Catch Up on the Top 100 Games

100 through 91
90 through 81
80 through 71

Top 100 Games (of all time) 2025 Edition 70 through 61

70. Meadow

Published By: Rebel Studio
Designer: Klemens Kalicki

Buy Meadow Here

This game is a beautiful nature game. It’s all about creating a meadow and stacking cards on top of each other really. Each card you select is going to have requirements as to how to place it. To go along with that, the selection process is great. I like how you place a token on a row or column and that token determines which thing you take. So you need to plan that out and sometimes make due with the limited placement access you have.

69. Mountain Goats

Published By: Allplay
Designer: Stefan Risthaus

Buy Mountain Goats Here

Mountain Goats is a little, simple, climbing game. All you do is roll your dice and decide how to split them up. Then you move your mountain goat up the tracks that are those numbers. If you reach the top or are at the top, you gain those points. If someone else is at the top when you get there, you knock them down to the bottom again. The game is so simple, but it works really well

68. burncycle

Published By: Chip Theory Games
Designers: Josh J Carlson, Shannon Wedge

Buy burncycle Here

Now we move to burncycle which is a much bigger game. In this game you complete one off missions as robots. I like the theme of the game, robots took over and now big corporations and people have taken it back and are out after the robots. You need to sneak around to complete missions both in buildings and on the network. And the burndown of the cycle is a great tool for the game as well. Just a lot of really fun elements into a big game.

67. The Lost Expedition

Published By: Osprey Games
Designer: Peer Sylvester

Buy The Lost Expedition Here.

The Lost Expedition is back on the list. This game is a great cooperative game. And I always like to mention, it is a good one for not having too much alpha gaming. The players all make their card choices with no input. And it changes up from morning trek to evening trek, I like that about the game as well. The former is playing cards in numerical order, or they slot in that order, while the other you just play out cards. So it changes up the strategy and sometimes you just end up stuck.

66. ISS Vanguard

Published By: Awaken Realms
Designers: Andrzej Betkiewicz, Krysztof Piskorski, Marcin Swierkot

Buy ISS Vanguard Here.

Now to another big campaign game. This one is all about exploring space and figuring out the mystery of why a message brought humanity out here in the stars. The game is also interesting because it’s split into two parts, the planetary exploration part and then the ship management aspect. I like both parts and it makes for a fun campaign, one that I need to get back to, ideally in a group.

65. Mansions of Madness

Published By: Fantasy Flight Games
Designer: Nikki Valens

Buy Mansions of Madness Here.

Now another scenario based game, Mansions of Madness is a classic at this point. Do you want to go on some big Lovecraftian adventure, but as a one off? This game is going to give you that. I like how grand it is, I like how the app lets the scenarios be different each time (albeit just slightly), and I like how the scenarios you play are so different. This is a good beer and pretzels type of game when you want a big game for an evening.

64. Sonora

Published By: Pandasaurus Games
Designer: Rob Newton

Not Available Currently

I like my roll and write games. And Sonora is a great one for that and it has a fun twist with it. Yes, you get all the combos that you get from a lot of roll and write games. But you also get to flick discs. So instead of rolling dice you are flicking discs with numbers to see what areas you activate. It’s fun to knock someone off a spot that they really wanted. And then, like I said, you go heads down and get to combo as many things as you can.

63. Lands of Galzyr

Published By: Snowdale Design
Designers: Seppo Kuukasjarvi, Sami Laakso

Buy Lands of Galzyr

Lands of Galzyr is an interesting game because it’s really different than most games that I’ve played. This one is all about going on adventures and completing quests. But the stakes, while often cool and interesting, are never that high because what quest you go on, that’s determined by whatever shows up. I like as well how you can rotate your skills, so you might start out sneaking and then end up with great lore, it’s up to you and the quests you take.

62. Kohaku

Published By: 25th Century Games
Designer: Danny Devine

Not Available Currently

I like games where you can draft. And Kohaku gives you that as well as being a beautiful game to play. The copy as own has the acrylic tiles which give it a depth from the surface of the water to the bottom which looks amazing. But the game play is good as well. You pick out a koi and a scoring tile and they need to be adjacent to each other. Then when you play them out, you can never put a koi orthogonally adjacent to another koi and same with scoring tiles. So it’s a bit scoring tableau that you create.

61. Nidavellir

Published By: GRRRE Games
Deisgner: Serge Laget

Buy Nidavellir Here

Finally is Nidavellir. This is a game that I actually got rid of at one point. But then I decided to hop into a three player game on BGA. And I realized what I had not liked about the game before. Nidavellir is a great bidding and dwarf set collection game, but for me, only as a three or more player game. It’s fun to try and get your bids just right and still upgrade your coins. Plus you need to diversify what you collect so you can get the bonus powerful dwarves.

Join Next Week

Just as a reminder, I am streaming my Top 100 Games (of all time) 2025 Edition every Wednesday night at 9 PM Central Time. The next few videos have their links up, so you can click notify on them to know when I go live. Or you can subscribe to the channel and click notify to know whenever a new video comes out. Currently I am playing through Legendary Kingdoms on Monday and then my wife and I are playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on Fridays. So join us for those videos.

And thank you for checking out the video and articles. Let me know what your favorite game from this chunk of 10 is and which one you would love to get played.

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How to Play Aquatica

This, like I said, is a hand management and engine building game where you try and generate the most points. Whomever has the most points at the end of the game, and there are three game end triggers, will win the game.

But Aquatica comes more down to how you use the cards in your hand to generate more cards and complete locations. And, in a lot of ways the game is about how you can combo locations together. Each location has some actions that you can do. They might give you more money or fighting power to get more locations. They might push up past blank actions on locations. Or they might let you score locations that you’ve used all of the actions for. Plus a little bit more.

So on each turn you can play out a single card action. But you chain together as many location actions as you want and makes sense. I say makes sense because you might chain some actions together that you don’t use the benefit. For example, I might not use the fighting power that I get on a turn. But I want to push a card past that to get the benefit I do want or to be able to store it as a treasure.

Here’s Rodney with more.

Chaining Actions

Let’s talk a bit about chaining actions or chaining location actions because I think that is the strongest element of the game. It is the part of the game what you are really puzzling out with the help of manta rays. I didn’t mention manta rays, but they provide actions like the locations do. However, they can refresh when you refresh your hand of cards.

But the chaining of actions provides an interesting puzzle to figure out. You need to figure out which actions, like I said, to push past and basically waste. They might be a waste, but it might help you score more points or score an end game scoring objective faster than your opponents. So there is strategy around it.

And a lot of the locations, you find, take a fair amount to get. But that is again where and why you might skip on a locations actions. I say skip, I mean pass over without the benefit. So you pass over so that you can get what you need to buy or conquer another location. You still need to think about the blank spaces. Because you are not allowed to just pass over a blank space. You need an arrow to do that, so it’s an interesting puzzle.

The Manta Rays

The manta rays are a fun addition to the game. Like the locations they are a resource that you can basically spend for coins, attack power, or to move locations further up. But unlike locations it isn’t a use it and that section or action is hidden. Manta rays flip over and there are a few cards what when you play them flip them back. So there is good interesting with the character cards that you use.

I also like around the manta rays how they help with Aquatica’s end scoring objectives. In that the four you start out with are the scoring markers for when you score the objectives. So the first person to score them gets 8 points, next 5, and than 3 after that. But as a benefit of not scoring, you keep your manta rays around longer. And as long as you can complete all of the objectives later in the game, you keep that benefit going.

The Boring Part of Aquatica

Now Aquatica isn’t all fun and excitement of how you chain your location actions together. You get a main action in the game, and that is playing a card that does, generally one thing or one pretty basic element of the game. It interacts with the main board to recruit a character or get a location. That is about it. There is a bit more, but not that much more.

And even recruiting a character, a new character with a new version of an action is not that exciting. By, because the actions don’t vary much or feel that much stronger than they do with your starting actions. The only reason to recruit more characters is that they are slightly better and you need them for an objective. Otherwise, I think just the basic actions might be about as good.

This element of the game just feels lacking. As you recruit characters it costs money. That cost is from 5 down to 0 and everything slides down. I’m not sure that it’s worth paying more than one or two coins to get something. It’s never worth spending resources which can get locations to go all the way to 5. No card is that much better. So recruiting feels more like a bust of a turn.

Final Thoughts on Aquatica

I want more in this game. I don’t think it’s that often where I complain about a game having too little. And really, I don’t want that much more. I just want the cards for the characters I recruit to feel cooler. They are all so one and done that it doesn’t feel like I’m setting anything up or being that clever about it. And in a lot of ways that is holding the rest of the game back for me.

Why is that when I like the manta rays and the locations? Well, when I flip manta rays and slide up cards, it is all for an action that doesn’t feel that exciting. I complete this great puzzle of sliding cards around to get to 8 conqueror that I use when I play down a card that gets me a location. No points right then, which is okay, a benefit I can use right away, unless it just let’s me buy stuff or conqueror stuff. In which case, I get a great toy for the future with a pretty boring and basic action.

That said, I want to look into the expansions. This game might benefit from them because it might add variety. If it adds variety, then I think the game and the basic character actions might seem more interesting. And I need to play with the king, the powerful characters you can start with. It won’t make the other recruiting feel better, but it might make the game feel more interesting from the start with the actions I can do.

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How To Play The Great Split

The Great Split is an art collection game, but really, it is a game with tracks that you are going up on to optimize your score and have the most points at the end of the game. That’s the generic version of a lot of games. But The Great Split does it in a couple of interesting ways.

The main mechanism of The Great Split is “I split, you choose.” If you aren’t familiar, I create two groups of something, in this case, cards in my hand. You get to see those two groups and then pick the one that you want. I get what is left.

What you pick determines what tracks you go up on. You can go up on books, which have certain scoring thresholds when you score books. You go up on art where you score based off of how much art you own compared to the market. Or finally you push up the track on gems, either green or blue but ideally both, and you score twice your lowest gem total.

To go along with that, there are also tracks for contracts and coins. Contracts are end game scoring that triggers based off of how many contracts you’ve gotten in a particular area times how much those contracts are worth. So if I have 5 green gem contracts and I got my green gem contracts to be worth 3 points, I get 15 points. And with coins, they have contracts as well, but you can “spend” money to move up on other tracks as well.

The game plays over a number of rounds. And like I said at the beginning, the player with the most points wins.

The Details

So, as I’ve started doing, let’s look at what the box says.

For players it says 2-7 and the Board Game Geek community says best at 4-6. I think it would be fine at 4-7 players. And I know from playing it at 3, it’s still fun. But there is a difference. With more players more cards get into the rotation so you see more options. That is a big benefit with more. I don’t know that I really want to play it with two players.

It also says it plays in 45 minutes, and that is close. I think it is a bit longer than that. But the core mechanics are of the game are simultaneous. I only have played when I taught new players. I think with players who know the game, it might hit that time range. The game is only 7 rounds, plus three spots to score.

And finally, they say it is for 8+. Now as always a caveat with this. It is more about safety, but, The Great Split is language independent and has it’s one core mechanic. An adult might need to help with scoring, but I can see a younger kid playing it, say eight. They might not get all of the rules and nuisance of the game, which is to be expected.

What Doesn’t Work?

This is a very thinky game. And as a player you make a decision at times that might not be perfect for you. And because The Great Split is so thinky, someone who tends towards analysis paralysis and taking long turns will slow the game down. It is noticeable when it is there turn. But in a game with simultaneous play, it is going to be more noticeable. So be aware of that with The Great Split.

What Works?

The main mechanism in the game is amazing. I love I split you choose. And this game is that distilled. Yes, there are the tracks and they do create combos. But the main part of the game is I split my cards and you pick from those two splits. And that decision space is so good and so simple in this game. But when you split the cards, you worry that you either made the split too good to get back what you want. Or you didn’t make it good enough.

I also think that the tracks work well. They are not complex and basically you teach the game quickly. There is some to go over, but once you teach the player board, you teach the rest of the game in round one. So it is not a complex game but one that is fun to teach and play that way. Plus the combos in the game are simple in a good way. I hit this point on the coins, I advance two in another area.

The scoring is also well done. The Great Split is scored three times. Though what you score the first two times can vary. You score each of books, art, and gems. But when you set up the game you don’t know if you score books and gems at the first scoring and then art at the second or maybe gems at the first and book and art at the second. It gives you shifting goals. And then you score everything at the end.

Who Is It For?

This is a tough part that I almost skipped. Mainly because the core decisions can be tricky in the game. It might feel like too much to a casual game. I think this is a good filler for heavier gamers but also a fun game who play games. But for them, it is going to be the game of the night versus a filler game. But it is an accessible game with no reading on cards and different symbols to help with color blindness. That is really nice.

Final Thoughts – The Great Split

I love this game. I think that it is clever in in what it does in the best way possible. When I said that I like a game that does one thing and makes it thinky, I’m not lying. The Great Split makes every choice matter. What I pass to you is important and how I pass them to you. But that is seven times I make that choice in the game. And seven times I pick from the cards someone passes me. It is smart in how it does that and then making the tracks simple, but still meaningful. If they were a hard puzzle as well, it’d be less fun.

My one concern hasn’t been played out yet. I worry about how well it will hold up long term. Not components wise they are great. But will The Great Split feel consistent through every play and eventually start to feel like there isn’t enough change? I don’t know. I suspect it might, eventually, but that is a long ways out. Why, because the core mechanism is so strong with I split you choose that it makes for an interesting decision every time.

My Grade: A
Gamer Grade: B+
Casual Grade: B-

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How To Play On Tour

On Tour is a simple route building game. You roll two dice, and get two numbers. Let’s say a seven and a two. So on your board you put down 27 in one spot and 72 in another. And you try and build up a route as long as possible connecting numbers in ascending order.

There are two things to know about how you do that. Firstly, you connect your route at the end of the game. So that means you don’t need to put those numbers next to existing numbers. And secondly, and as importantly, there are three cards flipped per roll. This affects where you can place the numbers. In the maps, US and Europe, it is split into North and South, and East and West.

Each of the cards also has a location on it. Generally a country or state depending on the map. And if you put the number in that specific location, you get to circle it as well. What do circles do? Well, they get you a point if you route goes through there. So let’s talk scoring. You get one point for each stop for your band. If the location is circled you get an extra point. Most points wins.

What Doesn’t Work?

The game play might be too simple for some gamers. I personally like it because it kind of has a push your luck to it. But All you do is flip cards and roll a die to figure out a route. There are no combos, there is no clever game play. So for some gamers, On Tour is going to be too simple.

I also think for some people the route connections at the end might be tricky. There is a limited number of spots that you can go, so that helps. But you look at your board full of numbers and it can be hard to find all the connections and what is your longest. I think it is useful for a second player to look at it and see what they can find.

What Works?

On Tour plays in a great arc. What do I mean with that? When you start the game, you push for things, like maybe pushing to get more circles. And as the map tightens up, the tensions increases. Towards the end you need specific numbers, and about half way through the game, you know where you’ll need them. So the game feels like the tension is growing as you play it.

I also think that the simplicity of the game works. Like I said, for some people who really want combos, the game will be too simple. But the game plays in a very smart way. It gives you this balance of risk and reward, like of like No Thanks that I wrote about yesterday. It really asks you how much you want to push your luck. Because a shorter route will score you more points than the player who pushed for a long route but missed one connection they needed.

This game also plays fast and scales well. It is, like many roll and writes, a game where the difference between solo and multiplayer doesn’t exist. What I do on my board doesn’t affect what you do. But we all play at the same time, so that means the game moves along really well. Yes, choices can be hard and slower in the middle of the game, but they are still limited well by the cards and dice, so even then it doesn’t take too long.

On Tour Final Thoughts

I really enjoy On Tour. Clearly if I own the app and I still wanted to own the game. And I think for a lot of people On Tour is going to work very well. It falls into that category of Railroad Ink for me. It is a challenging game, but it also isn’t too complicated. The difference is in Railroad Ink you need to think about four dice placement, and in On Tour, it’s just two numbers. So the options are more limited in On Tour.

I also think that a lot of people will like how fast the game plays, it really moves along quite nicely. But it doesn’t feel like it is too short, it feels like it’s the right length and really does give you that arc of game play. Where the tensions builds towards the middle of the game and into the end game. But the game itself doesn’t drag out too long. No one can optimize their last few placements or turns, because the game limits them.

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

I think this game probably skews a bit towards the more casual gamer. But I can see gamers liking this one as a palate cleanser between games. It is fast enough to be a filler, but for some groups it’ll be big enough to be the main course. For me, I know it’s a roll and write that won’t be leaving my collection.

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This game is split into two parts and six rounds. The first half of each round players are flicking discs onto a board, depending on the number of the disc and where it lands, at the end of the flicking phase, you will get to use it on the second part of the round. That is where you are using the number and location to determine actions on your player/scoring board. The game has you doing a few different things, four in fact, depending on the area where you flicked your discs. The first one, the lizard, is simply filling in areas as fast as you can based off of the total number on the discs that you’ve flipped, the bigger area you fill in, the more points you get when you complete it and the better bonus you get if you’re the first person to complete it. The eagle is a bit trickier, you are using the numbers you flicked into that section to fill in cross out and then circle spots for either bonuses or scoring. Then in the fox, you are tetrising in pieces to get points by covering up cacti, and the more you get of a given type, the more points you get, plus you can circle bonuses as well. Finally with the rabbit, you are totaling up the discs in the area and using them to cross of intersections which will allow you to connect vertices which again gets you points for cacti you’ve surrounded as well as bonuses. After six rounds, the player with the most points wins.

So, we know from my Top 100, which is going on now, I like roll and writes and flip and writes, so how about a flick and write, does the flicking part work for me? I’d say yes, I think I can get better at it, I got good at ICECOOL, but I think that it works for me, it’s a fun randomization aspect of the game. I almost wish there were more ways to lock in a disc once you’ve flicked it, other than hitting the middle wild spot, but there are bonus double spots on the board and I do like trying to knock other people off of them. My flicking was bad enough that I think in two games I only hit the double once. That said, I was always in the games. So while the flicking is important, utilizing the bonuses on the sections most effectively and you can really create massive combos is just as important. So I think that both parts of the game works well.

I think another thing that works well is that this game has little to no downtime. Sure, it might take a minute to get back to flicking again, but the flicking portion of the game goes fast. And then when filling in your board, you are doing that all at the same time, minus the lizard just because with the lizard the first person to complete a section gets a bonus. So everyone can go at the same time and while my scoring, if I don’t do many combos and get bonuses might go faster than yours, generally it isn’t a massive time difference and you’re not waiting for one person to do theirs, then the next, and then you. I think that’s a smart thing we’re seeing in a lot of roll and flip and write games is that they are trying to keep down time between turns to a minimum and Sonora does that as well.

If I had a knock against the game, I do think that the discs you are flicking could be slightly higher quality. They are wooden, which is nice and screen printed, but they are very light, just for me, I wish they had a little bit more heft to them. And the biggest thing, I wish that they had the numbers on both sides. It’s possible for the disc to flip when you shoot it, so you are having to reach in and flip it over so everyone can see, and probably moving it slightly. I think that the extra heft too would keep them from flipping as much or flying off the board as much, but then again, they do give you reflicks for it it does fly off the board, or maybe lands where you don’t want it to stop after you’ve flicked it.

Overall, this is a really fun game. I think that I’d say it’s a bit more complex than some roll and write games, but not too complex. Once you learn what each section does the game really goes fast, and I think playing two rounds for learning rounds is about all that you need before people really start to get it. There is strategy to the game, and I think that any of the different options are going to give you a chance to win. There are a few different ways that you can play it, you can play long, regular, or short games, and you can play basic or advanced rules, and I like the advanced rules where you can’t just flick to the section in front of you, you have to bounce off of something to either stop in that section or bounce back into it, it adds in some more strategy. Really good game and something that feels similar but different in the [blank] and write genre.

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

Is this a game that you like, one that sounds interesting to you?

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Mortal Kombat is one of the classic fighting games. You are going through a tournament trying to become the greatest fighter. With my skill level thus far at the game, I am far from the greatest fighter. However, games like this are fun to sit down and play, because I’m not that good, but I can button mash and sometimes accidentally stumble across a special move.

Mortal Kombat featured unique ways in which special moves were performed, being the first game to introduce special moves performed exclusively using the joystick. Most special moves were performed by tapping the joystick, sometimes ending with a button press.

As the Mortal Kombat Wikapedia link talks about, these special moves are what make characters that otherwise fought basically identically seem different. Since I’m playing with the Retron system with a Super Nintendo, I am going to have to learn the special moves myself. I was able to figure out a throw, and then immediately forget how that worked.

Like I said, one of the things that I like a lot about this style of game is the ability to just sit down and play it. It isn’t anything all that difficult to learn, and while the special moves require knowing how to do them, you can still get a fun experience from it. I’m also not playing this game on any sort of difficulty so that I can actually get through a few fights.

It’s a game that will continue to get more play and a game that I’m going to actually glance through the manual that game with the game. Another game that I picked at Heroic Goods & Games in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I got this one as part of a sale, I think it was minimum 10% off for the sale, and roll a D20 (twenty sided die) to see if you can get a higher percentile off, I am pretty sure I got 17% off. The game cam with the box and with the manual. So I flipped through it just to see what it looked like, but it’s probably going to be one of the spots to really get the story of the game. Since it’s basically just a fighting game, they don’t have much in way of story development in the part of the game that I’ve played. However, in the “attract mode” screen, the screen that plays in arcades or while the video game is waiting for someone to play it, it does tell some of the story. The Wikapedia article has some more about the story.

One final thing about this game, it uses screen capture for actual actors in the fighting. I remember this from some video games like Return to Zork that I played on a computer, but on a gaming system like the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) they don’t look as good. This was something that I always found interesting in games how they would use them sometimes just for cut scenes. But when they would blend them into the game it was generally an interesting choice. It works in a game like this as it stands out from the standard graphics for NES/SNES games.

I’m trying to figure out how to wrap up these articles on the Cartridge Capers. Normally I’d give it a grade, which I think I’ll do, but do classic games like this need a grade? I’m going to ask if people have played the games, but it feels like there needs to be some sort of metric as I play through more common/well known games now, but will eventually end up playing more obscure games, because I’ve picked up some random ones.

So, I think I’ll try this:

Final Thoughts on the Game

This is one of the classic arcade games, and while on the SNES it’s a little bit cleaner because they didn’t want the blood of the arcade version, it’s been a fun time playing it. Along with the likes of Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat is a classic fighting video game and there’s always going to be a spot on my shelf for games like it because of the nostalgia factor, even though I didn’t grow up with a gaming system. They were the games that had that “attract mode” screen that was eye catching when you’d walk past it in an arcade or looked the coolest when you saw people playing them.

Game Suggestion: Own

So instead of doing my normal grading, I’m going to go with Pass/Play/Own. Own is the highest rating meaning that I think it’s a good one to have and keep in a collection. Play means that the game is fun and worth a play, but I wouldn’t go out hunting for it. Pass means that the game isn’t all that interesting to me or has some weird mechanic or annoying part to the game and I wouldn’t recommend it.

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