Catch Up on the Top 100 Games

100 through 91
90 through 81

Top 100 Games (of all time) 2025 Edition – 80 through 71

80. Rock Hard 1977

Published By: Devir
Designer: Jackie Fox

Buy Rock Hard 1977

Do you want to be a rockstar? Rock Hard 1977 is all about being a rockstar and the designer is legitimately a rockstar. In this game you place out workers in day, evening and night activities that help take you from garage band playing little local shows to playing sold out stadiums. The player who can make the journey the best is going to be the winner of the game. And each part of the day is going to let you do different things, in the day you might record a record, evening perform, and night go hang out at a club.

79. The Night Cage

Published By: Smirk & Dagger Games
Designer: Christopher Ryan Chan, Chris McMahon and Rosswell Saunders

Buy The Night Cage

I like a good spooky game. The Night Cage gives you that spooky feeling by creating tension as you race to get out of an every changing labyrinth. Can everyone get their keys and get to a portal before the candles run out and the players are lost in there forever. That counting down of tiles as they leave the board and new ones are placed out as a timer is great in this game. And it is spooky, which is hard for a board game to do.

78. Cthulhu: Death May Die

Published By: CMON Global Limited
Designers: Rob Daviau and Eric M Lang

Sold Out on online retailers, look for sellers on the Board Game Geek Marketplace or eBay.

Maybe your spooky is better with lots of giant monsters and a scenario where you know an elder being is going to come eventually. Cthulhu: Death May Die, called CDMD or Death May Die in the hobby, is a big game with minis and madness. You want to push your insanity up a little bit so that you unlock new powers and abilities to defeat the ancient horrors. But too much insanity and you knocked out of the game. This is a good beer and pretzels sort of game.

77. Captain Flip

Published By: PlayPunk
Designers: Remo Conzadori and Paolo Mori

Buy Captain Flip

Moving on from the spooky games, we have Captain Flip. This is tile laying game about filling up your pirate ship with crew. Every crew member is going to give you points, positive or negative, in some way. When you draw a tile you see one side. Then you decide do you want to place that onto your ship, or do you want flip it? If you flip it you are stuck on that side and have to put that down. It’s this balance of optimizing your score, playing out pirates, and pushing your luck as you flip the tiles.

76. Cartographers

Published By: Thunderworks Games
Designer: Jordy Adan

Buy Cartographers

Cartographers used to be my Top Roll and Write style game. Now it is dropping a bit, some because there are so many roll and write games that I like, and some because I haven’t played it recently. But I really enjoy this one and really enjoy making a map. I like the interactivity of the monsters who I play it on my opponents board in the worst spot possible for them. And I like how you score four different things, but depending on the season you score two and the season determines the two. It’s one I need to play again.

75. Letter Jam

Published By: Czech Games Edition (CGE)
Designer: Ondra Skoupy

Buy Letter Jam

Do you like word games but it seems like some people are just better at them? Letter Jam is a cooperative word game, so everyone needs to work together. In this game you don’t know the letters or the word you have. But everyone else can see one letter of yours at a time, and you can see one letter of everyone else’s. You all need to give good clues of words so people can figure out what their letter is. Say you have an “O” if I give a clue that shows you that the word uses the letters “FR[your letter]M” you can figure out what it is. But everyone needs to figure theirs out and figure out their word.

74. Can’t Stop

Published By: Eagle Gryphon Games
Designer: Sid Sackson

Buy Can’t Stop

Can’t Stop is another push your luck game to make the list. I like a good push your luck game like this one, Push, or Flip 7. They are easy to teach and play. In this one you want to get to the top of 3 columns. If you do that, you win. How do you do that, well, you roll dice and then split them into two pairs of two. The twist is that you only move up on three numbers per turn. So I might roll and get a combo to make ten and eleven, if I am not going up on ten or eleven, I lose my progress. But if I play it too safe, I lose.

73. Under Falling Skies

Published By: Czech Games Edition (CGE)
Designer: Tomas Uhlif

Buy Under Falling Skies

Do you like the movie Independence Day? Did you grow up playing the game Space Invaders. Under Falling Skies is a game that gives me the feel of both of those things. You need to research how to stop the mother ship while keeping too many of the smaller ships from making it to earth. And it uses an interesting die system. The higher the die, the more powerful the actions you can take are. But also the faster those little ships descend towards earth. I love that balancing act puzzle of the game.

72. So Clover!

Published By: Repos Production
Designer: Francois Romain

Buy So Clover!

So Clover! is a cooperative party game. It is one that is easy to teach in person and hard to explain. Basically you create a grid of cards that have words on every side. So you need to connect the two words per side with another word. Then everyone else is trying to get those words back onto the board in the right order, but the twist is there is an extra word thrown in. Plus often times the words are not easy to match. The better you do that as a group the more points you get.

71. Rallyman: DIRT

Published By: Holy Grail Games
Designer: Jean-Cristophe Bouvier

Buy Rallyman: DIRT

Finally rounding out this 10 is Rallyman: DIRT. This is another push your luck game and a racing game. In it you plot you course down the track and then get a choice. You either roll one die at a time which allows you to stop before you spin out and bad things happen. Or you roll all the dice at once. Why roll all at once? Well, when you roll all at once, you take negative one second to your time per die rolled. So you can reduce your overall time if you don’t spin out.

Join Next Week

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

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

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How To Play Rallyman Dirt

Rallyman Dirt is a rally racing game. What you need to know about that is that it’s not like Nascar or F1 where you have all the cars on the track at the same time. This is still about going the fastest, but blocking people and passing isn’t a part of what you’re doing.

Plan Your Route

On your turn you plan out your route. This means that you lay out your dice from gears 1 through 6 and two for coasting. You decide how many you want to use to create your route. You probably won’t use all of them because you need to hit certain speeds at certain corners otherwise you go out of control. And you still might go out of control because once you plan out your route you have a choice on how to roll your dice.

Rolling Your Dice

You either roll all out or you can roll a bit more safely and strategically. Why might you not want to do the safer option? Well, because you get a bonus if you go all out. When you go all out you grab all the dice from your route and roll them all at once. If you get three (or more) hazard symbols you’re going to lose control. So you plan back out your route, figure out where you lose control and draw negative things, which might be using fewer dice. But you get negative seconds for going all out.

Or you can roll more safely. That involves rolling one die at a time. So you decide when you want to stop and that means that you can stop before it goes out of control, but if you get two hazards early, you might still choose to push yourself further so that you can get a higher speed, because of your time, which I’ll talk about next.

Your Time

After you roll your dice, you get your time. This time card is going to give you a time that you add together at the end of the race. As well as it lets you know what gear you finished in. The faster you go, the shorter the time. In fact, if you’re in sixth gear, at the end, and you go all out with five dice, you get a 10 second card, for sixth gear, and negative five seconds for going all out.

Each gear is going to give you a different amount of time. But if you lose control, they are all (kind of) the same. If you lose control you flip over the card, from the gear you were in, and you get one minute added to your time. And then you draw out some tokens that might have negative effects.

Game Structure

The structure of the game is pretty unique. If you are the first player, you go twice in a row. That means that you should be far enough down the track that other people won’t catch you. Then the second player goes, but they go once. If you play with more than two people, turn order then goes back to the first player and then the second player before the third player. This is so everyone stays evenly spaced on the track.

You also can play a single race. But that generally puts the leader at a disadvantage. They go first to set the track, basically, and that means that their coasting dice are riskier than other players. So often you play a rally in several stages. Whomever has the fastest overall time at the end of a stage is the leader for the next stage and gets the riskier dice. This helps balance a couple of things. First it means you are less likely to get a runaway leader. But it also is meant to simulate how the first driver on a course won’t know it as well.

What Doesn’t Work

So, I think there are a couple of elements that might be a bit tricky for some players. First off the turn order is weird. It’s not a massive negative, but it’s an interesting thing to explain. I feel like it works best when I explain what rally racing is. Otherwise people thing racing, everyone is on the track at once. Nope, that’s not how this is going to work, and players need to understand that to some extent. It also means in a higher player count game, someone might be about finishing a leg of the rally by the time the last player is starting.

The dice are also a bit tricky to teach. Not too bad once you get into it, but there is a bit that needs to make sense about plotting out your path and seeing how far you go and how much you want to push your luck. And also the difference between the dice, or how you want to calculate the odds that you’ll crash or not.

What Works

Firstly, the push your luck works really well. I love to grab that handful of dice, probably five or six, and roll it and push my luck to get those negative seconds. Does it workout all the time, most certainly not. But I really like that element of the game because that’s where you get that high speed feel to the game.

I also really like how you need to plan out your movement. You know what the whole course looks like, and you know the speeds you want to hit. You want to go as fast as you can and as far as you can. But sometimes you need to think about how you can slam it into the corner, do you use the brakes to slow down faster? Of course, slamming on your brakes gives you more of a chance to lose control. It is important to figure out that rhythm for the track that is built.

The timing is another area that I like. I like how if you go out of control on a lower gear, it’s less bad. Sure it’s more time, but you draw out fewer potentially bad tokens. But even if you go far, ending in first gear as compared to even third gear is a difference of twenty seconds. So you need to play around with what gear you want to end up in, how far you want to go, and how it sets you up for future corners.

Who is Rallyman Dirt For?

Firstly, I think that people who like racing games will enjoy this game. But along with that, you can’t just like racing games, you need to enjoy push your luck. Yes, you might just be able to play it safe and get around without crashing. But if someone is pushing their luck and does that, they will have destroyed you with their negative seconds. So you need to be at least somewhat comfortable with that.

My Final Thoughts on Rallyman Dirt

I really enjoy this game. I want to quick talk about the BGA implementation of this. It’s great, with the caveat of it’s great on the computer. On a phone selecting which late you want to be in or if you want to be drifting when you can versus just driving hard into the corner, that’s hard to get clicked. But that’s only an issue with the game online and only on your phone.

In person the game is great as well. I do think that there are elements of it that are maybe slightly better online. Especially in a higher player count game, you might be sitting there for a little bit. But to race a whole rally, let’s say three games in a night, and determine the champion, that is a ton of fun. And Rallyman Dirt, while it gives you a lot of fun challenge with dealing with corners and other hazards, is really a beer and pretzels game. By that I mean you want to push your luck, you want to roll a big handful of dice and you want to see what happens.

My Grade: A
Strategy Grade: C
Lucky Grade: A

So I switched up my grading just a little bit. I am going from gamer and casual. While I like those metrics, not all people steeped in the hobby love heavy strategy games. Likewise, people who are more casually in the hobby might like strategy a lot. So I think that strategy and luck scores are better to let you know if it’s a game for you.

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How To Play Rallyman Dirt

The first part of the game that might be out of the normal is you need to build the track. You build out a course that you want, the box comes with some ideas for them, and you can start to race. Though, Rallyman Dirt is different than some other racing games.

Rally Time

Let’s quickly talk about how rally racing works. Cars are on the course not at the same time, or they are staggered in what order they go in. If you get caught, that is bad. And generally, a rally is held over several races, we’ll get to why that matters here in a minute. Just know that it isn’t a mass start from a starting line, like a gam like Heat or Formula D.

Planning and Rolling

So the first player grabs their dice. The dice number 1 through 6, a red die, and two yellow dice for the first player. Following players swap the two yellow dice for two white dice. You plan out your course next. You start in first gear and then move to higher gears. The higher the gear, the faster you go. Of course, you don’t always want to be in a high gear. You reach a corner and go to fast, it is going to go poorly for you.

Once you plan out your route, you roll the dice. You either roll them all at once, or one at a time. If you roll them all at once you geta time reduction in seconds equal to the number of dice you rolled. If you roll them one at a time you can stop whenever. The advantage to rolling one at a time is that you can avoid a crash or spinout if you go out of control, mainly because you know when you will potentially be rolling enough symbols to go out of control. And the leader is at a disadvantage. The leader rolls for their dice, two yellow dice, and those have a higher chance of a crash.

Turn Order

Another element I want to talk about is how turn order works. Because it goes out of order, in some ways. In a four player game, the first player goes twice before the second player. Then the first and second player go again before the third. This is to keep you spaced out on the course.

The Finish

At the end of the race you count up the time that you took on the course, you get a tile for each gear you were in at the end of each turn that makes up your time. And then you subtract time for each die that you rolled while going flat out. The fastest time wins that leg of the rally.

Then in order from first to last, you go on a new course. I like to play three races in a row, but how many you want to do is up to you. You even can do one race, but that means one person is at a disadvantage because they roll the yellow dice. At the end of all the races, and you adjust the order each time, the person with the fastest overall time is the winner.

What Doesn’t Work

I think that people will find it out, and I agree it kind of is, how the turn order works. But that is somewhat to simulate how a rally race actually works. But it is also to keep cars from bunching up. If you are following the leader, you don’t want to end up accidentally blocked, and it can happen. So you need to strategize your turns. Sometimes moving less is okay because you just go fast for a short distance and take a small amount of time.

What Works

Time System

The timing system in the game is clever. I like how you get a tile for the gear you were in at the end of each turn. So if you are going fast, it’s a gear with less time. I think gear six, you get 10 seconds added to your time. And if you go flat out, roll all the dice at once, you maybe reduce your time by another 4-5 seconds, depending on how far you went. But then you also need to slam it into lower gears often too.

I also like how the timing system doesn’t just allow you to stick in a high gear. Sure, I could stay in gear 6 as much as possible and move one to three spots a round, but that means that I’m taking a lot of those tokens. Sometimes it’s better to slam it into a low gear after moving a long distance so that you can really push how far you go. Because a slower time but further along the track means that you are taking fewer turns to get around the track, which means fewer time tokens overall.

Coasting

And the yellow and white dice are great. They are the coasting dice. Basically dice that let you maintain a speed. But if you are the leader in the race, you don’t know what is coming up. So while you aren’t going to be crashing all the time, the yellow dice increase those odds. And because someone has been on the course before, the white dice make it easier for you.

The Tracks

One element that I didn’t mention that I like are the hazards or obstacles on the track. You might have a jump, if you meet the speed total for the jump or are one higher you clear an extra space. Too much speed and you end up spinning out. Then there is water that you need to either cross in first gear or while coasting. And there are shortcuts on the tracks. Basically corners that you can hit and drift through a little area to make it even shorter and keep your speed even faster. Plus more elements as well.

And on the topic of tracks, I like how the tracks are just hexes. That means that you build the track you want. You want only big sweeping curves to keep the speeds fast, you can do that. You want a really technical course with a lot of hazards, sharp turns, and some shortcuts, you can do that as well. Or you pick from the tracks in the book that make up a three race rally and go you from there and play those. The game gives you a lot of freedom.

Simplicity

Finally, I want to talk about the simplicity. It is easy to understand what is going on. You don’t need to spend a lot of time learning about how gears work, what all the steps are that you check or anything like that. You literally place the dice onto the track to plot out how you are going to be going. And because you can only hit each gear once per turn, you don’t play with a ton of choices. At the start, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, coast and coast is a reasonable turn that everyone will do.

But as you get further along the track and as people spin out or run into issues or try different lines, the race really changes up. What it never does, though, is bog you down with too many choices. It’s set the dice out based off of the gear you ended the previous turn in and see how far and fast you can get.

Who Is Rallyman Dirt For?

I think Rallyman Dirt is a game for people who like dice chucking, but not just dice chucking and see what happens. There are definitely some fun options in terms of strategy with how you plan out your gears, when you try and push it as hard as you can, and when you go flat out and roll and when you roll one die at a time.

If someone is looking for a very technical racing game, this isn’t going to be it. But for people who want a fun game, a beer and pretzels style racing game but one that isn’t just luck and chaos, this is going to be a good game.

I also think this is a good game for people who want a racing game. This and Heat: Pedal to the Metal offer pretty easy to understanding racing without it feeling like a kids game or a luck fest. And I appreciate that I lot, and I think a lot of people will like it for that reason.

Final Thoughts on Rallyman Dirt

I like Rallyman Dirt a lot. I think that probably comes across easily with how long the section is for elements that work. For me, I know that I like a lot of racing games. And while I already own and play a number of racing games, this one still has a spot on my shelf because it feels like it does something different. The time trial element to it is great. I love connecting a few races together as well to face a bigger challenge.

The flexibility of Rallyman Dirt is great as well. I like how I am able to set-up or race on a track that is unique or different every time. Or maybe I want to do a rally on prebuilt tracks. There is a lot of variety in that. But also with the dice play, it has the flexibility for new gamers to jump into a game. I think that with the turn structure it even helps out with that more. When I teach the game I am going to be the first player, I am going to take the bad dice. Why, because I go twice before anyone else does, so they see how turns work in the game.

Rallyman Dirt is going to easily go into a rotation of racing games for me. I know I want to play more Heat: Pedal to the Metal. And I like games that are goofy like Titans Race, Tiny Turbo Cars, and PitchCar as well for racing. But this one lands in a great spot for me. Now I need to play my heavier racing games as well.

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

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Often times, though board games find trouble when it comes to doing racing games. Part of a good racing experience often times is the tension at the end. Did I do enough to win? Can I get that last second pass in? I want to get that feeling from a board game. So let’s talk about what games give that experience for me the best.

Top 5 Racing Games

5. Tiny Turbo Cars

Let’s start with one of the more unique games on the list. Tiny Turbo Cars is an RC racing game. You play with a controller and everything. Except this is a crazy racing time as you race across a house and try to be the first one to launch across the finish line. I enjoy the house theme for this game. I find that it makes the game feel different.

But the biggest element that makes the game feel different is the real time element. And I appreciate that you get a burst of real time and then it’s not. So, like a Galaxy Trucker, it isn’t just doing things in real time all the time. But for the real time you are programming how your car and move. It’s a slide puzzle and it’s great and challenging because you activate the eight symbols in the middle two rows. Mess it up and you might find yourself crashing, a lot. But that’s some of the hectic fun of the game.

4. Pitchcar

Next up is Pitchcar. This one is a dexterity game. You flick your car along as track as far as you can. But you need to stay on the track so you can’t go purely with power. It’s balancing launching forward all the time while hitting turns. There is skill to this game and the more you play the better you’ll get. But it also has a great element of, sometimes you just get lucky with an amazing shot. And when you are a few cars back half way through the race and you hit that shot to catch up, or you got stuck somewhere and you blast through, people get excited.

I like that about the game because I want you to do well. Not better than me, but I want you to do well. And there is an excitement about the game that is heightened by the fact everyone is standing up. The experience is just a little bit different in this game when it comes to racing.

3. Dungeon Kart

Now, maybe you want a Mario Kart style of game. Dungeon Kart from Brotherwise Games is going to give you some of that feel. It’s a bit like Tiny Turbo Cars in that there are certainly a good amount of chaotic elements to the game. But this one makes the game simpler than that one is.

In this one you get a car and a driver with a power and what you are better at. You want to race around the track, collecting spells and using them to keep yourself in the front. You blast someone, well, that might be good, but there is no guarantee that will stop them from catching up and blasting you next turn. But it isn’t just pure chaos. You also need to plan out your movement because some lines are shorter, but is it worth it for hitting the brakes and going across grass?

2. Ready Set Bet

I only put one mainly betting game on the list. Others like Long Shot: The Dice Game and Downforce could hit the list as well. But I went with Ready Set Bet because it is a racing game that has stand-up moments in the game.

In Ready Set Bet one player is calling the game each race. And that is just done by rolling dice. Everyone else is betting in real time. You want to end up with the winning horse paying out well for you. But so does everyone else. So if the seven horse gets out to an early lead is that enough for you to go all in there? Or do you want to risk it for bigger odds on a less likely horse? I’ve seen horses in from every lane, so it’s crazy chaos.

And at the end of the game after all the bets are done, the players stand around and a pulling for certain dice rolls. There is actual tension to the game as it wraps up which I find amazing. How can just rolling some dice create so much excitement?

1. Heat: Pedal to the Metal

Finally I want to add Heat: Pedal to the Metal, probably the most popular racing game as of late. This one takes hand management and push your luck in a really fun way. The coolest element to me is how you need to manage the heat on your engine. As you push to go fast on the straightaways and then need to slam on the brakes going into a corner, everything can heat up your engine.

So you need to know when to push it and build up that heat. When is it worth it to push around a corner faster than you should? It might cost some heat, but if you save a turn, is that a good enough reason to do it? That element of the game is just a ton of fun and a great puzzle to try and figure out.

Plus it makes sense, you push your engine too hard you risk running into issues. Or at least it is going to force you to cool down your engine. But if you can kind of hang out just by the leaders you can potentially draft past them at key times without exerting your engine as much.

Final Thoughts

I really like racing games. There are more racing games that didn’t make the list that I have really enjoyed or do really enjoy. The Quest for Eldorado might look like a deck builder, but it is a racing game where you are trying to build up that deck that let’s you race to the end faster than others. Titan Race has that Mario Kart feel to it and then the two that I mentioned with Ready Set Bet offer great betting and racing.

One that might make the list if I do it again in the future is Rallyman Dirt. This is a time trial race like rally racing is. And I really enjoyed my play, though it wasn’t a full game play at Gen Con. I think there are a ton of cool elements to it and the fact that you can do a series of races is also great. That one and Heat: Pedal to the Metal are ones that I’d love to do a race circuit of with friends to see who is the best racer out of all of them.

What are your favorite racing games?

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