The advice in this article, hopefully, will help people be able to decide what to buy in a more responsible manner but also decide what to keep. As when I cull games, I often consider what group I’ll be playing it with as well as other factors.

The Premise

I talk about this from time to time about how I have multiple board game groups. I play with a game night group. There are times I just play with one or two people. I play with a board game club group and a campaign group. And, I play board games solo. Plus, I often play games with my family as well. So I play games with six different groups, counting solo.

Not every game I own works with every group. I wouldn’t pull out Gloomhaven and try and make that work at a board game night. First off, 8 people can’t play Gloomhaven at once, at least not well. You’d be sharing duties on a character or house ruling everything. On the flip side, I can’t play Codenames Pictures with myself. But, both games are in my collection, because they work for groups I play with.

What Are Your Groups?

So when buying, or selling, a board game, I think it’s useful to think about first what your groups are. Do you play games mainly solo and with a significant other, except for holidays? Do you have a regular gaming group? Or is playing at parties and get together how you mainly game?

By defining the group(s) that you play with, you can start to define what types of games that you might want to get or keep. Now, there is something to be said for groups growing and dynamics changing over time, but that doesn’t mean buy everything and wait for that to happen so you can play those games. Most games will be available to some extent for a long time, whether it’s new or cycling through used. So start by defining your groups.

Let me demonstrate:

• Board Game Night Group – party games, bigger group games, sometimes light to medium games if we split into groups to game
• One or Two People Group – generally games that can be played a few times in a night, a chance to pull more off of the shelf that I don’t normally
• Board Game Club Group – big thematic games, generally not campaigns but heavier ones that don’t get played during game nights, also longer games
• Campaign Group – campaign games that’ll be played over multiple sessions
• Family Group – light games, card games, and party games
• Solo Group (aka me) – campaign/thematic games, and smaller games with solo modes

Using That Information

Once you define your groups, you can start using it to decide what games to buy. You can see some things, light games on the list twice, campaign games and thematic games show up, group games and party games show up. So when I go out do I look for those types of games in particular?

Well, kind of. I won’t ignore any game when I am searching because what groups I game with isn’t everything. But when I look at a game, let’s say I were to pick up Gloomhaven off the shelf knowing nothing about it. I’d look at it and see that it is a big campaign game. So I’d ask myself, will my campaign group get to this any time soon, will I get to it solo anytime, should I put this giant box down while I think about this? And it might be that my campaign group and I won’t get to it for two years, and I still might pick it up.

Or, let’s give another example, Isle of Cats. That game is fairly light, but not light enough for family gaming. But the theme is a lot of fun So I picked that one up because I love cats, I can maybe play it with the board game club or the board game night groups, but for sure can with the small group when those happen. But that’s only one of my groups, so is the value there for me? Well, because I love cats and because I can get it played once in a while, yes.

Not Using That Information

There also are times where I don’t use that information. Tannhauser which I picked up recently is a great example. That is a complex game that is going to take some work to get to the table. I don’t know that I have a great group for that right now, or I have one person who would probably want to sit down and learn it with me. But it’s a game that I really want to play, so I grabbed it when I could.

The question to ask yourself then is, am I willing to put the work into finding a group? Do I want to try and track people down to play this game. That is going to require work on my behalf and am I willing to do it. There are going to be some games, like if I can find Battlestar Galactica at the right time and right price. I probably have a few people who I can play it with, but to get a group together will be effort.

Really, what I would be doing is creating a new gaming group. It would be a group that I could add to the list. Those people who like one day epic games. Some overlap maybe with the Board Game Club Group, but not fully. And everyone likely has a grail game that they want to get. And those games, especially, I don’t think need to fit into a group.

Right or Wrong

So I bring this up that this isn’t a hard and fast rule. Some of this question came up because the person who was asking has a game that they love but they don’t have a group for. It might not be the right time for a game, so get it and keep it if you want. And it also might not be the right time to try and make a new group for gaming that would play it.

But, for a lot of gamers who really like to buy games and try new games. I think it can be a useful exercise to think about your groups. I said use it for buying, but I’ve used it for selling as well. Cosmic Encounter just this week is one that I sold not because I didn’t like the game, I do, but because I don’t have a group. So when looking at your shelf, consider the groups you have.

I’m actually going to do an exercise, as I go through and organize my board games again soon, and put in my notes on Board Game Geek what group the games are for. That is more for me, so if I find one that doesn’t have a group and I’m not that excited about, it can be one to sell.

Do you consider who you play with when you buy board games or sell them?

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The Collection

Numbers

A’s – B’s – C’s – D’s – E and F’s – G and H’s – I, J and K’s – L’s – M’s – N, O, and P’s – Q and R’s – S’s

T’s

T.I.M.E. Stories (and Expansions)

I love this game, it is really well made in what I’ve played through of the expansions with each different scenario pack feeling it it’s something new. I’ve heard that some aren’t as strong as others, but through four of them it’s been really interesting. This reminds me of Assassin’s Creed in some ways, though depending on the scenario, less about fighting. And they have done a lot of weird things, from dragons to ancient Egypt to zombies.

Status: Played

The Table is Lava

We all know the rules of the floor is lava, don’t touch the floor. But with this, you have meeples and you are flicking cards. You flick them onto the table, and if you hit someone else’s meeples you can knock them over or knock them onto the table, which is lava, of course. But you get points if your meeples are standing up and less if they are laying down, so you have a lot of different ways to score, but also some strategy in how or where you toss your cards, because you could go to knockdowns or you could try and keep it separate so you are less likely to have meeples knocked off. It seems like silly fun.

Status: To Be Played

Tainted Grail

I love my Awaken Realms games. Tainted Grail is a massive grim dark Arthurian legend and it’s really hard. I like the fact that it’s hard, I like that the combat has you running away fairly often and that you are fighting for survival, what they advertised the game as. The story in this game is really good, and I’ve played through the first chapter multiple times and I always find something new that I haven’t done before and places that I’d love to get to, except for the time that we have left on the Menhir. I’m excited to get back to this after Christmas.

Status: Played

Takenoko

Sometimes you want a game that is just a fun time, and Takenoko with it’s fat bamboo eating panda definitely is that. This game looks family weight but has a little bit more going on as you are putting out tiles, growing bamboo, eating bamboo and more. It has some random elements with the dice, but overall is a really fun time with a lot of good decisions to make. When do you want to water a spot so it starts to grow, does it help you more than the other players by doing that, when you want to move the panda and do you want to get more panda, gardener, or tile scoring cards?

Status: Played

The Terrifying Girl Disorder

Japanime Games makes weird games that definitely have a bit of an anime feel to them even if they aren’t about an actual anime, and this is one of those games. I picked it up because it was on a sale and it looked weird. From what I remember about it, you are picking cards, almost drafting them, to get sets for the girl that you have, but that can change who you have. It is a weird game and sounds like it either will be an interesting game for some people, or that it might be a bit too much game for how small it is.

Status: To Be Played

That’s Pretty Clever

Roll and write, you know the drill. But this roll and write has the distinction of being the one that really started the roll and write craze we’re in now. Ganz Schon Clever, as it’s known in German, is a good comboing roll and write game that has a lot of interesting scoring to it. The sequels then use that and build upon it, but they are their own separate games. That’s Pretty Clever introduces one of the best ideas that I’ve seen, of foxes, these are points where if you can get them can score you a lot of points, but they only score the lowest point total of another section, so if I don’t do well, let’s say in the yellow section and get zero points, foxes are worth nothing. This forces you to diversify as you go.

Status: Played

This War of Mine

Probably better known as a video game, this war of mine is another Awaken Realms game, one of the earliest ones that they did. It is based off of the IP of the video game, and is about trying to survive in a war torn world. From what I know of the game, it’s extremely dark, depressing and hard to in. Now, not all Awaken Realms are like that, but I always expect that an Awaken Realms game will have some elements to it that are punishing. This one I want to try solo and just play in short bits because of the darkness of the theme.

Status: To Be Played

Ticket to Ride

It’s a classic gateway game for a lot of people. This one is all about collecting cards, putting down trains and completing routes. What makes this work so well as a gateway game is that you do one of a few things on your turn. You either take train cards, play down trains, or you take routes. That’s it, you don’t do more than one of those things on a turn. It makes the game easy to teach an very accessible. The game also is based around connecting those routes which is an idea that is really easy to grasp, because we’re all familiar with a road trip of going from point A to point B, with Ticket to Ride it’s just about how you get there.

Status: Played

Tiny Towns

This game has been a pretty popular one this year from AEG and last year. It is a simple cube placement game with a bit more depth than it’d first seem. What makes this really interesting for me is the picking of the resource and how I can use that to my advantage at times or to hurt someone else. Now, I don’t think that hate picking is a viable strategy, but if I see that my next opponent has a brick and wood for building a house, or straw, whatever it is, and I just have a wood, I might pick brick so that they are likely to pick straw and we both get houses, but now they have an extra brick they have to work with. And there are a ton of combinations or buildings that are really fun to work with.

Status: Played

Titan Race

Another fun filler type game is Titan Race. This one is again really easy with dice drafting and racing either across the same board three times or across three different boards once each. The game is fast and easy to learn, and each racer having their own powers is fun. What I also like about the game is that even when you are knocked down to 0, you just lose a turn and you get going again. But what is the most fun is knocking people around, being able to drop a trap right in front or someone or push them into lava, it’s great. And even though there is the take that feel to the game, since it’s so fast and so silly, people aren’t likely to have their feeling hurt.

Status: Played

Tofu Kingdom

I bet you didn’t know tofu had a kingdom. This is a bluffing game where players can either lie or tell the truth depending on what cards they have in their hand and the person who is Prince Mochi is has to try and guess who has Princess Tofu in their hand. It seems like one of those silly little games, almost social deduction, with a little bit of deduction thrown in. What is nice is that it plays a pretty large number of players. I’m curious to get it to the tale once we have people playing in person again, because it seems best at a higher player count.

Status: To Be Played

Tokyo Highway

Dexterity games are a ton of fun for me. I like them because late in a game night, you might not want to sit down and play something too meaty. Instead, you can grab out a game and try, in your tired state, to balance roads and place cars on them. Tokyo Highways is one of the most aesthetically pleasing games to see played. When you wrap it up, it’s almost a piece of artwork, which is crazy to say for a board game. And the rules are simple enough, if your road crossed over or under another road, you get to put a car on your road, the first person to get all their cars out is the winner. But you only have a limited number of discs to raise or lower your road, and without special discs you can’t raise or lower than more by one. It’s a lot of fun and tense, but so pretty that it’s calming.

Status: Played

Tsuro

This is another of the high player count but not a party game games. It’s actually one of the most played in that category for me. Tsuro, the way of the path, is about using your tiles to keep yourself on the paths as long as you can, and outlast everyone else. I think this game plays best at the higher player counts where you can knock out a game or two fast and then move onto something bigger. I’m a little bit played out of this game which is why I’ve added more games of similar player counts to my collection, but it’s still a good one when you need something fast.

Status: Played

Twice as Clever

The follow up to Ganz Schon Clever (That’s So Clever), this game takes the foundation that you get in That’s So Clever and builds upon it. Twice as Clever is by far, I’d say, the most challenging of the three games to play. You have to think a lot about all the sections because the scoring is quite different. I do like pieces of it though, the pink track is great, the grey/silver area is really interesting to think about. The yellow area is hard to rock, but if you can, you can get a lot of points and some good bonuses. It, like That’s So Clever, is all about getting as many combos as possible and getting to those foxes so you can score the most points off of them, but not forgetting to get points in every area.

Status: Played

That’s it for the T’s, definitely less than there were of the S’s, but that’s fine, I have a lot of games as it is. What is your favorite game that begins wit the Letter T? Is there any that I’m missing from my collection that you’d think I’d like?

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100 to 91

90 to 81

80 to 71

70 to 61

60 to 51

50 to 41

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

40. Second Chance

Dropping a ways on the list, I still really like Second Chance, and it’s such a peaceful game to play and easy game to teach that I’ve played it quite a lot. And that’s probably the reason for it dropping, just wanting a bit more variety in what I’m doing. In Second Chance you are using Tetris like shape, polyomino shapes, to fill in a grid. Every turn you have two different ones you can choose from and you goal is just to fill in as much as you can. if there are ever shapes flipped that you can’t put on your board, because the shapes are just wrong for you, you then get a second chance. That is a single card flipped, just for you, to keep you in the game. The game is very simple, very fast to play, but is a very calming game to play as well. It’s also fun to doodle in the shapes so that you end up with a unique looking board.

Last Year: 15

39. The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game

I can’t really say why this one has dropped so much, I’ve even played it a number of times recently. I still really enjoy the game, I think that this is one that actually works pretty well over Zoom, especially if both players have the game. The best way to describe this game is that you are trying to beat the puzzle that is a Dresden Files book. You are trying to solve more cases than you have bad guys left standing at the end. That means you might need to beat down a lot of villains or you might need to focus on cases, plus there are obstacles to overcome and advantages to grab. The game is a lot of fun if you know the series well, and I think with the exception of the last two books, the last one which just came out, I’ve read all of them at least twice. The story is really interesting and really good, and this game doesn’t have a ton of theme, but if you know the books, you give it theme as you play through the books with the characters.

Last Year: 14

38. Cartographers

Another roll and write on the list, and one that I just recently talked about because there is a standalone expansion for it on Kickstarter. This game is all, as the name suggests, about making maps. You are score points depending different scoring cards, two for each season. You are filling in polyomino shapes again, and trying to get those to match up with the scoring. There are four different land types, villages, forest, fields, or water and they will all score in a different way, depending on what the scoring is. Plus, there are monster cards, and this is something unique for a flip and write or roll and write, where you pass your sheet to the player to the left or right and let them fill in the monster on the worst spot possible. The game has a lot of interesting elements to it with the monsters and with the scoring of the seasons, so A and B scoring cards in spring, but then it comes back around to A again in Winter, so you score it at the start and end. Not complex, but a few interesting things to keep track of and a theme that works well.

Last Year: 39

37. Star Wars: Rebellion

Dropping down the list is Star Wars: Rebellion, and that’s mainly because I haven’t gotten to play it in a long time. This is a great game and a big game. It’s “Star Wars in a box” as Sam Healy used to say on The Dice Tower. In this game one team is the empire trying to track down and hidden rebel base, all the while, the rebels are trying to cause unrest and complete missions in the Imperial systems. It’s an interesting game of cat and mouse between the two and makes a really fun time. This is a big game, and it take a long time to play, probably 3 hours, but it is very immersive and time flies by. For some people there’ll be a negative of dice combat, but there’s an expansion that helps with the randomness of that, and I don’t mind it at all, personally. Really good game, and if you are a Star Wars fan and a gamer, you’ll probably like this game.

Last Year: 11

36. Roll Player

Second Roll Player game on this chunk of the list, technically. The other being Cartographers. Roll Player is interesting because I’ve enjoyed the game every time I play it and the dice drafting aspect is a lot of fun. With that said, I always want a little bit more from the game. I know that I’m going to be getting that with Roll Player Adventures when that comes out, so I’m excited for that, and there are expansions that add more to Roll Player itself that I need to try. But in this game you are drafting dice and using them to create a D&D/RPG character. You have your stats, you are getting them from when you have place three dice, so it’s really D&D like. And for me, making characters is a lot of fun, you gear them up nicely and then you score points off of skills you have, where your stats are at, and where certain dice are placed for your background. It’s not a complex game and a fun way to do drafting.

Last Year: 57

35. The Grimm Masquerade

Now, I don’t like social deduction games for the most part. The Grimm Masquerade is a combination of social deduction and deduction that I like quite well. In this game you are all going to a fancy masquerade ball and you are Grimm fairy tale characters in disguise. You are trying to figure out who everyone else is. You are doing this by trying to either bust a player by giving them a card that they don’t want, or through process of elimination guess who someone is. All the time you are trying to collect the gift that you want. They make this work in an interesting way because on your turn, you can do a special action if you want or have the cards to do one, but mainly you are drawing a card and giving it away or keeping it and then doing the other thing with the other card. So you might accidentally bust yourself if you aren’t careful, or you might pass something away that you wanted because you have to, but can you keep a poker face while doing that? It’s a clever little game and the special powers that you can play with make the game feel different each time you play it.

Last Year: Not Ranked

34. Village Attacks

A GenCon play for me last year, this one has maintained a pretty high spot on my list while I wait for my copy to come from their most recent Kickstarter. In this game instead of playing the villagers or “heroes” standing up against the monsters, you are playing the monsters as the villagers ruin their peaceful evening in their lair by kicking down the door and trying to kill you, kill your lair, or complete some other objective. This is a cooperative game of tower defense where you are killing villagers, leveling up, killing more, and hoping you can survive the onslaught. Overall, it’s a dark game, look wise, and the monsters are monstrous, but it feels and plays pretty light. The theme somehow feels more goofy than it does dark, and it really just works well. The dice use for determining actions works well so that you can’t plan everything, and the leveling up is fun to do in game. I like also that it is scenario based, but not campaign based so you can pick it up and play easily.

Last Year: 29

33. Sushi Go Party!

This is one of my favorite big group filler style games. This is a card drafting set collection game where everyone is going at the same time, picking a card from their hand, building up their collection, passing their cards, and then once all the cards have been drafted scoring them and doing it all over again. The concept of the game is simple, but it works well because how the sets score are different and because you can mix in a variety of special ability cards that can change up how you draft cards or help you complete sets. There is a basic version of this game with out the variability of being able to switch up your cards, but Sushi Go Party! is really cheap so I recommend it instead. I think that variability is what keeps it so high on my list because it is a filler game, but for something that plays a large number of people, it is better than a lot of filler or group style games.

Last Year: 31

32. Draftosaurus

Another filler game, but this one with a lower player count. But that works because it is another fun drafting game, three on this section of the top 10. In Draftosaurus you are building you best dino park, you do that by drafting dino meeples and placing them into your park. However, there is a die rolled each turn and that determines where you have to place the dino, unless you were the one to roll the die in which case you can put it anywhere. You have a number of different pens and each scores differently. One will give you more points for each different type of dino you have in the pen, others will score you points for pairs of dinos. The game is super fast and super cute because of the dinosaur meeples, and while you are drafting from a hidden hand, the game is so fast that it really doesn’t matter if others see what dinos you have. This is one that when people see the box or see it on the table, even if they aren’t gamers, they’ll want to try it.

Last Year: Not Ranked

31. Tokyo Highway

Another one that I got at GenCon but didn’t get it to the table until after I ranked for last years list. This game is an amazingly beautiful production, and the same company that is doing Crash Octopus which I did a Back or Brick on. In this game you are building out the Tokyo Highways system. Roads going every which way, and you are stacking and balancing them. This isn’t that precarious, but when you cross over or under another road you can balance a car on your section of road, because the goal is to get your cars out as fast as possible, but you don’t want to knock over the other roads because that can cost you your pylons which you use to get your road over or under the other ones. I think that really makes this game more than just your normal simple dexterity game is the beauty of it. This looks so amazing on the table, it really is an art piece almost when you are done. And the rules and concept are simple so it’s not a convoluted game, but there’s enough going on that it’s not just a stacking game like Jenga. Overall a lovely game.

Last Year: Not Ranked

So there were a number of games in this section that I hadn’t played last year when I did my list, which is kind of fun to see all the new and fun games that are coming out. It’s interesting to see what games have moved up and down even for myself and I plan on seeing which ones have fallen off when I do a retrospective on my list at the end of this. As always, I do want to ask, what one sounds the most interesting or is your favorite in this 10?

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In Cross Clues you are laying out a X and Y axis of cards, so A to D and 1 to 4, for a medium difficulty. These are tiles, and under these tiles you slip a word card so that it shows one word. This word might under A might be Mars and under 3 might be Mouth. So you’re trying to give a one word clue to get the other players to guess the intersection that you have in your hand. So if I had A3, I’d say something like Candy. The players then discuss, come to a consensus and if they guess A3 correctly, you get to place the card down on it’s spot in the grid. If they guess incorrectly, the card goes face down next to the board so they don’t know what they got. This goes on with the players giving clues to the other players, everyone can be a clue giver, until all the locations have been guessed correctly or incorrectly. Then you compare your score against the game and see how well you did. There are a few rules on how to give clues and you play with a five minute timer to see how well you do.

Because we were playing it digitally we modified the game in two ways. First, we did away with the time limit. While that would definitely ramp up the intensity of the game, because we were playing via Zoom, people talking over each other and discussing doesn’t work as well as in person. So the rush of time would have just caused confusion and probably things to go slower rather than faster. The other thing is that we obviously can’t pass out the grid location cards, the A1, A2, A3, etc. So that meant that we played the two or three player variant, even though we had 8 of us playing it, which is over the max player count. We, myself and my wife, were the clue givers so in the variant, we had two cards each for thinking about and giving clues, and everyone else was guessing. This still worked extremely well with just the two of us giving clues and everyone had fun with it. Now I do want to try and play this properly in person sometime in the future, and I’m sure it’ll happen, because the game works well on Zoom, but to get the full experience for reviewing, I want to play it timed and with everyone getting a grid location card.

Now, I can already say, I really like this game as a party game and a filler game. The game plays fast, even with not playing it timed, the games we played went by quickly, and we played three games in a row. This for me is a more interesting version of basic Codenames where you are giving a clue for people to guess a word, but in this one you have more creativity, I feel, than base Codenames. It also has a bit of that Just One vibe to it as well. It’s cooperative, so that’s part of it, but you’re also still giving just a one word clue. This is a game that I can see playing with my parents on a holiday, pulling out at a convention when those happen again, or using to start off or wind down a game night. I like games that have the versatility for that, because as much as I love bigger and heavier games, having a game that works well in almost any situation means that it’s getting pulled of the shelf more often.

I like the aesthetic of the game a lot as well. It has a 1950’s supermarket advertisement vibe to it, mixed with a little bit of Fallout, and it works well for the game. It gives it a classic and approachable look that makes the game, again, more accessible to a larger audience. The design is also really clean so you’re never confused by extra symbols or anything on the card, the location cards are always just a letter and a number. The word cards, have four words on them, two on the front, two on the back, but how it’s set-up, you only see one so there is never confusion. The package for the game just works really well and has that classic family photo of playing a game and laughing just baked into it.

One thing that I will say as something to be aware of, not really a negative, a medium or whatever level of the game you’re playing at can vary wildly depending on the word combinations. The first game we played the only hard word to create a junction with was avocado, but we also played a game, forget if it was our second or third where we had cauliflower on one access and strawberry and tomato on the other access, so there was a ton of overlap, plus wood and jungle so much nature going on that clues were a lot harder because a clue like garden could have been two different things. So just the combination of words an cause the ease or difficulty level of giving clues to vary wildly. Not a negative really, because it’s fun to see what sort of creative clues you can come up with, but it can slow down the game, which is probably why they have the timer.

Overall, though, my first impressions are that I really enjoy this game. I think because of the number of words per card and the number of word cards, plus the fact that they are being laid out in a grid so the combinations and intersections will be different, this game has a ton of replay value. And for a party game that is extremely important to me, because so many, Cards Against Humanity, Apples to Apples, and Catch Phrase, has a limited replayability at best. This is definitely a filler game sleeper to checkout this year and one that would probably be getting bigger buzz is conventions were happening.

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But before that, let’s talk a little bit about why you build up a collection of board games. For me, clearly I love board games and having a variety of board games brings me joy. I like being able to pull out so many really different games and play them, but also to just look at them on my shelf, mess around with the pieces and learning the rules. It also gives me joy because I get to introduce other people to the board game hobby as well because I have so many games. I can pull out a game for any occasion, whether it was the board game club that I started just before Covid-19 hit so it’s been on hiatus, or if it’s playing with family, or introducing someone to gaming. Now, that’s why I have a diverse collection of games, but that also is something that won’t work for some people, some people simply do not want to play complex games or they don’t want to play party games, and therefore you might not have as much in your collection. So when building up your collection target games that you’ll love and games that you’ll enjoy that work for your group. If you only play with casual gamers, you’ll probably want to focus your collection more on games that’ll fit their play style. If everyone hates party games, no need to have one in your collection.

Let’s talk about the three different types of games that I think make a strong collection.

1 – Games You Love

This part is pretty obvious. Your collection should have a lot, probably the majority, of games that you like to play. This is whatever type of game you love, maybe you love heavy war games, or euro games, or ameritrash games, campaign games, dungeons crawls, sci-fi, deduction, trick taking, whatever it might be, most of the games in your collection should be games that you love. Most likely, if you love these games, you’re going to have a few people to play them with, as part of your gaming group. These are the games that I’m using, thus far, in the board game club, so not my campaign games that I love, though I do have a group for that, but stuff like Blood Rage, Lords of Hellas, Dead of Winter, Clank! In! Space!, bigger and a bit meatier games that we can sit down and just spend an evening playing those games. These won’t be the games that you play the most, most likely, but that’s fine, these are the games that you always want to play.

2 – Gateway Games

This is a pretty small part of your collection, these are games that you use to introduce people to hobby gaming. Best known are the Ticket to Rides, Dominion, Carcassone, Small World, and Catan. But find what works for you and the ones that you enjoy. Having a few of these slightly more complicated games than your typical mass market games will allow you to get more people into hobby gaming. You wouldn’t want to start someone off with Blood Rage if they don’t understand area control and card drafting strategies, but Small World and Sushi Go Party! and now they have a basis for potentially playing Blood Rage. Make sure that you do enjoy the ones that you have, you might be sitting for a while in this part of your collection with some gamers as they get to explore and discover new games and strategies as compared to the mass market games, and consider outside the normal games. Something like King of Tokyo is great that isn’t mentioned as often as the big five I mentioned above, but works well and is familiar in some ways to Yahtzee, or something like Century: Golem Edition is easy to teach and play and newer.

3 – Big Group Games

Now, with board game nights, there’s kind of a tipping point of around eight people to ten people where you can start to split into multiple groups. But even then, sometimes you want to play in a big group. I also like these bigger group games for kicking off or winding down a board game night as people start to leave and you go from a couple of groups into a single group. This category of games has stuff like Criss Cross, Welcome To…, Just One, Scattergories, Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, Sushi Go Party!, and more that can handle a pretty good size number, and they don’t take that long. They are almost filler games, but for a bigger group, and I could have probably put a fourth category of filler games, but I also like just using the higher player count games with lower player counts if I need a filler. These games are meant to get played quickly to start off a game night, played by people who don’t want to play a heavier game, or just played for the whole game night if that’s what everyone is feeling or you don’t have enough people to split into two groups easily.

Now, obviously, your group and your tastes will get different mileage out of the different types of games. You might just have it planned out that you don’t need filler games. When one game is full, the next person there just starts setting up the next game until more people show up. But that’s going to be up to you. If you know you need a more well rounded collection, those are the three categories that I would look at filling out your collection with. All this keeping in mind that your collection is to bring you joy, so with Gateway Games and Big Group Games, you can fill in a few that you like or can tolerate if you need them. If you hate all gateway games, don’t have any in your collection, that is okay, same with group/filler types of games, but think about the group that you play with, and make your decisions based off of that.

Do you have a mix of games in your collection? Is it only games that you like, do you find that you need group games or gateway games?

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These are all games that are light weight games, generally fast, that fall into the filler category.

Let’s talk quickly about what is a filler game.

A filler game is any game you’re going to use if multiple groups are playing games and you’ve wrapped up one game, but the other group is still going and you need something to pad out the time, or for the start or end of a game night when you want to wind things up or down. It can also be for when you have a little bit of time otherwise and you want to fit in a board game. These games generally have a higher player count, short time frame, and are easy to teach.

Let’s meet the contenders.

Tsuro: The Game of the Path

Tsuro is a faced playing tile laying game where you are trying to keep your stone traveling it’s path longer than anyone else. It plays up to eight people, and even with eight people plays in fifteen to twenty minutes. You pick a starting location on the edge of the board, then playing tiles on your stone, you move it along the path you laid in front of it. It get’s tricky when there are a lot of tiles on the board and you have to figure out where a different path might lead you because you continue until you find the end of the path or run into someone else. If you go off the edge of the board, you are out, if you run into someone, you are both out.

Zombie Dice

Basically a simple version of Farkle, in Zombie Dice you are a zombie who is trying to eat brains, as zombies are want to do. But the humans are fighting back for some reason. Blindly, you grab three dice out of cup and roll them. If you get a brain, you get a point, if you get a shotgun blast, you might get knocked out for the round, and if you get a runner, you have to draw back up to three, keeping that die, for your next roll. Zombie Dice is a classic push your luck game as you’re seeing how far you want to push it and how many brains you can get, banking them before you roll three shot gun blasts, and the winner is the person with the highest total after someone has gotten to 13 or more brains. With Zombie Dice you can play with as many people as you want and is a nice casual game, though, the more people you have the longer it’ll take, and if the dice rolls don’t go well it can take a bit.

Love Letter

Love Letter is a simple and fast playing deduction game. It has a lower player count at 4 players, but each round of the game takes only a couple of minutes. In it, you have cards with different members of the royal court, and you’re trying to get a love letter to the princess. You want to end the round, without being eliminated and having the highest rank card, the one closest to the princess to hand her the letter. You score a point for a win, and technically you play up to four points, but you can go as high as you want or as low as you want for when people are showing up.

Ice Cool

This game has a bit more set-up, but even that is fast as you put together the board so you can start flicking penguins. While with Zombie Dice and Love Letter you barely need a table, with Ice Cool you definitely need one. Players take turns as penguins who are skipping class trying to avoid the hall monitor. The student penguins are trying to get fish and the hall monitor is trying to catch them. For each fish a penguin gets they get a point card, and for each penguin the hall monitor catches, they get a point card. While technically every player should get a turn as hall monitor, you don’t need to do that. Currently it only plays four, but the expansion is coming out to make the board bigger and allow it to play eight.

Now this one is harder to do similarities and differences on, so we’re just going to get to a judgement faster.

These are all fun filler games. Generally I use the first two for board game nights because of the higher player count. There are other games I considered as options for the filler battle, but thought that these four worked the best.

Personally, my favorite out of all of these is Ice Cool. The game is just silly fun, but I don’t think it is the best filler. It requires a little bit of set-up and it only plays four. To play the whole game also take s a little bit longer. Love Letter is also getting the cut because of the lower player count. Between Zombie Dice and Tsuro, Zombie Dice is the easier game to teach, but Tsuro is more fun, and you can get in more game potentially as a filler game. So the winner of the Cruiser Weight Title is Tsuro.

Tsuro really hits that spot where there is a little stress to the game as sometimes your piece is in someone else’s hands just with how the tiles are on the board and you have to hope that they keep you alive. I think that makes the game stronger, also the fact that people want to play it again is something that I don’t get with Zombie Dice. It isn’t that people don’t like Zombie Dice, it’s just that it’s a bit more straight forward whereas with Tsuro, people always think, if I did this, I might have been able to win, and there’s less random luck in Tsuro.

What are some of your favorite filler games?

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