Author: Damion Schubert (Page 2 of 125)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

99. Unsettled

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

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

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

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

98. On Tour

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

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

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

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

97. Yedo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

95. Maglev Metro

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

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

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

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

94. Nothing Personal

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

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

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

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

93. Blood Rage

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

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

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

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

92. Las Vegas/Las Vegas Royale

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

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

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

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

91. Marvel United

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concerning.

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

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

About that….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading

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

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

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) April 21, 2023

Oh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He decided they were selling STATUS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The blue checkmark is now a virtual MAGA hat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On to the list!

10. Architects of the West Kingdom

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. Gùgōng

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

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

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

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

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

8. Pandemic Legacy: Season 1

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

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

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

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

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

7. Lost Ruins of Arnak

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

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

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

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

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

6. Yokohama

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

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

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

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

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

5. Beyond the Sun

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Champions of Midgard

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

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

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

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

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

3. Whistle Mountain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Clank Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Great Western Trail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

20. Trajan

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

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

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

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

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

19. Grand Austrian Hotel

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

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

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

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

18. The Crew: Mission Deep Sea

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

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

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

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

17. My Father’s Work

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

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

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

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

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

16. Magic: The Gathering

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

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

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

15. Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy

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

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

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

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

14. Genotype

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

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

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

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

13. Bloc by Bloc: Uprising

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

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

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

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

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

12. Everdell

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

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

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

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

11. Mind MGMT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

30. Underwater Cities

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

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

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

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

29. VagrantSong

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

It’s Hobo Ghostbusters.

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

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

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

28. Caesar! Seize Rome in 20 Minutes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

27. Blood Rage

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

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

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

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

26. Space Base

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

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

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

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

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

25. Western Legends

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

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

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

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

24. Cascadia

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

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

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

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

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

23. Mansions of Madness (Second Edition)

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

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

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

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

22. Cryo

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

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

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

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

21. Praga Caput Regni

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.

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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.