The cool thing about this part of the list is that we’re now well in the part of the list where no one cares. At the low end, you have ‘are you kidding me? You put THAT marginal game on your list?” At the high end, there’s “I can’t believe you put this stupid game at #2!” But no one has strong opinions about the midsection of the list. No one’s going to get angry because Ra is at 59 instead of 57. This part of this list is the slog, but it’s also surprisingly pressure free. Hell, you’re probably not even reading this. Which is good because writing these intro blurbs is annoying AF.
Previously: 100-91 90-81 80-71 70-61
60. Targi
“Outwit your rival by selecting where to place nomad workers on a dynamic desert grid.”
Released: 2012
Designer: Andreas Steiger
Players: 2
Estimated Time: 60 mins
New To List
I don’t do a ton of two-player games – having two young’uns at an age where my wife gives me looks if I play too many game nights a week means I tend to focus my gaming opportunities on bigger three- or four-person affairs. That said, every now and then someone gets sick, and I still have a stack of great two-player games. Which is good – a great many games that SAY two-player on the box fall apart at that player count. You’re ALMOST always better off getting a game meant for a head to head duel.
Targi is one of these games, and it’s a legitimate classic, somehow managing to make a two-player worker placement game make sense. The way it works is simple – cards are laid out in a grid, and another series of cards (let’s call them the row/column cards) are put surrounding the grid. Players will take turns placing their workers on row/column cards, which offer modest benefits, but the real prize are the benefits from where their chosen row and columns interact. Since there are two of these cross points (where 1 row meets 2 columns), these prizes are worth chasing — and figuring out how you can confound your opponent’s plans while progressing your own is an absolute delight.
59. Ra
“Bid to acquire the most valuable sets of Egyptian artifacts and resources.”
Released: 1999
Designer: Reiner Knizia
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 45-60 mins
Last Year: 62
Hey, look, it’s another game that can be defined as a ‘stone cold classic’. Ra is first and foremost an auction game, but it’s also a set collection game. Players bid with sun tokens that they acquire (the big numbers that they have). If they win the bid, they lose the tile and replace it with the last tile someone won with. It’s a simple mechanic that at first seems counterintuitive (there is no currency to win), but it creates weird inflection points where you might bid on something solely in hopes of upgrading your low number for something you hopefully can use in the next round.
I should also note that Ra is an old game that has gone through many printings. The recent reprint by 25th Century Games is the gold standard, though. If you can find a way to get your hands on one, it’s definitely worth the expense.
58. Doughnut Drive-Thru
“Prepare, serve and sell amazing doughnuts to customers. Most tips wins!”
Released: 2015
Designer: Ikaga-Ya
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 20-30 mins
Didn’t Appear Last Year (Appeared on Previous Lists)
Doughnut Drive-Thru is a small little card game that is, surprisingly, one of the more vicious worker placement games I’ve ever encountered. As such, it perennially reminds me of it’s existence as one of the great end-of-night filler games in my group’s collection.
It works like this. Each player has two meeples (that look like little cheerios) at the start of the game, which they use to try to prepare and serve their doughnuts (which involves rolling dice to try to hit targets on the card). But these workers are not specific to a color, and there’s no ‘reset’ event, where everyone has to take up their workers. Instead, if you’re out of meeples, you can choose an action which lets you take all the doughnut meeples from any one card. But sometimes, you get screwed, because no card has two meeples, which makes this action way less efficient.
The result is a game that is surprisingly interactive – there are numerous ways you can mess with the guy after you and force him to have a sub-optimal turn. Which is fine, because the game is short and fast enough that you don’t care when it happens to you. Just a great little quickie game.
57. Altiplano
“Bag building in the highlands of Peru.”
Released: 2017
Designer: Reiner Stockhausen
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 60-120 mins
Last Year: 50
I’m continually amazed that more ‘bag building’ games don’t exist. It’s undeniably a fun and engaging mechanic, with some significant advantages over ‘deck building’ games (namely, no need for shuffling) and yet, there’s only a handful of them, and the two most notable were made by the same designer and company.
Orleans and Altiplano are similar in many ways. Orleans has historically done significantly better, still appears on OTHER people’s top 100 lists, and has two well-regarded expansion packs. Altiplano, though, has llamas. So which is better? Who can say?
In all seriousness, both have similar patterns where you accomplish the things you want to do by filling in patterns on your player board. Orleans accompanies this with a political map where you spread your influence across a political map. Altiplano replaces that central board presence with a rondel-like assortment of locations you can wander around to further build your economic engine. I genuinely tend to prefer that, but both of these are great games.
That’s not to say that we won’t see bag building again. But the game I’ll choose may surprise you.
56. Nidavellir
“Assemble and prepare a formidable crew of dwarfs to fight the mighty Fafnir! “
Released: 2020
Designer: Serge Laget
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 45 mins
Last Year: 73
Nidavellir is a simple auction game where each player is playing a set collection game where they’re trying to build a clan of dwarves. Each player also starts with 5 coins (0, 2, 3, 4, 5). There are also three taverns. Players will place three coins next to the three taverns – and the size of their bid determines the order which players will choose the dwarf they (hopefully) want.
But what makes the game stand out to me is what you can do with the two leftover 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). Which means that if you want to try to quickly get to bigger, more powerful coins to bid with, you’ll lose a lot of early bidding power.
55. Underwater Cities
“Develop future cities on the seafloor through politics, production, and science.”
Released: 2018
Designer: Vladimir Suchy
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 80-150 mins
Last Year: 30
This is Vladimir Suchy’s highest ranking on the list, and it contains all of his hallmark design elements. An unusual, highly strategic action selection mechanism that creates a lot of table interaction, a crunchy and heavy design euro that’s still not hard to teach, and an interesting and engaging board presence (I love those little domes).
Players are trying to build cities, and connect them with tunnels, and build farms and research facilities in/around them. To do so, they’ll place their worker on a worker placement, and then place a card of (hopefully) the same color. If the color matches, the player does the action on both the card AND the space. If they don’t, he chooses one or the other. Combine this with the fact that someone else might take the spot you were angling to take, and you end up with a situation where players are often forced to choose between an efficient action that doesn’t quite do what they need, or an inefficient action that still gets where they want to go – or they can risk trying to line up the next turn to be better – but who knows if someone will steal THAT spot too.
Underwater Cities also has some tableau building in it – fans of Terraforming Mars will find that part very familiar, as they will the ‘colonize a hostile environment’ vibe. But I find it superior to TM for a lot of reasons, one of which being that the tableau building is somewhat constrained which helps keep the game focuses (and prevents situations where one player ends up having a million cards that end up gumming up the works).
54. Bloc by Bloc: Uprising
“Take back the streets of your city in the ultimate edition of the insurrection game. “
Released: 2022
Designer: T.L. Simons
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 60-120 mins
Last Year: 13
When Guillotine was a perennial favorite on this list, I used to make a joke about how it was a game that accurately captured the zeitgeist of the times. And now I know about Bloc by Bloc, a game that literally advertises itself as “The Insurrection Game”.
In Bloc by Bloc, players are working cooperatively in order to try to take control of the city. The Man (represented, in a nice touch, as white cubes) is trying to keep you down, and to take over the city, you’ll need to crash barricades, flip cop cars, and attend secret meetings. If you’re successful, you’ll ‘occupy’ the district, flipping it over from it’s black-and-white side. Thus, as your revolution spreads, you’ll bring color back to the world (another nice, subtle touch).
Bloc by Bloc‘s ranking fell quite a bit this year from last. This may be because I didn’t get it on the table as much this year. So there’s a good chance that this game bounces back next year. Especially since when I write the next list, a presidential election will have just happened.
53. The Crew: Mission Deep Sea
“Dive into the deep sea in this co-operative trick-taking game with variable missions.”
Released: 2021
Designer: Thomas Sing
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 20
Last Year: 18
The release of the original Crew kickstarted a minor renaissance of trick-taking games. I think this was somewhat shortlived – the only non-Crew game that is still on my radar is Cat in the Box, which is based on Schrodinger’s Cat but I didn’t really get enough chance to play that one. So for me, the second Crew game remains the genre’s gold standard.
The thing that makes the Crew games special is the fact that they are cooperative trick taking games. And you’re not really allowed to talk about your hands. Each player has different goals they have to pursue. This is where Crew: Mission Deep Sea is superior to it’s predecessor due to the card-based objectives that are wildly variable and are chaotic and often feel impossibly at odds with each other.
The one knock I have is that even though it’s a light filler game, it’s also a brain burner. This is one of those games where if you’ve just wrapped up something incredibly tense and tiring to play (I’m looking at you, Dune Imperium), this may not be the right thing to slap on the table. And yet, my group has probably played more of this game than anything else over the last two years.
52. Mind MGMT: The Psychic Espionage “Game.”
“Psychic rogue agents team up to track down the Recruiter in Zanzibar.”
Released: 2021
Designer: Jay Cormier, Sen-Foong Lim
Players: 1-5
Estimated Time: 45-75 mins
Last Year: 11
One vs many hidden deduction games have the potential to be both great and terrible. In these games, one player is running and hiding whereas everyone else is trying to find them. If the Hunted is too good, the rest of the table can’t catch up. If the Hunted is bad – or in many games, if the players just get unusually lucky – you can end up with a short, stunted and unsatisfying gameplay experience. But if the stars DO line up, then it’s a deliciously satisfying gaming experience.
The flagship of this genre is Fury of Dracula, which is usually great but also has the capacity to go too long. Mind MGMT manages to create a great experience but in a much shorter game experience, and yet too-short luck wins are rare. The trail of evidence the Hunted leaves behind is a fun and interesting puzzle for the rest of the table to solve.
And I’m just going to quote this part verbatim from last year: “The theming of Mind MGMT is weird. Based on an indie comic of the same name, the core conceit is a little hard to explain to the uninitiated. And the art for the game is a tad divisive – it’s apparently straight from the source material, and is seen as evocative and interesting to some, and noisy and distracting to others.”
Clearly, this is not a problem for me, though, and I’ve never read the comic. If you can get past this weirdness, there is a great one-vs-many experience to be had.
51. The Great Wall
Released: 2021
Designer: Kamil ‘Sanex’ Cieśla, Robert Plesowicz, Łukasz Włodarczyk
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 120-180
New to List
Awaken Realms is a game publisher famous for games that are huge collections of plastic. The games themselves are hit-and-miss, even if the art, components and miniatures are usually top-notch (and Great Wall is no exception). Great Wall is one of their more divisive titles, but for me and my group, it absolutely works.
This isn’t really a coop game. However, players have to work together to fight off the incoming hordes while trying to construct the nominal Great Wall to defend themselves. The goal is to try to get more honor than your competitors. The core mechanic is a worker placement game – but an odd worker placement game where actions don’t fire unless multiple people fill in all of the spots for a certain action.
All of this leads up to a great table presence where you have a visually impressive wall. The combat is relatively easy and fun. The player powers are impressive and feel great. The worker placement element is a very interesting social twist on this classic game element. This is a great, meaty (albeit a little long) game with a ton of interesting choices and fantastic production values.
All that said, there’s a version of this game that just has meeples instead of minis. Fuck that. While you don’t need all of the expansion content, the miniatures do take it to the next level.
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