Something I’m noticing as I go down this list is a surprising number of these games I haven’t really played since the last time I made this list. Yet, when I compare them against the other games I’ve played, they’ve left a mark on me. There is some recency bias going on here, where the games I’ve played more recently appear higher on the list, but I feel like all of these games have an enduring quality to them. They’ll be in my top 100 for quite some time.
The variability and asymmetric nature of the game just delights me. There are 16 units in the base box, and the game starts with a draft to give each player 4 unique units to try and wrest control of the map with. I love two player games, and if I had a partner who was really into two player head-to-head games, I know I’d be playing a LOT more War Chest.
The namesake mechanic of moving the switches and signals. Every junction can only have two directions open at a time, and there’s only 7 open signals that you need to share between all the stops on the board turns this pick up and deliver coop game into a juggling act.
68 – For Sale
My favourite thing about For Sale:
The two act nature of the game where winning auctions in the first act directly assists you in claiming properties in the second act. It’s one of my favourite pure bidding games, and the travel edition ensures that I can play a game anywhere.
I don’t harbour a great love for 4x games in general, but Eclipse is pretty special. The part I like the most, aside from the economy engine running the whole game, is the technology tracks. I love unlocking special abilities and upgrading my fleet to earn the strategic edge in combat. That is, until some jerk just rolls 4 6’s on their first shot and decimates my fleet. As frustrating as dice can be as a combat resolution mechanism, it sure did get 4 fairly reserved grown men standing and shouting, a feat not many euro games can accomplish.
The tableau is by far my favourite part about Earth. I like playing cards and seeing the field grow, I like putting cubes and trees on the cards, and I love the cascade of actions when all the cards of a colour that I’ve played a lot of get to trigger. It feels like you’ve won the lottery, if the lottery paid out in soil and compost.
My favourite thing about The Great Heartland Hauling Co.:
The multi-use cards in a pick up and deliver game, coupled with the strict hand limit ensures that players can’t just stock up their hand of cards with the colour they want to pick up and deliver the most valuable resource every round. I like the push-your-luck aspect of having a hold full of pigs and digging for more pig cards so you can make that delivery next round.
My favourite thing about Caverna: The Cave Farmers:
I like that Caverna is more open than it’s non-fiction counterpart Agricola. Having a whole second side of the board to dig a home out of without taking over your farming fields lets me breathe a little easier in each game. Also, with all the houses being available each game, I do enjoy that I can formulate a plan ahead of time, and be reasonably sure that I’ll be able to execute on that plan.
I love the 10 different scoring objectives. 5 are from the animals, which each animal scoring in different ways (and each type of animal has 4 different variants), plus each of the largest terrain groupings score points too. Cascadia pulls you into a thousand different directions, but still offers enough flexibility that you rarely feel stuck.
Millennium Blades achieves something really special. It takes me back to my TCG playing, anime watching youth. What really makes Millennium Blades special for me isn’t the unique and amazing gameplay, but the theme and references to dozens of childhood favourite games and anime.
It’s just so fast and easy to play, making it perfect for introducing to people who haven’t been exposed to the wild world of board games. Also, my partner really loves it, and will request to play it, which gives it a special ranking in my books.
I’ve mentioned it in other places, but we have a new child in our home. Which means sleep is a bit of a luxury, and a lot of these lists were written in the wee hours of the morning. Please forgive the brevity or grammatical errors you may find!
The feeling of progression makes a game of Splendor feel splendid, ahem satisfying. I know there’s a strategy where you only buy 3rd row cards, but playing that way isn’t fun to me. I like getting a plethora of cheap gems to get to the point where I rarely ever have to visit the gem market anymore!
The 3d building/toy factor is a large part of my enjoyment of Santorini. But my favourite aspect of the game is the variety of player powers available. Each one will drastically change how you approach your opponent, and gives lovely texture to this awesome game.
I can’t deny that the production of Foundations of Rome has nothing to do with my enjoyment. I love how gorgeous it is, how peoples Jaws hit the floor when I hand them their player tray. Beyond that, it’s a lovely light game. Buy deeds, build buildings, score points. Simple, gorgeous game.
My favourite thing about Viticulture: Essential Edition:
Like many board gamers, I just innately enjoy a good worker placement game, and Viticulture is a great worker placement game. I love building a farm, harvesting grapes, and the mechanic of aging the grapes and wine makes me smile. Realistically, I know you don’t age grapes on a crush pad, but as a game mechanic, it’s satisfying to know you can harvest bad grapes and eventually they’ll become a quality wine.
Similar to Santorini, the part of Hive I enjoy the most is the variety of powers to play with. The twist is that both players have access to all the different unit types. What separates winners and closers in Hive is the order in which and how they choose to spawn their units into the play area.
75 – Go
My favourite thing about Go:
Coming in as the complete opposite of Hive, Go is the grand-daddy of abstract strategy games. A 19 x 19 grid of lines and a bowl of black and white stones. I love the relative simplicity of Go, while also harbouring an incredibly high skill ceiling.
I played Go a lot more as a teenager, and while I would love to play more, finding casual games locally is more than a challenge.
74 – Cribbage
My favourite thing about Cribbage:
I love the nostalgia that I have associated with Cribbage. Memories of lazy summer days, visiting Grandma at the cabin on Cape Breton Island, and getting absolutely skunked at cribbage made me into the gamer that I am today.
My favourite thing about Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion
My favourite part of Gloomhaven is how varied the action cards are. Every character has wildly different abilities, and because Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion only has 4 characters, their abilities are designed to sync up nicely. This makes it the perfect scaffold to get into the beast that is the Gloomhaven system.
This little card game houses a lot of tension. All players simultaneously select a card, then all at once the choices are revealed. The surprise, shock, and horror as the cards slide into their appropriate rows is just a delight to experience.
Another game with a lavish production that gets me excited to play it. But the box full of minis isn’t what I love most about Mechs vs. Minions, no. It’s the push your luck of constantly adding to your action programming row. The more you add to it, the more you can do. But the more you have to do, the more likely it is you’ll end up impotently spinning out in the corner.
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!
