***Disclaimer***

These rankings are the opinion of yours truly, and if you don’t like them, that’s okay. We all have different tastes in games and that is great. There are some games that I’ve only played as a demo, and I felt like I got enough of a feel to put them on the list, thanks GenCon for all the demos. These are living rankings so next year I’m sure that things will change, so I’ll probably be doing another one next year. Thanks to Board Game Geek for letting me enter/rate my collection and games I’ve played. Thanks to Pub Meeple for creating a tool that pulls in those games that I’ve rated and creating a ranking tool. Again, the numbers and names will be linked to Cool Stuff Inc and Amazon if you’re interested in the games.

70 – Root
Root is probably one of the trickiest games to teach on the list. Each player is a different faction of woodland creatures fighting for dominance, unless you’re the Vagabond. The trick is that each faction plays differently so that the cats are just looking to increase their dominance. The Aerie is regimented and looking to take back from the cats. The other woodland creatures are trying to create a ground swell movement, and the vagabond is bouncing around trying to build things. So the teach for this game is long, but the game play has been worth it. I loved playing as the Aerie, creating this machine of actions that I was able to take and almost able to win because of it. It’s not a fast game, but definitely one that has a unique flavor to it, as it looks cute, but has some war game feeling to it.

69 – Scattergories
First of two party games back to back here, Scattergories has been around for a long time. In it, you have a list of prompts and a letter, you are trying to come up with something for each prompt that starts with that letter, and you score points if you come up with a unique one. So like some other party games where you are trying not to match, you have to determine do you go unique hoping that other people will put down the normal one, or do you think everyone else is going unique, so you’re safe to put down the normal word. For example, a “Boy’s Name” that starts with “B”. “Bob” is a very easy answer, but do you do “Bertrand” because it’s unique. It’s a fun game where you technically can play through something like 15 different lists, but whenever we play, we go through a few and then move onto the next game, with the random letter, it always keeps it feeling fresh and there are some good laughs.

68 – Wits & Wagers
I like this one a bit better than Scattergories because it’s almost more silly and easier to play, and it’s only numbers. In this party game you are all writing down what you guess a certain number will be, such as the number of quarters in the worlds largest quarter collection. Everyone puts down an answer, you arrange them on a board, and then you have a chance to bet on which one you think is right. The closer you are to the middle number, the less return you get, but how well do you trust your friends to have guessed close to it, without going over. At the end of several rounds, the person with the most money wins. Whereas Scattergories has a problem that someone might not know anything about a certain prompt, anyone can write down a number and then, you bet on someone else’s number. When we play, I normally know the most about sports, so people will tend to bet on my answer and sometimes they still get points for it, if I don’t go over. So it’s a good balance of trivia, but also making it so you still have a chance even if you don’t know.

67 – Dice Throne: Season Two Vampire Lord v Seraph
More Dice Throne. Because it’s split up just into two characters that you can play, it’s lower on the list. Eventually you’d get tired of the two characters. But this is, again, a fun yahtzee style battling game where you are trying to out last your opponent and do as much damage as you can. Both the Vampire Lord and the Seraph are fun to play as, and they play different. It’s cool how each character has their own deck of cards that you can improve the character with, and their own dice, so you feel like your character is different. And the characters do different things, put on different effects, so they are really unique. There are a lot of characters out there, but they all feel different from what I’ve played. Possibly more on Dice Throne coming later.

66 – Gravwell: Escape from the 9th Dimension
You are the captain of a spaceship and you’ve made a terrible mistake. You ended up in the 9th Dimension, completely skipping over a lot of the other ones, and now you need to get back out before the singularity closes and you’re stuck there forever. And to make matters worse, you’ve run out of fuel. Thankfully, you have a fully stocked laboratory, so you just start dumping different elements into the engine to get moving. Gravwell is a very puzzly game where you are drafting different fuels, but the name hints at this, you are often affected by gravity. Some of the fuels will always move you towards the nearest ship, which might be further away from escaping, or you can repulse away, or you can pull other ships to you. So you have to figure out ways to slingshot yourself forward and not accidentally go a long ways backwards. The game is a bit tricky to wrap your head around, but once you do, it’s a fun puzzle to solve with great moments of launching forward, and hilarious moments of accidentally going backwards.

65 – Small World Underground
The world of (s)laughter has gone underground, and now you’re battling for control there. This game plays very similarly to regular Small World, but adds in a few new things. There aren’t lakes, but there are still impassible areas. And there are now monuments or ruins that you can find that will affect your team in some way. This adds even a bit more randomness into a silly random game of area control. In Small World Underground, you take various races and powers that are combined together, and make them fight against each other to get you points, and then you swap for a new one and try again and repeat the process for a number of rounds, and the most points (coins) wins. It’s a game with a lot of fighting, but it’s a silly game, so people don’t tend to get picked on too much and if you are picked on, you can get them with your next race and power combo. The base game of this is a Risk killer for me, and this one also falls into that category as well.

64 – Machi Koro: Bright Lights, Big City
This is like Splendor, but with more theme, and dice, but no poker chips. In it, you’re trying to build up the best city that you can, getting some great attractions set-up. First person to get all different attractions built wins. But you’re setting up a tableau of cards that get triggered on dice rolls to get you more money to buy more cards. You can hope for a number or two to get rolled often, but if they don’t, you won’t do well. Or you can diversify and that can give you consistent money, but you might never get multiple large pay days in a row. The game is pretty simple, the trickiest part is the amount of text on the cards and remembering what everything does. But once you’ve played a couple of times, you come to realize that the cards mainly do the same thing, and you can play the game really quickly. It’s a fun little tableau engine building that gives you lots of fun options as you play.

63 – Illimat
The Decemberists made a trick taking game, and this is it. The look of the game is a little bit odd, but it’s fun game as you play cards down into different fields for different seasons and then try and manipulate the seasons so that you can get the cards that you want for scoring, but avoid getting cards from the seasons that give negative scoring. Plus there are tarot style cards that can influence how scoring or how the seasons work to add twists to the game as you clear out fields and then replant them. The game generally works on getting sets of matching cards and harvesting them. I got to play this a few times at GenCon, and it’s a good game. The mechanics work well, the fact that the board is part of the game is cool. The clothe playmat aesthetically looks nice, but is only okay in practice, and the weird little bronze pieces are weird. I don’t have many trick taking games on the list, but this is one that I definitely enjoyed and would gladly play again.

62 – Parade
Alice in Wonderland is a fun theme for a game. This game plasters it on and calls it good, and it works. In this game you are trying to get the fewest points by playing down cards that are various colors and numbers, this determines what cards from the parade, line-up, of cards that you’re going to have to take. The trick to the game is that cards are worth their face value unless you have the most of that color, then all those cards are only worth a single point. So you have to balance what you have versus what is out there, and generally, you’re trying to take as little as possible. Parade is a fun little abstract game that is easy to teach and fast to play. Generally, you sit down and you play two or three games in my experience and once that’s done, you can hop into a bigger game. This can be hard to find though, as it seems to go in and out of print fairly quickly.

61 – Tsuro
This is technically a party strategy game, so probably my third or fourth group light style game. In Tsuro, you are flying your dragon stones, not to be confused with Dragon Balls which are completely unrelated, around paths trying to be the last dragon on a path. To do this, you are playing down a tile from your hand trying to stay on the board and not run into someone else. However, there are up to 7 other players doing that as well, and soon the board becomes cramped and you hope that someone else puts their fate in your hands, because you’ll be playing a tile that will cause both of you to move, and you’re also hoping that you have the right tile to keep yourself alive and not just collide with them an eliminate both of you. Tsuro is another one of those games that you’ll play a couple of times in a sitting because it goes very quickly.

We’re done with another ten games and we’re reaching the midway point, so that means were getting close to actually good games. No, I like all of these games a lot this far down on the list and there are games outside of the top 100 that I really enjoy as well. Thanks for checking out my list, and let me know which games you enjoy or what games look interesting and you want to try out.

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