As we creep closer to the halfway point of my top 100 games, the variety of games begins increase, and dexterity games start to appear! Spoiler alert, I love dexterity games. Look forward to seeing more and more as the list counts down! In a wild departure from last time, this section of the list has no economic farming games!
70 – Pandemic: Fall of Rome
Pandemic: Fall of Rome Is a cooperative game designed by Matt Leacock and Paolo Mori that takes the main gameplay concepts from Pandemic and twists it into a struggle to survive against invading tribes. The biggest change in this version of Pandemic is that instead of having threats popping up all over the map and the need to cover a large area in a short amount of time, the threat cards push different tribes closer and closer to Rome in a (almost) straight line. It’s up to you and your Romans to set up defenses, push back the invading horde, and make the necessary treaties before Rome falls to the barbarian tribes!
I really loved this take on Pandemic. The mechanics felt vaguely familiar, but the challenge was wholly different. The change of having the barbarians marching toward Rome on a predetermined route added more predictability and allowed us to see our impending doom from further away. It also gave me the feeling that if we were better at the game, we’d be able to change our fate.
This is the version of Pandemic that I am eager to explore further. While I wouldn’t recommend this as a introduction to the Pandemic system, if someone told me that they couldn’t take the whole virus theme now that we’ve all collectively lived through a pandemic, I’d wholeheartedly recommend buying Fall of Rome over base Pandemic. Heck, these two games feel quite different, and I have no issues recommending having both in collection.
69 – Crokinole
Something that I’m discovering about myself more every day is that I have a deep affinity for dexterity games. Perhaps it’s the analog to sports, where you only have one chance to make that perfect shot, and although the tension mounts as the odds are stacked up against you, you get into the flow and manage to hit that triple ricochet to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. It is something that most board games can’t compare to.
On the flipside, unlike most board games, if you make a bad shot you can’t just say “oh, I’m just going to undo and take my turn again”, like some people do. Instead you have to live with your mistakes and try to turn the situation around. At risk of sounding like a Scrooge, I firmly believe that when you take a turn, then pass play to another player, but then notice you made a mistake, taking your mistake back is poor form. Of course, I play games for fun so I’m not forcing my friends to adhere to my own moral standards, but the inability to undo a bad shot is a feature inherently baked into dexterity games, and I thoroughly enjoy it.
Crokinole is the classic family dexterity game. Each player takes turns flicking discs into the centre. If your opponent has discs on the board, you must first hit one of their discs for your disc to count. At the end of the round, you count up your scores and the first player to 100 wins. There’s also a rule about keeping your buttocks on the chair, and I’m just so happy that someone actually wrote “buttocks” in a rulebook.
68 – Hansa Teutonica
Hansa Teutonica has one of those “no, it’s good I swear” board games. It has terribly boring cover art, and an extremely boring beige board. However, Hansa Teutonica is an absolutely amazing and fun territory control euro game. My first experience playing Hansa Teutonica was at a friend’s house, where he pulled it off the shelf and said “I have this game up for sale online, but I kind of want to play it once before I sell it.”.
As the game teacher of the group I was handed the rule book and spent the next 20 minutes profusely swearing under my breath. Hansa Teutonica isn’t hard to play, but the rulebook has some peculiarities, such as having a “thematic” German name for every aspect. Also, certain concepts that are key to the game are quite difficult to conceptualize. For instance, having tokens that could either be in the general supply, your personal supply, or the board, and they move between those three places frequently.
Luckily the rulebook as been re-written for the big box edition of the game, and it makes learning the game so much easier. Hansa Teutonica is an excellent game about josteling your opponents out of your way while maneuvering yourself into advantageous positions. I get a kick out of placing my tokens in exactly the right spot then immediately trying to convince my opponents that it’s in their best interest to bump me (despite the fact that doing so would give me more power on the board). It’s just so enjoyable.
For the record, after our first play my friend immediately removed Hansa Teutonica from his ‘for sale’ list and still owns it to this day. If that’s not a recommendation, I’m not sure what is.
67 – Vast: The Crystal Caverns
Vast: The Crystal Caverns is similar to Hansa Teutonica in that it’s super hard to teach. Players who are tenacious enough to get past the barrier of a rulebook are rewarded with a great gaming experience. Vast is a heavily asymmetric game where every player is almost playing an entirely different game. Each characters goal lies directly in the way of another character’s goal; the Goblin wants to slay the knight, the knight wants to slay the dragon, the dragon wants to escape the cave, the cave wants to collapse in on everyone, and the thief wants to steal everything and get as much treasure out as possible. I, for one, am stoked to see that “the cave” is a character unto itself.
Because each character is so different, the game requires multiple plays in quick succession with the same group of players. As players become more familiar with the nuances of their own character, they start to realize how best to throttle each individual character to slow them down enough so they don’t run away with the win. The Dragon is great at slowing down the thief, but does poorly against the Goblins, for example.
I am always searching for the opportunity to play Vast more. This is a great game that’s waiting for me to delve deeper and uncover the gems that lay inside. The real unfortunate part for me is that as a gamer, I greatly value discovery, so I am constantly looking to discover new games. This game is fantastic for replayability, but my heart longs to discover new games. The list of new games I want to play and explore grows so rapidly I find myself leaving gems like Vast on the shelf for far too long.
66 – Just One
Just One is a party game by Ludovic Roudy and Bruno Sautter that has been a consistent hit whenever I introduce it to people. In Just One, one player is the guesser while the rest offer clues. The guesser does not get to see the hidden word, and the clue givers are tasked with writing one-word clues to lead the guesser to the goal. However, if two people write the same clue, then that clue is removed from the game, giving the guesser even less information to use to form their guess.
My favourite way to teach this game is to just tell people to repeat the name of the game whenever they have a rules question. “How many words can we use in the clue?” “How many guesses does the guesser get?” “How many pieces of pie do I get?” The answer is always “Just one”.
65 – Mr. Jack
Mr. Jack is a clever 2-player hidden movement game from Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc. In Mr. Jack, one player has the role of the investigator, while the other plays Jack the Ripper. Jack’s goal is to sow confusion and escape the map, while the investigator’s sole goal is to capture Mr. Jack and hold him accountable for his actions.
The game begins with 8 characters on the board, a deck of 8 character cards which show each character’s ability, and a deck of 8 alibi cards, one of which is given to Jack to tell them which character they have to get off the board. Each turn 4 of the 8 character cards are revealed. The players take turns activating those four characters, moving them around the board and using their special abilities. Once all four are used, Jack must declare if he is visible or not (visible meaning next to another character, or in in the light of the gas lamps). After that declaration, any characters who can be ruled out as “not Jack” are flipped over to mark them as innocent.
Jack wins the game if his character escapes the map or hasn’t been caught at the end of the 8th round, or if the detective captures the wrong character. The detective can only win if they move any character on top of Mr. Jack’s character, capturing them.
Mr. Jack is an excellent and quick 2 player game. While the odds of winning do feel slanted towards the player who is playing Jack, it’s fast enough that once one game ends, it’s easy to just switch roles and start a whole new game, again and again.
64 – For Sale
For Sale by Stefan Dorra is a small auction game about buying and selling homes. A game of For Sale begins by auctioning off houses. Each round, a number of houses equal to the number of players is placed in the centre of the table. Players take turns bidding their limited funds to acquire one of the houses. If a player chooses to pass instead of increasing the bid, they take back half of the money they have bid up to this point and take the lowest value house. This continues until the all players but one are out of the auction. That player pays all of their money into the bank and takes the last remaining value card.
Once all the houses have been bought, it’s time to sell. Much like the first round, a row of value cards are laid out. Each player chooses one of their houses and simultaneously reveal their choices. The home with the highest number gets the most value, and so on. Once all the houses have been sold, the player who amassed the most money wins.
For Sale is the perfect game to begin and end a game night with. It plays quickly, and every turn has players wrestling with tough decisions. Your opponent bid 6 for that house, do you dare bid 7? Or, do you bow out to take the lowest house, but pay 2 for it? Is it worth paying 2 for a low house, or 7 for a high house? The amount of cost/benefit analysis going on in your head in a short period of time is just incredible.
63 – Star Realms
Star Realms is a quintessential deck building game. It has no extra boards or side mechanics to distract you from the goal of crafting the best desk possible and using it to crush your opponent. In Star Realms each player starts with the same weak deck. Turn by turn you earn currency by playing cards and buying new cards from a common store to add to your discard pile, which will be cycled into your deck eventually. Cards in Star Realms come in one of four suits, with many cards offering much stronger abilities if they’re played at the same time as other cards of the matching suit.
Star Realms has distilled the deck building experience down to an engaging and deep game that fits in your pocket. The entirety of the core game is comprised of 128 cards. Dozens of expansions exist if you happen to be one of those people who play the base game over a hundred times and really want to shake up the gameplay. Star Realms is a direct conflict 2 player game, so this isn’t the game to play if your partner doesn’t enjoy attacking or being attacked directly. With that caveat, if you and a friend or partner can enjoy a direct conflict game, and are looking for a fast playing 2 player duel that is eminently replayable, I suggest picking up the base deck of Star Realms and really getting lost in the game!
62 – Shogun
Shogun by Dirk Henn appeared on my table with a sticker from the local Salvation Army Thrift Store advertising that this game was purchased for the hefty sum of $4.00. Opening the massive box of bits, I was sure we’d find something terrible, like the box was just being used to contain grandma’s knitting needles. Fortunately, upon opening the box and performing a full inventory we were delighted to find that there wasn’t a single piece missing. I have often wondered if there’s a board gamer somewhere who returned home from a college semester only to find that their parent ‘cleaned’ up and donated Shogun amongst other valuables to charity.
The game of Shogun is encased in a large box that contains a lot of small pieces. The centrepiece of the game is the fascinating combat resolution mechanism. In Shogun each player is a Daimyo trying to take control of feudal Japan during the Sengoku period. If two players find themselves embroiled in conflict, they each drop cubes representing their troops into a cube tower, and whichever player happens to have more troops fall out the bottom decides the winner. There are situations later in the game where a player is attacked and only gets to drop a single cube of their colour into the tower, but several cubes that had been stuck in the tower in the previous battles suddenly come to their aid to create a unexpected victory. It’s a different kind of randomness from other combat resolution mechanics (such as dice), but I really enjoyed the mechanism.
61 – Keyflower
Keyflower by Sebastian Bleasdale & Richard Breese is an auction game where players are bidding their workers to get tiles into their village. These tiles assist in procuring resources, which you can then use to upgrade the tiles to earn more points. Honestly, the theme of building a village abstracts away very quickly, leaving only the excellent auction and worker placement mechanics behind.
A game of Keyflower takes place over 4 seasons. In each season tiles will be placed in the centre of the table for all players to use and bid on. Each player will have a mix of red, yellow, and blue meeples. You can either place these meeples on a tile to take the action, or place them along the outside of the tile to bid for ownership of the tile. The round ends when all players pass in succession. At the end of the round, tiles are distributed to the players that won them, and any meeples on the tiles become the property of the winners. Each player also gets to claim a boat with more meeples and play continues. After 4 seasons, the player with the most points is the winner.
Keyflower is a perfect hybrid of worker placement and auction mechanics. Tied into those mechanics is some resource generation and management that you’ll need to master to win the game. Keyflower has a fairly random setup making every game feel different. The art on the tiles is simple and perfect, and the auction injects a wonderful amount on tension. Keyflower is a unique game, and an excellent design that I feel everyone should experience at least once in their gaming career.
This week in my top 100 games series we’ll see plenty of sheep, birds and even a panda. We’ll be at odds with the weather as it controls us in Takenoko, and we’ll try to control the floods in Lowlands. Let’s stop beating around the bush and get to it!
80 – Takenoko
Takenoko is a colourful game about building a garden, growing bamboo, feeding a insatiable panda, and cursing the whims of the weather. Designed by Antoine Bauza, Takenoko has players competing to accomplish 3 different kinds of tasks with the winner being the player the one who accrues the most favour with the emperor.
I absolutely love the “toy-factor” of this game. The bamboo pieces are large, brightly coloured, and stand tall off the table creating an excellent table presence. Stacking bamboo pieces is simply fun! The game behind the bamboo spires is straightforward and easy to play. Takenoko is a great game for families to play, as the decisions you make turn to turn are simple, but there is enough strategic depth to keep older gamers engaged.
79 – Wingspan
Wingspan, designed by Elizabeth Hargave, is a wonderful game that has transcended the board game hobby. So rarely does a board game get the attention of the wider world, but damn, Wingspan has broken the glass ceiling to reach a wide demographic. Every illustrations on the (many) cards of the various birds are wonderful, and the gameplay itself is very smooth. The production of Wingspan is also a work of art. The quality of each component has been lifted to a whole new degree that board games a decade ago could only dream of.
I have heard and had some criticisms of Wingspan (such as players spending the entire last round of the game just pumping the egg engine), but the reality is that any game that can reach such a vast audience and showcase just a glimpse of how good modern board games can be, deserves to have it’s praises sung.
Get it? sung? like, birdsong?
As an added bonus, Wingspan is one of my wife’s favourite games, and it is a nice change of pace when she is the one asking me to play a game.
78 – Forbidden Desert
Forbidden Desert is the 2013 follow up to 2010’s Forbidden Island. Another of designer Matt Leacock’s co-op board game, Forbidden Desert tasks players with searching the desert for lost pieces of an airship they can use to escape the hellish landscape before they’re buried under mountains of sand or die of thirst.
If you’ve played Matt Leacock’s previous co-op games, you’ll feel right at home with the rules. Take 4 actions, the world tries to kill you, the next player takes their turn, the world tries to kill you, and so on. In Forbidden Desert the environment the players are struggling against is a sandstorm represented by a hole in the layout of the tiles. Each turn the storm will move, shifting the location of the tiles relative to each other and dumping sand on top of all your hopes and dreams.
I vastly prefer Forbidden Desert to Forbidden Island, if only because Forbidden Island felt entirely too easy. I know you can increase the difficulty, but the board was too static. Forbidden Desert addresses my complaint by shifting the location tiles all around the board, then dumping a bucket of sand on my head. I suppose I technically asked for that.
77 – Las Vegas
Las Vegas is not going to be the last Rüdiger Dorn game on this list. One of the things I appreciate most is that his designs aren’t iterative; he doesn’t retread places he’s already been. Las Vegas is a push your luck, territory control game where you roll dice, curse, claim a spot on a casino, then curse further as your friends elbow you out of all the good spots.
When approaching Las Vegas (much like a real casino) you have to be ready to lose. Armed with the understanding that your fate is at the whims of the die and your loss is practically already assured, you can cackle with glee as you make ‘sub-optimal’ decisions and spitefully deny other players the things they want.
Ironically enough, when I sit down to play Las Vegas I have a singular goal in mind. I pick a specific person and make sure that person does not win (you know who you are). According to my stats, out of the 8 games we’ve played together, he’s won 0. That’s a win in my books.
76 – Troyes
Troyes is a dice worker placement game designed by Sébastien Dujardin, Xavier Georges, and Alain Orban that no one can agree on how to pronounce. Perhaps it’s just us ignorant anglophones that won’t agree when we’re told it should be pronounced “twah”.
I don’t have a lot to say about Troyes other than it’s quite the unique game. You’re contesting for spaces that give you more dice that allow you to do more of the things you want on your turn. There’s a semi-cooperative aspect where each player MUST contribute. Players who fail to prepare for this stage can find themselves robbed of all their opportunities. You can also use money to use the other players’ dice, which can really save you from a bind, or screw you when the player to your left takes the last red 6 that was on the table!
I also really love the art direction, if only because it’s so different. Visually, it stands out from the crowd of board game boxes.
75 – Power Grid
Power Grid by Friedemann Friese is another box that stands out on a shelf due it being oversized and garishly green. Hidden inside this long and thin cardboard box is a wonderful economic game about generating power and supplying as many cities as possible. Power Grid allows you to choose to either be an oil burning magnate with cheap power plants but a requirement to continually purchase resources to generate energy, or buy the very expensive renewable powerplants that generate power without any further resources needed. Power Grid is a modern classic that is great if you want to stretch your mental math skills; the board and gameplay is littered with numbers. Players are constantly trying to balance costs and benefits while maximizing the energy they can produce and their expansion into the cities on the board.
One criticism that I would like to see addressed is the ramifications of energy production explored. I’d like to see a mechanic picketing a nuclear plant, or a ‘government’ impose carbon taxes on coal plants while giving benefits or subsidies to the green energy. Then again, not every game needs to imitate life, and Power Grid as it stands now is an excellent economic game. Adding more mechanics might just muddy the nuclear pools.
74 – Tigris & Euphrates
Tigris & Euphrates is designer Reiner Kenizia’s magnum opus. It is a cutthroat area majority and hand management game where you try your very best to manage the expanding web of tiles, deftly positioning your leaders into advantageous positions and ensuring that when the impending conflicts finally come, you’ll be the one left standing after the dust settles.
Your goal in Tigris & Euphrates is to earn the most points of all four different kind of victory points, as your final score is equal to whichever one you have the least of. It doesn’t matter if you have dominated the red military or black government points because if you have failed to get any blue trading points, you won’t be winning this game.
Conflict in Tigris & Euphrates is tense and exciting. The tiles that you and your opponents lay down on the board don’t ‘belong’ to anybody until one player has placed their leader next to those tiles. If ever a group of tiles is joined to another group and two leaders of the same colour meet, war promptly breaks out. The majority of your combat power is determined by what’s already on the board (the number of same colour tiles touching your leader before the combat began), but players can commit tiles from their hand to swing the tide of battle and cause devastating upsets to the political topography of the board.
If you are a fan of area control games (which I usually am not) and have not played Tigris & Euphrates, you owe it to yourself to play it (hopefully multiple times with the same person). Each subsequent play enriches the overall experience.
73 – La Granja
La Granja is a lovely euro game designed by Andreas Odendahl and Michael Keller. In La Granja you’re tasked with expanding your farm, growing and processing goods, and delivering your goods to the market to score victory points.
What sets La Granja apart from the (many) other farming euro games is the multi-use cards. When you play a card you have to decide if you want to use the top, left, right, or bottom edge of the card, slotting it into the appropriate spot on your player board, hiding all the options you chose to forgo. This forces you to to decide what’s most important to you on each particular card. A card in your hand may be the only card that will let you grow olives, but you already have all the products to fulfill the order at the top of the card for victory points! But if you don’t choose the olives, how will you grow the olives you need for next round?
La Granja is a wonderful game with many options for players to explore. It’s also available to play on Board Game Arena and Yucata!
72 – Caverna: The Cave Farmers
Another farming theme board game hits my list at #72, Caverna is the big brother sequel to Uwe Rosenburg’s classic, Agricola. In my experience Caverna offers players more varied paths, allowing each player to do their own thing and avoid stepping on each others toes.
In Caverna, you play as a family of dwarves, carving out a life on the side of a mountain. Each player has their own ‘farm’ board with 2 halves. The left side is dedicated fields and pastures, where you can pen in animals and grow crops. The right side is the cave where you can hew out dwellings and build rooms that will offer your dwarven family special bonuses that assist as you amass a fortune.
Each of your dwarves has a ‘level’. You may chose to forgo the regular actions on the board and instead send that dwarf out on an adventure, with the higher levels allowing them to go on longer and more lucrative quests. This feature of the game can help you get resources that you desperately need if there is somehow a dearth of that resource available.
If Agricola’s cruel and unforgiving mechanics rubbed you the wrong way, I’d suggest giving Caverna a try, as it may have addressed some of your grievances. Personally, I liked how tight and punishing Agricola can be, and found Caverna to deliver a cornucopia of resources that robbed the game of it’s difficultly. I have been informed by trusted friends and advisors that my feelings in the matter are ‘wrong’.
71 – Lowlands
Ahem. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Lowlands is yet another farming themed euro game. Luckily Lowlands by Claudia and Ralf Partenheimer has shifted the focus from growing vegetables, to managing the exponential growth of breeding sheep and stemming the floods that threaten to wash away everything you’ve built.
In Lowlands each player has a farm and can produce sheep. At the end of a round if you have two sheep, you’ll earn a third, because… that’s how sheep grow. As the game goes on and on you may find yourself trying to cram 8 new sheep into your overcrowded paddocks like some kind of crazed sheep horder.
At the same time, a flood is coming. All players may contribute to a shared dyke that will hold back the floods. Should the dyke hold against the tide, and no precious sheepies will perish. If the dyke is poorly built, the waters will rush over your board and many sheep are swept away never to be heard from again. Because this is a cruel village, everyone knows who has and hasn’t maintained the wall. Along with some nasty gossip, you’ll also be faced with harsh penalties being doled out each player who prioritized their own farms’ needs and let the flood cause untold mayhem.
There is a balance to be struck; if you’re the only player who is contributing to the wall, everyone else will be spending their time growing their terrifying sheep engine. At some point it will be beneficial to let that flood come, especially if you have no sheep to care for. At the same time, there are benefits to be earned by contributing to the dyke, but not enough to offset a massive sheep monopoly. Lowlands offers a rare semi-cooperative mechanic that I just can’t get enough of!
Welcome to part two in my Top 100 games series, going through the next 10 games in my list! I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes time to pick a game, the games listed here aren’t necessarily at the forefront of my mind (almost as if there were at least 80 other games ahead of them), but I can tell you that if any of these games get suggested, I am down to play and know that I’ll have a great time doing so.
90 – Colt Express
Colt Express designed by Christophe Raimbault is a hand management, action programming game about being the best thief amongst a colourful cast of scoundrels. In Colt Express everyone plays cards one at a time that represent the actions they will perform and the order they will be performed. Each round is dictated by a round-card that tells all players how many actions can be queued up, and whether those actions are public or secret. If the actions are public, the card is placed face-up, while secret actions are denoted by face-down cards.
Your goal is to accrue the most wealth by scooping it up from the floor, shooting your opponents, and swinging fists in hopes to make people drop their hastily gathered loot. Other actions include shooting at your opponents (or getting shot by stray bullets), leaping up and down the train cars, and controlling the Marshall, who also shoots at anyone who gets too close.
What makes Colt Express fun is the chaos that ensues from needing to pre-plan and program all of your moves for the round, then having something unexpected throw all of your hopes and desires out the damn window. The whole table hoots with laughter they watch characters bumble about the train. You will hold your head in your hands with disbelief as your character moves unexpectedly to an empty train car, then punches the air, tries to pick up loot that isn’t there, and finally shoots their gun at nothing.
Broom Service by Andreas Pelikan and Alexander Pfister is a pick up and deliver game about witches delivering potions. In Broom Service, everyone has a handful of cards that dictate the actions that are available to them. Each card has a stronger “Brave” action and a weaker “Cowardly” action. The actions on a card are usually very similar, but the brave action is much stronger.
So why would anyone ever choose the cowardly action? Excellent question reader! At the beginning of a round, each player picks 4 of their 10 cards and that forms their ‘hand’. The first player will play one of their action cards and choose to play either the “Brave” or “Cowardly” action. Then, every other player in turn order will either pass, or play the same action card from their hand and also choose to play the “Brave” or “Cowardly” action. Anyone who chooses the cowardly action can simply perform that weaker action. Any players who chose to be brave need to wait until everyone has had a chance to play or pass. If any subsequent players choose to be brave, then all previous brave players don’t get to do anything for this action!
The tension of desiring to do the brave action, but fearing the following players snatching it away from you is genius. I love the theme of witches trying to deliver their potions around the world, and the art evokes memories of classic fairytale story books.
88 – Seasons
I’ve often tried to sell Seasons to my friends as a light version of Magic: The Gathering. In Seasons you play as sorcerers competing in the legendary tournament of 12 seasons with the winner being crowned archmage of the kingdom of Xidit. The game begins with a draft phase, where you swap hands with your opponent picking a card to keep and passing the rest until you have 9 cards in your hand. You then must separate those 9 cards into 3 stacks of 3. You’ll draw these cards into your hand at the start of each year.
On every turn, the die that correspond with the current season are rolled and each player gets to take one into their play area, gaining the benefits shown on the face. The remaining die progresses the time track forward, perhaps hurtling you into a new season.
I’ll be upfront; while I’ve played this game 16 times, every single play has been on Board Game Arena. The system takes care of all the bookkeeping like tracking your energy intake, your tableau limits, and your crystal counts. I could see how playing this game on the table would be a little onerous, but damn is this game worth playing, and worth playing repeatedly. The art is cute and charming, and players are constantly forced to make decisions on how best to play their cards. Each season has their own set of dice that dictate the types and amount of resources that will be available to players. for example, If the game is currently in the summer season, water energy may be in short supply, but fire will be plentiful. Of course, there are ways to mitigate the luck and restrictions, but they are not without their own penalties.
Seasons is best played with 2 players, and only gets better and better as you and your opponent reply it, learning how best to manipulate the system to amass the most crystals, and claim your crown as Archduke.
87 – Underwater Cities
Underwater Cities by Vladimir Suchy takes players into the depths of the ocean and tasks them with creating the best underwater metropolis possible. Kind of. The theme here has a tendency to melt away as your brain spins, trying to maximize your actions to maximize your productions and end game victory points.
UnderwaterCities utilizes a unique worker placement system that uses cards from the players hands. On your turn you can take any of the open colour-coded actions along the edge of the game board. At the same time you play a card from your hand. If the colour of the action and the card match, you can do both actions. If they don’t, you only get to do the action on the board.
This game is an exercise in loss aversion. I’ve found myself delaying taking a critical action simply because I didn’t have a properly coloured card to play along side it and refused to do something that felt inefficient. Underwater Cities also has an excellent arc to its gameplay, with the first few rounds making players feel starved for resources, then growing their engines until suddenly you find yourself placing several costly building on a single turn.
I recall when this game was released a few people compared it to extremely highly rated (by other people) Terraforming Mars. Personally, I don’t see the comparison, Underwater Cities is much more complex (and the better game in my opinion), but the games play significantly differently and don’t evoke the same feelings in players.
Underwater Cities is available to play on Yucata.de
86 – Calico
Calico by Kevin Russ is a tile placement game about matching patterns and colours to satisfy the whims and desires of cats. Each player takes turns placing a tile from their hand, then pulling one from an offer. Each player has their own board with 3 objectives that can be satisfied by patterns, colours, or both. You also get additional points if you can connect three tiles of the same colour you also get a button that’s worth points. Everyone knows kittens love quilts with buttons
Don’t be fooled by Calico’s adorable aesthetic. The actual game contains an intense cerebral workout. You only have two tiles in your hand and 3 in the supply that you can take from to refill your hand after you place one tile. Within these limitations, you’re tasked with trying to place tiles that contain 6 different patterns and 6 different colours in ways that connect like patterns and colours, while also satisfying the objectives on the board which require multiple different sets of colours and patterns. It does not take long before everyone at the table has their head in their hands and the only thing keeping the table from being flipped is the adorable kitten artwork dotting this game.
85 – Automobiles
Automobiles by David Short is one of my favourite racing games (being so far down the list is pretty telling on how I feel about racing games in general (But if you break it down, aren’t all games a race in the end? (No, shut up))).
I’ve written in depth about Automobiles before, so I won’t rehash words I’ve already written. For those who don’t know, Automobiles begins with two trays of cubes. One tray hold white, black, and various shades of grey cubes, representing the various gears of your car, which correspond to spots on the game board. The coloured cubes have special abilities that are set at the beginning of the game when you draw a card for each colour (the game has 4 cards of each colour, offering a wide variety of powers to choose from). From those trays of cubes each player seeds their own bag with a standard set of white and grey cubes, and a chosen selection of coloured cubes. Then they’re off to the races!
There aren’t a lot of bag building games, and theoretically, this could also work as a deck builder; the bag and cubes don’t do anything that cards couldn’t do also. Having the bag of cubes click and clatter as your swish your knuckles around, searching for a cube is satisfying. When you and your opponents are pulling around the final turn and you desperately need a specific cube THAT YOU KNOW YOU HAVE IN THE BAG SOMEWHERE really gets your heart pounding in your chest.
Also, it’s fun to make the vroom noises with your mouth as you move your little car around the track. Automobiles is available to play on Board Game Arena and Yucata.
84 – When I Dream
I love when a party game makes me question if my friends are insane or not. When I Dream by Chris Darsaklis has one player close their eyes and everyone else offer one word clues to try and lead them toward a word as dictated by a card. The guesser gets one guess, then the word card gets moved to either the correct or incorrect pile, then the game presses on with a new word card drawn.
After a couple of minutes the guesser is then asked to recount their dream, trying to name all the elements they can remember. If they’re able to name all the words that were in the ‘correct’ pile, they get a bonus two points.
What makes this game excellent is each of the players also have a role. Some are encouraged to try to get as many words correct as possible, while others are trying to lead the guesser astray. Others yet are trying to achieve a balance between the correct and incorrect cards. The inclusion of asking the guesser to recount their dream is a fun exercise that looks easy until you find yourself in the hot seat and the only word you can remember for the life of you is “spaghetti”.
83 – Evolution
Evolution, designed by Dominic Crapuchettes, Dmitry Knorre and Sergey Machin, is a hand management game about survival of the fittest. In Evolution you are tasked with growing creatures’ populations and body sizes, and assigning traits that will help them not only survive, but thrive.
The gameplay loop begins with a bunch of small herbivores, happily eating from a well stocked feeding hole. As a turn or two passes, the herbivores grow larger and get more efficient at eating. Eventually one creature gets a taste for blood and turns into a carnivore, feasting upon its neighbours. Very quickly defenses are raised; some animals learn to climb, other have defensive herding, and other develop a hard shell.
Evolution Is a brilliant game that has each player double guessing what their neighbours will do. With every creature you control having access to different traits, and some traits working off neighbouring creatures, you can have fun building an impenetrable wall, or you can have fun trying to tear down the other players’ walls. Only the fittest will survive.
82 – Everdell
Everdell is so hot right now. Released in 2018 and with 3 successful Kickstarters funding a myriad of expansions, Everdell has climbed the Boardgamegeek ranking and at the time of writing this, sits as the 31st best board game of all time.
Everdell is a light worker placement tableau building game set in a fantasy forest. As you play your workers and bring cards into your tableau, you’ll slowly start to see an engine form. It’s easy to play, has absolutely gorgeous artwork, and a family friendly andromorphic animal theme. It’s easy enough to play with your family, while maintaining enough complexity to keep adults involved. I don’t really want to use the term “gateway game”, but this gorgeous game is a perfect ambassador to show people how beautiful and interesting board games can be.
I’ve enjoyed my plays of this game a lot, and if the opportunity to play it more arose, I have no doubts that Everdell could climb higher in my rankings. As of this moment, it has settled at #82.
81 – Century: Spice Road
It seems for every game that has new and interesting mechanics, another one is just about trading cubes for other cubes to trade into points. Century: Spice Road is in the latter, but does so in a fast and satisfying way. In Century: Spice Road you take action cards into your hand, then play the cards to manipulate your cubes. Some cards will simply gain you more cubes, others will let you trade in specific recipes, while other others will allow you to upgrade some cubes higher along the value chain. The other action you can take is to sell a specific combination of spice cubes to acquire a point card, which are necessary to win the game.
Century: Spice Road does restrict players to only being able to hold 10 cubes at a time, so you feel an ebb and flow of resources as you build your wealth, then drain your coffers to nab a particularly high scoring card. The game often begins with people taking card after card from the row, but soon enough each player should have a small engine they can exploit to increase the number and value of their spice cubes until, finally, one person is labeled “The Spiciest Trader”
The Century series of games have the added benefit of being able to be combined with the other games in the series to enhance each other. I’ve played each of the games in the Century series, and while each one stands on it’s own as a good game, I firmly believe that Century: Spice Road stands taller than the rest.
Welcome to my personal and professional top 100 games as of March 2020. Each member of my game group compiles their own list each year around March, and we use each of our lists to determine what our favourite games are, and what our collective favourites are. It’s also really interesting to see how a game can rise and fall throughout a year, as we reflect on multiple plays of each game.
The best example is Terraforming Mars, which was on my list of top 50 games three years ago, but each time I play it, I like it less and less. My most recent play of it I found myself actively disliking the experience, so when it came time to make this list, I let it fall off completely.
Another interesting facet of having your own top 100 list is that you can scoff and feel superior when you see other top 100 lists, especially ones that are crowd sourced, like Reddit’s /r/boardgames top 100, or the Board Game Geek top 100, both of which have a pretty stark bias toward more complex games. I’ll talk more about my thoughts on these lists in a summary post at the end of this series.
This Complexity Bias in Ratings graph is from Dinesh Vatvani, who has an excellent series of posts about analyzing board games, that you can read on his website
Alright, enough chatter. Without further ado, here is the start of my top 100 games:
100 – Codenames
Codenames, by Vlaada Chvátil, is a game that needs no introduction, as it is constantly one of the best selling games each time I see a game store publish their yearly sales report. Codenames is an incredibly fun party game that takes only a minute to explain,encourages players to be both clever and witty, and often ends in uproarious laughter. Players are split into teams and take turns making one word clues, hoping to lead their team to their agents by guessing the correct word cards on the table. If they fail and their team members guess the wrong cards such as the bystanders or the other team’s agents, the turn is promptly ended. If you happen to inadvertently lead your team to the assassin, the whole game is over.
One of my favourite aspects of this game is trash talking the other team as they try to guess their spymaster’s clues. There’s nothing better than watching their perturbed faces as I try to throw them off-base. “Your spymaster said space, of course they want you to pick Turkey! Everyone knows about the Great Turkey Belt that sits between Mars and Jupiter!”
Stone Age by Bernd Brunnhofer (the box features his pen name, Michel Timmelhofer) is a worker placement game set in the titular time period. In Stone Age, you’re placing your workers onto various spots on the board, hoping to acquire goods, cards, buildings, or to improve your tribe. For every worker you assign to a spot you get a die to roll, which increases the amount of goods you can earn.
Stone Age is unique in that it’s one of the few games I can think of that lets you feed your people rocks, and features the “Bone Hut” action space where you put two workers in and three workers come back to your hand at the end of the round. It’s a simple game to teach and understand which makes it a good game to introduce to people who may be skeptical about these ‘newfangled board game things’.
I’ve only played Pax Pamir: Second Edition by Cole Wehrle once on Tabletop Simulator, but I am incredibly keen to try it again. Pax Pamir has players shifting their allegiance between the British, Russian, and Afgani factions. The game ends when one player achieves victory, requiring all players to keep each other in check.
Pax Pamir is the kind of game that you can’t give a fair review to after only a single play. The decisions you make and interactions that occur between the players will change based on everyone’s knowledge of the available cards in the game. The interplay of the mechanics and subsequent consequences for your (many) choices is deep and rewards those who explore it. The game offers many ways to subvert your opponents expectations, leading to exciting plays and situations.
I do need to prioritize getting Pax Pamir back to the table. One play is not enough for this complex game to show you all that it has to offer, despite the rules being fairly straight-forward.
97 – Qwirkle
Qwirkle by Susan McKinley Ross is a hand management, tile placement game about placing shapes and colours onto a shared structure. Each turn you place your pieces on the board, matching either their colour, or the depicted shape (a rainbow of squares for example, or a variety of red shapes). The hook is that every piece that goes down must match either the colour or the shape (but not both) of the connected pieces.
Placing more pieces connected grants you more points (think Scrabble style scoring), and placing the 6th piece of a set earns you a ‘Qwirkle!’ that comes with 6 bonus points if you shout out the word (yes, the shouting is mandatory).
The downsides of Qwirkle involve the colours. If the room has poor lighting, it can be nearly impossible to differentiate some of the colours, and don’t even bother with this game if you’re colour blind. The perks are that the tiles are thick wooden pieces that won’t blow away in the wind, and if you buy the ‘Travel Edition’, then it comes in a little pouch that is easy to bring camping or to the beach, which I can’t say about many games.
96 – Cacao
Cacao by Phil Walker-Harding is a clever tile laying game about gathering cacao fruit and selling it to villages, while amassing gold by travelling up a river (I guess there’s gold at the end of the river?).
In Cacao you take turns placing one of your square worker tiles adjacent to a jungle tile in the middle of the board. If due to your newly placed tile, there are now 2 worker tiles adjacent to 1 unoccupied jungle space, you have to fill this space with a tile from the jungle supply. Each one of your worker tiles depicts a number to actions along each of the sides. When you place your tile, you can do that many actions on the jungle tile that the side was placed against.
Cacao offers a unique spin on player interaction. If you place your tile near one of your opponents, you choose what tile will be adjacent to his workers, perhaps forcing them to take sub-optimal actions. As the jungle tiles begin to sprawl along the table, it creates a pleasant pattern of jungle and worker tiles. Cacao is easy to teach and play, and is a wonderful game to bring along to a family game night.
Lanterns: The Harvest Festival by Christopher Chung is another family friendly tile placement game that looks gorgeous on the table, and has a friendly way to interact with your opponents.
Using the theme of floating lanterns on a lake, players pick up cards by playing a tile into the lake. When a tile is placed, all players receive a lantern card that matches the colour on the side of the tile that is facing them (no side-by-side gaming here!). You use those cards to satisfy recipes (that depreciate in value as they get claimed by other players) for points at the end of the game. The winner is the player who uses the cards other players give you efficiently and earns the most points.
When introducing hobby games to people who aren’t traditionally ‘board gamers’. I find it’s very helpful to use a visually appealing product. Lanterns: The Harvest Festival fits that bill perfectly. Another way this game appeals to non-gamers is that it keeps everyone involved regardless of whose turn it is, so people do not get bored between turns. Lanterns: The Harvest Festival has been a large success with my family, and has become a go-to gift for couples who are just starting on their board gaming journey.
94 – Potion Explosion
Potion Explosion by Stefano Castelli, Andrea Crespi, and Lorenzo Silva is a marble drafting game about collecting resources and crafting powerful potions (which you can then drink to take advantage of special abilities).
Potion Explosion features a tray that has 5 marble chutes. On your turn you may pick and 1 marble from the chute and remove it. If your action causes two marbles of the same colour to collide, then you take those as well, and so on until the chain reactions stop.
With a surplus of ingredients in your hand, you’re tasked with completing potions for points, and completing sets of the same potion for even more points. You can take a little help and pull a second marble on your turn (this one does not trigger explosions), but doing so will cost you 2 victory points at the end of the game.
Potion Explosion’s marble chute and mechanic of ‘causing’ explosions is brilliant. It takes the potentiallyboring concept of set collection and adds a fun toy factor on top. Plus, getting one of those turns where you can chain 4 or 5 explosions to end up with 9 marbles in your hand feels amazing.
I introduced this game to my Candy Crush /Bejewled loving mother, who ended up falling in love with it. I suspect if she lived closer, I would have bought this game and played it over a dozen times with her by now.
Potion Explosion also has an app on Android, iOS, and Steam.
93 – Coloretto
Coloretto by Michael Schacht is a push-your-luck card game about drawing cards, placing them in rows, then claiming rows. The goal is to get as many cards of one suit as you can, but not to have too many suits in the end.
There’s also an advanced scoring rule that rewards players that get some, but not all of the cards in a suit, as the amount of points you get for that suit at the end of the game crescendos, but quickly diminishes if you get too greedy.
A row of cards exists for each player. Once you claim cards you’re out for the round. The hook becomes deciding to stay in to possibly get a couple extra cards, but if you wait too long,the available rows fill up with suits that you desperately don’t want, and you may find yourself with a mitt full of junk.
Coloretto is one of the first ‘designer’ games that found its way into my hands. Back before I really got into the board gaming hobby, a friend of my girlfriend was moving to France for a couple of years. He mentioned having to sell all his games because transporting a board game collection to the other side of the world just doesn’t make sense. My girlfriend (who is now my wife) offered to store his collection for him, as she had just moved into a bigger house with 2 roommates.
I pulled Coloretto off the bookshelf and opened the rules. My wife and I instantly fell in love with this game, playing it about a dozen times and roping in her roommates to play it as well. Little did I know that push-your-luck mechanics are one of my wife’s favourite things (best exemplified in her favourite game, Can’t Stop, which I’ve touched on here and here). Remind me to never take her to Vegas…
I’ve often heard that more people prefer Zooloretto, which uses similar mechanics in a larger board game, but I haven’t had the chance to play it yet.
Camel Up By Steffen Bogen is a betting, dice rolling, racing game. The joy of Camel Up is the unpredictability of how the camels will race along the track, and not knowing who will come in first.
In Camel Up You don’t play as a specific camel, aiming to be the first to cross the finish line. Instead you play as a gambler, makings bets on which camel will be the first and last to finish. The hook of the game is that if a camel moves and lands on a space that already contains a camel, they stack up. When a camel moves, all the camels on top of them move along as well (this clearly simulates real-life camel racing).
Camel Up also features a fun pyramid that holds a die for each of the camels. Each round consists of those die getting pulled out of the pyramid one by one until each die has been rolled once. Each camel may only have one die in the pyramid, but they will often move multiple times in a round by stacking on top of the competition.
Camel Up is a pleasant low-stakes gambling game. Because the race is so unpredictable and short, throwing caution to the wind is the perfect way to enjoy this hilarious game. The randomness of which camel moves first and how ‘Laggy Larry” can be in last place, hop on the back of the right camel and ride them all the way to victory creates dynamic and exciting moments, especially if you managed to bet on the dark horse that stole the victory.
The goal of the game isn’t to be the fastest, or the best, but to be the richest. You’ll rely on the information your opponents give you when they choose to move a camel, and make bluffs, claiming to have the knowledge on which camel will ultimately come in first to take the cup.
91 – Pandemic: The Cure
Pandemic: The Cure is a dice based version of the extremely popular Pandemic game. In Pandemic: The Cure, coloured dice represent the four viruses that threaten to envelop each continent. It’s your mission to spread out, treat the diseases, and discover the cure quickly before time runs out. On top of that, you get to roll a mittful of dice over and over, which really is one of my favourite things to do.
I find that Pandemic: The Cure plays more quickly than its full board brother, but the increased randomness makes it more difficult to effectively plan and win the game. You can roll your action die as many times as you want to try and earn the actions you desperately need to perform, but one of your die faces will contribute to the pandemic and one bad die roll of 5 biohazard symbols could easily cost you the game.
Comparing the randomness to the base Pandemic game, you almost always know where the diseases are going to spawn, so you can plan to have the right resources around to mitigate the disasters. Because Pandemic: The Cure abstracts away the individual cities and instead focuses on entire continents, it’s harder to know where the hot spots are going to be.
That said, I still really like Pandemic: The Cure. Designer Matt Leacock has developed a fantastic cooperative system that is satisfying to play, and Pandemic: The Cure feels significantly different enough differentiate it from others in the Pandemic line of games. The asymmetry of the player roles is higher in this version, as each player get their own set of action die that will push them toward a specialization. For example, the medic’s die are full of heals, but severely lack die that allow the player to move around efficiently. The strong asymmetric nature of the player roles and higher degree of randomness does inspire replayability, as a dream team might fail, while an unlikely duo could pull out a surprise victory that releases us all from a two week year long quarantine.
