I first started making these lists several years ago. A couple of these lists were Twitter only, meaning that I suspect at some point they will be lost to the sands of time unless I go and specifically spelunk my archive to go save them. All the same, going through these old lists is instructive. It highlights my own changing tastes as a game player and designer, but it also shows how games, in general, are getting better.
The majority of board games today are much tighter than they were a decade ago. New genres like cooperative and deckbuilding have matured through constant iteration. Designers in general have gotten MUCH better at writing rulebooks and templating rules on cards for consistency and readability. Production values are VASTLY improved. Solo gaming, once a weird fringe, is starting to become a source of pretty good games.
A lot of it is just competition, too. Yes, it may seem like board gaming is a ‘cult of the new’, but in reality, we have an entire field of game design that is flooded with content, forced to outdo each other to survive. What this means is that games that are new hits that break through are likely pretty good to get any sort of attention. It also makes the games that stick around as perennial list occupants that much more impressive (I’m looking at you, #41).
Previously: 100-91 90-81 80-71 70-61 60-51
50. Legendary Encounters: The Matrix
“Do you know kung fu? Download a winning deck to save humanity.”
Released: 2023
Designer: “Upper Deck Entertainment”
Players: 1-5 players
Estimated Time: 30-60 minutes
New to List
In the early years of this list, Legendary: Marvel was a frequent visitor to my top 100 list. It’s a very good cooperative deckbuilder, but it eventually fell off the list due to the fact that it has surprisingly long setup and teardown times, at a time when better deckbuilders were coming out – as well as other light Marvel experiences like Marvel United which scratch a similar itch but is much easier to start up.
Around that time, people whose opinion I trusted wouldn’t stop talking about another game called Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deckbuilding Game. They wouldn’t stop talking about how the game managed to take the core Legendary experience and… actually add a narrative to it. I was intrigued, but just never got around to it before it faded from the consciousness.
It was this history in mind that I sat down at a game con this year to play Legendary Encounters: The Matrix and I get it now. It’s still a core deckbuilder (with, I want to stress, the same annoying setup and teardown times) but that game is buttressed with a sort of campaign deck that constantly changes the rules and challenges of the game. What transpired was a roller coaster of a narrative experience that somehow managed to provide a near-perfect beat-by-beat recreation of the Matrix storyline but to do so in a way where things were constantly in doubt. I was constantly going from ‘we’re screwed’ to ‘we rock’ to ‘we’re totally screwed’. In the end of our scenario, the rules changed one more time – one of us became ‘the one’ and had to win the whole thing while the rest of us just focused on trying to survive.
49. Ivion
“Duel against an opponent in a brutal fantasy world.”
Released: 2018
Designer: Aislyn Hall, Aaron Shaw
Players: 2 (4 with team rules)
Estimated Time: 15-30 minutes
New to List
Ivion is more of a system than a single game. It’s sold in a series of duel boxes – The Ram and the Raven, for example, has two duel decks, one representing a sort of frost mage with a ton of control spells, and another as a barbarian who wants to get up close and personal before unleashing hell. Each dual box is balanced first and foremost against each other, but they are also designed so you can mix and match.
Each player gets a deck, and the two decks are wildly assymetric, representing massive differences in play style and flow. The players will use these two decks to take part in a tactical battle that takes place on a simple 5×5 grid. Simply moving doesn’t require cards, but attacking your opponent does, and your deck also supplies you with the defenses you need – provided you have the resources to cast those spells. Which means that a key part of the game is keeping those resources available in hopes of bluffing your opponent off from casting his most brutal cards.
One of the nicer design touches is that each player has a kind of ultimate that fires off when they get knocked below half-health. This one-time effect helps to rubber band a game, and keep things from becoming too lopsided. It’s not uncommon for all the momentum to switch wildly in this game, and these ‘second wind’ moments are usually the catalysts.
Every game of Ivion I’ve played has been a taut tightrope that comes down to the wire. If you like tactical dueling gameplay, this is for you.
48. Guild of Merchant Explorers
“Explore strange lands, establish trade routes, and search for treasure. “
Released: 2022
Designer:Matthew Dunstan, Brett J Gilbert
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 45 mins
New to List
Remember when I said there were no more roll and writes on the list? Well, Guild of Merchant Explorers has the SOUL of a roll-and-write. In fact, while playing it, I keep thinking that this game must have started its life as a roll and write, but at some point the designers decided the format was keeping it back. The result is something as fast and light as a roll and write, but with decidedly more depth.
Each turn, one player will flip a card that describes what exploration will happen (explore 2 desert spaces, for example), and then all players will place cubes on the map. Their goal is to explore whole regions, as well as place villages, discover towers and create trade routes between cities.
The game is divided into four ages, and during each age your explorers are removed from the board (some other aspects, such as your villages, survive between rounds), which resets things. This is the part that feels like it couldn’t be in a roll-and-write without running your eraser to a nub. It works, though – Guild of Merchant Explorers ends up being as light and easy to teach as most roll-and-writes while still providing a slightly meatier, more strategic experience.
47. The Taverns of Tiefenthal
“”Build your way to the best Tavern in town with this deckbuilding dice drafting game” “
Released: 2019
Designer: Wolfgang Warsch
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 60 mins
Last Year: 48
Taverns of Tiefenthal is a combination dice drafting/deck building game, where players try to build the best tavern. This game has been knocked by some by not being a great ‘running a tavern’ simulator, and anyone looking for a crunchy economic simulator are going to be disappointed. Those who like deckbuilding, dice drafting and press-your-luck into a tight, tavern-themed gaming package, though, are going to find a lot to love.
The goal of the game is to get victory points, which is done by serving beer to patrons. But the soul of the game is in the press-your-luck mechanics. You can hire staff to work your bar, who will increase your bar’s operating output. But the cards you acquire go into your deck. And at the start of your turn, you deal out cards. You can keep dealing out cards – hopefully mostly your staff – until all of your tables are full of customers (the three cards on top shown in pictures).
After this, there’s a round of dice drafting – players roll dice and then pass them around on little drink coasters. The staff and patrons that you’ve dealt out previously determines what you can do with those dice, and how you can turn them into victory points.
The centerpiece of the gaming experience is the player boards themselves. Your tavern is assembled from a handful of puzzle-type pieces. What this means is that when you upgrade an aspect of your tavern permanently, you’ll flip over that puzzle piece to the upgraded side, which creates a slick, satisfying experience as you further progress in the game.
46. Smartphone, Inc
“Success is measured in money as you build your global smartphone empire.”
Released: 2018
Designer: Ivan Lashin
Players: 1-5
Estimated Time: 60-90 mins
Last Year: 61
Smartphone is an interesting anomaly – it’s a complex-looking economic Eurogame that you can teach in 15 minutes and play in an hour. It’s slick, it’s quick, but it still has a lot of interesting decisions and provides a nice, meaty territorial control/economic sim. Also, it’s a simple, sleek and modern presentation.
The cornerstone of the game experience is the pad system, shown above, which determines the resources and actions the player can take. The player can take his two pads, and overlap them – the resources that are shown are what you have to play with this turn. In the above example, the player has two logistic actions (the blue trucks), one research (purple gear) and increased stock of two (the black crates – which also come with a price cut – this player is trying to make cheap phones in bulk!). And along the way, the player will research additional chits they can add to their pad (the red and purple duo in the picture) allowing them to get more and more satisfying resource yields each turn. It’s an simple puzzle that breaks your brains in interesting ways.
If you like the idea of Smartphone you might want to check out Mobile Markets, put out by the same team. This takes the core game engine of Smartphone and gets rid of the board, making it mostly a card game. I can’t quite vouch for that one, though – it looks promising but I haven’t gotten to play it yet.
45. Caesar! Seize Rome in 20 Minutes!
“Caesar and Pompey deploy units to battlegrounds across Rome to seize control!”
Released: 2022
Designer: Paolo Mori
Players: 1-2
Estimated Time: 20 mins
Last Year: 28
A small, tight territorial control game for two. In Caesar, you have a hand of three discs that you pull out of a bag. Each turn, you’ll place one on a circle that borders two territories. Once a territory is completely surrounded, one of the two players claims that territories.
What makes this an interesting puzzle, though, is that each disc has two halves of it, and each half has a different strength. Thus, if you put your best army on a border with a mind towards capturing the territory you REALLY want, you’re probably putting a significantly weaker army on the other side of that territory, creating an opportunity for your opponent. Figuring out how to balance immediate rewards with long-term planning is a tight, contentious and delightful duel.
PSC Games has recently had a string of luck making small-box tight 20-minute 2-person games. If you like Caesar, you might want to check out Blitzkrieg – it’s a game that has a very similar soul to Caesar, but with a more abstract, less map-like gameboard. This year, they also came out with Dogfight, which is… fine. I mean, it’s a good game, but still far below Caesar and Blitzkreig in terms of great gameplay.
44. Cryo
“Competing factions must scavenge the wreckage of their colony ship to survive.”
Released: 2021
Designer: Tom Jolly, Luke Laurie
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 60-90 mins
Last Year: 22
There’s a lot to like about Cryo, a midweight worker placement with an absolutely gorgeous graphic-novel-neon art style. Players play as one of several groups of survivors that survive a crashed interplanetary journal. Your job is to scavenge the remains of the ship, find your citizens still trapped in cryosleep on the ship, and ferry them under the surface of the planet before the temperature of the surface drops.
You’ll be using your drones to do all your heavy lifting, and this is a worker placement game. The trick is that docking locations (shown as the white X-shape in the image above) allow the player to harvest just one of the locations adjacent to them. This creates interesting dynamics where careful placement can not only block your opponent from taking the action that you wanted to take, it could potentially block them from a couple of other good actions as well.
It’s a tight, slick and gorgeous presentation as well. Most sci-fi games prefer either darkness and grit or slick, chrome sleekness. This is something else – a bright, colorful almost comic-like experience that is both thematic but also incredibly easy to parse as a player board. This one’s a keeper.
43. Spirit Island
“Island Spirits join forces using elemental powers to defend their home from invaders.”
Released: 2017
Designer: R. Eric Reuss
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 90-120 mins
Last Year: 32
Spirit Island burst into the board game consciousness as the ‘first game about DECOLONIZATION’. This is, of course, the opposite energy of most territorial control board games, where you start with an empty world and spread you influence across the map. That social-justice angle of things has never particularly appealed to me (I LIKE filling up maps), but all the same there’s no doubt that the result is a completely novel and interesting game experience.
Spirit Island is a cooperative board game that scales smoothly between player counts (the island grows and shrinks based on player count). You play as elemental spirits of the island, which has been discovered by filthy colonizing explorers and soldiers, who threaten the simple lives of the mushroom-hut-dwelling natives. The job of the players is to work together to drive them back into the sea.
Spirit Island is also one of the most complex cooperative board games available. Which is great – most cooperative games are relatively light, as they tend to be popular things to put on the table when someone brings their non-gaming friend or partner to game night. Spirit Island isn’t that – it’s definitely a meatier experience for a heavier crowd – but frankly it’s great that this exists.
42. Grand Austria Hotel
“Serve guests and prepare rooms to be the best hotelier in the Viennese modern age.”
Released: 2015
Designer: Virginio Gigli, Simone Luciani
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 60-120 mins
Last Year: 19
In Grand Austria Hotel, you play a 19th century hotelier, running one of several high-class luxury establishments. Your job is simple – attract the best guests, feed them, and put them in rooms.
The engine of the game is dice drafting. A large pool of dice are rolled, and seperated into piles based on numbers. Each number represents a different action – prepare a room, or cook some food, for example. One by one, each player will choose one of these dice, and the strength of the action is based on the number of dice in that pool. If there are four dice in the ‘prepare room’ action, you can prepare four rooms, as an example.
Players go around and choose one die and take the action. The last player will take two in a row, and then the rest of the table will continue to take actions in reverse turn order. In this manner, the first player will end up taking the first AND the last action, and because dice keep disappearing from the various pools, it also means he’ll likely take the strongest and weakest action as well.
The expansion, Let’s Waltz, is good but doesn’t add anything crucial to the game. That being said, one of my favorite things is that ‘strudel’ is one of the core resources in the game (along with cake, wine and coffee, food items you feed your customers). As such, one tasty upgrade is to go to Etsy and find one of the many component upgrade kits, many of which look better than the upgraded components that come with the Let’s Waltz expansion.
41. Kingsburg
“Grow your realm, influence members of the King’s court and fight the forces of winter “
Released: 2007
Designer: Andrea Chiarvesio, Luca Iennaco
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 90 mins
Last Year: 26
Kingsburg is a dice-rolling city-building game. Each player rolls three dice on their turn, and then they take turns placing dice on spots to claim the resources that spot provides. If you have a 3 and a 4, as an example, you can claim the 3 spot and the 4 spot, or you can place both on the 7 spot, which offers substantially improved rewards. But these spots are exclusive – only one person can claim each spot, so the game is much more interactive than it seems at first glance, as you need to be aware of the dice your opponents have to be sure you don’t get locked out of a spot you want.
The one knock I have on Kingsburg is that you have to be careful what edition you get. The first edition really requires the To Forge A Realm expansion, which provides a superior ‘bad guys are coming’ combat experience. This expansion is included in the Second Edition. The second edition also has ‘modernized’ art, which I frankly find inferior to the original. Still, Kingsburg is a gaming treat that will probably always fight to have a place on this list.
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