When Should You Rank Your Top 100 Board Games?

This is the first question I want to get out of the way. I know it crops up when other places do their Top 100 Board Games Of All Time, like Man vs Meeple and The Dice Tower. It’s the question, when do I have enough games played to make a good Top 100 Board Games list? The answer is, when you have 100. Unless one of them is horrible. Just kidding. I want to know the board games that you don’t like and I want to know the ones that you do.

Just because something is ranked at 100 doesn’t mean it’s good. It’s kind of the opposite problem that Tom Vasel from the Dice Tower has. He plays so many games that his 100 is a game that he truly loves and he could probably go out to 2000 and it’d still be games that he likes. So just remember that 100 games is enough to do you Top 100 Board Games list.

And one last thing when you make your list. A list is just a moment in time. So you might look back at it and go, how did I like that game? You did in that moment. So don’t stress about it too much and also why 100 games is totally the right number.

The Tools

Board Game Geek

Firstly, let’s start off with Board Game Geek or BGG. If you are not familiar with this site, BGG is like IMDb for board games. It allows you to rate games, it allows you to track plays, and keep track of your collection. The big thing for BGG in the process of creating a Top 100 Board Games is rating your games. If you don’t, it’s hard to know and remember which one’s you’ve played. So create a free account, and we’ll go over in the next section why it matters.

Pub Meeple

So, then you need to rank your games. Now you might think that rating them is all you need to do. But there is a twist on that of course, when you do a Top 100 Board Games list, what differentiates one nine from another nine? That is where you need to get everything figured out and where Pub Meeple comes in.

The Set-Up

Pub Meeple has a ranking engine where you can enter lists of whatever you want. But more importantly, it has a board game ranking section. And that section allows you to enter in your BGG user name and it’ll collect all of your games for you. It might take a bit to do that if you have a massive collection of games, and the BGG system is not the fastest system to get data from.

Once you do that you need to filter it. There are a few ways that you can filter it. The big thing is to deselect “Own” and “Played” because if you are like me, you didn’t start tracking your plays from your dawn of gaming, and select rated games. Now, if you want, you can then use another feature as well. You can use the slider for personal ratings until you drop off a number of them. For example, I might drop off 5 and below. Because I know they won’t make the list.

Once everything is added, you click the rank button and that’ll tell you how many different comparisons it might take to do. Let’s go on and talk about how you rank.

The Ranking

So now we’re to the biggest part of ranking. The actual ranking of the board games, and I want to talk about how Pub Meeple makes it work and why it’s great but also why it might show you a ton of different comparisons.

Pub Meeple works on a binary comparison system. By that I mean it takes two things and says is A better than B. And then it is going to ask you if C is better than D and so on. And now, that seems like a lot of comparisons, and for me, with 652 games ranked (and I need to verify that I haven’t missed any), that is 3381 comparisons.

If you are strong at math, I only know it because I can ballpark it, you know that number isn’t the total number of comparisons if you compare A to B and then A to C and so on. That’s because of how this sort of sorting can work.

Example

Let’s look at an example. You rank Game A over Game B and then you rank Game D or Game C. Now it is going to give you the comparison of Game A and Game D. If you say that Game D is better than Game A it is now going to ask you the question if Game A is better than Game C. Let’s say that you say that it is, then your ranking will be Game D, Game C, Game A, and Game B.

Now, you might be thinking, why isn’t Game B compared against any of the other games? Game A gets compared to D and C but not Game B. That’s because Pub Meeple is saying something is true, or more so, you are telling it something is true. You are telling it that Game B is worse than Game A. So if that statement is true and Games C and D are better than Game A, Game B cannot be better than Game C or Game D because it isn’t better than Game A.

What To Do With the List?

After you rank everything, then you can export your list or copy it over to somewhere and share you Top 100 Board Games. How you want to do that is up to you, but let’s look at some ways I’ve seen people share them.

The first one would be to do a video. I do that, The Dice Tower and Man vs Meeple do that as well. But not everyone is going to have the set-up for it. Another option is going to be to create an article. If you create an article you can share it assuming you have a blog. That I kind of do when I share the videos here on the website. There are other spots as well to share it like board game groups on Facebook.

Or, one that I want to start doing each year, is create a Geek List on Board Game Geek of my Top 100 Board Games. That is one that I’d recommend if you don’t have your own website or channel. It is public and it is a spot where board game lovers all come together and enjoy the hobby. So it’s a great spot to share your list.

My Top 100 Board Games

So let’s talk about my schedule. Normally I run into Thanksgiving and that throws off when that last one comes out. Because of that I am starting my list earlier this year. Every Wednesday at 9 PM Central starting September 10th and going through November 12th I will do my next 10 on the list. My hope is to get those video links posted ahead of time so that I can share them about and you can join me.

Which, that leads me to one last spot to share your Top 100. When I do my Top 100 and talk about a number, drop yours in the chat or in the comments. If you are live, drop them as I go along and match up with my number with your game at that number. Or drop in the chat the games of yours that fall into that section of the Top 100 Games (of all time) 2025 Edition.

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100 to 91

90 to 81

80 to 71

70 to 61

60 to 51

50 to 41

40 to 31

30 to 21

20 to 11

Plus a few notes on how I’ve put together the list:

• These are my favorite, you want what people consider best, see the Board Game Geek Top 100
• If a game you love isn’t on the list, it might be be coming, I might not have played it, and if I have, it’s 101
• If a game looks cool, I have links to buy it from CoolStuffInc or Amazon, or you can grab most at your FLGS
• There are a few games, Destiny 2 Player versus regular Destiny where if they are basically the same thing, I only do one of them

10. Pandemic Legacy Season 1

Starting here, we have a game that has dropped a little bit for me. Some of that is because I haven’t played it recently nor is it one that I can play more often than once every three or four years, because it is a legacy game. So there is a story element to the game that even when I played it the second time, I generally remembered the story and when the moments happened, though not always perfectly. The game play is really good, and even though it’s a legacy game, it is very much worth playing. It is a good building off of the main game, and it adds in surprising moments and some good twists along the way. The game is mechanically sound as well with nothing really throwing the game out of balance. Overall, it’s a game that is a great experience every time you pull it out while playing through the story, and at the end, even though you can’t use the board game, it doesn’t feel like a waste and you feel satisfied with how much you’ve played it.

Last Year: 3

9. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

New comer to the list, and one that I want to get to the table more. It might be the game that we play next after Gloomhaven because I think we’ll be able to play it pretty well over Zoom. In Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, this is a dark fantasy game where you are exploring story, going across maps and finding new lands, fighting monsters, all of this while trying to survive and keep giant statues, Menhir, lit, to hold back the Wyrdness that is threatening the land. This game has so much story to it and it is really well written, the minis are great in the game, the game mechanics are really interesting, most of them are pretty straightforward, but the combat and diplomacy encounters are done in a really interesting way. This game really shines because of how much it offers in story, and with two more expansions coming from this Kickstarter, there is going to be tons of hours of game play to get through the whole story of this world. I’m very excited to get it back to the table.

Last Year: Not Ranked

8. ICECOOL

This one shot up a long way, but I think that last year while ranking, I might have left it lower because it is just a light and silly game. But ICECOOL is a game that I love playing every time I get to the table. Whether it is just having a goofy time at a board game night or playing it somewhat more seriously at GenCon in a tournament, ICECOOL is always a blast. What is basically just a little flicking game, this game just works so well. The box is incredible as it comes apart to make this 3D high school (Ice cool, get it). The little penguin pieces are really nice, and the whole flicking thing just works so well. This is really a kids game, but it’s a lot of fun for adults, for kids, and for basically any setting. This is one that I’d definitely recommend to anyone, gamer or not, as a really fun time.

Last Year: 21

7. Dice Throne

Another one shooting up the list, this is one of my more played games last year. And it helps because there is a nice TTS (Tabletop Simulator) version that works well, and I was bummed because I was hoping to do a tournament of this game this year amongst my friends, but with Covid that hasn’t happened. Dice Throne is a battling dice chucking game where you are playing different types of characters, you might be something as simple as a Barbarian or a Paladin, you you can play a Seraph or an Artificer. While core mechanics might be similar in what you are trying to roll or what rolls are better, the game play for each character seems different. You’re looking for different things and trying to get that set-up right and the statuses on players at the right time or get them off yourself before you’re taken out. I like this game at two players probably the best, but I’ve been playing a lot of “King of the Hill” style with three players and that has been amazing as well. The game plays fast, and you feel engaged with it throughout. I am also really excited to see this battling style board game turned into more of an adventure game in Dice Throne: Adventures coming real soon.

Last Year: 19

6. Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game

Another new game to the list, and almost into the top 5, I’ve played Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game exactly 5 times, once for each case in the base box. And with that, I can’t really play the base box again. Well, I could, but I would more have to run the game for other people, which I think could be a lot of fun, make it into an almost role playing style experience for them. But even with that this game has expansions, I have two of them, and the game play and story itself were so good. You feel like you are in an NCIS or some sort of show like that, but while watching 13 season of something like that can get dry and repetitive, these feel unique and interesting. This is much more than just a procedural sort of mystery, it’s an experience as you unravel story old and new, and the database that you use, being able to look up real events online, and the story deck, all of it just works so well. If you like deduction/mystery style games, I cannot recommend this one highly enough, and if you want something that is easier than five tied together stories, there is a Season One with fewer cases and ones that aren’t intertwined as well.

Last Year: Not Ranked

5. Mansions of Madness: 2nd Edition

Moving up a few spots, we have Mansions of Madness: 2nd Edition. This game, every time I play it, shows me something different. Yes, I can play different scenarios that are obviously going to be different, but even playing the introductory scenario, while I might know the story, how the places are laid out is different. This is my highest ranked Lovecraftian game, though I do want to try Death May Die, and I have Arkham Horror 3rd Edition waiting to get played on my shelf. This one I love because you have stand alone scenarios of different lengths and difficulties, and you can just pull out an app and tell it what you have, it’ll show you what scenarios are available and you can jump into playing so quickly. Now, there is some work when it comes to the set-up of characters and you’ll have to spend time to the board, but the app walks you through that and you discover and explore more as you go. This game has just been consistently good for me, even though my win loss record isn’t that great.

Last Year: 8

4. Betrayal at House on the Hill

Now for a lot of people, this game will seem way to high. There are scenarios that aren’t that well balanced, it’s true. If a betrayer has all the good items or none of the good items, it’ll be over quickly when the haunt happens, also true. But there is just something about this game that I like so much and that just works for me. Some of it is because it just feels like a campy horror film as a group of misfits whom never should have gone into a haunted house together just have everything go horribly wrong and find something disturbing around every corner. And I like both parts of the game, the exploration part and the haunt when it happens. This game just scratches that bit of a horror in gaming itch that I have pretty often and that most games can’t scratch.

Last Year: 4

3. Marvel Champions

New one to the list, will be it be the highest, yes it will. But Marvel Champions has been a wonderful game for me. I won’t lie, I have a little bit of bittersweet feeling around it, though I do love it every time I play it, because it was the last time playing a game at a game shop before everything got stopped because of Covid. Even with that, I have played it a few more times, and I most certainly have picked everything up for it. This game is the superhero game that I wished Marvel Legendary was and completely knocked Marvel Legendary off my list. It’s not that I don’t have room for multiple superhero games, I do, and I love the Marvel theme, this one just makes you feel like you are playing a superhero instead of having a team of them that you build kind of at random. Here you can still have allies that help out, but you’re really playing Spider-Man/Peter Parker or Black Panther/T’Challa. You can flip between the two sides, hero and alter-ego, and you can play them in different ways. I haven’t gotten into the deck construction yet, but I know that’s something I want to explore as well. This game just is what I’ve been looking for in a superhero game.

Last Year: Not Ranked

2. Blood Rage

Not moving at all from last year, we have Blood Rage. This game is just an amazing game. There is area control, there is conflict, and there is card drafting, you go on missions, you recruit monsters and send them in to wreck your enemies, all of this while trying to balance out increases to your action points and to be able to get more troops on the board and get more glory for the battles that you’ve won. I also like that there are some different strategies you can take in this game, maybe you can draft missions well and end up scoring a lot, maybe you’ll get many a point in victory in battles. Or maybe you’ll do the Loki strategy and get into battles and let your clan die and go to Valhalla and get points from them when they leave. Depending on what you draft, that can determine what you’re going for in an age, and while you might want to focus on something, the other players can also draft to block you. This game is always fun for me and even having played it a number of times now, it feels like there is still so much more to explore.

Last Year: 2

1. Gloomhaven

Staying at #1 as well is Gloomhaven. This game is just about perfect to me, and most of the issues that I have are from the Forgotten Circles expansion which I’ve just about wrapped up, we’re on the final scenario. This game has so much that I love, there is a massive story campaign, there is a dungeon crawl focus and interesting monsters. It’s fully cooperative, and fighting in a given scenario is so interesting based off of the character that you have. You level up your characters getting different combat cards in, unlocking new abilities and generally changing up how you play until you retire and then you play a new character and get to discover everything they can do and how they play all over again. I think I’ve played over 200 hours of this game, probably easily over 200 pushing 300 at this point, and we haven’t done all the side scenarios or all the scenarios and story in the expansion, so there is just so much in this game. I can’t say enough good things, and honestly, I hope by the time I’m doing this next year, this is bumped to #2, because I’m so excited for Frosthaven and the city building piece of that as well.

Last Year: 1

So we have the top 100, I’m going to be putting up another article today with links to all the Top 100, look at what is new on the list, what is are the biggest movers and ask you your favorites overall. But in my Top 10 games, what are your favorites?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

100 to 91

90 to 81

80 to 71

70 to 61

60 to 51

50 to 41

40 to 31

Plus a few notes on how I’ve put together the list:

• These are my favorite, you want what people consider best, see the Board Game Geek Top 100
• If a game you love isn’t on the list, it might be be coming, I might not have played it, and if I have, it’s 101
• If a game looks cool, I have links to buy it from CoolStuffInc or Amazon, or you can grab most at your FLGS
• There are a few games, Destiny 2 Player versus regular Destiny where if they are basically the same thing, I only do one of them

30. Homebrewers

This is one that I think is going to climb higher and higher over time because of how simple but fun the game is. And I have to say, I really like the theme of brewing beer. This game is basically an engine builder where you are trying to be the best at brewing beer and to do that you need to brew, and hone your recipes so that you can place well at Summerfest and Oktoberfest. To do this you get cards that are ingredients which you can use for a one time affect, like if you need an influx of money, get one that gives you some money, or you can add the ingredients to a beer, so maybe every time I brew my porter now it has oyster in it which gives me $1 versus a one time cash thing of $5. You can create some fun and crazy combinations, and in all honesty, I’d probably try them. I also like that in this game each character as a special power, so you can decide how you want to play the game and can do something different than everyone else. This is a fast engine building game, and definitely one that can work as an introduction to engine building.

Last Year: 45

29. Zona: The Secret of Chernobyl

This is a game that I need to play more, but it is a big game, so it’s hard to get to the table all that often. In Zona, you are trying to get into the vault at the heart of Chernobyl, but to do that you need to brave the wasted lands surrounding it where few go and where mutated monsters roam. You can play this game solo, or you can play it competitively, which I think is really interesting. So you are exploring, finding what you need to get to get into lesser locations and then fight monsters, survive, and get into these locations, get out with some new very useful cards and get into the heart of Chernobyl before everything falls apart and the game wins. I find that interesting where the game has a timer where it can itself win, in a competitive game, so it is possible that all the players will lose.

Last Year: 34

28. Just One

Just One is the top party game on the list, and I think that it’ll hold that spot for a while. The game is just clever and enjoyable to play. In this game one person is “it” like in so many party games, and they, instead of trying to get people to guess a word are trying to guess a word. Everyone else is putting down clues for them, one word clues, hence Just One. And everyone needs to write down a unique clue. If people cross over with each other, those clues are cancelled out. Again, hence why this is called Just One. The game works really well and it is a lot of fun. I also like that like Cross Clues, Just One is a cooperative party game. Most party games are meant to be silly, but if you are out of the game part of the party game, it just becomes purely silly, and for a game night, I like party games that can keep people in the game itself, and Just One does a great job of that.

Last Year: 22

27. Say Bye to the Villains

This game my record is probably 0-15, maybe 0-20 at this point, and it’s a cooperative game. This is not a game where you win 50% of time like a lot of cooperative games try to be, it is a game that is extremely hard to win, but clearly I still love it. In this game you are Samurai who are taking on villains. You are fighting honorably, so you know when the fight is going to happen, so you prepare. You do this by researching the villains, by increasing your stats and then eventually once you’ve used up all of your time, you select the villain who you are facing off against. The issue is that you need everyone to beat the villain they are facing off against, and you basically never have the time needed to completely research the villains or to get yourself completely prepared to fight. The concept just works really well for me, and the game play is very smooth. My only knock is that this game can play a lot of people, but it probably should max out at four or five, because otherwise it is a bit long.

Last Year: 43

26. Hats

I love this game as a different feeling card puzzle game. Like Parade, this game has been randomly given the theme of Alice in Wonderland. It could have been anything or nothing. In it you are trying to score the most points by having the best collection of hats. These hats have numbers, and you start out with a hand of them as well as some that are going to be determining what is scored on the table. The trick to this game, and I think what I like about it so much, is that you are trying to manipulate the table in such a way by playing down cards and then using the ones for scoring that you place in front of you, that when all is said and done the colors you have are scoring and they are scoring well and that whatever you opponent(s) were collecting doesn’t score well. It just feels like a twist as you have a set hand of cards and while you can change them up a little, it might not be enough to get it set-up as you want. This game plays fast and is a good thinky filler.

Last Year: 26

25. Point Salad

Another filler on the list up quite high. This must have just gotten played after I made the list last year, but Point Salad has been a game that has consistently gotten to the table and even 4-5 times in the past week. In this game you are building up the best salad possible to score as many points as possible. And that’s the joke, in a point salad style game, everything you do is going to give you some points, so AEG created a game where you are building up salads and everything might give you points. What determines if something gives you points though is based off of the scoring cards you draft. So this is an extremely simple game, you either take vegetables for your salad or you take a scoring card. But you have to pay attention to what is scoring for you and how. Maybe you have a card that gives you 4 points per tomato, but it probably also gives you -2 points per onion and carrot, so you need to build your salad right so that you scoring as many points as possible. The game is so simple and turns are fast, and while there is less depth than Hats, this is still a great filler with a bit of depth.

Last Year: Not Ranked

24. Aeon’s End: War Eternal

I love deck building games, and Aeon’s End: War Eternal is a very good one, in my opinion. And I would hazard to say, had I played more of the Aeon’s End games, I’d say all are great deck building games. Now, there are a ton of deck building games, so what makes this stand out. I like that you are facing off against a big boss, which isn’t unique, but you can start to whittle them down right away if you want, which isn’t always the norm. I like the breach system for casting spells. You can open up more breaches for your character and cast more spells per turn when you do that. And what really makes this different is that you don’t shuffle your deck. This is the only deck building game that I know of that you don’t shuffle. What happens when you run out of cards, well, you just flip your discard pile and you have your deck again. This means, if you are counting cards, you can set-up turns for yourself. You might want a turn with no spells just because with a lot of purchase power you can buy a better spell, or maybe you want a good mix so that you never have a turn where nothing happens. What also is interesting is that turn order isn’t set. The nemesis, monster you’re fighting, will have 2 turns for every six player turns. But you have a turn order deck that is shuffled, and in a two player game where are two player one cards, two player two cards and two nemesis cards. So the nemesis could go twice in a row at the start, then four player turns, you just don’t know. It makes the puzzle feel harder that way, but also can set-up some moments of calm.

Last Year: 16

23. Criss Cross

One of my top roll and write games. Criss Cross is very simple but so much fun. In this game everyone is playing at once, trying to place symbols rolled on dice adjacent to each other in rows and columns on a 5 x 5 grid. That doesn’t sound too bad, but you need to treat the two dice rolled each round as a domino, basically. That means if the symbols rolled are a circle and a triangle you need to place the circle and the triangle adjacent to each other on the grid. You need to also make sure that you don’t leave yourself with a single spot separated from everything else because it means you won’t be able to fill that spot. The game is super fast and very fun. Scores can and will vary wildly based off of how things are rolled, but it is fun crossing your fingers hoping that the write combo is rolled. I like that you are scoring both the rows and columns too, and in the expert version the diagonal, so you can’t just focus on rows or columns and expect it to go extremely well.

Last Year: 23

22. Deranged

This game, why isn’t this game out yet. It was so amazing playing at GenCon last year that it is on my list because I got the full game experience there. It should, fingers crossed be coming out yet this year, I have a preorder in for it, and it might, just might, be coming out this month, October, still. Which would be perfect because this is a horror adjacent game. In this game you are spending time and moving around trying to get rid of your curses and be the first player to get out of the town. The issue is the town is keeping you trapped in as long as you are cursed and there are monsters roaming around. Plus, the other players, they don’t mind if you get attacked so they might be encouraging that. And they might be deranged and attacking you themselves. This game has nice card play for determining what actions you are doing and how good they are. And then if you’re deranged, you flip the card upside down and use a similar but different set of actions. The game is just clever and while not short, turns play pretty fast. So much fun in this game and has a good theme that I like.

Last Year: 17

21. The Lost Expedition

Some games have a fair amount of alpha gaming in them if they are a cooperative game. That is to say that one person tells everyone what to do on their turn. The Lost Expedition is a game that has, built into it’s mechanics, ways to prevent that from happening. Players, without communicating, place down cards for both a daytime and evening hike as they work their way toward the lost city of Z, so no one knows what the other people are going to play. In the day, the cards are then sorted into numerical order and you’ll have to navigate them, and even the evening, they are played in whatever order they come out. And most of these cards don’t do good things. So no one can tell other people what to play, then collectively as a group, you decide how to spend resources and what actions to take, of the optional actions on a card. Sometimes it’ll be good like giving you more food or bullets, but most of the time you are hurting yourself as spending resources from your guides, from your food supply, or bullets, and if you run out of life on your guides you lose the game. The game is very clever and plays very fast. There’s always discussion around the table as you try and map out the best route of using and gaining resources and advancing closer to the Lost City of Z.

Last Year: 32

This is an odd section of the list because two of these games are still really high after mainly just playing them at GenCon last year. Deranged isn’t out yet in the US, I believe mainly because of Covid delays, but I had so much fun with it, I had to make the list when I have played it. I have it preordered, I’m just waiting for it to eventually come, I suspect that Deranged will end up moving higher the more I play it.

What is your favorite from this section of the list?

100 to 91

90 to 81

80 to 71

70 to 61

60 to 51

Plus a few notes on how I’ve put together the list:

• These are my favorite, you want what people consider best, see the Board Game Geek Top 100
• If a game you love isn’t on the list, it might be be coming, I might not have played it, and if I have, it’s 101
• If a game looks cool, I have links to buy it from CoolStuffInc or Amazon, or you can grab most at your FLGS
• There are a few games, Destiny 2 Player versus regular Destiny where if they are basically the same thing, I only do one of them

50. Onirim

I think this is the purely solo game on the list and it’s dropped a little bit, but I’m still enjoying it a lot. The app is great for playing this game, but I do like the physical one as well. In this game you are trapped in a nightmare and trying to escape, to do this you are trying to find eight doors. This is done by playing down cards in a row where you are trying to get three cards of the same color in a row, when you do you find a door. But there are nightmares in the deck that are trying to stop you, you have a few different ways you can deal with them. I think that’s where the game really is interesting, because there are powerful key cards that can just get a door in without any hassle, but they are also be used to deal with a nightmare. Or you could discard cards off the top of the deck, but that might get rid of a key. Or you can discard your hand or put a door back into a deck. There’s a good amount of strategy in what seems like a small and random card game.

Last Year: 36

49. Stipulations

One of my top party games, this is one that I’m glad I backed on Kickstarter, but glad that I didn’t back the “adult” version of it. In this game a person picks from four different categories, you might have a superpower, an occupation, lifetime supply of something, or a fulfilled dream, but then, everyone writes a stipulation for it, and you pick your favorite. This game works really well because you can tailor it for your group. If it’s a bunch of college friends drinking, you can make it as adult or dirty as you want, if it’s Christmas with your great aunt and 10 year old cousin, you can make it clean. And it can just get silly, like most party games and eventually people end up writing down weird stuff or reoccurring jokes. It’s really the same concept as a Cards Against Humanity or Apples to Apples, but it’s much more replayable because you aren’t using cards to answer/fulfill the prompt, which means you can change up your answer for a stipulation for the superpower of flight from “But only when you fart” to “But never more than 6 inches off the ground.” and the prompt will feel different when you play.

Last Year: 42

48. Silver

This one wasn’t ranked last year because I hadn’t played it much, it was just one time at GenCon where I kind of got the rules. But I’ve played it a lot since, I’ve probably played the physical game 10-15 times this year, and Silver Bullet expansion 3 times, and the app who knows how many times, but a lot. I am really enjoying this game now and the standalone expansion(s) – I have two, but only played one. In this game you are trying to get your village of 5 cards down to the fewest points possible. The trick is your cards are face down and you only know at the start of a round what two of them are. Cards have values from 0 to 12 and each card has a special power. You can use them for a power, or you can swap out cards with what you’ve drawn or is on top of the deck. If you have two of the same number you can trade in those two for one card, which allows you to get down in cards and lower the number of points you can possibly have. There’s some luck with the game for sure, but overall it’s a very fast and fun game that is a bit mean with a bunch of take that cards, especially in the Silver Bullet expansion, but still a lot of fun.

Last Year: Not Ranked

47. Wits & Wagers

Another party game on the list, this time it’s Wits & Wagers which is a classic party game at this point. In Wits and Wagers you are putting down a best guess or a random number, so some trivia question, it might be something like “How many goals did Pele have in his professional career?” Everyone writes down a number, you sort the numbers and then you bet on who you think was the closest without going over. If you’re right you get more chips to bet or to save because however much money you have at the end is your score. This game works well because you don’t need to know anything about soccer. I know a fair amount, so if you’re playing with me and know that, you can bet on my guess even if you guessed either 10 or 10 million for your number. So you get to play the people and think about who might know an answer, or at least have a better clue than you. The answer, by the way, is over 1,000 for goals by Pele, just in case you get that question sometime.

Last Year: 68

46. Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game

This one has dropped a bit for me as you can see. I do really enjoy this game a lot, and I would gladly play it, the only reason I don’t play it more is because it’s a bit of a longer game. This is a game about surviving the zombie apocalypse, for a scenario, with everyone having their own goals, and potentially having a traitor in your midst. This is one of those semi-cooperative games where it tries to make everyone look guilty to help hide the traitor. That is one slightly issue that I have with the game, if you beat the scenario, and a lot of them are hard just purely cooperative, you still don’t win unless you get your secret objective. But the rest of the game works really well, and I consider it a half win if you beat the the scenario. This game also has a thing called Crossroads cards, which is why it has crossroads in the name. These cards offer you tough choices that you’ll have to make during the game and are one of the highlights of the game. We have a house rule for them where instead of drawing one and seeing if it happens on someone’s turn, you draw two and if one of them happens, you do the crossroads event. It just highlights that fun part of the game more. Overall, a really enjoyable game that is just tricky to get to the table all the time because of it’s length.

Last Year: 18

45. Ascension: Deckbuilding Game

For a lot of people Dominion is their gateway or introduction to deckbuilding, but I don’t like Dominion, so for me, Ascension is the one that I’d use. This is a pure deck building game where you are getting cards and adding them to your deck to buy more cards and fight monsters. Why I like this one so much better than Dominion is that Dominion has a fixed Market, so if someone can spot the ideal combo before the game starts, they’ve probably already won. Whereas Ascension has an ever changing market. Whenever a card is bought or a monster is killed in the market row, a new card is flipped out, and it might be the perfect card for you, or it might be another monster, or who knows what. So you have to be able to adjust a bit more on the fly and you can pick some really good strategies and just stick with them, but depending on how the cards come out, you might have to still adjust even if you have you ideal strategy started. For me, that’s what I like in a game and why I am less of a Euro gamer and more of a Amerithrash gamer, which Ascension feels like compared to Dominion.

Last Year: 46

44. Cry Havoc

Cry Havoc is an asymmetrical game where the players have different ways of building up their point totals. And it’s also a unique game with a bit of deck building and some really interesting combat. I like this game as it has some area control, some diceless combat, and really different strategies for the different factions. In this game you’re trying to control crystals which will give you points at the end of a round, to do that you need to take over areas, battling for the crystals there. The combat is diceless as I said, but it has an interesting flow to it, first the attacker will place their troops on the area majority, kill, or capture spots. Then the defender will, and it basically goes along the lines of, check majority, check kills, check captures, and if you kill someone who would capture one of your pieces that won’t happen. But you have cards in your hand that you use both to do actions, but that can influence combat as well. So maybe it’s a close fight and we’re tied for majority in area control, I could play a card to move someone up there if I’m the attacker so I can take the area, but maybe my opponent will do something to change that. The combat is different but really enjoyable.

Last Year: 52

43. Century: Golem Edition

This, for me, is a Splendor killer, though, I still have both in my collection. Century: Golem Edition, is a fun hand building game where you are trying to create an engine of cards that is going to get your gems, and trade gems in such a way that you can score golem cards. The first person to five golems triggers end game. But where the game works, besides the amazing components and artwork, is the card play. You can build up a combo that might start by giving you three yellows, which you can turn into two greens, which maybe you can turn into a pink, which can be turned into a blue and two greens, and you can really find interesting ways to manipulate the gems that you have. The game plays extremely fast with either playing a card and doing it’s action, getting a golem, or picking back up your hand of cards being all that you do on a turn. It really does have a good amount of strategy to it, but it’s still easy to teach and to score so it might be just slightly too much for a complete game novice, but someone who has something like Ticket to Ride or Catan under their belt will be able to learn it.

Last Year: 33

42. Not Alone

There have been a number of party games on the list thus far, and while Not Alone isn’t a party game, it is one that can play a larger player count. This is a one versus all game where the all are playing crew of a spaceship who have crashed onto a planet and are waiting rescue. However, the planet and the monster on the planet are not happy that they are there. So the planet is trying to take everyone out before the rescue ship can get there. It’s an interesting game of cat and mouse, because the crew can strategize amongst themselves as much as they want, but they have to do it so that the monster can listen. So do they try and send him down a false path, or can they split things up in such a way to be able to do most of what they want. This is another hand management style game for the crew as they have various locations that they can go to, but they discard it to their own, visible, discard pile and the monster has powers that it can use throughout the game. The game has basically always been close when we play it, and it’s a pretty easy game to play, but one that has a nice tension. Probably, actually, a pretty good Halloween game as it has some horror elements to it.

Last Year: 41

41. Cross Clues

This apparently was the party game section. Not ranked last year because it came out this year, Cross Clues is a fun and challenging party game where people are giving clues so that other players can determine the intersection point between two things. To put this better, you have a spread sheet that is 5 by 5, each row and column has a header of a word, so A might be stick and 1 might be wind. If I have the card that has A1 denoted on it, I have to give a clue that will get the other players to guess A1, maybe I go with something like Kite. But maybe C is tail, now kites have tails as well as sticks as structure on them, so which do I mean. So maybe that’s not the best clue, maybe for rustle, but maybe D is cattle, so wind and cattle might make sense for that. So you have to be clever with your clues, and you are trying to get as many done in five minutes as you can, or since we’ve played it across Zoom, just seeing how many out of the 25 on a 5 by 5 grid or 16 for a medium challenge, we can get and score that. It’s a clever game that works really well, and I’m not sure how many word cards there are, but depending on how they intersect the game has a ton of replayability. Definitely a party game that everyone should checkout, in my opinion, and probably one that’d be really popular now, if it wasn’t for the pandemic.

Last Year: Not Ranked

So what from this part of the list, the beginning of the Top 50, looks most interesting to you? Any you’d put higher in your own Top 100?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

100 to 91

90 to 81

80 to 71

70 to 61

Plus a few notes on how I’ve put together the list:

• These are my favorite, you want what people consider best, see the Board Game Geek Top 100
• If a game you love isn’t on the list, it might be be coming, I might not have played it, and if I have, it’s 101
• If a game looks cool, I have links to buy it from CoolStuffInc or Amazon, or you can grab most at your FLGS
• There are a few games, Destiny 2 Player versus regular Destiny where if they are basically the same thing, I only do one of them

60. Hanabi

Hanabi is an interesting game, because it’s a twist on a fairly simple board game concept. There are a lot of games where you are trying to put out numbers in ascending order, in this case 1 through 5. In this one, you can’t see your cards, so you have a hand of cards and they are all facing away from you. So you can give clues to your fellow players, such as what cards in their hand are a given color or what cards in their hand are a given number, but you can’t give both. And you have a limited number of clues but you can get more, you just have to discard a card to get one back. The game is an interesting push and pull of how much you know and how much you don’t. It is also a game that works well at all player counts, so that is fun as well. Cool concept, good execution and just good fun.

Last Year: 44

59. Gravwell: Escape from the 9th Dimension

We go from one kind of tricky game to wrap your head around to another with Gravwell. In this game you are trying to escape from a black hole and get to a wormhole before it closes. To do that, you are racing against your fellow players using whatever you can find as fuel to power your ship. Now, I make that sound fairly thematic, it is quite abstract. But what makes this game is the playing of fuels, they are all elements, so you go in alphabetical order of the element as everyone plays their fuel for the round all at once. And most of the fuel, it causes you to go towards the nearest object, whether that is in front of or behind you. There are some fuels that repel you from the nearest object and others that draw the other ships towards you, so it’s a guessing game of what you think other people might have and how quickly they might be going, because maybe the person behind you will go fast and get too close so if you go towards the object you’ll get pulled towards them, or maybe they want to go a ways and will go with one later in the alphabet, so you’ll want to be pulled by the person in front of you. It’s really a game about reading and guessing what your opponents will do.

Last Year: 66

58. Photosynthesis

This is a mean game about growing trees. Which, that sounds kind of odd, but it’s mean because you can block your opponents trees from getting sunlight. Now, that doesn’t seem all that mean, except that is how you get your action points to grow trees, harvest trees for points, and plant more trees. So if the sun is positioned right and your tree is tall enough, you can cast a shadow on shorter or like height trees. It’s an interesting thing as you plan out where the trees are going to go so you’re not only going to be set-up for your next turn but will be set-up for futures ones as well. And you have to ask, is it worth it to maybe have a really bad turn if you can set-up a great turn down the line. You can plan this because the sun moves each turn around the board, and you have a certain number of times around the board for the game, so you know where it’s going to be all of the following turns as you plan. And I say that this game is mean, it’s more that it can be mean, most of the time you aren’t thinking about blocking as much as you are planning out your turn.

Last Year: 28

57. Five Tribes

A gateway style game that has just a bit more going on, this is also a point salad game as well. By that I mean that everything gives you points. You place a camel, you’ll get points for that tile, there’s a palm tree or a palace on it, points, viziers, points, collections of spices, points, and so on and so forth. This game uses a fun mancala style meeple movement. Whatever meeple color you decide to end up with is what you end up doing, it can be shopping, buying a Djinn, or a few more options such as just getting money. I like this game because you can set-up some great turns, and in two player, you could even find a couple of great turns in a row if you wanted or you could move stuff to set-up yourself for a good turn. You can do this because turn order is bid upon. If you find a great turn, you can bid higher for it, and while it’d have to be a really great turn to bid too high, you can go for something or block someone from getting something if you see what they are after. This game works well because you can score points in so many ways, so most of the time you can focus in on one or two of them as well, so someone learning the game doesn’t have to have a whole grasp on the strategy for everything. And for gamers, it feels like there is more going on to be paid attention to than your standard gateway game.

Last Year: 47

56. The Lord of the Rings

One of the earlier cooperative games, this game is all about getting the Fellowship to Mordor and tossing the ring into the fire. But you’re doing this by playing through the whole trilogy of The Lord of the Rings. You get gifts and cards along the way as you advance all while trying to keep Sauron’s eye off of you. There are a lot of boards in this game as you play out cards to advance upon different tracks and play through different things, it might be the mines of Moria or Helms Deep, but you are playing through the story and you can potentially get stuff along the way such as at Rivendell or from Galadriel. The game is really hard as you push your way through all of the story and the different maps. You need to balance card use so that you can make it down the main path, but some of the other paths do offer good things as well and you want to try and do them also. Overall, a fun and hard cooperative game that is really expensive in that link, but there’s a new printing coming out soon, so wait for that.

Last Year: 85

55. Small World

I’ve talked about Small World Underground already, this is just basic Small World and I like it better. I think that the game, while being slightly simpler, is easier to play and grasp onto and since I have an expansion for that, it adds in some additional fun that way as well. This game is all about rushing in with one group of fantasy creatures, beating up and getting beat up, going into decline, picking a new group of fantasy creatures, and doing it all over again. I always call this Risk but fun, and that’s because Risk can gang up and knock one person out quickly, whereas in this game, you can always come back in again so you’re never truly out of the game. And the game plays faster as well in comparison to Risk. This game works because it doesn’t take itself seriously, so you get your fun combos and even when you get beat down, who knows, maybe the flying halflings will come in and save the day for you.

Last Year: 24

54. Cat Cafe

An interesting roll and write, this one is all about attracting the most cats to you in the cat cafe. You do this carefully curating a creative collection of cat toys, beds, and food. They all score in different ways, the toy mouse will score more points for the largest group of them that you have, while the cat bed wants different things around it on all sides to score you more points. Plus, you’re also working on filling up cat trees so that they score you the most possible points for having them completed. The end game is trigger when one person completes their third cat tree. What works nicely in this game is that everyone is doing things at the same time. You draft dice, and then you, using the final dice, place something on a cat tree at the level of the number on either your drafted dice or the group die, and then an item with the other one. You have ways to adjust the numbers which works well, and you can score the cats at times as well to get you more points in game. Overall, a fun and cute roll and write that has a fair amount going on all things considered.

Last Year: 54

53. Titan Race

If you’ve ever wanted to race on the back of monsters this is the game for you. A light dice drafting, take that, monster racing game, this is all about completing three laps or the grand circuit of three maps, faster than anyone else. But while you’re doing that you’re trying to stay out of lava on some maps, make a sweet jump to move faster on other maps, or sliding across ice. All of this while jostling for position. You roll dice for the number of players and then players take turns drafting dice and making their move, and so the last player doesn’t get stuck with one die, come their turn, they pick them all up and roll them again. This game is somewhat random because of the dice rolling, but you can plan as bumping into someone deals them damage, and pushes them further forward, but might be what you need to push them into lava which will knock them out for a round, which might get you past them. The game is silly fun and a very good time for a light racing style game.

Last Year: 48

52. Potion Explosion

People are pretty familiar with app games where you try and get like colors touching, and if they do, they disappear, and if those make a like match, they disappear and so on and so forth. Potion Explosion is like that with marbles. In this game you are trying to complete potions, use their powers, and score points from them. You do this by collecting ingredients. You pull out one marble, if the marbles that hit are the same color, you get all of those color that are touching, and if that causes more to hit, you do it again. Then you can store a few ingredients for later, but you’re mainly trying to put them into potions and get as many of those done as possible. The game is nice because it has a great toy affect. It also works well because as you get more potions done, you can really start to combo stuff using the powers of the potions to have big turns. This is a game that’ll attract people to it because of how it looks on the table, and it’s basically gateway level.

Last Year: Not Ranked

51. Skulk Hollow

Generally I don’t have a ton of two player games. My wife and I do play a few two player games sometimes, but this one caught my eye when it was on Kickstarter. The company is one that I am familiar with and they always make beautiful projects, and this one seems like an interesting balance of strategy and cuteness on the board. In this game one person takes on the foxes of the forest who have built up a settlement in this town. Another is an ancient guardian that has awoken. The guardians are all trying to do something different to win the game it might just be take out a lot of foxes, or it could be placing tentacles on the board or something like that. The foxes on the other hand are all about getting to the guardian, hopping on it, and chopping away at their health, doing that can take out different actions for the guardian. The game has a good and different feel as you play it because of how the guardians change and how the different leaders can affect play for the fox player as well. It’s one that I think works well for people because it is pretty simple and it offers some good choices with how the game play works.

Last Year: Not Ranked

What’s your favorite from this section? Any that stand out, any based off of my taste that you think I should try or you think will be higher on the list?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

100 to 91

90 to 81

80 to 71

Plus a few notes on how I’ve put together the list:

• These are my favorite, you want what people consider best, see the Board Game Geek Top 100
• If a game you love isn’t on the list, it might be be coming, I might not have played it, and if I have, it’s 101
• If a game looks cool, I have links to buy it from CoolStuffInc or Amazon, or you can grab most at your FLGS
• There are a few games, Destiny 2 Player versus regular Destiny where if they are basically the same thing, I only do one of them

70. Marrying Mr Darcy

This is a smaller and less known game than a lot on the list, but I like it because it is pretty simple and quirky fun. At the heart it’s a set collection game as you collect different skills so that when the first part of the game is done, you can get your ideal suitor and marry them. But because it has a Price and Prejudice theme to it, and because the theme itself is just a little bit goofy, the game is a lot of fun and the set collection almost becomes a background to the randomness of everything else. This is not a highly strategic game, but it is fun. I do think that while the game needs a lot of cards just so you can build up your wit and cunning and other skills, it does overstay a little bit for a game where most of the fun comes from the silly randomness. If there was more variety in the parties and how those worked, it might be higher on my list as well.

Last Year: 98

69. Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game

Battlestar Galactica is a massive hidden traitor, hidden role game. The theme works amazing in this game as you are trying to escape the Cylons and get to Earth, but you’re not sure that you can trust everyone and who might be a Cylon and who might not be. So you’re pushing forward, you’re seeing who might be doing something suspicious and there are times when you just can’t help either, so that makes you look suspicious. This is a long game and a big game, but it feels tense the whole time you’re playing, and eve if you can figure out who the Cylon’s on board are, will that help you enough? Does knowing the show help for this game, most certainly, but it’s still an extremely well built game so it’ll still be fun even if you don’t.

Last Year: 55

68. Carcassonne

Another one of those modern classic games and gateway games to make the list. Carcasone probably introduced a lot of people into modern board gaming as you placed tiles down, used your meeples smartly to score, and built out a nice looking map on the table. This game plays fast, and it is still fun to play even though it’s a little bit older at this point. The only negative I have with the game is the farm scoring just because that can be a bit odd, so it’s a bit harder to teach that. Even with that, I like the building of the landscape and I think that the scoring is interesting as you can lock up a meeple to score points in a bigger thing, but that might mean you don’t have enough meeples to score something else. So there’s a balancing act with that and then with making sure you have all your meeples out at the end for scoring then as well.

Last Year: 90

67. Clank! A Deck-Building Adventure

Won’t be the only Clank! on my list, but one that’s a good time. This is the fantasy themed game where you are going down into a dungeon, trying not to disturb the dragon and make too much noise as you go around in your armor, fighting goblins, and then eventually grabbing a treasure and racing out of there. All of this while you are making noise which might attracts the dragon to you and if you take too much damage you’re done. So there’s a push your luck element to the game as you push further into the depth of the dungeon to grab a better treasure. And you do this with deck building, which is fun as you can be risky and get better cards but it might cause you to clank more. I love deck building and I like this game a lot, the only issue I have is that the end game message is a bit abrupt and can punish players for trying to push too deep if someone barely goes into the dungeon and gets out with the cheapest treasure they might be able to screw everyone else over. But if people don’t try and play that way but play more in the spirit of the game, I think that the game works well.

Last Year: Not Ranked

66. Dice Forge

Dice Forge is an interesting dice construction game where you are rolling dice and getting resources to buy cards and buy more dice faces to put on your dice. I think that the game is really interesting that way because you are literally changing up the dice. The different combinations of cards and how you build your dice can really change the strategy of the game as you play. You can go for buying tons of cards, you can go for getting the best dice possible in terms of coins or resources, and you can just go and get victory points from the the cards and dice. There’s one thing that really makes this game work. On your turn you roll your dice, get resources and can buy cards and dice face, but not on your turn, you still roll your dice and get resources.

Last Year: 53

65. Cosmic Encounter

This game is hard to explain but it’s a lot of fun. People could take this game seriously, but the game is best when it’s played in a silly way. Cosmic Encounter is all about getting your bases onto various planets, but to do this, on your turn, you pick a planet to attack and you and the person you attack can play cards to augment how much your attack/defense are. But, there’s more, you can get people to help you and add their ships into their attack, so they can get onto the planet with you as well. But the numbers the players can play can change up the attack greatly, so you can negotiate with the person you’re fighting, maybe if they play a low card for you, you’ll give them a good card, or something like that, so you can really work together for the best of everyone, but of course, you can also lie. But that might not work out, because you might owe someone something, or they might have a special alien power where they win with a lower number than a higher. The game should be played really goofy and with lots of negotiation, so won’t be for every table, but for me, it’s a lot of fun.

Last Year: 49

64. Parade

This game has an Alice in Wonderland theme, but really it’s a abstract game. In this you are trying to get the fewest points and you do that by playing down cards into a line, you look at the number of cards equal to what you put down and you get the cards that match the color or are a lower number, so you can potentially get none, but you might get a lot and they might be high points. If anyone ever gets all the colors, that ends the game and you score, or if you run out of cards in the deck to draw from. The scoring is simple, it’s the total of the numbers of your cards, unless, of course, you have the most of a color. If you have 4 green cards and that’s the most in everyone, you get 1 point per card, so you can push for a lot of a single color or you can try and only get low number cards not really caring about the color. I like how the different in strategies work and it makes for an interesting game.

Last Year: 62

63. Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

As I’ve said many a time, I really like deck building games, and this one is a pretty straight forward game, but has a theme that I like with Harry Potter. I think this game does a good job with some nods to the books and movies and I like how this game builds over time and becomes harder but offers more specialization and diversity in what the characters can do. Between the theme and difficulty of the game and this is actually a decent gateway deck building game especially if you have more complex ones you want people to learn. Overall, just a fun game and a good straight forward and cooperative deck building game.

Last Year: 59

62. Galaxy Trucker

I’ve talked about a few goofier games in this section, and I think this qualifies as one as well. In this game you are trying to build a space “truck” and get enough crew and enough cargo spots so you can go fly around the galaxy, get the most money at the end of the flight. But the goofy parts are, first, that you build your ship in real time, so you’re going nice and fast as you’re trying to get everything built and you have to think about the weapons, shields, and engines on your ship. Because if you’re the fastest you can get to planets first and get the stuff you want, but if you add in too many engines or too much energy to fire your engines, you might not have enough to deal with asteroids and pirates. And the asteroids can just blow up part of your ship if you can’t shoot it down or you don’t have a shield that can stop it. After a few different builds and runs to get and deliver cargo, the person with the most money wins. It’s a game that is quite random, but it plays pretty fast and is just good fun.

Last Year: 56

61. Fruit Picking

This one for sure is new to the list because I just got it recently and I played it for GenCon online, but I really like this game already. The game has some very fun things in it. I like how you move the seeds around and how you store the seeds so that you can purchase fruit cards. And you just use those cards to complete sets, like a full house, three pairs, four of a kind, or one of each and once someone has one of those, the game is over and that person won. But to get the seeds, you move them around in a circle, Mancala style, banking seeds but where you end, that’s what you can buy and it gets you more seeds. Just a lot of fun and very much a gateway game. The game is also interesting because it’s from Korea as well, and I don’t know much about the Korean board game scene, but this one was a lot of fun. If you’re in search of a new gateway game, this one works well, though it’s only available via BGG in the US.

Last Year: Not Ranked

What’s your favorite from this section? Any that stand out, any based off of my taste that you think I should try or you think will be higher on the list?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

***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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***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.

20 – Sagrada
Sagrada is a very pretty game in which you are drafting dice in order to create the most beautiful stained glass window out there. However, you have certain rules as to how you can place those dice, such as certain colors being required in spots or certain numbers being required. To make it even trickier, you can’t have the same number or the same color orthogonally adjacent to one another. So, your stained glass window soon becomes a puzzle. To add to that, you are also looking at scoring in four different areas. Each player has a private objective that they are trying to score, but there are also three more public objectives that players are trying to get as many points from. That seems like a lot of things to stay on top of, and it is, thankfully, the game gives you ways to move or manipulate dice, so hopefully you can fill in your whole stained glass window. Sagrada is a pretty game on the table with the translucent dice, and a fun game to play. it is definitely lighter, but there is enough going on that I feel engaged throughout the game, and I’m always hoping people won’t draft that one die that I really need. They normally do, but I’m hoping that they won’t. The game also scales up well, so it’s fun with two players and it’s fun with four players. There is an expansion that takes it up to six, but I haven’t tried that yet.

19 – Dice Throne: Season One
Alright, here it is, the first season of Dice Throne. As compared to the other ones, which in the future might just be Dice Throne Season Two when I finish getting all the characters, Dice Throne: Season One comes with six different characters that all play in fun and different ways. The game is still a yahtzee style dice rolling battle where you are trying to knock down your opponent before they can take you down. But characters like the Paladin can heal more and has buff abilities, whereas the Pyromancer is just about doing damage and doesn’t really do defense. This is fun, because it makes you adjust how you are going to play the game. The Shadow Thief for example, is all about getting combat points to put cards into play, but the more combat points they have, the more damage that they can do on some attacks. I think technically you could play this as a three versus three game with each team facing off against the other, but I prefer the game as a one versus one game. All the characters feel pretty balanced and it seems to be a luck of the roll as to who wins but there is enough dice manipulation that you feel like you can go for your ultimate ability if possible. I haven’t done this yet, but this game seems like ti would be amazing in a tournament format, so I’m hoping to get one of those done this winter. I really love all the Dice Throne stuff, and some of the Season Two characters are more interesting, but with what I got for Season One, I got more characters, so that’s why it’s higher.

18 – Dead of Winter
It’s zombie time, and Christmas. You and your group of survivors are huddled in your base in the town VFW (not part of the game, but I gave it a location), you’ve barricaded the doors off but the zombies keep coming, and you’re going to need to get food eventually. Dead of Winter is a zombie survival game where each player has their own objective as to what they want to do, or have in their hand, by the end of the scenario in order to win the game. However, the scenario has things you need to do as well, and there keep on being crisis that happen. And then you need to feed the colony as well. So life is tough for you as players as you run around to various locations, searching for what you need, and hoping not to get bitten by a zombie or get frost bite (bitten by a cold zombie). To make matters worse, you’re beginning to suspect that there might be a traitor in your midst. That’s Dead of Winter in a nutshell, a semi-cooperative game where each player has a secret objective that they need to complete, and there might be a traitor in the game. The odds of their being one are fairly low, because you mix it into 2 x [The Number of Players] cards, but most of the time there is one. Everyone is suspicious of everyone else, and then there are crossroads cards. These are cards that have you make tough decisions in the zombie filled world, like, do you let in some strangers to your group, you get more actions, but more mouths to feed as well. This is a big game with a lot of decisions to make in it, and if the scenarios weren’t hard enough, the daily crisis and personal objectives make the whole game even harder.

17 – Deranged
This game isn’t even out yet, how do I have it on my list so high? Because that’s how awesome the long demo at GenCon was. In Deranged you are stuck in a small town, because you are cursed, and you only have a limited amount of time before you can escape. But in order to escape you have to get rid of your curses. And if that wasn’t hard enough, there are monsters floating about down there that want to try and kill you. And then, if you die, you come back, because you know you’re in a cursed town that never wants you to leave, and you are cursed again. Plus, it’s possible at night time that you are going to become a deranged monster who has lost their humanity and then you can’t escape, but don’t worry, you can get your humanity back, you just have to kill another character, which will cause them to come back with another curse. This game is a ton of fun as you play cards that might advance time to the point where you hit night and become deranged. This game feels like a lighter horror game that offers a lot of decisions and plays pretty quickly with teaching the game and playing through it. The demo I played wasn’t the full game, but I got a really good taste of it going through a day. The aesthetic on this game is great as it has not a Lovecraftian feel, but definitely an early 1900’s feel. The game play is slick as you use cards for their abilities, but you have to weigh the choice of a good power or keeping back a card to play on defense if a monster is going to attack you or maybe a deranged is in your area. It’s coming to the US in Quarter One of 2020, I believe, and I’m waiting excitedly to be able to get my hands on it.

16 – Aeon’s End: War Eternal
I’m a big fan of deck building games that have theme, aka. not Dominion. And though I did have Ascension on the list that doesn’t have theme, the ones higher than it definitely do. In Aeon’s End: War Eternal, the standalone expansion to Aeon’s End a game I haven’t played, you are taking on the role of various breach mages who are trying to stop the town of Gravehold from being destroyed by one of several monsters that might be after it. You have the power, and you can acquire and gain more power to deal damage, cast more spells, and get more powerful spells throughout the game. Aeon’s End: War Eternal at it’s heart is like most deck building games where you have a market of cards where you can spend your money to buy either attack spells, artifacts that do something, or buy better and more money. But the way you cast your attack spells is unique because you have breaches that you have to cast your spells through, and depending on your character, you might have more breaches available to start than another player. However, the biggest difference from this game as compared to other deck building games is that you don’t shuffle your deck. When you play your cards on your turn, you play as many of them as you want at and then you sort how they go into the discard pile. So if I want, I can clump a group of money together in hopes that when I draw my hand after going through the deck, I’ll be able to get a hand with a lot of money in it. So you there is another area to strategize in this game as compared to a normal deck building game. The theme comes through well, and I like that the different giant monsters you are fighting have different goals. One of them is trying not to do direct damage to the player or the town of Gravehold, but is trying to dig under the city so that it collapses. This is a game that feels like it has a ton of replayability, and it has a legacy version that I really need to play.

15 – Second Chance
Another flip and write (roll and write) game, they are so popular right now, and I do like them quite well for a relaxing game to sit back and play. In Second Chance, you are flipping two shape cards every turn, and players pick one of the shapes and can rotate it, flip it, mirror it, whatever they want to put that shape somewhere on their board as long as it touches another shape they’ve put in play. The goal of the game is to fill in as many of the squares in as possible in this Tetris like puzzle. But sometimes you really need a specific shape and you get two shapes that you can’t use. In that case, you get a, you guessed it, second chance. A single card flip that has a shape that only you can use. If you can use it, you are still in the game, if you can’t, you are out and you can start counting up your open spaces. Second Chance is a fun game and a very relaxing game to play. I like to doodle as I fill in the shapes so that each section looks different than other ones do. Kristen likes to do specific patterns in how she fills in her shapes. The game plays fast, and because everyone is using the shapes, though with a unique starting shape, there is no downtime for anyone in the game. Like Criss Cross before, Second Chance is a game that people will play once and then want to play again. If you’re looking for a very accessible roll and write (flip and write) game, Second Chance is definitely that.

14 – The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game
When I started ranking everything, I thought that this game was going to be higher on my list. But it dropped, I like this game a lot as 14 is really good. I think the reason is that while this game offers a lot of interesting choices, it doesn’t have the same weight of decision making that some of the other games do. In this game you take on the roll of Harry Dresden and other characters from The Dresden File books as you work through a book to try and solve the mystery that is going on. You can focus on two areas, the first is solving cases with your investigation cards. These cards have a cost and then they put clues on a case according to various rules on the card. The other is attack, which works like the investigate cards, but goes on the bad guys instead of the cases. Your goal, at the end of the game is to have more cases solved than there are bad guys left on the board. It’s tricky though, because everything costs something, and you have a limited amount of fate points (as they are called) to spend. But you can get them back by discarding a card and getting back the cards cost in fate points. That works well as a mechanic, but can lead to someone having to discard several turns in a row, which can be boring. Thankfully, discarding does a bit more than that, it also has another action that it triggers for the players. For someone characters it might be adding in damage to a certain bad guy, either the nearest or farthest, or do the same thing with a case. Plus, each character has a one time ability that feels like them. This game, while being a big puzzle, is very thematic and a lot of fun as you try and recreate the book on the table.

13 – Hanamikoji
This is the first of two two player games on the list. Technically the other can be played with four, but it’s a two player game. Hanamikoji is, however, only a two player game. In this game you are trying to win favor of various Geisha by giving them gifts. Each Geisha is worth a certain number of points and wants a certain type of gift. If you have more gifts in front of that Geisha at the end of the round, you win their favor. How you get gifts in front of them is where the meat of this game is, though. It is actually only just cards, but you have four different ways you can play down cards. You can discard two that won’t be used for winning a Geisha’s favor, you can play one face down that will be used, you can play down three cards, your opponent picks one that they get and you get the other two to use for winning favor, and finally, you can put down two groups of two, and your opponent picks one of them. The trick of this game is that you want to keep everything and often times you are helping your opponent. Can you manipulate things to where you’ve gotten enough favor points from the Geisha or have won the favor of enough Geisha? I feel like most of the time the game is over in two rounds of the four actions, but it’s always a struggle. And you really want your opponent making the hard decisions for you. This is a fast game that is abstract, but it looks good on the table, and because of it’s speed, you generally want to play multiple times. There is also enough hidden information that you can never fully solve the puzzle of how to play it.

12 – Welcome To…
The last roll (flip) and write on the list. This is my favorite of that genre because there is a bit more to sink your teeth into. In the game you are building your perfect 1950’s neighborhood so that people come to your development over that Stepford neighborhood over there. And of course, to do that, you need to set-up your neighborhood correctly. Do you go for a lot of parks, do you try and build swimming pools, are you advertising your neighborhood? But most importantly, are you building those white picket fences, because a neighborhood isn’t a neighborhood without them. This is another one of these roll (flip) and write games that everyone is using the same resources. Everyone gets to pick which one of three combinations of an action and a house number to use each turn, so the game can play up to 100 out of the box, since there are 100 sheets with the game. This game still plays fast, but I like it since it gives you more options as to what you can do and how you want to try and get your scoring as compared to games like Second Chance and Criss Cross. I also like it, because I can quickly tell people what the game is about with that 1950’s neighborhood reference, and everyone gets an idea. There are also expansions that I haven’t played yet, but I have the spring one and a fallout, I mean, bomb shelter, one ready to try. I’m excited to get those to the table soon as they add in a few new things to the game which seem fun.

11 – Star Wars: Rebellion
This is the other two player game, though technically it can be played with four people, basically just splitting up the two sides of the Empire and Rebels. I wouldn’t do that. In this game if you are the Empire, you are trying to build up enough troops and search the galaxy for the rebel base. You get some help from that with your probe droids, plus you are trying to mess over the rebels in whatever ways you can. The Rebels are trying to create unrest in the empire and complete missions to undermine the empire. If they can complete a certain number of them for points before the empire can find them and wipe them out, they win the game. Of course, you can also build Death Stars and blow up planets if you want as well. This game is described by the Dice Tower as Star Wars in a box. And I have to agree with them, it is only the original trilogy, but that’s all I want to play. I don’t need to have mechanics for a romance subplot between Hayden Christenson and Natalie Portman. It’s a game of cat and mouse as both sides try and disrupt the other, but both sides ultimately have bigger goals that they are working towards. Plus, you can customize the characters you are playing with as you go along. Maybe you get Chewie but not Han, or who needs the Emperor when you have Grand Moff Tarkin? But each of them brings an ability that they are better at, so you have to balance that. Along with that, you get to have epic space battles and ground battles that take place on and around these planets which can swing who is leading. Star Wars: Rebellion is a big, long, and thematic game that I’d recommend to Star Wars fans who like to board game. I’ve enjoyed playing both sides as well, though I’ve had better luck as the Empire, just made one mistake as the Rebels, though, and I could have won.

Man, there is so much to say about these games. I really do love them all and I want to sit down and play them all. I’m excited to do my top 10, because I had a game in there that surprised me after I had done all of the sorting. But you’ll have to wait for Friday for that game.

If you have a game that you like out of this section of the list, let me know what it is. Or what game do you want to try?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
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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.

30 – Star Wars: Imperial Assault
We’re back into a bigger and heavier game. In Star Wars: Imperial Assault, you can either skirmish two sides against each other, but the more fun way to play it, in my opinion, is to play through the missions. In the game, you can play through missions either as a one against all game where one person controls the Empire who are trying to hunt down the Rebels, or you play as no name Rebels who are trying to survive. You can play through different missions, like a Jedi finding a lightsaber, maybe, or more. Either way, if the players win or lose, the story progresses in some way, because the Empire’s objective isn’t always to just kill off the rebels. Or, you can use an app and basically play the same thing, but instead of it being a situation where one person is the empire, the app takes care of that and directs their activations and the players move them on the board using a set-up that lets them know what actions to take based on distance. The game has a lot of little pieces to it, but the game feels like Star Wars, and feels like you’re part of a big story. If you’re a Star Wars fan, it would be a good one that is worth checking out.

29 – Village Attacks
There are a lot of games where you play the villagers or heroes who are going out to defeat the monsters. But do you ever really think about those poor monsters? Maybe they are just trying to live their lives and the villagers are just in the way, do they really deserve to be attacked by these villagers with their cruel intentions with pitchforks and torches? The answer is probably yes, but in this tower defense style game, you play as the monsters who are fending off hordes of villagers who are trying to complete some objective or attack the heart of the monsters lair, which would of course cause the whole building to crumble, bringing doom to the monster and all those around. This is a fun miniature, dice combat, tower defense game. I got to play a special scenario made at GenCon, and then I found out that it wasn’t available, which was annoying, because I really enjoyed it, and the cooperative play is always a good thing. Thankfully, it is back on kickstarter, so the pack that I got for the game with that scenario and some other goodies won’t go to waste and I’ll eventually be able to play the game. If you like playing as the bad guys, this game does a good job with that, but also without it feels too grim.

28 – Photosynthesis
Photosynthesis is one of those aesthetically pleasing games, not to say the others on this section of the list aren’t, but with Photosynthesis, it jumps off the table as being pretty. In the game, you are growing trees, collecting light points to help your trees going more and hoping that you’ve set stuff up correctly so that you will be able to harvest your trees when they are old in order to get points and then start the process again. The game is really an abstract puzzle as you figure out where to place your trees and how to grow them, but it does have some thematic things as well. The sun travels around the forest, so that at some points in time, certain spots will get sunlight and spots won’t. That part is cool, and how you tell if an area doesn’t get sunlight is if there is a shadow being cast on it, which you can tell by where the sun is, and how tall various trees are on the board. This game can actually be a little bit mean, because you are probably going to be blocking other peoples trees at times from the sun and they doing that to your trees, so it’s possible to get no sun points if you are unlucky. But the game itself doesn’t feel that mean, because the theme of growing trees isn’t that confrontational. I really have enjoyed playing this game. I think that all the pieces look great and the concept of it works really well and even manages to feel thematic.

27 – Letter Jam
Letter Jam, when I saw it played, was going to be a game that I loved. I knew it. It’s a word game and a puzzle as you are getting clues about what letters you might have and trying to guess them as time goes on to figure out the word that you have. So I demoed it at GenCon, and the experience was bad. It was the first day at GenCon, one of the other people demoing didn’t want to be there, the person running the demo didn’t want to be there, and one of the people, because of the person running the demo didn’t realize the game was cooperative until half way through. So that was a poor experience, but then I tried it again with a different person running the demo, and it was a ton of fun to sit down and play the game, I was just sad that they were sold out at that point. In Letter Jam, you have a word made of between 4 and 6 letter cards (I believe), that are face down on the table. At the start of the game, everyone puts one upright away from themselves, and then people give clues as to what the letters are. So to do that, you spell out a word using tokens that are placed in front of peoples letters. But, of course, you can’t see your letter, only the other players, so you might get the word “F*IGHT”. If you got that word, and your letter is the asterisk, you can guess that your letter is probably an “L” or an “R”. Once you think you know what your letter is, you can flip it down and go to your next letter trying to figure out your word. But everyone is trying to do that, so everyone has to give clues. The game is a ton of fun, plays quickly, and I really love word puzzles.

26 – Hats
Another GenCon release, this one I did pick up. I wrote a TableTopTake on it a while ago. This is an Alice in Wonderland themed game that is a bit trippy, which is something that I am always looking for. In the game you are at the Madd Hatter’s tea party, and you are trying to get the best scoring collection of hats. To do that, you are playing down a hat from your hand and putting it in place of a hat on the Madd Hatter’s table. The trick is, to replace a hat, you need to either have a matching color or a higher number. And the scoring of the game is interesting as well. You only score the colors of hats on the Madd Hatter’s table, and it’s possible that certain colors won’t end up on the table at the end of the game. So the work that you did collecting them might be worth nothing if you can’t hold back a card so that you can make sure that color is being scored at the end of the game. The other trick to the game is that the cards in your hand are cards you might not use for scoring for yourself, in fact, your opponent(s) might get all of them. So how do you manipulate what is in your hand to end up with the scoring that you want and to use what is on the table to help drive your strategy. I feel like every game of this is different and a really good puzzle.

25 – Sword & Sorcery
And after a small game in Hats, we have Sword & Sorcery, a massive dungeon crawler with characters with cool powers who are heroes of old and brought from the past in order to stop something that is horrible that is happening now. There’s a lot going on in the game, and you can find information about that in my TableTopTakes post. But it’s a dungeon crawl game where you are rolling dice to fight monsters, looking for soul gems to level up your characters or to bring them back if they turn into ghosts. The game has a book of secrets as well that helps the story unfold without making it linear in each scenario because you have different things that you can do. And I’m not sure, maybe some of the choices you make in the earlier games can influence the future, we finally had something that felt like it might do that, or possible two things in this past scenario. The game, I wouldn’t say, is extremely difficult, or with a little bit of luck in terms of what treasure you get, it can make it easier. We’ve also done a good job rolling dice, so getting lucky, that has made them easier, but it’s still a lot of fun to play through the game, think about combat and go through the scenarios. If you want a big dungeon crawl where you are chucking dice, this one is good,.

24 – Small World
Small World, as I normally put it, is Risk, but fun. In Small World, you are trying to control areas with your fantasy race, collect coins, and at the end of the game, have the most coins. But, Small World is a ton of silly fun. In it, you are picking from various fantasy races, like Elves, Dwarves, Giants, Tritons, etc. and they are paired up with a power. So you might have something like Seafaring Elves or maybe you have Wealthy Dwarves or Flying Giants. These combos change up every time, which makes the game really diverse. You place your race tokens on the board taking over territories and once you’ve expanded or been attacked enough that you can’t go any further, you put them into decline and then pick a new race. The game is good silly fun, because, unlike Risk, if you get wiped off the board, you can always come back in. And if people are attacking you, you can put your race into decline and then come in with a new strong race and attack the people who attacked you, and that’s going to happen in every game. It’s fun to figure out all the different combos and which one might be the best from those available. This is another good gateway game and a gateway game for people who like Risk but maybe find it too long or too mean.

23 – Criss Cross
The smallest game on the list, Criss Cross is a little roll and write. However, it is one of my favorite roll and write games. In Criss Cross you are placing different shapes onto a five by five grid based off of what comes up on the dice. There are two tricks to this game. The first being that you are scoring symbols that are next to each other in both the columns and the rows. So if you pay too much attention to the columns, you won’t score well in the rows or vice-a-verse. The other thing is that when the dice are rolled, and everyone uses the same die rolls, you have to place the two symbols next to each other. So you might end up with two symbols that work perfectly or you might end up with one symbol that you really want and one that you really don’t. So you have to figure out where to put them to give you the most scoring chances and also make sure that you don’t accidentally end up with a space by itself, because if you do that, on the last roll, you won’t be able to place the dice symbols since they need to be next to each other. The game goes by really quickly and I rarely play less than two games in a single sitting. I would say that this game is a bit tricky too teach, because you can place the dice symbols anywhere, but the two symbols need to be next to each other, and people either think that you have to always put the symbols next to another symbol you’ve written, making their game harder, or they try and split up the dice, or they forget that symbols score when they are next too each other. It’s not a complicated game once you get it down, teaching this simple game, for some reason, is just tricky.

22 – Just One
This should be the highest party game on my list, and the newest party game on my list. In Just One, it’s cooperative and you are all working together but separately to get the guesser to guess their one word answer. Maybe they picked, unknown to them, the word “Emergency”. All the players, separately, have to write down a one word clue. So everyone does that and then, without the guesser looking, the players compare their clues, and any of them that are duplicated are hidden, so say, for “Emergency” that two people wrote down “Hospital”, the guesser won’t see either clue of “Hospital” and will be left with whatever other clues might have been given. The game plays fast, but it’s a fun challenge. in many ways, it has a bit of a Scattergories feel where you are trying to be clever with your clue, but not too clever so that no one can guess the word from it, or too clever that you match up with someone else with went that clever route. And you don’t want it so that, in the case of the word “Emergency” that no one puts down the helpful clue of “Hospital”. It leads to some great moments where people guess a word based off of way fewer clues than you would think that they could. I remember the first time that we played it, a friend guessed the the word “Karate” based only off of the clues “Discipline” and “Style”. Those moments make this game work well, and with the limit set on how long the game is, 13 word cards total, it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome.

21 – Ice Cool
I had Ice Cool 2 lower on the list, but Ice Cool is almost a top 20 game for me, and I would play it anytime. I love how silly this game as you are flicking around penguins trying to either catch those silly penguins who are skipping class or the class skipping penguins trying to get their fish snacks. I’m waiting until my son is old enough to play this, probably 3 years from now, where we can just flick the penguins around and have fun with it. But the game is also a blast with adults. I’ve had it out at several board game nights and it’s always a success. I love that you can now combine it with Ice Cool 2 and play a massive eight player game. Since I’ve talked about this before I don’t have as much to say, but if you want a game that is just a lot of silly fun, Ice Cool is amazing for that, and the fact that you can get the penguins to jump over walls, if you do it right, or you can put spin on them and get them to go through multiple doors or a spin towards a penguin who is skipping class who thought they were safe, it’s just a blast. I know this game won’t work for more serious gamers, but if you have a group that is up for a fun time, I highly highly recommend this game.

I get to play one of these games tonight as my bi-weekly Sword & Sorcery game will happen. I’m excited to get it to the table, and now I want to play some of these games again. Maybe I can make a way to work them into the next board game night coming up in a few weeks. I really love all of these games and hopefully you can find some on here that you want to try as well.

Thank you for keeping up with this list with me. Let me know in the comments below if there any of these games that you love or that you really want to try.

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

***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.

40 – Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger
If you remember the silly choose your own adventures from the 90’s and earlier, that’s what this game is. You Read a bit of text, come to a decision point, and you hope to make the right decision so that you don’t die. But unlike the books, unless you kept your fingers stuck in spots to remember where you were, this is more forgiving and tells you where to go back to and try again. The game play for this is very simple, there are a few things besides making a decision that require a die roll, and if you do poorly, you can generally try to roll the die again, but it might be harder to get the roll you need. So, if you want something with decisions that really matter and are tough to make, House of Danger isn’t for you. If you want a silly fun time with your friends, House of Danger is a ton of fun with a completely absurd story. That’s what I was looking for, and I’m excited to play the second one sometime as it seems absurd as well. The simplicity of this game also makes it easier to play with non-gamers who might know the books, because this plays like the books.

39 – Cartographers: A Roll Player Tale
Is this connected to Roll Player which was down further on the list, technically yes. However, beyond the artwork that is similar, I don’t think there’s much of a connection, just the game developers wanting to keep their games in the same world. That said, Cartographers is a fun flip and write (roll and write) game where you are either placing one type of land in one of two shapes or one of two types of land in one shape. There are a lot of roll and write or flip and write games that have that put a shape on the board mechanic, but what makes Cartographers different? First, there are monsters, and when there are monsters, you pass your sheet to another player and they put the monster onto the sheet for you, and monsters can give you negative points if you aren’t careful. There’s some more player interaction in the game because of that. You also have interesting scoring which makes it feel different, instead of just scoring at the end of the game, you score 4 seasons, and instead of scoring everything in each season, you score two objectives (A & B) in spring, B & C in summer, C & D in fall and finally D & A in winter. So each objective gets scored twice, so you can’t just plan on one type of scoring, but if you want, you can lean into only a couple of them. Catographers while really being a little abstract game that doesn’t need to be a Roll Player Tale remains a lot of fun.

38 – Ticket to Ride
A classic game, Ticket to Ride as well as Catan are the two games that I would say got me into modern gaming. In Ticket to Ride you are trying to build routes between specific locations that you have on route cards. To do that, you need to take specific colored train cards to complete sections, get points, and get points for completing the routes. Ticket to Ride is a pretty simple game, but it’s a fun one as you try and figure out ways to get all your routes to stick together so you can get the bonus for a longest collection of trains in a row. This is very much a gateway game that a lot of people have seen, even if they haven’t played it. And the rules are simple, but there is a bit of strategy to it, to determine what routes you keep, to try and figure out where other people are going so that you know if you have to get ahead of them so that you can complete a route as efficiently as possible. This isn’t a big and thinky game, but it works really well at what it’s supposed to be, that game that almost anyone can sit down and play.

37 – King of Tokyo
Another gateway game, I’d say, is King of Tokyo. This game is all about giant, generic, monsters fighting in Tokyo and punching each other, who will be the last monster standing. Now, there is another way to win, by getting points, but most of the games of King of Tokyo that I’ve played, it’s been the last monster standing who won. The game is pretty simple as you are rolling dice Yahtzee style, so re-roll up to three times, to get things like fists for punching, energy to buy cards that give you a special power or points, hearts to heal, or just generic numbers that can maybe get you points. The trick of the game is that when you are in Tokyo, you can punch all the rest of the monsters around Tokyo with a single fist, but you can’t heal, so you have to decide how long you’ll stay in Tokyo, because you do get points for being there as well. The game is simple, it’s fast, and there is plenty of variety in the power cards that you can buy. All the monsters in the base game are generic monsters that a number of them are clearly riffing off of some other monsters like King Kong or Godzilla, but they didn’t get the rights to them. I wish each monster had their own powers, out of the box, but it is an expansion you can buy, if you have the 2nd edition of the base game, which I don’t. This really is one of those games, though, because of the simplicity that most people will enjoy, and because it’s rolling dice, it’s going to feel familiar, even though there’s more going on than a lot of old dice games.

36 – Onirim
This is the only purely solo game on my list, but one that I really enjoying playing with the cards and playing on the app. I think I like the physical copy more, just because I like to have the cards in my hand. But with digital one is nice since you shuffle cards a lot in the game. In the game, which is very abstract, you are in a dream world looking for doors to escape and trying to avoid nightmares. In reality, you are playing down groups of three cards, one at a time, in order to play doors, or getting them into play other ways and then discarding cards when nightmares come up, or spending keys that make it easier to put doors into play, but can also cancel a nightmare. If you get all the doors in play before the deck runs out, you escape the dream, if you don’t, you lose the game. I think I win just over 50% of the time. You can see a playthrough of this game on the Malts and Meeples YouTube channel. What I like about this game is that it is simple and fast, and you don’t need a ton of room to play it. I’ve been able to play the game while watching TV shows that I don’t need to fully pay attention to, because while there is a lot of good depth to the game, the decisions end up being somewhat clear, except when the nightmares come up, so you can play it fast with only paying some attention. If you are looking for a solo game to try, I’d highly recommend Onirim.

35 – Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate
The other Betrayal game that I’ve played will be much higher on the list. But Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate is a ton of fun as well and I like the Dungeons and Dragons setting. In it, you are a group of adventurers who are back in town and just going around, finding things in the town, however, there are horrible things lurking in the town waiting for one of you to betray your friends. To do this, you are finding omens, and if a roll happens where you don’t get a high enough result, the haunt happens. In the haunt, the betrayer has a secret objective and the rest of the players have their objective, and they know generally what the other persons is, so they are trying to stop them and complete their own objective. Or sometimes, it might be something like a dragon attack so everyone works together, which is fun as well. Then, whatever side gets their objective done wins. The game really plays in two different parts, and I think it works well. I like playing as a character with a unique power, and while the theme doesn’t quite fit the mechanics like the other Betrayal game, this one is still a lot of fun to play, and feels like they’ve improved some of the balancing of the game that the other Betrayal had. If you think Betrayal sounds interesting but don’t like horror, Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate does a good job with it’s fantasy Dungeons and Dragons theme.

34 – Zona: The Secret of Chernobyl
This game isn’t even out yet, I think they were selling copies at Essen Spiel in Germany this past week, but I got to play a good demo of it at GenCon, and I feel in love with it immediately. The aesthetic is very fun with the fallout of Chernobyl having caused mutated monsters to show up, plus there might be magic now. In the game you are looking for artifacts that you can use to get into the main vault at Chernobyl and probably unleash a horrible monsters, but theoretically it’s some treasure worth having. The game is challenging as it’s competitive and you’re racing your other players, fighting these mutants and dealing with events in the world. But you are finding gear that’s still left around, and it can be what you needed to take care of a monster. This seemed like it would be a pretty long game, but the aesthetic is great and what you are doing seems challenging enough, plus, you have a countdown before the treasure is lost forever, so you can’t spend too much time. I’m really waiting for this game to be for sale in the US, because I want to get to play it more and fight more monsters in hopes of finding out the secrets. The characters felt cool and different, the monsters were different, and how you fought them was cool. Definitely a bigger game than some of the previous ones on the list.

33 – Century: Golem Edition
This is another very pretty game, while Zona was very monster filled and post apocalyptic, Century is very cute with some very pretty gems. In this game, you are buying cards for your hand in order to improve the gems that you have, so you can get the right collection of gems so you can power up various golems which give you points. This is very much an engine building game where you are looking to get the right cards so that you can turn gems into various types easily. This game plays fast because you are either paying for a golem, trading gems, or getting a card. But for being a fairly simple and fast game, you definitely have a good amount of decisions to make as to how you build up your engine. The draw for people who might not be gamers with this game, because I could see using this as a gateway game, is that the pieces are amazing. There are so many pretty gems, the golems look amazing, and there are metal coins that are fun to hold and mess with. There is another version of Century, Century Spice Road that came out first, but the Golem Edition definitely looks better and will have a broader appeal.

32 – The Lost Expedition
You are walking through the jungles of South America, and you are searching for the fabled lost city of Z, will you be able to find it before all of your guides die? That’s what this cooperative game asks of it’s players as you spend resources like bullets and food to navigate cards as well as the various skills in survival, tracking, and nature that your guides have. I’m really noticing that the game higher on the list all really have very nice aesthetics, as this game has great artwork that looks like Tintin by Herge comic art. But, beyond that, this game does a cool thing where it is cooperative, but players have a hand of cards which is for creating a path for the morning and evening walks, but you can’t tell people what is in your hand, so you have to decide what to play down yourself, and you lose a bit of the alpha gamer. Then, as a group, you go down the path you laid out for the day in hopes to get closer to the lost city of Z, while keeping your guides in good shape. The thing is, you never will, but that’s just part of the game, the question is, can you rush along fast enough but not do too dangerously. The game makes you make tough decisions on when to play certain cards and you hope that you get the good cards when you need them, because, not enough food, a guide loses a health, or no bullet, might be a worse option instead that you have to do on a card with a jaguar. I think I have over a 50% win total, but it’s generally close and a lot of fun as you’re worried about it.

31 – Sushi Go Party!
Final game in this section of my top 100. This game is another good looking game, though less on the table, and more with the cute artwork on the cards. A lot of people will prefer 7 Wonders as a card drafting game, but for me, Sushi Go Party! is the better of the two games because the artwork is cute anthropomorphized little Japanese foods like nigiri, sashimi, or pudding. In this game, you are trying to gets sets of different types of cards to get you more points. To do this, you are taking one card from your hand of cards and playing that, then you pass your cards either to the left or to the right and the take a card from the hand of cards that is passed to you. But you are looking at a lot of different things to determine how you want to get points. If you get nigiri they are guaranteed points, but they aren’t a ton of points, and sashimi can be ten points, but only if you have three of them. And tofu is worth five points if you have two of them, but if you get a third, they are worth zero points, because you don’t want to fill up on tofu. This game has variable different scoring, so you can play it over and over again with different scoring and what you’ll be drafting will change up. It’s also a game that is pretty easy to teach, even with having that out there, and the cute looks helps make it interesting to more people.

Alright, another ten done, we’re getting close to the end, if I’m right, we’ll finish on Friday, which will be exciting. I’m glad that I have a board game night coming up soon so that I can get some of these games to the table again.

What are some games that look like fun from this part of the list. This is definitely a section of my top 100 where the games are a lot lighter, but definitely a good time to play. Are there any that you love? Are there any that you want to play?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

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