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.
Rank
Score
Name
Count
AT
1
263.28
Earth
28
22
2
182.21
The White Castle
21
2
3
168.19
Apiary
19
2
4
146.16
Thunder Road: Vendetta
16
7
5
132.21
Sky Team
21
4
6
108.12
Darwin’s Journey
12
5
7
102.12
Scholars of the South Tigris
12
3
8
102.1
Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West
10
3
9
95.11
Expeditions
11
7
10
94.09
Barcelona
9
1
11
91.11
World Wonders
11
3
12
90.09
The Witcher: Old World
9
2
13
80.07
Voidfall
7
1
14
79.08
Distilled
8
5
15
76.08
Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze
8
0
16
74.08
Fit to Print
8
1
17
73.09
3 Ring Circus
9
3
17
73.09
Forest Shuffle
9
1
19
72.08
Nucleum
8
4
20
67.09
Hegemony: Lead Your Class To Victory
9
4
21
67.07
Marvel Zombies: A Zombicide Game
7
8
22
64.09
Kutna Hora: City of Silver
9
0
23
61.05
Sagrada Artisans
5
0
24
60.09
Wild Tiled West
9
0
25
57.07
Last Light
7
3
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.
Here we are, once again, at the top of my annual list of board games. There’s a lot of familiar faces from previous years in here – not a surprise, great board games rarely stop being great) but this section includes not only two variants of great game franchises, but also two bits of new blood, including one that will seem…. let’s just say insanely high.
It’s always personally rewarding to me to build this list – as a game designer, one of the things that I really enjoy doing and finding valuable is dissecting a game to figure out WHY I think it’s great. But at the same time, it’s also a huge sigh of relief to actually get this done every year. I try to do this before Christmas every year just in case it inspires someone to get a last-minute stocking stuffer, but that of course means that I’m piling more on myself in the craziest part of the year.
So I ask you to do one thing for me, dear reader, which is to give feedback. Tell me, either here or on Twitter and Bluesky, what you think. It may not seem like much, but creators crave knowing that big projects like this are reaching an audience. So tell me: what did I get wrong? What did I get right? What’s missing? And perhaps what I find most interesting, what did I convince you that you need to give a shot?
“Manage your race car’s speed to keep from overheating.”
Released: 2022 Designer: Asger Harding Granerud, Daniel Skjold Pedersen Players: 1-6 Estimated Time: 30-60 New to List
Image from boardgamegeek.com
I’m not usually a big fan of racing games, but I was intrigued when Heat started getting hyped at the end of last year. And I managed to sit down and play a couple games, and the hype is real.
The problem with most racing games is that it’s hard to thread the needle and make a gamer’s game. If you manage to add in too much complexity, it bogs the game down and doesn’t feel like a true race. If you simplify it too much, even your best game can feel a little … kiddie-oriented. (I’m looking at you, Camel Up). Heat does thread that needle.
Heat is, at it’s core, a deckbuilding game, where most of the cards represent your car’s speed. The gear you are in determines how many of those cards you can play. But you can also try to do a handful of ludicrous things (such as change two gears at once), and if you do, then ‘heat’ cards get added to your deck. These ‘heat’ cards basically just junk up your deck, and acquiring a ton of ‘heat’ cards can leave you with a hand of junk that effectively requires you to take a turn off to get things under control.
This whole system hits its apex when you try to round curves. Players want to round curves at an optimal speed, but if they go too fast, they’ll spin out and be set back. And there are random elements to the game, where you can’t always be sure what speed you’ll be hitting a curve at.
The end result is a game design that is simple and elegant, but also provides a puzzle that more established gamers will really sink their teeth into. And on top of that is a beautiful production, with lots of expansion potential in the form of new tracks. Heat is good, and deserves the praise it’s getting.
“Explore an island to find resources and discover the lost ruins of Arnak.”
Released: 2020 Designer: Elwen, Min Players: 1-4 Estimated Time: 30-120 mins Last Year: 7
Image from boardgamegeek.com
In 2020, two games took bold swings at an innovative new genre which merges worker placement with deckbuilding. Most people prefer Dune Imperium, a game that has already been covered. But that game is a knife fight. I prefer the sprawling, more loose Indiana Jones-esque experience that is Ruins of Arnak.
Each player plays as an Indiana Jones-esque hero, attempting to explore the wilds of some overgrown jungle in order to find the fabled Temple of Arnak. Along the way, you’ll need to acquire resources, explore discovery sites, acquire sidekicks that provide you powers, and then plunge into the depths of the temple itself.
My favorite part of the game is how new worker placement locations are added to the board – a game mechanic I always love when it appears (Lords of Waterdeep is another game that does this well). When players explore locations, they unlock new locations that can be used by other players on other turns. They also get first crack at those rewards as well as bonuses – and a monster they need to fight.
The resulting package is big, gaudy, sprawling, thematic and a lot of fun, and yet still playable in a reasonable amount of time. A big thumbs up on this one.
“Collectively develop a tech tree to fuel new discoveries and colonize space.”
Released: 2020 Designer: Dennis K. Chan Players: 2-4 Estimated Time: 60-120 Last Year: 5
Image from boardgamegeek.com
Let’s cut to the chase. This is Skill Trees: The Game. If that description appeals to you at all, you should go to Amazon and drop this in your cart right now.
The central focus of Beyond the Sun is the main board, which has a massive skill tree. Players start with a small handful of basic technologies, but can eventually acquire the knowledge and resources to expand further into the skill tree. Everyone on the table has the same options, but the decisions you make can make your civilization radically different from your opponents.
Unlocking skillboxes in the skill tree offer a number of benefits, but the most interesting is that the skill tree actually has worker placement locations on it, which unlock as you get deeper into the experience. These worker placement options are exclusive (only one person can claim them at a time) but given that everyone’s skill tree development can be radically different, it’s likely and possible that you have worker placement options unavailable to anyone at the table.
Image from boardgamegeek.com
The game also has a smaller sideboard, which has an incredibly simplified galactic map where players can fight over and colonize planets. Claiming these planets is really the goal of the game, and the skill tree nodes not devoted to straight-up production efficiency are really focused on building bigger, stronger ships to help you colonize these planets.
The game would probably be ranked even higher in the list if it were better looking. It’s not a surprise that this game has a dry, sparse presentation, especially with a huge honkin’ skill tree being the centerpiece of the game, but it still seems like things could look a lot better, especially elements like the playerboard. Still, the people who like fiddling with skill trees aren’t going to care. If you’re the sort of nerd that at one point spent too much time on Elitist Jerks making WoW builds, this game is going to simply strike a chord with you.
“Mutating diseases are spreading around the world – can your team save humanity?”
Released: 2015 Designer: Rob Daviau, Matt Leacock Players: 2-4 Estimated Time: 60 mins Last Year: 8
Image from boardgamegeek.com
Pandemic is a fine, classic board game – really the progenitor of all modern cooperative gaming – but frankly it’s showing its age. But in 2015, the brains behind Pandemic completely reinvented it to create what is probably the finest Legacy game ever made.
A ‘legacy’ game is one with an ongoing story thread, but also it’s a game where new game elements and components are added and removed over time. You will rip cards in half, add new game components to the board to represent unlocked game rules, and even add stickers to the board – for example, to show that your group let a city collapse too far into chaos, becoming a festering pile of ruin reminding you of your failure with every future game you play.
So how does this all come together? Each player has a different character with a different special power, and they attempt to work together to cross the globe and stop a global pandemic. Pandemic Legacy adds chapter-by-chapter narrative to the experience, where each month of a year represents a different scenario, with different rules and storybeast. As players progress through the year, new content is unlocked, new challenges are encountered, and new game pieces and mechanics are added to the game. The whole thing elevates masterfully, and tells a compelling story full of twists and turns that will drive you nuts.
I’ve generally stayed away from legacy games (well, multiplayer ones anyway) as my gaming time is pretty limited nowadays, and I’d rather play a wide reach of board games than focus on one for a few weeks in a row. But Pandemic Legacy is an exception. If you have a steady board game group that likes coop and can stick through the whole campaign (which will take between 12-20 games of 45-60 minutes each, depending on how well you do), Pandemic Legacy is one of the best board game experiences you can possibly buy.
“Claim your fame as the dominant merchant in the Meiji period of Yokohama.”
Released: 2016 Designer: Hisashi Hayashi Players: 2-4 Estimated Time: 90 mins Last Year: 6
Image from boardgamegeek.com
In Yokohama, players play as the CEO of a company with a handful of apprentices. On your turn, you’ll place up to three apprentices, and then walk your CEO from one location to another. You can go anywhere you want, as long as there is an unbroken string of apprentices between your current location and your final location.
If this sounds like midweight classic Istanbulto you, then yes, that’s a good eye. However, the gaming community more frequently refers to it as “Istanbul on crack”. The primary reason is that, when players get to a location, the action they take is equal to the number of meeples on the space. Thus, if you have your CEO and three meeples at the fishing dock, you would take 4 fish (and then pick up the meeples for use in a later turn). Also, you have the ability to build shops and offices, which act as ‘permanent’ meeples on locations you want to go to frequently.
Image from boardgamegeek.com
Yokohama has an intimidating board presence. Setup involves building a randomized pyramid of locations based on player size, and at first glance, this game looks like a wall of byzantine decisions. But underneath all of this, the game is actually simple, the core puzzle of placing workers optimally is fiendishly delicious to take on, and the whole package wraps into a bundle of heavy eurogaming goodness at its finest.
“Construct machines and collect resources from your new airships.”
Released: 2020 Designer: Scott Caputo, Luke Laurie Players: 2-4 Estimated Time: 60-90 mins Last Year: 3
Image from boardgamegeek.com
I like worker placement games. If you’ve read this far, you probably like worker placement games, too. But what if they were crazier? Worker placement games where your options are constantly changing, with powerful new options constantly coming available and others disappearing from the board? Well, allow me to present ‘worker placement, only completely insane’.
In Whistle Mountain, each player is working together to help build a town/structure in a canyon as the bottom of the canyon begins the flood. Each player has three ‘workers’ represented by three balloons, which vary from 1×1 (hot air balloon) to 1×3 (zeppelin). On your turn, you can place your worker on the board, and it will get all the resources that it’s adjacent to, either on the scaffolding or rooms that are next to it (see image above for an example of both).
But here’s the thing. You are also building the scaffolding ang the rooms, which means that the players, each working towards their own ends, are continually adding new worker placement locations – locations that eventually other players can take advantage of as well.
Image from boardgamegeek.com
But that’s not all! As your group’s pile of scaffolding reaches ever higher towards the sun, the bottom of the canyon begins to flood, which is done by placing water strips over those rooms and scaffolding (see image above). This effectively destroys those worker placement levels. It’s very common to have games where a resource is ridiculously abundant in early levels, only to become nearly completely unavailable once the lower levels flood.
The end result is a worker placement game that feels like surfing chaos. Is it for everyone? No. While the game isn’t particularly heavy, it does require a certain ability to deal with this kind of madness and adjust smoothly to emerging circumstances, but people who love swimming in madness are going to find this a delight.
“Deck-building adventure meets tile-laying in the newest incarnation of Clank!”
Released: 2022 Designer: Paul Dennen Players: 2-4 Estimated Time: 45-90 New To List (Clank Legacy was #2)
Image from boardgamegeek.com
You’re just not going to go wrong buying a game that has ‘Clank!’ in the title. The original Clank was my top game for a long time. Last year, Clank: Legacy was a coin flip away from the top spot, and it’s probably my favorite Legacy game of all time. But I didn’t want to put two Clanks on the list, and I think it’s worth noting that Clank: Catacombs deserves a space in the conversation.
The core of Clank has always remained the same. Players are adventurers trying to sneak into a dungeon, get as much loot as they can and (this part is important) get out.
Clank is also a deckbuilding game. Each turn, a player will play their hand of five cards. Each card will – among other effects – give the player movement and combat capability, as well as give them purchasing power they can use to buy better cards. The most powerful cards generate noise – called ‘clank’. This clank gets thrown in a bag, and when the inevitable dragon attack happens, these cubes are pulled from a bag. You can only have ten of these cubes pulled before you die.
Clank! is a great core ruleset because it manages to successfully merge deckbuilding with press your luck gameplay, and nearly every game is exciting because even if someone is well behind on points, there is great entertainment value in seeing if they manage to escape the dungeon at all.
Image from boardgamegeek.com
What Clank: Catacombs adds to this formula is randomness. Instead of having a static board which, frankly, can start to get optimized with a few plays, the dungeon in catacombs is explored and revealed as players move through tiles. Not only this, tiles can constantly be moved or rotated by various effects. The end result is a Clank, but it’s a Clank where players have to constantly react to an evolving board state – and that’s a significantly fresh take on core formula.
It’s almost certain some version of Clank! will appear on my list for years to come. Which one will it be next year? I don’t know for sure, but I do have an inkling.
“Tend to your sheep on the South Island of New Zealand.”
Released: 2023 Designer: Alexander Pfister Players: 1-4 Estimated Time: 75-150 New to List (Great Western Trail was #1)
Image from boardgamegeek.com
Last year, Great Western Trailwas my #1 game. It’s slipped a little – largely because while it’s a phenomenal game, it’s a TOUGH teach, with several aspects that are non-intuitive at first. But if you like heavier, meatier board games, GWT is still among the very best you can get. And in the last couple of years, they released two variants: Great Western Trail: Argentina and Great Western Trail: New Zealand. The former I have not played, but I did manage to get my hands on New Zealand and, at least for now, it’s my favorite take on this IP.
The general premise of the game is unchanged – drive a flock of livestock to market, and hopefully have the most diverse hand of livestock possible when you get there. In New Zealand, that livestock is sheep instead of cows, and they add a sheep shearing minigame, which is just the sort of sentence you write when you review board games.
The engine is unchanged – players can travel 3-4 spaces around the board, which basically operates as a large, fancy rondel, and take actions on the spaces they end up on. The actions that you can do allow you to buy new sheep (adding them to your deck), establish new ports to trade with in the waters, shear your sheep for money, and build new buildings, which act as new stops on the rondel.
Image from boardgamegeek.com
But all of these spaces have a secondary side, which allows you to ‘sell’ your crappier sheep for some sort of benefit. This is not only important to gain the money or other benefits you might get, but it also allows you to draw to replace the sheep you’ve spent. Because ultimately, your goal is to end up in Wellington with the most diverse hand of sheep you can possibly have, as you can only sell different sheep when you arrive.
The shipping minigame basically acts as a simplified version of the excellentRails to the North expansion of the base game, included right in the box, which is great.The other change is that this game leans more into the fact that this IP is a deckbuilder. As such, there’s a new classification of cards players can add to their deck, which operate like cantrips in Magic: the Gathering – you use them, and then immediately draw to replace them, which allows the designers to add more and more interesting gameplay effects to the deck without slowing down the crucial herd assembling game that is central to the core game.
Great Western Trail: New Zealand is a great addition to the ecosphere, and this entire IP is going to be my go-to heavy euro for quite some time. I still have yet to get my hands on Great Western Trail: Argentina, but I suspect we’ll prefer New Zealand, solely because of my wife’s passion for knitting and as a result having something sheep-centric is always going to be the tie-breaker in this household.
“Disrupt the ritual and slay the Elder Gods in this co-op dice chucker. “
Released: 2019 Designer: Rob Daviau, Eric Lang Players: 1-5 Estimated Time: 90-120 New to List
Image from boardgamegeek.com
Normally, I’m not a big fan of tactical dudes-on-a-map board games. If I wanted to play D&D, I’d play D&D, and if I wanted great tactical combat, I’d play a computer game, because frankly computers do math much faster than I do. So I’m as shocked as anyone else that two of these games made appearances on the list. I mean, Zombicide Undead or Aliveat #70 is one thing, but Cthulhu: Death May Diemaking a new appearance at #2 is frankly pretty shocking. And yet, this is no fluke – my group probably played more of this than any other game on the list. Because it’s GOOD.
A huge part of why both these games are on the list is probably that they are NOT finely tuned tactical puzzles, but are more akin to beer-and-pretzels dice tossers. Monsters will be spawning in hordes around you, and you’ll be killing them in hordes as well. In an unusual move for a Cthulhu game, your characters feel almost superpowered right from the start, and you’re going to go straight into the teeth of the bad guys. And go crazy doing it.
Image from boardgamegeek.com
In most Cthulhu-themed games, insanity is a resource, and this game is no exception. But they add an interesting twist – insanity also makes you more powerful. As you get more insane (see the bar on top of this player sheet here), you’ll unlock new, powerful abilities and may even unlock new dice you can use on every roll. Which means that sometimes – in fact, very FREQUENTLY, getting more insane fast is the best thing you can do, but again you’re playing with fire. Lose all of your sanity, and you’re out. Effectively, this makes the very basics of character development a press-your-luck game – and it’s wonderful.
The game is scenario-based but it’s also mix-and-match. For each game, you’ll match one episode box with one bad guy. The episode details the dungeon layout and outlines the steps necessary to summon the big bad, whereas the bad guy you choose helps determine the side enemies you’ll face as well as well as delivers the contours for the final battle, and mixing and matching these is more than sufficient to create an appreciable sense of gameplay variety. The core box contains 2 big bads (Cthulhu and Hastur) and 6 episodes as well as 10 investigators (with wildly varying powers) and a host of trash bad guys to kill. More content was released as part of the initial kickstarter, but if you’re really craving more, keep an eye on the upcoming Fear of the Unknown standalone expansion.
Image from boardgamegeek.con
On top of all the above, the game has some of the best Cthulhu-themed miniatures I’ve ever seen, and playing with a painted set is an absolute joy (even if my painting skills are involved). Death May Die is just a great game that checks all the boxes, if you like great, dicechucking-weight tactical gameplay.
“Gain glory by defending a Viking harbor town against trolls, draugr and other beasts.”
Released: 2015 Designer: Ole Steiness Players: 2-4 Estimated Time: 60-90 mins Last Year: 4
Image from boardgamegeek
Champions of Midgard is a wonderful game, a delicate balance of thoughtful worker placement Eurogaming with Ameritrash dice slinging, all wrapped in a wonderfully Norse package of goodness.
In Champions of Midgard, each player plays a Viking Tribe trying to aspire to Greatness as measured in Victory Points. Doing so will require the players to acquire Viking warriors – represented by dice, find monsters and kill them. By and large, acquiring dice is the core part of the economic half of the game, but the battles are the good part. You’ll cross across the ocean (possibly being waylaid by Krakens or other bad guys, which can pull warriors off the boats) and then the survivors will fight these bad guys with a roll of those dice. And there’s always a chance that you get a bad roll, and your Viking horde is wiped out in a blaze of ignobility.
Some players don’t like the randomness of the dice, though, and while I don’t agree, the Valhalla expansion solves this nicely. Not only does it add three new kinds of warriors (represented by new, differently colored dice), it also rewards with valhalla chits, which can be traded for benefits. Sometimes, what you can get is so nice that the right move is to send your Viking clan straight into the meat grinder.
At the end of the day, Champions of Midgard is a perfect combination. It’s an easy teach, it’s got thoughtful economic development, Ameritrash combat, a great thematic board presence and just enough interaction between players to keep things spicy. And for all these reasons, it’s most Top Board Game Of All Time, At Least In 2023.
What makes for a great board game? Well, as you can see, I’m amenable to almost any subject matter and weight. Different gaming sessions and different audiences want different things, usually on the same game night! My favorite games tend to be midweights, but some of my best sessions have been with lighter fare because i’m playing with someone new. However, if I had request(s) for any board game designer it would be this:
Tell me how to play your game.
In this day and age, there’s no good reason to have a bad rulebook, and I cannot tell you how many games haven’t made it to the table because I opened the rulebook and said ‘nope, this is too much’. Also, don’t be too cute with your rulebook. I recently played Age of Comics, and the rules – while appreciably short and sweet – are also written with what feels like no kerning whatsoever, which meant that looking for simple rules gave me a headache. There are great rulebooks out there. Crack one open and copy it!
Make a youtube video.
Learning the basic rules from a Youtube video is by far the best way to learn a new game, and a lot of the people out there are really good at making these videos. When I want to learn a game, I reflexively look for a video by Rahdo or Rodney at Watch It Played but there are several people who are good at it. Pay someone to make this video for you! Also, if this video is longer than, say, 25 minutes, your game may be too complicated.
Clearly label/call out expansion content
This is mostly for kickstarters and the like, where additional modules and add-ons might be included with the core game but, for the love of god, tell me what they are. Nothing’s more frustrating than being told that there should be 20 meeples, discovering there are 26 meeples, and then trying to read through the whole booklet to figure out which ones are for some random expansion module you don’t want to play on the first playthrough… while a whole table sits idle doomscrolling while waiting for you. And while we’re at it, put a damn symbol on expansion cards and the like so they can be removed if you want to play without the expansion for a simpler game or because it turns out the expansion sucks. It’s 2023! there’s no excuse to keep doing this wrong, The Hunger:High Stakes!
I realize this sounds like a bunch of nitpicking but it’s really not. There are too many games out there for me to waste hours trying to figure out how to set up and play a new game before I can even figure out if it’s fun. Respect our time!
“Cast spells and summon fantasy monsters in the original collectible card game.”
Released: 1993 Designer: Richard Garfield Players: 2+ Estimated Time: 20 mins Last Year: 16
image from boardgamegeek.com
I go in and out of Magic phases, and I’ve generally been ‘out’ since the two rugrats have been born. Young kids make it hard to excessively go to Friday Night Magic without earning spouse aggro, and even online options are difficult when you frequently have to put down your iPad and leave an opponent hanging because your younger has started unleashing his crayon Michelangelo on the living room wall. And yet…
Magic remains the gold standard of collectible card games. Players play as two wizards dueling against each other by casting spells and summoning creatures. 2023 represents the thirtieth anniversary of Magic, and in those thirty years, it’s become a master class on how great games can continually refine and reinvent themselves to remain relevant. Of particular note, in recent years a new format named “Commander” has become dominant in non-competitive play, as it provides a large multiplayer format and only allows one of each cards in a deck, resulting in crazy, unpredictable games where all of those ‘filler’ cards that normally go unplayed finally get to see the light of day.’
In one of the weirder things to happen to Magic, they have started doing special IP crossover sets called ‘Secret Lair’, which includes sets for Doctor Who, Walking Dead, and Jurassic Park, as examples. These sets are a small handful of cards that aren’t playable in ‘standard’ Magic. Personally, I’m not a fan of them but I will note that this strategy led to a full set of Lord of the Rings cards, which came out in 2023 and was pretty awesome.
“Explore the waterways, map the land, and chart the stars in medieval Baghdad.”
Released: 2022 Designer: S J Macdonald, Shem Phillips Players: 1-4 Estimated Time: 60-90 New to List
image from boardgamegeek.com
Shem Phillips and Garphill Games have been on a tear. They released a trilogy of one great and two okay great games in the North Sea trilogy (Raiders of the North Sea, which just missed the list) and then significantly upped their game for the West Kingdom trilogy (one of which we will see soon). Wayfarers of the North Sea represents for them the first entry in an all-new trilogy, which has more of a persian/middle eastern theme. And early indications are that this whole trilogy is the heaviest stuff Garphill has done yet.
The core of the game is a die placement game. Players will have 3 dice, which they will roll randomly, and then on their turn they can place a single die, which corresponds to various actions. But WHAT those actions are is fiddly, and can be changed as players advance in the game.
image from boardgamegeek.com
While playing the game, players will end up building a beautiful panorama attached to their playerboard. On one side, they’ll place mountains and plains, which will generally unlock onetime bonuses. On the other side, harbors and seas which unlocks new dice placement location. And across the top, they’ll be building the heavens themselves – stars and planets which represent a huge chunk of your scoring.
Don’t get me wrong – Wayfarers is one of the heaviest games in my top 20. It’s heavy, it’s fiddly, it’s a bit of a hard teach, and oftentimes it feels more like a long slog for a battle of inches. But it’s also elegant, interesting, dynamic and beautiful, and there’s always a sense of pride in your final panorama. If your table likes heavier fare, take a closer look at this.
Last year, I played Wayfarers of the South Tigris after I made this list and regretted doing so too late to get it on the list. I fear that this will repeat itself with Scholars of the South Tigris which is currently on the Pile of Unplayed Shame, mocking me until we get past the madness of the Christmas season.
“Art is so subjective! Don’t like the color? Change the rules so you can win!”
Released: 2014 Designer: Carl Chudyk, Chris Cieslik Players: 2-4 Estimated Time: 5-30 mins Last Year: 77
image from boardgamegeek.com
I believe that, if you’re at a convention, any game designer worth his salt should have one game in their pocket ready to go at any given time. Red 7 is my personal weapon of choice.
The rule of Red 7 are simple. Each player has a tableau of cards that they are building in front of them, which starts with a single card. They also have a hand of 7 cards. In the center of the table, one card states the rule, such as ‘have the highest value card’. Your goal is to end your turn so that you’re winning.
As an example, if the rule is ‘have the highest value card in your tableau’ and the highest value card that anyone else has is a 5, you can play a 6 or a 7. But if you can’t do that, you can change the rules by putting out another card (each card can either be a rule or part of a tableau).
As an example, if you play a blue card in the middle, suddenly the rule becomes ‘have most cards in a row (a straight)’. All of a sudden, a hand with a 1-2-3 is a very strong hand. And if that’s not enough for you to win, you can drop one more card to your tableau (the 4 presumably) in order to extend your straight longer than your competitors.
I only have one problem with Red 7, which is that the tiebreakers are hard to internalize. In our example above, a 1-2-3 beats a 1-2 obviously, but a 2-3-4 beats a 1-2-3. And if both players have a 2-3-4, it looks at a color ranking on the ‘4’. But it’s a minor issue in a game that I genuinely think is one of the best pocket games on the market.
“Crews race and shoot to be the last car standing.”
Released: 2023 Designer: Dave Chalker, Brett Myers, Noah Cohen, Rob Daviau, Justin D Jacobson, Jim Keifer, Brian Neff Players: 2-4 Estimated Time: 45-75 New To List
Image from boardgamegeek, contains some custom pieces
I’m going to say straight up – that image above shows custom terrain. The add-ons you can get on Etsy to make this game look cooler are INSANE. The cars and helicopter, though, those are stock.
Thunder Road: Vendetta is a revival of a 1986 game called Thunder Road. And frankly, the older game is barely a game. But since then, the game geniuses over at Restoration got the rights. This team has already done well-regarded updates to classic games like Return to Dark Tower and Fireball Island: Curse of Vul-Kar but Thunder Road Vendetta remains their masterpiece, one that hopes to recreate the madness of a Mad Max film.
Each player starts with three cars (light, medium and heavy) and each round, they’ll roll three dice. Each turn, players will take turns moving one of their cars that may spaces ahead. But this isn’t just a race game, it’s a game about survival. Players can get behind opponents and shoot at them, or better yet, play a game of ‘let’s see what happens’ by ramming into them – ramming pushes players in a random direction, which can often result in pinballing hilarity if you push a car into a large crowd of cars. And if someone’s TOO far ahead? You also have a helicopter that you can, on occasion, delegate in an attempt to try to slow them down a bit.
Image from boardgamegeek.com
This IS a race game, but it goes mostly in a straight line. And it’s ‘endless’ – the race track is made of two boards, and when one players reaches the end of the track, everybody on the back half of that racetrack is eliminated, and that now-cleared rear portion of the track is moved to the front. But it’s also a survival game – once one player’s team is fully eliminated, endgame is triggered.
Aside from being gorgeous and thematic, it’s also relatively simple to play. One member of my gaming group has declared it a big hit with his 8-year-old daughter and her friends. And yet, this game still brings a lot to the table that more hardcore gamers can appreciate.
“Craft the best stained-glass windows by carefully placing colorful transparent dice.”
Released: 2017 Designer: Adrian Adamescu, Daryl Andrews Players: 1-4 Estimated Time: 30-45 Last Year: 71
image from boardgamegeek.com
Do you like rolling dice? Do you like drafting dice? Do you like stained glass? Well, boy do I have a game for you.
Sagrada is a dice drafting game. One player will roll a handful of dice (number of players plus one) and then claim one. People will then go around the table, claiming a single die with the goal of filling a certain pattern on their stained glass window. Once the last player drafts a die, they take another die and player continue drafting until the first player drafts his second die (meaning he gets the first and last choice). Players will repeat this 10 times.
The trick is that there are significant constraints to dice placement – you have to match colors and/or numbers in your chosen pattern. You can’t put a color next to itself – same for numbers. Also simultaneously, you’re trying to achieve the GOALS of the game, which are to achieve patterns on various cards to earn victory points.
Sagrada has been a popular filler game for a very long time, because it’s simple, easy to teach and yet still very deep and fulfilling. It’s probably no surprise that they’d try to expand this, but them releasing a legacy version is somewhat baffling to me. Sagrada is a simple game that doesn’t NEED or WANT more bells and whistles, but to be honest, I haven’t had a chance to take a closer look to see if my skepticism is unwarranted.
Hey, honey, we’re building zoos! Ark Nova is a big, meaty game that doesn’t FEEL big and meaty, probably because the subject matter (building a zoo) is so easily accessible. Players will build animal pens (paddocks), acquire animals, try to improve the fame and reputation of your zoo, and shovel an ungodly amount of elephant dung.
Image from boardgamegeek.com
The core of Ark Nova that I appreciate is the action selection mechanism. Each player has five action cards, laid out horizontally. When you use a card, you execute it, and move it all the way to the end of the line. The trick is that the strength of the card is based on what position in line its at, which means that cards are more powerful the longer you wait to use them. Even better, each of these cards can be upgraded (i.e. flipped over) to a more powerful version of the same ability. But you can’t upgrade them all, so you’ll need to decide how you want to specialize your zoo.
Fans of Terraforming Marswill find it surprisingly familiar, due largely to its scientific nature and emphasis on tableau-building (the animals you put in your zoo). Some players even go so far as to say that Ark Nova has replaced Terraforming Mars in their collection, and I guess I agree, since Ark Nova is sitting here at #15 and Terraforming Mars didn’t make the cut at all.
“Make your wreckland run in this solo hero series game!”
Released: 2022 Designer: Scott Almes Players: 1 Estimated Time: 30-45 New To List
image from boardgamegeek.com
If you had told me at the start of 2023 that a solo game would break into my top 15, I would have told you that you were crazy, and yet here we are. But the truth cannot be denied – I probably played more hours of Wreckland Run than any other single game on my list this year.
In Wreckland Run, you play as a guy, just trying to humbly cross the radioactive post-apocalyptic wasteland while you repeatedly get attacked by hordes of bad guys. On your turn, you’ll roll a handful of dice. You’ll then activate them – white dice will activate your weapons, and red dice will activate various opponents. Your job is to survive 3 rounds, as ever-increasing waves attack you – always capped off by a ridiculously overpowered boss.
The real fun is that if you deal exactly enough damage to kill an opponent but no more (‘exactsies’), then you get to add that opponent to your ‘scrap’ pile. Scrapped enemies can be turned into ‘dice’ which trigger additional attacks – which allow for every increasingly awesome combotastic turns – but they can also be saved for the end of the round when you can convert that scrap into upgraded weapons for your car.
Image from boardgamegeek.com
Wreckland Run comes with a 7-chapter legacy campaign, where each chapter has an envelope of cards that contains new upgrades, enemies and bosses to fight. It also comes with 4 different vehicles, all of which play radically different from each other. I do have some concerns about replayability – I’ve played through it and the 4-chapter expansion in its entirety twice now and feel like I’m done with it – but I have no doubt I got my money’s worth.
Released: 2009 Designer: Eric Lang Players: 3-4 Estimated Time: 60-120 mins Last Year: 45
image from boardgamegeek.com
A lot of people who make lists like this don’t like to put games that are out of print on them. Not me. Gaming greatness should be recognized. That being said, Chaos in the Old World is probably the best game out there that will never be reprinted, which is a shame, as it may be the best work that designer Eric Lang has ever done.
Chaos in the Old World is a unique and highly strategic board game that puts players in the roles of powerful, ancient gods vying for control over the world. On the player’s turn, they will play corruption cards that allow them to spread their influence across the land. As various territories get overpopulated, they’ll get scored, and then turned to black. The war of the old gods will leave nothing but a black husk behind, as the gods war for all-important victory points.
But the game is also a masterwork of assymetric design. Khorne is the most direct, and whoever plays them will be screaming ‘Blood for the Blood God!’ a lot. Nurgle is all about spreading plague, and The Horned Rat (from the excellent expansion) will result in you leading an army of rats washing across the continent from sea to sea. The assymetry works because the counterstrategies to each god are built into the abilities of the other gods – so much so that playing this game with fewer than 4 people kind of falls apart. But with 4 (or 5 with the expansion) it’s a masterpiece.
So yeah, if you see Chaos in the Old World out there at a non-stupid price, pick it up! It’s a fascinating, funny, chaotic gaming experience, and if you don’t like it — well, you’ll have no problem at all dumping it off on eBay.
“Deliver goods, build the city and your tableau using a unique dice selection method.”
Released: 2022 Designer: Stefan Feld Players: 1-4 Estimated Time: 60-120 Last Year: 34 (as Macao)
Image from boardgamegeek.com
Stefan Feld is my favorite designer, and Macao as my favorite of his games, even though (and I know I sound like a broken record here) it was always held back by disappointing production values – dim cards, bad templating, components without enough color differentiation. As such, I was greatly looking forward to Amsterdam, a recent reworking of Macao done as part of Stefan Feld’s city collection. I was not disappointed.
In Amsterdam, players will try to acquire businesses, ship goods to trade partners, and build tableaus of cards that will help their efforts or earn themselves victory points. Fairly standard euro stuff. But what makes the game a fascinating puzzle is the ship’s wheel.
At the start of each round, the six colored dice are rolled. Each player can choose two of those dice (players can choose the same dice!). For each die, they place the number of cubes equal to the dice number – on the spot equal by the dice number. So if the player chooses an orange 5 and a purple 1, they’ll place a purple cube in the 1 spot, and 5 orange cubes in the 5 spot. Players will then rotate the wheel, and claim everything in the ‘1’ spot.
These cubes are the core resource you need in the game, especially to play cards into your tableau, so the game is a consistent balance between short-term thinking and long-term planning. If you chase big numbers, you’ll end up with nothing in the short term, which means you won’t be able to hire workers with potentially big game-swinging effects until much later. But if you live only in the here and now, you may not ever get the really big stuff to the table.
Amsterdam is here because it receives my highest praise for any board game – it breaks your brain in interesting ways. And I can’t express how happy I am that a new, beautiful edition of the game came out so a new generation of board gamers can experience it.
I was going to say that this is probably Shem Phillips’ finest work, but I notice that on both this and the previously mentioned Wayfarers of the South Tigris, another designer, SJ Macdonald, is listed first. So at the very least, maybe he shouldn’t get ALL the credit. At any rate, this is a fresh take on worker placement that is strikingly different and has a cool press-your-luck component. Also, and I cannot stress this enough, it’s a lot of fun to arrest your other player’s workers.
It works like this – players start the game with a TON of meeples. On their turn, they can place their meeple on a worker placement location – even one that’s already occupied. Plus, the strength of a player action is based on the number of workers there. So your first worker at the wood mill will get you one wood, and the second will get you two, and so on.
But one of the actions that your competitors can take is to arrest all of the workers of a single color at a single location. Which creates an interesting press-your-luck mechanic – yes, placing your fourth worker at the gold mine will get you the gold you need to build a high victory point building in front of you, but it’s also tempting fate, almost guaranteeing that you’ll soon need to spend a turn breaking them out of prison.
There are other aspects to the game as well, and they all work seamlessly together. There’s an alignment system, where scoundrels have access to a black market and your more noble players have access to big rewards helping the church build the cathedral. Players can acquire workers and build buildings which earn victory points or give them new powers. But really, the gem at the center of this is that worker placement system. Because arresting your opponent’s dudes is always hilarious.
As you move further up the list, one would expect for there to be fewer new entries in every section. We have now moved largely into experiences we would hope and expect to be tried and true battle-tested affairs that have withstood my withering so-called game design analysis for multiple years.
And mostly that’s true. Most of the entries from here on out are pretty highly ranked, and have been for a while now. Still, new blood has to come in, otherwise the list gets pretty boring and static to read, much less write.
All the above being said, I find it interesting that this set of 10 games has the fewest new games on the list. Which is to say, this has been a pretty good couple of years for great new games.
“Card Crafting meets 4X! Sail the high seas and choose your path to victory!”
Released: 2022 Designer: John D. Clair Players: 1-4 Estimated Time: 90-150 mins New To List
Image from boardgamegeek.com
In previous years, Mystic Vale was a perennial on the list. Mystic Vale is a game that centers on card crafting – players actually slide transparent card pieces into a card to make better cards. Mystic Vale was the first attempt at this game mechanic, and it worked, turning Vale into a fairly simple deckbuilder-like press-your-luck game. It’s good!
But the team behind it seems to have always thought that the collectable card mechanic could have a home in bigger, better games. They first tried with Edge of Darkness, a rather forgettable mess of a game. Their next attempt was Dead Reckoning, where they knocked it out of the park.
Image from boardgamegeek.com
Dead Reckoning is a pirate-y sandbox game, where players can drive their ships across the sea and choose their own path. You can live the life of a warlike pirate, but you can also found trade colonies or explore the vast reaches of the oceans. The world is your oyster. Go nuts.
Image from boardgamegeek.com
The card crafting system is the beating heart of the experience. Each player has a crew of 15 cards, and will draw 5 at the start of their turn. Each crew member has some inherent abilities. They also have room for up to three transparent inserts, which can add even more abilities to their card (here, you can see the Buccaneer has only one, and the Gunner has two). But they’ve also added the concept of a ‘level’ – the entire backing card can be flipped vertically and front-to-back to level up the core card from 1 to 4. This is not only really cool, but it also really helps the player to customize their crew to the sandbox play style they are hoping to pursue.
“Create the most harmonious ecosystem as you puzzle together habitats and wildlife. “
Released: 2021 Designer: Randy Flynn Players: 1-4 Estimated Time: 30-45 minutes Last Year: 24
Image from boardgamegeek.com
A nature-themed hex-drafting game, where each player is attempting to build their own cross-section of the ecosystem of the Pacific Northwest. On their turn, players will draft a single tile, and an animal token that has been randomly placed with it. Hopefully, the terrain tiles they’ve placed have good locations for them to place those animal tokens.
The ultimate goal is for those animal tokens to be placed in certain scoring patterns. The patterns are randomly chosen for each animal at the beginning of the game, but there are themes that the cards will tend towards: deer like to stick to herds, bears in pairs, and hawks alone. The result is a lightweight, casual-accessible game with beautiful art that’s quick to learn but still with more depth than you initially think. A great filler-class game.
Released: 2023 Designer: Shem Phillips Players: 1 Estimated Time: 60 minutes New to List
Image from boardgamegeek.com
I told you we’d see solo gameplay again. Legacy of Yu is a gorgeous single-player worker placement game. It was developed by Shem Phillips, a game designer with an impossibly good track record that includes hits like Raiders of the North Seaand Architects of the West Kingdom. His specialty? Reinventing worker placement as a core game concept.
In Legacy of Yu, you’re trying to rebuild a local community after years of misery. You’ll be placing workers in order to hire advisors, rebuild your houses, fend off barbarians, and prepare for upcoming floods.
Image from boardgamegeek.com
But this is also a legacy game! The whole game is laid out in a series of missions which get increasingly difficult, where as you take actions you may unlock story nuggets which are, in general, well written. These story nuggets can also result in additional gameplay components being unlocked, which all thematically reinforce the story well.
I have one knock against the Legacy of Yu is that, once you complete the campaign, you feel like you’ve seen everything there is to see. It’s replayability is not the best, but in general that’s okay. Completing the whole campaign will take you several hours, and when you do, you’ll definitely feel like you’ve gotten your money’s worth.
As I mentioned when reviewing Final Girl, this was really a great year for solo games. Already we’ve seen two games in the top 40! But what if I told you we weren’t done yet? Stay tuned…
“Build an interstellar civilization by exploration, research, conquest, and diplomacy.”
Released: 2020 Designer: Touko Tahkokallio Players: 2-6 Estimated Time: 60-200 mins Last Year: 15
Image from boardgamegeek.com
It’s been 12 years since the first edition of Eclipse came out, and for my money, it remains the gold standard of great space 4x gameplay. Some may prefer Twilight Imperium but frankly, it’s not good enough to spend 12 hours playing a single board game. A newcomer called Voidfall just came out, and while I enjoyed my first (and so far only) playthrough, it definitely feels bloated beyond necessity and players are in general too far apart for serious space battles to happen with anyone aside from the NPCs. And so Eclipse holds the crown.
In Eclipse, players will start on hexes remote from each other. They’ll quickly explore nearby space, colonizing nearby planets, which hopefully provide the resources they need to build bigger fleets, or acquire new technology that makes their fleets more powerful or their civilizations more bountiful. The focus IS on economics, but this economic engine is usually driven towards attempting to take the system in the center of the map, which means the majority of games tend to end in a violent war players have been building up the whole game to get to.
From a design standpoint, my favorite mechanic is the design of inefficiencyinto the system. As players expand out into the world, they place discs onto the planets they take – which increases the upkeep costs to keep their civilization afloat, and by extension limits the number of actions they can take. It’s a simple, elegant design solution that nearly eliminates the ‘rich get richer’ problem endemic to many 4x games, and also creates possibilities even for players who decide to focus on small, tight civilizations that focus on alternate routes to victory.
Image from boardgamegeek.com
If you do get Eclipse, I would recommend the second edition. The components are nicer, yes, but the real benefit IMHO is the inclusion of a tech tray (see above) which allows players to pass it around the table. Before that, my group used to have the tech tree off on a side table, which made figuring out whether you wanted to research tech a real PITA. And with that, I’ll note that it’s interesting how the little things can help the form factor of even complex board games a great deal.
“Recruit heroes and conquer locations in a race to expand your kingdom under the sea.”
Released: 2019 Designer: Ivan Tuzovsky Players: 1-4 Estimated Time: 30-60 mins Last Year: 43
Image from boardgamegeek.com
If you had told me two years that one of my favorite midweight games would focus on merfolk battles and collecting manta rays, I would rolled for disbelief. Nothing against merfolk but… come ON. And then I got my hands on the game and… these little manta ray tokens may be one of my favorite game components of all time.
Image from boardgamegeek.com
The gameplay itself is fantastic because it combines two of my favorite game design goals: it’s simple, and yet absolutely comboriffic. While there is definitely a small deckbuilding game in terms of acquiring heroes to help your goals, which you can play for various effects, the meat of the game are firing off the locations.
Image from boardgamegeek
When players collect a location, they will push it into their playerboard to the top icon on the left side. The goal is to score the location, which involves pushing the card all the way in (the card on the left, above, is worth 9 victory points if you do so). Pushing the cards in requires an effect to happen, but can also give the player other benefits (those other colored icons on the left). Including, sometimes, pushing in other cards, which means that every now and then, you have a combolicious turn where you feel like an absolute God for activating and scoring all your locations and getting a ton of other benefits on the way.
Aquatica is, all told, a midcore game that leans on the ‘light’ side. It doesn’t have a ton of mechanics and is therefore pretty easy to teach and get to the table, but it’s combocentric nature can result in some occasionally very thinky turns that, when they unfold correctly, can make you feel like a god. A Merfolk god, but a god nonetheless.
“Science? Military? What will you draft to win this head-to-head version of 7 Wonders?”
Released: 2015 Designer: Antoine Bauza, Bruno Cathala Players: 2 Estimated Time: 30 Last Year: 31
image from boardgamegeek.com
When 7 Wonders came out, it found itself in a lot of collections and on a lot of ‘best game’ lists because it was, and frankly still is, immediately one of the best games you can possibly pull off the shelf when too many people show up for game night. It’s light, it’s easy to teach, and simultaneous nature of taking turns means that it plays almost as fast with 7 people as it does with 3.
Eventually, the luster faded from 7 Wonders but in the midst of it’s initial popularity, they released 7 Wonders Duel, a game that tried to make the core 7 Wonders game work with 2 players. And in my opinion, it succeeded.
The core 7 Wonders gameplay is a card-drafting game, where players will take one card from a hand of cards, play it in front of them and pass the rest of the cards to the left. After a round, players have played about 7 cards into their hand, and after three rounds, they have a full city, where their city is scored based on what various cards they’ve managed to turn into scoring opportunities. Which is great, but the card drafting game doesn’t work well with two people.
Image from boardgamegeek.com
Duel solves this with the pyramid. All the cards for the round are laid out in a pyramid, and when its your turn to draft, you can only draft from the bottom of the pyramid. But when you draft a card, you may expose (and make available for drafting) a card your opponent really needs. Even worse, some of the cards in the pyramid are placed facedown – and revealed faceup when the cards blocking them are removed and they’re exposed. Which means that sometimes, when you draft the perfect card you really needed, you may still grant your opponent a moment of joy rivalling Christmas morning when that card is revealed.
“Become a gun-toting outlaw, or a law-abiding marshal in this Wild West sandbox.”
Released: 2018 Designer: Herve Lemaitre Players: 2-6 Estimated Time: 60-90 mins Last Year: 25
Image from boardgamegeek.com
A lot of board games claim to be ‘sandboxes’ but as far as I’m concerned, none have succeeded like Western Legends. Do you want to be a cowboy? An outlaw? A lawman? Poker ace? Run a brothel? Prospect for gold? Scrub the latrines? You can almost do it all.
Well, some of it’s locked in expansions, but this is one of the few games where having all the expansions really pays off. Cardboard chits become great feeling poker chips. The Ante Up expanion adds a train you can rob – which has a nice plastic miniature to represent it.
The end of the game is reaching certain goals in victory points, but this really isn’t a game that focuses on winners and score. This is more of a game where your goal is just to be in this western world, and just make your way in it.
“Move assassins, elders & builders through Naqala to claim oases & control djinns.”
Released: 2014 Designer: Bruno Cathala Players: 2-4 Estimated Time: 40-80 Last Year: 35
Image from boardgamegeek.com
We recently talked about Trajan, a game whose central mechanic is a mancala, a game mechanic that goes back some 1700 years or so. Five Tribes expands upon it even further, putting the mancala on the main board and spreading it across a larger freeform board.
On a player’s turn, they will pick up all of the meeples on a single location, and drop them one at a time while moving towards a new location. At the location where you place the final meeple, there must be another meeple of the same color – you then do an action based on that color, where the strength of the action is based on the number of meeples of that color are there, and then you remove the meeples of your chosen color. And if the final location is empty, you can then claim it (and its victory points) as your own.
Five Tribes is a wonderful game, with a simple core gameplay loop that can still lead to crunchy decisions. That being said, the decision tree is absolutely enormous. If you have someone at your standard gaming table who is prone to what’s called ‘analysis paralysis’ (a fancy turn for “jesus christ, Bill, just DO something”) this may not be the right game for that crew. But if not, this is a great brainbreaker and an immensely rewarding puzzle.
I have recently become acutely sensitive to the role of Box Size in my collection. I’m a reasonably well-paid individual, I do board game kickstarters, and a lot of times they come in massive boxes. Some of the games on this list are productions that came in big, or alternative lots of boxes (I’m looking at you, Marvel United and Great Wall). And while getting lots of bells and whistles on your game is great, shelf space starts to become a real issue. A big box could take the place of several smaller boxes. When you look at it this way, it becomes more understandable that, increasingly, games need to justify their shelf space.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at a random thumbnail I found that showed Foundations of Rome‘s box scale next to a human being. You know, for fun.
Thumbnail of review of Foundations of Rome done by Two Sheep One Wheat
Holy moly! To say I was not prepared for the ludicrous size of this box is an understatement. This thing is a monster, which is even more surprising because the game is relatively simple, and rarely extends beyond an hour. Does this game justify the shelf space? Hell, yes.
Foundations of Rome is a game that unfolds in a manner reminiscent of Acquire, a board game that’s now 60 years old. Players will purchase lots, which they will try to use to place their own personal buildings. Each player has a whole tray of buildings they can place. Here, you can see 3 player trays.
Image from boardgamegeek.com
The result of the game are full game boards that look absolutely amazing. Good photos of this game are ridiculously easy to find. They just assemble themselves naturally.
Of course, this would all be so much overproduced shlock if the game wasn’t good but… it actually is. Turns are quick, decisions are compelling, and the final result of any game is immensely satisfying. Foundations of Rome is a fantastic game that can, once you get past the fact that it’s a filler game in a mammoth box.
“Exchange gifts, send servants, and visit the Emperor in a luscious 1570 China.”
Released: 2018 Designer: Andreas Steding Players: 1-5 Estimated Time: 60-90 Last Year: 9
Image from boardgamegeek.com
Gugong is based upon a period of time in China where they were having a huge problem with bribery, and so the government made efforts to outlaw it. However, bribery is also a useful way for businessmen to get things done and underpaid public servants to pad their salary and so… bureaucrats… ahh… find a way. Political culture started to gravitate towards gift exchanges, which were legal. But sometimes, you know, those trades aren’t exactly … equitable. I mean, under these rules it’s not TECHNICALLY bribery if you give me a potted cactus and I give you a Lambhorgini, but you’re definitely going to be inclined to do me some favors.
In Gugong, each player starts each round with a hand of cards from 1 to 9. Scattered around the board are 7 government officials, which also have a card on them from 1 to 9. Each government official is related to an action the player can take. But to take that action, you need to give them a gift that is higher than the card they currently have. For example, if you play a 9 on a 4, you can take that action, and that 4 goes facedown on your player board, where it will become part of your hand the next turn.
This has two wonderful gameplay effects. The first is that, when you take an action, you’re also setting up your hand for next turn (a 4 is of far less value than a 9. 1s can beat 9s though, so maybe taking an action there is better!) The second, which is far more insidious, is that this is a game where players are very highly likely to accidentallyscrew over their opponent’s plans. Which, honestly, may be even more fun than doing it on purpose.
Gugong is a crazy dance where you need to get in the mindset of not getting too attached to your plans, because the board state will be in an entirely different place when your turn comes around. But if you like surfing chaos, Gugong can be an uproariously good time.
Assembling this list every year is a great excuse for me to constantly interrogate myself as to why I do or don’t like certain games. The answer, usually, is one you’d expect from a game designer – I value novel game mechanics above all else. In fact, in some of the earliest versions of this list I did, giving a single novel game mechanic per game was part of the whole schtick. Maybe next year, I’ll retreat back to that format, as it will refresh the format.
This section is relatively strong for ‘game mechanics you should at least try once’. Of particular note, #39, #37, #34 and #32 all center on game mechanics not done, or at least not done well, by any other competitor. Given that a couple of these games are ten years old, it’s somewhat surprising but on another level, maybe not. Some game mechanics are so tightly wed to their source material that there is no way to copy them without being seen as a blatant ripoff.
“You alone must survive and defeat the horror movie killer.”
Released: 2021 Designer: Evan Derrick, A. J. Porfirio Players: 1 Estimated Time: 20-60 mins New to List
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2023 was an absolute banner year for great single player board games. I usually throw one on the list near the bottom, but this year the single player gaming was just too awesome. One of the great ones was Final Girl, a game that could be described as the Cadillac of solo board gaming.
Based on the core system of Hostage Negotiator (a game that I think made my very first list not quite a decade ago), the game is simple. Players need to manage not only their health, but also their terror levels, as they run around the map. They can try to help other people escape the map. This is good as it powers up your character and the inverse (them dying at the hands of the villain) powers up the bad guy. But frankly, you can’t save them all, and sometimes you have to make some coldhearted decisions as you try to prepare yourself for a final showdown with the big bad.
But Final Girl isn’t a game, it’s a SYSTEM. To play, you need a core box, and then at least one episode box, most of which are designed to be parodies/analogs of classic 80 horror films. Play as Nancy, as you tackle Dr. Fright in the “Frightmare on Maple Lane”. Or Laurie, taking on Hans the Butcher at “Camp Happy Trails”.
But the key thing is that these three elements (girl, villain, location) can be mixed and matched freely. Each girl has different powers. Each villain is a radically different puzzle to solve. And each location has different strengths, weaknesses, rules and improvised weapons to find. All of this combines to create a great sense of replayability that, frankly, eludes most solo board games.
Final Girl is truly awesome, and absolutely worthy to be this high on the list, and those intrigued may want to see if they can somehow make a late pledge for Season 3. But if you’re intrigued by the concept of solo gaming, I should note that it is not the only solo game on the list.
“Manage and rule all aspects of Ancient Rome with a clever action selection mancala.”
Released: 2011 Designer: Stefan Feld Players: 2-4 Estimated Time: 60-120 Last Year: 20
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As long as reprinting Stefan Feld games is in vogue, I’d love to see a reprint of Trajan. This game is an absolute cornucopia of awesome gaming and interesting decisions, held back only by art direction that feels, frankly, pretty 2011. Players will take turns taking actions, where they can take part of multiple minigames across the board, from taking control of the senate, going on military excursions, or doing a little trading, all of which are represented by different minigames.
But the real meat of the game is the action-selection system. And that’s the mancala. Every player has a mancala with a whole bunch of markers in it, with each cup representing a different action. On your turn, you’ll pick up all of the pegs in one cup and distribute them, one at a time, in cups in a clockwise direction. The cup your last peg is placed in is the action that you’re taking.
While this is going on, you’re also trying to color match certain pegs in cups in order to unlock powerful bonuses. This creates a dynamic where planning two to three turns ahead is both crucial and really hard. (Like, ‘don’t play this while you’re drunk’ hard). It’s just great.
Trajan is a stone-cold classic but we will see design Stefan Feld again on this list. Multiple times.
“An immersive game of combining tea flavours to make your perfect blend!”
Released: 2019 Designer: Dan Kazmaier, Connie Kazmaier Players: 1-5 Estimated Time: 20-60 mins Last Year: 58
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In Chai, you are a tea merchant managing a tea shop. Your job is to fill orders, which requires you to acquire differentkinds of tea (green, black, etc) as well as different kinds of flavoring (milk, honey, vanilla, etc) meant to disguise the fact that most tea tastes like swampy grass clippings.
It’s a small simple game, with a simple yet devious market mechanic that gets it on this list. The market is a tile board of 18 tiles (3 rows of six) that get more expensive left to right. You can only buy one KIND of item from the market, but you can buy all instances of that tea on the market that touch each other orthagonally. So you can luck into being able to buy massive amounts of what you need in bulk. But your purchases also risk making similar opportunities for your opponents.
Chai is a relatively fast and lightweight game. It’s got a warm cozy feel and is quick and easy to set up and play. But it’s also capable of being quite cutthroat, and it’s always funny when this game shifts into that gear, because when it does so, it still never loses that cozy vibe.
“Gather resources to develop a harmonious village of woodland critters and structures. “
Released: 2018 Designer: James A Wilson Players: 1-4 Estimated Time: 40-80 Last Year: 12
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Do you like furries? Not, like, kinky furries, more like charming pastoral Redwall furries. Well, if so, then allow me to introduce you to Everdell, a beautiful game with a whimsical art style, gorgeous components, and of course, a big honkin’ tree.
(Yes, all those components are in the base version of the game)
Everdell is a tableau-building game. Each player is trying to build their own 15-card village, where they try to assemble certain sets, acquire resources via worker placement games and claim objectives. As they build their tableau, they’ll unlock new powers and worker placement locations.
Everdell is a solidly midweight game, with several expansions, all of which are actually pretty good but each of which will nudge the game a little past midweight towards heavy. Still, this is a charming, attractive and thoughtful game that most likely will hit the table frequently. If you’re looking for something that skews a little younger, this year they also released a simpler version called My Lil’ Everdell as well as a new variant of the game called Everdell Farshore. But I haven’t tried these yet, so I can’t quite vouch for them.
“Plan, trade, and build your Burgundian estate to prosperity and prominence.”
Released: 2023 Designer: Stefan Feld Players: 1-4 Estimated Time: 70-120 minutes Didn’t Appear Last Year (Standard edition appeared on previous lists)
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Castles of Burgundy is widely regarded as Stefan Feld’s finest pure game from a mechanics point of view, and it was on my list for a long time, but last year it finally fell off, due to production values that were, to put it blunt, warm buttered ass. That all changed with the new Special Edition, which is an absolute joy to play with – nice castles, big chunky tiles, and ALL of the expansions. And Castles is a simple enough game that the expansions are easy to layer on.
On each turn, players will roll dice. Those dice will allow them to do just a handful of actions, namely claiming tiles from a contested board to put in your ‘under construction area’, or moving them from your ‘under construction’ area to their main board. Along the way, players will try to fill in their map (filling contiguous zones gives big scoring bonuses) and acquire buildings with powerful rule-changing effects. It’s a simple game that immediately surprises you with its depth.
One more thing about Castles of Burgundy that I should mention is that it’s one of those rare ‘designed for 3+ person games’ that actually is as good at 2 players as it is at higher player counts. In fact, the community at BoardGameGeek considers that to be its BEST player count! I don’t know about all that, but I do think that it’s worth noting that this is a game that can be played during the week with just your partner or spouse, and then pulled out for a larger group on game night, and there are a lot of people who value that flexibility.
“A wild west elimination dice game with secret teams.”
Released: 2013 Designer: Michael Palm, Lukas Zach Players: 3-8 Estimated Time: 15 Last Year: 89
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My game nights were never particularly huge, and they’ve shrunk considerably since COVID and the arrival of two Schubert Munchkins that take up most of my time and energy. As such, while social games have never been a huge part of my gaming diet, they REALLY haven’t been the focus of late. Most of my list is tailored for a gaming group of 3 to 4.
But I have a soft spot for Bang! The Dice Game. Quite simply, it’s provided some of the most hilarious moments of my gaming career.
Each player is dealt a role, which is a secret. There is a sheriff, a horde of outlaws trying to kill the sheriff, a deputy trying to help him, and a renegade trying to kill everyone. And no one knows who is who. On your turn, you’ll roll dice, and from the results, deal damage to players within range, hopeful that they are a target you’re supposed to be killing. If you lose all your health, you flip over your role card, and the table erupts as your role is exposed.
What makes ‘Bang’ work for me whereas (most) other social deduction games falter is the dice. That random element adds an element of chaos to your plans. You may (think you) know exactly who you’re supposed to be killing, but sometimes the dice don’t want to help you. Add this random element to the standard lying and backstabbing found in a social deduction game, and you have a recipe for pure table-flipping chaos.
Released: 2012 Designer: Simone Luciani, Daniele Tascini Players: 2-4 Estimated Time: 90 mins Last Year: 42
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I’m going to get straight to the point here: Tzolk’in is all about the big freakin’ wheels.
The centerpiece of the game board is a gigantic gear, which connects to five other gears scattered around the board. These aren’t just a decorative gimmick, they’re what translates this into one of the deepest and most interesting worker placement games on the market.
The player has a small number (3-5) of workers. On their turn, they can do one of two things: put guys on the wheel, or take them off. When you put them on, you have to put them on near the ‘start’ of a wheel track. When you pull them off, you get the resources next to their current wheel location. After everyone takes a turn, all the wheels turn one spot. Which means that the longer you let your meeples ride, the better rewards you can get.
The end result is a deeply interesting puzzle. How long do I let something ride? Should I effectively sacrifice a turn to get out of rhythm with the rest of the table (so I’m placing meeples right after they’re pulling them off?)
And as a delicious game design chili pepper in the pot, once a game, the first player can force a double wheel turn. This can speed your meeples into more useful resources or open up more placement spots for your own dudes – but there are also some delicious ways that you can hose your opponents with this action.
Tzolk’in is a fantastic game. It’s a tad crunchy and on the long side, but man, your table will not be able to resist the majesty of that wheel.
“Strategically grow your ecosystem card engine with unique flora, fauna, and terrains.”
Released: 2023 Designer: Maxime Tardif Players: 1-5 Estimated Time: 45-90 mins New to List
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Nature-themed games are having a bit of a moment of late. I think Wingspankicked the gates open and now the board game stores are awash with games about trees, nature, birds, butterflies, mushrooms and all sorts of hippy nonsense. Historically, these tend to be lighter, simpler fare that washes right off of me.
Earth, however, isn’t quite that. While it is largely a card-based game, it’s heavier than it looks. In many ways, it’s reminiscent of tableau builders like Ark Nova and Terraforming Mars. And yet, it’s much simpler than THOSE games. So it manages to straddle that divide, which is a surprisingly unique place to land.
On your turn, you’ll be doing one of four actions, but the end result is that you’ll mostly be trying to acquire soil in order to plant plants in a 4×4 grid. How you arrange these plants matter quite a bit – you’ll want to place your cards in ways that create synergy with each other. Results of doing so are things like planting sprouts (the cubes) or vertically growing trees, which both help you in the endgame.
Also, Earth has one of my favorite mechanisms seen in many (and yet not enough) games, the lesser action. Every action you take also results in everyone else at the table being able to take a lesser version of the same action. Did you just take the plant action, which allows you to plant 2 cards in your tableau and draw 4 cards and keep one? Great, that means that everyone else gets to plant 1 card and draw 1 card. This not only speeds up the game, but it also keeps you invested in other players’ turns. Your turn may be obsolete by the time it gets back to you – but only because everyone else accidentally gave you what you were looking for! Merry Christmas!
So there you have it – a great nature-based games. That’s not to say I hate nature-based games. In fact, we’ll have an old friend returning to the list in the 20s.
Released: 2005 Designer: Bruno Cathala, Bruno Faidutti Players: 3-5 Estimated Time: 60 mins Last Year: 66
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Mission: Red Planet is a highly social game set in a steampunk world that has somehow invented space travel, and you and your fellow players each play different corporations trying to get to Mars so you can begin strip-mining it. Mars is divided up into several territories which are worth different point values, all of which are hidden initially. Your goal is to get to Mars, explore to find the high value point zones, and then end the game with control of those zones.
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Each turn, players will play one of their deck of 9 cards, face down so no one can see. Once everyone has chosen, the cards are revealed in numerical order and players then take their turn. The femme fatale can seduce an enemy soldier to your side (effectively a 2-soldier swing!) The soldier can move troops around on mars. The Travel agent can most efficiently load soldiers onto a rocket. The Pilot can change the destination of a rocket that hasn’t launched to Mars yet – sending your opponent to some useless backwater. And the Saboteur can blow up a rocket still on the launch pad. All of the troops aboard that rocket then become martyrs in the great race to colonize space.
Mission: Red Planet is on this list for one great reason. It’s a highly social, highly mean game, and yet it never feels mean. It feels like a chaos factory, but it very much is a game where frequently you get shiv’d with a smile.
“Post-apocalyptic bands of punks fight to destroy the rival tribe’s camps.”
Released: 2021 Designer: Daniel Piechnick Players: 2 Estimated Time: 20-40 mins New to List
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Radlands is a head-to-head dueling game, where players play as warlords in some sort of post-apocalyptic radioactive wasteland. Each player has three bases they’ve been dealt at the start of the game. These bases have powerful abilities, but they are also the objectives of the game – the first player who destroys all of the opponent’s bases wins the game.
The primary resource of the game is water, and on most turns, players will have 3 water to spend. Water is used to both summon your troops as well as use their abilities. And summoning those troops are important – in general, your opponent can only damage your frontline, so it’s crucial you get some meat shields in front of your bases as quickly as possible, and work to keep them alive. Life is cheap, bases are bloody expensive.
The impressive thing about Radlands is how it manages to create a cohesive dueling card game experience with no deckbuilding – and in fact, both players play from the same deck. Despite this, a shocking amount of different strategies emerge quickly, and it always feels like you have some sort of synergy within the random cards you’ve been dealt. For those who like games like Magic the Gathering but are turned off by deckbuilding or are concerned about assymetry in decks, this is a great pickup.
I first started making these lists several years ago. A couple of these lists were Twitter only, meaning that I suspect at some point they will be lost to the sands of time unless I go and specifically spelunk my archive to go save them. All the same, going through these old lists is instructive. It highlights my own changing tastes as a game player and designer, but it also shows how games, in general, are getting better.
The majority of board games today are much tighter than they were a decade ago. New genres like cooperative and deckbuilding have matured through constant iteration. Designers in general have gotten MUCH better at writing rulebooks and templating rules on cards for consistency and readability. Production values are VASTLY improved. Solo gaming, once a weird fringe, is starting to become a source of pretty good games.
A lot of it is just competition, too. Yes, it may seem like board gaming is a ‘cult of the new’, but in reality, we have an entire field of game design that is flooded with content, forced to outdo each other to survive. What this means is that games that are new hits that break through are likely pretty good to get any sort of attention. It also makes the games that stick around as perennial list occupants that much more impressive (I’m looking at you, #41).
“Do you know kung fu? Download a winning deck to save humanity.”
Released: 2023 Designer: “Upper Deck Entertainment” Players: 1-5 players Estimated Time: 30-60 minutes New to List
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In the early years of this list, Legendary: Marvel was a frequent visitor to my top 100 list. It’s a very good cooperative deckbuilder, but it eventually fell off the list due to the fact that it has surprisingly long setup and teardown times, at a time when better deckbuilders were coming out – as well as other light Marvel experiences like Marvel United which scratch a similar itch but is much easier to start up.
Around that time, people whose opinion I trusted wouldn’t stop talking about another game called Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deckbuilding Game. They wouldn’t stop talking about how the game managed to take the core Legendary experience and… actually add a narrative to it. I was intrigued, but just never got around to it before it faded from the consciousness.
It was this history in mind that I sat down at a game con this year to play Legendary Encounters: The Matrix and I get it now. It’s still a core deckbuilder (with, I want to stress, the same annoying setup and teardown times) but that game is buttressed with a sort of campaign deck that constantly changes the rules and challenges of the game. What transpired was a roller coaster of a narrative experience that somehow managed to provide a near-perfect beat-by-beat recreation of the Matrix storyline but to do so in a way where things were constantly in doubt. I was constantly going from ‘we’re screwed’ to ‘we rock’ to ‘we’re totally screwed’. In the end of our scenario, the rules changed one more time – one of us became ‘the one’ and had to win the whole thing while the rest of us just focused on trying to survive.
“Duel against an opponent in a brutal fantasy world.”
Released: 2018 Designer: Aislyn Hall, Aaron Shaw Players: 2 (4 with team rules) Estimated Time: 15-30 minutes New to List
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Ivion is more of a system than a single game. It’s sold in a series of duel boxes – The Ram and the Raven, for example, has two duel decks, one representing a sort of frost mage with a ton of control spells, and another as a barbarian who wants to get up close and personal before unleashing hell. Each dual box is balanced first and foremost against each other, but they are also designed so you can mix and match.
Each player gets a deck, and the two decks are wildly assymetric, representing massive differences in play style and flow. The players will use these two decks to take part in a tactical battle that takes place on a simple 5×5 grid. Simply moving doesn’t require cards, but attacking your opponent does, and your deck also supplies you with the defenses you need – provided you have the resources to cast those spells. Which means that a key part of the game is keeping those resources available in hopes of bluffing your opponent off from casting his most brutal cards.
One of the nicer design touches is that each player has a kind of ultimate that fires off when they get knocked below half-health. This one-time effect helps to rubber band a game, and keep things from becoming too lopsided. It’s not uncommon for all the momentum to switch wildly in this game, and these ‘second wind’ moments are usually the catalysts.
Every game of Ivion I’ve played has been a taut tightrope that comes down to the wire. If you like tactical dueling gameplay, this is for you.
“Explore strange lands, establish trade routes, and search for treasure. “
Released: 2022 Designer:Matthew Dunstan, Brett J Gilbert Players: 1-4 Estimated Time: 45 mins New to List
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Remember when I said there were no more roll and writes on the list? Well, Guild of Merchant Explorers has the SOUL of a roll-and-write. In fact, while playing it, I keep thinking that this game must have started its life as a roll and write, but at some point the designers decided the format was keeping it back. The result is something as fast and light as a roll and write, but with decidedly more depth.
Each turn, one player will flip a card that describes what exploration will happen (explore 2 desert spaces, for example), and then all players will place cubes on the map. Their goal is to explore whole regions, as well as place villages, discover towers and create trade routes between cities.
The game is divided into four ages, and during each age your explorers are removed from the board (some other aspects, such as your villages, survive between rounds), which resets things. This is the part that feels like it couldn’t be in a roll-and-write without running your eraser to a nub. It works, though – Guild of Merchant Explorers ends up being as light and easy to teach as most roll-and-writes while still providing a slightly meatier, more strategic experience.
“”Build your way to the best Tavern in town with this deckbuilding dice drafting game” “
Released: 2019 Designer: Wolfgang Warsch Players: 2-4 Estimated Time: 60 mins Last Year: 48
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Taverns of Tiefenthal is a combination dice drafting/deck building game, where players try to build the best tavern. This game has been knocked by some by not being a great ‘running a tavern’ simulator, and anyone looking for a crunchy economic simulator are going to be disappointed. Those who like deckbuilding, dice drafting and press-your-luck into a tight, tavern-themed gaming package, though, are going to find a lot to love.
The goal of the game is to get victory points, which is done by serving beer to patrons. But the soul of the game is in the press-your-luck mechanics. You can hire staff to work your bar, who will increase your bar’s operating output. But the cards you acquire go into your deck. And at the start of your turn, you deal out cards. You can keep dealing out cards – hopefully mostly your staff – until all of your tables are full of customers (the three cards on top shown in pictures).
After this, there’s a round of dice drafting – players roll dice and then pass them around on little drink coasters. The staff and patrons that you’ve dealt out previously determines what you can do with those dice, and how you can turn them into victory points.
The centerpiece of the gaming experience is the player boards themselves. Your tavern is assembled from a handful of puzzle-type pieces. What this means is that when you upgrade an aspect of your tavern permanently, you’ll flip over that puzzle piece to the upgraded side, which creates a slick, satisfying experience as you further progress in the game.
“Success is measured in money as you build your global smartphone empire.”
Released: 2018 Designer: Ivan Lashin Players: 1-5 Estimated Time: 60-90 mins Last Year: 61
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Smartphone is an interesting anomaly – it’s a complex-looking economic Eurogame that you can teach in 15 minutes and play in an hour. It’s slick, it’s quick, but it still has a lot of interesting decisions and provides a nice, meaty territorial control/economic sim. Also, it’s a simple, sleek and modern presentation.
image from boardgamegeek.com
The cornerstone of the game experience is the pad system, shown above, which determines the resources and actions the player can take. The player can take his two pads, and overlap them – the resources that are shown are what you have to play with this turn. In the above example, the player has two logistic actions (the blue trucks), one research (purple gear) and increased stock of two (the black crates – which also come with a price cut – this player is trying to make cheap phones in bulk!). And along the way, the player will research additional chits they can add to their pad (the red and purple duo in the picture) allowing them to get more and more satisfying resource yields each turn. It’s an simple puzzle that breaks your brains in interesting ways.
If you like the idea of Smartphone you might want to check out Mobile Markets, put out by the same team. This takes the core game engine of Smartphone and gets rid of the board, making it mostly a card game. I can’t quite vouch for that one, though – it looks promising but I haven’t gotten to play it yet.
“Caesar and Pompey deploy units to battlegrounds across Rome to seize control!”
Released: 2022 Designer: Paolo Mori Players: 1-2 Estimated Time: 20 mins Last Year: 28
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A small, tight territorial control game for two. In Caesar, you have a hand of three discs that you pull out of a bag. Each turn, you’ll place one on a circle that borders two territories. Once a territory is completely surrounded, one of the two players claims that territories.
What makes this an interesting puzzle, though, is that each disc has two halves of it, and each half has a different strength. Thus, if you put your best army on a border with a mind towards capturing the territory you REALLY want, you’re probably putting a significantly weaker army on the other side of that territory, creating an opportunity for your opponent. Figuring out how to balance immediate rewards with long-term planning is a tight, contentious and delightful duel.
PSC Games has recently had a string of luck making small-box tight 20-minute 2-person games. If you like Caesar, you might want to check out Blitzkrieg– it’s a game that has a very similar soul to Caesar, but with a more abstract, less map-like gameboard. This year, they also came out with Dogfight, which is… fine. I mean, it’s a good game, butstill far below Caesar and Blitzkreig in terms of great gameplay.
“Competing factions must scavenge the wreckage of their colony ship to survive.”
Released: 2021 Designer: Tom Jolly, Luke Laurie Players: 2-4 Estimated Time: 60-90 mins Last Year: 22
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There’s a lot to like about Cryo, a midweight worker placement with an absolutely gorgeous graphic-novel-neon art style. Players play as one of several groups of survivors that survive a crashed interplanetary journal. Your job is to scavenge the remains of the ship, find your citizens still trapped in cryosleep on the ship, and ferry them under the surface of the planet before the temperature of the surface drops.
You’ll be using your drones to do all your heavy lifting, and this is a worker placement game. The trick is that docking locations (shown as the white X-shape in the image above) allow the player to harvest just one of the locations adjacent to them. This creates interesting dynamics where careful placement can not only block your opponent from taking the action that you wanted to take, it could potentially block them from a couple of other good actions as well.
It’s a tight, slick and gorgeous presentation as well. Most sci-fi games prefer either darkness and grit or slick, chrome sleekness. This is something else – a bright, colorful almost comic-like experience that is both thematic but also incredibly easy to parse as a player board. This one’s a keeper.
“Island Spirits join forces using elemental powers to defend their home from invaders.”
Released: 2017 Designer: R. Eric Reuss Players: 1-4 Estimated Time: 90-120 mins Last Year: 32
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Spirit Island burst into the board game consciousness as the ‘first game about DECOLONIZATION’. This is, of course, the opposite energy of most territorial control board games, where you start with an empty world and spread you influence across the map. That social-justice angle of things has never particularly appealed to me (I LIKE filling up maps), but all the same there’s no doubt that the result is a completely novel and interesting game experience.
Spirit Island is a cooperative board game that scales smoothly between player counts (the island grows and shrinks based on player count). You play as elemental spirits of the island, which has been discovered by filthy colonizing explorers and soldiers, who threaten the simple lives of the mushroom-hut-dwelling natives. The job of the players is to work together to drive them back into the sea.
Spirit Island is also one of the most complex cooperative board games available. Which is great – most cooperative games are relatively light, as they tend to be popular things to put on the table when someone brings their non-gaming friend or partner to game night. Spirit Island isn’t that – it’s definitely a meatier experience for a heavier crowd – but frankly it’s great that this exists.
“Serve guests and prepare rooms to be the best hotelier in the Viennese modern age.”
Released: 2015 Designer: Virginio Gigli, Simone Luciani Players: 2-4 Estimated Time: 60-120 mins Last Year: 19
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In Grand Austria Hotel, you play a 19th century hotelier, running one of several high-class luxury establishments. Your job is simple – attract the best guests, feed them, and put them in rooms.
The engine of the game is dice drafting. A large pool of dice are rolled, and seperated into piles based on numbers. Each number represents a different action – prepare a room, or cook some food, for example. One by one, each player will choose one of these dice, and the strength of the action is based on the number of dice in that pool. If there are four dice in the ‘prepare room’ action, you can prepare four rooms, as an example.
Players go around and choose one die and take the action. The last player will take two in a row, and then the rest of the table will continue to take actions in reverse turn order. In this manner, the first player will end up taking the first AND the last action, and because dice keep disappearing from the various pools, it also means he’ll likely take the strongest and weakest action as well.
The expansion, Let’s Waltz, is good but doesn’t add anything crucial to the game. That being said, one of my favorite things is that ‘strudel’ is one of the core resources in the game (along with cake, wine and coffee, food items you feed your customers). As such, one tasty upgrade is to go to Etsy and find one of the many component upgrade kits, many of which look better than the upgraded components that come with the Let’s Waltz expansion.
“Grow your realm, influence members of the King’s court and fight the forces of winter “
Released: 2007 Designer: Andrea Chiarvesio, Luca Iennaco Players: 2-5 Estimated Time: 90 mins Last Year: 26
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Kingsburg is a dice-rolling city-building game. Each player rolls three dice on their turn, and then they take turns placing dice on spots to claim the resources that spot provides. If you have a 3 and a 4, as an example, you can claim the 3 spot and the 4 spot, or you can place both on the 7 spot, which offers substantially improved rewards. But these spots are exclusive – only one person can claim each spot, so the game is much more interactive than it seems at first glance, as you need to be aware of the dice your opponents have to be sure you don’t get locked out of a spot you want.
The one knock I have on Kingsburg is that you have to be careful what edition you get. The first edition really requires the To Forge A Realmexpansion, which provides a superior ‘bad guys are coming’ combat experience. This expansion is included in the Second Edition. The second edition also has ‘modernized’ art, which I frankly find inferior to the original. Still, Kingsburg is a gaming treat that will probably always fight to have a place on this list.
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.
“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
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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.
“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
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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.
“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)
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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.
Released: 2017 Designer: Reiner Stockhausen Players: 2-5 Estimated Time: 60-120 mins Last Year: 50
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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.
“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
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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.
“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
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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 Marswill 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).
“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
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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.
“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
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The release of the original Crewkickstarted 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.
“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
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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.
Released: 2021 Designer: Kamil ‘Sanex’ Cieśla, Robert Plesowicz, Łukasz Włodarczyk Players: 1-4 Estimated Time: 120-180 New to List
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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.
Every year, I start this project with gusto, and usually by the time I get to the 60s, I’m regretting my life choices. It’s fun, but it’s also a soulcrushing grind, especially once you’ve posted the early parts of the list and you can feel the pressure to finish it. Also, it’s simultaneously happening with major life events like, you know, the need to actually do Christmas shopping for my kids, who would probably prefer something other than old magic cards under the tree.
So if you like what you’re reading, tell me! It means a lot and keeps me going! Even if you don’t like it, tell me you do! I need this! I’m a sad and lonely man!
“Battle together to fight off zombies in the Old West… or die trying.”
Released: 2022 Designer: Raphaël Guiton, Jean-Baptiste Lullien, Nicolas Raoult Players: 1-6 Estimated Time: 60 mins New to List
Honestly, no Zombicide has ever grabbed me like this one. They all just seem so generic and blah. But for some reason, putting the entire thing in a western setting just WORKS for me.
It’s largely the classic Zombicide formula. Zombies spawn in large numbers. You slaughter them in large numbers. There are objectives on the map to deal with, and opportunities for players to search for weapons and provisions to succeed. Each character has unique abilities to help the group deal with this problem.
Why does this one work for me more? Again, I think it’s the Western setting. Our last campaign ended with my Lady of the Night tossing dynamite into massive zombie hordes from the whorehouse balcony to buy time for the rest of my party to board a rapidly departing freight train. This game just seems to CREATE STORIES, which is really what you want from your cooperative games.
“Bid for the stalls to attract customers at the night market.”
Released: 2023 Designer: Zong-Ger Players: 2-4 Estimated Time: 60-80 New to List
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Taiwan Night Market has a simple premise. People are trying to stumble home drunk after a hard night partying. And they’re hungry. Maybe you should feed them.
Players bid on stall locations upon each of the major paths. NPCs randomly spawn at the start of the paths, and are hungry for one of the major foot categories (boba or donuts, for example). They’ll stop at the first place that serves their preferred treat – something you can solve with clever marketing.
Taiwan Night Market is simple, evocative, and silly, with just the right amount of asshattery for a lightweight end-of-game-night title.
“Diverse pirate-animal crews take to the skies, dividing up powerful loot.”
Released: 2022 Designer: Paolo Mori Players: 1-6 Estimated Time: 45-60 minutes Last Year: 36
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Libertalia is a pirate-themed game that is played over the course of three rounds. On each round, players are dealt a hand of six identical pirate cards, each of which has a numerical strength value and a superpower. Over six turns, each player will choose a card secretly. Once revealed, the cards are placed in order of numerical strength and then, one by one, their powers are resolved. The goal is to, ultimately, manipulate the turn order in which players will select their loot. Different loot scores differently, and thus different players are chasing different objectives.
Libertalia: WIngs of Galecrest is a new edition of the classic board game Libertalia. The new edition has streamlined rules and more possible hero cards to play. It also has… furry art. I mean, it’s not scandalous or anything, but a lot of people seem to prefer the more realistic human pirates of the original. *I* don’t, mind you, but I do feel like you should be informed on the matter.
I think I’m getting old, because at one point I used to have 3 or 4 Vital Lacerda games on every list. Lacerda is the king of overcomplex, heavy Eurogames, where every action you take triggers other actions in a never-ending sea of combos and auxiliary actions. Kanban in particular is still very close to my heart, but it just doesn’t hit the table very often anymore.
If I’m in the mood for a Lacerda these days, I’m most likely to reach for On Mars, his take on Mars exploration and colonization. There’s a lot of reasons why, but I think a lot of it is that this theme is among his least abstract – things are complex, but most of the complexity makes sense for reasons beyond ‘this creates cool combos’. I still LIKE cool combos, but them having context that makes sense makes it a lot easier to teach and navigate the complexity.
“Push and pull your fellow pirates to be the last one on the ship. “
Released: 2013 Designer: Shane Steely, Jared Tinney Players: 3-5 Estimated Time: 20 mins Didn’t Appear Last Year (Appeared on Previous Lists)
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A lightweight filler game. Each player controls a couple of pirates, who represent the worst, most disgraceful pirates on a ship. You’ve finally earned the wrath of your boss pirate and it’s time for you to go overboard. Your goal is to be the last to go overboard.
Players can play simple cards, moving one of their meeples forward or back along the 3-plank gangplank. They can also shove other players furhter out, or withdraw one segment of the gangplank. The goal is to be one of the last two pirates standing. This game is all pure, fast, fun asshattery.
“Merchants in the Roman Empire compete to amass the greatest amount of wealth.”
Released: 2018 Designer: Mac Gerdts Players: 2-6 Estimated Time: 60-120 Last Year: 47
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Concordia is a design marvel – it’s a meaty economic eurogame with a four page rulebook. Players will start near the center, and then work to spread their economic influence across the world. It’s surprisingly deep, and yet is an absolute breeze to teach.
The beauty of the game is the card-based action system. Each player starts with five cards, which is everything you can do. You play a card, and do what the card says. That’s your turn. Turns move fast and furious, and the teach is a breeze. Cards allow you to do simple things, such as move your agents around the board, build outposts, collect resources from those locations, sell your resources, or buy slightly more powerful (but not more complicated) cards.
The most important card allows you to pick up all of the discarded cards, resetting your hand and action options again. But still, most of the time, you’ll be trying to optimize a core set of actions.
One nice thing is that there are several expansions that are mostly just new maps. There’s actually a lively community discussion about which maps are the best for which player size. For what it’s worth, I’ve ranked Concordia Venus on this list because that’s the edition I own. But it’s functionally the same game, only with a few more rules and cards to allow for team-based play.
“Draft dice and purchase skills, traits and equipment to create the perfect RPG hero.”
Released: 2016 Designer: Keith Matejka Players: 1-4 Estimated Time: 60-90 Last Year: 86
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Are you the sort of sad soul who, as a child, had a D&D sourcebook and no friends to play with? Did you roll dozens of characters that never got played? Then boy, do I have a game for you. If not… well, I hope I didn’t just reveal too much about my childhood.
Roll Player is a dice drafting game, where players will slot dice into their core stats, which have crazy and indecipherable stats like strength, dexterity and charisma. You’ll be drafting your dice in such a way to earn bonuses from class, race and alignment cards – assuming you match certain goals of course. You’ll earn a little gold to get some gear that unlocks more powers or bonus points. You will absolutely have a dump stat.
Roll Player is not an RPG, but if you have any history with classic dice-based RPGs, it will strike a chord with you, deep in your soul. And yet, the dice drafting puzzle is a fun, intricate and occasionally deep puzzle to solve. It’s a relatively easy teach and pretty easy to get to the table.
If you do pick it up and enjoy it, you may want to consider picking up the Monsters & Minionsexpansion. I don’t always recommend expansions – most games, frankly, don’t need expansions and they often complexify setup and teaches far greater than the added fun they provide. But Roll Player is an exception – it’s a simple enough game as it is, and adding a minor layer where you can kill monsters just seems to make so much sense.
“Continue the work of a mad scientist over the course of three generations.”
Released: 2022 Designer: TC Petty III Players: 2-4 Estimated Time: 180 Mins Last Year: 17
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Imagine shortly after your dad croaked, you went through his papers and discovered he was that close to realizing his dream of zombifying a dead dog. Now imagine you dug deeper and realized that his grand dream of building Frankenstein’s monster was within reach. And you decided to continue his work. That’s the premise of My Father’s Work.
Each player plays as the child of a different mad scientist, who is intent on furthering… scientific progress. All of you live near the same poor beleagered town, which is a handy source of resources. Like, um, corpses from the graveyard. Which are represented by little coffin tokens. The components of this game are among the most awesome I’ve ever played with.
What makes My Father’s Work interesting is that its a worker placement game, but the ‘board’ that represents the town you live near is a spiral book, and as you and the table make decisions and achieve objectives, the town may change… by having you all turn to a different page in the book. It’s a worker placement game, but it’s one with a sense of history. And it absolutely drips with the victorian mad scientist vibe.
My one knock on this game is that it’s long. That 180 minute time estimate seems roughly accurate… for three players. I can only imagine it gets considerably longer with four. But that length isn’t really complexity – this game is not a hard teach. It is a meaty yet rewarding experience, though, if you have a table that wants to immerse themselves in the life of a mad scientist for a while.
“You’re an artisan working on creating striking patterns within a king’s palace.”
Released: 2019 Designer: Michael Keisling Players: 2-4 Estimated Time: 30-45 mins Didn’t Appear Last Year (Appeared on Previous Lists)
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If you’re looking for a lightweight game with a small amount of asshattery, it’s hard to go wrong with an Azul game. Every year, I alternate between putting Azul Summer Pavilion or Azul Stained Glass of Sintra on the list. You honestly can’t go wrong with any of them, although I prefer these two because the core Azul has the opportunity for some profound evil, and these more recent titles offer ways to mitigate that somewhat.
The general premise of all these games is simple – tiles are randomly placed on drink tokens, and then players go around, one-by-one taking all of the tiles of one color from a single coaster and throwing them in the middle, in an attempt to complete patterns on their own playmat. Any other tiles on that coaster are thrown in the center, which becomes a valid position to choose from – and which can accrue massive tile piles for you to pull from. But be careful – getting TOO many tiles can hurt you, and not completing patterns can clog up the works.
Azul games are all gorgeous, incredibly tactile and relatively simple to teach. And while they aren’t as popular as they used to be, Azul still remains an incredibly popular brand of lightweight filler games.
“In a magical realm a village awakes, and artisan dragons make coffee and cakes! “
Released: 2022 Designer: Manny Vega Players: 1-5 Estimated Time: 60 mins New to List
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I wasn’t expecting to like Flamecraft. I mean, look at it. It’s very… cute. Look at those dragons. They’re adorable. Yes, this is a nice economic sim, but it’s also got more sugar than my Texas grandma’s old sweet tea. And yet…
Players will be using their dragons to become the most famous dragon enchanters in this adorable village. To do this, they’ll be placing dragons in different shops in a worker placement game. Most of the time, they’ll be placing a dragon card there from their hand. If they do the latter, they can also activate a dragon in that location.
Alternatively, they can enchant the shop, which is the primary way to earn victory points, and also allows them to activate ALL the dragons in the shop. My primary knock on the game is that it’s table presence is perhaps TOO sprawling – this game board is ridiculously long. But it’s also charming and endearing, and if your table can stomach the excessive cuteness, it’s worth a look.
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.
“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
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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.
“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
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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.
“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
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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.
“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
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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.
“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
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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.
“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)
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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.
“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
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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.
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.
“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
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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.
“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
image from boardgamegeek.com
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 Basewhich 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.
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?
“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
image from boardgamegeek.com
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.
“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
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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.
“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
image from BoardGameGeek.com
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.
“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
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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!
“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
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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.
“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
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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.
“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.
“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
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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.
“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
image by boardgamegeek.com
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.
“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
Image from boardgamegeek.com
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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