List of Lists: Top Board Games of 2023

Ever since the double-whammy of ‘having kids’ and ‘global pandemic’, I haven’t been going to board game nights at game stores that much. To regain some of my exposure to new game releases, I tend to watch ‘Top 10’ lists for the last year. This year, I decided to compile all of the top 10 lists I could find to create a global list. This took way more time than it should have.

Methodology: I simply took all of the top 10 lists and put them into a spreadsheet. I then gave them all a score of (14-placement), so a #1 game gets 13 points and a #10 game gets 4 points – or slightly less than 33% of a #1 game. Any mentions beyond #10 got a single point – it was pretty common for listers to give a couple of honorable mentions, and also gives a nod to overachievers like Rahdo who listed his top 30 (we get it, you play EVERYTHING).

For the most part, I only included generic lists of games (i.e. no ‘top party games of 2023’ or ‘top solo games of 2023’). I skipped any lists that didn’t have ranks. I also skipped any lists where the lists turned out to be ‘new to me’ lists: congrats on discovering Terraforming Mars, but I’m sorry, your list is irrelevant to our needs.

I also gave a bonus of (appearance count/100) to each game, so that the number of lists a game appears on acts as a tiebreaker. This rewards consensus rather than zeal, which I felt was in the spirit of the project).

Caveats: Not everybody plays by the same rules when making their top 10 lists. Some people only listed 5, for example. Some included late 2022 entries, but most had a firm ‘BGG release date’ rule. Most people excluded rereleases or deluxe editions (Ra, Castles of Burgundy) or expansions (Ark Nova: Marine World) but some people insisted. So the data is dirty, but it’s what we have to deal with.

Ultimately, we ended up with 42 videos that represented 67 unique ranked lists. A gobsmacking 237 games were ranked in someone’s top 10, with another 35 that were honorable mentions only (these were often x-pacs, 2022 releases or games that are coming out in 2024 that they had release copies of).

Anyway, here’s the top 25.

To the surprise of probably absolutely no one, Earth is the top game of 2023, at least among the sort of people who make Youtube videos. And it’s not particularly close. It’s well-deserved too, as are The White Castle (#2) and Thunder Road: Vendetta (#4). Unmatched: Tales to Amaze (#15) also did very well, considering I feel a lot of reviewers may have not counted it.

The other interesting column is the ‘AT’ column. That is the number of these games that appear on ‘top games of all time’ lists, which I am ALSO curating. You’ll see that update in a few weeks – I’m currently waiting for some slackers to finish their annual lists. Still, this gives a pretty good hint of staying power. Expeditions is only #9 on this list, but already appears on 7 top ‘all-time’ lists. Barcelona is #10, but appears on only 1. I suspect this may give a pretty good clue which of these games will still be getting play two years from now.

I have plans to migrate my magic spreadsheet into Google Sheets so I can make the data open to all (so you can do whatever data analysis you want on your own, and correct whatever egregious mistakes or weighting decisions I’ve made. But until then, in the interests of transparency, here are links to the videos that were used to assemble the list.

Anyway, watch this space, as I’ll probably do the ‘lists of lists’ update in the next couple of keeps.