Before I get to the list, let’s talk about some of the criteria, if it’s mythological, is it fantasy? Generally, unless there is that more fantastical element that the game leans into, then I’d lean towards it being a fantasy game, but if there’s less of that, then not. Also, if I liked Dominion, it has a witch, it has curses, technically those are fantastical type elements, but Dominion is medieval and themeless, so it wouldn’t be on the list even though it has some of those fantasy adjacent elements. Or something like Lost Expedition won’t be on the list even though you have the Fountain of Youth and a werebeast in the expansion. Finally, if it’s clearly more of another genre and some elements are just fantastical at times, Betrayal at House on the Hill, for example, it won’t be on the list. Yes there are magical and fantastical things that can happen, but that is a horror themed game.

But with all of that out of the way, let’s get to the list.

10 – Ascension
Now, theme is going to be a bit of stretch for this game, not that it doesn’t have a fantasy theme, but that the theme really matters all that much. In this game you’re doing deck building and creating combos to buy better cards and then defeat monsters. So it’s kind of themed around your slinging spells, fighting horrific monsters, and playing out magical constructs, but it’s really much more just cards. That said, this is a really fun game, I love the changing market as people buy cards and defeat monsters new cards and monsters come out. There are different strategies you can take in the game, and while some are extremely powerful, depending on when you see cards it can really change up how things go. Definitely a fun one with a lighter fantasy theme.

9 – Village Attacks
In most fantasy games you’re playing the epic heroes who are going to be able to take on anything and everything. In this one, you’re playing the monsters who after a hard day dealing with uncooperative villagers just want to relax and enjoy their evening. Then the villagers show up with pitchforks and torches and they are just going to make this a long night, you know. And you must protect the magical heart of your castle where you are able to regenerate, because if you don’t and you die, you will never be able to come back. It’s a fun twist that uses a fairly horrific looking art style, but plays much lighter than it looks in terms of theme.

8 – Deranged
I’m really waiting for this horror fantasy game to come out. I think that this one walks the line more so than Betrayal at House on the Hill does. In Deranged you are fighting off monsters as you are trapped in this remote village, but not just because of it’s remote location but because a magical force is keeping you trapped in the town, but there is a way out. Unfortunately to leave, you cannot be cursed, and you are cursed. But if you die, you become a deranged monster which can help you stop someone else from escaping but is going to end up giving you more curses. This game has really interesting card play and was supposed to be coming out in the US quarter one, but I’m hoping will be coming out here in quarter two.

7 – The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game
I have already talked about that this is one of my favorite series, so I was excited for a game that let me play through the books in the series, and this one gives you that feel of the series. It’s tricky, you’re probably not going to win on the first try, and there’s luck to the game, and that’s a lot of how the books feel as well. This is straight up urban fantasy that leans into the fae and fae courts for some of it’s magical history as well as an interesting take on the 30 pieces of silver that were given to Judas to betray Jesus, and other fantasy elements, including unique vampires. The book series is amazing, and the game is good, but probably best if you’re a fan of the series.

6 – Dice Throne
You’ve been summoned to a tournament, the winner will get to face off against the emperor who has been undefeated for over 5000 years, I believe. Are you going to have what it takes to rise through the ranks? That’s the backstory for this game that is really more of a one on one dice chucking battle game where you could play a raging barbarian or a pyromancer slinging fire spells to a vampire or a cursed pirate. This one tells less of a story than a lot of fantasy games, more just pitting fantasy characters against each other to see who might come out on top. The quality of this game is off the charts, and the characters feel like they are unique even though a lot of what you are rolling for is similar, straights, matching numbers, etc.

5 – Arkham Horror: The Card Game
Hard to put on the list, but there’s another Lovecraftian game coming up. This one feels more investigative than it doesn’t fantastical, but you’re still fighting eldritch monsters and crazy cultists bent on summoning in elder gods to destroy the world. And you can sling spells if you want to or focus on more conventional means of investigating. And the system lends itself to going more fantastical or less fantastical, it’s up to the scenario that you are playing through. Definitely one that just made the list, but has strong enough elements of fantasy and in particular urban fantasy.

4 – Aeon’s End: War Eternal
You’re mages of the breech who are tasked with the job of defending the town of Gravehold against the mighty titans and their monstrous minions. Can you hold them off, this is a spell slinging cooperative game where each player plays as a breech mage. These mages are fairly standard looking, but have interesting powers and there are a lot of them in the base game. Plus, you get several Titans all who have their own different minions and schemes that you have to go up against. This game really is interesting and works well, the world that they’ve created for the series is fairly tightly focused but they’ve done a good job of creating lore around it, and I’m excited to try Aeon’s End: Legacy coming up here sometime.

3 – Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is not a magically heavy, but it definitely has heavy elements of fantasy with crazy monsters that have been warped by the Wyrdness, magical Menhir that are driving back the Wyrdness giving the humans a chance to survive in a little pockets. It’s a grim fantasy setting but I really have enjoyed how it can be dark, but not too dark, and that it is very hard. The story is well written as well, I say that some of these games have more generic style fantasy stories, but this one, even though it’s based on Arthurian legend feels fresh and unique and horrifying, but it always leaves you wanting to explore more and find out more in the world that Awaken Realms has created.

2 – Mansions of Madness: Second Edition
This one might surprise some people to be on the list, it’s not the epic swords and sorcery fantasy, but as the investigators, you can sling spells around, you are dealing with fantastical monsters, some from other parts of the universe or dimensions. There’s certainly an urban fantasy element to the game that shapes a lot of the stories that you get in it. And the whole idea of these Eldritch horrors is very fantastical in nature. I do think that you get more of a sense of adventure and investigation than you do fantasy from the game, but it doesn’t lean heavily into any theme more than the fantasy element to it, it’s just a different type of fantasy than what we normally think of.

1 – Gloomhaven
A big epic fantasy game in a box, Gloomhaven has a distinction of having it’s own original fantasy theme. Now, that’s not to say that some of the others haven’t done their own interesting things, but Gloomhaven is almost completely unique. The Cragheart, Quatryl, Vermling, and more are all unique to the world that Isaac Childres has created in the game, and that’s impressive to take such a big thing as world building and turn it into something that is specific and unique for a game the size of Gloomhaven. Each class and race feel unique and you get an interesting fantasy tale, I won’t say it’s the best written, but it’s good and the game play is great.

There are a lot of other games that I considered. Grimm Masquerade with it’s fairy tale theme just missed and Lord s of Hellas walks that line of fantasy and mythology and missed the list as did Blood Rage. One that I really strongly considered was TIME Stories. Why I kept TIME Stories off the list is that not all of the scenarios are really that magical. There’s definitely some of that, but Prophecy of Dragons is the main one that really leans into the magic.

Fantasy is certainly a popular theme in board games, and a popular theme in games that want to have that heavier story to it and even border on role playing, though if you want to go that way, you can just play Dungeons and Dragons, another highly recommended game. What are some of your favorite games with a fantasy theme? What are some that I should checkout?

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Will any of those movies make my list, you’ll have to see, but the big movies this year, for me, were primarily Marvel movies, and with #10MinMarvel podcast, I might like Marvel a little bit.

5 – Tucker & Dale vs Evil
What happens when a group of college students go out to a remote cabin to have a fun weekend? Clearly, the locals are going to attack them, but Tucker & Dale vs Evil does a fun twist on that. If you want a horror comedy film with some over the top deaths, this is a great film. Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk do amazing work in this film being the locals in this film, and how everything happens around them is great. I think that even if you don’t love horror, this is a film that it’s so on the edge of everything that you’ll like this film. If you do like horror, you’ll appreciate the tropes that they use throughout the film and how they subvert them often.

4 – Dog Soldier
Probably the least well known movie on my list, but one that I enjoy a lot. This is from Neil Marshall who directed the battle of the wall in Game of Thrones, or at least one of the episodes around that. He also has done The Descent which is really good as well, but Dog Soldier is my favorite. It’s not a big budget film, but it does horror well. What works well in this film is that it creates a limited area for the characters to interact with the world. So they are cut off, but more than that, they are stuck in a small area, and I think when horror films go too big with the world, it makes it less of a horror film, and that’s actually a trope that another film I like picks up on, see the honorable mentions below.

3 – John Wick
This was a new to me movie this year, and it was a lot of fun to binge through the series of movies quickly. But the first one is my favorite of them. The world in this movie and the sequels is cool, but what everyone is there for is the gun fu/gun kata action, and John Wick has some great action. There’s a scene at a club where there is a gun fight that goes across several floors and it works really really well. This film doesn’t have an extremely heavy plot, but it works well enough to get you into the action and Keanu Reeves is a lot of fun in this film. If you are looking for a straight up action film, this is one of the best that has come out recently.

2 – Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
I really enjoy this film in terms of a dumb pulp sort of film. You get a convoluted plot where you have a giant mystery that ties everything together. I really like the performances in this movie. Robert Downey Jr. does a great job especially in this film, and it’s before Iron Man. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is a lot of fun. It isn’t a deep film, but probably my most watched film of all time. I also like that this is a satire of the buddy cop genre of films as well, and done really well that way.

1 – Avengers: Infinity War
Now, as you’ve seen, I don’t have Endgame on the list. I think that the two movies are tied together so closely, that it felt a little bit odd putting them both on there. For me, Infinity War is the slightly better film. Some of it is that it doesn’t have that superhero ending, you end up in a bad place, and that is really interesting, without it being a super dark and depressing again, for a superhero movie. So you get something you’re very familiar with because it has that heroic feel, but at the same time, it subverts expectations. While it might not be the Marvel movie I want to watch the most, but for me, it’s the best Marvel movie.

There are so many good movies, I could easily do my top 5 Marvel movies and it would be pretty close to my top 5 movies of all time. I didn’t want to repeat anything on the list, but that’s what honorable mentions are for.

Honorable Mention:
Cabin in the Woods
Avengers: Endgame
Thor: Ragnorak
Dr. Strangelove
The Fifth Element
The Last Witch Hunter

As you can see, I really love the highly critically acclaimed movies, outside of superhero movies. My taste is really all over the place, but most of the time I just want to sit down an watch a movie that is fun, and not have to think about things too much, so that’s why t hings like The Fifth Element and The Last Witch Hunter make my list.

What are some of your favorite movies? Is there any crossover with my top 5 list?

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I’ve mentioned Urban Fantasy before in some articles, but I wanted to delve deeper into it and provide some more examples beyond my normal one.

Urban fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy in which the narrative has an urban setting.^[1][2] Works of urban fantasy are set primarily in the real world and contain aspects of fantasy, such as the discovery of earthbound mythological creatures, coexistence or conflict between humans and paranormal beings, and other changes to city life.^[3][4] A contemporary setting is not strictly necessary for a work of urban fantasy: works of the genre may also take place in futuristic and historical settings, actual or imagined.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_fantasy

I figure I can just drop in some Wikapedia knowledge to get the conversation going since they are going to define it basically the same way that I’m going to describe it. I would say that urban fantasy basically does always show up in a contemporary setting at least from what I’ve seen. But as they say it isn’t required, but it is extremely normal for it to show up in that contemporary setting.

The best way that I would describe it is that it takes a realistic setting, generally earth and our world, and then puts a twist on it. Whether it’s Fae creatures as in Grimm and The Dresden Files, to the weird London Below in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, there are large chunks of the normal world still there for the story. These twists on the world can be highly hidden such as in Neverwhere or sometimes very obvious as in The Dresden Files, though magic and monsters are still generally kept under wraps there as well.

What generally makes strong urban fantasy is the balance of normalcy with the absurd. You see the normal world happening around the characters and you often see the characters pining for or rushing headlong into the more magical aspect of the world. While I wouldn’t quality Harry Potter as Urban Fantasy since most of it takes place at Hogwarts, it does have some elements of urban fantasy, and Harry is someone who rushes headlong into the magical world because anything seems better than living in the space beneath the stairs. That compares to Grimm where Detective Nick Burkhardt is not all that excited to find out what else is going on in the world. It makes his job much harder and makes his life much crazier in ways that he doesn’t want. I think this really helps drive the home the humanity of the main character as you see the struggle. There is some Urban Fantasy, and Lost Girl is an example, where the main character, Bo, loses touch with her humanity seemingly as the series goes along. Now, a lot of that is just writing, but it hurts the show when the focus on that has been lost and it was stronger at the start of the show. They made some poor decisions in the show by trying to be edgy, but unfortunately the writing dropped off too much and the acting talent wasn’t up to snuff to pull it off.

When I think about it, I don’t think that there are many particular things that make urban fantasy strong that doesn’t make most other books, movies, and TV shows strong. It has to focus in on an interesting character with flaws and have an interesting plot to go along with it. Within that a good focus on the tension between the two worlds is generally one of the driving forces. Shows like Grimm and Supernatural, which isn’t pure urban fantasy, but is closely aligned to Urban fantasy, and book series like The Dresden Files, all the main characters are the gate keepers keeping the world of monsters and other scary things back and allowing humanity to live in blissful ignorance of what is actually going on. That tension, whether or not the main character is the gate keeper, is probably the thing that is most unique to urban fantasy as it’s the most consistent theme to it. However, it is certainly not a required part of urban fantasy or something that is only limited to urban fantasy.

So I’ve mentioned some of the examples of Urban Fantasy that I’m familiar with. There are certainly a whole lot more out there, and I’m always interested in finding more to read. So I’m going to ask for some suggestions and then give some suggestions of my own. If you have some that you’ve enjoyed, let me know.

The Dresden Files
My #1 recommendation. The books are very well done and Jim Butcher does a really good job of developing an interesting world with interesting monsters. The series starts off a bit rough as it was some of if not Jim Butcher’s first major writing experience. But besides that, it’s about Harry Dresden, a wizard PI in Chicago who is basically one of the only forces holding back hordes of darkness from not just consuming the city, but at times the world.

Grimm
I believe this show was met with mixed reviews, and I will say that there is some camp factor to the show and special effects. However, I liked the show. It is a bit monster of the week throughout a lot of it, but it does that well. The main character is interesting, and the creatures and building up of the world is quite interesting as well.

Neverwhere
Probably my first introduction to Urban Fantasy, though I might have read the first Dresden Files book before. Neverwhere is an interesting and crazy crafted world of the London Below. A normal human runs across a girl named Door whose life is in danger. After helping her, Richard Mayhew starts having changes in life, and he starts to disappear from the world. He finds out that he’s now moved from his normal life in London to being part of London Below.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer
One that people might not think about as it’s moved on from being part of the collective view, but like Supernatural, it’s a modern show with monsters. The reason that I would say this is more urban fantasy, at least as how I would qualify it, is that Buffy takes place in a single town of Sunnydale that just happens to be sitting on a hellmouth. It’s a classic show and one that does have a bad season or two in there, but is mostly very strong.

Just to do some more quick hits based off of what other places are calling Urban Fantasy that I’ve enjoyed:
Warehouse 13
Supernatural
Reaper
Stranger Things
The Librarians
All fun TV shows

Big Trouble in Little China
From Dusk Til Dawn
The Last Witch Hunter
The Librarian
Underworld
All solid movie choices, though a lot of them B-movies.

Little Witch Academia
Blood Blockade Battlefront
Ghost Hunt
Those are some anime options.

American Gods
Harry Potter
IT
Daughter of Smoke and Bone
Last two I would say are urban fantasy adjacent books. But I recommend all of these books.

So you can see that I’ve watched a lot, but what are some other recommendations especially in books and anime?

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