But now you’ve backed one thing. Now only that, you’ve backed it and the project delivered in a year, it was a small game, and it’s in your hands. It feels great. And then you see someone talking about another game on crowdfunding. And then there is another interesting looking one, and another. All of a sudden, you’re checking daily, or more often, and backing two things a week and it’s out of control. Because, what if this is the greatest game ever? What if this game isn’t coming to retail?

Now you are in the clutches of FOMO, so let’s talk about controlling it.

Why Is There So Much Crowdfunding FOMO?

There are a few reasons why there is so much FOMO happening around crowdfunding. There are three big reasons, though, that I see. The first is the game might not come to retail. Some games are just too big to come to retail. Some games there is enough interest to get it made but no connections to get it to retail. Especially for smaller passion projects, they just don’t know how or who to work with to get it to retail. And some games are just to niche.

Next is the upgraded or deluxe version of the game. This is something that’s too fancy to come to retail. But it works on Kickstarter of Gamefound. You can pay the premium to get it knowing that the retail version is going to be more plain. Often this might be minis, or metal coins, or wooden or plastic tokens versus cardboard. This is kind of like the next reason, but the next reason encompasses even more.

The other reason is exclusives. And I talk about it as what are the benefits of going with the crowdfunded version versus retail. Am I getting it cheaper, it could happen, but most likely not. What am I getting that’s exclusive, a first player marker? Metal coins? A mini expansion? And almost all games on crowdfunding do have something like that. Something that makes you think, oh, if I don’t get that, I won’t be able to later.

So How Do You Avoid It?

There are a few things to consider, and honestly, sometimes the FOMO will just get to you, and that’s okay. But let’s talk about the things to think about.

Do You Need the Deluxe?

Let’s start off with this one, the first two are really about points I made above. But this one has to do with the deluxe. Often times that is what traps people into backing something. It seems like a good deal to get all the fancy pieces, or maybe two more factions to play, but do you really need it? Does the deluxe add to the game play? Does the deluxe add to game play? Often times without adding to game play, it won’t make the game get played more often.

Will This Be At Retail?

Next, will it be in retail. This goes back to the question, does the crowdfunding add in more game play that is exclusive? Because, most of the time, you are going to be getting the exact same game at retail. And while the MSRP might be higher, once you figure in shipping versus free shipping, it’s often cheaper to buy it at retail as part of a bigger order. I mean, a game that is MSRP $100 is basically $100 versus discounted to $80 with $25 shipping for $105 via the Kickstarter or Gamefound.

Do You Know You’ll Like The Game?

Also, why do you think you’ll like this game so much? When I started backing crowdfunding games, I backed little things that I thought looked interesting. And some of them were complete duds, and some were cool. But I backed based off of what I thought looked cool. Now when I back, I need to believe that I will really like the game and I need to see what it is doing that I will like. If that information isn’t there, or it’s just shiny minis or metal coins that are drawing you in, stand firm.

Are The FOMO Items Game Play or Cosmetic?

This is going to be a big one that probably trips up a lot of people. It goes back to getting it retail or not. But sometimes you look at a game and you see all these cool things, upgraded resources, metal coins, card sleeves, whatever it might be, and they don’t add to game play. Those are purely cosmetic. If the game is really good, you can probably find something to upgrade the game with on Etsy later, for cheaper. So don’t factor those into a decision, game play is king. A fancy game with bad game play is still a bad game.

Will It Make It More Likely That I Play It?

Now, to counter that last one, sometimes a game needs those cosmetic things to make it better. It’s more interesting when you have those resources that look like resources. Or you have miniatures instead of meeples. It brings you into the game more. They don’t affect game play, but they do affect how likely you are to play it.

On the flip side of things, sometimes games have too much. So there is an element of FOMO about all the things you can get for the game that make it sound like a great deal. But ask yourself, do you need that all in pledge where you get twelve expansions for the game? Sometimes that makes you less likely to play the game because there’s just too much stuff for it.

What Other Games Do I Have Coming?

For me, this comes down to campaign games. I have a lot of campaign games coming. Whenever I see another one on Kickstarter or Gamefound, I want to back it. But I always have to ask myself, do I need it with what I have coming. And right now, I have a number coming. So do I need another game like that, how quickly am I playing that type of game. Those are all questions I need to ask myself. And what different thing is it doing than the ones I already have.

Will It Hold It’s Value If I Don’t Like It?

Probably not a thing you’d think about in the heat of the moment, but is this a game that is going to hold it’s value. I might not like it, so can I get rid of it. It doesn’t even need to be a get 100% of your money back thing. But can you get 75% back or can you get pledge amount minus shipping? Now, this matters more on a $100+ game, or for you it might be a $50+ game. Don’t expect to get your money back on a $15 game with $5 shipping, expect $10 or less on that. But for a big game, and a game with a ton of FOMO, is it a smart buy if you don’t like it?

Options If It’s Too Much Crowdfunding FOMO?

Stop Going on Crowdfunding Sites

Firstly, and most simply, stop going to Kickstarter or Gamefound. If you don’t see it, you won’t back it. That’s the simplest way, cold turkey if it’s a big problem. I know of people who have stopped using Discord, stopped going to the crowdfunding websites, because there is always a new cool game coming out. And they had trouble not buying all the games.

Some of this is cult of the new. Cult of the new being the idea that you always need the newest thing. This happens whenever a new version of the iPhone comes out as well. People with a great working phone go out to get a new phone even though they don’t need it.

And, cult of the new is and isn’t a problem. It is a problem if every game sounds cool and you try and buy them all. That’s a way to go bankrupt. Plus, it might sound cool, but not be cool for you. And it isn’t a problem, because someone else might be really excited about it for good reason. I don’t feel FOMO when it comes to euro style games. They aren’t something excites me, I don’t mind playing them once and a while but they won’t come off my shelf.

Set A Budget

Know how much you can spend. When you set how much you can spend, it makes it easier not to spend money. Because once the money you can spend is gone, then that means that great game that is coming down the pipeline on Kickstarter or Gamefound, it’s outside of the budget. So something that might have hype, might have FOMO going on, but isn’t exactly what you want, or has a retail version coming, it is easier to say no to it.

Know Your Taste in Games

Often times the biggest FOMO regrets aren’t that big game that you got everything for that you love. If you love it you probably are glad you got everything. It’s more the games that aren’t your type that you might like okay that are the big regrets.

If you know what you like, it is easier to avoid FOMO. Now, some of this takes time, and it’s best to experiment on non-crowdfunded games. Play an Ameritrash game. Play a Euro game. Deck building, engine building, tableau building, set collection, drafting, push your luck, take that, figure out what you like. When you know what you like, then you know what really excites you.

An example of that for me was Tidal Blades 1. The game from Druid City Games looks amazing. And it has some cool things going on in it, with upgrading your dice. Just from the look of the game I really wanted it. Then I watched the Dice Tower playthrough of the prototype, and I immediately knew I wouldn’t back it. The game looks fun, but I know my taste, and I know that it is too much on the worker placement and all the world building in it, that’s the artwork, not the game. Tidal Blades 2, the dungeon crawler, was much more tempting to me.

Connect With Other Gamers

This one might seem the oddest one out there. How does that stop you from buying more games? Well, if you can build up a good board game community, you’ll know what other games people are getting.

Let’s talk about Darkest Dungeon by Mythic Games. That game looked intriguing, but I wasn’t sure it’d be my type of game exactly. Dungeon crawl, yeah, I’m into that, and leveling and fighting. But the lack of story, that’s less my taste. So I didn’t back it, but someone who I play games with often did.

Now, this isn’t say that you should encourage someone else to get a game so that you can play it. That to me is just kind of rude to suggest that. Or to ask people to help pay for a game, though with legacy or campaign games that can be different. And you need to know the people well. But knowing what they are getting can ease some FOMO.

Also, it can ease FOMO because you have more gamers to talk to. If I were the only person in my group to own games, and everyone else just played, I’d end up being tempted to back more. But I’m not, so I don’t need to worry about it as much, I can talk to them, and talk about a game and what they think about it.

Count Your Unplayed Games

This isn’t something that I do too much as for me I can avoid a lot of FOMO based off of my taste in games. But when getting into the hobby, it is tempting to get a lot of games to play because games are awesome. And yes, while they are awesome, it’s important to play your games as well as just collect them.

I’m not someone to harp on it when people like to collect games. I like to collect games. And yes, I do have a lot of unplayed games for that reason. But I also like to play games. And April has been way to light on playing games for me thus far.

But when getting into the board game and crowdfunding part of the hobby, look at what you haven’t played. This isn’t about feeling shame over it, but just know what games you still need to play. Ask yourself, do I need that extra game now, or in a little while, to sit on the shelf as well. Do I have a game I need to try that does the same thing?

Final Thoughts

FOMO is a real thing, especially when you see lots of other people being really excited about it. And it is easy to want to go all in on games because games are really exciting. Honestly, there is little that gives me as much joy as getting a new game in to play around with. Even if the game isn’t for me, that’s okay, a new game is exciting to try and then move on from.

But it is really tough at the beginning to just not back a lot of things because they look cool. And that’s the big thing. Not all cool looking games are going to be for you. And some of them might not be for anyone because they aren’t good games. But a shiny crowdfunding page with lots of exclusives, stretch goals getting unlocked left and right, it’s hard to say no.

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The Euro Gamer

This gamer is all about the mechanics. If a game has really interesting mechanics, focuses on those mechanics, and allows them to strategize a lot, they’ll like this game.

I think another name for this gamer would also be the strategy gamer. This person likes to pick a strategy and be able to build towards it throughout the game without having to change and deviate from it much at all. It’s all about taking the set of inputs at the start of and throughout the game and implement a long term strategy that can get them the most points.

The Amerithrash Gamer

Also known as Ameritrash, Amerithrash just has a nicer ring to it and also sounds less derogatory to the gamer. This gamer likes their big games that have a lot of theme but a lot more randomness. For an Amerithrash gamer, theme is king and they are more willing to overlook mechanics if the game has a lot of theme.

So, another name for an Amerithrash gamer would probably be a theme gamer. This gamer is going to be fine with a whole lot more randomness, less laid out rules, and changing states of the game and events shaking up the game, as long as it is thematic.

The Party Gamer

This one is pretty simple and probably not reading an article about different types of gamers. This is the person who might dip their toe into a game like Monopoly or even Ticket to Ride, but they really only play party style games. For them, the point of a game is to make them laugh. The funnier they find the cards or a theme of the game, the better that game is going to be for them. They look at board games as another form of entertainment like a movie or television show where it is the entertainments job to provide the fun, not incumbent at all upon the person watching, reading, or playing it.

The Omni-Gamer

This gamer likes all games whether they are Euro or Amerithrash, they are going to be willing to sit down and play most any game and probably find something fun with it. They’re even cool sitting down and playing a party game.

I think that a lot of gamers almost fall into this category of being an Omni-gamer. Most, however, will have one way that they prefer, whether it’s the more strategic Euro style sensibilities or the heavily involved theme of Amerithrash. But they’ll be willing to play most any game, at least once.

The Experience Gamer

I think that all of them that I’ve written to up to this point are gamers that most board gamers would find to be pretty normal. Euro and Amerithrash are two very accepted styles of board games and games that gamers often have strong opinions on.

I think that there is a fifth type of gamer, and I think that I fall into this one. I will say that this might skew a little bit more towards the Amerithrash side, but not completely there. While I don’t mind dice chucking madness like you get in a lot of heavy Amerithrash games, I prefer games that give me an experience. A lot of Amerithrash games do that because they have heavy amounts of theme and theme as king gives a lot of interesting experiences.

But I think of gamers like Gloomhaven and Lords of Hellas, two games one that has a story running through it and another that doesn’t, but both aren’t just your standard dice chucking game with minis. Then again, both of the games do have some minis. Gloomhaven does have some randomness with a modifier deck, but you are able to tailor that as you play so it’s less random, or more random, or more randomly better. And the card play in Gloomhaven and how you build your deck is definitely strategic. With Lords of Hellas, sure you can go fight giant monsters, but it’s done through card play again, and you can pick various strategies from just building temples to fighting lots of monsters to beating up on other players to building statues. The main thing about those two thematic but not really Ameritrash games that drew me in was the experience I had playing it.

So I think there is a fifth gamer option, and that is the experience gamer. This is the gamer who doesn’t care about the mechanics, if they are great or bad, doesn’t care about the theme, if it’s dripping with theme or non-existent, they care about the experience of the game. This is also made trickier by the fact that experience can depend on the other players at the table as well, but most of the time I can separate that player experience from the game experience.

What type of Gamer Are You?

Let me say, while some board gamers might look down upon other types of gamers, all types of gamers are good board gamers and true board gamers. Just because ones taste doesn’t match with someone else’s or because party games are easier to learn and play than other games doesn’t make them worse or better. I really want to hammer this home because often gamers look down on other types of gamers, and I want to see the hobby grow.

So let me know in the comments below what type of gamer you are, or over on Twitter and Facebook.

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Unfortunately I can’t drop in anything more than I link, like I do with Kickstarter for the page, you can find it here.

Pros

• Space Theme
• Great Track record
• Exploration period
• Campaign Game
• Leveling, upgrading
• Ship and planet parts of game
• Aesthetic/Graphic Design

Cons

• Cost & shipping

Page

This is Awaken Realms, and this is their own crowdfunding site, it is going to look good. They know what to throw up to get people to check it out, and they’ve been advertising this a ton. I think it’s important to note that, because it’s been launched for all of an hour and 5 minutes on their own platform and it is at $467,000. Now that’s a lot of money, this game is going to make a ton of money for them, but it’s a risk because I’d guess this would be over a million or near that, if it was on Kickstarter.

But besides that little note, Awaken Realms really knows how to create a great looking game and a great looking page. Tainted Grail had a nice dark moody look to it that matches the game, this page gives you that sense of excitement and largeness of the game and space. And while certainly, from some of the playthroughs if you check them out, things can go wrong, this game looks like it’s less dark and more about the massiveness of space, exploration and adventure.

I also like that with this new layout the pledge levels aren’t off to the side, you can see what you’re pledging when you go through the whole process and the page has bookmarks/navigation along the side for more than just risks. This whole page looks really nice and functional for what I need. And now, I will say, the playing section, that part as I always say, I want it higher and more, but Awaken Realms generally has done a great job with games, so I don’t need as much from them, they have done a great job with getting playthroughs out.

The Game

This game has a lot of things that attract me to it. There is dice rolling, which isn’t one of them. I don’t’ mind dice rolling, but the fact that you’re rolling dice and that’s a bit part of the game on the planets doesn’t have me super excited. Now, I don’t think that it’s going to be a bad part of the game, but I like a lot of mitigation of the dice rolls, or better yet card play, but there also seems to be some of that as well, or planning that comes with it.

I do really like how the game is split into two phases, there is the ship phase. You’re doing things around the ship, playing through that book so that you can get ready for the next planet that you decide to go to, and you have a wide variety of planets to go to that you can pick form. You can upgrade the crew, the lander, the ship itself, you can do a lot of different things, heal up, whatever it might be, and that’s a big part of this big game, so I do get my euro piece to it which apparently I want.

Then you get down to the planet, and there’s a ton of story, you’re exploring, looking for things, trying to complete missions, fight aliens and monsters and ideally not die, but let’s be honest, it’s an Awaken Realms game, you’ll die at least 4 times. And you can go back to planets again, but whatever state you left that planet in is what it’ll be like when you get back there again, which I think is really interesting and makes the game feel even more epic than it would have otherwise.

Back or Brick

Not going to draw this out, this was an instant back for me. I signed up for the notification when this was put up on Gamefound right away when they announced that they were going to do their own crowdfunding site. And the question I had for myself was minis or not. I did end up going with the minis because they look amazing, Awaken Realms did minis before board games, but they feel like they’ll add more to the immersive experience of the game.

How about for you, is this a back or a brick?

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Numbers

A’s – B’s – C’s – D’s – E and F’s

G and H’s

Gloom

This is a fun little story telling card game, and one of the earlier “new” games that I picked up after watching it played on Wil Wheaton’s Table Top show. What drew me to this game was how creative and morbid they were with everything, and how a game could have such a silly objective, such as killing of your family for the fewest points possible to get the win. What keeps this on my shelf, even though I haven’t played it in a few years, is that it’s just such a fun time when you do play it. You get into the morbid absurdity of it and collectively tell such a tragic but absurd story.

Status: Played

Gloomhaven (Forgotten Circles Exp and Jaws of the Lion)

Gloomhaven is my favorite game of all time, so clearly I’ve played it a lot, and I’ve beaten it and the Forgotten Circles expansion, I haven’t beaten Jaws of the Lion yet. What I love about Gloomhaven is just the large, sprawling story that it tells and the very Ameritrash feel, but also the Euro game sensibilities in the combat and combat cards come through, and no dice. Now, I like dice chucking, but I’ve found that I really like that tactical nature of the game play in Gloomhaven where it is much more buttoned down than a pure dice fest. This is a massive game with a massive rule book, but not that difficult when you get into it.

Gloomhaven and expansion Status: Played
Gloomhaven Jaws of the Lion: To Be Played

Gravwell: Escape from the 9th Dimension

This is a game that I picked up in San Diego because I had a few hours to burn before seeing family and after I was out of my hotel, so of course I went to a game shop. This is one that I had seen played on Rodney Smith’s channel, Watch It Played, and that looks like it was a lot of fun. I’m glad I made the purchase as I’ve had fun with it, trying to time out things so that I can rocket forward by spending the right fuel as you try and get your spaceship to escape a black hole and get back to your own dimension. What makes this one fun is trying to read what the other players are going to be doing, you know half the cards they have, but what else might they have to power their ships, how fast will it go compared to yours will that move them closer or further from you. And I like how some fuels move you closer to the nearest object while others push you away or pull them all closer to you. It’s a clever idea that works well in a game.

Status: Played

The Grimm Masquerade

I almost missed this one, but you wouldn’t know that had I not said it. This game I like as a deduction/social deduction game. I think what works well is that it really is more deduction than anything else. In this game you are at a masquerade and you’re trying to guess what Grimm’s Fairly Tale characters everyone is. Now that should be obvious, Rumpelstiltskin and The Beast form Beauty and the Beast should be pretty obviously in why they are, but let’s say magic. What I really like about this game is the two cards you give or keep each turn. You draw one and you have the choice of giving it to someone or keeping it for yourself and they have an item on it that you might want, because if you collect enough of one, you can win, if it’s the right one for your character. The second card you do the opposite thing from the first one, so if I give it away, I have to keep the second card. But the downside is that you have a weakness and if you get enough cards of that type, you are out of the round and can’t get the rose which is worth a bunch of points. I like the push and pull of that as you have to consider, do I take something that’s just neutral for me because I know if I get another of a certain item I’ll be out? It’s just a really good and quick deduction game.

Status: Played

Hanabi

This is a weird game, in that you have a hand of cards and they don’t face you, so you can’t see your cards, but you can see everyone else’s cards. This is also a game about hold information in your head, not just for yourself but what clues other people have been given already about the cards in their hands. You’re trying to play down cards from 1 to 5 in different colors, but you are limited in how you can talk, and of course you can’t see your own cards. It’s a nice simple game, but one that has a lot going on when you really get down to it.

Status: Played

Hanamikoji

I was going to say that this probably my favorite game to play with two, but there is one that I like better, but it’s the best two player only game that I have. This game has you trying to win the favor of Geisha so that they will come to your restaurant, you do that by giving them gifts. But what works so well in this game is how you give the gifts, each player, per round, does four actions, put down two cards face down that won’t be used for gaining favor, one face down that will be used for gaining favor, giving your opponent the choice of 3 cards which they get one and you get two for gaining favor, or giving your opponent a choice between two sets of two cards for gaining favor. That’s it, and both of you can do those actions in any order, if you can figure out what your opponent might have, you can make them have some really hard choices as to what to take, but it’s always a bit of a risk. Great two player game.

Status: Played

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

This is Harry Potter in a deck building game, as you face off against the different bad guys from the books with the characters of Harry, Hermoine, Ron, and Neville. What is really interesting about this game is that as you start you’re playing through the first book, then they add more cards and of things from the second book and you get more, and then the third, fourth, and all the way up through the 7th. It’s basically a campaign game that takes you through the whole Harry Potter series Now that does mean that the first game is pretty simple but later ones are longer and more challenging, but you can do cooler and different things than before.

Status: Played (partially)

Hats

This was one of my most anticipated games from GenCon 2019 after seeing it played by Man vs Meeple. This is an interesting game with an Alice in Wonderland theme, but really it’s a unique card game. in this game your hand of cards are cards you’re playing onto the table in the middle of the game, the cards you take off the table are the ones that you use for scoring. And scoring is fun as well, because there are more suits than there are spots at the table, and the table might have brown in two different spots, not everything will be scored, so you need to push for some colors, sometimes, and then hold one or two back so you can play it down and that color will be scored. But a card on the Mad Hatters table can be replaced if someone plays the same color or a higher number over that card, so it’s a real balancing act and puzzle, great at two very thinky, fun at four, but much more random.

Status: Played

Hearts

Yes, I own a deck of cards. Hearts is a pretty fun trick taking card game. I don’t play it often, but I won’t say no to a game.

Status: Played

Heaven & Ale

This is a game that I talked about recently in a Point of Order post. It’s a euro game which normally isn’t my cup of tea, or pint of beer in this case. However, because of the beer theme, and a reviewer who I like their reviews and generally like their taste said it was one of their top games, and because it was deeply discounted for Black Friday, I grabbed it. This is a game that you can basically call a puzzle as you are putting out tiles, getting resources, trying to get the most victory points, I’m interested to try it when I can play with people in person again.

Status: To Be Played

Heroes of Terrinoth

There are some YouTube channels that you’ll see often on my posts, Rolling Solo is one of them. He highlighted this game a while back, and when I spotted it used at my FLGS, All Systems Go, I decided to grab it. In this game you are playing as heroes trying to defeat scenarios, which might be searching for something, going to different places and fighting monsters, and eventually dealing with a big boss. What I thought was interesting was how you had four abilities and you’d have to reset them at times, so it isn’t just about doing the same thing over and over again. Plus, you can upgrade those abilities, and how that lets you focus your character in a few different ways, just in the scenario itself.

Status: To Be Played

The Hobbit

I like Lord of the Rings a lot, so when The Hobbit game from Fantasy Flight was on sale, I decided to pick it up. This is a really interesting game as it’s almost semi-cooperative in nature. As a group you need to deal with a series of challenge points, and you can raise your stats to do that. But not one player will be able to deal with all of the challenges, so you need everyone to have raised their stats as well. To do this you are playing cards from your hand with numbers on them, the higher the number the further you’ll move in your group of travelers. But going the furthest doesn’t always mean you’ll get the best thing, but you also might not want to always get the best thing, because if someone is lagging behind too much in their stats, it’ll make it more likely that Smaug will move forward and everyone will lose the game. It’s a clever system that I enjoy.

Status: Played

Homebrewers

Have I mentioned that I like beer? Homebrewers is a game all about being a home brewer and in a home brew club where you are trying to brew the best beer to get points at Summerfest and Oktoberfest. You do this by getting ingredients, putting them on your beers, brewing those beers, and then each ingredient has some power of some sort, it might be you get $2, or you could move up another beer on how well you can brew it, it all depends on the ingredients that you have on the beer. So if you’re smart with how you do it, you can brew one beer to influence more or to make things easier. It’s a nice engine building game that gives you a lot of fun options and things you can do, and it also plays well at two players.

Status: Played

Hues and Cues

Final game for the letter H, Hues and Cues is a fun, new, party game from The Op, formerly USOpoloy. What I like about this game is that it’s a different kind of party game. In so many you are trying to make people laugh, or something like that by what you do or write, Hues and Cues challenges you to give good one word and then two word clues to get people as close as possible to the color you want. I like that you want people to guess right, but also for the players, guessing close works as well. But you can’t just say something like Sky Blue, as that tells you that the color is some shade of blue, but your one word clue could be sky, so what do people consider sky, or maybe you give a clue that has people going in the wrong way, you then can give another clue to get people closer again. It also works pretty well via Zoom, just everyone should be looking at a monitor to get the colors as close as possible to each other.

Status: Played

What’s your favorite game from the G’s and H’s? Is there one that stands out as one that you’d want to try or one that I should try that I don’t have in this letter range?

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So, what is a Dungeon Crawl?

A dungeon crawl game is generally going to be a one versus many or game versus many sort of game where the players are going through a dungeon and clearing out the monsters in that dungeon while also trying to possibly complete additional objectives depending on the scenario that is given. Generally you’ll have your character, the monsters, and anything else important on a map and you’ll use in the scenario. Generally these sorts of games are going to have a fair amount of combat. This combat can be done through card play but very often Dungeon Crawl games are going to have you rolling a bunch of dice to see if you hit or how much damage you do. That will be how you defeat traps and sometimes you’ll use different skills for things like overcoming obstacles or disarming traps as well.

One thing to note is that when we say Dungeon Crawl, it doesn’t have to be a dungeon per se. There are games out there where you’re going through a mine in the old west or fighting through a lab to get some secret plans. Dungeon Crawl definitely comes from fantasy and RPG roots but it’s something that’s been placed onto a lot of different settings. The term really refers to the idea that you enter the scenario at one point, you fight the monsters or bad guys, and you complete the objective.

Dungeon Crawls also generally fall into the broad category of Ameritrash games. This means that most Dungeon Crawl games are going to have some higher level of luck to them. Most often this will be in combat where you are rolling dice to see if you hit or not. For some people this can be off putting because if they roll poorly they might not be able to do anything about it. But a lot of these games also have something known as dice mitigation. This basically means that you have ways to manipulate the dice, either by rerolling them to see if you improve your result or the ability to change the face of the dice. Also, I would say, a lot of these dungeon crawl games have moved away from a simple pass or fail on an attack. Yes, an attack might not hit, but even on a miss they generally try and supply some sort of benefit.

Let’s talk about some games that fall into the style:

Gateway Games

Mice and Mystics – Now this is one that I actually haven’t played but that I’m quite familiar with, and I think provides an interesting feel and a good introductory point for a dungeon crawler. This game is not a massive game like a lot of dungeon crawlers are and the theme is really targeted towards kids and families, which is ideal for a gateway game as that means that it is going to be rules lighter. In this game you play as a band of mice who are fighting off monsters and completing a storybook of quests and missions. This works well as well because everyone is working cooperatively together against the game.That means that for younger players or people who might not be following all the rules, it’ll be easy to help them mid game, just don’t end up taking their turn for them.

Medium Weight

Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition – Now, I think the 1st Edition is hard to find at this point so I probably don’t need to specify, but I still like to anyways. In this game it’s a more story immersive dungeon crawl as you are going to a location to complete a specific story driven element on the game. You’re trying to solve the mysterious goings on at a mansion, or people disappearing at the seaside, or maybe even there might be some time travel. But there is something going on. This is another fully cooperative game as there is an app that directs you in what you need to do for the monsters and how the board changes as you reveal new map tiles and explore finding cultists, monsters, or clues that you need to stop the disappearances or ritual. This game has more complex rules, though most of your actions are pretty simple, but the app with the game makes it so that it walks you through a lot of stuff that could be a potential downfall. It’s a really fun game with a lot of expansions and scenarios.

Heavy Weight

Gloomhaven – Now, I was tempted to put Gloomhaven as the medium weight game on my list. I do not think that it is highly complex, but compared to Mansions of Madness and Mice and Mystics, it is more complex and just because of the volume of stuff in Gloomhaven, it is way more intimidating. This one, unlike Mansions of Madness which is one off scenarios, is a massive campaign game as well as you go through scenarios which are intertwined together to create a massive story of monsters, mystery and destruction. In this one the combat is less random because you have a modifier deck that you are using. Yes, you could still hit your null and do no damage, but you can improve the odds of doing well as you level up your character.

There are a ton more Dungeon Crawl games out there, I mentioned wild west, Shadows of Brimstone, if that theme is more interesting, there’s Reichbusters about being a crack team going in and basically fighting Nazi zombies. Or you could play through missions in Star Wars: Imperial Assault around the events of the original trilogy or play as Gimli and Legolas in an adventure in Lord of the Rings: Journeys In Middle Earth. So there are Dungeon Crawls for everyone out there and some are very complex and have massive rule books, while others are more simple.

What is your favorite dungeon crawl game? Are there any that stand out to you as being better than the rest? If you haven’t played a Dungeon Crawl game, what’s keeping you from playing one?

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Let’s get to the list:

10 – Sword & Sorcery
This is a big dice chucking ameritrash campaign game where you take your group of heroes of old who have been brought back in the nations time of need. You get to level up, get new skills and attacks and generally be pretty awesome as you chuck dice and go through a pretty simple story. The game really gives you a lot of dice to chuck and a lot of cool abilities to use. Just in the base game there are plenty of characters to checkout and you can get a whole lot more in small character expansions or in the bigger box story expansions. This is probably one of the most classic in terms of story that you’ll find for a campaign. It is a bit fiddly, but the upkeep and monster actions are fairly simple and the story is small enough that you don’t feel like you’re spending all your time adjusting the board and looking up story elements in the book, but the initial set-up can be pretty slow.

9 – Risk Legacy
Probably the campaign that has the least amount of story in it. However, the board changes in a legacy style as you play and you can unlock things as new things happen in the game to create even more weird challenges. The story of this game really comes from the players as you face off against each other over and over again for points in this Risk based game that allows you to win not from taking over but by getting victory points for taking out your enemies bases and completing missions. Each game goes pretty fast, which is enjoyable, and you feel like you’ve gotten that Risk dice chucking combat done, but without it overstaying it’s welcome. Plus, unless an odd situation happens, you’re always going to be able to hope back into the game and possibly mess someone up and get back into contention, versus being eliminated. Not a ton of depth to this campaign, but a fun time.

8 – Star Wars: Imperial Assault
The Star Wars dungeon crawl, Imperial Assault offers you two ways to play. First, you can do it with someone running the empire and working within the game to create scenarios and a story that you play through. Or you can be completely cooperative and play through the game using an app that helps you with your book keeping as to everything the empire needs to do. This was the precursor to Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth in what it was doing with the app. The story is fun, and what I really like about this story is that it’s adjacent to the original trilogy story, at least out of the core box. So you don’t play as Luke, Leia, or Han, and you can’t kill of Darth Vader or the Emperor, but they might show up in your story as someone to help you or someone to run away from. It’s fun to see how they can weave that together and create a fun experience of a campaign.

7 – Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle
Another not that story driven one, Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, has you play through a campaign of the books, getting new threats that you’re raising to finish and new bad guys you’re trying to beat. This is a deck building game that builds on itself as you play more and more games of it, there are seven total games to play out of the base box, one for each book, and you gain new abilities and new cards to build you deck in each one. It starts out simple, but eventually has you focusing more into what you can do really well. You get to play the main characters the base box has Neville, Ron, Hermione, and Harry, and take them through their times at Hogwarts. A downside is that while the game is simple, the longer you go, the more bad guys you have to beat.

6 – Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game
One that I just got into recently but this game has so many things that I love. First, there is a digital component, not that that makes the game so amazing, but because it makes it more immersive as you’re trying to “solve” the case put in front of you. Then with that, you’re also using your own deduction skills, I really like using deduction and puzzling through things, even if I’m not great at figuring out the puzzle all the time, right away. There is so much going on in this game, story wise, that you feel like you’re in it trying to actually solve this case. It reminds me a bit of procedural crime TV shows, but you get to be the main characters. And while I’m not a huge fan of those shows, being a character in that show is fascinating. And while we were investigating, we were getting cards and things to be added into future cases because of what we’d studied before so out of the base box, with five cases, you develop a whole story as these cases tie together.

5 – Arkham Horror: The Card Game
Arkham Horror is an interesting one to put on the list, because as a Living Card game it’s getting new campaigns and parts to old campaigns pretty often. Out of the base box, you have a three part story where you do the first scenario and what you do in that causes changes for future scenarios. There is a lot that I love out of this game, first you get to play through a surprisingly immersive story for something that is done just with cards. You have interesting and different characters as well in the story. And even with just cards, they do wildly different things at times. Add in that you can do some deck building in this game, not during the game but before or between, you can develop the strategy that you want to take into a case, it might be a strategy of more fighting or more investigating, or blending and balancing the two depending on your style, and unlike some of these campaigns where eventually you’ll have played through it, this one is still getting new content all the time.

4 – TIME Stories
This one has less of a through story than a lot of the campaign games, but there are certain elements that tie it together. You are always worried about another time agency that is trying to mess with time and multiverse in it, and thus far, I’ve really enjoyed every scenario. I feel like they’ve managed to change them up a bit, and while you often have combat or things that are just rolling dice and hoping to get lucky, it does work very well. Each scenario has very strong story elements to it as well as you are trying to figure out a puzzle and an optimal path through the game to win, but with that, you’re exploring and uncovering elements of the story as well. I really like the fact that you are put into “vessels” and that’s how you time travel in the game, and sometimes, you don’t do well enough and your “vessel” dies, but jumping back into the past, you can join the game again and do another run to try and solve the puzzle. It can get a bit repetitive for some, but I haven’t found that to be an issue.

3 – Pandemic Legacy Season 1
Second Legacy game on the list, and I will toss in Season 2 as kind of continuation of this if you want more content. Pandemic is a great cooperative game where you are trying to cure diseases. Pandemic Legacy offers much of the same with that, but story and a changing and expanding rule set as time goes on. The game never feels too complex, but it is more challenging than the regular game. I really like how they manage losing in the game, you continue on if you lost twice in a month, and help you balance that out by getting more useful cards back in your deck that allow you to bend the rules. And the story, while not complex is good, and it has a nice twist to it. I don’t think that the twist was all that surprising, but definitely changes up the game.

2 – Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon
This game just screams epic campaign game. You get to level up and improve your character and you get to explore a massive story as you travel through the lands of Avalon. There are some things I really enjoy about the game, first is the story element. You get to delve into so much of a massive exploration journal and find out so much about the world. This is a dark world as well, and I really appreciate that the storytelling is set in that and that there is a survival element to the game as well. This can be a punishing game that makes you travel around places and do the same things multiple times, but that’s kind of the point of the game as you are traveling through this grim dark Avalon facing off against monstes, trying to hold the Wyrdness at bay by keeping Menhir lit, and struggling to find food. It’s played out over several chapters and you definitely don’t see everything in the game, so it’s a campaign you can come back to again and explore more to see if you can do better.

1 – Gloomhaven
My #1 game of all time, no surprise it’s at the top of the list. Gloomhaven just is a wonderfully massive game. It tells a good story, I wouldn’t say as good as Tainted Grail, but beyond that, the mechanics are amazing, I love the card combat and movement that you have in each scenario as you try and puzzle out what is going to be the best and what the enemies might do. And there’s just so much content in the game, not just scenarios, but also monsters to fight and characters to play as. I love that you have to retire characters at certain points, and that then gives you a new character that feels different from other characters, there’s just so much interesting things going on in the game and there are apps to help make it faster to get to the table that are great. I’ve talked about this a lot, so I’ll stop there, but it’s amazing.

One thing I’ll point out about this list, with the exception of Risk Legacy, all the games on the list are cooperative. It’s fairly rare for there to be competitive campaign games, that I’ve seen, though there are some out there with the likes of Charterstone, which is fun, and Seafall, which is long. But most are going to lean cooperative, so think about that, if you don’t love cooperative games and you want to play a campaign game. And I have a lot more to play and coming than I’ve already played. I really want to get the likes of Betrayal Legacy, Clank Legacy! and Aeon’s End Legacy to the table as well sooner rather than later, because all of those are campaigns based off of games that I already love. Also, I left Dungeons and Dragons off the list, because, I want to keep it board games versus adding in RPG’s which are great but different experiences.

What are some of your favorite campaign games? What are some that I should checkout?

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Taking from the Oxford dictionary, the definition of a game is:

“a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck”

Oxford Dictionary

According to that definition, is my example of The Mind, a game?

Basics of the Mind are that you are trying to play cards in numerical order without talking, you can see your cards but there is no communication, so you have to guess, based off of feel when to play them down, and you’re trying to get through a certain number of rounds.

By the definition of a game, it doesn’t really take skill or strength, but it is very much luck. And, I think that something that I’d say for a definition of a game, it needs to have a win condition of some sort, I think that competitive is trying to cover for that, but I think a win condition is clearer, because cooperative board games are definitely games even though you’re not competing against someone. So, the Mind, by the technical definition is a game. But, when looking at the definition, it feels like it’s lacking a little bit of what is normally a game because it is just luck based.

So, maybe it’s a combo of a game and activity. I think that you could say that all games are activities. And with the Mind, because you’re mainly just guessing when to play down a card or when to use a special ability, it feels more like an activity to me. And it is a fun group activity as you try and use body language or other non-verbal queues and non-spoiling clues to get other people to play or to have a rush of playing when the numbers are close together. For me, the Mind is more of [redacted – come back for the review].

Is it bad that it might be more of an activity than it is a game? No. I think that many party games, they are best when they are treated more as an activity than a game. When you are playing something like Stipulations and trying to come up with an answer, it’s better to put down something that you think is funny. Same with Balderdash or a game like Cards Against Humanity or Apple to Apples. Even if it isn’t the best answer or the answer most likely to win, it’s a lot of fun just to create moments where you can laugh. And you play until laughing is just starting to fade, and you’ve had a great activity without caring about who wins because you can just be goofy. If you treat them as a game, you won’t get the in-joke answers, you’ll get people trying really hard, and that’s less fun. Yes, you might be removing the game aspect from it or going against the spirit of the rules, but it’s a party game, and a party is supposed to be fun. That’s why I have issues with “party” style games that don’t led themselves to being an activity because they can’t have the same level of fun. I’ll talk about what makes a good party game later as well.

So, with the Mind or party games, they can border on an activity, and that’s fine. I think what’s not fine and some of the reason why I’m writing this article, is because there can be a sort of snooty thumbing of the nose towards these games and the people who play them. Yes, it’s not that complex a game or activity, but are the people having fun, yes. Can it be a gateway for getting people into the heavier and more complex games? Yes. Will it always do that? No, and that’s fine. We want to encourage as many diverse gamers to join the hobby as possible as that will keep the hobby growing and from becoming stale. It might not be a 4X game, an 18XX game, a euro game, or an Ameritrash game, but that’s fine depending on the group, and if they don’t want to move on to those sorts of games, it might be that game group isn’t the right one for you, but don’t disparage someone for having fun in their own way.

What is a light game that you think works better or is more of an activity? Have you tried The Mind, and do you like it? Let me know in the comments below.

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I knew, going into Gloomhaven that it was a beast of a game but I was up for that. I thought that I’d enjoy it from the get go because of how the combat worked, how the scenarios worked, and how there was story to the game, and it’s been almost two years of playing almost every other Tuesday, plus some long Saturdays knocking out a bunch of scenarios, but it was worth it.

If you’re been following my Top 100 Games, you would know that I had Gloomhaven as my #1 game. And there are a lot of reasons for it, the story aspect, the unique combat, and the giant epic nature of it all really speak to me and have helped me figure out that I like games like that a lot. Also the bit of a legacy aspect to the game is a ton of fun as well. Is it a perfect game, I don’t think so, but it’s the closest that I’ve found.

Let’s talk about it a little bit more in detail, because I think there are two primary things that hold people back, besides the size of the game, and that’s, do the characters feel different, and do the scenarios feel different?

Do the Characters Feel Different?
I think that this is a clear yes for me. We unlocked every character in the base game and we’ve played all but two of them (plus there’s a new one in the expansion), and the characters have felt different. Some of them were great at healing, some of them would boost others attacks, some of them would go fast and do bits of damage, but always been in and out. Others would go in there and tank and even others would do massive amounts of damage, but were a bit of a glass cannon. There were ones that slung spells, and some that played riffs. Each of the characters felt unique and basically all of them felt like you can tailor them a little bit to how you wanted to play. And while I always wanted to find a tank, I didn’t feel like I was missing anything by pretty often playing a support type of character in the game, because how the supported was different for each character. And yes, we all probably had our favorites coming out of the game, but I don’t think any of us hated a character that we played or even disliked a character because they felt weaker or anything like that.

Do the Scenarios Feel Different?
Now, while the characters feel different, I think that this is one of the areas that Gloomhaven isn’t perfect. It’s not much of knock, but there are a lot of scenarios where the win situation is just kill everything, so that part of the scenario feels the same. And we also happened to hit the run in, grab this thing, and run back out a number of times in a row. But, while the end goal most have been similar fairly often, the story leading in was always interesting and helped the scenarios feel different, but more so than that, the monsters made scenarios feel different. A black imp is very different than a drake which is very different than a skeleton archer in what they do. So you had to play now you played each scenario differently and that’s often where you got most of your differences. Plus, then, you have the unique characters. There were some scenarios that we had to wait until we had a better team to come and deal with it, but that was part of the fun of the game that made scenarios feel unique, there were some characters that were just better in different types of scenarios, and generally, even if they weren’t ideal, you still had a chance to figure it out.

Overall, I don’t really have complaints about Gloomhaven. Maybe that some of the scenarios or more of them anyways, could have been goal oriented, but combat is easier to explain and make as a goal than something that’s trickier, and there was good variety in combat anyways. While I don’t think that Gloomhaven is going to be the game for everyone, I think that a lot of people will enjoy it. The combat is a bit more tactical than your standard Ameritrash game and there is more story than Euro games. And while it is big, the game, once you’re into it, isn’t that difficult, it might just take a couple of scenarios to teach someone who doesn’t do dungeon crawl games all the time.

Overall Grade: A+
Gamer Grade: A+
Casual Grade: C+

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***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.

10 – Deception: Murder in Hong Kong
I am not that much of a fan of hidden role games like Werewolf, Mafia, Secret Hitler. I don’t mind playing them, but for the most part, it feels like randomly guessing with no real information to go on. Deception: Murder in Hong Kong is not like that. What makes this game seem different is that you have way more information to go on because of the role of the forensic scientist. They are handing up reports from the basement where they have their lab, unfortunately their reports are a bit generic. So you are having to guess a clue and murder weapon by the end of the game that the killer has in front of them. However, the murder has a an accomplice who is trying to help throw everyone off the trail, but without making it too obvious. Then there was a witness to the crime who wants to get people on the right track, they know who the murder is but not the clue and murder weapon, but not too obviously, because if the murder and accomplice can pin point the witness at the end of the game, they still win. The game is a ton of fun and it comes with a ton of different content. There is always a “How” and “Where” report that the forensic scientist sends up, but the rest of the reports can be the state of dress of the murder victim to being if there was noise made during the murder. It’s a really fun deduction game that has a ton of talking to it and people declaring that they couldn’t possibly be the murder. It’s a game that you generally sit down and play two or more times in a game night because it goes over so well, and it plays a large group.

9 – Clank! In! Space!
This one surprised me a little by being so high, but I do really enjoy the game. In Clank! In! Space!, you are racing around the spaceship of an evil alien overlord who has a ton of trophies in his compartments on the ship. And, as an adventurer, you want to liberate a trophy so that you can become famous. Now, you do this by building up a deck of cards that allows you to purchase better cards for the deck and move and fight things. Plus, you have to get a key code from the ship to be able to get into the trophy room. So there is a bunch going on in this game, but it’s basically a deck building game. What works well for me is that it has more going than that, and the clank mechanic. The clank mechanic is basically you making noise as you stumble around the ship trying to find your way to the treasures and this evil alien is paying attention to that. So you want to make as little noise as possible, because you make too much, he’ll get you and you’ll be out of the game. But if you don’t make much clank, you can possibly get in to the good treasure, but it also might take a lot longer and then there is a higher chance that your clank (cubes) will be drawn from a bag, the few that are put in there. The game has a nice push your luck element to go with the deck building aspect, and I basically always want to push my luck. The game also isn’t a serious game, the cards riff off of various sci-fi films, TV shows, and stories. I don’t know that this game would work with a more serious theme. It’s a bit longer of a game than some deck builders, but the rest of the game play doesn’t cause it to overstay it’s welcome.

8 – Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition
Yes, 2nd Edition is important here as that is the game with the app that allows you to play through the scenario without someone having to run the scenario. This is a Lovecraftian themed game where you take on the role of investigators in the 1920’s. You’re called to a mansion or some location to investigate something strange that is going on. And whatever it is, it’s strange. Maybe it’s a town that is controlled by deep ones, maybe it’s a ritual that is meant to summon an elder god, or maybe it’s time travel plus probably everything else mentioned. With the app, there are a lot of scenarios that you can play through, and because the app knows what expansions you have for the game, it can change up how the mansion you are exploring or whatever the location is, looks and move rooms around. In the game, you are fighting monsters, investigating the case, solving puzzle, and probably going insane. It’s like a lot of Fantasy Flight Games Lovecraftian games that way, but this game has so much to it that you feel like you can play a scenario a couple of times, and even if the overall story doesn’t change, your experience with it will. And with the app, there are a lot of scenarios, some that require expansions, and some that don’t. This game really gives you a nice feeling of tension as you have to balance investigating with fighting. The game is also nice, because it offers different scenarios of differing length, so if you want to play for an hour and a half, you can do that, but if you want to play a longer game, you can do that as well. I believe that the app even lets you save, though, I haven’t used that feature yet, because we’ve always played through a scenario. This game uses the app well in that it doesn’t take over the game, but it makes the game easier to play.

7 – XenoShyft: Onslaught
The highest deck building game on the list, XenoShyft is a deck building game that has more than just the deck building aspect. It is Starship Troopers the board game where you are on a mining planet dealing with a bug infestation. But the bugs aren’t little or medium sized cockroaches, these are giant bugs who are going to destroy your base. The base has more health with more players, but with more players, you are going to be dealing with more monsters in each wave. Each player has their own side of the base to defend. However, you can aid other people. So if I am in charge of the med bay, I can heal your troops, but I only have a limited number of cards, and each player can have up to four characters to defend their base per round, and there are four bugs coming to get them each round. While this game has a deck building aspect to it, I feel like it’s also just as much a tower defense game as you watch the bugs slowly whittle away the bases hit points. This game has a good amount of pressure to it, and while it feels like it shouldn’t be impossibly hard, I don’t have a high win percentage. In whatever player count you’re playing at, you feel like you never have enough things to deal with each players side of the base. And I really like challenging cooperative games. This game as a lot of things going for it, and the cooperative nature of the deck building and being able to build up your deck and what you are getting, but then being able to sh are that with others makes this game feel unique compared to most others.

6 – Arkham Horror: The Card Game
I really like my Lovecraft board games, and this one really has a lot of story to it. You take one or two characters on an adventure as you try and solve the weird things that are happening in your town. This game, I guess, could technically be consider a deck builder, but you build the deck prior to the actual game. But each investigator has a unique deck of items. So the waitress, she might have a knife or something like that, but she’s not going to be as well armed as the FBI agent. In this game, which is a living card game, you are playing as a character or two and using resources to get cards and abilities into play, discarding cards to help you make checks to fight a monster or to investigate and gather clues while you are watching the bad guys schemes also count up until the point where you might have lost the game. One of the cool things about this game is that you have the ability to upgrade your deck in between games. You get experience points that you can spend, so maybe you have a decent revolver that has four bullets, you can get a six shooter that has six bullets now to replace it, so you can use it longer (that is a made up example). Along with that, this is a living card game, what that means is that there are more scenarios that can be made, and it is just more cards that are added to your game. You can play the game multiple times, though, through a story because you have different choices you can make as a group, and you have to decide which one is better. I like this game solo and I like it two players as well. I think that the living card game aspect could be a barrier of entry for some people, but the games aren’t long and you don’t have to play more than the base game if you don’t want to. And I realized I forgot one thing, in this game, you are trying to defeat challenges with various skills, pretty normal stuff for all the Fantasy Flight Arkham games, but in this one, instead of rolling dice, you are pulling tokens from a bag that can modify your result. It’s a fun twist that works like a die roll, but if you want to play a story focused game, you can make the bag easier, less negative numbers, or if you want to change yourself, you can make it harder. That ability to scale difficulty is really fun and make plays seem different.

5 – T.I.M.E. Stories
And now for something completely different, though still story driven. In T.I.M.E. Stories you are from an agency that is worried about the time stream and what might be happening and how people can use it for evil (I suspect I’m actually a bad guy or at least my boss is). You play through different scenarios that challenge you to explore locations, find clues, and solve the mystery that is happening. To do that, your consciousness is sent back into a vessel which can and probably will die or you’ll run out of time. But the good thing is, you can be sent back again and your boss will only be somewhat mad at you. T.I.M.E. Stories is a really cool game where you get little hints, from time to time, of a story that is going on that’s larger. And all the scenarios I’ve played thus far have felt different. The first one we were trying to stop something from happening in an Asylum. The next one we were trying to rescue someone during a zombie outbreak, and the final one we were in an alternate dimension in a fantasy world. And there was way more stories and locations than that, that I haven’t played yet. This game, is so much fun, the downside is that you can’t replay it once you’ve solved it, at least not for a while. You’ll probably always generally remember the puzzles, but the scenarios aren’t too expensive, you can play with up to four people, and you get more playing time out of each scenario than you would watching a movie, or at least we have. There are red herrings in there too that make the game harder as you are racing against a clock, time track, to be able to get everything solved before time runs out, and generally you have to reset at least once. I love this game, and I have the next scenario waiting for me, just need to schedule a time to play it.

4 – Betrayal at House on the Hill
I’m going to have this game higher than a lot of people, because there are some issues with the game. Mainly, when reading through a scenario for the haunting, which is the second half of the game, the betrayer or the other group, might have some issues clearly understanding their goal. Or their goal might be super easy. But that’s just part of the game and actually feels fairly thematic when it’s easy or when it’s hard. In this game, you are a rag tag group of ghost hunters, or thrill seekers, or just there because some dared you to, or a creepy child, who are investigating a creepy haunted house. You are finding rooms, finding items in rooms, and dealing with the creepy things that are going on. Eventually, you’ll have found a number of omen cards and a roll will happen and you might have a haunt happen. If it doesn’t, you continue until the haunt does happen because someone has found an omen card and failed their roll. Then you look up a scenario based on the omen and the room it was found in, and you play through that as the second half of the game, each side with a semi secret way to win. This game just drips theme for me and while it can be a bit stressful being the betrayer figuring out what you need to do by yourself, the game generally works. Each haunt feels different, and that’s some of the reason it doesn’t always feel balanced. The fact that a haunt can happen early in the game as only a little bit of the house has been explore or late in the game after almost everything is found is fun as well. This is a really good horror themed game for me, though I know it won’t be for everyone. I’d recommend you give it a try and try to get immersed in the story and feeling of the game, versus seeing if everything is fair and balanced.

3 – Pandemic Legacy Season 1
It was going to be on the list, and I’ve loved my experience with the game. I won’t go into too much on how it works, but as a legacy game, you are finding out new bits of story, new mechanics, and tearing up things as you go along. Pandemic is a game where you are part of a team trying to cure diseases and uncover what is going on in the world because there are those diseases spreading. The game is a ton of fun, and I’ve played it through twice. The story is linear and simple, but there is enough to it that it’s compelling. It’s also compelling, because Pandemic isn’t that easy a game as a the base game, and Pandemic Legacy Season 1 isn’t that easy a game either, plus you soon have to start balancing new things against the normal win condition which is just curing all four diseases. When I played through it a second time, a few years later, I played it solo on Malts and Meeples and I certainly didn’t remember everything for the game, though, I remembered the big plot points fairly well, just not when they would come up in the game. Each character that is played has their own abilities and you can improve them as time goes on, but you can also lose them if they get stuck in too many bad situations. The game really works well, and now it’s come down in price some. If you haven’t played this game, I’d highly recommend it, because there was a reason it was #1 on Board Game Geek for a while.

2 – Blood Rage
Most of the games in my top 10 have some story driven aspect to it. This game does not. However, this game has so many cool things about it. It has a great Norse theme to it as you are a Viking clan who are fighting for control over Yggdrasil and other sections of the nine realms. You start out in each age by drafting cards that help you with your strategy. Maybe you look to upgrade your clan leader so that they are more powerful. Or maybe you make it so that you get more glory if your clan members die in battle. Maybe you focus on being strong in battle or recruiting monsters. The drafting part of the game, while quick, really helps shape how you play the game. Then you try and take over areas of the map in order to improve your abilities, such as action points so you can take more actions, how many points you get for winning a battle or how many troops you can have on the board. Once everyone is out of action points, one of the realms is lost and you start again. Blood Rage plays fairly quickly for a game with a lot of minis and a lot going on in it. And the game feels different each time you play, because the cards that you draft are going to change up your strategy, and if you go too much into one strategy in an early age, players can block you from that strategy in later ages. And if you can focus on a single strategy, it might allow you to win the game, but there isn’t a strategy that seems too much stronger, whether your are fighting or peaceful. This game is just a ton of fun to play, and I finally got a copy, because right now it’s hard to find.

1 – Gloomhaven
My #1 game matches up with Board Game Geeks #1 game overall. Gloomhaven is a massive dungeon crawl game where you and a group of adventurers go through and fight monsters trying to figure out what is happening in the city of Gloomhaven and the lands surrounding it. This game is so much fun, because it’s a massive campaign game that has some legacy style aspects to it, mainly putting stickers on cards to improve them, but you can play it again completely. The combat and movement in this game are fun as well, as you play cards, picking them based on abilities, but also number at the top of one of them, because that determines how fast you act, and possibly if you are ahead of the monsters. Plus, with that, you get experience points which allows you to put in better cards, but the higher level you get and the better cards you have in there, the harder that the monsters get as well. You also have a goal that your character is going for, both overall and in each scenario. The scenario ones help you improve your character even more, but the overall one, that one causes you to retire and unlock a new character. Then you get to pick from all the unlocked characters and join the party again as a new character. There are a ton of scenarios in the game, as I’ve been playing it with a group of three of us and it’s taken us playing almost every other week for three hours in an evening, and it’s almost been two years. The game is amazing, it’s massive, and I think it’s going to scratch the itch for ameritrash players because it is so story driven, but the combat actually has a bit of a more strategic feel because you are playing cards and modifying with more cards, so it’s less random than rolling dice. I also think that, even though Gloomhaven is a massive game, it’s pretty straight forward once you have a few core concepts down, so while it might be intimidating to start, if you have someone who knows the game well, I think that more casual gamers would be able to join in the game and have a blast. This was an easy #1 game for me and as I was sorting I knew there wasn’t a chance anything would be higher.

So there it is, my top 100 games. I know that I’ve played a game since this started or since they were ranked that would probably be on the list. So this is definitely a living list. Thanks for coming along on this ride with me.

Let me know what games in the top 10 and top 100 look cool to you. Are there any that you love as well or love more than I do? Are there any that you really want to try?

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In Sword & Sorcery, you control a character who is an ancient hero brought back in this time of need. You are exploring and different scenarios, getting options presented to you as to what to do, and making choices based on the sort of party that you have. During each scenario, you are fighting monsters, collecting soul points, getting money and other loot and hopefully leveling up your character. Then, as you win, you advance to more scenarios. All in all, the basics of what you’re doing in a game are pretty standard.

Sword & Sorcery does have some unique things, the biggest one being death in the game. When your character dies, you were an ancient soul that has been brought forward in time, so you become a ghost, instead of just being dead. You can do a few things as a ghost, but the main thing you can do and what you want to do, is get to your soul respawn point, respawn, and get back into the fight as fast as possible. Because, if your teammates go down as well, you’ll lose the scenario. This feels unique to me in the game because death isn’t the end. In Gloomhaven, it’s possible to have a character go down half way through a scenario, and while there is plenty of things that player can still help with in terms of running the encounter, you are done playing your character for that scenario. Sword & Sorcery handles that differently allowing you to hop back into the fight, but at a cost. To respawn, you have to use a soul point. And while that doesn’t seem like much of a cost, the soul points are what you use to level up as well, so you’re slowing down your leveling progression, and when you get knocked out and turned into ghost form and come back, you lose a level.

The leveling is also interesting in this game. It’s interesting because it’s not a standard leveling. Characters don’t level up based on XP that is gained, there isn’t a divided amount of anything that gets you closer at a regular rate. You have a group pool of soul points, and you don’t get soul points all that fast. You also have to keep a reserve of soul points because if someone goes down and you have none, they are extremely limited in what they can do until they can get back into the fight. Leveling up is also not a cheap affair. You are spending soul points equal to the level squared that you are going up to. So at level 2 it’s 4 soul points, at level 3 it’s 9 soul points, at level 5 it’s 25 soul points. The game hands them out fairly often, but that’s a lot of soul points to get up to the higher levels.

Another part of the game that I really enjoy, is the character creation/skills aspect of the game. Each character has two sides, a lawful side and a chaotic side. When you start the game, you, as a party, decides if you are going to be lawful or chaotic. That is going to give you a different unique character power than if you have played lawful. It also gives you the opportunity to get different abilities. And when you pick abilities, you have a large variety to pick from. So how you build up a character over time is going to be different than someone else might. Because of that, you really do get a good variety in the game and it adds back in some replayability, even if you know what is going to happen in the scenarios. And, depending on if you are lawful or chaotic, you are locked out of picking some abilities which limits your choices some in an interesting way.

They also have some cool rules for characters and monsters in the same area. If there are more heroes than monsters in the area, you have majority, if you have have twice as many you dominate the area, and just for that, you get an extra hit. But it isn’t just for you, it’s also for the monsters, so if you get swarmed or split up, it’s possible that you’ll be taking extra damage. It’s a nice way to make the majority feel like it means something, but it also means that you can get piled on quickly if you aren’t careful. This is one area that strategy is added into the game where it isn’t just the die rolls.

The game has a massive rule book, however, and like a lot of dungeon crawlers, that can be a deterrent from people getting into the game. I don’t think that the rules are all that complex, however, once you’re used to them. Most of what you need to know is explained on the cards for your abilities, and resolved by die rolls. So, once you know how to interpret those rolls, it goes fast. I feel like that’s fairly common for larger dungeon crawlers where they need to cover the edge cases, but most of those things will be fairly rare so the focus of the game is actually pretty straight forward.

One downside to the game is that it’s a bit fiddly. I bought a ton of small plastic bags and that helps keep things sorted. But the game itself does not come with those, which means that it would be a lot of work finding stuff. I think that a tackle box or a cross stitch thread box would work nicely as well. I feel like this is a common issue with a lot of dungeon crawlers. Without an organizer or organization strategy for Gloomhaven, it would have the same issue as well. Also, because of the size of the maps and the amount of tokens, you need a fairly large table to play the game easily. Once you’re into the game you know what you need and it’s easier to keep track of, but set-up can be a lot, thankfully tear down is a lot faster which is to be expected.

I also will say that right now I’m playing the game two player, each of us running a single character. I think that we’re going to consider going to two players each. The reason for that was that we’ve had good luck. The friend seems to roll defense like no ones business, so their character has never been in danger and is often the one focused on. And I’ve had a lot of luck doing large amounts of damage so it’s been fairly easy. I don’t know how much more difficult it will be controlling two characters each or what that will do to the length of play, but we’re hoping it bumps up the difficulty a bit. It should because you flip an encounter card after every heroes activation, so theoretically characters will get hit more. We also have two magic users, so we are limited in what we can use for equipment and want to get more variety.

I have enjoyed this game a lot thus far. I don’t think that it’s as good as Gloomhaven, but it’s a lot of fun. The story has been enjoyable, and I like the fact that when you’re knocked out, you really aren’t knocked out of the scenario. I wish it felt a bit harder or had a good way to scale the difficulty. But there are unique aspects to the game and I’m excited for playing more of it. There are also a lot of interesting characters to play and way more than I will probably ever get to, plus expansions. This is definitely not a game for those who don’t like the luck of the dice though.

Overall Grade: B+
Gamer Grade: B+
Casual Grade: C-

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