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
40 through 31

Top 100 Games (of all time) 2025 Edition – 30 through 21

30. Space Base

Published By: Alderac Entertainment Group
Designer: John D. Clair

Buy Space Base

This is a game that I should have played a long time ago. But it is one that left my collection and then I played it on BGA. Once I played it on BGA, I knew that I needed it back in my collection. Much like other games like Valeria and Mochi Koro this one is about activating spots based off of dice rolls. And then building up those spots so that you can activate more things. Space Base just ramps up in a much better way than those and offers some interesting choices and an interesting moment of when you change from money to points.

29. Symbiose

Published By: Subverti
Designers: Jeremy Partinico and Christelle Partinico

Not Available Yet

Symbiose is one of the new games on the list, in fact, I’m not sure you can get it in the US yet. But this is one I’ll be getting for sure. It’s a simple game where you try and get a two tall by four wide grid full of cards. And those cards are going to score you points based off of the other cards in the grid. But there is a simple twist that makes this work. You score your grid with the central four cards. But the ones to the left and right score your opponents to the left and right. And that is enough to make this a very fun game.

28. XenoShyft: Onslaught

Published By: CMON Limited
Designers: Keren Philosophales and Michael Shinall

Out of Print

I love cooperative and deck building games. XenoShyft does both of those things really as well as you build up your deck to fight off monsters. On the deck building side I like how you always get money to add to your hand. That means that you are always able to buy something which is good and rewarding. The other part is I can just give you a card, you need more troops, I can give you one. It is now part of your deck, and it’s not to the discard, it is straight to your hand. A very tough and rewarding game.

27. One-Hit Heroes

Published By: Wiggles 3D
Designers: AC Atienza and Connor Reid

Buy One-Hit Heroes

This one is a theme that I like a lot with super heroes, but it is doing something different. You are heroes who are glass cannons, kind of. By that I mean if you take a hit you are out, but the game gives you tons of ways to avoid them. So you need to manage your hand and what the enemy is doing. And each enemy is different and each hero is different, so there is a ton of replayability in the box. Plus you level up, so to speak, as you play and get to add in new cards to your deck.

26. Planet Unknown

Published By: Adam’s Apple Games, LLC
Designers: Ryan Lambert and Adam Rehberg

Buy Planet Unknown

Planet Unknown is one of my favorite planet terraforming games. In this one I love how you are covering up the planet and activating locations to move up on tech, and other tracks. The tracks are such a fun part of the game. And as you play the game more you play not with the starting abilities but with special ones. They make you unique, and of course there is the lazy susan. Being able to spin that and then pick where you want to pick from is great. You can set yourself up well, or you can try and mess over your opponents plans or ideally both.

25. Paper Dungeons

Published By: MeepleBR
Designer: Leandro Pires

Out of Stock

I think that this is the highest roll and write game on the list and one of the most complex that I play. Paper Dungeons is a “Dungeon Scrawler”, as they call it, where you level up heroes and explore the dungeon fighting monsters. But there is more than that, you need to manage your heroes health, make adventuring gear and find treasure. Of course, if you make it to the boss monsters that is another way to get even more points, but hopefully not at the expense of too much health.

24. Kingdom Legacy: Feudal Kingdom

Published By: FryxGames
Designer: Jonathan Fryxelius

Buy Kingdom Legacy – note, there might be an additional tariff related shipping charge in the US.

I was not sure about Kingdom Legacy the first time I watched a video on it, but the more I watched the more I liked it. This is a legacy game of managing your deck of cards by destroying cards, leveling up cards, or even adding new cards. And as you go through, you need to decide which cards are best used for upgrading and points and when to use cards for resources to level up others. It’s a nice balance of multiuse cards, and a challenge to optimize your score.

23. Ready Set Bet

Published By: Alderac Entertainment Group
Designer: John D. Clair

Buy Ready Set Bet

I like betting and I like racing when it comes to games. Ready Set Bet somehow combines the two of them into real time fun and stand-up moments. Personally I like both parts of this game betting and being the person calling the race. As you call the race, it’s just to get into it and keep the race moving and watch everyone else stand-up. As a better it’s all about trying to make the right bets the fastest. If you wait too long the best spots are gone, and if you bet too quickly you’re more apt to make bad bets. It sounds chaotic, which it is, but it’s also so much fun.

22. Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition

Published By: Stronghold Games
Designers: Sydney Engelstein, Jacob Fryxelius, and Nick Little

Buy Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition

Another game about terraforming a planet, Ares Expedition is a big engine building game of, well, doing a better job terraforming Mars. In this game it’s all about the action selection and how that works. I pick an action, everyone gets to do it, but I get a bonus for it. It might be a bonus of drawing more cards or a discount on building something. But then again, if my opponent(s) pick the same action, we all only do that action, and the other possible actions are skipped. So it’s always trying to guess what your opponent(s) will do to optimize your actions.

21. Hanamikoji

Published By: EmperorS4
Designer: Kota Nakayama

Buy Hanamikji

Finally is one of my favorite two player games. Hanamikoji is a game of trying to win the favor of Geisha by giving them gifts. Each one wants a certain gift and there is a limited number of them. You want to win the favor of four or eleven points worth.

But the biggest draw of this two player game is the action system. You only have four actions and you do one per turn and only once per round. They are simple actions like discarding two cards that won’t be used facedown, or putting one facedown that you’ll score. The other two offer a bit more with the “I Split, You Choose” mechanism in play, and makes you think about what cards you show your opponent for that.

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 Dedale

Dedale is a card playing game where you overlap the cards to create different rooms to trap the minotaur in. This is a cooperative game that is able to be played solo. And the turns are very simple, as you play one of the two cards, overlapping other cards in the labyrinth. If you complete the goal before all the cards are played, you win the game. If not, you can restart that level and try again.

Now, that is the vast majority of the game. But I want to touch on the one rule of playing out cards. The first thing is that when you play out a card, you must overlap. And while you still have cards in your draw pile, you must overlap a square that matches the color of the square on the back of a card. So the game controls where you are able to play cards. When the draw pile runs out, you place your card however youw ant.

And let’s talk really quickly about what a level looks like. In one level you need to get torches in a row and then that room closed off. Another one you want to have only a single color in the room with the minotaur. And as you go up in level the difficulty level gets higher.

What Doesn’t Work

The difficulty is inconsistent in the game. And I don’t just mean with the leveling up. I think that the new levels are basically always more challenging. And I haven’t beat all of them yet. But because it is card draw there is a higher element of randomness to the game. And the more players you play with, the more random it is going to get. So as a solo game the first five levels might be extremely simple, but at three or four players way more challenging.

And I don’t think that the challenges are all that fun in the game. So each level provides something but it’s really a lot of variation on the same themes. And I think there is a missed opportunity. Everything is always, trap the minotaur in a room with a certain condition. Why not make it, give the minotaur a single path with a certain condition? It is possible to have more variety than the game has.

What Works

Now, there are some elements that does work. Firstly, the challenges while not super exciting, they do level up nicely in difficulty. As a two player game, myself and another player on BGA were able to comfortably handle them going up to about level 6. At level 7 it became much more of a challenge. Though, see what I said about where the challenge comes from above.

The game is also simple and fast to play. A turn won’t take long at all. You know your objective so you simply go for that. And the limit on where you play is going to mean that you are limited in what you do. Even as the labyrinth gets bigger it isn’t too much.

Who Is Dedale For?

I think this is a fun game for people who like a puzzle of a game. If you want a challenge of a puzzle that isn’t an escape room game, but is a good puzzle, Dedale is strong that way. It is a bit more random than something like Relics of Rajavihara a solo puzzle game that I love, but it is going to give you that sort of feel.

Final Thought on Dedale

So, I want to compare Dedale to Relics of Rajavihara. And I think the big thing is that I sold Relics of Rajavihara and I bought it back because I want to do the puzzles again. It is just a fun experience to set-up the challenge and see if I can figure it out. Dedale on the other hand, having to replay a challenge starts to feel like a slog. The puzzles don’t do enough for me to generate a ton of interest in what’s happening and that’s a flaw for the game.

For a game that is a puzzle to try and solve, having randomness is not a good thing. And I also look at it as I think about games where I overlay cards. I own Grove and Orchard which I love. This one tries to do more with the levels and puzzle and just takes the fun out of the fast game.

Now, this is all pretty negative. And I don’t love Dedale. I don’t think it is a horrible game either. I think that it is mainly just a pretty boring game. And I think that there are better puzzle games out there or card layering games out there. So while I had some fun with it, the more I played it on BGA the less interesting it became.

My Grade: C-
Gamer Grade: C-
Casual Grade: B-
Strategy (out of 10): 3
Luck (out of 10): 7

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How to Play Symbiose

Symbiose is a simple score creating game. I’ll talk about what that means here and how it works in a second. You want to create the largest scoring grid that you can based off of the cards in your grid and the cards in your opponents grid.

On your turn you pick one card from the “river” of cards. These are four cards set out. Then you take one of your face down cards and put that into the river where you took the card from. And that new card goes into that spot. That is basically the whole game. But, of course it’s not quite as simple as that. Where you put that new card matters.

Each card has a few different things on it. It has a color and a symbol, these are snails, fish, or dragonfly on the top half. Then on the bottom half is scoring. Generally the scoring is going to be points for either a color or for a symbol on the card. Some cards don’t have scoring that depends on other cards and just gives you fixed points.

So, how does the scoring work? We have an idea, but there is more to it for Symbiose. When you play the game you have a two by four grid, two tall and four wide. The left most and right most columns score based off of what your opponents play out in their grid, on the left and right respectively. And then your two middle columns score for everything in your grid. Whomever creates the most symbiotic grid will score the most points and win.

What Doesn’t Work

This game has a level of luck to it. You start with eight cards face down and you flip one up randomly. Based off of the cards that are in play that game, you might never find a synergy to that first card. And the ideal cards for you scoring grid might be face down in your grid. So there is no way to know and when you flip cards what you’ll flip or if they will come back to you.

I also think it’s worth noting that the two player game is different. This isn’t a “not work” so much for me. But it is different. There is the river but it becomes a two by four as well. So you score off of that as one of your sides. Which makes it even more random because that is changing more often. In fact you might mess up your own scoring, or have to, in a two player game. So it’s more just be aware that the mechanisms are the same but the luck increases.

What Works

I love the simplicity of the actions in the game. Your turns go relatively quickly because you only have four a cards to take from. And I think it works well like a number of other games where at the beginning you have more choices as to where to place a card but it matters less. It matters less because your strategy will unfold as you go. In those final few turns it matters more because you know how you and your opponents are scoring. But your choices are much more limited.

This game is fast on BGA as well which is nice. But I think as quick as it is on there it is going to be an even faster game in person. This again comes because of the simplicity of the actions in the game.

I also really like games where you set your own scoring. It reminds me of Castle Combo in some ways, or Point Salad. But this is a little simpler, kind of. So that works well for me, you don’t need to be monitoring your cash to get cards or keys to move like you do in Castle Combo. So it’s simpler to table and play turns that way.

Who Is Symbiose For?

I think this is a game for people who like that building up of their own scoring. But beyond that, I think this is a great next step sort of game for a lot of people. The artwork is going to be fun for them as it’s nice art, and the game play is simple enough to learn. But it’s teaching and challenging them to new things.

Final Thoughts on Symbiose

I very much enjoy this game. I like a game where I create my own scoring and this one does so simply. And I really like that I need to pay attention to what my opponents are doing as well. This isn’t a highly interactive game, sure I could take something you want. But it’s better for me to score more points than to stop you from scoring points. But there is still that interaction because I want to use what you are scoring to my advantage.

And I also appreciate how fast the game plays. Which I think makes the game work really well for me as well. It feels like one of those smaller box games that is easy to add into the rotation. And while I love Castle Combo, one of my favorite games from last year, I think that Sybmiose will hit a similar spot in my collection and be easier to table. Is it a better game, I’m not sure, but it’s a game for a different and more common group.

My Grade: B+
Strategy: B
Luck: B

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