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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What Didn’t I Like

So, I have one thing that I want to see how it works more consistently. When I played it was only at two players. I feel like two player play was just fine. Mainly because of the card drafting piece. When you draft, you pick two cards, pass your hand, pick two cards, pass your hand, pick two cards. That means you end up drafting 4 cards. You can manipulate a little bit what the other person gets but you don’t have much variety.

Playing two player I’d almost want to create a dummy hand of six cards or so. That would just make the drafting at two players feel more dynamic. Mainly I felt like I didn’t see enough cards. You are always going to end up being “stuck” with the last two cards. But if someone had a great hand or two great cards, you just don’t see quite enough. I think that with more players, this will be less of a problem.

What I Liked

Drafting

Now, while I did complain about the card selection in the drafting, I do like the drafting quite well. And some of that is because of how it works. You draft eight total cards, but you don’t have to keep all eight of them. In fact, you likely won’t. So even if you are not getting ideal cards one round, you don’t have to keep them all and clutter up your hand. Mainly because you pay for those cards with fish, but you also need fish to entice cats into baskets to get them on your boat.

This creates a really nice tension. Do I potentially get less cats one turn because I want to keep more cards? Or do I have a lot of baskets available so I want to keep a lot of fish around to get a lot of cats in a round. It’s a meaningful choice that can really affect scoring in a lot of ways.

Scoring

And scoring itself, I feel like, is a lot of fun. Because this is kind of a point salad type of game. By point salad, I mean that basically anything you do gives you points. If you put down a global scoring card, probably you’re doing that because it gives you points. Private scoring, more points. Cats of a color next to each other, more points. Rare treasures, more points. Covering up rooms, more points. You can see, there are ton of different point options in there. So while the cards or cats might not line up perfectly with your strategy, you doing everything for points.

What I Want To Try

Firstly, I want to play this game with more people. I am curious to find out if the drafting might just be a little all over the place or if more people helps make the drafting feel more even. I keep on talking about this, it doesn’t ruin the game for me by any stretch of the imagination. There are enough other things to do that work well, but it is something that I wan to mess around with more.

I also feel like there are strategies that I want to try as well. I went fairly heavily into collecting cats. That scored me a fair number of points, but private objectives weren’t one thing that I did much. Again, I didn’t have that many come up for me to draft. How might that change strategy, or could I push even more for cats?

First Thoughts

This is a fun game, I oddly enough get some simple Blood Rage vibes from it. Not that it’s area control, but just that it’s a drafting game that has so much going on with it besides drafting. I think that it’ll end up in that rotation for when I want to play a heavier drafting game but don’t want to go all the way to Blood Rage, or maybe I don’t have the right group for Blood Rage. Isle of Cats is obviously a much cuter theme and going to be more enjoyable for more people.

But I am still backing more stuff on Kickstarter, getting more ships, and even a cool looking Isle of Cats roll and write. And if the game sounds interesting, maybe consider backing it as well. Normally I wouldn’t talk too much about a big box, but checkout that big box in the Kickstarter. It isn’t needed, but the set-up of the game can be a bit slow. The insert in the big box is supposed to help make getting it to the table faster, and I feel like that’ll be nice.

Do you like Isle of Cats?

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