I know a lot of people use the PubMeeple ranking engine to generate their top X lists, but I’ve gotten to the point in my gaming career where that tool is almost unusable for me. Comparing 500+ games takes thousands of matchups and takes literal hours to complete.
What I do to make these lists is go through BGG and sort by all the games I’ve played, then give them a ranking from 1 – 10. I then export the list, sort the games by their ranking, and then take each respective number and figure out the order within that segment of games. What really shocked me was learning that I have some games that I’ve rated an 8 that didn’t make it onto the top 100 list. There are so many games out there that even great games don’t crack my top 100!
But my feelings are always changing, so maybe if they see another play, they’ll work their way into the list the next time I do this.
I love that the components for the game is just a generic deck of cards, and yet the way you interact with the game is engaging and exciting. Making the royalty cards bosses to be overcome, and every suit a special ability is some special, out of the box thinking that I really appreciate.
The resource market brings me so much joy. The ebb and flow of fuel that dictates which plants can produce energy is easily my favourite thing about Power Grid. I’ve only played this twice, and haven’t played it in over 5 years, but it obviously left quite the impression on me to remain on my top 100 list even through years of not playing it.
How dynamic the gameplay is with different players. When I played a 2 player game with Otter, we were absolutely rolling in resources. When I played a 5 player game, most rounds each player only gets 1 action, so you really have to make them count. I really enjoy that Le Havre not only works at low and high player counts, but that the experience is so different.
87 – Inis
My favourite thing about Inis:
The quality of decisions grow as the group gets more familiar with the cards. In the first game, the draft is somewhat important, but after everyone has a game under their belt, every card you take feels monumental. Handing your opponent a hand of cards that you know could cripple you is delicious.
86 – Underwater Cities
My favourite thing about Underwater Cities:
The interplay between the cards in your hand and the actions on the board. It’s tight, but not too tight. Gently nudging you from doing EXACTLY what you want to do, and doing what might be the most efficient thing, feels great. I love having to decide between the action on the board I want to do, but not having a card, or, having a card that I really want to play, but don’t have an action on the board that benefits me.
The whole game revolves around the central mechanic. There’s a grid of building tiles that require you to a worker with a number along the edge of the board to claim the tile that many spaces in from the edge, and place it into a matching space on your player board, with points being awarded for certain things being adjacent to other buildings. There are two modes of play, one gives everyone a set of numbers for them to use, the other pools all the numbers together into a common supply. I literally cannot tell which mode I prefer, both are so amazing to play, and this central mechanic is genius.
The double-sided cards mixed with the mechanic of not being able to re-arrange your cards does allow the space for some clever play. I keep expecting to get bored of playing Scout, but it’s been a joy every time I play.
I like arguing with my friends over which words could possibly connect with the clues they’ve given us and agonizing over what clues to give. How do you connect the words Quilt and Sausage? Homemade! I love word games like Just One and Codenames, as you’ll see further on down this list, and I feel like So Clover sits right up with them, which is an impressive feat. There’s a lot of word-based puzzle games out there, and breaking into the top spots is an accomplishment.
The amount of details in the map is astounding. Over the course of all the missions you’ll be pouring over the map for hours, and while it starts to feel familiar, you’re constantly discovering new people and new situations that you must have missed the last four times you were investigating a certain area. Discovery is something I’m always craving, and MicroMacro: Crime City delivers on that front.
The way the barbarians march gives an amazing sense of impending dread. Unlike base Pandemic, where new hot-spots can pop out anywhere, Fall of Rome has a great progression to it. Tribes you ignore slowly follow their path towards Rome, giving the game a great thematic feel.
Here we are again, counting down my top 100 games of all time. It’s been about 3 years since I last did this, and a lot has changed in my heart and soul. Not to mention, I’ve played a lot more games since then, so, let’s get right into it!
I won’t be spending a huge amount of time on each game, as many of them now have full reviews, which I’ll try to link in where appropriate. What I will be doing is just focusing on something that I love about each of these games. This isn’t to say that each of these games is perfect, far from it. But each of these games does have something to love, something that makes them stand out in my mind.
La Granja takes multi-use cards and takes them to the next level. Every card can be used in 4 ways, either to expand your farm on the left or right side, as an order along the top, or as a player power along the bottom. Forcing players to make the choice between either an excellent power or the perfect order to fulfill makes La Granja a delight to play
Much like La Granja, I love the way multiple ways dice are used. 3 dice are rolled into every action of the game board. The pip value can affect the power of the action, and the colour affects the ‘pure, tainted, or forbidden’ quality of the dice. At the end of each round, your karma must be balanced, or you may suffer some penalties.
Also, having a standing Spire is fairly unnecessary to the gameplay, but it does make the board look so much more impressive when it’s on the table
I really like the turns in Alhambra when the stars align, and you happen to buy several cards in the same turn. It feels amazing slapping down the perfect amount of cash three times in a row, slot all the tiles into your garden, then your opponents suddenly realize that you just overtook their green majority right before the scoring phase. So satisfying!
The core mechanism of the sun going around the board and the ebb and flow of the sun and shade is a really fascinating puzzle. I also love the 3d trees and watching the board grow from just a few saplings to a dense forest.
The dice worker placement is excellent. I like the mechanic where you can use other players dice, for a cost. This grants you access to more actions than what would normally be available, or, if you’re first in player order, can snipe all the dice of a specific colour (for a cost) to control access to the associated action. I really appreciate that level of freedom.
The aspect of the game that sets it apart from the rest of the Pandemic universe! The way the water flows is wildly interesting to me. I also find Pandemic: Rising Tide to be quite a bit more difficult than the other Pandemic games that I’ve played, and the challenge is something I appreciate.
The polyonmino puzzle, especially with the oval play space. So many Polyonmino games (Like Patchwork or Bärenpark) have you playing your tiles on a square plane. The Isle of Cats choice to make the boat a bit rounded on the ends makes it a much more interesting game
93 – Tak
My favourite thing about Tak:
It’s so simple, yet surprisingly deep. I love it when someone proclaims that a game is stupid or has no strategy, then can’t beat me in it. Such is the case with Tak. It’s so easy that it feels like it’s anyone’s game at any point, but a sufficiently skilled player will win every single time.
92 – Star Realms
My favourite thing about Star Realms:
Speed and size. I love that Star Realms contains an eminently replayable and engaging 1 v 1 deck building experience in a tiny deck of cards. Many games have tried to do similar things to Star Realms with much more production, but I still feel compelled to come back to this little deck of cards (disclaimer: I have no expansions, which is why my copy of Star Realms is still so small)
91 – Red7
My favourite thing about Red7:
The constantly changing rules keeps players on their toes. Because every player has to be ‘winning’ at the end of their turns, the rules and table situation is constantly changing, and I love the way these colours bend my brain!
If you’ve been following some of board games largest and best creators on social media, you may have noticed that trick taking games are enjoying a bit of a renaissance at the moment. With dozens of fascinating games appearing, all with their own interesting spins on the genre, it can be a little intimidating if this is a genre of game that you haven’t spent a lot of time with. From Cat in the Box, to The Crew, to Jekyll and Hyde, to Ghosts of Christmas, all of these games are “Trick taking +” for the new millennium.
Going WAY back to 1997 for a moment, I want to introduce NYET! by Stefan Dorra to the mix. NYET! is a semi-coop trick taking game where the players determine the parameters for the round. Let me explain. In a round of NYET!, all the cards are dealt to the players. Then, beginning with the dealer, players take turns choosing one of the aspects of the round to be covered up. It’s less bidding for what to do, and more vetoing. Maybe your hand is void of blue cards, so you ensure that blue is not the trump for the round. Maybe you have nothing but low cards, so you really don’t want each trick to score for much, so you cover the 4 point spot. Around and around the table, players place their tokens on a little board, determining 5 aspects. The first player, how many cards are discarded, which suit is trump, which suit is super trump, and how many points the round is worth.
Once the parameters have been set, the first player chooses their partner, and the game commences! Like any other trick taking game, a lead card is played, players must follow if possible, if not possible, can play any card from their hand. The highest value card played that matches the lead suit takes the trick, unless a trump is played, then the highest trump card takes the trick, and the winner starts the next round. One more hook, if you take a 1 from an opponent, it’s kept as loot. Once all cards have been played, score points based on the board for every trick and loot you and your partner managed to capture. The first player to pass 100 points is the winner.
There’s a few things in NYET! that are just fascinating to me. First, the board offers a dramatic, dynamic game. Each round, you assess your hand and then veto the aspect that would be most devastating to you. Some rounds you’ll have several things in your hand that, if they go right, means you’ll have a killer turn. On the other hand, someone arbitrarily vetoing the yellow 1’s as super trump can leave you with a handful of loot that you might have to give away. Those 1’s can either be the most valuable thing in your hand as a super trump, or, the worst thing in your hand as loot for your opponents.
There is no way this ends well
The next thing that makes NYET! shine is the fact that the start player every round chooses who their partner is going to be. Shifting alliances means the scores will rise unequally, and there’s a surprising amount of information that can be gleaned from what your opponents chose to veto. There will be times when you think the player across from you would meld well with your hand, but they’re in the lead. Are you going to assist them in earning more points, or do you choose one of the other players in the hopes you’ll close the gap?
The other fascinating aspect is that your partner won’t always be across the table from you. There were a few times in our plays where we got caught in a nasty pincer trap. The first player would lead a card, my partner and I would follow, and the lead player’s partner would come in with the hammer and win the trick. Not leading or concluding a hand felt like a tough position to be in, but I find it fascinating non-the-less.
There are lots of moments of tension in NYET!. When playing with odd number of players, the group with fewer players gets a doubler card, which creates some amazing come from behind victories. If you’re not careful, a round could end up with every trick and loot being worth -2 points, causing chaos and strife as everyone tries desperately to slough off their best cards at the right moment. Because the teams are ever-changing, players are playing for themselves. Moments of comradery are short-lived as you immediately stab each other in the back. There is humour and excitement in this trick taking game, especially when someone slams down their super-trump and completely changes the temp of a hand. A game of NYET! never fails to get me and my friends shouting.
NYET! is a fantastic game from a by-gone era. I’m sad that more people haven’t played this, especially as Trick-takings games continue to rise in popularity. NYET! is a game that I love to play, and while I’m not particularly good at trick taking games, the auction board makes me feel like I have just a little bit of control. And the chance that each trick in a round could be worth -2 points adds a tiny bit of chaos that I absolutely love.
I feel like everywhere I look, people are expressing their distress at the#666666 amount of stuff we all have. Our kitchen counters are full of air fryers, coffee machines, and tea kettles, our drawers are overflowing with knickknacks, and our board game shelves are buckling under the weight of triple layered cardboard. People everyone are calling out game boxes that are mostly empty, while praising other games for reducing their footprint on our shelves. Bezier Games looks at this landscape and says, “you know what the people want? Colossaleditions“
I know that Colossal Editions are not for me, but I couldn’t help myself when I saw a new in shrink Royal Collectors edition pop up in our local used marketplace. I hemmed and hawed, sold off my copy of Massive Darkness, and used the funds to procure this big fancy box for myself.
Castles of Mad King Ludwig is a 1 to 5 player game, where players are trying to build the best castle. Each round, the Master Builder takes all the tiles available for purchase this round, and sets their prices by placing each one below a spot on the market track. Then in player order to the left of the Master Builder, all players can buy a single tile, handing their money to the Master Builder. The Master Builder themselves gets the final option to buy a tile, but their money goes into the supply.
Players take the tile they purchased, and place it into their castle, adjoining rooms via doorways, and scoring points accordingly. There are 8 different kinds of rooms in a variety of sizes, and each room has different scoring opportunities. Some tiles will give points by being connected via an open door to other specific types of rooms, while activity rooms have a high intrinsic value, but will lose points if they share a wall with other kinds of rooms. You don’t want a bowling alley next to your bedroom after all. Then there’s the basement rooms, which will offer points based on specific types of rooms found throughout your entire castle, adjacency not required.
Rooms are considered complete when all of their doorways are connected to other doorways. When a room is completed, it triggers a special bonus based on the type of room that it is. All players will have secret goals in which they’ll earn points at the end of the game, and there’s some public scoring objectives that are revealed at the start of the game as well. When the deck of room cards runs out, the game is over, and the player with the most points has pleased the Mad King, and I’m sure the others are banished to the dungeons for their failures.
I already knew that I lovedThe Castles of Mad King Ludwig before I bought the Royal Collectors edition. There’s tension and conflicting decisions all over the place. From the Master Builder setting the price of the tiles, to deciding where to put the rooms into your castle and which bonuses to chase down, I’ve never felt bored when playing this game, but I’ll expound on that later. This new edition gives the game a gorgeous face lift. All the tiles are now vibrant and speckled with art and Easter eggs. I found a couple copies of Suburbia littered amongst the tables in my castle. The look of the game is great, but the functionality isn’t perfect.
Starting with the whole Big Box experience. All the tiles and game pieces are kept in 4 trays at the bottom of the box. Generally, I expect a Game Trayz inclusion to assist in setting up the game, but that’s not the case of Castles of Mad King Ludwig. Instead, you need to lay out the board, slot in these green PVC looking holsters, pull all the tiles of each shape out of the trays, shuffle them up, and count out a certain number of tiles of each shape depending on the player count. I understand why this is necessary, as any stacks of tiles that are depleted at the end of the game are worth extra points, but I hate it. It feels tedious, and then I need to put the trays aside for the rest of the game, as they aren’t needed past the initial set up. Then, all the heaviest pieces, the Kings Favours poker chips, the metal coins, and the player pawns are all in a single tray, making it significantly heavier than the rest of the trays. I cringe as I pull that tray out of the box and feel the plastic bowing under its own weight. It hasn’t failed yet, but I have my concerns.
As for the player pawns, there are 20 colours to choose from. 20! In a 5 player game! Someone can say “I’d like to be blue please” and have 4 slightly different options! Combined with the 20 swans, there are 20 foyers as well. It feels even more excessive and unnecessary. On one hand, hooray for choice. On the other hand, I’m probably never going to play with more than half of these pieces, they were created for nothing.
My own production qualms aside, the gameplay of The Castles of Mad King Ludwig remains largely unchanged from its original debut 10 years ago. Each round a number of tiles comes out, the Master Builder chooses the price for each tile, then all other players get a chance to buy. I love this phase, the master builder has to balance making the best tiles expensive, but not unreasonably so. The other players similarly need to choose between giving the master builder all their money and taking the tile they want. The ‘I split-you choose’ bidding mechanism is great for creating delicious decisions.
Then building your castle is its own bundle of trade-offs. Rooms want to be adjacent to certain other rooms, but not adjacent to some. Sometimes you’ll really want to complete a room to earn its completion bonus, but the only tile available to you that round does nothing to help your score. I love building the castles, and seeing how sometimes they sprawl horizontally, and other times they seem to twist in on themselves, creating a crowded and hilarious castle.
The Royal Collectors edition also came with a couple of expansions, namely the Moats, Swans, Secret Entrances, Towers, and Royal Decrees. Each one is a small addition to the game. None of which are overwhelming, but each one being a separate entity that you need to teach. Most of them you could include with new players, but some, such as the Secret Entrances, I would leave out just because they can be quite influential if played right.
It’s hard to say much more about The Castles of Mad King Ludwig, because the summary of my experience is “it’s good! Real good!”. Years ago, I picked up Ted Alspach’s other game Suburbia, and felt like it was the better design. As time has gone on, however, I find myself much more inclined to return to the Mad King’s Castles. The dynamic market feels much more interactive, and I always find looking at each player’s castle a delight at the end of the game. There’s a whimsy here that Suburbia is missing. Not to say that Suburbia is a bad game by any stretch, heck no. But my appreciation for The Castles of Mad King Ludwig has grown over time, while Suburbia has stayed consistent. I love this game, and would play it at any opportunity. Yes, the Royal Collectors Edition has some missteps with the production, and I did read some people being displeased about a new expansion being announced before this “complete version” of the game was even delivered. That doesn’t bother me, I don’t need expansions to this game. I’m so happy every time this hits the table, and I get to play in my little sandbox building a glorious castle.
Want to hear this post in a podcast? Check out the Talking Tabletop Podcast Episode 4 to hear my voice read these words, amongst other great contributors!
I feel like this post may be preaching to the choir, as I suspect the intersection of person who reads a board game blog and person who takes an active role in teaching and introducing new games is close to a circle. Regardless, it’s something that’s been on my mind lately, and for those of you who listen to this and aren’t the primary game teacher, I hope you appreciate the person you have in your life for the role they fulfill.
Firstly, my background. I am the primary rules teacher for our game group, and our usual cadence is that we meet on Wednesdays at one of our houses (we rotate who hosts for the evening). Usually on Monday the host will drop a couple game suggestions, and everyone will give their opinion on what they’d like to play, in addition to confirming their attendance.
That’s a lot of rules…
I am usually the one who pulls up the rulebook and give it a read through. Then, on game day, I generally take the rulebook and give the abridged version to the group. If any questions come up, I usually know where to find them in that book, just due to the fact that I’ve read the book at least once, so I’ll read out the rule as written, and sometimes we’ll debate the meaning of the rule.
I don’t always learn well from JUST reading a rulebook, and in fact, I learn best when I have the game in front of me and I can move pieces as I talk through the rules, that’s how I best internalize rules, by doing. Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good at teaching my friends how to play, one of the tricks I’ve learned works well is to get everyone’s hands on pieces during the set-up. Get one person to shuffle cards, get the next person to sort components, get the third person to place tokens on the board, things like that.
That said, by the time game night rolls around, I’ve generally already spent 30 minutes to an hour researching the game, even if it is just reading a book and looking for FAQs and Errata’s. It’s a hidden time cost, one that doesn’t always get recognized. Depending on the complexity of the game and the quality of the rulebook (Hansa Teutonica, I’m looking at you), that can flex in either direction. Personally, I find it incredibly difficult when rulebooks have thematic names for all the different aspects that’s only mentioned once at the start of the book and never again. Like, the first time I read the rule “For 1 action, a player may displace another player’s trader from a house along a trading route (not from an office). To do so, he removes the other player’s trader and replaces it with his own trader or merchant from his personal supply; however, the displacing player must pay a penalty by moving an additional trader or merchant from his own personal supply back into his stock.” I had to stop for a second and just shake my head. It makes sense when you’re actually playing Hansa Teutonica, but out of context, just as words on a page, it’s hard to make sense of it.
In Hansa Teutonica, cubes are traders and discs are merchants.
Going a bit further, game teachers have an extra cognitive load to bear. In addition to playing their own game, developing their own strategy, they also end up being the arbiter of the rules, watching each other player’s turns to make sure no rules were missed. If rules questions come up, the teacher needs to stop thinking about their strategy and pivot to looking up the specific question in the rule book.
Now the ugly part. With new games comes rule mistakes, and sometimes, hurt feelings. I get an awful, sinking feeling in my gut when I teach a game one way, only to realize halfway through that we’ve made a critical error. Sometimes it comes up on a player’s turn and I get a “I didn’t know that was a rule! I wouldn’t have done this if I had known that!”. I get it, it sucks when the wind is taken out of your sail because of a mistake. Thankfully, no one in my group gets really heated, we all know it’s just a game. We’ll debate how best to rectify the situation, either play out the rest of the game with the rule as we’ve been playing it, or undo turns to make the aggrieved party whole
Leaning and teaching a new game is difficult. There’s a lot of nuance that you don’t always glean from just reading a rulebook, sentences that don’t make sense when taken out of context of the gameplay. I recently had someone tell me a story of a time they taught a rule wrong at a public meet-up, and one of the players threw a bit of a fit and just… left.
There’s a lot of stuff in the Voidfall box
The inspiration for this post mostly comes from my recent Voidfall experience, whereby the time we took the first turn, I had invested like, 6 to 8 hours in unboxing, organizing, re-boxing, learning, and setup. 6 hours of my time that I’m spending, so our group can have a better experience.
In the end, all I’m trying to say is, if you have a game teacher in your life. Say thanks! Acknowledge the effort they’re putting forth for the group, and if they make a mistake, be lenient.
And if you’re not willing to be lenient, then take on the task of teaching the games. Be the change you want to see in the world.
