Automobiles: Racing Season feels like a Monkey’s Paw type of expansion. It’s something you thought you really wanted, but when it comes to fruition, you’re left with regrets. You see, this expansion adds 3 more maps, and a Grand Prix mode where you carry over your cubes from race to race, plus individual player powers and in-between race abilities in the form of sponsors.
Now, I’ve already covered Automobiles in-depth (in fact, Automobiles was one of the first reviews I ever wrote), but for those who need it, here’s a quick rundown: Automobiles is a bag building racing game. Each turn, players pull cubes from their bags, and use those cubes to propel their cars around the track. The white, greys, and black cubes are straightforward and present in every race, they move you one space on their associated colour. The colourful dice have variable powers that you set at the start of the race, and do vary pretty wildly, offering some nice replayability, as a different set of cards will make your race feel quite different. The base game also came with 2 different maps for a bit more variety from game to game.
The new tracks and action cards that Automobiles: Racing Season adds can be folded into the base game with no concern for complexity or bloat. Even the driver cards are fairly simple in execution, now each player gets a player power at the start of the race they can use ones per turn. The real meat of the expansion comes in the season campaign.
The season campaign has players carrying over their bag of cubes from one race to another to see who can score the most points over a series of races. Players still pick a driver at the start of the racing season, but once the driver and action cards have been decided, they’re locked in place for the duration of the season. In between races, players can pick a sponsor to help modify their bag of cubes before going onto the next race. Some will prioritize removing wear cubes, while others will let you remove some and add others.
It sounds like everything I wanted in an expansion, but the more I’ve played it, the more frustrated I’ve felt with this set-up. Some of the player powers, specifically the ones that just let players draw extra cubes, feel a lot more helpful than others. Having the action cards being locked for the whole season make sense, but it rips the variability away from the game in general. If one player gets ahead in the first few races, it can be quite challenging to catch up to them.
Perhaps the worst part of all, is the limited nature of the cubes. I’ve found that more often than not, by the end of the first or second race, the majority of the cubes have already been bought, making it quite impossible to modify your racing strategy for future races. You’re stuck with the bag you’ve built, hope it works for all races. This also nerfs the between race sponsers, as the ones that give you a chance to get more cubes are simply less helpful than the ones that will clear the wear out of your bag.
I’ve been playing a lot of Automobiles on Board Game Arena lately, playing a season with each of the recommended action card sets, and some of them are really not geared toward this style of play. In one season, the purple cubes had the ability to remove up to 3 cubes, then add one back in. As I said before, every cube was purchased, aside from the useless yellow and the brown wear cubes, so each purple cube is taking 3 wear out and adding one back in. Near the end of the fourth race, all of our cars had more wear than would have been possible in a physical game, and ensuring that each car could only move one or two spaces each round.
I’m not quite sure how I’d recommend fixing this experience. Locking the action cards and carrying over your bag from race to race makes sense, and it should create a sense of momentum, but in reality, it just saps the variability away, making the 3rd, 4th, and 5th race in the season a dull experience of just running the bag you’ve built and trying to come in first. The mid-game sponsors are comparatively boring, and the driver cards are unbalanced, making it feel a little unfair for one player to hold the best one for 5 races in a row.
Perhaps most importantly, racing games have come a long way in the past 10 years. Restoration Games released Downforce in 2017, which gives players the ability to control all the cars with betting being the way for players to win, Thunder Road: Vandetta is ostensibly a race, albeit a violent one, and a race that ends with one car standing more often than a car passing the finish line. 2022’s Heat: Pedal to the Metal garnered a ton of praise the year it released, and one that I keep meaning to go back to. All of these games do a better job of instilling the feeling of a race, the feeling of momentum, and the excitement of that nail-biting finish
Automobiles: Racing Season ultimately feels like it’s a lap too long. The new tracks and action cards are excellent additions and easily worth mixing into the base game. But once you step into the marquee Season mode, the excitement sputters out. What should feel like a grand championship instead drags into a grind, where you’re stuck with the same bag for race after race, and your ability to modify it is totally diminished.
Automobiles remains a clever and underrated racing game that I’ll happily keep returning to, but the Racing Season expansion doesn’t add fuel to the engine. It’s the kind of expansion that sounds thrilling on paper, but when the rubber hits the road, it only makes me want to pack the new maps and action cards into the base box, and leave the rest behind.
Going through these games is really reminding me that the years in which I played the most games are far behind me. Sure, today I have more money so I can buy a lot more games, but the amount of time I give to each video game is vanishingly small. Almost every game on this portion of the top 10 was released between 2000 and 2010, when I was between the ages of 10 and 20. Being an adult sucks sometimes!
90 – Pokémon Snap
Year Released: 1999 | Platform: Nintendo 64
I really don’t know who, in the height of Pokémon craze, thought “Battling and catching Pokémon is boring. We need more photography games!” and yet, they were right! Pokémon Snap is incredibly accessible and offers a unique way to explore a 3D Pokémon world without the usual RPG elements. It’s so engaging that even my sister, who usually isn’t into Pokémon games, loved it. The gameplay is straightforward: you move on rails, passing by various Pokémon, and you need to snap their pictures at just the right moment to score points. There are even tricks to get the Pokémon to pose in certain ways, or get them to interact with the world around them, or even with each other.
The real joy of Pokémon Snap comes from the pride of capturing that perfect shot, much like in real-life photography. Back when the game was released, there were kiosks where you could turn your photos into stickers by inserting your Nintendo 64 cartridge. Sadly, growing up in the middle of nowhere meant I never got to make my own stickers, but the game itself was a blast and a memorable part of my gaming journey.
89 – Tales of Xillia
Year Released: 2011 | Platform: PlayStation 3
Buckle up, because you’re going to be hearing about a lot of games from the “Tales of” franchise on these lists. I won’t belabour every game by going over the trademark Linear Motion Battle System each time. What makes Tales of Xillia special is the locations, they’re the most imaginative of the entire franchise. I also really loved the way they played with the incarnation of Maxwell in the main character, Milla (for those who don’t know, Maxwell is usually an end-game summon in the Tales of games). I thought Tales of Xillia had quite a fresh, more modern world than most of the Tales of games up to this point, and I thoroughly enjoyed the game, even if the story was a bit slow to get started.
I somewhat lament that Tales of Xillia is locked to the PlayStation 3. I mean, I have the console and the disc, so I could hook it up and play it, but that would require me going down to my garage, and that just seems like a lot of effort these days.
88 – Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
Year Released: 2002 | Platform: PC
Growing up, we had the family PC in the living room, with it’s MASSIVE 32GB of storage and 256MB of RAM. Needless to say, it was not a gaming device. And my family didn’t really dive into PC games, as we had the Super Nintendo for video games. When I was in my final year of high school, the graduates fundraised all year, and we managed to purchase a Dell Laptop for each of the graduates (there were only 3 of us after all). Once I had that laptop, I finally had the chance to go back and play some of the greatest hits that PC gaming had to offer, and one of my favourites was WarCraft 3.
Surprisingly, consoles are awful at RTS mechanics, so it was a genre I never really dove into. But playing WarCraft 3, and it’s expansion, I can see why it was so revered. I never ventured into playing against other people, but the single player campaign was engrossing, the gameplay was exciting and tactical, and to this day I’m quite fond of my time playing WarCraft 3.
Sure is a shame that World of Warcraft just prints money, because I really don’t like MMOs…
87 – Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift
Year Released: 2007 | Platform: Nintendo DS
Spoiler Alert, you’ll see Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced higher up on the list, but FFTA2 was a really great follow-up to an utterly stellar game. While on the easy side, I loved so much about what this entry enhanced. More classes, more abilities, more character types, a bigger map, more equipment, it’s everything a player should want, right?
I was disappointed in the story, which was significantly worse than its predecessor. I also found the auction house mechanic to be an unnecessary diversion. But even still, FFTA2 is one of the best tactics games around, and is actually the game I’m playing as I was creating this whole list.
86 – Yoshi’s Cookie
Year Released: 1992 | Platform: Super Nintendo
Now this is a classic that my mom and I played the ever loving heck out of. And a real hot take here, I always enjoyed this more than Dr. Mario.
Yoshi’s Cookie is a simple puzzle game. You move cookies on the X and Y axis until cookies of the same type stretch all the way across the cookie grid, then they clear. As you play, cookies descend from above and from the right, adding to your grid. Each level is cleared when all the cookies have been cleared.
The sound effects in Yoshi’s Cookie are wildly distinct, and to this day, I can still here the bright and cheery chirp that happens when a line of cookies clears. I don’t think it’s really worth going back and playing today, but I still harbour significant nostalgia for this clever puzzle game.
85 – SoulCalibur II
Year Released: 2003 | Platform: Nintendo GameCube
When I was creating the list of games that would go into the lists, then looking at all the amazing games that got cut, I consoled myself with the thought that sometimes, I would say that an entry for a game stands for the whole series, and that’s how I feel for SoulCalibur II. I chose this edition, because it’s the one I played the most, although I did play a significant amount on my friends Xbox as well, then we spent an unhealthy number of hours on the PS2 with SoulCalibur III.
Anyways, SoulCalibur. It’s a one v. one fighting game, where each of the characters has a unique and distinct weapon. From Talim and her dual elbow blades, to Kilik and his staff, each character has benefits and drawbacks. The roster in SoulCalibur II is limited by today’s standards, but I never found myself wanting for more characters. Each one has a story that intertwines with the other heroes, and playing through each character’s story is a joy. As with all fighting games, it’s best played with a group of similarly skilled friends, and SoulCalibur feels like a well-balanced game. Sure, my friends gave me a hard time for picking Kilik so much with his impressive reach, but they all learned how to dodge his staff and get in close to punish.
I don’t like very many fighting games, and I’ve barely touched the series since SoulCalibur III, but if I was going to suggest a fighting game, SoulCalibur would be high on my list of picks.
84 – The World Ends with You
Year Released: 2007 | Platform: Nintendo DS
Gosh, here’s a game that came out of nowhere for me. I picked this one up fairly blind, mostly on the pedigree of publisher Square Enix, and the punk anime aesthetic. Damned, this game blew my socks off the first time I played it.
In The World Ends With You, you (Neku) wakes up without any memories in a crowded intersection of Shibuya, and are thrust into a death game that takes place over 3 weeks. You team up wth a bunch of characters as you battle ghosts and spirits, trying to unravel the mystery and survive.
The gameplay is fascinating. On the bottom screen with a stylus and gesture controls (slashing, tapping, holding down the stylus on an enemy, etc.), you control Neku, who equips various pins that give him different attacks to take down the enemies of the day. Simultaneously, on the top screen is one of your partners, who has attacks that they can preform by pressing specific directions on the D Pad to match symbols on the top of the top screen. Thankfully, if you choose to ignore the top, it gets poorly controlled by an AI. I absolutely adore it when games take advantage of the uniqueness of it’s host hardware.
The combat is wild and frenetic, while the story offers twists and turns that rival almost any other game. I love games that make you feel like you’ve reached the end of your journey, then SURPRISE TWIST! It’s only just the beginning, which is exactly what happens here. I slightly regret not having picked up the sequel, Neo: The World Ends With You. I know I will one day, but time at the moment, is a luxury,
83 – Wii Sports
Year Released: 2006 | Platform: Nintendo Wii
The pack in software for the Nintendo Wii was an absolute Banger. 5 simple sports, that showcase the motion controls, turned out to be one of the most played games in my household in 2007. Baseball, and Tennis, I barely remember, as the sports of choice for us were bowling, golf, and boxing. Boxing, ended up being mostly a mash/swing-fest as we frantically flailed at each other. Bowling was the party game that we broke out all the time. And golf, was what my mom and I played, which, I have to stop and tell you, that I got a hole in one, once. It was glorious.
I strongly feel that every console should have a pack in game, and here, Nintendo delivered.
82 – Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories
Year Released: 2004 | Platform: Game Boy Advance
Hey look, it’s the only Kingdom Hearts game I’ve beaten. Which isn’t entirely my fault, I played ~15 hours of the first one, only to have my cousin save over my save file, and then I played it again to about ~20 hours, only to have my PS2 memory card get eaten by a friend’s dog, and at that point, I just haven’t bothered to go back.
But this isn’t about my woes in replaying Kingdom Hearts, this is about the Game Boy sequel, Chain of Memories. In Chain of Memories, Sora wanders into Castle Oblivion, and immedately loses all of his memories, because that’s the magic of the castle. The game takes you through all the locations from the first game, remeeting all the Disney characters. The gameplay, is a real time action battler, much like the original Kingdom Hearts games, but now all of Sora’s cards are represented by cards. Both yours and your opponents cards/attacks have numbers attached to them, and when two attacks are thrown out at the same time, the card with the higher number wins.
The story isn’t what drew me into Chain of Memories, but the card battling system was super intreging to me. Once you complete Sora’s story, you take control of Riku, and lose the ability to customize your deck, instead are forced to overcome any challenge with the deck the game chooses to give you.
I always meant to go back and play through the Kingdom Hearts series, but I’ve yet to prioritize them. Until something changes, Chain of Memories remains as my sole Kingdom Hearts experience.
81 – New Super Mario Bros. Wii
Year Released: 2009 | Platform: Wii
I’ve always loved 2D Mario games, but when New Super Mario Bros. Wii hit the scene, and introduced 4 player simulationous multiplayer, I was skeptical. And for good reason, the biggest critisim I’ve seen for this game is that the other players get in your way, especially when they die and the game freezes for a couple frames. But those aspects never bothered me, I was able to compensate for the freeze frames just fine, and the utter hilarity that came with having 4 players at the same time just can’t be beat.
I ended up bringing New Super Mario Bros. Wii to a friends house shortly after launch, and we played a 4 player game from start to finish because we were just having so much fun. From leaping off each others heads, to purposefully throwing each other into lava pits, I haven’t full belllied laughed while playing a Mario game in such a long time.
A copy of Wyrmspan was provided by Stonemaier Games for review purposes.
Introduction
Wyrmspan is an odd game to describe. On the one hand, it’s clearly the spiritual sibling of Wingspan, the bird-collecting blockbuster that has brought countless people into our hobby. On the other hand, it trades the gentle avian charm for fire-breathing dragons and cavern excavation. I know I prefer dragons, but I’m not sure if my wife will agree.
I’ll admit, I was sitting on a bus at 7 in the morning shortly after my son was born when I first heard about Wyrmspan, and I let out an audible “pfft”. What I expected at that point was just a full art reskin of Wingspan, perhaps as a collectors item. What designer Connie Vogelmann has done, however, was create something that feels familiar enough to have the “-Span” name, yet is distinct enough to stand proudly on its own.
How to Play
At its core, Wyrmspan keeps the same rhythm as Wingspan. You collect and play dragons to your tableau, hopefully craft an engine, and watch as your combos grow more satisfying every round. But instead of happy little ecosystems, your tableau is a mountain cavern, and your first job is to excavate chambers and then entice dragons to come live in them.
On your turn, you’ll spend dragon coins (a new form of action economy) to do one of three main actions:
Excavate – carve out a new cave, opening up space for dragons and gaining a small bonus.
Entice – pay resources (meat, gold, milk, crystals) to bring a dragon into one of your caves.
Explore – send your pawn through one of your three caverns, triggering resources from your dragons and the spaces between them, effectively activating your engine.
Along the way, you’ll lay eggs, care for hatchlings, and advance on the Dragon Guild track for extra perks. Like in Wingspan, you’re aiming to balance resource management, end-of-round goals, and long-term scoring opportunities, but while the gameplay beats are all familiar, the finished product feels fresh.
Review
The production is everything you’d expect from a Stonemaier Games production. Thick cards, gorgeous speckled dragon eggs, and beautiful artwork that gives each dragon personality. I particularly appreciate that the dragon lore isn’t crammed onto 5 point text on the bottom of the cards themselves, but instead presented in a separate booklet, something that I spent a surprising amount of time flipping through between turns. It’s a nice nod to the theme, and if I can’t use an app to hear each birdsong in my tableau, this is probably the next best thing.
I really have to comment how Wyrmspan improves on some of Wingspan’s rough edges. In Wingspan, early turns could feel painfully slow as you scraped for food and cards, before really opening up in the second and third rounds. Here, the excavation system gives you immediate bonuses, and the Dragon Guild provides a trickle of resources to easily keep things moving. The action economy with dragon coins also gives players more direct control over how and when the round comes to an end. It feels less restrictive, less at the mercy of a bad food dice roll or stagnant card row. I also appreciate that you have a bit of control on when your round ends, in the form of the silver coins. Instead of a set number of rounds, you can choose to keep playing, although it gets crushingly expensive as you choose to do so. I enjoyed managing my silver, choosing to have a lean round so that my next one could be bombastic.
What hasn’t changed, is that like Wingspan, Wyrmspan is still largely multiplayer solitaire. You’ll compete for end-of-round goals, but the bulk of your attention will be mostly focused on nurturing your own cavern of dragons. Personally, I wish there was a bit more friction between players, but the payoff is that Wyrmspan remains friendly and approachable, even with these added layers of complexity.
And speaking of layers, I love the cavern exploration action. Getting bonuses from excavating caves, and bonuses from attracting dragons, turning those bonuses into playing cards, and then moving your pawn through chambers and triggering each dragon as you go is incredibly satisfying. In one game, I had a dragon that cached meat to gain a resource, the next dragon cached meat to gain crystals, and the next dragon paid a crystal to lay 2 eggs, who fed into another dragon who ate eggs for Dragon Guild points. Each dragon fed into each other wonderfully, and made running through that cavern exciting. Discovering those combos is what brings me back to a game time and time again.
Final Thoughts
Is Wyrmspan better than Wingspan? Not necessarily. Wingspan is simpler, cleaner, and more universally appealing. It’s still the game I’d pull out with new players, and it’s the one that has some expansions that improve on the base game quite a bit. Wyrmspan is the heavier sibling, offering more control and more opportunities to shape your engine in clever ways, but overall does require more commitment from its players.
For my collection, the two can happily coexist. My wife still prefers Wingspan for its comfort and accessibility, but I find myself much more drawn to the richer systems of Wyrmspan. And honestly, having dragons to look at instead of backyard sparrows doesn’t hurt.
If Wingspan invited us into the hobby with open wings, Wyrmspan pulls us deeper into the mountain, and rewards us with fire-breathing companions once we get there. I guess the only question remains, is how does Finspan compare?
It’s a weird experience, starting a new top 100 series. In my head they sound like a good idea, after all, it’s 10 more posts for my blog! But I often forget how much effort actually goes into just creating the list, let alone writing out my thoughts for each game.
Regardless, what will be interesting is that unlike my board game top 100, I’ve been playing video games since I was 5 years old. A lot (and I mean A LOT) of these games are steeped in nostalgia and are created cherished memories that I hold dearly to this day. Speaking of nostalgia…
100 – Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose!
Year Released: 1992 | Platform: Super Nintendo
I didn’t watch any of the Tiny Toons cartoon series, but somehow the game Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose made its way into my household, and I loved seeing young bubs dash, slide, and jump his way through the levels. A pure platformer, the whole goal of the Buster Busts Loose is to make it to the end of the level, alive. Familiar faces show up frequently, from the Tasmanian Devil destroying the cafeteria, to a wild west train ride, to leaping to and fro on hot air balloons, I loved playing this game over and over. It was bright, colourful, and fast, often requiring daring leaps of faith at the climax of an exciting level.
99 – Fire Emblem Engage
Year Released: 2023 | Platform: Nintendo Switch
Hey, I actually wrote a whole review on Fire Emblem: Engage when I played it back in May. The summary of that review is that I had FUN playing Fire Emblem: Engage. I was engaged with the army building aspects, tweaking my characters classes, and getting through each battle without a casualty, which is what I really want out of a Fire Emblem game. I’ll save you the though, Fire Emblem: Three Houses didn’t make it onto my top 100, because SO MUCH of the time was spent in between battles. Running through the school, doing all the side tasks and talking to the ludicrous number of characters took up entirely too much time. I felt that Engage had a much better balance between the tactical combat (which I love) and the army management/dating sim aspects (which I’m less fond of). It also tapped into my nostalgia vein really well, as a longtime fan of the series, seeing all the old lords come back was a real treat for me.
98 – Sid Meier’s Civilization V
Year Released: 2010 | Platform: PC
It’s kind of hard to believe that I never played a Civilization game before Sid Meier’s Civilization V. That gap in my gaming history was mostly thanks to the fact that I was a console gamer for most of my life, until about 2014 when I build my first PC and picked up Civ V for cheap.
Civ V is a civilization building 4x game (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate). Players take control of a historical faction, complete with their own special bonuses, and lead their civilization through the ages into prosperity. You’ll create cities, expand your armies, and crawl across the world until you bump up against your neighbours, and eventually conquer them. Civ V is played on a hex map, so it’s basically a board game, but with enough math going on under the hood that you wouldn’t ever actually want to play it on a table.
Civ V is the kind of game that keeps you up until 4 in the morning, saying “Just one more turn…”. The game drip feeds accomplishments and achievements to you, always dangling the next carrot for you to chase. I’ve only finished a game of Civ V once, as I often just end up starting a new game, as that exploration and expansion aspect of the game is what I really enjoy, not so much the combat and conquering. At least not with these mechanics.
97 – Celeste
Year Released: 2018 | Platform: Xbox
Celeste is another platforming game, but this one doesn’t rely on blind leaps of faith. Instead, you play a red-headed heroine named Madeline as she scales a mountain and faces her inner demons and anxieties. The platforming in Celeste is tight and utterly satisfying, and the dialogue and characters are heartfelt. Most of the game has a sombre, melancholy vibe to it, especially when Badeline shows up and heckles Madeline.
Rife with themes of depression and anxiety, Celeste is so much more than a simple platformer, a-la Super Meat Boy. It’s beautiful pixel art drew me in, and the themes hooked me. Some of the platforming challenges are utterly frustrating, requiring near pixel perfect precision. But when you can overcome a challenge that felt unsurmountable, oh the feeling of euphoria makes those hundreds of attempts worth it.
96 – Braid
Year Released: 2008 | Platform: PC
Braid happened to be one of the first indie games I bought after building my first PC in 2013. I like platformers, and it was highly rated, so I figured I had nothing to lose. What I ended up getting was an amazing little experience. The platforming puzzles tickled my brain just right, the time travel mechanic made it easy to try tricky jumps again quickly, and the twist at the end caught me completely flat-footed.
Braid instilled a love of indie games in my heart. Games made by small teams that felt like they were made by people who love games, and less like pieces of product to be marketed and sold. It’s only a couple hours long, but it was absolutely worth the short trip!
95 – Mini Metro
Year Released: 2015 | Platform: Android
As much as I don’t like to admit it, I spend a lot of time on my phone. Mostly thanks to sitting on the bus. But in general, I don’t like scrolling through social media much, I’d rather be playing a game. Unfortunately the mobile gaming landscape can be kind of a mess. Thank goodness for games like Mini Metro. A simple puzzle game about creating routes to get passengers from location to location. Each game starts so simply, with only 3 stops. But as time goes on, the screen slowly pans out and more locations pop up. Each week you get access to some more things, like more trains, extra passenger cars, more bridges/tunnels, and extra lines. The goal is to just last as long as possible and deliver as many passengers as possible.
Mini Metro is a game my wife and I both got fairly competitive at. We would lay in bed playing the same maps to compare our scores. Never before did I think I would curse a circle out so hard, but when a cluster of stops makes a line have 7 circles in a row, it’s horribly inefficient! Really, any game that gets me invested to the point where I’m cursing basic shapes is a pretty excellent game.
94 – Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition
Year Released: 2018 | Platform: Nintendo Switch
When I first heard that there was going to be a Dynasty Warriors spin-off set in the Legend of Zelda world, I let out a groan. While I love The Legend of Zelda, I’ve never been a big fan of Dynasty Warriors. I’ve always found the gameplay repettive, and I’ve also never been fond of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which Dynasty Warriors draws its story and lore from.
I finally played Hyrule Warriors in late 2020 when my daughter was born. She had awful sleep patterns and would sometimes only sleep if she was being held. Now, if you don’t know, it’s unsafe to sleep while a baby is sleeping on you, so I spent many nights of my paternity leave laying on the couch at 3 in the morning with my daughter sleeping on my chest, and I needed a game that was active enough to keep me awake, but brain dead enough that my sleep-addled brain could comprehend it. I don’t find Hyrule Warriors a particularily phenomonial game, but I do cherish the memories that I associate with the game.
93 – Quest 64
Year Released: 1998 | Platform: Nintendo 64
Now here’s a game that I KNOW doesn’t hold up. Quest 64 has the prestige of being my very first 3D RPG adventure. Its simplicity made it an ideal starting point for my little 9-year-old brain, featuring all the basic elements of an RPG: character interactions, a story-driven plot, food upkeep, combat, levelling, and a search for those little magic gem things. It felt like a pure, early adventurer’s journey, the simple world offered a childlike charm that resonated with me.
However, Quest 64’s simplicity is a double-edged sword. I did replay this a few years ago, and found it utterly lacking in depth. All the mechanics felt watered down, and everything about this game is utterly forgettable. Town 1 and Town 2 are indistinguishable, and I can’t recall the name of anything without looking it up first.
That being said, it still holds a special place in my heart. I recognize that Quest 64 shouldn’t be on any “top 100 games” list, and yet it’s still a part of my history as a gamer, so here it sits.
92 – Pokémon Stadium
Year Released: 1999 | Platform: Nintendo 64
I tell this story often, but when I was 8 or 9 years old, my grandparents took my sister and I on a road trip to a family reunion. I was given $100 in spending money. At the first stop, I bought Pokémon Red from the local Wal-Mart for $50, and I spent the other $50 on batteries for my Game Boy. I was the perfect age for the Pokémon craze, the target demographic, and I was utterly hooked. So when Pokémon Staduim came out and had these amazing 3D visuals, I knew I had to get my paws on it.
And eventually I did. But I never did get the transfer pack, so my entire experience playing Pokémon Stadium was using the rental Pokémon to tackle the gym leaders and elite four. And beyond that my sister and I spent an amazing amount of time playing those little mini-games. I never did manage to beat her in Dig, Sandshrew, Dig…
91 – Tetrisphere
Year Released: 1997 | Platform: Nintendo 64
Hey look, 3 Nintendo 64 games in a row. Funny coincidence. Definitely not indicitive of how many Nintendo games are going to be on this list…
I love Tetris, as you’ll find out higher on the lists, but Tetrisphere is a wonky 3D take on the puzzle game. You twist the ball around, slide pieces around, then slam your pieces down on matching shapes that clear that piece, and any attached piece of the same shape/type. The goal of the game is to try and get to the core like it’s some kind of jawbreaker and release the prisioner. It’s pretty simple, I really enjoyed it as a kid, and I’m a little sad that it never made an apperance outside of the Nintendo 64!
A perpetual argument amongst ignorant anglophones in the board game community is how you pronounce certain game tiles. Orléans gets the or-LEENZ or OR-le-enh. Being a written medium, I don’t need to wade into this argument. I have the benefit of copy and paste, then everyone can read the word how they choose. My dilemma is if I include the accent over the e or not. Including the accent is technically correct, but leaving it off is almost certainly better for SEO. Is my goal with this blog to be seen, or is it more important to me to be correct? Bah, who’s even searching for Orléans these days, anyway?
Released in 2014, Orléans by designer Reiner Stockhausen hit the scene to critical acclaim, and was promptly nominated for the 2015 Kennerspiel des Jahres. Now, it lost to Broom Service, but I think that speaks more to the proclivities of the Spiel des Jahres judges, and less about the quality of the game itself.
Orléans is a bag building game. Players pulling worker discs from their sacks, then placing them on various work houses on their player boards. Once an action has all the necessary staff, players take turns activating those actions. Generally, they gain a new worker disc, and move up the corresponding track, gaining a specific benefit. Then, the worked workers are also tossed back into the sack until it’s time to draw again.
The actions you’re taking in Orléans are all fairly simple. You move a meeple around a board, dropping guild houses in each of the cities (hopefully doing so before your opponents). You’re earning coins, books, citizens, building new technology tiles, and eventually, sending your staff to the town hall, where they will go onto contribute beneficial deeds, and then… never come back to work for you?
Okay, the theme falls apart pretty quickly when you try to examine it closely. But what’s important here is that the game mechanics are solid. Each turn, you pull a handful of disks out of your bag, and you get to decide which actions you want to take that turn. Sometimes, you’ll be blocked out of an action because you didn’t pull enough blue fishermen. Other times, you’ll draw 4 of him, and get to do almost nothing anyway. I know that doesn’t sound like fun, but bear with me here. I promise it gets good.
The score track in Orléans features these development status spaces, which has the opportunity to multiply some of your endgame score (your guild halls + your citizens). I’ve already touched on the guild halls, just litter them across the province. The citizens generally rest at the end of each of the tracks, which means gunning for one of them is going to fill your bag up with one type of worker. Another way to earn those citizen tokens are for being the last person to contribute to a beneficial deed. In classic group project fashion, all the glory goes to whomever reads the conclusion, not whomever did the most work.
Orléans often feels like a race, you’ll nervously eye your opponents player boards trying to ascertain if they’ll be able to snag the bonus tile that you’re gunning for, or waiting for just the right moment to place your workers onto the beneficial deeds track. Remember, those workers won’t ever come back to your sac, but a well-timed placement can net you one or two of the coveted citizen tokens that multiply your development status.
On one hand, It’s hard to compare Orléans to anything else I’ve played because it feels so unique. Other bag builders (Quacks of Quedlingburg and Automobiles) don’t come close to the same feeling of strategy and engine building that Orléans offers. Crafting your bag to deliver you the perfect workers turn after turn feels satisfying. By the end of the game, you’ve built several new action spaces that only you can use, you’ve covered 4 worker spaces with gears so the actions have become way cheaper, and you’re pushing up on the end of each of the tracks. Orléans
There is such a sense of progression in Orléans. Your bag grows and shrinks, disks come in as you take actions and go up the tracks, and flow out as you commit them to the beneficial deeds. Your actions get stronger as you crawl up those tracks, making it feel like you’re making way more progress that you ever thought possible at the start of the game. That said, Orléans can be a long game, 2 hours or more in the higher player counts. It’s not terrible, but considering you’re kind of doing the same 6 actions/ manipulating the same tracks over and over, it can start to drag if players are ruminating too much on their turns.
It’s kind of fascinating to have such a luck element such as bag building in a strategic euro game. I feel like I should be frustrated by the handcuffs of only being able to take the actions based on the workers that came out of the bag. But that luck is what makes Orléans special. Also, it feels like there are several paths to victory, from having guildhalls all over the place, to running up on the tracks, to just amassing an impressive hoard of goods tiles.
Orléans is one of those rare Euros that manages to be both strategic and a little chaotic. You craft your bag and then just hope the right people show up to work. It rewards careful planning and punishes tunnel vision, offering a dynamic bag-building arc that’s hard to replicate elsewhere.
It’s not perfect. The theme barely hangs together, the rounds can DRAG with overthinkers, and at higher player counts it might outstay its welcome. But what it lacks in narrative flair, it makes up for in mechanical satisfaction.
For Euro fans who enjoy engine-building with just enough luck to keep things spicy, Orléans is a classic for good reason. It’s easy to teach, deeply replayable, and always leaves you wondering how you could’ve done just a bit better.
