This year’s list has a lot of shakeups, and this section of the list sums it up pretty well. Two new titles in this section, and a lot of downward motion in the list, including two games that peaked in the twenties last year. I think this is because 2023 was a VERY good year for board games, and in many cases the new games coming in are taking the ‘spot’ of one of these older games as a superior alternative. I’ll be sure to call that out if it happens, but hey, you wouldn’t want to read the same list twice in a row anyways, right?
Previous: 100-91
90. Steam Up: A Feast of Dim Sum
“Experience an unforgettable taste of dim sum and leave with the fullest stomach.”
Released: 2023
Designer: Pauline Kong, Haymen Lee, Marie Wong
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 40-60
New to list
Whenever my friends and I go to a game convention, and it gets late at night and we’re all too tired to digest a long rulebook, for some reason we always devolve to playing lightweight games about food. They’re usually fast to learn, have cool table presences and are fun and quirky to boot. This year, we probably played half a dozen of these lightweight games, and the clear winner was Steam Up, a game about fulfilling orders and collecting Dim Sum steamer baskets. Sushi Go! Spin Some for Dim Sum was also well regarded. In retrospect, maybe we were just hungry.
89. Lords of Waterdeep (w Scoundrels of Skullport expansion)
“Deploy agents and hire adventurers to expand your control over the city of Waterdeep.”
Released: 2012
Designer: Peter Lee, Rodney Thompson
Players: 2-5 (6 with Expansion)
Estimated Time: 60-120 minutes
Last Year: 40
Lords of Waterdeep remains the best entry-level Eurogame on the market. It’s simple and a fast teach. It starts with a simple board of options, but the ability for players to build new buildings allows more complexity to be added at a place where newer gamers can easily absorb it. And the D&D Ameritrash coat of paint can convince an RPG player to give this game a shot whereas a game about farming turnips may not do so.
Lords of Waterdeep is also persistently on the list because, with the Scoundrels of Skullport expansion, it’s one of the very best options for ‘oops, 6 people showed up to game night and 2 of them aren’t heavy gamers’. The expansion adds some high risk-high reward gambits for more experienced gamers to take advantage of, but casual gamers can safely avoid them. And the core of the game is still fast and streamlined – even with 6 people, turns move fast. And finally, there’s just enough asshattery to keep things interesting without making this a ‘take that’ game that can turn off newer gamers.
88. Mercurial
“Control the chaos of your elemental dice to craft new & unknown spells.”
Released: 2023
Designer: David Goh
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 45-90
New To List
I won’t lie, I’ve only got one playthrough of Mercurial under my belt, but I really dug it and can’t wait to get it on the table again. It’s an engine-building game, where you’re trying to use your engine to assemble recipes to complete missions. The art is gorgeous, the game is simple, and yet there’s multiple paths to victory that all seem equally playable.
In many ways, it’s a more complexified version of Century – an absolute stone-cold classic that just missed this list (no lie, it came it at #102). Normally, I frown on complexifying fillers – as I pointed out with Las Vegas, if you make a filler long or complicated, you’ve probably lost track of why that game is being thrown on the table. But in this case, while this game is definitely bigger than a filler, the new stuff being added is interesting and suggests that this design space has a lot more space to explore.
87. Bunny Kingdom
“Adorable bunnies build cities, harvest carrots, and go on missions to be ‘Big Ears!'”
Released: 2017
Designer: Richard Garfield
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 40-60
Last Year: 91
The basic formula is simple: mixing a card-drafting system of a game like 7 Wonders with the territorial control of Acquire. Most of the cards simply allow players to claim a set of grid coordinates – and the key to the game is assembling contiguous territory. And because the map is so visible, there are tons of wonderful decision points – whether to draft a card that moderately helps you, or to hatedraft a card that MASSIVELY helps your opponent. But not all cards are territories – there are also additional secret goals and other rule-breaking effects you can draft.
If I had one knock on this game, it’s that the scoring phases are far more obtuse than the rest of the game and really gum up the works. But if you have one guy who can quickly figure out that math, it’s a quick, fun game with a great table presence. I mean, look at those bunny meeples!
86. Dune: Imperium
“Influence, intrigue, and combat in the universe of Dune.”
Released: 2020
Designer: Paul Dennen
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 60-120 minutes
Last Year: 56
Dune Imperium is a worker placement game with a layer of deckbuilding set in the world of Dune. The most common phrase used when talking about the game is ‘knife fight’ and that’s not inaccurate. The game is a mad sprint to 10 points, and every single point is precious and often won or stolen by a razor’s edge. Games are not long, but they are frequent intense – you’ll want to follow Dune Imperium with something lighter to cool people off.
Both of the expansions are good, although I prefer the Rise of Ix expansion for the new leaders. That said, this year also marked the release of a new version of Dune Imperium called Dune Imperium: Uprising. I haven’t personally played Uprising, but the general vibe I got when I asked people about it that it’s ‘better, but not better enough to replace the original’. So if you don’t own Dune Imperium yet, you might consider Uprising, but if you do, you probably don’t need to make the switch.
85. Unfair
“Create thematic fun parks, hire staff and attract guests galore!”
Released: 2017
Designer: Joel Finch
Players: 2-5
Estimated Time: 50-125 minutes
New to List
A simple tableau-builder where you try to assemble a theme park by building rides, attaching improvements to them, and hiring staff to run them. The interesting thing about Unfair is that each game is assembled out of four theme park ‘themes’, and their expansions are to simply add more of those themes. As an example, this year’s expansion allows you to add attractions with Comic Book, Hacker, Kaiju and Ocean themes. Each of these themes has different rule tweaks and focuses, so mixing and matching 4 of the available themes (out of the 12 now available) means each game is going to feel different from the last.
The game has a reasonable amount of ‘take that’, which may turn off some users. If that’s the case, I should let you know that they released a version without the take that called Funfair. I haven’t played that variant, but I can’t imagine any reason why it wouldn’t work.
84. Vagrantsong
“Six trainhoppers hop aboard a ghost train and must work together to escape.”
Released: 2022
Designer: Matt Carter, Justin Gibbs, Kyle Roawn
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 4
Last Year: 29
Just thematically one of the best games on the list – each player plays as a hobo on a train, but it turns out the train is haunted. As such, players will need to take part in tactical ‘combat’ in order to help each ghost find peace. It’s a wonderful vibe, it’s got a beautiful art style, a crazy original premise and the components are awesome.
If I had one knock, it’s that there’s more rules ambiguity than there should be. The designers have promised that they’ll improve this in the next edition as part of the Kickstarter for the next expansion. If they deliver on this, it’s very likely Vagrantsong shoots way up the rankings next year.
83. Jekyll vs Hyde
“Will you maintain balance or give in to darkness in the battle of Hyde and Jekyll?”
Released: 2021
Designer: Geonil
Players: 2
Estimated Time: 30 mins
Last Year: 33
I’m not going to lie, this is here because as a designer I am utterly tickled that they managed to solve the problem of a two-person trick-taking game. Each player has a hand of 10 cards (and 5 are randomly discarded so you don’t fully know what your opponent has). There’s also a mechanic where the ‘trump’ card can be shifted as the game goes on.
But it’s the scoring that’s really novel. Dr. Jekyll is trying to pursue balance – he wants to win as many hands as he loses. Dr. Hyde is trying for the opposite – he wants to either win all the hands or lose them all, and progress on the score track is determined by the difference between the two. It’s an incredibly simple premise and yet creates a devilish problem for users to solve.
82. Praga Caput Regni
“Wealthy citizens of medieval Prague organize building projects to gain king’s favor.”
Released: 2020
Designer: Vladimir Suchy
Players: 1-4
Estimated Time: 45-150 minutes
Last Year: 21
Praga is a very heavy Euro, and it’s got a lot going on. It’s a presentation, whether it’s the wall and cathedral stands, the action crane wheel or the cute little bridge. You’ll work with all of these to gather resources, build walls, complete the bridge, construct buildings and advance technologies.
The beating heart of Praga is the action crane wheel. This is a round game construct that contains beige tiles. Each tile contains two actions the player can perform – the player chooses one of those. However, each tile is on a wheel which spins around, and lines up with bonuses on the inner circle of the wheel. On top of that, tiles may have costs or bonuses on the outside. This rewards you with bonuses if you choose a tile that hasn’t been chosen in a while (shown as blue in the picture above) and penalties if you chose a tile that has been recently chosen (shown as red). The net result is an action system that lets you take any action tile – if you’re willing to pay the cost.
Praga Caput Regni is just a heavyweight of a heavy Euro, which combines beautiful presentation, deep strategy and a very novel core mechanic. Just a great grab if you like the heavy stuff. Also, how many of you noticed that this is literally the same blurb I cut and pasted from last year? I promise I won’t do it again. Probably.
81. Furnace
“19th century capitalists manipulate the market and manage their industrial empires.”
Released: 2020
Designer: Ivan Lashin
Players: 2-4
Estimated Time: 30-60
Last Year: 67
Furnace is an engine building game, where players bid on machines that will helpfully let them acquire and convert the resources they need to achieve their goals. Each player has 4 bid tokens, from 1 to 4, that they place on the card they want to win.
The twist is that, on any card for auction, whoever comes in second ALSO gets something, usually in the form of some resources. Which creates some incredibly interesting design wrinkles – you might bid low, HOPING someone outbids you, only winning the card you didn’t want by accident. It’s a freewheeling, lightweight engine building with a ton of social asshattery, much of it accidental (which is often the most hilarious kind).
Keep checking back as I try to get as much of this done before we get too knee-deep in the Christmas season!
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