If you need to catch up all the videos are over on the Malts and Meeples YouTube Channel. And The next part of the list will be live on next Wednesday, October 6th at 8 PM Central Time.

100 Through 91

90 Through 81

Top 100 Board Games – 80 through 71

80. Just One

This is an interesting party game in that it’s fully cooperative. A lot of party games have teams against each other, or everyone is vying for solo victory, but not that many are cooperative. In this game, one person is the guesser, the other people are giving clues for one word. The other people write down a single word clue. If they duplicate both those clues go away, and the guesser has less clues to guess from. So you want to give a unique, but meaningful clue, or maybe the most obvious one and hope no one else does. We do house rule it so you don’t get penalized for a wrong guess and the game is still great.

Buy on Miniature Market

79. Merchants Cove

It’s one of two highly asymmetrical games on the list, Merchants Cove has you taking on one of several different roles, building up your own engine of things that you do, to try and get goods to sell to merchants. The Captain uses a spinner in some of what they do, the Oracle does it as a roll and write, the Inn keeper is guessing how merchants are going to show up, the alchemist is playing a version of Potion Explosion. The game works well at 2-3 and the different characters are great. Not a complex game but a lot of fun.

Buy on CoolStuffInc

78. The Grimm Masquerade

I called this social deduction, but it’s more hidden role and deduction. In this game you are trying to collect your masquerade character’s gift. But there is a gift you don’t want to get because it’ll reveal who you are. The game is simple to play, you just flip a card and decide to keep it or give it away. You’re trying to get them to bust while getting your correct gifts. Once you’ve decide with your first card you flip and do the opposite with the next. So it might make you closer to busting, or help you, you don’t know. Plus you can guess who other characters are for even more points. Pretty simple game and great artwork.

Not Available

77. Dice Forge

Some games have a lot of toy factor and are just okay games. Other games have great toy factor and are really good games. Dice Forge is a really good game. It has really good toy factor too in that you change up the side of the dice. You build up an engine which allows you to get cards for points but also pull off a side of a die and get a new side. It’s fairly themeless but the artwork is really nice and game play is a lot of fun. What resources do you add to your dice, and how do you optimize to score the most points?

Buy On Miniature Market

76. Claim

I like trick taking games, I own a number of them, but I haven’t played a ton of them. Claim, though, is a really fun trick taking game. The game plays over two rounds, the first you’re playing to build your hand, and the second hand is your actual scoring hand. It is interesting because to build your hand you are trying to win or lose tricks based off of a card that is flipped up. So if it’s a low card of a suit you try and lose and get a blind card instead. Plus the suits have powers which are interesting as well. It also plays really quickly, which is what I want in trick taking.

Buy on Miniature Market

75. Small World

Small World is a game that I call Risk but fun. Plus Small World has you with special powers and fantasy races which let you be different than everyone else. And you are always fighting people, you can gang up on someone in a great position, but then they put their fantasy race into decline and come in with another and attack. There’s no getting stuck in a corner and just left alive in this game. It is faster than Risk, more entertaining and just a really good area control game.

Buy on CoolStuffInc

74. Star Wars: Rebellion

Star Wars in a box. This game is kind of the original trilogy where one player is the Empire and the other player is the Rebels. The Rebels are trying to complete missions to subvert the Empire to win the game. The Empire is just trying to find the Rebel base and wipe that off the map. The game has you moving troops, fighting battles, capturing enemy leaders, and more. It works well, it’s a big game, and even with dice combat it’s a whole lot of fun.

Buy on Miniature Market

73. Pandemic Legacy: Season 1

This is the game that has dropped massively. It was my #10 game overall last year, and honestly could probably be higher. This is how I want to play Pandemic, whatever Legacy season. The reason it’s dropped is that I’ve played through it twice already. So do I need to play it again, I could and I’d like it. But it’s also a legacy game, so I know a bunch of the story and the beats. The game I still highly recommend and if you’re looking for a fresh way to play Pandemic, it’s an amazing cooperative gaming experience.

Buy on Miniature Market

72. Root

Root is the more complex of the two asymmetrical games on the list. Each faction plays differently, but you need to know how the other factions work because that matters for how you play the game. You take on different groups of creatures in the woods from the Eyrie to the Marquise de Cat to a Woodland Alliance and more. The game has you fighting and trying to get area control in a lot of ways. Really smartly done game but harder to learn. I want to start playing it again more often because it’s really good.

Buy on Miniature Market

71. Medium

Another party game to wrap up this section of the list. Medium is amazingly fun. The game has you and a partner on a turn you try and guess the word between two words that you’ve played down. If you match up you get the higher point tokens, if not you try and come up with the linking word between the two that you just said. And now you see if you match again. It’s a good funny party game that has you thinking but it’s somewhat cooperative because matching helps you. And even if it’s not your go, you’ll be thinking of a word that connects just to see if you’d match.

Buy on Amazon

The Next Ten

The list is now 30 games in, and we’re getting close to that mid point. The disclaimer as always, while I like the games higher on the list more, the games on this list are all really good in my opinion. So if you want to see what the next ten are live you can join me next Wednesday. And in general to know when I go live, you can subscribe and click the notification bell. That’ll alert you when I am going to go live or when I put up a new video.

Thanks for checking out the list. Let me know which of these games you’d like to get to the table most? Any that you haven’t tried or that you know you already love?

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Merchants Cove Overview

In Merchants Cove, each player is playing as a different merchant on the cove. You have the alchemist, pirate, blacksmith, and chronomancer in the main box. But the expansions add in an oracle, dragon rancher, and innkeeper that can be played with as well. Each of these characters is creating their own version of large and small items to sell. Each character is creating their own goods on their own boards.

There is a main board where the players do interact slightly. Mainly they interact by adding in adventurers, think merchants, to various boats, and as boats come in, that determines what goods are going to be bought at what prices. So you can keep the prices lower by spreading out where the merchants come in at or push them higher by putting a lot of the various types onto a few boats.

In the end, the person with the most points is the winner. You get points by selling your goods as well as sponsorships. But you can also push your luck to do more and better things in the game, but you get corruption which is negative points in the end.

What I Don’t Like

This isn’t really a negative, more just a statement of fact, Merchants Cove is not the easiest game to teach. The different factions all do things differently. So while I can teach you the main board, everyone needs to learn their own character. Or I need to spend time teaching each person their own character. So that does take longer than in a lot of games.

Also, I liked this game at two and at three. However, playing with three players, especially new players to the game as we all were, that takes a chunk of time. Even with players who know the game better, for a game without a ton of story or interaction, the game will last a little while. You aren’t so much engaged on your opponents turn.

What I Like

I like asymmetric games. I always find them interesting because everyone is doing their own thing. And they are really challenging to make. So while Merchants Cove might be simpler than say Root, it is easier to get to the table and extremely well balanced. And fairly often it’s what the different groups want to do that is so different. In this game it’s even how the players are doing the things. The Oracle is a roll and write, the Alchemist is basically playing Potion Explosion, the Blacksmith is manipulating dice, the Innkeeper is doing set collection. All of them are extremely different in really cool ways.

I also like that it’s a pretty simple game. Now, when I say it takes a bit to teach, that’s because everyone is doing something different. The game play for each character itself is pretty simple. You basically have six actions and two of those actions are ones that are common across everyone. So really, you have four actions that you need to learn for your character. That makes it way easier on a new player, going back to the example, something like Root.

The interaction that does happen on the main board is good as well. Sure, there isn’t a ton of it, but what there is works well. I like that I can strategize, even on a random draw where things go. Do I push people towards the black market and taking more corruption or do I try and make my small goods as valuable as possible. It is a small part of the game, but it is a major part of how you score.

Finally, let’s talk about that scoring. I really like how it works as well. It’s a multiplier system. The more merchants of a color coming in, that is multiplied by the points on the goods you’re selling of that color. So this ties directly into that interaction. You can set it up so that you have three three point small red items and five red merchants coming in, that’s 45 points. This game isn’t shy about giving you points and I like that. Or maybe you opponent has that, can you make it so that only two are coming in so they get only 18 points instead?

Merchants Cove Final Thoughts

This is a really fun game. I get why it won’t work for everyone. This is a lighter game and while there will be some variety in how you play each time and how even a character will play each time, might be a bit more limited. But for myself and my play group, I like it a lot. I think that the different characters are interesting and I’ve only seen half of them at this point. The two I played

I think for someone who wants a big looking game to play but maybe doesn’t play as big as it looks, Merchants Cove is going to be a great option. But for a heavy euro gamer, this might feel like the choices are a bit light in what you are doing. Still, the production value is amazing on the game and the play is a ton of fun, so one I definitely recommend.

My Grade: B+
Gamer Grade: C
Casual Grade B+

Is Merchants Cove a game that you want to try?

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Skulk Hollow is an asymmetrical strategic game where one player takes on the role of foxes who live in the area and the other player ancient guardians that have awoken. The Foxen are trying to disable the guardians while avoiding having their leader perish. To do this, they have to get close enough to the guardian and either shoot them or leap onto them and hack away with their swords. The Guardian, on the other hand is trying to take out to Foxen leader, but they’ll also have some additional objective. It might be getting a certain number of tentacles into play or just taking out a certain number of the foxen heroes. Whomever completes their objective first wins the game.

The game play is pretty simple. Each player has a certain number of cards in their hand and they can play a number, this varies for the Guardians as there are several different ones out of the box that can have varying numbers. These all you to move, attack, maybe heal, leap onto the guardian, or whatever it might be. What’s impressive is that while the Foxen always have the same decks, each Guardian has their own unique deck, and that’s because all the guardians have their own unique ability. Raptra can fly whereas Grak can stomp, so those abilities show up uniquely on the Guardians own deck. Some of the Guardians, and some of the Foxen folk can augment their turn by having spent cards to collect what basically amounts to energy, which can allow them to take various free actions as well by spending the cubes. The game really gets down into a game play where you are trying to guess what your opponent has in their hand and using your cards as efficiently as possible.

I’ve talked some about what makes the two sides asymmetrical and how the guardians all play differently and have different objectives, but it isn’t just them. The Foxen also have the ability to change up their faction. With the Foxen you have the ability to change out your leader. In the base game, they suggest that you go with the Foxen King who has more health than the other Foxen leaders but no special abilities. The abilities of the Foxen leaders can be healing or giving additional moves or pulling cards back from the discard pile. That can change up how the Foxen play as well, and really adds to the replayability of the game. Just out of the box, you have four guardians and four leaders, so you have 32 unique plays of the game with playing both sides once in each combo, which should be plenty to allow you to go back and try a set-up again with it feeling different.

Thus far it’s mainly been about the game play. But I’d be remiss not to talk about the quality of the game. I’ve been very impressed with the quality of Pencil First games and this game definitely keep the standard high. The Foxen meeples are nice, the cards a great, and the boards for the different Guardians are really nice as is the board of the Foxen lands. But what brings the quality level up a lot is the production quality of the guardians. This could have been a game where they created plastic molds and we ended up with impressively detailed minis, but they didn’t do that, because that wouldn’t have matched the aesthetic of the rest of the game, instead we got wood meeples for each guardian. But they aren’t your classic meeple sculpt, they are amazing and fairly large cut outs that match the shape of the monster board. So it’s a very unique cut that makes each Guardian feel unique, and some of them come with extra wooden pieces as well, such as Raptra with a cloud for when they are flying. This really makes the game pop on the table and gives it a similar aesthetic feel to Root.

Now, the game isn’t perfect. You can get into situations where one or the other side will just slowly bleed until they are gone, but they can prolong the game. This happened in a play that I had and while 40 minutes seems generally accurate for the game, that play took over an hour. There was a bit of teaching to that time, but it reached a point where I was pretty sure I was going to lose as the Guardian, but , not being familiar enough with the game, we just didn’t want to scoop. I think especially with the more basic Foxen leader and Guardian this is more apt to happen because of how the winning condition is combat. So I’d be healing to not be able to do something to then have it taken away to heal again, and repeated for a while. This isn’t a massive negative to me, mainly because, I haven’t found this to be the normal for the game. And maybe with a bit better luck in terms of card draw I could have gotten out of it, but it didn’t happen. Just know that it is possible that sometimes one side could be in a position that it’s nearly impossible for them to come back from but not quite dead and that last little bit can be slow.

Overall, this is a really fun game. I think the rules are simple enough and the strategy/tactics are high enough that it is a good game for both more casual players are board gamers. The look of the game also helps a ton because of how cute the artwork is. One of the artists has worked on Disney projects before, and this has an animated Robin Hood feel to it’s look. I think that’ll help sell people getting the game to the table. Skulk Hollow is a good two player game that has an appeal for most people, I’d think.

Overall Grade: B+
Gamer Grade: B+
Casual Grade: B

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