For the first time this year, I decided to include last year’s ranking as part of the general information about a game. I did this out of curiosity, of course, and also to make it easier to plagiarize my past self. Writing 100 blurbs in a week is a pain in the ass, especially if I expect to inflict some of you with any of mygame design expertise and/or so-called humor.
Exposing these numbers, of course, exposes something else, namely that I’m a massive fraud. I mean, look at these numbers. How did Genotype drop 66 points in a year? Am I just making shit up as I go along? The answer is yes. Every one of us making a list like this is just pulling this shit out of our posteriors, and then spoonfeeding it to you and calling it content.
In all seriousness, this year I probably made 20-30 versions of this list in PubMeeple, refining and refining. Some games got richer on replays. Some games had warts exposed. New games made older games feel dated or obsolete. And tastes change. So anyway, I’m pretty confident that this year’s list is a very comprehensive and accurate list of the best 100 board games ever made.
Not like last year’s list. That list was obviously crap and should be nuked from orbit, just to be sure.
One final highlight is that this section of the list has the highest percentage of new or non-repeating games out of all the sections. Apparently, the 70s is where I put games I want to park the new cars before I take them for extended drives.
80. Genotype: A Mendelian Genetics Game
“Grab a trowel and breed pea plants on your way to become a master geneticist.”
Released: 2021
Designer: John Coveyou, Paul Saloman, Ian Zang
Players: 1-5
Estimated Time: 45-90 minutes
Last Year: 14
For my money, Genotype is the best legume-growing simulator on the market (sorry, Bohnanza, it’s true). In this game, you play as scientists trying to discover the secrets of hereditary traits, mimicking the famous experiments of legendary scientist Gregor Mendel. The game is incredibly reverent to the subject matter, and a lot of work goes into capturing the feel of turn-of-the-century science and naturalism, and the whole feel is frankly a lovely and wonderful experience if the period or the science is attractive to you.
But this isn’t just some educational game. The mechanics are novel and interesting. Genotype it, at its core, a dice drafting game. What makes it unique is that players have the ability to modify what the dice MEAN. If you really need a pea plant where the pod color is yellow, you can jury-rig the pool so that more possible dice roll gives you the result you need. And yet this happens before the dice is rolled, meaning that sometimes your investment in making something more likely whiffs completely.
Genotype is not a heavy game, but it is just a tad too heavy to slap in front of non-gamers. However, if you have a table full of gamers who like the history of science, this is a great medium-weight experience to put in front of them.
79. Rush Out!
“Heroes try to escape the dungeon while the Sorcerer uses his magic to stop them. “
Released: 2021
Designer: Thomas Dupont
Players: 3-5
Estimated Time: 20-30 minutes
Last Year: 64
Most real-time games are, to be blunt, hot buttered ass. They’re chaotic. They’re frequently frustrating. Real-life issues such as table placement, lighting and assets being within board reach of everyone are real issues. You can’t really stop and ask a rules question, and it’s easy and common for people to cheat, accidentally, because no one is paying attention to what you’re doing, and people frequently lose track of what they’re doing.
There are two exceptions to this rule. The first is a little coop game called Fuse (which has appeared on prior lists), where players role dice and then grab dice to try to accomplish missions in front of them. It’s clean, it works, and its easy to be sure everyone knows what’s going on.
Rush Out! improves upon this by turning it into a one-versus-many experience. One player plays as the dark wizard, trying to cast spells to slow the enemy. The rest of the players can complete dice patterns to try to attack him. And the game comes with additional modules that makes the game more intricate and complex, but there’s no need for any of that if you don’t want to add them.
If this sounds intriguing to you, you might want to check out Shut Up and Sit Down’s review of the game, which turned me onto this delightful title.
78. Hamburg (formerly Bruges)
“Build your influence in Hamburg while avoiding threats.”
Released: 2022/2013
Designer: Stefan Feld
Players: 1-5
Estimated Time: 60-90 minutes
New to List
Recently, my favorite designer Stefan Feld released the City Collection, where he revisited some of his old designs, gave them a new theme in a new city. This has given me a chance to revisit some of his older designs that I never got a chance to play the first time around. By far, the high part of this experience has been Hamburg, which is adapted from his classic game Bruges.
The magic of this particular title is the unique use of multi-use cards. At the start of every turn, players draw up to 5 cards (there are 5 colors but they can draw whatever cards they want). On one side these cards represent buildings that you can build. But these cards can also be used for fuel for different actions. As an example, you can ‘sell’ any color card you want for the value of the die of the same color that gets rerolled each turn. Which creates some unusual tension – yes, you may want to build the pink building in your hand, but the pink die is a 6 and everything else is a 2 or lower, and you need a lot of money NOW.
I love Hamburg. I do note that it is a little pricey for what it is, and I also should note that many people feel the art in Bruges is superior. Just something to consider if you see it on sale out there somewhere.
77. Horrified
“Classic movie monsters terrorize a town! Can your team stop them in time?”
Released: 2019
Designer: Prospero Hall
Players: 1-5
Estimated Time: 60 minutes
Last Year: 87
A lot of games have tried to copy the classic, groundbreaking game Pandemic but Horrified is among the best to do it. Players each play heroes – each with unique abilities, of course, who are trying to stop Universal monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man) from…. doing evil shit, I guess. Each monster has unique special abilities, and the game comes with six of them. Each game has 2 (or 3, if you like a challenge) monsters to defeat, which can be mixed and matched to add more depth and replayability.
Horrified succeeds again by having simple mechanics interact with relatively complex rules for your boss monsters – something we saw back with Marvel United. It’s incredibly easy to teach and learn, and the classic Universal monsters have …. universal appeal (get it? Haha, I kill me).
I should note that I did manage to get my hands on Horrified: Greek Monsters at BGG.con. Mechanically…. well, it’s the same game only with a greek coat of paint. Each of the new bosses has a new, mechanically different monster – which was good and appreciated, and shows how flexible the underlying system actually is. However, I think the core box has more Universal appeal (Hahaha, I kill me) and feels more… well, horrifying… and should probably be your first choice unless you or someone in your playgroup is a big ol’ Hercules fanboy.
76. Tamashii: Chronicle of Ascend
“Become an outsider and fight against Ascend, a cold AI, that rules over the world. “
Released: 2023
Designer: Kamil ‘Sanex’ Cieśla, Robert Plesowicz, Łukasz Włodarczyk
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 60-180 minutes
New to List
Tamashii is an epic, sprawling cooperative Cyberpunk-themed game, where players must work together to solve mission scenarios, each of which are different. To do so they’ll need to explore the city, do a lot of hacking and occasionally swap to jack into more powerful host bodies.
The core mechanic that drives all of this is the hacking minigame. This is the core conflict resolution mechanic in the game, from swapping bodies to engaging in combat to solving the various scenario puzzles, players must slide tiles around on a grid to form certain patterns. This system is surprisingly resilient and interesting, and provides a good analog to the player activity of ‘hacking’.
I got Tamishii on Kickstarter because I fell in love with their absolutely gorgeous Cyberpunk miniatures (and a growing realization I had no games with any good Cyberpunk miniatures, gorgeous or otherwise). What I got is a great, albeit relatively heavy, game. I only have one knock on the game, and that is that, for a coop scenario-based game, you can’t really help each other. As an example, when you’re attacked by a ‘monster’, it happens in your own cyberspace, and you must fight (i.e. hack them by building their pattern) alone – others can do very little to help you. A little odd, but if you can accept that as just part of this cyberpunk reality, you’ll have a great campaign game on your hands.
75. Blokus
“Fit your tiles on a shared board with not enough space for everyone.”
Released: 2000
Designer: Bernard Tavitian
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 20
Didn’t Appear Last Year (Appeared on Previous Lists)
Blokus is very close to the perfect game to pull out for your non-gaming muggle friends. It’s so simple the rules could fit on a notecard. The tetris-y pieces are attractive and tactile. It’s capable of great depth and surprising viciousness. And you can usually pick up a copy at Target for $20.
The rules: (1) You have a set number of game pieces, representing every possible shape of squares between 1 subsquare and 5. (2) Your first piece must go in a corner. (3) Every subsequent piece must touch one of your previously placed – but only on a corner (no two faces of your two pieces can be orthagonally adjacent). (4) If you can’t place a piece, you’re out, and your score is the number of subsquares you have left.
You will be SHOCKED at how fast this game will get your mother-in-law to tell you to go fuck yourself in the best possible way.
74. Woodcraft
“Grow trees, gather wood and other materials, craft items and build the best workshop!”
Released: 2022
Designer: Ross Arnold, Vladimir Suchy
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 60-120 minutes
New to List
There’s a point which I may have to just accept that I’m becoming a Vladimir Suchy fanboy. He’s designed my favorite heavy games in the last few years. His bread and butter is interesting action choosing mechanics. We’ve already seen him once on this list (with Praga Caput Regni) and we will see him again.
Woodcraft follows in that mold of interesting action selection mechanisms. Players play as carpenters. They’ll collect dice of various colors (representing various strains of wood) and will use tools to manipulate those dice (splitting one die into two with a saw for example) to get the numbers they need. They can even plant trees (i.e. low level dice) and grow them into the numbers they need.
The action selection mechanism is the gem of this experience, though. That central sawblade is the core mechanic. The actions that players can choose are one of those little slivers around the sawblade. Rarely used actions end up getting bonuses if they aren’t picked, making them more attractive. Popular actions end up getting frozen out and being unpickable after a bit. The end result is a Eurogame that is complex, dense but unique and deeply rewarding.
73. QE
“Bid ANYTHING to bail out companies, but just don’t bid the MOST!”
Released: 2019
Designer: Gavin Birnbaum
Players: 3-5 players
Estimated Time: 45 minutes
Last Year: 99
A simple auction game with a simple premise – you can bid whatever you want. You play as a country who has the ability to literally print money. But whoever prints the most money plunges their country into a deflationary death spiral – and automatically loses.
It works like this – one player chooses an asset, and names a minimum bid. Other players – who are trying to chase certain asset classes for scoring REASONS – may then bid anything that’s higher than that amount. Whoever bids the most wins. But at the end of the game, all the successful bids are tallied, and whoever printed the most money recieves a score of zero.
72. Terror Below
“Avoid & defeat gigantic critters while collecting their eggs in this campy game!”
Released: 2019
Designer: Mike Elliott
Players: 1-5
Estimated Time: 45-60 minutes
New to List
It seems like every year, I have at least one ‘this game is MOVIE in a box’ game. Star Wars: Rebellion is ‘Star Wars in a box’. Firefly: The Game is Firefly in a box. Nemesis is ‘Aliens in a box, and also please no one tell the lawyers at 20th Century Fox we exist, thank you’. All are excellent games who have appeared on previous versions of this list.
This year, I thought I’d go with ‘Tremors in a box’, also known as ‘Terror Below’. Players will compete to kill worms and collect eggs in a government test site in the Nevada desert. Players will need to scavenge for weapons, only pick fights they can win, and occasionally work together – even though this is not really a coop game.
Also, it would be great if no one tells the lawyers at Universal Studios this exists.
71. Bad Company
“Build your own gang, complete heists and escape the police.”
Released: 2021
Designer: Kenneth Minde, Kristian Amundsen Østby, Eilif Svensson
Players: 1-6
Estimated Time: 30 minutes
New to List
Once upon a time, there was a game called Machi Koro, where each player builds a tableau of cards in front of them. Players take turns rolling dice, and get rewards based on the tableau they’ve built on that number – but you also get rewards based on what other players roll as well! This was quickly aped by other games, including Valeria Card Kingdoms but the high water mark for years has been Space Base which last year came in on this list at a rosy 26.
But this year, the group has been more likely to reach for Bad Company, for a couple of reasons. The first is that Space Base literally has a killer combo with a ‘I win’ card that everyone at the table hates – except for that one guy who always manages to pull it off. The second is that the theme of Bad Company is decidedly more fun, and the absurd visual design of your tableau of gang members being represented by infinitely tall stacks of cards (see image) as you further expand their stacks.
Will we stick with Bad Company over Space Base? I think so, but I gotta tell you, Mr. I Win Combo is eager to switch back.
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