Author: Damion Schubert (Page 3 of 125)

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

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

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

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

60. Maglev Metro

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

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

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

59. Yedo

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

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

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

58. Chai

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

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

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

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

57. Oak

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

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

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

56. Dune Imperium

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

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

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

55. Anachrony

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

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

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

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

54. Unsettled

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

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

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

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

53. Merlin

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

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

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

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

52. Lords of Vegas

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

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

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

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

51. Nemesis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

70. Eternal Palace

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

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

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

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

69. Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North

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

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

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

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

68. Power Grid

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

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

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

67. Furnace

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

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

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

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

66. Mission: Red Planet

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

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

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

65. On Mars

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

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

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

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

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

64. Rush Out!

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

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

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

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

63. Francis Drake

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

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

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

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

62. Ra

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

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

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

61. Smartphone Inc

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s move on.

80. Kokopelli

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

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

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

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

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

79. On Tour

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

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

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

78. Spirit Island

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

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

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

77. Red7

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

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

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

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

76. Paladins of the West Kingdom

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

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

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

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

75. The Reckoners

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

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

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

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

74. Mystic Vale

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

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

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

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

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

73. Nidavellir

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

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

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

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

72. Dinosaur Island

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

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

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

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

71. Sagrada

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

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

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

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


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

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

On to the list!

90. Marvel United

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

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

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

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

89. Bang: the Dice Game

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

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

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

88. Caverna: The Cave Farmers

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

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

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

87. Horrified

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

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

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

86. Roll Player

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

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

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

85. Dice Hospital: ER – Emergency Roll

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

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

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

84. Star Wars: Rebellion

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

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

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

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

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

83. Castles of Mad King Ludwig

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

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

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

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

82. Roll Camera!

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

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

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

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

81. Watergate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

100. Quacks of Quedlinburg

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

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

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

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

99. Q.E.

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

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

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

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

98. Carpe Diem

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

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

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

97. Ghost Stories

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

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

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

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

96. Firefly: the Game

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

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

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

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

95. Sheriff of Nottingham

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

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

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

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

94. Mombasa

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

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

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

93. For Sale

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

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

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

92. Maquis

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

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

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

91. Bunny Kingdom

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

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

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

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


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

Just because you think you’re hosting a really swell combo Klan rally and clambake, Coca-Cola is under no obligation to sponsor the shindig or put up big Coke banners up by the burning crosses. Yeah, this is an Elon rant.

Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022

Today, Elon declared war on Apple. He got pretty melodramatic.

This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 29, 2022

My dude, you make an app that primarily shares cat pics, dank memes and dunking to the edge of harassment. And in the grand scheme of things, it’s pretty small – it’s not even a top 10 social media app. And that was before you decided to turn it into $8chan. It’s gonna get smaller.

Now then, there are good reasons for Elon to be mad at Apple. To wit:

1) Apple has cut their ad spend. Apple was Twitter’s top advertiser before Elon. They spent $48M in 3 months (1 quarter) earlier this year, which was 4% of Twitter’s revenue.

2) Apple’s 30% cut. Elon posted this a little later.

Did you know Apple puts a secret 30% tax on everything you buy through their App Store? https://t.co/LGkPZ4EYcz

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022

Why, yes, Elon. I did know this. Everybody who has ever made an iOS app knows this (we also know it goes down to 15% in the second year). It definitely wasn’t a ‘secret’ of any sort. This is the sort of thing that any competent business person on the Internet should know before they, say, spend $44B on a website with no real plans to make that back from a business that’s treading water.

For iOS users, that $8 will be closer to $5.60 for the first year. There are ways around it. Netflix, for example, doesn’t let you pay in-app, urging you to go to a website to pay.

Now I’m not thrilled about Apple in this case, but let’s not pretend its unusual – Steam’s cut is in the same ballpark.

3) Apple’s threats to delist the app from the store. I’ve always considered this a longshot eventuality, but apparently it’s a real enough concern for Elon to publicly air it.

Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022

Apple will pull your app from the store for all sorts of insane reasons (trust me, I’ve been there!) but it’s not a decision they take lightly.

Anyway, these are three very good reasons for Twitter to tread cautiously when dealing with Apple. Apple is a goliath. It’s the biggest company in the world. As rich as Elon is, Apple earns twice Elon’s net worth every YEAR (and that was before Elon set fire to his valuation on this fools’ errand). Surely Elon will realize the position he’s in, and go to Apple with proper deference and…

What’s going on here @tim_cook?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022

No, sorry. Instead he’s going to launch his army of flying monkeys at the CEO of the company who was, until recently, his company’s #1 source of revenue. In order to shame them into playing nice.

LOL. Words cannot express the degree in which Apple does not give a fuck about antics like this. They famously punted Fortnite off the app store for not playing by the rules when Fortnite was generating hundreds of millions of dollars for Apple. Amazon, Netflix and other giants have also gone toe-to-toe with Apple over Apple’s rules and 30% cut. All have been humbled.

Twitter, a relatively miniscule company with little cash and enormous debt, has no chance if those companies didn’t. Apple’s mercy is all the hope they have. That comes from compliance. Defiance and openly flouting the rules are not likely to go well for Twitter.

Two days ago, I thought the odds of Twitter being delisted were remote. Now, Elon’s begging to be made an example.

---

Let’s go back to this first tweet.

Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022

Free speech is a noble goal. Everyone at Apple probably supports it in principle. But it’s also a trap. Taken too far, and you no longer have a civilized business. As a simple comparison, you absolutely can run a restaurant where you encourage people to stand on the counters and shout racial epiphets at other customers. It’s completely legal to do that, and within your rights as a business owner. But you shouldn’t expect to stay in business for long, and you shouldn’t expect anyone to want to stay in business with you.

Here are some reasons why Apple might be wary:

1) They probably don’t want to associate too closely with a company that has an enormous CSAM problem after Elon gutted the teams that were tasked to finding and getting rid of child porn and reporting that stuff to authorities.
2) They probably don’t want their ads appearing next to tweets from the virulent antisemites Elon is letting back into the service.

Y'all, Apple is almost certainly threatening to pull Twitter because they've stopped following Apple's objectionable content policy.

(Follow @AuschwitzMuseum which is tracking how suddenly reports of antisemitic content are being found "within policy" at Twitter.) pic.twitter.com/YgfCoHLzxS

— Yell in a War 🐀 (@jelenawoehr) November 28, 2022

3) They probably don’t want their ads appearing next to tweets from the open nazis Elon is letting back into the service – and giving verified checkmarks to.
4) They probably don’t want their ads appearing next to tweets from the aggressively homophobic and transphobic folks people are letting back into the service, especially just a week after a shooting targeting a drag show that many of these people are cheering and/or blaming on the victims.
5) They probably don’t want their ads appearing next to those of a guy who tried to overturn American democracy.
6) They probably don’t want their ads appearing on a service that just let back in a whole bunch of people who led harassment campaigns against other users, especially minority users.
7) They probably don’t want to keep an app on the app store that is certain to fail Europe’s very harsh GDPR regulations – failure to comply became almost certain once Elon laid off the team that ensured compliance.
8) They probably don’t want to keep an app on the app store where impersonation of famous people will remain ridiculously easy.
9) They probably don’t want to maintain relations with a company where a huge percentage of the people who maintain relations with advertisers have quit or been fired, and where the tools are slowly starting to break.
10) They probably don’t want to maintain relations with a company whose owner thinks the fact that they had a Trust and Safety division was a joke.
11) They’re probably not a big fan of the fact that the CEO himself passes around tinfoil hat nuttery and obvious fabricated news.
12) They probably don’t want to advertise for a platform where activists are actively ridiculed and demonized and blamed for Elon being flatly unable to deal with any of these concerns.

A large coalition of political/social activist groups agreed not to try to kill Twitter by starving us of advertising revenue if I agreed to this condition.

They broke the deal.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 22, 2022

And before you think that Apple is being a big baby, one should note that half of Twitter’s top advertisers have made a similar decision. This isn’t Marxism. This is crass capitalism. Advertisers didn’t want to advertise on 8chan, and they won’t want to advertise on $8chan either.

Sure, you’ve probably made some purchase decisions you regret, but have you ever just set fire to 44 billion dollars? No? Why would anyone?

Ah right. Well, when you purchase a company – for ‘da lulz’ or some other reason, you pick up a whole bunch of things as part of the package deal. Let’s take a quick gander at what Elon paid money for – and then take a look at how he’s systematically destroying each one.

The Intellectual Property. Buy a company and you get both their code, and you get the creations they’ve created. In the games industry, it’s usually around the creations – Microsoft is much more interested in owning Call of Duty and World of Warcraft than any piece of Activision code. Not so here – Twitter’s IP is almost exclusively code. And Elon owns it now.

And that’s not nothing! As simple as Twitter appears on the outside, it’s an incredibly complex organism behind the scenes, especially to operate at scale. There’s a reason why no serious Twitter competitor has risen up in more than a decade. Twitter is the only codebase that can really do what it does – and is within a year of doing so.

So on the face this is good, right? Heh, we’ll get back to that.

The Customers.

Twitter had a very large and very loyal audience. They aren’t loyal anymore. Elon has made his plans clear for Twitter: It’s going to be an active source of disinformation, it’s going to be actively hostile to minority members, it’s going to be full of spammers and harassment is going to go relatively unpunished.

He’s also pushing to make it a more expensive service, expecting the majority of users to pay $8 a month (and promising those who don’t will get a severely degraded service). This is in a media landscape where everything similar is free.

Competitors like Mastodon and Hive are seeing massive growth in response. If the free service continues to degrade, people will not stick around.

The Actual Customers

But wait – very few Twitter users actually give Twitter any money. Twitter is actually in the advertising business, and Twitter depends on their money to keep the lights on. Elon’s going to need to not only keep existing advertisers as well as grow this revenue base and possibly raise prices if he’s going to keep Twitter going, now that he’s saddled the company with enormous debts that require servicing. How’s that going?

Thank you.

A thermonuclear name & shame is exactly what will happen if this continues.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022

Yep, Twitter advertisers are leaving Twitter en masse. Elon is quick to blame ‘activists’ and not the fact that he’s turning it into a den of misinformation and virulent hate.

Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.

Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022

The Content

Every day, a handful of notable people – ‘blue checkmarks’ if you will – grace Twitter with their presence and provide the free content of whatever comes to their mind. Millions of people are attracted to Twitter so that they can see what people like Stephen King, Trent Reznor and Kathy Griffin have to say. Elon Musk has made it clear that these are all ‘elitists’, has worked hard to show them the door, and has pissed on them while they’re gone.

Imagine being slammed by both Stephen King and Trent Reznor — two genuinely nice, world beloved bonafide artistic geniuses who used to enrich your platform with free content — because you’re desperate to win the favor of dipshit pseudofascists like Andy Ngo, Cernovich and IMC.

— Damion Schubert – @ZenOfDesign@Brokentoys.social (@ZenOfDesign) November 24, 2022

What’s going to fill in the gap? Why, some of the worst people in the world, of course. Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate were unbanned, and immediately responded by being absolutely shitty. Donald Trump, the man who literally tried to overthrow democracy, was also unbanned.

Elon’s argument are that these elitists were dominating conversation. But no one’s logging in to hear the political insights of FirstNameBunchaNumbers. As the best content creators leave, Elon will increasingly be left with a platform and an audience that looks a lot like Gab’s — and that’s a formula that’s already failed numerous times.

The Staff

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t expect layoffs after a major event like a purchase. You absolutely should. And many times, layoffs in these situations are necessary and/or warranted. Companies often have excessive baggage, and it’s reasonable to expect the purchasers to take a company in a new direction. But.

BUT.

Every person who has left in the last month is part of the puzzle that understands how Twitter operates. This isn’t just the coders. It’s the QA guys who know how to replicate bugs and the IT guys who know how to keep the servers up. It’s the moderation team that struggles to maintain a consistent moderation policy across the board. It’s the legal guys who keep Twitter from being sued when Elon does something dumb. It’s the international guys who know how to navigate laws across 200 countries.

Is there fat to trim here? Probably. Is it half the company? Almost certainly not. But perhaps most saliently, is one week enough time to figure out who is valuable and who is fat? ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT. But that’s how long Elon took to drop the first hammer. He’s still doing it. On Monday, he promised that Twitter was done with layoffs. Then he laid off more people Wednesday night.

there were a number of news outlets that reported just two days ago that “Elon Musk said he was done with Twitter layoffs”

i hope they learned their lesson https://t.co/ljAbl1DmKh

— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) November 24, 2022

Not only that, Elon has made it clear that Twitter will be a fucking terrible place to work. He will end the WFH policy that is now relatively standard in Silicon Valley. He will try to deny you compensation you’ve earned if he can weasel out of it. And he will crunch your team to do incredibly stupid features, and the push them into the world with insufficient QA or even any data that the userbase even wants them.

Everyone who went to Twitter because of the vision of Twitter is almost certainly gone. Everyone with talent probably had an offer in their mailbox before Elon showed up. Twitter currently has no central vision, and their new CEO is actively trying to destroy the old one that motivated the team.

Which brings us back to the IP. You know the code.

It’s a humongous pile of shit.

I mean, I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard rumblings but, more to the point, it’s 16 years old. That’s 16 years of experimentation, desperate patches, failed experiments, and lord knows what else all piled on top of each other. I guaruntee its a festering slop pile of WTF.

That’s not unusual, of course. There are lots of billion dollar companies built on the back of festering slop piles of WTF. But here’s the key. The reason it works is the people. Twitter’s engineering staff is the only staff in the world capable of implementing anything in that code base quickly, safely, and with minimal service disruption.

Elon disintegrated it.

Elon wants to expand Twitter Blue to be an $8 checkmark anyone can buy. He laid off the Twitter Blue team. Elon wants to bring back Vine. He laid off the team that did that. Almost every idea that Elon has randomly thrown out as ideas who could rescue Twitter from the precarious financial position that Elon has put Twitter in was in some stage of development at Twitter already. And most of the people working on those features are gone.

And almost certainly much, much happier this Thanksgiving than the people who decided to stick around and work on this pathetic manchild’s incomprehensible and constantly shifting roadmap for the future.

The Reputation

LOL, well, that’s torched. As is Elon’s reputation as a wunderkind.

In Conclusion

Elon paid $44 billion dollars for Twitter – already 2-3x what experts thought Twitter was actually worth. For that money he got the codebase, the employees, the reputation, the customers, loyalty of the talent, the infrastructure and the advertising base. Every single one of these is in tatters compared to a month ago. And the reasons why can all be laid at the feet of the guy in charge.

Twitter is currently in a death spiral. Every decision that Elon has made so far has pushed Twitter farther away from being a viable business. And he’s trapped in it because he surrounds himself with sycophants and listens to right-wing nutjobs, none of which has even a meager understanding of the business. Can it break out? Probably not, until a more sober leader can come in.

Is it tragic? Yes. Is it funny? In a horrific sort of way, sure. But it’s all fun and games until you realize ol’ What’s His Face also applies this dazzling intellect, business savvy, respect for society, drive for quality and intellectual rigor to filling our streets with cars that drive themselves as well

There is no more cursed phrase in Web dev than ‘pivot to video’ and so OF COURSE this is where Elon and his dipshitosphere of incompetent yes men are thinking of pushing Twitter.

Don’t get me wrong. It is the absolute height of macabre hilarity watching Elon squirm like an epileptic, drunken orangutan in quicksand as he tries to find some sort of viable business plan that can change the fundamental reality: he bought a company that danced back and forth across the line of profitability but at the time had cash in the bank. In doing so saddled it with so much crippling debt that even Bob Cratchit would say ‘yeah, let them fail’.

As a side note: part of the reason the debt is crippling is that Elon paid 2-3x what any observer thought Twitter was worth, and in doing so had to sell enough Tesla stock that Tesla is now more than 50% off it’s peak as well. Given that much of Elon’s wealth is still in Tesla stock, that means that a gobsmacking percentage of Elon’s personal fortune has simply evaporated in the last six months. He now owns a business that will need to come up with an extra $1B in revenue annually just to pay interest – a business that was just treading water before. Also, he’ll need to make up lost revenue from advertisers he spends his moments on the shitter jumping on Twitter to actively antagonize.

Also, Elon Musk is a business genius. So there’s that.

Anyway, Elon’s planning all sorts of crazy plans to dig himself out of this hole. This includes crazy ideas such as charging money for blue checkmarks and allowing Twitter to become an online bank.

But longform video seems to be where Elon wants to go, and Twitter currently allows short videos, which could in theory be expanded. And as befitting a business genius of his stature, he seems to be getting ideas on the business realities of the space from randos on Twitter, so you know this plan is super fleshed out and well-realized.

We can do 42 min chunks at 1080 resolution now for new Blue, so you could break up a longer video. The 42 min limit should be fixed next month.

How does YouTube monetization work & what could Twitter do better?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 5, 2022

Some of Elon’s sycophants have suggested that that indeed is where Elon wants to go.

I can't wait for Twitter to take on YouTube by hosting long-form video content (like video podcasts). Competition makes everyone better.

— Lex Fridman (@lexfridman) November 23, 2022

(Running parallel to this is Elon’s idea that Twitter should bring back Vine. This specifically is a bad idea for lots of reasons, the biggest being that Vine died for good reasons, and since then the Vine codebase has aged like a carton of milk in Death Valley)

some free advice, from someone who worked at Vine and also led the shutdown of Vine.

This code is 6+ years old. Some of it is 10+. You don't want to look there. If you want to revive Vine, you should start over.

trust me on this one guys ✌️🌱 https://t.co/knM0mKM3Xf

— sara beykpour (@pandemona) October 31, 2022

Anyway, reasons why this is all very funny:

1. Moderation. Elon Musk is abandoning the concept of moderation at a breakneck pace, utterly dismantling the internal mechanisms for moderating Twitter. But video requires EVEN MORE MODERATION. Like MASSIVELY MORE. Moderating video is massively more difficult and time-intensive than moderating text, and MUCH harder to do algorithmically. The companies that invest in video have enormous sweatshops of people whose entire job is to keep your Youtube feed from filling up with snuff films and child porn. Side note: Moderation problems were one of the reasons why Twitter killed Vine in the first place.
2. Advertisers. The reason why Youtube works is because of advertisers. Advertising will become massively MORE important in a world where Twitter is centered on video, and that does not play nice with Elon’s declaration of war on advertisers, or insistence on the ‘free speech’ principles of allowing and promoting racist, antisemitic and homophobic content that advertisers abhor.
3. Storage Space. At a time where Elon Musk is dismantling internal infrastructure to save a buck, video requires massively MORE infrastructure to store and distribute than 288 character text snippets.
4. Technical Difficulty. It’s very good that Twitter has some tech here, but the real meat of video is Live Streaming, which is very difficult to do well, especially at the scale of more popular content creators. Can Twitter’s infrastructure handle distributing a live feed to a million people simultaneously? Because that’s the arena Elon’s saying he wants to play in if he wants a credible competitor.
5. Entrenched Competition. Longform video currently has two established players – Youtube and Twitch – who also happen to be owned by companies with VERY deep pockets (Google and Amazon). Elon’s bright idea is to compensate creators more than those companies. Where he thinks he’ll get the cash to do that is ANYONE’s guess, but not even Elon has enough to do it if Youtube and Twitch decide to fight back.

Now, some have surmised that Elon can get around some of these issues if the focus of the work is to put content behind paywalls, thus allowing for example adult performers to make a buck on Twitter. Problems:

1. OnlyFans already exists.
2. If you think advertisers are fleeing now, just wait until you tell them that the future of Twitter is hardcore porn.

Could I be proven wrong? Sure. The Internet is still a place where a brilliant vision can surprise everyone and win the day. But is there a brilliant vision here? Nope. Just a billionaire flailing desperately as his fortune and wunderkind reputation evaporates.

Took some doing, including remembering HOW to log into the site that hosts my blog, but in theory the old blog is up and running again. Now I just have to remember to not peruse old posts and see how stupid I was when I was younger.

This morning, Microsoft announced that they were acquiring Activision-Blizzard . Like most deals of this size and magnitude, there’s a long timeline to it, with an expected closure happening sometime next summer or so. The total price is just shy of $69 billion dollars.

Here’s some quick thoughts on the topic.

1.This is about exclusives. Microsoft were very bad losers in the XBox One/PS4 generation because Sony kicked the shit out of them in terms of Exclusive Content. Exclusives are what win console wars, and Microsoft just could not compete with a exclusive lineup that contained Spider-Man, God of War and Horizon Dawn. Microsoft is determined to not make the same mistake again. Last year, they famously bought Bethesda Zenimax and shortly afterwards confirmed that the upcoming Starfield will be a PC/XBox exclusive. It’s also driven acquisition of several studios since 2018, including Obsidian, Ninja Theory, inXile, the Initiative, and Double Fine. This isn’t just about making money off those titles, it’s also about taking oxygen away from Sony Playstation.

2. Gamepass is the real disruptor in the games industry now. For all the talk about blockchain in games, the real sea change to the games industry in the last few years has been a movement towards subscription-based gaming. Sure, Microsoft isn’t the only ones doing it – both Apple and Netflix are wading into the space in mobile, and it seems to be the preferred business model of some cloud gaming platforms.

Still, Microsoft’s GamePass is the clear front-runner in the space. And that’s important! Most people are not going to have several game subscriptions, and so being so big that you’re the ‘default’ choice is a huge deal. One could say that this is them trying to become The Netflix of Games, which is fair. But one could also that by buying up all the primo IP, they’re also trying to be the Disney Plus of games as well.

3. This could also be a frontal attack on Steam and Epic as well. What, were you not AWARE that your gamepass also got you the games on PC? And while I don’t expect for Microsoft to be so brazen as to remove titles from Steam, they can compete effectively with Steam with their Try-Before-You-Buy strategy. Microsoft has always considered PC to be territory they should own, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see this heat up more after the Activision deal goes through.

4. This may add new challenges for indies on GamePass. GamePass has been a revelation for indie gamers, as it gives devs a new platform for discovery. Countless games have gotten the ‘try before you buy’ treatment as players try stuff for ‘free’. However, Microsoft-owned titles don’t rotate in and out of the store, which means that indies have to compete with always-available titles like Forza and Skyrim. The more that Microsoft packs GamePass with AAA offerings, the harder it may be for indie games to find oxygen.

5. This is probably a good thing for Activision’s current culture problems. Look, I’m not saying that Microsoft is perfect and has never had a major-league fuckup – indeed, part of working in the games industry is usually trying to find a place with crazy that is compatible with your crazy. And I know that there’s some disappointment that embattled CEO Bobby Kotick likely won’t leave until the deal is completed. Also, as far as I know of, there’s no Microsoft union, and I suspect game devs passionate about that goal will find it further away once all is said and done.

All the above being said, firing Kotick probably wouldn’t have fixed the culture problems, but getting a new corporate overlord will probably result in massive changes. Most people I know who work at Microsoft believe that their heart is in the right place on these issues, and they’re not afraid to fire people who are being obstacles to true change.

The above being said, there may be some disappointment in the RATE of change. One of the things that companies like EA and Microsoft try NOT to do is to ruin the magic of the studios they buy, at least for a couple of years. So it remains to be seen whether or not Microsoft results in a sledgehammer to these problems, or a Light Touch With A Promise That They Will Get Involved If You Don’t Take Care Of Your Own Shit. But one way or another, I expect the toxic forces that may still be lurking in ACTI to be discovering it’s a lot harder to hide.

6. This is probably a good thing if you don’t want to see Call of Duty in-game NFTs.
Microsoft HAS dabbled in blockchain stuff, and in the realm of NFTs have done some experiments that includes even gaming that flew mostly under the radar. That being said, head of Xbox Phil Spencer seems to be a pretty big skeptic of the concept. Microsoft has been hyperfocused on creating gamer good will in order to create energy and momentum for GamePass, and as such I’d expect their studios (including ACTI) to steer clear of the concept – at least until someone else demonstrates a use of the technology that has wide market favorability.

But before I get ahead of myself on this one, let’s keep in mind that the press release announcing the deal called it the building blocks of the metaverse.I mean, that’s PROBABLY just them using Wall Street friendly buzzwords, but I guess we’ll see.

7. Activision/Blizzard is about to enter a weird year-long ‘don’t make waves’ purgatory. One of the fun things about being in this ‘pending’ state – and I’ve seen it many times over the years – is that the number one overriding goal for the entire organization becomes ‘Don’t blow up the deal!’ As an example, I was working on SWTOR when Disney was maneuvering to buy Lucas, and it was about then that our community manager decided to tell players inquiring about same-sex romances in SWTOR that, if you think about it, there really aren’t gay people in Star Wars. It was a thing, and would eventually lead to pissed off conservatives when we backpedalled and ultimately the “Gay Planet”. Whoopsie.

Anyway, was LucasArts mad at us? You betcha! Was it for soiling George Lucas’ vision? Was it for not having gay romances? Was it for eventually including gay romance? Was it for pissing off conservatives? None of the above. It was for making news. All that mattered was that we didn’t blow up the deal. As far as they were concerned, they didn’t care HOW this little fuckup went away, just so long as it did, eventually, go away.

Anyway, just something to think about the next time there’s disquieting Activision/Blizzard news.

8. So it’s probably mostly good news but…. l know a lot of people are disquieted when giant behemoths get bigger, and I won’t lie, that’s a concern. It’s not really a monopolistic concern – Microsoft will only be the third biggest gaming company after this deal goes through, after TenCent and Sony – but it will dramatically increase the clout of one of the biggest companies in the world. Concentration of power is not usually very great, especially if you’re a smaller company trying to compete or get a deal.

That being said, one interesting mental exercise is to think about the next Blizzard RPG, the next Bethesda RPG and the next Obsidian RPG. Will corporate influence push these titles to be more similar due to shared corporate goals? Will corporate influence push these titles to be more different – even in cases designers don’t want to go that direction – to create further differentiation inside the same company? Or will corporations do the right thing and keep their hands off the wheel and let designers and teams make these decisions. I know what lip service we’ll get, but only time will tell for real.