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!
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