What’s Deck Building and List Criteria

Deck building is when in a game you are adding cards to a deck or cards that you then draw and play from. IT is not a game where you build a custom deck to start and no cards are added during the game to that deck of cards. This eliminates games like Arkham Horror The Card Game, Marvel Champions and Star Wars Unlimited from being on the list.

For this list, one of the important elements is that it needs to matter in the game. There are some games where you maybe add a card or two during the game. Those aren’t going to be making the list. I’ll talk in each about how much the deck building matters in the game.

Top 10 Deck Building Games

10. The Quest for El Dorado

The Quest for El Dorado is the only deck building racing game that I have on the list. In fact, I’m not sure that I can think of any. Heat can have a drafting element before the rest to kind of create some deck construction, but that’s it.

This one is all about getting to El Dorado as quickly as you can with your explorer. You play out cards matching terrains to be able to move along. And there are big blocks of different terrains, so you build up your deck one way and then you need to be able to pivot away from that or not get so deep in that because you need to get cards for the next terrain type as well.

One of the cool thing about this game is that as you empty out piles or cards, the next player picks what new stack of cards is going to go into that pile. It creates this interesting element where the players are the ones who set the market.

9. Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle is the one campaign game on the list. Though there are two more that offer campaign modes. But this one is only a campaign game where you play through the books of the Harry Potter series. It’s a fun game as you add new spells to your deck and you balance getting cards to get better spells and getting spells to help deal with the threats that can start to pile up.

There is a negative to this game. While it does offer cool unlocks of new things that are added for each book, there are also the same bad guys. So each time you play there are more and more bad guys. Now your deck should be getting more powerful because of the added cards, but you don’t carry anything over. So while I enjoy this game, it’s not one that stuck in my collection because it’s not too fast.

8. Knights of the Hound Table

Knights of the Hound Table is a game that I need to get played again. After playing it at Gen Con I decided I should pick it up. This game is an interesting little game where you are adding dog knights to your deck and them facing them off against your opponent.

You play out three cards each turn and depending on how the fight goes, that is going to determine who gets to buy first and who is gaining points in the game. Each card is going to give you something special. The ones on either end of the three you play give you attack and defense, respectively. Then the one in the middle is going to give you a special power of some sort (I believe I have that order correct). So it becomes an interesting little game of how you can manipulate your hand of cards to get a winning combination out there.

7. Hero Realms

Hero Realms is another two player head to head game, or it can be solo/cooperative against a boss/enemy deck. But I like this game a lot as a two player head to head game. You are trying to whittle down the other players health.

To do this you are playing out troops and they can either attack your opponent, assuming there is no enemy troop who forces you to attack them first. Plus there are other cards that offer more than just troops. Some of it might be money to buy more cards. Or you might be healing up and keeping ahead of your opponent that way.

The game also has a lot of expansions. I really like to use the characters for the game. Each character is going to provide a slightly different starting set-up and some powers that you can use throughout the game. It is going to give you a bit more of that asymmetrical experience while keeping the goal the same.

6. Ascension

Ascension is the most straightforward of the deck building games on the list. It is about grabbing cards, fighting monsters, and getting points. It’s one of two deck building games that I would consider great spots to get into deck building that I’ve played. The other being Dominion. But I don’t like Dominion that well and I think that it struggles more disparity in player experience.

There are three big things that I like better about Ascension. Firstly there are monsters. So it is not just about buying cards to get the victory point cards, you also want to buy troops to fight the monsters and get victory points from killing them. You also have a changing market. By that I mean that when a monster is defeated or a card is bought a new random one is flipped out. Finally are the constructs which stay in play. They give you a bonus that keeps going from round to round, unless your opponent destroys them.

5. Mistborn

Now we move onto the newest game on the list. Mistborn is a competitive deck building game to see who can be the best Mistborn. Or you can play it cooperatively against the Lord Ruler. You can see that cooperative style of game on the Malts and Meeples YouTube and down below.

Both ways work well for the game. And while it is a deck building game, the game offers some very unique things. The big one is that it pulls in burning metals like they do in the Mistborn books. And as you go through the game you get better at burning metals. That means that you can burn more on your turn which means that you can play more cards.

I also like that you can burn the metal on a card to play another card. It offers just a little bit more strategy. And I mentioned leveling up. The game is great with that because you level up each turn. And sometimes you can play cards to make that move faster. But it means that you feel more powerful and also can push the end game faster as you get further into the game. So it doesn’t stagnate in what you can do.

4. Clank! (All Versions)

This spot on the list includes Clank! The Adventure Deck Building Game, Clank! In! Space! and Clank! Catacombs. I recommend if you are starting out, get Clank! Catacombs. That is the newest one but all of the games generally follow the same system. The system is get into the dungeon/spaceship, grab a big treasure and get out.

Clank! is a deck building game that is competitive again, I have one more competitive one on the list. But what you can do to mess with other players is limited. Instead, your big concerns are making too much noise, clank, and then the monster drawing them out of the bag and damaging you and knocking you out before you can get out.

The deck building is all about pushing further into the dungeon. You want to grab cards that are going to let you move. But you also need cards to deal with the monsters or get coins to buy from other markets and grab points that way. The game gives you a lot of ways to get points while also giving you a very nice push your luck feel as you try and race back out once you’ve gotten your treasure. Because when people grab treasure that is going to push the game closer to the end.

3. Lost Ruins of Arnak

Lost Ruins of Arnak is the game on the list that is way more than just a deck building game. And you don’t always draw a ton of cards in the game. So as you build your deck, you might find that you only see cards one or two times. But the deck building is important in this game, as is the worker placement and resource gathering.

Let’s mainly talk about the cards. The cards are always going to augment what you can do in the game. There are two different types that I like as well. There are goods cards which you can buy, and they go to the bottom of your draw pile. So for a game with only a few turns it means that you see those cards quickly. And then there are relic cards that you get to use immediately, without paying their cost and then discard.

I had someone explain them to me this way. Relics are things you find while you explore the Lost Ruins. So it makes sense you can use them right away. The goods, though, are being shipped over to your expedition. So they take a bit more to get to you.

2. Xenoshyft: Onslaught

Xenoshyft: Onslaught is one of my favorite deck building games and just games overall. The first part I guess I didn’t need to say, really. But I love how cooperative this game is. And the final two deck building games on the list are cooperative.

In Xenoshyft, you are battling waves off bug aliens who want to destroy your base. So it is really a tower defense game. And each player has their own side of the tower that they defend against. But the total health of the tower, that is shared across all the players and all sides of the base.

There are a few things that make me love this game. Firstly, the game feeds you money. For each wave you get through you get more and more money. And that corresponds with unlocking better and better troops. So you are always able to buy troops.

I also love how cooperative this game is. I use my cards like grenades or healing on your turn defending the tower. In fact, we talk through that and work through that all together. But there is more than that. Maybe you didn’t draw enough troops because you have a lot or armor. Well, I can just play a troop your side of the base and now that is your card. Or maybe you have an extra weapon. You can equip that card to one of my troops and now that stays in my deck.

1. Aeon’s End

The final game on the list is cooperative and it has a campaign. I love Aeon’s End, and there is a ton of it to choose from. This game is all about surviving a big boss fight. And the bosses, called nemesis, all are slightly different. And the mages that you play, they are all slightly different as well. So your strategy each game is going to change depending on the mages that you play with and nemesis that you are going up against.

One of the big unique things for Aeon’s End is that you don’t shuffle your deck. That seems like one of the standards for deck building, but it’s a negative to shuffle your deck. When you buy cards they go to your discard. And after you are done buying and playing cards, you take those cards that would go to the discard and put them into the discard in the order that you want. So you can try and split-up cards if you get too many spells by each other, or you can create combos in your funding to really optimize your money.

Finally, I like how the spell and turn systems work. Though, the turn system make it so that I think Aeon’s End is a two player game or solo. The turn order is random and you draw a card to see who goes. With more than two, it can be a long time between turns. But with two, players get to go twice in a shuffle of turn order cards with the nemesis going twice as well. And that works well because you play a spell one turn and shoot if off the next. So you feel like you are doing stuff each round.

Final Thoughts

I managed to get 13 games into a Top 10 list. I like deck building and I think there is a ton of fun going on with it. There are other games that I want to play that have deck building in them, or ones that just missed the list. Shadowrun Crossfire is one that I enjoy but I need to play more of it. And Etherfields has a deck building component to it. So does Dune Imperium, which I own but have yet to play. And I suspect that if I were to think about it, there are a few more as well that could have made the list, or have that element that I need to play.

What is your favorite deck building game?

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Deck Building vs Deck Construction

So let’s talk about this really quickly because one game that isn’t on this list is Gloomhaven. Though, you do add cards to your deck throughout the whole of the Gloomhaven campaign. And there is another one on the list, no spoilers, where you do the same thing. But it’s done in a different way.

Deck Building allows you to add cards to your deck when you can purchase them. And while you might be able to do things to manipulate how many cards you have in your deck, those rules aren’t as in place. In some of them you might need a lot of cards in your deck.

Deck Construction, on the other hand, allows you to focus your deck. You decide what you want to put into your deck and keep in your deck. Often times there are rules as to how you can even construct your deck. Gloomhaven only allows you to have a set number of cards. Or Magic: The Gathering, in standard, you can have a 60 card deck, no more, no less.

The Rankings

14. Dominion

I know that Dominion would top a lot of people’s lists. But for me, Dominion is not that interesting a game. The mechanics are perfectly fine, but it’s just deck building for the sake of deck building. It is just the mechanic for the sake of the mechanic. And it doesn’t look good on the table. Plus, Dominion misses on one big thing for me. A person who can look at all the cards and figure out the best strategy before the game starts will win. I like a bit more randomness in my deck building so it’s more on the fly decisions versus from the very start.

13. DC Comics Deck-Building Game

This one I haven’t played in so long. I remember it being perfectly fine but nothing really stood out to me. Add in the fact that DC Comics don’t interest me that much, mainly because there are too many comics overall to keep up on, and it is low for me. I would play this one again, but it is mainly a forgettable experience.

12. God or War: The Card Game

Another one that falls into this category, God of War was just a dud when I played it at GenCon. The game play seemed too easy and the decision making space was so limited. I get that it was a demo scenario, and maybe the game is more challenging, but I like a cooperative game challenging. This I felt like I’d win 75% or more of the time, and that doesn’t interest me. Plus, how you got the cards was just okay. You divided them amongst the group, and did it cooperative, but the choices were limited. It barely, if at all, qualifies as a deck building game.

11. Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game

Now to a theme that I love, but one that is really low on the list. Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game should work for me, but it misses on three things. Firstly, the game set-up is way too long. Some of that is too much stuff for the game. The other part is just it’s too complex with it’s set-up. Then the game takes too long. You take forever to start being able to hit the boss. Finally, the theme is missing for me. I want it to feel like a super hero team-up. But when you have cards of five heroes, and I have cards of those five heroes as well, it doesn’t feel like that.

10. Legendary Encounters: A Firefly Deck Building Game

Another Legendary game from Upper Deck, and this one I like a bit better. Mainly because the balance feels better. The scenarios, different episodes, are fun to play through. And while it does have the same thing as Marvel version where we are all playing all the characters, it just works smoother. I think having less stuff makes it play faster and be faster to get to the table.

9. Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

This is one that I’m bummed I never got to play through the whole game. I could have kept Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle in my collection. And it might come back to my collection later. But it wasn’t getting played, and in terms of campaign games, I felt like it wasn’t going to be one that I came back to any time soon. The game is fun in that you unlock things as you go along. So not a legacy game, but a resettable campaign which is cool. And it took you through the books.

8. Cry Havoc

Another one that left my collection, and this one it is because I have Root. Cry Havoc and Root do different things, but I’d prefer to teach and play Root if I’m going to play an asymmetric game. Combat is really cool where you put your troops on a track to determine how it goes and then manipulate it with cards. And the deck building is interesting as you use them in combat, for powers, or to do basic actions. So card uses were really cool in the game.

7. Clank!: A Deck-Building Game

Now we start to get into the heavy hitters and games still in my collection. Clank! A Deck-Building Game is a wonderful time. It is a nice light deck builder, but one that isn’t only deck building. You build up your deck as you adventure down into a dungeon. All the time you are trying to do it as quietly as you can so the dragon doesn’t find you. But some of the better cards make you go clank. It’s a great push your luck game with a nice theme.

6. Ascension: Deckbuilding Game

Ascension goes back to being a pure deck building game. But I like this one so much better than Dominion. Firstly, there isn’t a fixed market. That means that I need to think about and adjust my strategy on the fly. And there is fighting monsters. Yes, everything can give you points. But in Dominion, everyone works towards the same points, here, someone can focus on getting cards for points or for combat, or do both.

5. Aeon’s End: Legacy

This is almost cheating, because it maybe should be combined with an entry coming up. But I do think that Aeon’s End Legacy and Aeon’s End are two different games. At least until the legacy experience is done. I really enjoyed my time with Aeon’s End: Legacy, and I do think it’s a great game. If you want to learn Aeon’s End, I would recommend you play this before you dive into the base game. But once you are done and you play against other nemesis, the game will seem easy.

4. Clank! In! Space!: A Deck-Building Game

Another Clank! game on the list. I prefer Clank! In! Space!, because it is even goofier than regular Clank!. And I do think that I like the space theme better. Plus, the game play is better for me. It adds in two changes. Firstly, how the game ends, there is no longer a timer, it is just until the players all get out, or Lord Eradikus takes them down. In Clank! it is a set number of rounds. And I like that you need to unlock the treasure room. It means there is more than just rush in grab treasure and rush out.

3. Aeon’s End

Later this year when I do my Top 100 Games (of All Time) 2022 Edition, I might combine this with Legacy. But I do think that the base game, or any of the expansions are better. Aeon’s End is a great cooperative deck building game. I like that you don’t shuffle, if you are good, it adds to the challenge. I also like how different the breach mages are and how different the nemesis are. It gives the game a lot of good challenges. Plus there is so much content to dig into.

2. Xenoshyft: Onslaught

I’m trying to remember, I’m not sure I’ve ever beat Xenoshyft: Onslaught. I think maybe one time. But I have come close a lot of times. This is another cooperative game, and you defend a base from waves after waves of bugs. Yes, this might sound like Starship Troopers the board game. I would say it is, but maybe slightly more serious. I love the challenge, and I like how each different area you can play has different powers and abilities.

What pushes this game ahead of Aeon’s End for me is how you can help others. I might draw a hand where I hold three weapons. But I only need two. I can give you that card to equip to one of your guys. Your line of defense getting weak, I can drop a paratrooper in. I’m getting some tough monsters, you can throw a grenade. It is highly cooperative and I love it for that.

1. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

Finally, this is the one I was talking about when I was talking about deck building versus deck construction. And in all fairness, I don’t play this for deck building. I play Tainted Grail for the story. But you do deck building, spending XP to get random card draw and then picking between them to add to your deck. And while you can remove cards from your deck whenever, there aren’t a lot of limits on how many you can have, just how few you can have. It’s a small part of the game, but making a great combat deck can be a challenge.

Final Thoughts

There are a lot of deck building games that I still want to play. In particular, I want to play Clank! Legacy because I love the theme for that one. And I know there are more deck building games out there to try. It is a mechanic that I really love, like roll and writes, so I don’t think I will ever complain about finding new favorites to work into the rotation. I’ll probably do deck construction games here soon, because I do like them as well, though I own and have played fewer.

What are your favorite deck building games? If you’ve played Tainted Grail, would you consider it one? Let me know in the comments below.

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If you want to join in on the live stream and see the games as I talk about them as well as comment on my choices, you can join on Wednesdays from now until November 17th. I stream over on Malts and Meeples on YouTube at 8 PM Central Time. And if you need to catch up on the list.

100 Through 91

Top 100 Board Games 90 – 81

90. Skulk Hollow

A fun and pretty simple and fast two player asymmetrical game. One person plays as foxes who are trying to take down the other players guardian. The guardian has it’s goal, to take out the foxes leader to some other objective. The foxes are trying to get onto the guardian and hit it, taking out all of it’s health locations and disabling abilities. This is all done through some pretty simple card draw that makes the game easy to play.

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89. Titan Race

This might be the first racing game that I ever got. It is a light and silly little one, which is what I look for in a filler. In this game you are racing across one board three times or three boards. You use special powers to stop your opponents, knock them off course, and get further ahead. The game play is fun too because you are drafting dice to figure out what your movement is. It’s a good game that can probably be played with all ages.

Not Available

88. King of Tokyo

A classic game at this point, King of Tokyo is about all those monsters you know the names of hitting each other to get into Tokyo. Granted none of the monsters are actually named right because of licensing costs. But this is a great game that uses the Yahtzee style mechanic of rolling dice, keeping, and then rolling up to twice more. You can win by knocking out the other monsters, the most fun way, or by points. This is a game I don’t always pull out, but when I do, it’s a good time.

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87. Tokyo Highway

Keeping on the theme of Tokyo, we have Tokyo Highway. A game that is as much a piece of art as it is a game. Now, don’t get me wrong, there is a game there, but when you finish playing it looks amazing. In this game you build highways through Tokyo while going over and under other roads. The trick is you can only raise or lower your road by one each time, and can’t touch the table with your road. If you go over or under another road you get to put out cars, but that’s harder because you can’t touch the other roads or knock them over. A fun and beautiful dexterity game.

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86. Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

Not even the first deck builder on my list, Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle is one of the easier ones to teach. First there is the theme that makes it easier to get to the table, people know Harry Potter. And a lot of people love Harry Potter. So it’s something that people can jump into as they know the spells and characters you add to your deck. And the game grows and progresses the further you play into it. Even just playing the first book several times, it’s a fun game that is very accessible.

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85. Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game

This is the zombie survival game in the lines of The Walking Dead. Yes, you have to kill zombies in the game, but it’s about how you can work together as players while still trying to complete your own secret objective. That part of the game is good, but where it really shires is the Crossroads cards. These offer you challenging decisions as to if you rescue someone or not because that means another mouth to feed. I do house rule this one by drawing two Crossroads cards. Only one can happen, but it means that they happen more often.

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84. Silver

This game is tricky to explain, but not that hard to play. In the game you are drawing a card and deciding what to do with it, do you add it to your village or discard it for a power. The interesting bit is that you have a village of five in front of you but the cards are face down. At the beginning of each of the four rounds, you look at two of them. So you need to figure out ways to see your other cards, or maybe swap them blindly. And to get rid of cards completely so you have the lowest score. Good little take that type of game.

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83. Hues and Cues

There are a few party games on my list, but this one wasn’t there last year because I had yet to play it. It’s a game about trying to get people to guess a color. But you first give a one word clue and then a two word clue. As the person giving the clue, you get points for more people getting close or the right guess. And for the guessers you want to get close because that gives you points. Giving clues to guess colors is definitely different and feels unique for a party game.

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82. Clank!: A Deck-Building Adventure Game

Clank! A Deck Building Adventure Game I own but I haven’t played my copy. I have played on Table Top Simulator on Steam and had a blast with it. It’s a great push your luck deck building game.

You delve into a dungeon to steal a dragon’s treasure. But as you go through the dungeon you make noise and clank. When the dragon awakens he draws from a bag that has your clank and others. If too much is drawn you die. But if you can get in and then get back out with the best treasure and most points, or the other players die, you can win the game. It’s light goofy and fun. And I really need to play Clank! Legacy.

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81. Gravwell: Escape from the 9th Dimension

This is an odd game, it is fairly abstract but challenging and fun. Gravwell, I’m not doing the full title, has you sucked into another dimension and trying to escape back home before the portal closes. All while there is a black hole you don’t want to get sucked into. You are also out of your normal fuel, it’s not a good day. So you play down different elements as your fuel.

And this is where the game gets odd because some fuel pulls you towards the closest ship, some push you away and some draw ships towards you. Plus, every player plays down an element at the same time and they activate in alphabetical order. So if you play a later letter, like P let’s say, that might move you a long way towards the closest ship, but will that be the right direction when you get to activate. Silly game with a great and different mechanic to it.

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The Next Ten

So there we have it, we’re 20 games in between the two weeks. And every time I do the list I come up with a game I want to play And I come up with a game I think was too low.

If you want to join in on the next 10 live, you can do that on Wednesday September 29th at 8 PM Central Time. And then all the rest of the Wednesday’s up through November 17th. That’s over on the Malts and Meeples YouTube Channel. Subscribe and click the notification bell so you know when I go live.

And let me know which of these 10 is your favorite and which one do you want to try?

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There is going to be a consistent theme on a lot of these games. When I look at them, I think I have games that do something like it better, for me. But let’s not spoil too much and get into all the games I’m either selling to friends or trading into my local FLGS.

Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth

This was probably the hardest one to get rid of, but also one that I’ve been wondering about for a long time. I really like Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth, but I don’t know when I’ll play it. I look at my shelf and see a lot of campaign games. Games like Solomon Kane, Reichbusters, Arkham Horror The Card Game, Star Wars: Imperial Assault and more are going to get played before it.

Plus I have Kickstarter games coming in like Etherfields, ISS Vanguard, HEL: The Last Saga, Primal, and Oathsworn. So when I look at Journeys in Middle Earth, I had to ask myself, would I play this before those. And the answer is, probably not. While the theme is one that I love, and the game was a lot of fun, I don’t see myself playing it when I have other bigger campaign games and other smaller campaign games.

This one I sold to a friend last night actually who had a group that had gone through Imperial Assault. For them it could be a good next game to play, and again he also really likes the theme as well, so it works well for him. I wish I’d played it, but I also know that I won’t.

Legacy of Dragonholt

Another campaign style game. This one is different though, it’s choose your own adventure with character stats. It’s somewhere between an RPG and a board game. I’ve played the start of it a few times and it’s fun. I think that it does a lot of things really well, but again, you saw my list of campaign games. When am I going to fit this one in?

Oddly enough, I think that it’s just a little bit too big for it’s own good. It takes a bit too much effort to get to the table. And the ruleset is just a bit too complex, though really simple, to play and then come back to in a few weeks or in a couple of months. If I want to do something that is purely choose your own adventure, I have Choose Your Own Adventure House of Danger. If I want that storybook and stat sheet, I have Loup Garou from Van Ryder games that is a one off thing.

Legends of Andor (and Expansion)

This, I think, is kind of another campaign game. Now, I say I think because I didn’t delve too far into the game. It is a fun puzzle game where you are trying to maximize what you do. However, for me, it’s just one I won’t play again. Legends of Andor has some really cool things about it though.

It does have that story element that I like to a game. And it makes you think about what you’re doing for an adventure game where there are monsters. You can’t just kill all the monsters, if you kill all of the monsters, you push up on a track. The faster you push up on that track the faster the game will end. So you only need to deal with the monsters that are a threat or are in the way. That is what really drives the puzzle aspect.

But, again, it falls into that category of a game that is pretty light, but has just enough rules that I can’t pull it off the shelf and get it to the table in minutes. And the campaign element isn’t strong to it, so I could play one off scenarios, but I’m likely just going to play the tutorial one again if I were to play it more.

Bring Your Own Book

Bring Your Own Book was one of my first Kickstarted board games. I liked it a fair amount in concept the game, just a bit less in actual game play. The idea is simple, everyone has a book and there is someone who is it. They put out a prompt and everyone has a couple of minutes to find a sentence or phrase in their book as an answer. Sounds fun and funny to have a wide variety of books.

There is one flaw in the game for me, though. It isn’t easy to find passages. Two minutes of time, or let’s say even three, isn’t that long. And while it’s funny to have a textbook and a biography and a novel as people’s books, some books just don’t work as well. And some people aren’t as fast as flipping through their books. I am not a speed reader but I can skim/read fast. Even for me it was tricky at times, or what you land is just something because you have to, not because it’s any good. I’d describe this game as clutchy, it can work, or it can stall real easily.

Boss Monster

Boss Monster is another I’d call clutchy. It is a pretty fun game with a great theme. You are building out a dungeon and are the boss monster at the end of it. Your goal is to kill as many adventurers as possible. And if you have the most of some symbols you attract adventurers.

That is where the game gets clutchy though. You don’t start out with a dungeon good enough to kill the adventurers. So they only show up in your dungeon if you have the most, so you are trying to tie with people the first few rounds. That isn’t fun, simple as that. If we started with a preseeded dungeon and we could make it bigger or better, that’d be more fun. Also some of the other mechanics aren’t what I’d call intuitive. With that said, I don’t hate the game, I just know I probably won’t play it again.

Sentinels Tactics: The Flame of Freedom

This one is pretty simple to describe why I got it and why it’s leaving. I got it on accident, I thought I was getting another Sentinels of the Multiverse expansion, it is a different game. Why is it leaving, tactics games like this one aren’t always my jam. I have not that many teams on a map games, Super Fantasy Brawl being my favorite. And I know the comparison isn’t perfect, but it’s in a category of games where I just don’t think I’ll get it to the table. It’s just a genre of games that I don’t need that many of.

Small World Underground

Finally one that might be surprising but don’t worry Small World is still in my collection. Small World Underground is basically the game thing as Small World, it just adds in a few little things, like locations to control that give you something more you can do. It is a lot of fun, so why is it leaving?

It’s leaving because I have Small World. That little extra thing to teach means I don’t want to play it as often. When we play Small World it’s generally because we can pull it off the shelf and play immediately. Nothing needs to get taught, everyone in the group knows it or needs a two sentence refresher on it. If I were to pull out Underground, we couldn’t get it to the table as fast.

Which Would You Keep?

So, in all fairness, I actually pulled back one game that was in the pile as I was talking about it. I am keeping Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, at least for right now. It’s such a simple deck building game with a theme that people like, even if they don’t like JK Rowling. And I kind of do want to push through all seven chapters just to see everything that changes. It might not last for a long time, but we’ll see, maybe I’ll stream it.

As you can see, though, there are two main things that pushed games off my shelf. Would I play them over other games in the same genre, and are they in that category of too complex but easy. I’m not sure that makes sense, the better way to put it might be that the games a pretty simple when you get down to it, but have enough rules that you need to refresh yourself to play them.

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You can find my whole collection here.

Numbers

A’s – B’s – C’s – D’s – E and F’s

G and H’s

Gloom

This is a fun little story telling card game, and one of the earlier “new” games that I picked up after watching it played on Wil Wheaton’s Table Top show. What drew me to this game was how creative and morbid they were with everything, and how a game could have such a silly objective, such as killing of your family for the fewest points possible to get the win. What keeps this on my shelf, even though I haven’t played it in a few years, is that it’s just such a fun time when you do play it. You get into the morbid absurdity of it and collectively tell such a tragic but absurd story.

Status: Played

Gloomhaven (Forgotten Circles Exp and Jaws of the Lion)

Gloomhaven is my favorite game of all time, so clearly I’ve played it a lot, and I’ve beaten it and the Forgotten Circles expansion, I haven’t beaten Jaws of the Lion yet. What I love about Gloomhaven is just the large, sprawling story that it tells and the very Ameritrash feel, but also the Euro game sensibilities in the combat and combat cards come through, and no dice. Now, I like dice chucking, but I’ve found that I really like that tactical nature of the game play in Gloomhaven where it is much more buttoned down than a pure dice fest. This is a massive game with a massive rule book, but not that difficult when you get into it.

Gloomhaven and expansion Status: Played
Gloomhaven Jaws of the Lion: To Be Played

Gravwell: Escape from the 9th Dimension

This is a game that I picked up in San Diego because I had a few hours to burn before seeing family and after I was out of my hotel, so of course I went to a game shop. This is one that I had seen played on Rodney Smith’s channel, Watch It Played, and that looks like it was a lot of fun. I’m glad I made the purchase as I’ve had fun with it, trying to time out things so that I can rocket forward by spending the right fuel as you try and get your spaceship to escape a black hole and get back to your own dimension. What makes this one fun is trying to read what the other players are going to be doing, you know half the cards they have, but what else might they have to power their ships, how fast will it go compared to yours will that move them closer or further from you. And I like how some fuels move you closer to the nearest object while others push you away or pull them all closer to you. It’s a clever idea that works well in a game.

Status: Played

The Grimm Masquerade

I almost missed this one, but you wouldn’t know that had I not said it. This game I like as a deduction/social deduction game. I think what works well is that it really is more deduction than anything else. In this game you are at a masquerade and you’re trying to guess what Grimm’s Fairly Tale characters everyone is. Now that should be obvious, Rumpelstiltskin and The Beast form Beauty and the Beast should be pretty obviously in why they are, but let’s say magic. What I really like about this game is the two cards you give or keep each turn. You draw one and you have the choice of giving it to someone or keeping it for yourself and they have an item on it that you might want, because if you collect enough of one, you can win, if it’s the right one for your character. The second card you do the opposite thing from the first one, so if I give it away, I have to keep the second card. But the downside is that you have a weakness and if you get enough cards of that type, you are out of the round and can’t get the rose which is worth a bunch of points. I like the push and pull of that as you have to consider, do I take something that’s just neutral for me because I know if I get another of a certain item I’ll be out? It’s just a really good and quick deduction game.

Status: Played

Hanabi

This is a weird game, in that you have a hand of cards and they don’t face you, so you can’t see your cards, but you can see everyone else’s cards. This is also a game about hold information in your head, not just for yourself but what clues other people have been given already about the cards in their hands. You’re trying to play down cards from 1 to 5 in different colors, but you are limited in how you can talk, and of course you can’t see your own cards. It’s a nice simple game, but one that has a lot going on when you really get down to it.

Status: Played

Hanamikoji

I was going to say that this probably my favorite game to play with two, but there is one that I like better, but it’s the best two player only game that I have. This game has you trying to win the favor of Geisha so that they will come to your restaurant, you do that by giving them gifts. But what works so well in this game is how you give the gifts, each player, per round, does four actions, put down two cards face down that won’t be used for gaining favor, one face down that will be used for gaining favor, giving your opponent the choice of 3 cards which they get one and you get two for gaining favor, or giving your opponent a choice between two sets of two cards for gaining favor. That’s it, and both of you can do those actions in any order, if you can figure out what your opponent might have, you can make them have some really hard choices as to what to take, but it’s always a bit of a risk. Great two player game.

Status: Played

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

This is Harry Potter in a deck building game, as you face off against the different bad guys from the books with the characters of Harry, Hermoine, Ron, and Neville. What is really interesting about this game is that as you start you’re playing through the first book, then they add more cards and of things from the second book and you get more, and then the third, fourth, and all the way up through the 7th. It’s basically a campaign game that takes you through the whole Harry Potter series Now that does mean that the first game is pretty simple but later ones are longer and more challenging, but you can do cooler and different things than before.

Status: Played (partially)

Hats

This was one of my most anticipated games from GenCon 2019 after seeing it played by Man vs Meeple. This is an interesting game with an Alice in Wonderland theme, but really it’s a unique card game. in this game your hand of cards are cards you’re playing onto the table in the middle of the game, the cards you take off the table are the ones that you use for scoring. And scoring is fun as well, because there are more suits than there are spots at the table, and the table might have brown in two different spots, not everything will be scored, so you need to push for some colors, sometimes, and then hold one or two back so you can play it down and that color will be scored. But a card on the Mad Hatters table can be replaced if someone plays the same color or a higher number over that card, so it’s a real balancing act and puzzle, great at two very thinky, fun at four, but much more random.

Status: Played

Hearts

Yes, I own a deck of cards. Hearts is a pretty fun trick taking card game. I don’t play it often, but I won’t say no to a game.

Status: Played

Heaven & Ale

This is a game that I talked about recently in a Point of Order post. It’s a euro game which normally isn’t my cup of tea, or pint of beer in this case. However, because of the beer theme, and a reviewer who I like their reviews and generally like their taste said it was one of their top games, and because it was deeply discounted for Black Friday, I grabbed it. This is a game that you can basically call a puzzle as you are putting out tiles, getting resources, trying to get the most victory points, I’m interested to try it when I can play with people in person again.

Status: To Be Played

Heroes of Terrinoth

There are some YouTube channels that you’ll see often on my posts, Rolling Solo is one of them. He highlighted this game a while back, and when I spotted it used at my FLGS, All Systems Go, I decided to grab it. In this game you are playing as heroes trying to defeat scenarios, which might be searching for something, going to different places and fighting monsters, and eventually dealing with a big boss. What I thought was interesting was how you had four abilities and you’d have to reset them at times, so it isn’t just about doing the same thing over and over again. Plus, you can upgrade those abilities, and how that lets you focus your character in a few different ways, just in the scenario itself.

Status: To Be Played

The Hobbit

I like Lord of the Rings a lot, so when The Hobbit game from Fantasy Flight was on sale, I decided to pick it up. This is a really interesting game as it’s almost semi-cooperative in nature. As a group you need to deal with a series of challenge points, and you can raise your stats to do that. But not one player will be able to deal with all of the challenges, so you need everyone to have raised their stats as well. To do this you are playing cards from your hand with numbers on them, the higher the number the further you’ll move in your group of travelers. But going the furthest doesn’t always mean you’ll get the best thing, but you also might not want to always get the best thing, because if someone is lagging behind too much in their stats, it’ll make it more likely that Smaug will move forward and everyone will lose the game. It’s a clever system that I enjoy.

Status: Played

Homebrewers

Have I mentioned that I like beer? Homebrewers is a game all about being a home brewer and in a home brew club where you are trying to brew the best beer to get points at Summerfest and Oktoberfest. You do this by getting ingredients, putting them on your beers, brewing those beers, and then each ingredient has some power of some sort, it might be you get $2, or you could move up another beer on how well you can brew it, it all depends on the ingredients that you have on the beer. So if you’re smart with how you do it, you can brew one beer to influence more or to make things easier. It’s a nice engine building game that gives you a lot of fun options and things you can do, and it also plays well at two players.

Status: Played

Hues and Cues

Final game for the letter H, Hues and Cues is a fun, new, party game from The Op, formerly USOpoloy. What I like about this game is that it’s a different kind of party game. In so many you are trying to make people laugh, or something like that by what you do or write, Hues and Cues challenges you to give good one word and then two word clues to get people as close as possible to the color you want. I like that you want people to guess right, but also for the players, guessing close works as well. But you can’t just say something like Sky Blue, as that tells you that the color is some shade of blue, but your one word clue could be sky, so what do people consider sky, or maybe you give a clue that has people going in the wrong way, you then can give another clue to get people closer again. It also works pretty well via Zoom, just everyone should be looking at a monitor to get the colors as close as possible to each other.

Status: Played

What’s your favorite game from the G’s and H’s? Is there one that stands out as one that you’d want to try or one that I should try that I don’t have in this letter range?

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100 to 91

90 to 81

80 to 71

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

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

70. Marrying Mr Darcy

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

Last Year: 98

69. Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game

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

Last Year: 55

68. Carcassonne

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

Last Year: 90

67. Clank! A Deck-Building Adventure

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

Last Year: Not Ranked

66. Dice Forge

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

Last Year: 53

65. Cosmic Encounter

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

Last Year: 49

64. Parade

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

Last Year: 62

63. Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

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

Last Year: 59

62. Galaxy Trucker

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

Last Year: 56

61. Fruit Picking

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

Last Year: Not Ranked

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

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

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Let’s get to the list:

10 – Sword & Sorcery
This is a big dice chucking ameritrash campaign game where you take your group of heroes of old who have been brought back in the nations time of need. You get to level up, get new skills and attacks and generally be pretty awesome as you chuck dice and go through a pretty simple story. The game really gives you a lot of dice to chuck and a lot of cool abilities to use. Just in the base game there are plenty of characters to checkout and you can get a whole lot more in small character expansions or in the bigger box story expansions. This is probably one of the most classic in terms of story that you’ll find for a campaign. It is a bit fiddly, but the upkeep and monster actions are fairly simple and the story is small enough that you don’t feel like you’re spending all your time adjusting the board and looking up story elements in the book, but the initial set-up can be pretty slow.

9 – Risk Legacy
Probably the campaign that has the least amount of story in it. However, the board changes in a legacy style as you play and you can unlock things as new things happen in the game to create even more weird challenges. The story of this game really comes from the players as you face off against each other over and over again for points in this Risk based game that allows you to win not from taking over but by getting victory points for taking out your enemies bases and completing missions. Each game goes pretty fast, which is enjoyable, and you feel like you’ve gotten that Risk dice chucking combat done, but without it overstaying it’s welcome. Plus, unless an odd situation happens, you’re always going to be able to hope back into the game and possibly mess someone up and get back into contention, versus being eliminated. Not a ton of depth to this campaign, but a fun time.

8 – Star Wars: Imperial Assault
The Star Wars dungeon crawl, Imperial Assault offers you two ways to play. First, you can do it with someone running the empire and working within the game to create scenarios and a story that you play through. Or you can be completely cooperative and play through the game using an app that helps you with your book keeping as to everything the empire needs to do. This was the precursor to Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth in what it was doing with the app. The story is fun, and what I really like about this story is that it’s adjacent to the original trilogy story, at least out of the core box. So you don’t play as Luke, Leia, or Han, and you can’t kill of Darth Vader or the Emperor, but they might show up in your story as someone to help you or someone to run away from. It’s fun to see how they can weave that together and create a fun experience of a campaign.

7 – Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle
Another not that story driven one, Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, has you play through a campaign of the books, getting new threats that you’re raising to finish and new bad guys you’re trying to beat. This is a deck building game that builds on itself as you play more and more games of it, there are seven total games to play out of the base box, one for each book, and you gain new abilities and new cards to build you deck in each one. It starts out simple, but eventually has you focusing more into what you can do really well. You get to play the main characters the base box has Neville, Ron, Hermione, and Harry, and take them through their times at Hogwarts. A downside is that while the game is simple, the longer you go, the more bad guys you have to beat.

6 – Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game
One that I just got into recently but this game has so many things that I love. First, there is a digital component, not that that makes the game so amazing, but because it makes it more immersive as you’re trying to “solve” the case put in front of you. Then with that, you’re also using your own deduction skills, I really like using deduction and puzzling through things, even if I’m not great at figuring out the puzzle all the time, right away. There is so much going on in this game, story wise, that you feel like you’re in it trying to actually solve this case. It reminds me a bit of procedural crime TV shows, but you get to be the main characters. And while I’m not a huge fan of those shows, being a character in that show is fascinating. And while we were investigating, we were getting cards and things to be added into future cases because of what we’d studied before so out of the base box, with five cases, you develop a whole story as these cases tie together.

5 – Arkham Horror: The Card Game
Arkham Horror is an interesting one to put on the list, because as a Living Card game it’s getting new campaigns and parts to old campaigns pretty often. Out of the base box, you have a three part story where you do the first scenario and what you do in that causes changes for future scenarios. There is a lot that I love out of this game, first you get to play through a surprisingly immersive story for something that is done just with cards. You have interesting and different characters as well in the story. And even with just cards, they do wildly different things at times. Add in that you can do some deck building in this game, not during the game but before or between, you can develop the strategy that you want to take into a case, it might be a strategy of more fighting or more investigating, or blending and balancing the two depending on your style, and unlike some of these campaigns where eventually you’ll have played through it, this one is still getting new content all the time.

4 – TIME Stories
This one has less of a through story than a lot of the campaign games, but there are certain elements that tie it together. You are always worried about another time agency that is trying to mess with time and multiverse in it, and thus far, I’ve really enjoyed every scenario. I feel like they’ve managed to change them up a bit, and while you often have combat or things that are just rolling dice and hoping to get lucky, it does work very well. Each scenario has very strong story elements to it as well as you are trying to figure out a puzzle and an optimal path through the game to win, but with that, you’re exploring and uncovering elements of the story as well. I really like the fact that you are put into “vessels” and that’s how you time travel in the game, and sometimes, you don’t do well enough and your “vessel” dies, but jumping back into the past, you can join the game again and do another run to try and solve the puzzle. It can get a bit repetitive for some, but I haven’t found that to be an issue.

3 – Pandemic Legacy Season 1
Second Legacy game on the list, and I will toss in Season 2 as kind of continuation of this if you want more content. Pandemic is a great cooperative game where you are trying to cure diseases. Pandemic Legacy offers much of the same with that, but story and a changing and expanding rule set as time goes on. The game never feels too complex, but it is more challenging than the regular game. I really like how they manage losing in the game, you continue on if you lost twice in a month, and help you balance that out by getting more useful cards back in your deck that allow you to bend the rules. And the story, while not complex is good, and it has a nice twist to it. I don’t think that the twist was all that surprising, but definitely changes up the game.

2 – Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon
This game just screams epic campaign game. You get to level up and improve your character and you get to explore a massive story as you travel through the lands of Avalon. There are some things I really enjoy about the game, first is the story element. You get to delve into so much of a massive exploration journal and find out so much about the world. This is a dark world as well, and I really appreciate that the storytelling is set in that and that there is a survival element to the game as well. This can be a punishing game that makes you travel around places and do the same things multiple times, but that’s kind of the point of the game as you are traveling through this grim dark Avalon facing off against monstes, trying to hold the Wyrdness at bay by keeping Menhir lit, and struggling to find food. It’s played out over several chapters and you definitely don’t see everything in the game, so it’s a campaign you can come back to again and explore more to see if you can do better.

1 – Gloomhaven
My #1 game of all time, no surprise it’s at the top of the list. Gloomhaven just is a wonderfully massive game. It tells a good story, I wouldn’t say as good as Tainted Grail, but beyond that, the mechanics are amazing, I love the card combat and movement that you have in each scenario as you try and puzzle out what is going to be the best and what the enemies might do. And there’s just so much content in the game, not just scenarios, but also monsters to fight and characters to play as. I love that you have to retire characters at certain points, and that then gives you a new character that feels different from other characters, there’s just so much interesting things going on in the game and there are apps to help make it faster to get to the table that are great. I’ve talked about this a lot, so I’ll stop there, but it’s amazing.

One thing I’ll point out about this list, with the exception of Risk Legacy, all the games on the list are cooperative. It’s fairly rare for there to be competitive campaign games, that I’ve seen, though there are some out there with the likes of Charterstone, which is fun, and Seafall, which is long. But most are going to lean cooperative, so think about that, if you don’t love cooperative games and you want to play a campaign game. And I have a lot more to play and coming than I’ve already played. I really want to get the likes of Betrayal Legacy, Clank Legacy! and Aeon’s End Legacy to the table as well sooner rather than later, because all of those are campaigns based off of games that I already love. Also, I left Dungeons and Dragons off the list, because, I want to keep it board games versus adding in RPG’s which are great but different experiences.

What are some of your favorite campaign games? What are some that I should checkout?

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10 – Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle
Do you want to play through the Harry Potter books? That’s what Hogwarts Battle gives you as you can play from Ron, Hermoine, Neville, or Harry himself as you go up against he-who-shall-not-be-named. Though, you need to deal with the likes of Crabbe and Goyle, Quirrel, and others first. To do that, you need to build up your deck so that you can deal with the threats before the plans of the villains get too tough to deal with and you lose the game. The game grows in complexity as you advance through the various books until you get your NEWT’s and you can specialize your skills even more. And there are more challenges that you need to tackle. There’s even an expansion to add in some of the monsters that live in the forest and Luna as a playable character as well.

9 – Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate
D&D Theme here which is kind of odd to have a game that’s based on an RPG and Video Game. But there’s a game that is actually based on Betrayal at House in the Hill. In this game you’re going to explore the city of Baldur’s Gate and there are odd things going on, crazy events, and omens, and items. Eventually someone is a traitor and everyone is going to have to deal with their betrayal. You get that classic D&D sort of feel as you have all your different character classes that you can play and all of them do something special that makes sense for their class. The cleric heals, the wizard has magic missiles, and it’s a very fun time. While it is a big generic in terms of what people expect from fantasy now, the game is a lot of fun and more balanced than Betrayal at House on the Hill.

8 – Lord of the Rings
There are a number of Lord of the Rings games, this isn’t the Living Card Game or Journeys in Middle Earth, this is the game that came out in 2000. This one is all about playing cards in a such a way that you can complete legs of Sam and Frodo’s journey to Mount Doom to destroy the ring. It allows you to go on that journey and play as Pippin, Merry, or Fatty Bolger if you’re playing with five players. It’s fairly abstracted but overall a bunch of fun and punishingly hard as you reach towards the end of the game. The artwork in the game is beautiful and fully cooperative, though, there is a Sauron expansion where someone can control Sauron.

7 – Hats
Not all games with an IP are going to have a ton of theme to them. Hats is definitely one of them as you’re trying to create you best collection of hats. Now, that’s all around the Madd Hatter’s tea party and his hat collection and which hats you should be wearing, but it’s really a card based game where you are collecting hats and trying to set yourself up to score the best that you can. It’s a fun abstract game with a vague Alice in Wonderland aesthetic to it, but that’s about it. It’s a fun fast game that has some clever things around it when you consider which hats you’re trying to collect and which you’re playing down that might help your opponent. Definitely a stretch for an IP, but technically it has one.

6 – The Grimm Masquerade
There are a few of these that are using public domain IP’s. The fairy tale characters that you get in this hidden role game are all out there for anyone to use, but they are a theme that has been added to the game from a previous work. In Grimm Masquerade, you are at a masquerade, unsurprisingly, and you are trying to figure out who all the other players are. You do that by giving them gifts and taking a gift for yourself. If you’re Cinderella you want to get a glass slipper, but there is one that is going to be bad for you and if you get that, it outs who you are as a character and you’re out for the round. But you don’t have to just give gifts, you can accuse as well. And if you correctly guess who someone is, you get more points. There’s an interesting amount of strategy to this generally lighter style of game.

5 – Star Wars: Rebellion
Star Wars in a box, this game is all about playing that original trilogy and seeing of the Empire is able to find and destroy the rebel base or if the rebels are able to sabotage the empire’s plans and outlast them. You get to play with iconic characters and write your version of the trilogy. Maybe it’ll be Yavin that gets blown up or Endor. Will the rebels capture Darth Vader, or maybe the Emperor himself will be leading the Death Star into battle. It’s a big game of cat and mouse that takes a while, but it feels like a Star Wars movie each time you play it.

4 – The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game
Probably one of the more abstracted games on the list, the theme still comes through well, especially if you’re familiar with the books. You are taking your team of investigators, combatants, and possibly werewolves to try and solve the case from a given Dresden Files book. Each book has it’s own balance of advantages you can get, obstacles you can overcome, and most importantly cases to solve and villains to beat. If you can solve more cases than there are villains left, you win, but you might be dealing with the final encounter where you can use some abilities, but hope that you got things close enough so that with a lucky roll you can defeat that last villain you need to defeat or solve the last case at the last minute.

3 – Arkham Horror: The Card Game
One of two Lovecraft games on the list, and since you haven’t seen the other one, you know that it is going to be higher. This game allows you to play through scenarios, trying to avoid going insane and be able to solve the mystery presented before you with basically just cards and a few tokens. It has some good mechanics some of the randomness and mechanics, and I really like that you can tailor your experience where if you want to enjoy the story more, you can play on easy, if you want it hard, you can play at an extremely difficult level. It works well, with that, for like I said if you just want to experience the story or for learning the game, being able to play on an easier level.

2 – Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition
The second game on the list based around Lovecraftian mythos and they come back to back. Mansions of Madness just does a better job with it’s app integration for doing the book keeping of moving the story along nicely. In both of the cases, you can play very different types of stories, but they are all set in the Lovecraft mythos, or at least adjacent to it. Lovecraft’s works were less pulp detective than the Fantasy Flight Lovecraftian games are, but it still has some of the theme of the monsters, and a game that is just about madness and dread wouldn’t work extremely well, you need something for the players to do.

1 – Marvel Champions: The Card Game
Top spot goes to Marvel, this game a lot of fun, and it really uses it’s IP well. You have your superhero, Spider-Man for example, fighting Rhino. Well, if Rhino has been hitting Spider-Man too much, he can always flip over into Peter Parker, and Rhino will stop attacking and go back to scheming on his great plan to rob a bank. So it really feels very thematic and you come in with a web swing and kick Rhino to eventually beat him, it feels like you’re playing as Spider-Man. The art helps the theme as well, and even the graphic design on things like the “Tough” and “Stunned” cards have a great comic book look and feel to them.

There are a lot of fun games with good IP’s on them that don’t have to be a generic fantasy or sci-fi setting. A lot of these games, while some are a bit more complicated are going to be good things to get people who maybe aren’t big game players who really love a theme. I think that all of these are fun games, and I really wish, looking at the list, that I had some time to play some of them right now, but thankfully some of them, Marvel Champions, Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle can be played solo, or with Lord of the Rings, my wife enjoys that game as well. There are a lot of good games with IP’s now after it just being generic roll and move games.

What are some of your favorite games with an IP?

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This first list is going to be Deck Building Games, now on BGG, they combine pool and bag building games as well, but I’m only going to do deck building. However, it is going to include deck construction games as well. Because you are technically constructing the deck, it is just prior to the game, but it is also a large part of the game. I will call out those games. In deck building, you are constructing the deck to do something in the game, it might be getting victory points, it might be for buying more cards, fighting or many other things. Let’s see what my list looks like.

The List

10 – The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth
It’s a long title and an interesting game, a deck construction game, you start out with an archetype and some character cards. But you can play against type, so maybe Gimli as a leader and Aragorn as a tank, and between scenarios you can spend experience to level up the deck and get better cards. How you use the cards is interesting, most of the time you are looking for successes on cards, but you can also use cards for a more permanent ability, but the better the ability, more likely it’s to have successes on it, which means you want it in the deck for your challenges so that you can pass them. It’s a good mechanic because it makes so many decisions tough. Plus, there’s a campaign for it, and an app driven story, this is weaker than Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition for that, but the app helps so much, if you’re a Lord of the Rings fan, it’s definitely a game to check out.

9 – Dragonfire
I haven’t played this game as much as I’d like though I have played both Dragonfire and Shadowrun: Crossfire, which are both built off of the same system. I’m going with Dragonfire because that’s the one that I own. The game offers interesting scenarios and challenges for the players to defeat, and you start out with your class which means that you are a little bit better at something than others. You get to purchase cards to improve your deck, but at the same time, you’re trying to deal with monsters and avoid becoming exhausted or taken out. It’s a tough game that I don’t feel like I fully have a grasp on the strategy for it yet, but I like the deck building aspect and I think that it does some interesting things with leveling up your characters. Definitely a fun time to play, and while I like the Shadowrun RPG theme better than the D&D RPG theme, I think that both are fun, so either works, just depends if you want fantasy or cyberpunk.

8 – Magic: The Gathering
MtG was a game that I loved and I’d play all the time for a while, but unfortunately I don’t have a group anymore for it. But I still love it for the deck construction aspect of it. You could build all sorts of crazy decks, and I think, almost as much as playing it, I loved finding an odd card that didn’t have an obvious way for it to work, but I would figure out a way to create a deck around it. Sometimes they were cool decks, and sometimes they failed horribly, but it was always fun to experiment. And then we got into commander which adds a challenge of only having a single copy of a card in the deck and a 100 yard deck, so there was always something new to try and build. I miss playing it as often sometimes, but it’s a classic and extremely popular game for a reason. It’s also addictive to open packs once you get into it.

7 – Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle
This is just a fun game as you get to play through the books, getting further in your education and improving your deck. You get to sling spells, get friends to help you and try and defeat everyone. The game starts out pretty simple, and I like that, because it can continue to add in mechanics and rules and cards for each book that you go to, which makes it more thematic. It does get longer the further in you go because, while you are theoretically getting better cards the longer it goes, in the later chapters, you’re dealing with the villains from the first books as well as the ones from the later books so that number always increases. But Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle is just a good deck building game and a good theme that will draw people in.

6 – Ascension
This is the most generic deck building game on the list. In it, you have a basic starting deck, you get to buy more cards that allow you to buy more cards or fight monsters that show up. You can combo things together with card draw and constructs, and that’s probably the only unique bit is that you have constructs that you can play out and they stay out while heroes go into the discard at the end of the turn. So you can vary your strategy by either going construct heavy or maybe hero and attack heavy or buy heavy. Each of them gives you a chance to win because you get points for killing monsters, but you can also get points for getting cards and some constructs are worth a lot of points. This is my preferred introduction to deck building.

5 – Clank! In! Space!
Some games take themselves seriously, but Clank! In! Space! is not one of those games. You’re an adventurer/thief, stumbling around Lord Eradikus’s spaceship, trying not to make too much clank so that you don’t get tracked down and knocked out. The cards are all references to other sci-fi things, and it just works really well. It’s a deck builder where you have a few different types of cards that can combo together to create some epic turns, if it shuffles out right, plus it’s push your luck with deck building as well, because you can go further into the spaceship to get a better treasure, but it’ll take you longer to get out and Lord Eradikus might get you before that happens. But if he doesn’t, you’ll be in a much better spot to win. The game is light fun with good replayability.

4 – Aeon’s End: War Eternal
Aeon’s End: War Eternal is such an interesting deck building game that gives you a chance to not have to worry about the randomness of your deck. When you buy cards, they go into the discard, when you spend your cards on a turn, they go to the discard, but cards that you spend on a turn, you can sort those. That’s not a big deal if you’re shuffling the deck, but you’re not, when you run out of cards, you just flip your deck, so it gives you the ability to potentially set-up hands. Add in the game play, which has an interesting spell casting mechanic where you need to prep them, tough monsters to fight, and a town to defend, the game gives you so much replayability just out of the base box and then there is more in expansions and other editions. It’s just a nice twist on deck building that works really well for my style of play, plus it’s cooperative.

3 – Arkham Horror: The Card Game
Another deck contrusction game on the list, Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a great experience creating your character so that they can investigate, attack, or deal with whatever might come up better for a given story. And then you get to take them through a campaign, so it’s not just a one off game, so between games you get to improve your deck so that you’re more prepared for the next part of the story. And characters, depending on their skills will be able to use certain types of cards better or will need help on some skills, so will need more of those cards in their decks, you can really tailor your investigator how you want.

2 – Marvel Champions
It was hard to know where to slot this one in, it’s deck construction, so you build your deck before the game, but it is so much fun. I’ve been writing about it a bunch recently, and it just works for me, all it’s missing is a campaign, which we’re getting. In it, you play as a superhero who is taking on the likes of Rhino, Ultron, or Green Goblin. What makes this work and be an interesting deck construction game is the different archetypes. So you could play someone like Spider-Man with defensive cards in his deck to keep him standing longer without having to flip back to the Peter Parker side, or you could be aggressive hoping to end the game faster. It gives you so many options when you’re constructing your deck. It just feels like taking your superhero up against a villain who has some grand or small scheme.

1 – Xenoshyft: Onslaught
Why is this my favorite, it’s actually fairly low rank on BGG, but the game is just a ton of fun, and I think it does some interesting things for a deck builder. You are never short money, which is nice, but when you buy cards and you are creating your defenses to stop an alien bug attack on your mining base, you can help other people as well. So you build up your defenses, but you can also help build up others, so even if someone has a bad card draw, you’ll be able to help them, or vice-a-versa. It’s just an interesting thing that makes the game feel even more cooperative in it’s nature and not something that you can do in many other deck building games. Plus, you’re blasting alien bug monsters, and I’m always down for that.

I’ve left a few games off of here that do have deck construction or deck building in them because I think that, while it’s important for those games, t here are other things that are also as big a part. Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon is one of them, but that one is a story driven survival game with deck construction being part of how you level up. The same goes for Gloomhaven, you can improve your hand of cards versus a deck there, but you can improve your modifier deck as you level up. I wanted to go with games where the deck construction is a huge part of the game. I think with the exception of Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth, though you are using the deck for everything, you do need to really focus on the deck building part of the game.

There are a couple of notable deck building games that aren’t on the list. First, Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game, I just find that game to be okay. I think that there’s so much in the game now that it can be hard to keep track of everything and you can pretty easily end up with a less than ideal combo of heroes that don’t synergize as well as they could. If that happens, you just get stomped, and I feel like that is pretty common for that game. Dominion also didn’t make my list, and while I know that some of these games, if not all, wouldn’t have existed without Dominion, it doesn’t make Dominion a good game. It’s a pure deck building game, I’ll give it that, but it’s not thematic and it’s not nice to look at, and because it has a static market, someone who has played it more or played with a certain combo is going to be at an advantage because they know what to build immediately, and there’s always an optimal strategy. I like games that make me adjust as I go and stretch me that way, and I don’t think Dominion does that.

What are some of your favorite deck building games? Are there any, based off of what I like, that you think I should check out?

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Most of these games are going to be pretty simple and easy to play with a range of ages and are often called introductory games. While, if you are a seasoned gamer, these might be a little bit lighter than you’d want to play all the time, but it’s a good compromise with family who might only want to play very light games or “classic” games like Uno and Monopoly.

Carcassonne – This game can actually be a bit more challenging for new players when it comes to placing out their meeples. When do they do it, where should they do it, how do farmers even work? But the tile playing piece is something that is very easy for people to pick up on and fun for people to do. It’s a fun game for that tile laying aspect, and once they have down the basics of the scoring, and scoring at least towns and monasteries are easy to understand, Carcassonne is a good game for the whole family.

Castle Panic – This game skews a little bit younger, but maybe you have a younger sibling or niece of nephew who you want to get into gaming or a grand child. Whatever the relationship might be, Castle Panic is a fun game. It’s simple as to how it works, it’s cooperative, so you can all plan out things together and that makes it easier to teach as well. Definitely, once they start to get the idea of the game hang back and let them take the lead, but this tower defense card game is a lot of fun, and easy for younger kids to pick up. There is also My First Castle Panic for even younger kids.

Century: Golem Edition – I picked this one over the normal version, Century: Spice Road, because the gems in this game are cooler than cubes in Spice Road. It’s a pretty simple game of collecting gems, getting cards, using those cards to get other types of gems, and turning in gems for golems. This game has a bit more going on to it, but the turns are very fast, and since you can only do one action per turn, it makes it easier for people to figure it out as they go along. The table appeal is great for this game as well.

Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger – Now, this one is completely different and might be too silly for some people in your family. But in Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger, you are going through chapters of this story, making choices and rolling dice once in a while to see if you can complete a challenge. This is really a story telling game, and it would be an easy one to play just sitting around a living room without needing a table. This game is light, easy and cooperative.

Dice Throne Season 1 – This game is just silly in a very different way than Choose Your Own Adventure. This one is also about the opposite of a cooperative game as you’re having different contestants fight against each other in a dice chucking game. But it is also familiar because it’s yahtzee style rolling, just with more added onto it. It would be a fun one to face off different characters against each other and see who can do the best. The games also play fast, so you could do a small tournament if you wanted and had the right group. The art in the game is also fun, and the dice are great. I’d recommend the first season of the game though, as the second season has more complicated characters.

Draftosaurous – Draftosaurous is a game that I’ve only played once, but it was a ton of fun when I did. In it, you are drafting dinosaur and scoring them in different ways. The ways are simple and you can easily explain them as often as you want in your game without slowing down the game. Plus, the dinosaurs are meeples, which look amazing. So it has a cute factor going for it as well. The game also plays very quickly, so you might end up playing a few in a row. But the game isn’t so simple that people will get board with it fast.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle – People will be drawn to games with an intellectual property (IP) that they recognize. And Harry Potter is a very popular IP that most people are at least familiar with, even if they haven’t seen all the movies or read all the books. This is a deck building game, so it has a little bit to teach with deck building if people aren’t familiar with it, but the first few games, which have bad guys from the first few books, keep the game simple so that people can understand it. Eventually you get more complex things, but by then, people should be familiar with deck building enough that more won’t complicate it for them. It’s a good fun game, and has a little bit more than some other games.

ICECOOL – This one, if you’ve followed my top 100 and my thoughts on the game, shouldn’t be a surprise to you. Icecool is a great family game that anyone can play. Even younger kids can play with only possibly needing to make the rules simpler just for scoring, and go with more of a tournament rule style. This game is just about flicking penguins around and having a silly good time. If you want to play it on a table, you can, if you want to play it on the floor you can. Adults might find it a bit too simple, but it is meant to be silly fun more than a strategic match.

Just One – Yes, it showed up on the stocking stuffer list, but it works well here also. It’s a cooperative party game, and instead of just pulling out the old ones at your parents or grandparents place, Just One offers something new. The game play is easy and the components are nice. The concept of the game is also easy to teach. This game should work well in most settings and with a wide age range, from Grandma and Grandpa to your 10 year old cousin.

Lost Expedition – Another cooperative game, but I really think that for family weight games, cooperative games are great. They are good introductory level and for people who might not like conflict in games, they work well. Lost Expedition is all about going and trying to find the lost city of Z. However, there are plenty of challenges you have to get through each morning and evening as you hike. If you don’t ration out your resources, you might die before they get there, but with some clever path construction, you can rush to the end before you run out of resources. The game is quite easy to explain and the artwork is nice. This game also helps keep alpha players from running the table.

Machi Koro – I’m not going to suggest any Machi Koro in particular, but if you think people will like the game, I recommend the legacy version. For me, that game seemed to play faster than the base game and being able to make the game unique to the person who is getting it, that’s something that is cool and most games don’t do. This is a tableau building game, but you can more easily explain it that you are trying to build up the best town by getting buildings and building monuments. Turns are pretty fast in Machi Koro, especially when people start to become familiar with the cards. And the cards are pretty simple, so it shouldn’t take too long. While not my favorite game, it’s a good one that is easy to teach to a lot of different levels of players.

Pandemic – I’m sure you expected this one to be on the list, but it’s a good and straightforward cooperative game. It’s also one that even if people aren’t gamers, they might have seen before. It’s also challenging enough that the person you give it to won’t get bored with it or beat it too often right away. And when they start to, there are expansions that can be added to change up the game to make it more challenging. This game of player powers and curing diseases also has a theme that people will be able to understand quickly, even if the game is fairly abstract.

Potion Explosion – The toy factor to this game is high with all the marbles in it, but the game itself is pretty simple. You are collecting marbles to complete potions to help you get more marbles. The game play is simple just pulling out a marble, if like colored marbles hit, you get those marbles, and it can cascade onward. These marbles you then use to complete potions, and the potions give you more things that you can do to get more marbles. But the game is really about pulling out those marbles and letting them hit and getting a whole bunch of marbles when they keep on doing that. Turns are pretty fast, and the concept is easy to grasp, especially with so many app games doing something similar.

Sagrada – A game about making stained glass windows, this looks great on the table with translucent dice that actually help make it look like stained glass. Another drafting game, this one you are taking dice that match specific colors or numbers to try and fill in your stained glass windows. The scoring for the game is pretty simple, and while there are some powers that are a bit tricky, there are plenty of simple ones you can start with, and I often choose those for the first game. The concepts are simple, like numbers and colors can’t go next to each other orthogonally (in rows and columns), and you have to place the die you drafted next to another one, diagonally or orthogonally. Definitely one that most people will pick up on fast.

Second Chance – Another one from the stocking stuffer list, but this is my roll and write (or flip and write as the case might be) for the list. Second Chance just works well because of the Tetris like shapes and people understand trying to fill in an area as much as possible. It is pretty solitaire as what other people are doing won’t affect you, but the game is pretty when it’s completed and a fast game to play. Generally I don’t see people only playing a single game of it, you at least play two, one for each side of your sheet before being done.

Small World – Another classic modern game, Small World is an area control game where you get points for all the areas that you have and other scoring, such as what type of area you are in. It’s a silly game that can be a bit mean, but the nice thing about how this game can be mean is that if you are almost kicked off the board, you can go into decline, get a new race next turn and go onto the board. That’s the only tricky part about the game, in my opinion, knowing when to go into decline and understanding that it is your whole turn. The combinations of races and powers are what then make the game stand out, because who doesn’t want flying halflings or maybe seafaring dwarves. You never know what combination you might get or want.

Sushi Go Party! – Now, this is a bit more complex than just normal Sushi Go, but because of that complexity, if offers variability which will keep it coming to the table longer. In the game you are drafting different types of foods to create the best meal and scoring points over three rounds. Depending on what type of food it is, it’ll score you points in various ways. Maybe you want three sashimi to get 10 points, but will get three of them, whereas tofu scores you points for two of them, but if you get a third, you don’t get any points, because you don’t want to fill up on tofu. The game can take a little bit to get into, but if you play a pretty basic set-up to start, people will catch on fast.

Ticket to Ride – The Train Game, as a lot of people call it, is a classic family weight game where you’re trying to complete various routes. This game has a little bit of strategy in it, mainly in picking your routes to help create the longest route, but beyond that, it’s collecting sets of cards and building your train routes. What works well in this game is that the rules are simple and you only do one thing on your turn. This helps people not be bogged down by all the options available. While this game doesn’t have a ton of variety in the base box, there are other maps you can get for it that’ll change up how the game works once you’ve played through the base game enough. But this one is a good one to add to parents or grand parents collection and play once or twice a year around the holidays.

Wits & Wagers – Final game on the list, and other party game. This one is my favorite trivia style party game, because you don’t need to be great at trivia. You just have to know, who in the group, might know the answer or be closest to the answer, without going over. All the questions have answers that are numbers, so you put down your answer and then bet on what answer you think is right. If you are correct, you get your money back plus some, depending on how close to the middle it was, so you can bet on your answer, if you think you are right, or you can go with the person who you think might know more about it than you do. It’s a fun and sometimes funny game that is good for a whole family and because of how it works, can play with younger kids.

Now, there are so many more family games out there. I left some off the list that I like, simply because I had something similar on the list. Dice Throne could have easily been left off the list for King of Tokyo that has a similar mechanic, but I also wanted to provide some different options as well. Hopefully you can play some of these with family or friends over the holidays, and maybe give them to them as a gift so that they can introduce them to their friends and grow the board gaming hobby.

What are some of your favorites from my list? Is there a game that you’ve found works well as a gift?

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