Catch up on my Top 100 Games (of all Time) 2023 Edition:

100 through 91
90 through 81
80 through 71
70 through 61
60 through 51
50 through 41
40 through 31
30 through 21
20 through 11

Top 100 Games (of all time) 2023 Edition – 10 through 1

10. Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game

Let’s start off with Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game at #10 this year. Detective is deduction game where you and your teammates are trying to solve cases. The base box comes with five cases that take about 2-3 hours each. And you’re up against the clock, in the game, to solve everything and figure out what answers you need as you get quizzed on what happened and the who, what, and why of the case at the end. Plus little details that you might have missed or you can piece together.

This is like a crime television drama. I don’t love watching those, but playing in one is amazing. You actually get to put together deduction skills and piece together what happened. Sometimes it’s easy, and other times it is hard, but it’s always worth it.

And this game does a good job using technology as you play. Part of how you get information is interacting with a computer and a database to pull up details that might already exist on the case. Or it might be details that already exist on people in the case. It really helps make Detective into a great immersive experience.

Buy Detective

9. The Great Split

Next up we have The Great Split, a new game to the list and one that does a single thing well. In The Great Split, it is primarily an “I split, you choose” game. What does that mean? It means that I have a group of cards and I put them into two groups. You pick one of those groups and I get the other one back. Then we both use them for scoring, which is what everyone is doing at the same time. So, I love the simplicity and simultaneous nature of the game play.

Plus the scoring is nice in the game as well as it isn’t too difficult or too easy. What it mainly is, is pushing up on on tracks for artwork, literature, gems, and money. And each of them is going to score in a different way. Some of them score with how well you are doing against a market or against a scoring track. Others score, the gems, with your lowest of the two gem tracks. So it’s figuring out what you want to go for, because that’s not all the scoring.

There is also contracts in the game. Those are on the tracks as well, but you have other tracks that you want to push up on. Because they make the contracts you have, loaning your art pieces out to museums and stuff like that, worth more. But if you’re pushing up on those tracks, you aren’t on the main scoring tracks, so it’s a really good balance. And all of that with very simple rules teach and very simple game play.

Buy The Great Split

8. Floriferous

Now we have Floriferous, a game that has made it’s way higher up on the list from last year. And some of that is what I redid how I thought about the list, some. I now put more stock into the games that I want to play all the time and do play often, as well as the ones that give me a great experience when I play them. Which is why there are fewer campaign games in the Top 10, though, don’t worry, their are still several.

But Floriferous is a drafting game of building up your best bouquet of flowers. But how you draft and how you know what you are scoring is what I love about the game. You lay out the cards to be drafted from at the start of the round. And then players take turns drafting from the first column of cards. Where you draft in that column then determines your drafting order for the next column. It makes for great decisions as decide to take a less ideal card to make sure you get the perfect card next column.

And then there is the scoring. A little of the scoring just exists at the start of the game. Most of what you score you need to draft. So I need to draft a card that says “2 points for all purple flowers”, for example. And I can do that, but the scoring cards are always at the bottom of the column. That means when I take a scoring card I’m going to be going last next round which is a choice, as I said above, that I really love.

Buy Floriferous

7. Planet Unknown

Next up we have Planet Unknown a terraforming, polyomino laying game. And it’s one that is not that hard to teach, if you have the game in front of you. But it does some very cool things, which I’ll get to in a second here. But the game is about filling up your planet with tiles, clearing out meteors that have hit your planet, and building up on various tracks of nature, water, technology, rover mobility, and civilization.

The game is able to be played in two ways. The first way is a simple generic way where everyone has the exact same thing. I think it is a solid system if everyone is learning the game, and you have new to gaming people in there. But once people know the system at all, flip over the boards and the groups going to the planets. That is when the fun begins as everyone is working a little bit differently and has their own ways and timings as they go up the tracks while still playing the same game.

And the one thing I haven’t touched on yet is how you pick your tiles. There is a lazy susan in the middle with all of the tiles on it. And on your turn, you turn the lazy susan to the side you want facing you so you get the tile that you want. It’s a tough decision, and then everyone else takes from the side facing them. Or at least kind of facing them, because they’ll have a marker, placed at the start of the game, that determines where they take from. I love that mechanism as I can get what I want, or I might choose to mess with you.

Late Pledge Planet Unknown

6. Lost Ruins of Arnak

Then we have Lost Ruins of Arnak. And this one I do want to specify that it is a top 10 game for me with the first expansion. The second expansion definitely keeps it up this high as well, but the first one is needed, in my opinion. It takes Lost Ruins of Arnak from a fun game to one of my top games of all time.

So how does it play, and why do I like the expansion so much. Well, at it’s heart, The Lost Ruins of Arnak is a resource management game of going out, collecting resources and turning them in to move up a research track. But there are a number of twists with it as well. Because I also am building up a deck of cards that let me do more actions or power up the actions that I do take. And I love that aspect to it.

So let’s talk about what the expansion adds and why I think Expedition Leaders is very important to the game. In Lost Ruins of Arnak, base game, everyone has the same camp, same workers, and same starting deck of cards. And there are two tracks which you can go up on. It’s fun. But Expedition Leaders says your camp, your cards, how many workers you have, all of that can be unique now. Because you have a leader that makes you unique and I really love that.

Buy The Lost Ruins of Arnak

5. Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition

Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition is the next game on the list coming in at #5. And it is one that I haven’t played in probably eight months. I really need to get it back to the the table. But I love this engine building game and another game about terraforming a planet, but this time, I’d say, it’s way more about building up that engine to generate more resources and points.

The game, like I said, is about building up that engine and determining when to activate everything, and when to pick an action to do based off of what you think your opponent is going to do. How does that work? Well, the game has five actions and the actions that are played out by the players that round are the ones that are going to happen.

The actions also fire off in a particular order. So if I pick research it’s action #5, so it’ll go last. Someone else might pick activating actions, and that’s #3, so it goes in that order. Which ever one you pick, you get a special bonus for it, while your opponents get whatever the basic action is (which you do as well). So it’s about trying to not match with your opponents to get more actions done and to figure out what benefits you the most. Of course, if everyone is doing that, well, then no one might pick that one action everyone wants.

Buy Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition

4. Stars of Akarios

Now we’re onto one of the big campaign games. And you can see game play for this one on Malts and Meeples. Stars of Akarios is a game that I absolutely enjoyed all that I did. Some parts are better than others, but as a whole, I think the game is a ton of fun. It’s a big space adventure that gives me vibes from Enders Game and Space Dandy, two really different things, but it works for this game.

The game is split into three parts, but we’re going to talk about two of them. First part is planetary exploration. This has a 7th Continent type feel to it with flipping over locations and interacting with places. Plus there is a lot of story that you can find as well for the different planets. There are skill checks and things like that, but a lot of it is story and the choices you make in that story unlocks new things that you can do.

The main part of the game is tactical space combat. It’s about using your dice to flank and out maneuver the enemies so that you are in the right spot for a big hit and they can’t hit you back. I adore the puzzle that this game provides in this space combat. It is good enough to just be a game by itself, but the story and the world/universe that is being built in the game is just amazing. I can’t wait to get back to it, and maybe it’ll be a campaign game that I come back to and try and play through solo sometime.

Buy Stars of Akarios

Note the 1.5 version of Stars of Akarios is coming out. There should be a late pledge available soon.

3. Dice Throne

Next up is Dice Throne. I believe that my #2 and #3 flipped spots from last year. Dice Throne is a battling game of taking characters up against each other and rolling dice, Yahtzee style, to deal damage. You get a better roll, like a large straight or all sixes and you get to do more damage.

The game really shines in two areas. The first is how they manage to make all of the characters feel different. I have Marvel Dice Throne pictured here, but in the video I have Dice Throne Season 1 and I figured out coming soon there will be 35 different characters. And all of the characters do feel different. They come with different tokens that change up how they interact with the enemies or how they ramp up to deal more damage themselves.

And then there is the card play in this game. What doesn’t make it just pure dice chucking are these cards. Some of them are upgrades to your attacks that offer better results and more damage when you roll them. Other times, and I’d say most often this, it’s about getting better results on your dice. You don’t want to end up being stuck doing nothing if you try and shoot the moon and go for all sixes. So you keep cards to manipulate the dice. It’s a great system that offers more depth than you’d think from the initial description.

Buy Dice Throne

2. Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon

Now we have Tainted Grail at #2. This one moved up, I think, because I made it through all three campaigns, wrapping up the third one this year. And all of them offer something unique and fun that is really enjoyable to play. I love how you start in the middle with the first campaign and then the second takes place 500 years later and the first 500 years before it. It offers a lot of interesting storytelling, which the writer really takes advantage of.

The game play is also pretty slick once you get into it. The combat and diplomacy checks are done through card play. And while that is an important part of the game, it’s not too hard to build up something that is powerful enough. Or players with specialize in different areas. One element about the combat that I really like is that you need to pay attention is to the enemies attack. How much damage you deal determines the enemies attack. If you aren’t careful, you’re going to take a lot of damage.

But the game really shines around the exploration and survival aspects of the game. I think it’s best on story mode because the story is so good. But you always need to be keeping track of the menhir that you have lit. Because if they go out, then you start to lose parts of the map as the wyrdness takes over. And that limits where you can explore. And as I said, exploration is the best part of the game. It is a chance to dive into that story. So it’s a balance of story, resource gathering, and then just surviving that makes Tainted Grail work so well.

Buy Tainted Grail

1. Gloomhaven

My #1 hasn’t changed, it’s still Gloomhaven. Though, you can say that it is Gloomhaven, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, and Frosthaven all rolled into one. Jaws of the Lion might be a game that I show off here on Malts and Meeples. And I’m now playing through a campaign of Frosthaven.

This is a classic dungeon crawling game where you go into a scenario and need to tactically move around and kill all the bad guys. Or at least that’s the objective in a lot of base Gloomhaven’s scenarios. The other ones offer more variety. But it’s also a game of leveling up your characters, unlocking more abilities, and then eventually retiring and getting a whole new character to play with.

And getting those abilities and playing them out is where the game is amazing. You play out two cards from your hand each turn. They have abilities on the top and bottom. And you’ll activate one of the top abilities and one of the bottom ones. Plus you need to figure out where in initiative that you want to go as well.

And the variety in them and how different the characters are is impressive. It’s like a lot of the games in my Top 10, I like the variable player powers and variability in what you are doing. Gloomhaven and all the following games offer a ton of that. And it’s sad to lose a character to retirement that you’ve spent time with, but exciting to unlock something new. This is just an amazing game that deserves the love it gets.

Buy Gloomhaven

Thanks for Joining Me

Thank you for joining me as I went through all of the games on this list. I really have fun doing this every year. And I hope that you have fun watching along. I appreciate everyone who has been in the chats and watched the videos. It means a lot to me to see that people are enjoying it. Let me know what some of your favorite games are.

Upcoming Streaming

And join me for future upcoming streams. I made a comment that my Monday streams might be changing. We’ll have to see on that, it might just be less often, or it might move to a different night, it depends on some variables as I look at the new year. Right now, though, that it’s changing. I plan on streaming Monday nights at 9 PM Central. I won’t have some on the 25th of December, I will be around next week.

Then on Wednesday, I generally stream a campaign game. I won’t be doing that this upcoming week. And I’ll be missing the following week. But as I start 2024, I plan to stream Rogue Angels. A game that I think will be in my Top 100 starting next year. One of my rules was that I needed to have played a physical copy. And thus far I only have played it digitally. Now I’ll be able to play it in person, which I’m really excited for. So join me for that starting in 2024. And Wednesday streams start at 8 PM Central time.

But the best way, if you want to know when I go live or a new video goes up (it’s basically always live), please consider subscribing. You can do that here. And click that notification bell on the channel and you’ll always know when I go live.

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The App Integration

This is one thing I didn’t have the experience with to talk about. Tainted Grail when I first played it hadn’t been out for long and only Wave 1 had shipped. Now, there is an app that takes care of the exploration journal for you. I really like this feature. I know some people don’t want apps in their games, and I can get that sentiment, kind of. However, this is an app that definitely makes the game better. It makes it easier to navigate what you are doing and lays out the information, section changes, exploration, everything from that exploration book in an more accessible way.

The app also isn’t part of what plays the game. The game is still played at the table. It is just instead of pulling out the book and someone at the table reading out loud or to themselves their exploration, the app can do that for you. That provides more immersion into the game for me and because it is only story, it keeps it from feeling like a video game, which I know can be an issue for some people.

Echoes of the Past

This is another thing that wasn’t available when I first did my review. This is an expansion that you can add into all three campaigns. Basically, it gives you cool abilities that you can do, if you reach certain goals or milestones. It also fills in the backstory for your characters.

I am generally kind of iffy on backstory for characters that is more of a paragraph. How I play my character might not align with the backstory that the character is given. And while I think that could be an issue for some people with Tainted Grail, for me it isn’t an issue. I feel like I am playing my character fairly close to the backstory that I am reading, and honestly, it is as much about the things you unlock.

The goals you need to complete are not easy. And while Tainted Grail is certainly not an easy game in general, it can be tricky to know what to do, these goals do give you a bit of focus when you might not be at the crux of the adventure. Now, you can push for them at the wrong times, sometime, but you don’t know what which makes it even more fun. There are definitely a lot of cool things for them. And they aren’t easy so when you get that power unlocked it is really cool.

Attribute Cards

One thing I hadn’t gotten far enough into the game to find or upgrade to were the cards you can get for your attributes. These are cards that give you basically game changing powers. Nothing game breaking, but things that can really shake things up. Some allow you to get more energy or do better in combat or diplomacy. It can really shape how you build your character.

They also help a lot when dealing with some of the harder monsters. Anything that can dish out more damage in combat is really important in the game. And that might be a slight knock to the game that I’ll talk about next.

Combat vs Diplomacy

This, I know, people have called out as a negative to the game, and I am going to say for me it’s neutral. The world of Avalon is a hard dangerous world, there are going to be a lot of things that want to kill you before talking to you. That does mean that the attributes for diplomacy are less important than those for combat. It also means that the diplomacy cards are less important than combat cards.

This is mimicked in the decks of encounters. There are three decks that have monsters and only one that has diplomatic encounters. So again, it really encourages you to lean into combat, which is fine. Just know that going into the game, know that you probably won’t spend as many resources upgrading diplomacy attributes or deck.

Regular Mode vs Story Mode

Final thing I want to talk about is the few different modes that the game has. Now, I think that there is a hard mode, I don’t know that I’ll ever get to that. The regular mode is hard enough, and in a game where you really want to dive into the story, it can be frustrating with all the management of the Menhir that you are needing to do. This was compounded by the fact we were playing remote, but I think it’s worth saying that regular mode is a tough game.

Story Mode is a simple change, you just act like everything is being paid for by one less person than you have in the group. Exploring with two people would take one energy instead of two. Lighting a Menhir which could be 2 energy per person, 2 magic per person and 3 food per person, make it a total of 4, 4 and 6 instead of 6, 6, and 9. Story Mode really does allow you to focus on the story more and let it be challenging without adding in so much of the grind.

Do I Still Like It?

Yes, I love Tainted Grail. The story is amazing, some of the best I’ve played in a game. The combat and diplomacy are fun. What helps the combat and diplomacy is Echoes of the Past. Now there is more reason for both of those things. You have goals to try and complete more than just beating the encounter.

One thing you’ll have to find for yourself is player count. I like playing with a group of people. I think it is more fun. However, that can lead to combat downtime. For me, not an issue, great game that I want to know what others are doing. For some people, solo will be better.

Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon still gets a solid A+ from me. I love the game and experience. It is a bit messy, there are some grey areas, but so much fun. I just wanted to come back and highlight a few things I might not have talked about as much in my initial review.

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In Tainted Grail you take on the roles of 1 to 4 characters, these characters aren’t your typical heroes, they are the B-Team. You’re deeply flawed characters with an iffy backstory and something that is a negative for you. When the A-Team, those people from the farmhold of Caunacht who were more skilled and more important than you went missing, you were tasked to find them. It wouldn’t have been that big an issue, but the Wyrdness is starting to take back the land and the Menhir, statues that Arthur and his knights erected to drive back the Wyrdness, are going out. Can you find a way to save the lands of Avalon and keep the Wyrdness at bay, or will it fall? That’s the story of the game, the mechanics for most of the game aren’t that difficult. In it, you spend energy to explore locations move around the lands of Avalon and light the Menhir, but all of this is while you are trying to balance finding the resources you need to keep the Menhir going and fighting off monsters and convince hostile villages and farmholds that you means no harm. And when you fight or do a diplomatic encounter, the game changes. You are now in a tactical card playing phase where you are looking to change together cards to do damage, use abilities on those cards, and most importantly, leave yourself in position where you aren’t taking to much damage. It’s a giant puzzle to figure out as you chain moves together to take out monsters or string words and stories together to convince those doubting people.

Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is split up into 15 chapters and each chapter can go between half an hour and probably up to two or so hours, maybe even longer as I’m in Chapter 2 and I’ve been playing for an hour and fifteen minutes, but I’m also streaming it (Here on Youtube). I think, if I had hit a couple more ideal battles, I’d be in a much better position, but you can check that out. So there is some luck in how long it takes, do you explore in the right direction, do you not find too difficult encounters, things like that. And I think that there is a little bit of early scaling that might not be quite correctly paced, I’ll talk about that in a second when I talk about some issues. But it really is this massive branching story which is even more impressive. I believe even as early as Chapter 3, depending on what you picked in Chapter 2, the game can branch into different parts of narrative and how you choose to solve everything. So this 30+ hours of game play is replayable as you can pick different paths to take, which ism extremely impressive to me. If I were playing with more than a single character, that would make a difference as well for me. I am really digging that piece of the game.

So, let’s talk about my first negative for the game quickly, and I hinted at it before, I feel like the monsters level slightly too fast. I get that this is a grim dark setting and it’s supposed to be hard. In Chapter 1, you have the first tier of monsters, I’m not going to say level 1 monsters, because some of them are a lot harder than others, in level 2, I added in tier 2 monsters, and maybe because of how I went about the game, I wasn’t able to level up my character as much, but right now I’m running away from 90% of the encounters that I face just to get as little damage as possible. I think either having more tiers of monsters or adding in a partial grouping of tier 2 monsters and encounters, and then finishing adding them in chapter 3 and slowing down that progression a little bit would still keep the game hard, but I’d only be running from 67% of them instead of most of them. And some of that is my fault as well, I am the type of poker player where I want to see the flop at least with almost any hand, and I know that’s not a good strategy, so I often hang in combat for a round and then drop out when I should just know to drop out right away, but I want to see if I can draw that one card that will help me crack the puzzle and win the encounter. This is a minor negative.

My other negative and this one is slightly larger, is that when you die you have to restart the game. If you’re smart, I’m not, you have a nice save sheet that you can use between chapters to save the game and come back, but I’m not smart, and people who are playing multiple chapters at a time are going to have the same issue. I wish that it was an official rule that you have to save between every chapter so that when you die you can restart the chapter. This game is really tough, and if I’m in chapter 8, I don’t want to start again at Chapter 1, even though I’ll know how to rush through it. Or, better yet, I wish that the beginning of each chapter told you how to reset the world, so yes, you might have to reset your character or take a hit to your character, but to be able to have a starting option for each chapter so that you don’t have to replay would be nice, because it would mean that if you are playing through, you’d be able to quickly get into the game again if you die. It could also work if you don’t want to do Chapter 1 again and get to where it branches faster, you’d be able to do that, because Chapter 1 is a bit of a prologue. Now, I just came up with a solution for some of my issues, and I’ll have to go back and implement that for myself, save at the end of every chapter, but it would be nice to have something more official.

Next, I want to talk about some things that others have brought up as negatives. It’s the time that the Menhir are lit and the amount of food that you need. People have claimed, and I can see why, that the game forces you to farm for certain things, you need to farm food so that you can eat every night, not become exhausted, and heal and have your terror go down (eating is good). But you also want to be exploring and doing other things not just farming food. The same with the Menhir. You need some resources, probably magic, so that you are going to need to farm that. One of the characters can produce their own magic, so that’s good for them, but the one that I’m playing actually needs an extra magic because of his flaw, so I need to farm even more magic. But all of that said, neither of those things are negatives for me. First, my character can produce food if I really need it in a pinch, so while it does take up energy to do that so I can’t do as much in terms of exploring and traveling I always have that option. It also is fine, because we knew the game was going to be like that going into it, or if people paid attention to the kickstarter and rules and so many things, it was obvious that this game was going to be tough to survive. The grind is going to be part of it, and I feel like most of the grind isn’t even that grindy, because it is going to drop you into a combat which is such a fun puzzle to try and figure out that it doesn’t just feel like wasted time. Though, as you can see, I think that the encounter level does go a bit fast. Mainly, this piece of the game is very thematic, and the Menhir running down it adds to the stress of the game, and you can do things to play in more of a story mode, and I think there are interesting ways that you could “cheat” if you wanted it to be purely story mode, but that would lose some of the challenge and tension of the game.

But there are so many good things about the game, let’s start with the Exploration Journal. This thing is massive, and it has so much story in it. You feel like you’re always jumping into it, and there are so many options and statuses that come from it, that I don’t think it would ever be possible to get them all or read through all of it in a single game, and I love that. Plus, that then makes it really replayable. It also makes the world really immersive. All of the locations that you can go have a lot of history and depth built into them, and I’ve started running into side quests and things to explore that might create a more interesting story and more history that can be unlocked so that I can fully understand the world. And there are going to be two more expansions to the game, one before and one after the time frame of the base game, so I’m going to unlock the world history. I also can see, because of the amount of exploration how it would be fun to just be the keeper of the book, almost a game master, and lead other people through the journey so they aren’t getting spoiled to.

The encounter system, both combat and diplomatic, I really like as well. I’ve called it a puzzle and it really is. Cards connect on various keys and open up other various keys (I’m going to mainly give combat as the example), and you are trying to chain those together in the best way possible. The first card you play down is always free and doesn’t have to connect to anything, but ideally it does so that it’s not a wasted card, but it might be that you need to put it into play in order to combo something onto it later. Because some cards have a symbol that allows you to chain it together as a bonus move, and you can chain multiple of those together and hopefully in the first round take it out. It’s also a puzzle though because various levels of damage changes how the monsters responds to you. So if you’ve done 0-2 damage to them, they might hit you for one damage, but if you’ve done 6 and they need 7 damage they might run away. So, you won’t want to hit 7 damage, but it might be 6 damage on the monster means you get 3 wounds, so that isn’t ideal, so you’re trying to set-up a combo so that you can rush to the finish from 2 damage. I really enjoy the puzzle nature of it, and diplomacy works similar as well, but now you’re trying to move it up using different skills.

Finally the characters, that’s the last thing I want to talk about. I love how different they are. There are six skills and each character has a different set-up of those skills. That means, that Beor, for example, is great a combat at the start, but horrible at dealing with diplomatic encounters. Arev is a more balanced character. Beyond that, each character has their own unique upgrade cards for combat and diplomacy, now if you’ll see them, who knows, but that allows them to feel more thematically developed in terms of characters. I also like that each type of character, there are four archetypes that will be showing up throughout the base game and expansions, has their own combat and diplomacy for that archetype. Finally, each character has something unique that they can do, an action that is unique only to them. In Arev, that’s that he can always find some food, one food for two actions. But to balance that out they have a weakness as well. Arev’s is that he needs one more magic than required to light a Menhir. If a Menhir doesn’t have a requirement for magic, there’s not a requirement for a single magic because of Arev, that offers your own unique challenges for playing each character and adjusts how you can deal with certain encounters for combat and diplomacy or what options you might choose in exploration.

Overall, you can probably tell that I really like the game. Is it a perfect game, no, there is no such thing as a perfect game, my favorite game of all time, Gloomhaven, isn’t a perfect game. But Tainted Grail is an amazing game. I think that it might not work for someone people because it might be too dark in the story, but I think a lot of people are going to love it, and with it shooting up the lists on BGG, it is clearly being enjoyed by those who have it. The story part works so well, and the mechanics are actually quite simple for how large a game it is. Even if someone doesn’t like the story element of it, they can tune that out if other players love it and just hunt down combat and other encounters for their character. This is a really well done game that looks beautiful on the table.

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

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But this one, thanks to Tom Cantwell (@BeskarTom), was the one that really stuck out to me:

“@TheScando Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective with bangers and mash or some other classic British dish is the first thing I think of”

I’m not just going to stick with the board games, but also if you are watching the Benedict Cumberbatch show, the Robert Downey Jr. movies, or are reading the book aloud as part of a book club, or playing Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective or 221B Baker Street. If it is Sherlock Holmes themed, here’s an idea of what you can do to get into the mood and mindset for the greatest detective of all time.

I had a few different thoughts. What Tom suggests in his tweet, bangers and mash or something like a meat pie would create a classic English feel that you could build off of, but that’s not the direction that I wanted to go. I also thought of molecular gastronomy, but that seemed less accessible than the idea that I landed on, food that isn’t as it seems, food that is the mystery.

Drinks:

Beer and Pop/Soda

So this seems like it would be really normal. You can have beer or pop any night and it doesn’t seem to be Sherlock Holmes themed, but I do have a reason for both of these. For the beer, get a sampler pack and then remove the labels from every single beer. Most beer comes in a darker colored bottle now, so it stays fresher longer,so you’ll have no idea what beer you are picking out of the case. Or will you? Can you through process of elimination, studying the bottle, and anything short of opening the bottle and sniffing, figure out which beer you are getting so you’ll get the one that you want? Same thing for the pop. Get two liter bottles of Coke, Diet Coke, Root Beer, and Dr. Pepper, take off the label, take off the caps and the little ring that goes with the cap, can you determine which soda is which without tasting or smelling it?

Appetizer:

Wontons

Why wontons, they don’t seem too English? They really aren’t, but what sort of fillings will you conceal within your wonton wrappers? Some ideas might be – cream cheese, cream cheese and cranberries, cream cheese and chocolate chips, cream cheese and onion/balsamic jam, pork, and you can really go crazy with this. Make it so that you have a number of different varieties and fry them up so that you as the host, you don’t even know what is what. And again, use your sleuthing skills to try and figure out which one is which. Here’s a real mean trick to play, you can get capsaicin in a bottle, it doesn’t have a ton of color, and could be an interesting surprise for someone. Now, if you control how much you put in there (and test it out yourself mixed in with cream cheese), and people like spice, it would be a fun thing to use.

Main Course:

Mashed Cauliflower

Chicken Fried Steak

Gravy

This is less about tricking people. It’s more about creating stuff that will look differently than you’d expect. Mashed Cauliflower can make a nice change of pace from mashed potatoes that people would expect. Chicken Fried Steak would take a food preparation that people are expecting for one sort of protein, but preparing it in another way, and if you break it up well enough, people still might be surprised when it’s beef and not chicken. Finally, you’d want to make a nice dark colored gravy. We’re not talking about a creamy gravy. Go with something that is dark and work on building it up so that it kind of matches a darker BBQ sauce color. Things won’t be exactly what people are expecting, but it’ll be a good meal still.

Desert:

Brownies

When I say brownies, I really mean brownies, with a little bit of a twist. When you go to make your brownies, add in a bit of habanero (with seeds) in a couple of the brownies. You probably know what size you normally cut brownies, so make it so it’s stuck in the middle of a brownie and then turn it into a game. People grab a brownie and let’s see who gets the pepper. And if you do get the pepper, maybe see if you can hide it form everyone so they don’t know you’ve gotten it. That way the rest of the brownies, people will be taking a bit of them in dread. Note that keeping the seeds in there is important, I’ve had one with habanero (pretty sure it was that an not jalapeno) and it didn’t have the seeds and it didn’t really taste hot.

What would your idea for theming a Sherlock Holmes meal be? Would you go with something more traditional? If so, what sort of English meal would you create?

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