Catch Up on the Top 100 Games

100 through 91
90 through 81
80 through 71
70 through 61
60 through 51
50 through 41

Top 100 Games (of all time) 2025 Edition – 40 through 31

40. Sushi Go Party!

Published By: Gamewright
Designer: Phil Walker-Harding

Buy Sushi Go Party!

Sushi Go and Sushi Go Party! are classic drafting games at this point. And I think with the fun theme and artwork more welcoming than other bigger group drafting games like 7 Wonders. In this game you draft a meal over three hands of cards. You score points for the sets of cards you get, depending on how those cards score. So an example is for each pair of tempura shrimp you score five points. Some might not score you points, though, if you get too many or too few of them. So it’s a fun changing strategy with lots of cards drafting game.

39. Ninjan

Published By: Helvetiq
Designer: 6jizo

Buy Ninjan

This little game I thought wasn’t going to be that interesting, but I really enjoy it. It’s rock paper scissors. But you don’t play against the other players, you play against a central set of cards. And if you beat a card you take that one and those are the points you get. The trick is that some points are negative. So if all the cards are negative in that middle display, you don’t want to beat them and take a card. It makes some some interesting choices and a lot of fun moments of trying not to get points.

38. First Rat

Published By: Pegasus Spiele
Designers: Gabriele Ausiello and Virginio Gigli

Buy First Rat

The moon is made a cheese, you’re rats so of course you know that to be true. And you want to get there. You do that by collecting resources to build up rocket parts and get your ratstronauts ready to go to space. This game is all about figuring out how you want to score and then optimizing that as you move your rats up tracks gaining resources and other things. I like how there is a variety of ways you can go about it in the game, and the theme is just great.

37. Let’s Go! To Japan

Published By: Alderac Entertainment Group
Designer: Josh Wood

Buy Let’s Go! To Japan

Second new game on the list Let’s Go! To Japan is one that I backed on Kickstarter but played first on BGA. This is another drafting game, I really enjoying drafting. In this game you want to create your best trip to Japan. And each day you have a certain goal you go for. So it might be food one day or cultural events. As you draft cards and plan your days you try and line that up. As well as you try and get the best scoring for each day that you can. There are a lot of fun things with how this drafting work. And it’s just fun to see your trip when you are done.

36. Guild of Merchant Explorers

Published By: Alderac Entertainment Group
Designers: Matthew Dunstan and Brett J Gilbert

Buy Guild of Merchant Explorers

The last new game on the list is Guild of Merchant Explorers. This is a game with a roll and write feel but uses cubes for that. You are creating routes across your map and filling in areas to get points and create trading posts. I love how simple this game is, everyone has the same map and you flip a card and you place a cube or cubes on that type of terrain. But then you get special cards that make you different in each era and games start to go in very different ways. Plus the treasures which always feel like they should be better than they are, but I always want them.

35. The Isle of Cats: Explore and Draw

Published By: The City of Games
Designer: Frank West

Buy Isle of Cats: Explore and Draw

This is one of the highest roll and write games on the list. The Isle of Cats: Explore and Draw is a really fun game where you are rescuing cats from an island before the bad guy gets there. And to do that you pick a column of cards to activate. Some of those columns are just cats and you add them to your ship trying to create groups of cats. Others might have scoring objectives, so it’s this fun balance of determining how you want to score or maybe you need more cats to make your scoring work. All this while having a polyomino puzzle on your board.

34. The Isofarian Guard

Published By: Sky Kingdom Games
Designers: Eric Bittermann, Sean Craten, David Yanchick

Buy The Isofarian Guard

The Isofarian Guard is one of two bigger story games on the list. And I think you’ll find that a lot of the bigger story games are towards the top half of my list. I love this type of game. And The Isofarian Guard has a lot of fun bag building as you level up characters. Then you explore and enjoy a big story while hopping into combats and using that bag building to battle the bad guys. It’s interesting how there are multiple campaigns with different guard members that all happen during the same time period. That is unique to the game.

33. Forest Shuffle

Published By: Lookout Games
Designer: Kosch

Buy Forest Shuffle

Some games give you a ton of points and Forest Shuffle is for sure one of those. In this game you build out a tableau that is your forest and surround the trees with flora and fauna. Every tree, every animal and every plant give you some benefit in some way. And your goal is to optimize is the best you can. Maybe you go all in on butterflies, or you get a bird card that scores more for other birds. You need to figure out your best scoring.

I need another paragraph to talk about the game because the card play and end game are so good. In the card play you spend cards from your hand to play cards, and that is always a tough decision as to which cards you might not get to play. And the end game is great with three winter cards in the bottom third of the deck. When you hit one or the second one, you know the end game is coming soon and you need to get cards played.

32. The 7th Citadel

Published By: Serious Poulp
Designer: Ludovic Roudy and Bruno Sautter

Buy The 7th Citadel

Another story and campaign game, The 7th Citadel creates a really unique world of necrodruids and monsters that you avoid, fight, and challenges to complete. With a map that you build out each time you play, you explore new areas and directions to get through the scenarios of the story.

And how you do your combat or challenges is really enjoyable. Each character has a deck of cards. And you draw from that deck trying to get the right stars to line-up. You can draw a lot of cards, but if you do, you’ll run out of cards sooner. So maybe you draw fewer, or maybe you really need to pass, so you draw a lot but then spend health to get more back. But of course, when you spend health that is putting you closer to death that way.

31. Star Wars: Unlimited

Published By: Fantasy Flight Games
Designers: Jim Cartwright, Tyler Parrott, Daniel Schaefer, Jeremy Zwirn

Buy Star Wars: Unlimited

The only TCG on the list is Star Wars: Unlimited. Though I’ve been loving Magic the Gathering again as well. But Star Wars: Unlimited is just an easier game to play. The actions being so simple and a back and forth one action and then one from your opponent is great. I also like the two theaters that you fight over, ground and space. Granted you can also just direct that damage at the base as well to try and take that down because that is how you win. And there are a lot of good synergies for building if you want to be a force user, a Mandalorian, or a Rebel, etc.

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 Ninjan?

Like i said, Ninjan is a game of rock paper scissors. So the normal winning hands work in this game, but there is more to the game. You play the game over nine rounds, and the person who wins the most points is the winner of the game.

How Does a Round Work?

In Ninjan you deal each player a hand of ten cards. Those cards will be the ones that you play rock paper scissors with against three cards that are set out in the middle of the table. Each card is going to have a symbol and a number on it between 10 and -6. Each player picks a card to play.

The player who played the highest value card is going to go first. They take one of the cards from the middle that they beat and replace that card with their new card. That continues for each player going in numerical order and then if there are ties on numbers the “stronger” card goes first. So in a tie between rock and paper, since paper beats rock, paper goes first. In the case of a three way tie, it goes rock, scissors, paper.

Once every player has played out their cards, each player plays down a new card and you continue until you have a single card left in your hand and total up your points. But what if you can’t beat something because you didn’t play a winning card?

What If You Don’t Beat Anything?

So what is going to happen if when you come to your turn you have a paper and there are no rocks out there? You add your card to one of the piles. So you might make a pile better with a positive point card, or you might make it worse if you played a negative point.

What Doesn’t Work?

There is luck in this game for sure. I’m going to say this more as a neutral thing, but for some people it is not going to be fun because there is a bunch of luck. You get dealt a hand. If you find that you have a ton of a single suit and are locked out of getting points some hands. And especially at lower player counts since you see a smaller percentage of the deck, that might be the case.

What Works?

Firstly, the game is simple and easy to understand. Everyone knows rock paper scissors so they understand how that works. That means I can teach this game in minutes and people will understand what is going on.

But the game also has more depth than you might think. If you are playing a game and it’s a good rock out there, or maybe two, but you only have low papers, the other players might fight over the rocks. So if you play a really low, negative value, scissors and they play out paper, you might be able to grab a good point card of paper. That changing middle section is really interesting to work with. And there is more strategy to the game than first appears.

I also like that the game is one hand of cards. I think the first game that you play might go twenty minutes. And with a full five players it might be twenty minutes all the time. But because everyone picks a card at once, there is little downtime and the game keeps moving. And I think that negates the negative above because it’s over so quickly. I think you could even play in ten minutes if people are on the ball and not overthinking everything.

Who Is Ninjan For?

Ninjan is going to be for people who want a filler style game. It is purely that and it is one that I think is going to have great success for me for game nights. Why, because people know how to play rock paper scissors so that is going to be easy for them learn and understand. And it scales from 2 to 5 players which is going to make it a good game as people who up.

Grades and Final Thoughts on Ninjan

I went into Ninjan expecting to think it’s just an okay game. The concept of Ninjan with rock paper scissors is so simple. And my expectation was that I would find there wasn’t enough going on in it. But I enjoy Ninjan a lot. The little addition of scoring and playing against that center board versus playing against other players makes it a good time.

Now, I’ve only played Ninjan on BGA thus far. So I suspect it is going to work in person well as well. Mainly because I think that a lot of people will enjoy and get into it when they sneak out a card before someone else can take it and stick them with negative points. Or it could be the heartbreak of being one number short. Or it could be the smart play of throwing down a -6 of scissors and snagging a 10 of paper with it.

My Grade: B
Gamer Grade: C
Casual Grade: B+
Luck (out of 10): 5
Strategy (out of 10): 3

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