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Top 100 Games (of all time) 2024 Edition – 70 through 61

70. Sagrada

• Published by Floodgate Games in 2017
• Build the most beautiful stained glass window

This game is just a great drafting game experience. The ease of play is wonderful as well because you draft a die and place it while other people are going on drafting their own dice. Especially with the 5-6 player expansion, which can be worked into the lower player counts, it makes it so you don’t need to spend time with what others are doing. But both ways to draft the dice and place the dice are mainly the same and really good. Plus the way you need to play the dice to not have colors or numbers adjacent makes a great puzzle.

Buy Sagrada

69. Mesozooic

• Published by Z-Man Games in 2018
• Slide your dino-themed park together in this light filler game

Mesozooic has a couple of great elements to the game. Firstly it’s drafting, and I really love drafting. But the game is more than that. You also need to complete a slide puzzle. You see you draft 11 cards and shuffle them up to create a 3 tall and 4 wide grid with an open spot. Then you slide them around frantically for 45 seconds like a slide puzzle to get the best dino-park that you can. It’s silly, light, and a very fun time.

Buy Mesozooic

68. 7 Wonders Duel

• Published by Repos Production in 2015
• Draft cards and build wonders in this head to head game

I like this game better than 7 Wonders. Mainly because I played 7 Wonders a few times at two and it isn’t a good game. 7 Wonders Duel is great that way, as expected. But the game is more than just a better version, I think that the drafting is very clever. I love the trying to avoid revealing a card that is good for your opponent. And some of the cards being face down so unknown until they are revealed. And the two side ways to win with science and military add in tension to the game as well. You can’t just draft your best engine, even though you want to.

Buy 7 Wonders Duel

67. Icecool

• Published by Brain Games in 2016
• Help your penguins sneak out of class and get fish in this dexterity game

Yes, the theme of Icecool is that simple and I love it for me. I love the flicking element of the game, it’s just fun. And I really enjoy the silliness of the game. This is one of my favorites for a late night of gaming. Just sit around and flick penguins and have a laugh. It is possible to get very good at the game, but it’s also a game where players can just have a great shot by pure luck. To me that is what makes it a fun game for all ages.

Buy Icecool

66. Super Fantasy Brawl

• Published by Mythic Games in 2022
• Choose your team and face off against an opponent in an arena

This game is coming back, kind of. I say kind of, I expect that most of the game is going to be the same, but CMON bought it from the now defunct Mythic Games. So I want to see what CMON is going to do with it. Because I love the simplicity of the game. Super Fantasy Brawl has you activate three different colors of cards each round. And you can do some on defense as well, but that means you won’t do as much on your turn. Then you either try to knock out your opponents for trophies or complete goals, or most likely, do both. The game is strategic but also fast and easy to play.

Follow Super Fantasy Brawl: Reborn

65. Trailblazers

• Published by Bitewing Games in 2023
• Create the best hiking, biking, and kayaking routes

Another drafting game on the list. This is the last one for this time, but there are four and possible five if you count drafting your team in Super Fantasy Brawl. In this one you draft cards to create trails. I love the trail creation aspect of the game because you really need to strategize as to how you’re going to do that. And I like how the game becomes more complex in your trail creation throughout as you add in other hubs that you need to start and leave from for each of the three routes.

Buy Trailblazers

64. Mind Up!

• Published by Pandasaurus Games in 2023
• Play the right number to collect and create sets of colors

This game is so easy to learn and play. I actually wrote about it yesterday in that exact context, so you can checkout the article after this. But it’s simply play out a card simultaneously with the other players. Then you look to see who played the lowest number, they get the lowest number from the middle. And after that it’s about trying to get the colors you want into the highest scoring column you have. The whole thing is just a really easy to play and simple time. I explain it better in the video, by the way.

Buy Mind Up!

63. So Clover!

• Published by Repost Productions in 2021
• Can you find the right pair of words based off of one word clues?

This game is always tricky for me to explain. Basically you have cards with four words, one on each side. And you have four of them making this little four by four grid. Each side is going to have two words, if that all makes sense and you’re picturing it. You need to create a one word clue so people can guess and put it back into that same order. Not that hard, well, it is when the words don’t connect at all. And there is going to be a mystery fifth card added in. But if you give the right clues you can lead people down the right path to recreate it.

Buy So Clover!

62. The Castles of Burgundy

• Published by alea in 2019
• Take a new kingdom and turn it into a bustling land

A game that I wouldn’t have expected that I like. But I really enjoy The Castles of Burgundy, a game of using dice to purchase and place new things into your land. As well as using them to sell goods, and get workers that let you manipulate your dice. There is a bunch going on and I feel like I need to nail down my strategy for it. But I really enjoy what this offers and it’s a new type of puzzle for me to spend time diving into as a game. I even have the fancy version coming that alea did with Awaken Realms.

Buy The Castles of Burgundy

61. Letter Jam

• Published by Czech Games Edition in 2019
• Work together to figure out what everyone’s letters are because you can’t see your own

If you know what Hanabi is that will help with it. But Letter Jam is a game where you can’t see the letters that form your word. Other players can see one of them at a time but they can’t see theirs. So you give clues to help people narrow down what their letters might be for their jumbled word. Of course everyone needs to get theirs figured out by the end of the game, but it’s cooperative so the challenge is great but fun to tackle.

Buy Letter Jam

Upcoming Streams

Just a reminder on my streaming schedule.

• Monday night, time varies, I play different small solo games, though I might be looking to start up a campaign again.
• Wednesday at 9 PM central is going to continue my Top 100 Games (of all time) 2024 Edition for another six weeks. After that expect this to be when I play my small games.
• Friday at 9 PM central my wife and I are streaming a playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3

The best way to know when we go live, though is to subscribe and click that notification bell. I can’t promise, and in fact it’s pretty unlikely, that I’ll have events to click on ahead of time. Though I do want to get better at it. I hope that you can join a stream and hop into the chat.

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What’s The Game?

Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes is a squad combat game. Both for battling with ships and with characters we know and love. It is also a leveling up game where you improve your characters, get better ranked characters and unlock new characters as you go along.

There are a few different game modes that you play a lot of depending on how far leveled you are into the game. In the start, you are just fighting against computer generated levels. You are trying to get more gear and more character shards to level up your characters. Then you start to level up in the character and ship arena getting more rewards and seeing how high you can climb. Finally you get to different events, conquest, and grand arena that really push you into more and interesting game modes.

Is It A Good Game?

Now this is a subjective thing. I will say that I really do enjoy the game. I don’t always love it, but it doesn’t do anything to make me want to stop playing it. That isn’t a ringing endorsement, so let me get into the details about what I love and what I don’t.

Pay to Play?

Firstly, this is an app game. You can 100% pay to “win” at the game from the very start. This is totally normal for an app game. They need to make money somehow, and because the app is free, that means that they are going to give the opportunity for in app purchases. But with that said, I have been playing for five years or so at this point. And my ships on my “server” are top 20 every day in the ship arena, my characters are top 200 every day. So you can get a long ways up by playing free to play.

This model will always bug some people because they want it to be “fair”. Games like this are a business first and foremost. They have development teams that are adding in new content to get new players and they need to be paid. So free to play is always an option, it just might take longer.

New Content

Now, while the pay to play is a negative, this is a massive positive. They do a great job of putting out new content all the time. It helps that Star Wars is pumping out new content all the time, but it’s not only new characters. Though, I do love getting new characters into the game. So, for example, while the Mandalorian Season 2 was wrapping up on Disney+, they were putting out new characters from the first and second season, like Bo-Katan and Dark Trooper.

But they are also putting out new game modes. Conquest was a new one this year and it’s been a lot of fun thus far. It allows you to do all sorts of crazy things with your characters that you couldn’t before. So they are giving us players who have been playing the game for a very long time new stuff to do.

And they do add in new ways to improve your characters. This is actually a negative at times because some of them are for really high level players only. Such to the point that some of the things I can’t even get to and I’ve been playing for five years. This goes back to the whole pay to play aspect. The people at the very very top that are getting this last 3% of the content are the people pay to play.

Repetitiveness

Now, this kind of falls into that content category, but does this game feel fresh enough? Or do you just do the same things over and over again? This is another mixed bag, there are certain things that are a grind. Especially early game you will be grinding a lot. Now early game should last maybe half a year or less if you play often. If you want to get leveled up fast in this game as a free to play there are YouTube creators like AhnaldT101 that can help with that. He does a free to play guide every year for new players.

Once you get further into the game, the game gives you more ways to play. The biggest one is Grand Arena. This is basically a battle against another players in the game. Each of you sets different areas of defense and then you attack each others defense getting points. The person who gets the most points wins. How you set up your defense, what you leave for your offense, you can come up with different strategies, and since everyone’s rosters look different, it different each time you face off.

Also conquest game mode is built around getting these cards that unlock new powers for the mode. So you can customize how you use those cards based off of the roster that you have. So that is fun to play around with right now, and these data cards that you get, they are rotating them at time goes by. One strategy might work one time, but you might get a whole new strategy the next time.

Ships

Now, we need to talk about one of the bigger negatives of the game. While getting new characters can be a pain, they have tried to improve it. Ships on the other hand just suck. Not only are they much harder to get, they are much less customizable. With the characters I can put mods on them to make them hit harder, survive longer, or take more turns depending on their role on the team. With ships, that doesn’t exist, all ships are just the same. So a good team in ships for me is going to be the same as another team.

But really, it’s the grind of leveling up that gest you. You need certain ships to unlock certain characters. And getting a ship from 3 to 6 stars can take the better part of a year. And that sucks when you are working for one of the better characters or towards one of the Galactic Legends characters that are really hard to get. Now you are farming a lousy ship just because you need it, even though you won’t use it anywhere else in the game. This is something that a lot of us long term players are still dealing with the grind of that.

But Is It Fun?

I mean, that’s the real question, are you patient with the game. It is hard to say, for me, the game is fun. Especially now that I am starting to get involved more in the game. I didn’t mention Guilds, but being in a good guild with higher level players means you can get a lot of things a whole lot faster. So if you are a free to play person like myself, it’ll take some time, but it is a lot of fun. If you are going to spend money on it, you can get the good characters really fast.

I think the most important thing is you need to love Star Wars. Without loving Star Wars why play a Star Wars game. It is kind of odd, there is Marvel Strike Force, a similar game for Marvel, that I played a little bit but then gave up on. It was mainly a time thing since I started Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes first. But I like Marvel better. This just gives me some fun Star Wars time and something to spend a few minutes on when I get the chance. But if you are looking for a game to sink your teeth into and enjoy, Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes is solid.

Have you played it? What is your favorite app game that keeps you coming back every day?

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