As you move further up the list, one would expect for there to be fewer new entries in every section. We have now moved largely into experiences we would hope and expect to be tried and true battle-tested affairs that have withstood my withering so-called game design analysis for multiple years.
And mostly that’s true. Most of the entries from here on out are pretty highly ranked, and have been for a while now. Still, new blood has to come in, otherwise the list gets pretty boring and static to read, much less write.
All the above being said, I find it interesting that this set of 10 games has the fewest new games on the list. Which is to say, this has been a pretty good couple of years for great new games.
Previously: 100-91 90-81 80-71 70-61 60-51 50-41 40-31
30. Dead Reckoning
“Card Crafting meets 4X! Sail the high seas and choose your path to victory!”
Released: 2022
Designer: John D. Clair
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 90-150 mins
New To List
In previous years, Mystic Vale was a perennial on the list. Mystic Vale is a game that centers on card crafting – players actually slide transparent card pieces into a card to make better cards. Mystic Vale was the first attempt at this game mechanic, and it worked, turning Vale into a fairly simple deckbuilder-like press-your-luck game. It’s good!
But the team behind it seems to have always thought that the collectable card mechanic could have a home in bigger, better games. They first tried with Edge of Darkness, a rather forgettable mess of a game. Their next attempt was Dead Reckoning, where they knocked it out of the park.
Dead Reckoning is a pirate-y sandbox game, where players can drive their ships across the sea and choose their own path. You can live the life of a warlike pirate, but you can also found trade colonies or explore the vast reaches of the oceans. The world is your oyster. Go nuts.
The card crafting system is the beating heart of the experience. Each player has a crew of 15 cards, and will draw 5 at the start of their turn. Each crew member has some inherent abilities. They also have room for up to three transparent inserts, which can add even more abilities to their card (here, you can see the Buccaneer has only one, and the Gunner has two). But they’ve also added the concept of a ‘level’ – the entire backing card can be flipped vertically and front-to-back to level up the core card from 1 to 4. This is not only really cool, but it also really helps the player to customize their crew to the sandbox play style they are hoping to pursue.
29. Cascadia
“Create the most harmonious ecosystem as you puzzle together habitats and wildlife. “
Released: 2021
Designer: Randy Flynn
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 30-45 minutes
Last Year: 24
A nature-themed hex-drafting game, where each player is attempting to build their own cross-section of the ecosystem of the Pacific Northwest. On their turn, players will draft a single tile, and an animal token that has been randomly placed with it. Hopefully, the terrain tiles they’ve placed have good locations for them to place those animal tokens.
The ultimate goal is for those animal tokens to be placed in certain scoring patterns. The patterns are randomly chosen for each animal at the beginning of the game, but there are themes that the cards will tend towards: deer like to stick to herds, bears in pairs, and hawks alone. The result is a lightweight, casual-accessible game with beautiful art that’s quick to learn but still with more depth than you initially think. A great filler-class game.
28. Legacy of Yu
Released: 2023
Designer: Shem Phillips
Players: 1
Estimated Time: 60 minutes
New to List
I told you we’d see solo gameplay again. Legacy of Yu is a gorgeous single-player worker placement game. It was developed by Shem Phillips, a game designer with an impossibly good track record that includes hits like Raiders of the North Sea and Architects of the West Kingdom. His specialty? Reinventing worker placement as a core game concept.
In Legacy of Yu, you’re trying to rebuild a local community after years of misery. You’ll be placing workers in order to hire advisors, rebuild your houses, fend off barbarians, and prepare for upcoming floods.
But this is also a legacy game! The whole game is laid out in a series of missions which get increasingly difficult, where as you take actions you may unlock story nuggets which are, in general, well written. These story nuggets can also result in additional gameplay components being unlocked, which all thematically reinforce the story well.
I have one knock against the Legacy of Yu is that, once you complete the campaign, you feel like you’ve seen everything there is to see. It’s replayability is not the best, but in general that’s okay. Completing the whole campaign will take you several hours, and when you do, you’ll definitely feel like you’ve gotten your money’s worth.
As I mentioned when reviewing Final Girl, this was really a great year for solo games. Already we’ve seen two games in the top 40! But what if I told you we weren’t done yet? Stay tuned…
27. Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy
“Build an interstellar civilization by exploration, research, conquest, and diplomacy.”
Released: 2020
Designer: Touko Tahkokallio
Players: 2-6
Estimated Time: 60-200 mins
Last Year: 15
It’s been 12 years since the first edition of Eclipse came out, and for my money, it remains the gold standard of great space 4x gameplay. Some may prefer Twilight Imperium but frankly, it’s not good enough to spend 12 hours playing a single board game. A newcomer called Voidfall just came out, and while I enjoyed my first (and so far only) playthrough, it definitely feels bloated beyond necessity and players are in general too far apart for serious space battles to happen with anyone aside from the NPCs. And so Eclipse holds the crown.
In Eclipse, players will start on hexes remote from each other. They’ll quickly explore nearby space, colonizing nearby planets, which hopefully provide the resources they need to build bigger fleets, or acquire new technology that makes their fleets more powerful or their civilizations more bountiful. The focus IS on economics, but this economic engine is usually driven towards attempting to take the system in the center of the map, which means the majority of games tend to end in a violent war players have been building up the whole game to get to.
From a design standpoint, my favorite mechanic is the design of inefficiency into the system. As players expand out into the world, they place discs onto the planets they take – which increases the upkeep costs to keep their civilization afloat, and by extension limits the number of actions they can take. It’s a simple, elegant design solution that nearly eliminates the ‘rich get richer’ problem endemic to many 4x games, and also creates possibilities even for players who decide to focus on small, tight civilizations that focus on alternate routes to victory.
If you do get Eclipse, I would recommend the second edition. The components are nicer, yes, but the real benefit IMHO is the inclusion of a tech tray (see above) which allows players to pass it around the table. Before that, my group used to have the tech tree off on a side table, which made figuring out whether you wanted to research tech a real PITA. And with that, I’ll note that it’s interesting how the little things can help the form factor of even complex board games a great deal.
26. Aquatica
“Recruit heroes and conquer locations in a race to expand your kingdom under the sea.”
Released: 2019
Designer: Ivan Tuzovsky
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 30-60 mins
Last Year: 43
If you had told me two years that one of my favorite midweight games would focus on merfolk battles and collecting manta rays, I would rolled for disbelief. Nothing against merfolk but… come ON. And then I got my hands on the game and… these little manta ray tokens may be one of my favorite game components of all time.
The gameplay itself is fantastic because it combines two of my favorite game design goals: it’s simple, and yet absolutely comboriffic. While there is definitely a small deckbuilding game in terms of acquiring heroes to help your goals, which you can play for various effects, the meat of the game are firing off the locations.
When players collect a location, they will push it into their playerboard to the top icon on the left side. The goal is to score the location, which involves pushing the card all the way in (the card on the left, above, is worth 9 victory points if you do so). Pushing the cards in requires an effect to happen, but can also give the player other benefits (those other colored icons on the left). Including, sometimes, pushing in other cards, which means that every now and then, you have a combolicious turn where you feel like an absolute God for activating and scoring all your locations and getting a ton of other benefits on the way.
Aquatica is, all told, a midcore game that leans on the ‘light’ side. It doesn’t have a ton of mechanics and is therefore pretty easy to teach and get to the table, but it’s combocentric nature can result in some occasionally very thinky turns that, when they unfold correctly, can make you feel like a god. A Merfolk god, but a god nonetheless.
25. 7 Wonders Duel
“Science? Military? What will you draft to win this head-to-head version of 7 Wonders?”
Released: 2015
Designer: Antoine Bauza, Bruno Cathala
Players: 2
Estimated Time: 30
Last Year: 31
When 7 Wonders came out, it found itself in a lot of collections and on a lot of ‘best game’ lists because it was, and frankly still is, immediately one of the best games you can possibly pull off the shelf when too many people show up for game night. It’s light, it’s easy to teach, and simultaneous nature of taking turns means that it plays almost as fast with 7 people as it does with 3.
Eventually, the luster faded from 7 Wonders but in the midst of it’s initial popularity, they released 7 Wonders Duel, a game that tried to make the core 7 Wonders game work with 2 players. And in my opinion, it succeeded.
The core 7 Wonders gameplay is a card-drafting game, where players will take one card from a hand of cards, play it in front of them and pass the rest of the cards to the left. After a round, players have played about 7 cards into their hand, and after three rounds, they have a full city, where their city is scored based on what various cards they’ve managed to turn into scoring opportunities. Which is great, but the card drafting game doesn’t work well with two people.
Duel solves this with the pyramid. All the cards for the round are laid out in a pyramid, and when its your turn to draft, you can only draft from the bottom of the pyramid. But when you draft a card, you may expose (and make available for drafting) a card your opponent really needs. Even worse, some of the cards in the pyramid are placed facedown – and revealed faceup when the cards blocking them are removed and they’re exposed. Which means that sometimes, when you draft the perfect card you really needed, you may still grant your opponent a moment of joy rivalling Christmas morning when that card is revealed.
24. Western Legends
“Become a gun-toting outlaw, or a law-abiding marshal in this Wild West sandbox.”
Released: 2018
Designer: Herve Lemaitre
Players: 2-6
Estimated Time: 60-90 mins
Last Year: 25
A lot of board games claim to be ‘sandboxes’ but as far as I’m concerned, none have succeeded like Western Legends. 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.
Well, some of it’s locked in expansions, but this is one of the few games where having all the expansions really pays off. Cardboard chits become great feeling poker chips. The Ante Up expanion adds a train you can rob – which has a nice plastic miniature to represent it.
The end of the game is reaching certain goals in victory points, but this really isn’t a game that focuses on winners and score. This is more of a game where your goal is just to be in this western world, and just make your way in it.
23. Five Tribes
“Move assassins, elders & builders through Naqala to claim oases & control djinns.”
Released: 2014
Designer: Bruno Cathala
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 40-80
Last Year: 35
We recently talked about Trajan, a game whose central mechanic is a mancala, a game mechanic that goes back some 1700 years or so. Five Tribes expands upon it even further, putting the mancala on the main board and spreading it across a larger freeform board.
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 then you remove the meeples of your chosen color. And if the final location is empty, you can then claim it (and its victory points) as your own.
Five Tribes is a wonderful game, with a simple core gameplay loop that can still lead to crunchy decisions. That being said, the decision tree is absolutely enormous. If you have someone at your standard gaming table who is prone to what’s called ‘analysis paralysis’ (a fancy turn for “jesus christ, Bill, just DO something”) this may not be the right game for that crew. But if not, this is a great brainbreaker and an immensely rewarding puzzle.
22. Foundations of Rome
“Construct buildings, vie for city lots, and compete to shape the city of Rome.”
Released: 2022
Designer: Emerson Matsuuchi
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 60-90
Last Year: 32
I have recently become acutely sensitive to the role of Box Size in my collection. I’m a reasonably well-paid individual, I do board game kickstarters, and a lot of times they come in massive boxes. Some of the games on this list are productions that came in big, or alternative lots of boxes (I’m looking at you, Marvel United and Great Wall). And while getting lots of bells and whistles on your game is great, shelf space starts to become a real issue. A big box could take the place of several smaller boxes. When you look at it this way, it becomes more understandable that, increasingly, games need to justify their shelf space.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at a random thumbnail I found that showed Foundations of Rome‘s box scale next to a human being. You know, for fun.
Holy moly! To say I was not prepared for the ludicrous size of this box is an understatement. This thing is a monster, which is even more surprising because the game is relatively simple, and rarely extends beyond an hour. Does this game justify the shelf space? Hell, yes.
Foundations of Rome is a game that unfolds in a manner reminiscent of Acquire, a board game that’s now 60 years old. Players will purchase lots, which they will try to use to place their own personal buildings. Each player has a whole tray of buildings they can place. Here, you can see 3 player trays.
The result of the game are full game boards that look absolutely amazing. Good photos of this game are ridiculously easy to find. They just assemble themselves naturally.
Of course, this would all be so much overproduced shlock if the game wasn’t good but… it actually is. Turns are quick, decisions are compelling, and the final result of any game is immensely satisfying. Foundations of Rome is a fantastic game that can, once you get past the fact that it’s a filler game in a mammoth box.
21. Gugong
“Exchange gifts, send servants, and visit the Emperor in a luscious 1570 China.”
Released: 2018
Designer: Andreas Steding
Players: 1-5
Estimated Time: 60-90
Last Year: 9
Gugong is based upon a period of time in China where they were having a huge problem with bribery, and so the government made efforts to outlaw it. However, bribery is also a useful way for businessmen to get things done and underpaid public servants to pad their salary and so… bureaucrats… ahh… find a way. Political culture started to gravitate towards gift exchanges, which were legal. But sometimes, you know, those trades aren’t exactly … equitable. I mean, under these rules it’s not TECHNICALLY bribery if you give me a potted cactus and I give you a Lambhorgini, but you’re definitely going to be inclined to do me some favors.
In Gugong, each player starts each round with a hand of cards from 1 to 9. Scattered around the board are 7 government officials, which also have a card on them from 1 to 9. Each government official is related to an action the player can take. But to take that action, you need to give them a gift that is higher than the card they currently have. For example, if you play a 9 on a 4, you can take that action, and that 4 goes facedown on your player board, where it will become part of your hand the next turn.
This has two wonderful gameplay effects. The first is that, when you take an action, you’re also setting up your hand for next turn (a 4 is of far less value than a 9. 1s can beat 9s though, so maybe taking an action there is better!) The second, which is far more insidious, is that this is a game where players are very highly likely to accidentally screw over their opponent’s plans. Which, honestly, may be even more fun than doing it on purpose.
Gugong is a crazy dance where you need to get in the mindset of not getting too attached to your plans, because the board state will be in an entirely different place when your turn comes around. But if you like surfing chaos, Gugong can be an uproariously good time.
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