiple (usually 3) ways. This creates a ton of flexibility in your hand, even when it’s small. But in general, the engine is damn good, and this is the best iteration of it.

Why? Well, maybe it’s because it’s the new shiny. But also it has a lot less cards that require you to look at your opponents’ tableau (the previous games were… problematic for old people with fading eyesight). Tack onto that the addition of quests (‘expeditions’) and the action wheel (which limits a players moves each turn, adding strategic depth as well as reducing turn paralysis) and you have my favorite iteration on this formula.

68. Power Grid

Released: 2004
Designer: Friedemann Friese
Players: 2-6
Estimated Time: 120 minutes

Nearly 20 years old and STILL the best garbage auctioning simulation on the market. In Power Grid, players will purchase power plants of variable strength, acquire rights to electrify a network of cities across the nation, and acquire the raw material (coal, oil, uranium or ‘trash’) to keep the lights on.

In terms of games that have stood the test of time, this is near the top. It’s a little longish, but in general nothing else combines the territorial control aspect of this game with TWO different auction mechanics as adroitly as this one.

67. Furnace

Released: 2020
Designer: Ivan Lashin
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 30-60 minutes

Apparently, we’re going to stick to burning coal as a theme here. Furnace is a much smaller, simpler game, though. It’s a fairly straightforward (and fairly literal) engine-building game. You’ll acquire cards that can convert resources into other cards, and are trying to find a loop that will push you to pure profit.

The real beating heart of this quirky little tableau-building gem is a unique auction system. Every turn, players will place four discs on different cards they want to acquire (numbered 1 to 4). Only the person who places the highest disk will claim the card, but everyone else who places a disk will get some sort of compensation – and often the compensation will be better than the card! Furthermore, the compensation pays off as many times as the token placed.

This creates some interesting situations. For example, you might really WANT your ‘3’ to be outbid by another players ‘4’ since you’ll get more compensation that way, but when this happens, that ‘3’ won’t be adding a permanent fixture to your machine. This tension makes for some very interesting choices that keep you constantly questioning the motives of the other players at the table.

66. Mission: Red Planet

Released: 2005
Designer: Bruno Cathala, Bruno Faidutti
Players: 3-5
Estimated Time: 60 minutes

Mission: Red Planet is a charming little territorial control game with way more ‘fuck you’ than you’d expect to come in such a lovely little box. This game is set in an alternative steampunk era where space travel has been achieved, and your goal is to get your soldiers onto Mars and control territory – specifically, you want to have as many territories as possible with the most discs.

The engine that drives the game is the selection of role cards. On each turn, you will select one of your role cards silently and place it face down. The role cards are then fired in numeric order (in a manner similar to Citadels). These role cards let you do things such as load spaceships with soldiers, redirect spaceships with soldiers to new destinations, or more aggressive actions like blowing up spaceships in the launch pad or seducing your opponents soldiers away from them. The whole game is simple and easy to teach, and yet is a satisfying and HIGHLY interactive game that doesn’t create too many bruised feelings.

65. On Mars

Released: 2020
Designer: Vital Lacerda
Players: 1-4
Playing Time: 90-150

Okay, I guess we’re sticking with the Mars theme, then.

If you want to know what sort of gamer reads Board Game Geek, you should know this – Vital Lacerda makes some of the most beautiful and complicated games on the market, and the result is a library of work that mercilessly clogs up the BGG top 500: On Mars (#49), Lisboa (#56), The Gallerist (#64), Vinhos (#119), Kanban EV (#217) and Escape Plan (#500). The newly released Weather Machine will likely end up there as well once more gamers get a chance to play and rank it.

All of these games are great games (well, I personally don’t care for Vinhos) but what’s more notable is that these are some of the most complex games on the market. A Lacerda game is a game where every action may trigger 3 or 4 downstream effects, where remembering to follow every step of an action is easy to forget, and where a normal game is scrambling for inches while setting up big combo turns with big payoffs. If you like big, meaty board games with beautiful production values that will challenge the whole table, Lacerda games are tough to beat.

Of Lacerda’s games, my current favorite is BGG’s favorite as well – On Mars. In it, you play a collective of Mars colonists, and you’ll be scouting the planet, harvesting resources, building settlements, and (like many Lacerda games) deciding whether an immediate windfall is worth sacrificing turn order priority. The theme makes the complexity of a Lacerda game easy to swallow. All in all, a beautiful production and a great game.

64. Rush Out!

Released: 2021
Designer: Thomas Dupont
Players: 3-5
Playing Time: 20-30 Minutes

Usually I avoid real-time games like the plague – noisy, boisterous affairs where you’re just taking it on faith that no one is cheating, as everyone is rolling dice and screaming simultaneously. In fact, I’m pretty sure that only one game (the also excellent FUSE) has appeared on my list previously. But this year, Shut Up and Sit Down recommended Rush Out so vociferously that I felt I had to pay attention. And I’m glad I did.

Rush Out is an asymmetric game. One player plays as the sorcerer, and the rest of the table is trying to stop him. Each side is rolling dice. The sorcerer is trying to consume a book of spells (i.e. deck) before the heroes can defeat all their ordeals (also a deck). The trick is that the heroes can pool their dice together to solve their challenges. Clearly the sorcerer can’t do that, but he gets a different benefit – spells he cast can do bad things to the opponent (such as remove all dice from a card, or add new cards to the heroes’ deck to solve. The assymetry is a good twist, and freshens up a genre that is usually pure coop.

Another cool thing about Rush Out is how there are several little modules that you can add to the decks to add more complexity and keep the games fresh. As an example, the ‘dracology’ deck allows the sorcerer to move a dragon onto the player ordeal stacks. Doing so locks down those ordeals so they can’t be dealt with, and deal with it you must: three unanswered dragon attacks will make the heroes lose the game.

63. Francis Drake

Released: 2013
Designer: Peter Hawes
Players: 3-5
Playing Time: 90-120 Minutes

Francis Drake is a game of privateering. The game takes part over two phases. In th first, players will provision their ship, competing for resources that will determine when and where they can set sail. In the second phase, they use those provisions to raid the carribean, raid settlements, form trading alliances and defend themselves from enemy vessels.

The second phase is where the design goodness happens. Each player in turn order places colored disks with numbers from 1 to 4 detailing where they intend to sail – FACE DOWN. Those discs are then revealed, and then locations are resolved. If, for example, you put a ‘4’ on a location and your opponent put a ‘2’ there, they may loot everything good there before you have a chance to visit.

The end result is an experience with a lot of interactivity, bluffing, and carefully gauging your opponent’s resources. Also, the game has cool little treasure chests to store your loot.

62. Ra

Released: 1999
Designer: Reiner Knizia
Players: 2-5
Playing Time: 45-60 Minutes

Ra is an absolute classic – an auction and set collection game. Each player has a number of sun tokens with different numbers on them, and those are what they bid with. If they win, though, they lose the tile they won with and replace it with the last tile someone won with. This simple mechanic makes for a surprisingly deep auction game that has stood the test of time.

It should be noted that Ra is a 20 year old game and that several editions are available, and art quality is somewhat variable between editions. The one pictured above is from the reprint by 25th Century Games that should be available to the public Any Day Now. I can’t wait to get my hands on mine.

61. Smartphone Inc

Released: 199
Designer: Ivan Lashan
Players: 1-5
Playing Time: 60-90 Minutes

Smartphone is a game about territorial control. Each player plays as a different cell phone company, each trying to earn a significant portion of the global telecommunications market. It’s a slick and sumptuous visual presentation, unlike almost anything else on my game shelf.

The core innovation is how resources and actions are granted each turn. Each player has two cards (called ‘Pads’) with icons depicting resources, logistics and other icons. Each player will arrange their ipads so one overlaps the other (1-4 squares must be covered, with hefty side bonuses for overlapping more squared), and additional Improvement cards (the small tile in the picture below) can then be played on top to further improve their output. Trying out how to arrange your pads so you can maximize resource production is a very interesting puzzle that breaks your brain in interesting ways.

Well, that wraps up this installment. Hopefully another installment coming late tonight!

Every year, I tell myself I’m going to try to do this before the end of the year, just in case it inspires some last-minute Christmas shopping. And then every year, I’m realized what a colossal mistake it is. I mean, it’s not like we don’t all have shit to do in the month of December, including buying my family their Christmas presents, and trying to finish important milestones at work before everyone evaporates for the holidays.

Ah, well, too late to stop now. Hopefully a couple of you get something about it! Previous installments here: 100-91 90-81

Let’s move on.

80. Kokopelli

Released: 2021
Designer: Stefan Feld
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 40-60 minutes

Kokopelli is… an oddly difficult game to describe. It’s a tableau builder, I suppose, but with a twist. Players all start with identical decks of cards (3 each of 10 cards and 6 wilds – or 36 cards). Every card that you play on your own tableau will grant you unique powers – more powerful card draw, or victory points for odd things, for example. So you try to build an engine.

The catch is that your neighbors can’t play the same card that you have close to them in a tableau. For example, the player to your right can’t play any card that you have in your right-most two slots. What they CAN do is place another card on your stack (you can do that as well!). If four cards are ever on the same stack, the stack is discarded, whoever played the last card gets a bundle of victory points, and you lose your power.

I almost punted this game this year, but my table insisted we pull it out over the last couple of weekends, and it wormed its way back in, for a few reasons. First off, it’s very unique, mechanically, and as a designer I place a lot of value on experiments that succeed. But even moreso than that, the core concept shows how you can get a lot of mileage out of very simple mechanics with lots of design space (I said something similar about Marvel United in the previous installment.

But perhaps most significantly, it’s a highly interactive game with a lot of ‘fuck you’ where you rarely leave a game with anyone’s feelings bruised. And there’s a lot of value in a box that does that.

79. On Tour

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

On Tour is a very simple roll-and-write. Every turn, two 10-sided dice are rolled, and players have two write both combinations of those dice in two cities. Example: if you roll a 3 and a 7, you’ll put 37 in one city and a 73 in another. Cards are flipped that will tell you which region of the map your numbers must be placed in, and offer bonuses if you match a specific city.

At the end of the game, you’ll draw a path through the best (usually longest) path of cities where all numbers ascend in order. While there are some other twists, that’s about it. It’s simple, direct and easy to teach. The game also includes maps of Europe. A great little filler game that scales to high player counts.

78. Spirit Island

Released: 2017
Designer: R. Eric Reuss
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 90-120 minutes

People have been bugging me to give Spirit Island a shot for a while now. It’s a cooperative game that is often referred to as the ‘anti-colonist game’. You play as ancient spirits defending an ancestral island from explorers and soldiers coming in from some unknown land (probably Spain, amirite). You’ll be defending your villagers and trying to drive these interlopers off your land. This is, of course, the inverse of MOST board games with territorial control, where you play as the guy seizing territory. Very woke, amirite?

Here’s the thing – it’s pretty good. It’s an unusual premise, it has a great table presence, and the different powers that the spirits have create some very varied game experiences. It’s a little denser than I was expecting – I don’t think you’d want to slap this in front of your non-gaming significant other – but this is a game that backs up its rep with a good cooperative puzzle for players. And it’s got a huge fandom and a million expansions too.

77. Red7

Released: 2014
Designer: Carl Chudyk, Chris Cieslik
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 5 minutes

Red7 is a very simple game. At the start of your turn, you will be losing. You must end your turn winning or you will be eliminated. You can do this by playing one or two cards. You can add to the palette of cards in front of you, or you can play a card in the middle of the table which will change the rules of the game.

Example below: the game starts with the Highest Card rule being in effect (the red below). You can satisfy the game’s requirements by placing a higher-numbered card in your tableau. Or alternatively, you can change the rules (as an example, playing the purple card below which makes whoever has the most cards below 4 in their tableau the current leader). If you need to add a card to your tableau to make this happen you can do so.

This is my favorite game to keep in my pocket at a con. It’s very simple (although the tiebreaker rules are just a tad hinky), games are fast, and the puzzle breaks your brain in interesting ways.

76. Paladins of the West Kingdom

Released: 2019
Designer: S J Macdonald, Shem Phillips
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 90-120 minutes

Since the initial release of Raiders of the North Sea, Shem Phillips’ little company has released several games in their ‘of the’ series, and the game has a lot more hits than misses. Paladins is my second favorite of them (meaning, we’ll see Shem again later).

Paladins is a very interesting twist on a worker placement game. Players get a certain number of workers, of certain colors, at the start of their turn, and they place them on their own board. Most actions take multiple workers, and require certain colors, which can hamstring your choices. The end result is a 6 primary scoring tracks, of which players will find they need to lean into two – and compete with other players chasing those same tracks.

Paladins is probably this series’ most complex game to date, but this studio has a real gift for finding novel mechanics and leaning into them, and this game is exactly that, only the different mechanics intertwine in interesting ways.

75. The Reckoners

Released: 2018
Designer: Brett Sobol, Seth Van Orden
Players: 1-6
Estimated Time: 60-100 minutes

Another coop dice-chucking game, this one is based upon a book series by Brandon Sanderson that, frankly, I don’t know much about. The overall gist, though, is straight-up ‘The Boys’. Superheroes ended up being not so super. You and your motley crew of rebels will need to find weaknesses for all the supervillains, beat them back, until you can finally find the secret you need to take down Superman-gone-bad stand-in Homelander…. *checks notes* sorry, I meant Superman-gone-bad stand-in Steelheart.

The Reckoners has lavish production values and a good rhythm to it, as players have to work together to figure out how to solve the puzzle, and deal with the randomness of the dice. Players can deploy their attacks in any order to maximize their attacks. Taking down normal supes isn’t hard, but Steelheart is a beast and he’s actively depopulating the planet, and there’s a real ticking clock on getting him down.

In all seriousness, a really solid coop effort if you like the deconstructing-superheroes vibe of things like the Boys. It is, I note something that doesn’t scale great – my 4 person group had a much easier time than my 2-person one.

74. Mystic Vale

Released: 2016
Designer: John D Clair
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 45 minutes

Deckbuilding has been a strong mechanic in gaming for more than a decande now. But in the last few years, there have been several attempts to make cardbuilding a thing. Of those attempts, my favorite is still the first one, Mystic Vale.

The player starts with a deck of card sleeves, some of which are populated with some light effects. The player will, over the course of the game, acquire new card components, which are on transparent paper, and slid into the sleeves. Each card has room for three components, meaning you can really Frankenstein a card together.

This is combined with a ‘test your luck’ mechanic. Each turn, you will play cards from your deck until you get two ‘spoilage’ symbols (red dots on the left-hand side). At that point you can collect materials and take advantage of whatever powers are on your card — or you can keep pulling cards. But if you draw a third spoilage, you get nothing for the turn!

Mystic Vale works largely because, beyond the card crafting system, the mechanics are generally pretty simple. The game is surprisingly easy to teach for the number of moving parts it has. That being said, it’s maybe a little TOO simple – this is one game where picking up a couple of expansions add just enough depth to keep it interesting.

73. Nidavellir

Released: 2020
Designer: Serge Laget
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 45 minutes

Nidavellir is a simple auction game with unexpected depth. Each player is trying to build up a dwarf army – each family of dwarf scores in different ways. Each player also starts with 5 coins (0, 2, 3, 4, 5). On each turn, they can use three of those coins to outbid other players at the various taverns around the city, in order to recruit them.

But what makes the game stand out to me is what you can do with the other two coins. If one of your three coins was your zero (0), then you can get a new coin that is the sum of the values of the two coins you gave up (merging a 3 and a 5 will give you an 8. The higher of the two ‘material’ coins – in this case, the 5 – is consumed).

This creates an interesting tension. Bidding low can cost you dearly, but it can also unlock heavy-duty firepower that makes bidding a lot easier at later levels. That kind of strategic pressure is a very interesting twist to the Auction genre.

72. Dinosaur Island

Released: 2017
Designer: Jonathan Gilmour, Brian Lewis, Ian Moss
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 90-120 minutes

A worker placement game where everyone is trying to build a theme park where the attractions will eat the guests. In this game, you’ll be building paddocks, staffing them with little dinosaurs, acquiring DNA to make bigger badder dinosaurs, and figuring out just how much to invest in being sure your guests don’t become dino hors d’oevres.

There’s a lot to love about Dinosaur Island, although I will say that it’s got a very ’80s visual aesthetic that tends to drive a love-hate reaction (I happen to love it), and the little dino meeples are very cool and fun to play with. This is on the heavier side, but the theme is a winner.

The expansion Totally Liquid adds new water dinosaurs to the mix. It’s got several modules to mix and match in – some quite good if you like a heavier experience. Unfortunately, the most-fun looking module (different powers for different players) isn’t very good as its wholly unbalanced, which is sad because it’s the module that gives you little goat meeples to feed to your… attractions. Also, I should note that the same team went on to do a more streamlined version called Dinosaur World last year, but that one I haven’t managed to get my hands on yet.

71. Sagrada

Released: 2017
Designer: Adrian Adamescu, Daryl Andrews
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 30-45 minutes

Absolutely the best stained glass crafting board game on the market. This joke landed differently when it was the ONLY one, but that’s not the case anymore.

Sagrada is a dice drafting game, and probably the best in its weight class. Over the course of ten rounds, players will take turns drafting two dice per round. They will try to slot those dice into their windows, following strict placement rules and matching colors and numbers on a target pattern. Along the way, they’ll be trying to hit bonus targets that are randomly chosen (such as ‘5 points for each row with dice of different colors).

Sagrada is easy to teach, and non-gaming muggles seem to enjoy it quite a bit. The puzzle is intuitive, the game moves quickly. The drafting results in more interaction than you like – games can get quite vicious once players start getting skilled enough to hate-draft the dice their neighbors need.


Welp, that’s another 10 games in the bag. Until next time!

In response to a throwaway comment in the last installment of this list, I was asked who would be my #1 sexiest starlet. I regret to inform you that some people have found it somewhat off-putting when I declare my lustful attraction to this unnamed starlet. I’m guessing it’s because I’ve officially hit the age where I’m a dirty old man. Anyway, the answer is Anne Hathaway.

On to the list!

90. Marvel United

Released: 2020
Designer: Andrew Chiarvesio, Eric M. Lang
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 40 minutes

Marvel: United is a very simple cooperative game, where each player controls a hero, and you’re all trying to take down a supervillain before his master plan goes off. This was a sizable kickstarter, and if you’ve gotten everything, you have access to hundreds of heroes and dozens of villains. This year, the Standalone X-Men expansion was released, and the heroes and villains within can be freely mixed and matched with the earlier Avengers-oriented set.

Look, I’m not going to lie to you. I bought this game because of the chibi miniatures. I mean, look at this shit, these are awesome:

But overall, this game is on the list because it’s a master class in how to expand an incredibly simple set of game mechanics into an absolute river of content. This game is VERY simple and easy to teach, and yet the heroes feel different from each other and appropriate to themselves, and even moreso, each villain is an entirely different puzzle to solve.

89. Bang: the Dice Game

Released: 2013
Designer: Michael Palm, Lukas Zach
Players: 3-8
Estimated Time: 15 minutes

A dice-based social deduction game. Each player is dealt a role, which is a secret. There is a sheriff, a horde of outlaws trying to kill the sheriff, a deputy trying to help him, and a renegade trying to kill everyone. And no one knows who is who. On your turn, you’ll roll dice, and from the results, deal damage to players within range, hopeful that they are a target you’re supposed to be killing. If you lose all your health, you flip over your role card, and the table erupts as your role is exposed.

Now, even before the worldwide pandemic that turned us all into shutins and shrunk board game tables, I wasn’t the biggest fan of social deduction games. Still, Bang: Dice stubbornly remains on the list as the source of some of the funniest game nights I’ve ever had.

88. Caverna: The Cave Farmers

Released: 2013
Designer: Uwe Rosenberg
Players: 1-7
Estimated Time: 30-210 minutes

Caverna is a worker placement game, where you will try to build your little dwarven homestead. You’ll plow fields, fence in livestock, harvest materials, build improvements, dig mines and even send your little guys out on adventures. As you go, your family and lands will expand, and new opportunities will emerge.

If you have Agricola, you should know that this game is very similar in many ways, but streamlined in some significant manners that result in Caverna being an excellent game (unlike Agricola which, despite its similarities, is hot garbage). Just don’t play Caverna with the max player count. It doesn’t scale to 6 or 7 very well, and in fact just bogs down completely.

87. Horrified

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

Horrified is a cooperative game where players play villagers in a town suddenly besieged by classic Universal movie monsters: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Creature from the Black Lagoon and others. In each game, there are two monsters (three if you’re hardcore) and each presents a different cooperative puzzle to solve. Each player has a unique ability, and careful planning and a fair amount of luck is required to send these monsters back to whence they came.

Horrified is, in many ways, going to be very familiar to fans of Pandemic, the all-time classic cooperative game, but at the same time, the different monsters create a lot more gameplay variety. Horrified also benefits from being very easy to teach, appealing to gamers and non-gamers alike as well as very cheap – you can often get it for under thirty bucks at Target.

86. Roll Player

Released: 2016
Designer: Keith Matejka
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 60-90 minutes

Do you believe the best part of D&D is rolling characters? Then this is the game for you. Roll Player is a dice drafting game – a handful of dice are rolled, and each player then selects one and adds it to their character sheet. While doing so, they’ll be trying to earn victory points by hitting target ranges for their class (Warriors want Strength, as an example), matching colors to spots, managing their alignment, and earning gold to do a little light shopping to earn some special powers and/or victory point conditions.

If this sounds appealing to you, it probably is. I will say the game definitely unfolds with the Monsters and Minions expansion and so that’s definitely worthwhile if you feel so inclined. That being said, this year the same company released Roll Player Adventures which was, in my opinion, a sprawling mess. Avoid that, and stick with the game that kicked off the franchise.

85. Dice Hospital: ER – Emergency Roll

Released: 2022
Designer: Matthew Dunstan, Brett J Gilbert
Players: 1-6
Estimated Time: 20-30 minutes

Dice Hospital: Emergency Roll is a ‘Flip and Roll and Write’ game where you’re trying to treat as many patients as possible. Three dice are rolled by a player, and that player uses one of the dice. All other players can choose from the remaining dice. As this occurs, cards are flipped from a deck – each card grants a power to one of the three dice which may factor into the player’s decision making.

If you Kickstarter a lot of games, about once a year you’ll get a game as a throw-in that’s better than the game you paid a lot of money to get. This was that game this year (in fact, it was better than TWO games in the same package: Dice Hospital and Dice Theme Park). On top of that, it’s a steal at about $15.

84. Star Wars: Rebellion

Released: 2016
Designer: Corey Konieczka
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 180-240 minutes

Rebellion is a rare breed: a heavyweight assymetric two-person game that’s definitely worth the lengthy time investment. The game is a highly assymetrical experience. The Empire player’s task is simple – scour the galaxy in order to find the Rebel secret base, and destroy it. The Rebellion’s task is even simpler: survive.

The overall vibe of the experience ends up providing a stark and fascinating view of guerilla tactics. In a good game, the Rebel player will feel absolutely smothered, and completely outclassed by the Empire’s superior industrial base spitting out death stars and the like, while you’re making do with scraps. Across the table, the Imperial player will be feeling baffled that, despite their massive reach, the rebels just seem to keep slipping through their fingers.

Star Wars: Rebellion has been called “Star Wars in a box” and I won’t argue that portrayal. Every game is a unique, galaxy-spanning epic with twists, turns, and inevitable betrayals. The primary fault is that this is essentially a deduction game, and like many deduction games, you occasionally have a flat game where the Imperials stumble onto the rebel base too quickly – something hard for the Rebels to recover from. But the good plays more than make up for this eventuality.

One more thing: the core combat is a tad clunky, and is greatly improved by the Rise of the Empire expansion, which also adds the characters of Rogue One to the mix. Definitely worth snagging if possible, IMHO.

83. Castles of Mad King Ludwig

Released: 2014
Designer: Ted Alspach
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 90 minutes

Castlies is, apparently, based on a real King Ludwig, a guy with a penchant for nutty constructions. Players try to relive his mad genius by building castles by drafting tiles, which can result in some odd and interesting mixes. Love Grotto right next to the Butter Room? Yes, please.

Points are earned primarily due to the point values of the rooms themselves, as well as bonuses for connecting certain kinds of rooms together. Also, closing off all doorways to a room will unlock that room’s special power, which is determined by the room color. The total package is relatively easy to teach and frequently quirky – quite popular with more casually gaming crowds.

Castles had actually fallen off my list the last couple of years, but this year came back on with the release of the Colossal Edition – a special edition where every piece is literally doubled in size. The good news is that this makes your resulting castle much more awesome and it’s much easier to see the tiles you’re drafting from across the table. The bad news is that it takes a ton of table space – it completely fills my very sizable dining room table with only three players. If you’re gaming on a folding card table, stick with the base set.

82. Roll Camera!

Released: 2021
Designer: Malachi Ray Rempen
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 45-90 minutes

Roll Camera is a cooperative game, where the table takes on different production roles on a film (director, producer, makeup artist, etc) with the hopes of making a blockbuster film that can finally break through. To do so, players will take turns rolling dice representing the different production departments, and assign those dice to actions to build sets, plan scripts, shoot scenes, etc, etc.

Roll Camera! is a charming little coop with a very approachable theme, and a result of every game will be a little film role of scenes that you’ve managed to assemble, which will tell your film’s story. Oftentimes this leads to hilarity.

Also, if you can find the Kickstarter edition, you’ll get the game in a box that looks like a movie clapperboard, and the game components fit in a gametrays that looks like a film case (see picture above). Also, as of this writing, the B-Movie Expansion is sitting on my table, although sadly unplayed. I’m very much looking forward to opening it.

81. Watergate

Released: 2019
Designer: Matthias Cramer
Players: 2
Estimated Time: 30-60 minutes

Watergate is a two-player battle over a board that looks like a Wall of Crazy. You know, the kind they have in detective shows as they try to string together evidence. You play as The Press or as the Presidency. If you’re the media, you’re desperately trying to forge links between two key witnesses and the President. If you’re Nixon, you’re trying to block those links as best you can, and stall for your time, as time is on your side.

In many ways, Watergate feels like the spiritual successor of 1960: The Making of the President and Twilight Struggle, not just because of the Cold War themes but also because of the engine of the game being dual-use cards that 1960 and Twilight Struggle used to create classic gameplay. But this game is on the list and those aren’t, largely because the formula seems to work so much better in a shorter game.

Stay tuned! New list segment coming soon! Included in the next segment are several that did not make last year’s list! Exciting!

I like ranking stuff. I just do. I have a pathological fondness for ranking everything from Marvel movies to guitar players to movie starlets to stupid Elon Musk quotes. Normally, it’s just sad, but when it’s games, suddenly it’s CONTENT. My opinions as a game designer have WEIGHT. It’s not just made up bullshit.

I’m a professional game designer, but my expertise is in the digital space – so my opinions are somewhat informed professionally. All the same, my list tends to favor games I think bring something interesting to the table mechanically. I’ll try to point out such innovations when I remember.

I’ve done a version of this for a few years now, but this year with the lockdowns being less stringent, I made a concerted effort to play more new games and get more new games on the list. As such, this year’s list has by far the highest turnover of any of these I’ve done. Please enjoy, and do drop a like or a comment if this is useful to you.

I’ll be releasing these in batches of 10, as my schedule allows (such things get harder as the toddlers get more demanding of my time). The whole list should be presented to y’all in a couple of weeks. Enjoy!

100. Quacks of Quedlinburg

Released: 2018
Designer: Wolfgang Warsch
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 45 minutes

Quacks of Quedlinburg is a pure – and one of the best – press-your-luck games. At it’s core it’s a bag builder. Each round, players will pull tokens from the bag trying to pull as many good things out of the bag before they pull enough cherry bombs to blow up. If you stop before you blow up, you get points and currency that you can use to buy fancier tokens that do cooler things. If you do blow up then… well, better luck next round.

Quacks is a great game with more replayability than its given credit for. There are several color tokens, and the superpowers of those tokens change based upon cardboard ‘tomes’ preselected before each game. The game does have a tad bit of a win-more problem — if someone gets enough of a lead, it can be HARD to catch up. But then again, that feeds into the press-your-luck foundation of the game.

If you do get this game, consider getting some upgraded tokens. The game just feels a lot better pulling acrylic tokens out of the bag instead of cardboard.

99. Q.E.

Released: 2019
Designer: Gavin Birnbaum
Players: 3-5
Estimated Time: 45 minutes

The most absurd auction game you’re likely to play. You play a nation in the midst of a financial crisis. You can bail out (i.e. bid to buy) several companies that are near the edge of ruin. You must outbid the other players at the table, but all of you have the ability to print money at will, meaning you can bid anything you want. Any number you want. $10. $100. $100000000. Keep adding zeros until your pen runs out of ink.

The trick is that at the end of the game, all of your bids are added up, and whoever bid the most money gets a score of zero! So bidding huge only pays off if people decide to outcompete you.

QE is a lightweight little filler game built on a schtick. That schtick doesn’t have the longest life, but it is very, very good.

98. Carpe Diem

Released: 2018
Designer: Stefan Feld
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 45-75 minutes

Carpe Diem is a tile drafting game with a twist. You have a little shopper meeple in the circle below, and every turn, they must move the shopper one space to the right or left and draft a single tile, which is added to their personal villa space. When doing so, they are assembling different kinds of buildings, which offer different scoring avenues and other special effects.

Look, I won’t lie to you. This isn’t the prettiest game out there. Stefan Feld is the king of making games that are good but would be a lot better with some more sizzling production values (as we will see, multiple times later in this list). But tile drafting games are hot right now, this is a VERY fun take on the concept, and you can pick this underrated little gem up in the bargain bin for less than thirty bucks.

97. Ghost Stories

Released: 2008
Designer: Antoine Bauza
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 60 minutes

In this cooperative game, you are a warrior monk fighting to protect a peaceful village from the demons of hell. Ghosts are drawn randomly from the deck, and the players will need to use teamwork to beat them back, protect the villagers, and ultimately win the day.

Ghost Stories is wildly regarded as one of hardest coop games on the market right now, and it’s no joke. It’s hard enough that the White Moon expansion is almost considered mandatory to keep the difficulty within the scope of reason – but that expansion also adds some additional gameplay vectors which make the game more interesting to boot so well worth it.

Sadly, this is an older game and harder to find. The more recently released Last Bastion is said to be its spiritual successor, but alas, I have not yet gotten my hands on that one.

96. Firefly: the Game

Released: 2013
Designer: Aaron Dill, John Kovaleski, Sean Sweigart
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 120-240 minutes

Lead a ship crewed by ne’er-do-wells across the galaxy in a sandboxy experience where you try to complete missions, run from reavers and avoid scrutiny of the law. If you’re a Browncoat, this game will take you right back to the cockpit of the Serenity.

A lot of intellectual property finds its way into board game translations, but for some reason they just stick better with sci-fi games: Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars: Rebellion are also just fantastic. But this one just does a better job of combining that level of detail and fan service with a sandbox-y experience – you feel like you can LIVE in this world.

The game’s not without its flaws. Of note, it takes an enormous amount of table space, and the PvP expansion is, frankly, trash and best left on the shelf. But if you love Firefly and can find this game, it’s well worth it.

95. Sheriff of Nottingham

Released: 2014
Designer: Sérgio Halaban, André Zatz
Players: 3-5
Estimated Time: 60 minutes

In this social bluffing and dealmaking game, each player will take turns playing the sheriff. Each other player will in turn, build a hand and then put up to 5 cards in a bag and declare what’s inside to the sheriff – following some strict rules such as no declarations of contraband. The sheriff can decide to search the bag. If the player was telling the truth or the sheriff doesn’t look, the player scores everything in the bag. But if he’s lying, he’s penalized – and contraband cards that are worth the most points also carry the sharpest penalties.

But here’s the thing: bribery works, and is in fact encouraged. Deal-swapping is common, as is alliance building (“If you don’t search this bag now, I won’t search yours later.”) Games frequently lapse into role-playing. Games also frequently lapse into hilarity.

Sheriff of Nottingham is a fantastic social game, and a second edition just came out. That being said, like most social games, whose sitting at the table matters a lot. This game is a lot better if at least half the people are extroverts, boisterous, and/or drunk.

94. Mombasa

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

Mombasa is a territorial control game set in colonial Africa – although the rules want to stress that it is NOT about the ‘S’ word. Still, it’s a fantastic game with a unique gameplay engine. You play with a small hand of cards, and on each turn, you play a row of cards. And then at the end of the turn, you pick up a column of cards to return to your hand. The result is a puzzle where you’re constantly weighing short-term gains with long-term planning.

Mombaba’s designer Alexander Pfister is one of the sharpest designers in the industry. We’ll be seeing him again. Oh yes, we will.

93. For Sale

Released: 1997
Designer: Stefan Dorra
Players: 3-6
Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

For sale is one of the true classics of the industry, a quick filler game about flipping real estate. Game proceeds in two phases. In the first phase, players compete in a simple auction mechanic to acquire real estate. In phase two, they turn around and sell what they bought – competing in a different competitive mechanic. The end result is a simple, fast and elegant game that scales well to high player counts.

I just realized this game is 25 years old, and now I feel ancient.

92. Maquis

Released: 2013
Designer: Jake Staines
Players: 1
Estimated Time: 30 Minutes

Maquis is a solo game where you play as a revolutionary in war-torn france. Your goal is to place workers to acquire resources and complete goals which will do damage to the occupying German forces – bombing military targets, disrupting parades, spray-painting graffiti. On each turn, the player places a worker, then draws a card to place a soldier. The trick is that workers must be able to trace a path back to the safehouse after completing their task – if your revolutionaries get captured, you lose.

Each year, I like to include one solo board game in the lower end of the list, and Maquis is the best new-to-me one I played this year. It’s fast, it’s elegant, and the theme really works for me.

91. Bunny Kingdom

Released: 2017
Designer: Richard Garfield
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 40-60 Minutes

Bunny Kingdom is a territorial control game, where each player controls a clan of rabbits, and attempts to place them in contiguous territories, upgrade their territories with castles and other bonuses, and rack up other interesting bonuses.

The engine of the game is a card drafting game – everyone’s dealt a hand of cards, and then they choose one, and pass the rest to the player next to them, and the process is repeated. This results in trying to plan ahead to figure out what you need to draft immediately and what can wait, as well as figuring out what to hate-draft to screw your opponents.

Bunny Kingdom is a midweight game but it also benefits from being fast to set up and extremely easy to teach. You may be asking yourself “Is this the game for me?” To which I will only respond with ‘do you like the classic board game Acquire but wish it included adorable bunny meeples and hate-drafting?’


Stay tuned for our next installment in a day or two!