We’ve arrived at the cream of the crop. My top 10 games of all time. Serendipitously, this is also my 200th post on this blog! Nothing more to say, other than thanks for reading!
10 – Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization
My favourite thing about Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization:
How deep and satisfying the puzzle is. I really cannot overstate how much I enjoy wrestling with the systems in Through the Ages. Now, it’s a game I’ve only played offline once, and it was tedious and took hours, but, I’ve played dozens of games online and on the app, and in those venues, the brilliance of this game shines through.
My favourite thing about Glen More II: Chronicles:
The tile roundel and being able to leap as far forward as you want allows for so much freedom in how you want to grow your village. Leaping ahead to get the best tile ensures you’ll get what you want but it allows your opponents to take everything that was left behind. Sometimes it’s worth it to claim that castle, but other times, slow and steady produces fistfuls of goods.
Yeah, that’s right. I have the OG Agricola where animals are cubs and resources are disks. My favourite thing about Agricola is easily the occupation and minor improvement cards that you get, and how drastically they impact every game. These cards are by far the reason why I prefer Agricola over Caverna.
The way they took the word building of Paperback and meshed it into a roguelike Slay the Spire-esque tabletop game is really fascinating. The mechanic of splaying your word left or right to get different icons, and choosing which card you want on top to trigger its ability, feels so satisfying. So many decisions to make on each turn, I am utterly in love with Paperback Adventures
The positive player interaction that I mentioned in Brass: Birmingham is here in full force. Weasling your way into the same province as the other players to benefit from their Prefect action. I love this peaceful economic game, and there are so many maps to explore, I never get tired to playing it.
It might be kinda silly, but I really love the fact that there are 3 ways to win. While achieving a science victory or military victory when playing against equally skilled players is incredibly rare, I love that they exist. And when one player makes a move towards one of the victory conditions, the other player is forced to respond. Commit too far and not achieve it, and you’ll have wasted a ton of precious actions, but still, the threat is palpable and exciting.
It’s fast, it’s variable, and it’s satisfying to build a functioning engine and goose it for fistfuls of points. So many other tableau building games wish they could achieve the level of satisfaction that Race for the Galaxy nails in just 30 minutes. Race for the Galaxy is my most played game on Board Game Arena, but that doesn’t mean I won’t play the physical version any chance I get!
The boss battle mode is just the perfect solo puzzle for me. It’s fast to set up, it’s wildly variable as each boss and each heroine have drastically different skill sets, and it takes less than 15 minutes to play. The puzzle is endlessly satisfying, and the push your luck element always has me on the edge of my seat. The expansions, Bullet⭐, Bullet🍊, Bullet 🐾, and Bullet🎨 all add more characters, and characters from any expansion can be mixed together, giving this excellent game almost endless variability.
No game has made me belly laugh more than Galaxy Trucker. From the moment I finish building my first ship until the final card in the game has been resolved, I have a stupid grin on my face, and when any ship gets cleved in two, my own included, I just feel giddy inside. A childlike sense of joy that comes from senseless and slapstick destruction makes me love Galaxy Trucker more than almost every other game I’ve ever played.
Everything. Okay, I know it’s a cop-out to say ‘everything’ to my favourite game of all time, but honestly, yeah, I love everything about Food Chain Magnate. The no luck strategy, the interaction that comes from all the players competing over the same customers, the way the economy seems dead for 5 rounds then BAM money starts flying all over the place. I love Food Chain Magnate with all my heart. My heart rate literally accelerates when I get to play it, and just thinking about playing it makes me salivate. I have a physical reaction to this game, and while my game group doesn’t share my level of enthusiasm, it does not deter my love for this masterpiece.
Almost to the end of the list now! These games are ones that I would play anytime, anywhere. These would always get a resounding “YES” from me, if ever asked to play
It’s one of the most satisfying dexterity games I’ve ever played. There’s a high skill ceiling, but also great potential for laugh out loud funny moments. From bouncing off two of your opponents disks to land in the centre, to fully missing the most basic of shots.
The translucent colourful dice are simply beautiful, and when beautiful components are paired with a simple yet satisfying puzzle, you get a perfect introductory game. I cannot tell you how many people I’ve convinced to start playing board games regularly when I see them doing a Sudoku, and I give them a nudge into the hobby with Sagrada.
The positive player interaction. One player builds a coal or iron mine, another player consumes it to build something else, both players benefit. That on top of some really interesting dynamics make Brass: Birmingham a top tier game.
Oh man, it’s a shorter list to say what I don’t love about Scythe. To pick one thing that really draws me into this game, I love that it’s a ‘cold-war’ game. The threat of combat is so much more present than the actual combat. I’ve had games where I was the loser of the only combat encounter of the whole game, but I ended up as the overall winner. It sounds counterintuitive, I know, but it’s endlessly satisfying.
My favourite Stefan Feld game by far. I love how simple each turn is, just use your two dice, but how efficently you use your actions determines how well you do in the game. There’s a push to fill your small provinces early to get the bonus points for doing so, but those large provinces offer huge rewards, if you can complete them. One day, I want to complete the whole board. I don’t know if it’s possible, but it’s what I want to do.
Oh gosh, Calico is a puzzle game with teeth, and I love it for it. Every hex you place feels impactful, and deciding to put a purple dots tile in one spot means you’re choosing to not pursue three other objectives with that spot. I have my head in my hands the entire time I’m playing Calico, which doesn’t sound like a good thing, but I love the burn this game gives my brain
Leaving a trail of workers behind and then doubling back to pick them up again is a genius mechanic. You want to be efficient with your actions, and spending time going back to a space you don’t need is painful, but running out of workers means you can’t do anything. I also love how fast Istanbul is to play, with most games taking around ~25 actions, you can fly through games, assuming no one is stalling at the market for too long.
The auction/bidding mechanic that makes money flow around the table, and the game constantly pouring more and more money into the economy letting the bids grow bigger and more ludicrous makes for exciting rounds. I love pricing one tile just a bit too high and watching my opponents agonize over spending that much cash on a single tile. I don’t even care if I win, I just want my friends to be uncomfortable for a bit!
Board Game Hot Takes recently did a poll discussing if the unthinkable happened, and you lost your entire board game collection, how many of your games would you re-acquire. I think every game in my top 30 would be strong candidates for re-acquisition!
It’s an easy, relaxing polyomino tile placement game. What sets Bärenpark above Patchwork in my mind is the fact that someone actually get to complete their park. Beyond that, BEARS!
Dexterity games hold a special place in my heart, as I really love the tension they deliver. I love seeing the highways rise up amongst the grey spires, and they duck and weave over and under each other. Then in an instant, it all comes crashing down.
The shared tunnel system creates a fascinating leapfrog effect. You’ll strike out in one direction, nabbing some juicy gems, but that gives your opponents a springboard to leap even further, collecting even better resources, which in turn sets you up on your turn.
Panda camel. Just kidding. I love the push and pull as you and your opponent pick at the shared market, swapping cards from your hand and trying to decide if you want to sell early to get the most valuable token, or if you should hoard cards to net that amazing 5 card bonus tile.
I like building up my deck in Paperback with a wide variety of powers, and the natural growth of the amount of money you’re able to generate. At the start of the game, earning 5 cents feels like an achievement. Then by the end of the game, dropping a casual 21 cent hand feels super satisfying.
A classic from 2006 about picking up cards and building mail routes. There’s enough short term benefits to distract you from your long term goals to create some very interesting decisions. Honestly, it’s hard to poinpoint what exactly I love about Thurn and Taxis, as it’s just a very fun and satisfying game to play. It’s light, it’s easy, I feel engaged. It’s lovely, and it’s moving up in my rankings!
The engine building of trying to get the right vikings to earn money and points is quite satisfying. You want all the vikings possible, but obviously you can’t take them all, plus, they might be paired with an island tile that you really can’t use! Also, the way the market dynamically adjusts based on the vikings that are getting purchased is unique and awesome. It’s a great game over-all.
The push-your-luck aspect of putting down the handshakes and just HOPING that you’ll pick up more cards of that colour is amazing. I love getting 3 handshakes down, knowing that every card I pull could be the one that launches me into the stratosphere of points. More often, my hubris leaves me in a hole that I can’t dig out of, but I have fun none-the-less.
I like that throughout the race you’re shedding cards from your deck, so in the final stretch you might be running right out of cards. It feels thematic in that sometimes at the end of the race you just don’t have the juice to make it over the finish line.
The cutthroat nature of the scoring, being able to deny others the ability to score their best lines just by holding one card in your hand is amazing. That said, every card you hold on to, to deny your opponent is one card that isn’t helping further your own goals. Every time I have to discard in Arboretum, I’m in anguish, and all the cards are ones I want to keep. And I really love that feeling!
Games games games. I still find it kind of amazing that I can list off 100 games that I love, and it’s less than 20% of the games I’ve played. There’s still so many games that I want to play, and new games coming out every year. I love this hobby!!
The auction for player order is so great. As the game goes on, the most valuable possible moves become more and more rare, and therefore, more sought after. Being able to control going first, making your opponents pay dearly for the privilege, or deny them access to the action they need as a punishment for their cheapness makes every turn in Five Tribes feel exciting
Many word games can end up suffering from a similar problem. You get a selection of letters, and you spend 15 minutes staring at them, trying to figure out a word, any word that you can make out of that mess. Hardback allows you to flip any card in your hand over, voiding any abilities or benefits it may offer, but turning it into a wild card. I love this mechanic as it keeps the game rolling and saves players from a truly awful draw.
I love the population track in Suburbia. The goal of the game is to earn population, as ultimately, the player with the most population is the winner. But on that population track are a bunch of red lines, and every line you cross, your reputation and incomes are knocked down a peg. I’ve seen players stumble into the perfect tile, slot it into their city, earning themselves insane amounts of population on a single turn, only to kneecap their own game, throwing their income into a deficit and making the next few turns a desperate struggle to buy an income generating tile.
That may sound needlessly harsh, but it’s a mechanic I adore in a game that I love.
My favourite thing about Castles of Mad King Ludwig
I’m torn between building wild looking castles, and the player controlled auction as my favourite aspect of Castles of Mad King Ludwig. Both aspects are awesome, and make the game feel fresh every time I play it.
The decision to make the vertical act as a score multiplier is so satisfying. I’ve had games where I manage to get several tiles of the same colour to the 4th level, which gets multiplied by all the stars of that colour makes for a really satisfying puzzle!
To this day, Pandemic is a go-to option for introducing anyone to the world of cooperative games. Pandemic has all kinds of tension, short term problems that need to be solved that are at odds with the long term goal of the game, plenty of opportunities for players to communicate and figure out an optimal plan. It’s a classic, and even though I’ve picked up a few of the spin-offs, the original remains in my collection.
It’s a shame about the actual pandemic creating all kinds of negative connotations, though.
The double resource cost of all the tiles needing money (buttons) and time makes for some fascinating decisions. At the beginning of the game, you don’t have many buttons to spend, so you’ll pick the high time cost pieces. Come the end of the game, you’ll be throwing fistfuls of cash at the board, but your new limiter is time. A pretty good allegory for life, if you think about it.
33 – Chess
My Favourite thing about Chess:
There isn’t much I can say about Chess that hasn’t been said already, by people who have devoted significantly more time than I have into playing and studying this game. With an endlessly high skill ceiling and dozens of books breaking down even just the opening moves of Chess, I love this game as it’s a pure strategy game. Any mistake is your own fault, and while it sucks to get crushed by someone more skilled than you are, I like that any victory or loss is earned by your actions and choices alone.
What I left unsaid about Patchwork applies here. Polyomino tile laying games are just simple fun. And I love My City for constantly evolving, even if I find the over-arching victory condition of the legacy campaign to be less than satisfying, I still enjoyed seeing the game change over time.
I love real time games, I love Tim Fowers games, and I love cooperative games, Now Boarding was an easy hit for us. What I love most about Now Boarding is that the game only gives you half the information you really need for the round, and obscures the rest of it. You can your teammates can plan out what you want to do, but when the real time phase starts, more information is thrown into the mix and it might drastically change your plans!
I know in the last post I said I don’t like to faff about with the partial rankings, but these games are all 8.5 for me. They’re better than the riffraff that came before them, but they aren’t quite a 9/10 for me. Still, I love all these games, and some of them I’m kind of flabbergasted that there’s still 40 games that I think are better!
Firstly, I love any game that has variable scoring. I love that the first thing you score comes Back to score again at the end of the game. And I love that every card has two different options for you to add to your map, often pulling you in different directions. Do you place the houses that will score this round, or do you play the trees that will score next round? Do you go against the edge for points in scoring objective B, or do you try to surround a mountain to earn a coin that’ll give you a point in every scoring? It’s an amazing and one of my favourite ‘X and write’ games.
Filling rows with tiles shouldn’t be as exciting as it is in Azul, but here we are. Taking tiles from any of the factories dumps the unclaimed tiles into the centre, which is a sweet pot that builds and builds until someone chooses to take it. The presence of the first player marker is both a blessing and a curse. Going first next round is brilliant, but losing a point for it kinda hurts. It’s genius, and I’m glad Azul is as popular as it is.
Before anyone asks, I’ve played all the Azul games, and the original is my favourite by far, hands down.
There is a simple, childlike joy in getting into everyone else’s way. Popping your single cube in a road that your opponent has committed heavily into feels devious and satisfying. Now they have to pay extra to get that road completed, and you get an extra benefit for getting bumped. Brilliant.
47 – The Crew: Mission Deep Sea
My Favourite thing about The Crew: Mission Deep Sea:
While I enjoy both versions of The Crew, Mission Deep Sea’s variable goal deck makes this version my favourite by far. It’s a mild complaint, but trying to bring The Quest for Planet Nine out for a casual group is mildly annoying in that you have to pick random missions to tackle. I much prefer just picking a difficulty number and flipping over goal cards until we’ve reached that threshold. And casual play is how I play The Crew the most anyway.
It’s pretty rare that an expansion to a game gets its own entry on the list, but I think in the case of Viticulture World, it’s warranted. The twist on gameplay, turning a competitive game into a collaborative experience, was such a joy to discover. I love that each player needs to earn 20 points before the time runs out, forcing everyone to consider how best to support their teammates, in addition to building up their own vineyards.
Honestly, it’s the large player count and short play time. Simultaneous play is something that I really appreciate, so having a great game to play when my table has up to 7 players is invaluable.
Clans of Caledonia combines the best parts of Terra Mystica with the shifting market of Navagador, and, it condenses all the various resources down into a single one, money. No need to faff about with power cubes, or cultists, or books, or terrain types. It’s all just money. I’d play Clans of Caledonia over Terra Mystica or Gaia Project, or Age of Innovation any day of the week.
The scoring for Kingdomino being the number of terrain tiles multiplied by the number of crowns, and where the number of crowns can equal 0, is delicious. It’s just a bit too much math for me to calculate out during the game, but the tension of having a huge pasture, and no crowns to show for it makes my heart beat a mile a minute.
That one turn. There’s at least one turn in Russian Railroads where all of your bonuses just start cascading into one amazing turn. Where normally you only get to do one little thing, suddenly you’re charging down the line, horn blaring, collecting benefit after benefit as you smash thresholds. It’s such a great feeling.
Manipulating the market is pure joy. Choosing to sell gold while produce in sugar and pumping each of those resources up and down makes my heart sing. I also really enjoy that by the end of the game, you’re raking in more money per round than you did in the entire first half of the game. Just a super satisfying experience all around.
Fun fact, the first 50 games on this list, I’ve rated every one as an 8/10. There’s actually another 20 games outside the top 100 that I also consider an 8/10, but for the purposes of creating the list, I had to cut games that numerically are identical, but I know in my heart I enjoy more. I generally don’t like faffing about with half ratings or decimal places, but, I might have to just to help me delineate my feelings on these games a little bit more. The bottom 50 of this list is in a constant state of flux, and depending on my feelings during the day that I make this list, a game could easily shift up and down. Beyond this point, though, my feelings on each of the games becomes a lot more concrete.
My Favourite thing about Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition
It’s a game that probably shouldn’t work. A trick taking game where you can just declare the suits? Nope. Should be broken. And yet it isn’t! For a while I was thinking the game was a bit too random, a bit too dependent on the draw of the cards, then I played with a friend who just proceeded to smack me around for several games in a row. So, there’s mastery to be found here. I don’t have it, but I know it’s there!
My favourite thing about The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine:
Much like Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition, my initial impressions were that this is a game that shouldn’t work. Cooperative trick taking isn’t going to be any fun, rather, it’s an exercise in sorting cards. Turns out, I’m dumb, and The Crew is awesome. It’s become a great way to end a long gaming session, and as you progress in the missions, the requirements get more and more intense. There’s tension where you play a card, then stare at the next player, willing them to play the right card, then an eruption of either elation, or fury depending on the result.
The full stack economy on display here is amazing. All players are simultaneously building the means of production, producing goods, acquiring goods, selling goods, shipping goods and buying goods. The semi-closed economy is fantastic, and greed leads to recessions.
The sheer number of people who have played the crap out of Dutch Blitz means I almost always have a challenging opponent to square off against. I love real time games, and speed-sorting cards is some wholesome fun that I can pull out at any opportunity.
The “Crush Otter” strategy. Let me explain, When playing Las Vegas, trying to control anything and having a strategy is a great way to having a frustrating game. So my plan for every game of Las Vegas I play, is to just beat Otter. I actually end up doing pretty well most of the time!
The worker placement mechanism of claiming three of the outside cards that also give you two of the inside cards is just brilliant. There’s so much delicious decision-making in picking which of the inside cards you want versus which of the outside cards you need, all while bumping up against your opponent and making sure they don’t snag that free gold coin card too easily. As far as 2 player games go, this one is simply brilliant
54 – The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth
My favourite thing about The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth
I’m not going to lie here, it’s the theme. I love the Lord of the Rings and any game that lets me take on the role of Aaragon and hew orcs is going to be a hit in my books. LotR: JiME is a fantastic adventure game in its own right, and the app managing the deployment of enemies and health trackers is a very welcome addition.
The combination auction/worker placement is so fun. Using a single worker to pin down a tile and ensuring the auction for that tile is the colour that you want it to be is really smart. I’m absolutely awful at Keyflower, otherwise I’m sure this would be much higher on my list.
The ease of play. Once everyone is set up the same, one player draws tiles randomly, and everyone else follows suit. I love the mechanism where everyone gets the exact same thing. The same situation, the same resources/ decision, but the things we choose to prioritize are what sets each of us apart and determines the winners and losers.
Just One is a brilliant little game where everyone had to give one clue, trying to lead the current guesser to a single word. If two people give the same clue, they’re cancelled out. I love this, as it encourages players to not use the most obvious clue, but sometimes the clues end up being a little too obscure, which is hilarious when the guesser opens there eyes, reads the clues and exclaims “WHAT?”. My dirty secret is that I’ve never owned a copy of Just One. I’ve always just used sheets of paper and the deck of Codename cards to play. I’ve introduced Just One at almost every family gathering and it’s always been a hit.
