Last time I was a grumpy, old, curmudgeon. It was a change of pace that I didn’t necessarily enjoy. Turns out, I don’t actually like complaining all that much. So this week I want to highlight some games that I really love, that I think are woefully underappreciated.

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1. Bullet♥︎

BGG Rank: #681

Solo Mode Review | Multiplayer Mode Review | Bullet Paw Expansion Review | Bullet Palette Expansion Review

A high-speed puzzle ‘SHUMP’ wrapped in the aesthetics of a futuristic magical girl anime, Bullet♥︎ is one of the slickest, most replayable games I’ve ever played, as evident as its placement as #3 on my top 100 games of all time list

It’s a real-time puzzle game, where you drop bullets onto a grid based on colour and number, trying to match patterns before your board fills up. Every heroine plays differently, and the combinations of Heroines and Bosses provide near-endless variety. It plays fantastically solo or with friends, and the real time rounds keep the game moving at a decent clip.

There’s nothing quite like pulling out the perfect bullet you need to complete a pattern just in the nick of time, clearing space on your board and sending a cascade of bullets flying at your opponent. That moment when the round ends, and they look at the mountain of wood you’ve sent their way, it’s just a pure delight.

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2. Le Havre: The Inland Port

BGG Rank: #1,729

Le Havre by Uwe Rosenburg gets plenty of plaudits. It’s revered by many a Uwe fan, even sitting in Tom Vassel’s #1 spot in his yearly Top 100 Games of all time lists in 2020 and 2021. Myself, I think it’s okay. It’s a bit big and unwieldy in my experience, but a great game none-the-less. What I am enthuasastic about, however, is the 2 player only spin off, Le Havre: The Inland Port.

The Inland Port features a resource grid, with 4 trackers on it. Players alternate taking turns building or using buildings, which sit on your own personal dial. As turns go by, the dials spin, powering up each of the buildings. When using a building, you can use your own for free, or throw a franc at your opponent to use their building. The buildings are mostly just different ways of getting more resources so you can build more buildings, but the resource grid has a fun spatial element to it. One building may move your wood marker up and to the left, but it’s useless to you if the marker is already bumped up to the left side.

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3. Now Boarding

BGG Rank: #2,514

Full Review

Now Boarding by Tim Fowers turns the stress and mundanity of air travel into an utterly delightful real-time cooperative experience. As always, featuring charming artwork from Ryan Goldsberry, and featuring a fast-paced, real time, pick-up-and-deliver framework, players are tasked with juggling angry passengers, unpredictable weather, and the literal ticking clock as they shuttle travelers back and forth across the U.S. What starts as a breezy morning shift ramps up quickly, with passengers piling up and the best laid plans unravelling in real time as new passengers and their destinations are revealed mid-round. The game encourages tight communication and flexible thinking, and yes, sometimes ejecting a passenger mid-route because someone more convenient popped up.

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4. Tokyo Highway

BGG Rank: #2,661

Full Review

No game makes a table look cooler by the end than Tokyo Highway. It’s part dexterity challenge, part spatial puzzle, and part architecture simulator.

You’re stacking and stretching tiny wooden roads on top of pillars, aiming to sneak under or over your opponent’s highways to place your cars. There’s a magical moment in every game where the roads twist into wild, impossible shapes and the table becomes a miniature cityscape of gravity-defying construction.

It’s easy to teach, hard to master, and packed with tension. Plus, it’s the rare abstract game that tells a story—not with words, but with the shape of the board by the end of the game.

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5. Paperback Adventures

BGG Rank: #2,937

Full Review

This solo word-building roguelike is what happens when a word game, a deck-builder, and a dungeon crawler walk into a bar and actually hit it off.

You’re building words to defeat a series of enemies, collecting power-ups, levelling up your deck, and trying to survive until the final boss. Each playable character offers unique abilities, which means your strategy shifts dramatically from one run to the next.

The progression is satisfying, the mechanics are sharp, and the design is downright clever. It’s not just “a good solo game” — it’s a great game, full stop. And once it hooks you, it really hooks you.

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Final Thoughts

Not every great game gets the love it deserves. Some are too niche, too chaotic, too quiet, or just fall between the cracks of hype cycles and hotness meters. But these five games prove that sometimes, everyone else is wrong.

So if you’re the type of person who stops looking at board games if they’re ranked lower than 500 on BGG, give these underrated gems a try. You might just find your next favourite game hiding behind a bad rank.