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 Gold’n’Crash

Gold’n’Crash is a two player game where players are trying to gain victory in one of two ways. Firstly, you win by having stored away the most gold (points) when either player gets through all of their character cards. Or the other way to claim victory is to destroy all of your opponents blimps.

The game is played going back and forth with each player taking two of three actions on their turn. And you can take the same action twice. You take a card, you discard a card, or you draw a card. That is how the game works, but let’s talk about the actions a bit more.

Drawing

Firstly, drawing a card is simple. You draw a card from your deck and add it to your hand. There is no hand limit, so it allows you, late game, if you don’t draw good cards to play or you think you have the most points to push the end of the game.

Playing

Next you can play out cards. There are six different types of cards. Some of them are just point cards that don’t have powers. But five of the types of cards have powers. They might draw more cards from you, from the discard pile or your draw pile, or attempt to blow up your opponents ship. There are rules for playing cards. You need to play in the column with the fewest cards. And in the case of a tie, you decide where to play them.

Discarding

Then you also are able to discard cards from your played cards. Each card, minus the point cards, can be discarded. When you discard you trigger a different ability. It might be to add cards to your scoring pile or remove cards from your opponents, or look at the top of your deck and move cards to the bottom of the deck.

You are playing out these cards to bank point cards. Every card has a point value, but there are some cards that have a bigger point value. And there are some cards, above the blimps in the play area, that give you a lot of points. But you need to meet a specific condition, like three green cards in that column, or five total cards, to gather those points. In the end, most points wins, or if you destroy all the blimps you win right there.

What Doesn’t Work

Firstly, it isn’t super obvious what each card type does immediately. You need to know ten different actions between playing cards and discarding. This is not a major issue in the game. It is one of those things where the more that you play, the more you are going to know how the game works and what the cards do. But there is a learning curve to what everything does.

The next thing is that this isn’t a game that is fast. I talked last week about Zenith and how the turns are simple and the game, while it can be a battle back and forth, it moves quickly. This is not that sort of game. Some of it is because of what I mentioned above, there are a lot of powers and abilities you need to know. But even with that, the bigger element is there are just a lot of cards. So while there is variety, you often feel like you are treading water on turns.

Finally, blowing up the blimps, it sounds like fun. But it’s an abrupt end to the game that sometimes you can do nothing about to stop. For a game that wants to be strategic in what you are doing, sometimes there is not really a choice. So the end of the game through the blimp destruction just feels a bit out of place compared to everything else you do, and it comes down so much to the luck of the draw.

What Works

I think that the game has a good amount of strategy to it. It is a game that wants to be a tense and well thought out back and forth game. And there is certainly an element of it. And as you play it more, more strategy is going to emerge as to how you manipulate the board state to your advantage. Because, everything is going to mess around with that board state, on your side of things or your opponents a little bit.

I also like how actions stack. If you play a second brown card to a column, they allow you to store treasures, you get to activate that ability for each brown card. That means you can stack up some good scoring turns. Or you might be able to mess with your opponents board state a lot in a single move. So you might want to plan out your moves that way to try and optimize it. However, since you can only play in the lowest stack, sometimes that isn’t all that reasonable to do.

Who is Gold’n’Crash For?

I think people who want to play a lot of really intense two player games will enjoy this one. Not that I think this is the most intense two player. You compare it to abstracts like Chess or Onitama, this is going to play with more luck in it. But for someone who wants all the powers and abilities, there are going to be a lot in the game. And for someone who maybe wants a game to play in a night, instead of player a two player game twice or more, this one can work for that as well.

My Final Thoughts on Gold’n’Crash

Now, I think that my opinion on this is going to be colored a little bit by the fact it was played right after Zenith. While Zenith is a smooth fast game with a lot of great decisions, Gold’n’Crash is a bit clunkier and clutchier.

And, by clutchier, I mean that it’s harder to get into and get going. I played quite a number of games of Gold’n’Crash to get a good feeling for the game. It wasn’t until I was at four or five plays that I started to really utilize all the abilities all that well. That is not a major negative to the game, but for a two player game, it is going to cause discrepancies between how good players are.

And it is a bit clunkier. You might draw what you need, you might not, but there is less ability to pivot. I definitely played games where I just drew card after card because none of them were worth playing. So it is better for me to build up a massive hand of cards until I get a couple cards that I need for a great turn, than it is for me to just play out cards. That doesn’t feel fun, too many passive turns in the game.

My Grade: C-
Gamer Grade: C+
Casual Grade: C

I think that some people will like this game better. When it comes out, I expect that some people will make it the game they play with their partner in an evening weekly or more often. But generally, I think people will find it kind of middle of the road. It isn’t a bad game, but it isn’t that good a game either.

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