Rauha.

Rauha came out earlier this year through Hachette and is a sort of spiritual successor to Nidavellir, although there’s no formal connection between the two games, merely sharing some similar scoring and artistic elements. It’s a very tight game where you’re working in a small space and will have to make some difficult decisions to undo things you’ve done before, fighting the natural attachment you might have to moves you made earlier in the game. It was co-designed by Johannes Goupy, who’s had a slew of games come out in the last 18 months (Elawa, Rainforest, Orichalcum); and Theo Rivière, who’s worked with Bruno Cathala on such games as Draftosaurus, Sea Salt + Paper, and Naga Raja, and also co-designed The LOOP.

(I’m currently giving away a copy of the game via Instagram, entries due by midnight, November 5th.)

Players place one “biome” tile per turn on their 3×3 boards, taking 12 turns in total – so naturally they’ll have to cover some tiles with later ones, which is where things get difficult, although I’ll get to that in a moment. Each biome tile has several features – a terrain, an animal type, possibly a water source, and possibly a power/reward for when the tile is activated. After you place a tile, you activate the current row or column on your board indicated by the round marker; thus you don’t activate the tile you just placed unless it happens to be in the row or column for the current round. After every third round, there’s a scoring round you activate all of your tiles with “spores” on them; some tiles allow you to pay crystals to place more spores, and you’ll have to get at least a couple of those to be competitive in the game. Those scoring round also give points to the player with the most water sources. After twelve regular rounds and four scoring rounds, the game ends.

The tiles are a little complex, with a lot of icons to learn, which was one of the drawbacks I found in the game. There are four terrain types, three animal types, and water sources on tiles; most tiles have some kind of power when activated, although some don’t. The majority of tiles don’t cost anything to take, but some cost up to 5 crystals, and some tiles later in the game can only be placed in specific spaces on your board. Tile powers can include straight crystals or points, allowing you to trade crystals for points, allowing you to pay crystals to place a spore, or granting you points based on the number of tiles of a specific animal type you have. When you place three tiles in a row of the same terrain type or same animal type, you can gain a God that grants you a power when you gain it and again in the scoring rounds. You keep a God tile until someone else claims it by making the required pattern, even if you cover up one of the tiles in the pattern on your board.

Rauha packs a lot of game into a little board, and it’s extremely well balanced within those player boards. The terrain and animal types are just symbols with no additional powers beyond what you get from the God tiles, so they all function the same way. You’re really at the mercy of the tile draws and the draft in each round, though, and it’s way too easy to end up, say, never getting a water source to stay competitive in that category, which is one of only two ways you’re really competing directly with opponents (along with the God tiles). It’s not a planning game, although it looks like one. You can do a little preparation, placing tiles so that you can complete a row/column two different ways, but that’s about it. It’s still more a game of skill than of chance, certainly, but it’s the kind of game where the chance elements can drown a less skilled player. That’s a whole style of game that has its adherents. I’m just not one of them, I think.

Challengers.

Challengers is one of the hottest new games of 2023, and snagged a Kennerspiel des Jahres nomination already (along with Iki and Planet Unknown). I’ve played it a bunch. It sucks.

Challengers does two extremely annoying things. One, the biggest flaw in the game, is that it is deeply asymmetrical in a way that can leave certain players at a huge disadvantage. It’s a small-deck deckbuilding game, but you only get a selection of six cards in each round and can choose one or two. If you don’t like the cards, you can refresh the supply one time, but that’s it. Since those sextets are drawn randomly from much larger decks, you can easily end up seeing a strictly inferior set of cards to those your opponents see. That alone would be enough to make a game suck.

The other is that its core mechanics are totally unoriginal. It’s a flag battle, where players flip cards from their decks to try to match or top the defense value of their opponent’s last played card, and regain control of the flag. A battle ends when one player has to draw and can’t, or when one player has to discard but already has filled all six spots on their bench (one spot per unique card type). This is Magic: the Gathering stuff and every game that it inspired or that just flat-out copied it. It’s also a game where most of the cards have unique powers, which just reeks of plans for future expansions, and also increases the learning curve for new players because you have to learn what’s in all the decks. Some games do this well, like Wingspan. Challengers does not.

In Challengers, up to 8 players will build their decks, adding one or two cards in each round and removing as many cards as they wish, then doing battle with one opponent. Each battle’s winner gets a trophy worth some random amount of fans, with that amount increasing as the rounds progress. The players with the most fans after all seven rounds play each other for the championship. Since the battles take place simultaneously, the game doesn’t take any longer with 8 players than it would with 2, in theory, at least.

The cards you can add progress in strength and special powers, with three levels, A, B, and C. In the first two rounds, you can only add from the A deck; by the seventh round, you can only add from the C deck; and in some intervening rounds you might have a choice of two decks. There are also multiple sets (colors) in each deck, which can matter for cards that only work on cards of the same set, or that change power based on how many different sets are on your bench. There are some cards that let you remove cards that are already on your bench, which in my experience are the most valuable and coveted cards – but you can play an entire game and never have a chance to add a single one of these (Butler, Sorceror, Vacuum Cleaner, etc.). Some cards also let you gain additional fans regardless of whether you won that match, even giving you fans just for selecting the card.

There’s nothing terribly new here, and it feels more than anything like a game to make money rather than a game you’d want to play again and again. The asymmetry of it is just too extreme for me – the game is fundamentally broken. If I want extreme randomness, I’m pretty sure there’s a dusty copy of Sorry! somewhere in the basement.

As for the Kennerspiel, I’ve played this, and I’ve played Iki, but have only seen Planet Unknown, which I think is out of print at the moment. Iki is fine, although the game itself is several years old and just made it to Europe within the last twelve months, so it was Spiel eligible without actually being new (like someone getting a Best New Artist Grammy nomination for their fifth album). Planet Unknown looks fantastic, and I’m still hoping to snag a copy somewhere. The slate of nominees for the Kennerspiel and the regular Spiel just contributed to my general sense that the award has become too hit or miss for me to worry about. The 2022 winners, Cascadia (Spiel) and Living Forest (Kennerspiel), were fantastic and both worthy of the honor. The previous year’s Spiel winner was MicroMacro Crime City, a perfectly fine game that didn’t break that much new ground and felt like a larger version of something I might have seen in GAMES magazine as a kid. In 2020, the Spiel went to Pictures, a goofy party game; and the Kennerspiel went to The Crew, an interesting cooperative trick-taking game that wasn’t good enough to earn the award or complex enough to win the “expert’s game” honor. And so on – they get some right, but they might be batting around .500. The award still matters a ton for sales and marketing, so I’m not dismissing or ignoring it, but I don’t think I’m using the same criteria they are when it comes to thinking about games.

Explorers.

Phil Walker-Harding’s games are very consistently among my favorites for light to midweight games that you can play with the whole family. Gizmos, Sushi Go, Cacao, Silver & Gold, Super Mega Lucky Box, Imhotep and Imhotep: The Duel, Gingerbread House, Bärenpark … he’s got few peers in his space, and he’s had very few misses in his fifteen-year career as a designer. Explorers ($25 at amazon via that link) came out in the U.S. last spring – I saw it at Gen Con – and it’s another flip and write that I’d say is part of an unofficial trilogy of games along with Silver & Gold (polyominos) and Super Mega Lucky Box (numbers).

In Explorers, players will mark off squares on their maps based on the terrain shown on the tile flipped on each turn, trying to expand from the starting square to mark off specific squares that show rewards. There’s no benefit to marking off blank squares unless they’re adjacent to one of the villages on the map; otherwise, everything you do is in service of moving towards reward spaces.

The terrain tiles have two different terrains on them, with four total on your maps – water, desert, plains, and mountains. When a terrain tile is flipped, the active player picks one of the two terrains shown and then may mark off three squares on their map that match the chosen terrain. The squares must all be adjacent to existing X’s (marked spaces), but don’t have to be adjacent to each other. Then, other players may either mark two squares of that same terrain, or mark three squares of the other terrain. There are also a couple of terrain tiles that show split terrains – so water/mountain or plains/desert – but they work the same way.

In the basic game, you score points in four ways. If you cross off a key, you can then cross off any temple and score for it, with the points for each temple declining every time a player reaches it, from 12 for the first player to 6 for the last in a four-player game. After each of the four rounds, you score one point for each gem you’ve crossed off – so a gem you cross off in the first round will be worth four points by game-end. In each round, you can score 2, 5, or 10 points for your provisions crossed off in that round – an apple, a carrot, and a fish. You can only cross off one of each in a round. And you score points for how many squares you’ve crossed off adjacent to your four villages – 3, 5, 7, or 10 points for 1, 2, 3, or 4 squares.

There are other squares that give bonuses beyond points. If you cross off a horse, you may cross off any square on your map that’s adjacent to one you’ve already X’d, regardless of terrain. If you cross off a scroll, you circle one on your board. On a later turn, you may then mark that off to ignore the terrain tile and choose any terrain you like, even one on the tile, but now you can cross off four squares rather than two or three.

The game allows you to change the maps and scoring tiles every time out, but all players use the same map and tiles in any specific game. All four of the basic scoring tiles are reversible to an advanced side; for example, the advanced provisions scoring won’t let you cross off any in round one, then gives you points only for apples in round two, carrots in round three, and fish in round four. It also allows you to use up to three expert scoring tiles that function like public objectives in other games – scoring 10 points if you mark at least one square in every desert section, or scoring points for touching all four edges of the map, with the bonus declining each round until you get it.

The game is also easy to play solo, like most roll-and-write or flip-and-write games, although I’d say this is even easier than most: You just flip a terrain tile and choose the one closest to you as the active (3-square) terrain. After each round, you cross off the highest bonus for each temple you haven’t reached yet. That’s it.

If you like Silver & Gold and/or Super Mega Lucky Box, then you’ll probably like Explorers – they all have a common DNA, right down to the way you build the flip deck (here you shuffle all eight terrain tiles at the start of each round, remove one at random, and then flip the other seven). All three games have bonuses that you can achieve through the game, although this has less chaining than SMLB or games like the Clever series from Wolfgang Warsch. This game is very much on my wavelength for a fun filler, and it comes in a smaller box, although it’s quite heavy thanks to the thicker cardboard tiles and frames for your boards. I’d rank it bottom among those three games, but not by much, and I’d say it’s a tiny bit more complex to learn and play well than either of its predecessors. It’s certainly another hit from Walker-Harding, who’s maybe had one real miss among all of his games that I’ve played (Cloud City), and definitely worthy of a family game night.

Top 100 boardgames, 2022 edition.

I’ve done board game rankings here every winter for fifteen years now, and this is the seventh year when I’ve ranked 100 games, which is a small fraction of the games I’ve played in my life (which I think is over 500 by this point). The definition of a boardgame is nebulous, but I define it for this list by exclusions: no RPGs, no miniatures, no party games, no word games, no four-hour games, nothing that requires advance prep to play well. Board games don’t need boards – Dominion is all cards, played on a tabletop, so it qualifies – but they do need some skill element to qualify. And since it’s my list, I get to decide what I include or exclude.

I’ve put a complexity grade to the end of each review, low/medium/high, to make it easier for you to jump around and see what games might appeal to you. I don’t think there’s better or worse complexity, just different levels for different kinds of players. I’m somewhere between medium and high complexity; super “crunchy” games, as other gamers will say, don’t appeal to me as much as they might to the Boardgamegeek crowd. I’m way behind in my review queue as well, with something like 30-40 games here to try out, many of which I won’t crack open until after the holidays.

Here are the games that came off since last year: Seasons, Elder Sign, Villainous, The Isle of Cats, Xenon Profiteer, San Juan, Downforce, Air Land & Sea, The Taverns of Tiefenthal, Agamemnon, Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra, 7 Summits.

The games that just missed the list: Sagani, The Isle of Cats (the last cut, having made the list last year, and it might be back), Equinox, Splendor: Duel, Fantastic Factories, Fantasy Realms, Pan Am.

Notable items on my Shelf of Shame (meaning games I own and haven’t played yet): Meadow, Paleo, Dune: Imperium, Lacrimosa, Horrified, Oath, Cubitos, Village, Eos: First Continent. I could go on.

If a board game’s title is hyperlinked, it probably goes to the Amazon page for the game, and I would receive a commission from any sales there as a member of Amazon’s affiliate program. Links to Miniature Market or other sites do not generate any commissions. If you see a link is broken, or leads to a page with an outrageous price, please let me know – I’d rather not link to a price-gouging seller on Amazon or any site.

100. Furnace. Full review. A very tight engine-builder with a clever bidding mechanism – players bid special tokens on cards in the central market, and if they lose, they get resources instead of the card, which sometimes is more valuable than the card itself. You then line up your cards in order and execute their actions from left to right. You can also upgrade cards to flip them over to their more powerful sides. It’s a real thinker, not complex to learn but a game that will challenge you to piece a lot of things together in your head, from what cards to obtain to the order in which to place them. Complexity: Medium.

99. Living Forest. The 2022 Kennerspiel des Jahres winner, Living Forest has an addictive push-your-luck mechanic at its core, while giving players the choice of three different paths to victory: planting twelve different plants, extinguishing 12 fire tokens, or gaining 12 flowers. You gain these things through a deck of cards that give you points to do those things, but a third of your starter deck are night cards; if you draw three such cards in a turn, you bust, and only get one action on that turn instead of two. There’s also a spirits track where you chase the other players around (and they chase you) to steal tokens from each other and gain bonuses. I found it confusing the first two or three times I played, but now I love it and am actually not half bad at it. It’s currently out of stock everywhere and the publisher couldn’t give me a date for the second U.S. printing. Complexity: Medium-low.

98. Three Sisters. Full review. If I were to rank games based on how well their theme and their gameplay worked together, Three Sisters would be very near the top. It’s a roll-and-write based on the traditional farming method of indigenous American peoples who learned that planting corn, beans, and squash together would allow all three plants to thrive: beans fix nitrogen in the soil for the corn and squash, the corn gives the beans something to climb (increasing yields), and the squash provides ground cover to limit competing weeds. Players here roll custom dice and mark off a series of spaces on two sheets, one showing their fields and the other showing tools, fruit, and other areas where they can gain more bonuses to check off even more things. It’s a brilliant, tight design that works as well as the Clever! series but with the added bonus of a real theme. Complexity: Medium-low.

97. Super Mega Lucky Box. Full review. A great flip-and-write that will remind you of bingo, but in a good way, not in a dreadful childhood memories way or a “my grandmother used to play that at the senior citizens’ place” way. Players start the game with three cards that show 3×3 grids with single-digit numbers in each box, although it’s not just 1-9. There’s a deck of 18 cards showing the numbers from 1-9 (two of each), and you flip 9 of those cards in each round, crossing off one box with the number that’s flipped. When you finish a row or column, you get a bonus. It’s easy for anyone from ages 7 to 75, but you can also do better with a little strategy, too. Complexity: Low.

96. Morels. Full review. Morels is an easy-to-learn two-player card game with plenty of decision-making and a small amount of interaction with your opponent as you try to complete and “cook” sets of various mushroom types to earn points. The artwork is impressive and the game is very balanced, reminiscent of Lost Cities but with an extra tick of difficulty because of the use of an open, rolling display of cards from which players can choose. The app version is also very good. Most of these mushrooms are also delicious. Complexity: Low.

95. Noctiluca. Full review. Shem Phillips’ Raiders of the North Sea just fell off the list this year – it would be in the 101-110 range – so this is now his only game on this ranking, a dice-drafting game with clever rules on how you place your tokens to pick dice from a specific row on the board to try to fill out either of your two objective cards at any given time. The dice come in four bright colors and the turns move quickly, with the entire game comprising two rounds where you fill the entire board from scratch. There’s a solo mode that isn’t too bad, but it’s definitely best as a two- to four-player game. Complexity: Medium-low.

94. 7 Ronin: Full review. An asymmetrical two-player game with a Seven Samurai theme – and when I say “theme,” I mean that’s the whole story of the game. One player is the seven ronin of the title, hired to defend a village against the invading ninjas, controlled by the other player. If the ninjas don’t take the village or wipe out the ronin before eight rounds are up, the ronin player wins. But the ninja can gain a decisive advantage in the first four rounds with the right moves. It’s very clever, the art is fantastic, and the theme is completely integrated into the game itself. It also plays in about 30 minutes. Complexity: Medium-low.

93. Lost Ruins of Arnak. Full review. The perfect game for folks who want a little of everything – it has a little deckbuilding, a little worker placement, a little achievement track scoring, a little resource management – and are okay with a game that doesn’t offer a lot of any one thing. It skims off the top of various mechanics, but if, say, you want a real deckbuilder, you’ll be disappointed. Players have just two workers and will build small decks to determine what actions and how many they can take in each of five rounds as they explore ancient ruins, gaining resources and uncovering monsters to defeat, while also spending resources to buy cards and move two tokens up the extremely important research track. I do like this because it has a lot of features I love, and feels heavy even though it’s fairly accessible. Complexity: Medium.

92. One Night Ultimate Werewolf. Needs at least five people to play well, but otherwise it’s a great social deduction game that can really play in under ten minutes, especially with the companion app to help you along. Each player gets a role, and then everyone closes their eyes; one role is called at a time, and those players “wake up” and do some action. At the end, everyone opens their eyes and tries to guess which players are werewolves – while the werewolves try to deke everyone else out. Complexity: Low.

91. Cryptid. Full review. A really clever deduction game that looks like it’ll be a generic dudes-on-a-map title but actually asks players to solve a sort of logic puzzle. Each player has a clue around the location of the Creature on the map, relating to the terrain type, distance from a landmark, or proximity to the two animal habitats. On each turn, a player asks one other player if the Creature could be on one specific hex, based on the second player’s clue; if yes, the second player places a disc on the hex, but if not, the second player places a cube on the hex AND the asking player places a cube on some other hex on the board where the Creature could not be. You can use the cards and codebooks with the game but it’s easier to use the associated site at playcryptid.com to set up the board and give out the clues. Complexity: Medium-low.

90. Ark Nova. Full review. The best new heavy game of 2022, at least among those I’ve played (I hear good things about Carnegie, FWIW), Ark Nova takes the familiar theme of zoo-building but ups the ante in several ways, borrowing mechanics from Bärenpark and Great Western Trail and more to create an intricate game of tile placement, set collection, and card drafting that can take two hours to play but has fairly quick turns. One beautiful thing about Ark Nova compared to other games of similar weight is that it has just one resource, money, so your cognitive load to play this is lower than it is for games like Tzolk’in or Terraforming Mars. If you want to dip your toes into the water of more complex, longer games, this is a good choice. Complexity: Medium-high.

89. Broom Service. Full review. The Kennerspiel des Jahres winner for 2015, Broom Service is lighter than most games in that category, but still complex enough to be more than just a family-strategy game, although the theme appealed to my daughter and she didn’t have any trouble understanding the base game’s rules when she was nine. Players take on various roles to move their witch tokens around the board, gathering potions or delivering them to various towers for points, or collecting wands and clouds to gain other bonuses. There are multiple paths to win, but they’re all fairly straightforward; the role selection process is unique and takes some getting used to for younger players. It was a well-deserving winner, but requires a minimum of three players. It’s been out of print for over a year, unfortunately. Complexity: Medium.

88. Seven Bridges. Full review. Seven Bridges came out right before Christmas of 2020, too late for my best games of the year post, but it is one of the best roll-and-write games I’ve ever played, and certainly the best one that I would say is at all complex. The title refers to the Seven Bridges of Königsberg, a famous problem in mathematics eventually solved by Leonard Euler – could you walk a path through the city, crossing each of its seven bridges exactly once? (The answer is no.) Here, you roll dice showing segments of paths, and must fill out parts of the roads and footpaths on your personal scoresheet, showing a city map with those seven bridges. You get points for crossing bridges, passing monuments, and other achievements, and you can unlock bonuses on the left side of the sheet that can help you get specific shapes you need. It’s extremely easy to teach, but I believe it’s hard to master because of how many ways you can score. The first print run sold out; it’s unclear when the next one will be. Complexity: Medium.

87. Chronicles of Crime. A cooperative deduction game that uses technology in a new (to me) way – you can examine a crime scene by looking at a 360 degree image on your phone, moving the device around to look for possible clues and objects to investigate further. You scan codes on cards to try to get further clues to solve each mystery, eventually having to answer a few questions to get your score. I’ve only played this solo so far but it works extremely well as a solitaire game. Complexity: Medium-low.

86. Exit: The Game. Full review. The Kennerspiel des Jahres winner in 2017 is actually a series of games you can play just once, because solving their puzzles requires tearing and cutting game components, writing on them, and just generally destroying things to find clues and answers that will lead you to the next question, at the end of which is the solution to the game. You can’t really lose, but you can grade your performance by looking at how many game hints you had to use over the time you played. The various titles in the series have varying levels of difficulty, and some are better than others, but my daughter and I keep playing the newest titles and most are fun and engaging. I didn’t care for the one longer Exit game, The Catacombs of Horror, which I think got its length and difficulty from making some puzzles too esoteric or hard to solve. I tried one of the new Exit games with a jigsaw puzzle included, which made the game a little longer but I’m not sure it made it better, just different. Complexity: Medium-low.

85. Calico. Full review. A surprisingly hard tile-laying game with a cute (maybe cutesy) theme of cats and quilts. You place tiles on your board to create patterns that will match your objective tiles or attract cats to your board for points. Your individual board has a frame around it, limiting your options and making every decision critical – place the wrong thing at the start and you might make scoring points extremely difficult later on. There’s some luck in the tile draws as well, so even a good plan might not come to fruition, but without that randomness I’m not sure you could play this well with inexperienced players. Complexity: Medium, at least.

84. Galaxy Trucker. Full app review. I have only played the iOS app version of the game, which is just amazing, and reviews of the physical game are all pretty strong. Players compete to build starships to handle voyages between stations, and there’s an actual race to grab components during the building phase, after which you have to face various external threats and try to grab treasures while completing missions. It’s a boardgame that has a hint of RPG territory; the app has a long narrative-centric campaign that is best of breed. Complexity: Medium-low.

83. Cat in the Box. Full review. An ingenious new trick-taking game that draws its inspiration from the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, incorporating that concept – that something is unknown until it’s observed. Here, cards have numbers but no colors (suits) until they’re played, at which point you must say what suit it is, and then place one of your tokens on the shared board that indicates that that specific color/number combination has been played. Each player bets on how many tricks they’ll win at the start of each round, and if they nail their bet, there’s a bonus for contiguous tokens on the board at the end of each round. Most rounds end because someone can’t make a legal play, with four suits but five cards of each number in the deck, causing a paradox and ending the round immediately. It’s a simple rule set but highly entertaining both for fun and intellectual value. It’s between printings right now. Complexity: Medium-low.

82. Ecosystem. Full review. A steal at $15, Ecosystem works with 3 players but it’s great at 5-6 because you get most of the game’s 120-card deck, depicting animals or habitats, involved. It’s a card-drafting game where each player will end up creating a 4×5 grid in front of them of those cards, with each card type scoring differently, often based on what cards are adjacent to it or in the same row or even what cards are not near it. It’s easy to learn, very portable, and highly replayable. The new sequel game, Ecosystem: Coral Reef, is more of the same, about as good as the original but with a whole new set of scoring rules for its species. Complexity: Low.

81. Century Spice Road. Full review. A fun, light, family game that’s perfect if you liked Splendor and want something similar but that has at least a few little differences. The core engine-building component is very similar, but instead of collecting jewels to pay for cards, you collect goods to trade and acquire them by playing cards from your hand, eventually using a turn to replenish that hand with cards you’ve already played. You win by gaining enough resources to buy bonus cards from the table that will refresh as the game goes along, and there’s always a conflict between trying to grab a bunch of those early for a quick victory and going more slowly to gain higher-point cards. It’s not quite Splendor good, but it should appeal to everyone who liked Splendor already. The second Century game, Century Eastern Wonders, is a solid pathfinding game with the same resource ladder, but I thought the third game, Century A New World, didn’t work at all. Complexity: Medium-low.

80. Kingdomino. Full review. The 2016 Spiel des Jahres winner, Kingdomino is a great family-strategy game, perfect for playing with a mix of adults and kids, perhaps a little light for the adult gamer crowd, which I think the publishers are hoping to target with the standalone sequel game Queendomino. Players take turns selecting two-square tiles from the display of four, and then place them next to the tiles they’ve already played, trying to fill out a 5×5 grid without going over any boundaries. You score points for creating contiguous areas of the five terrain types in the game, scoring multiples if you have more than one crown in an area. It’s under $20 on amazon now, which is a bargain. The brand-new kids’ version, Dragomino, is also very good for players as young as 4. Complexity: Medium-low.

79. Root. Full review. Super cute theme and artwork, vicious game. Two to four players each play unique forest creatures, each with its own tokens, abilities, themes, and methods of earning points, while fighting for control of the forest on the board. Some species will battle in forest clearings; some do better with trade or building items; one, the Vagabond, has no troops, but runs around stealing stuff and racking up points for items and for creating alliances with other players. It’s a deceptively rich game in a theme that looks like it would appeal to little kids. The Dire Wolf app is great, as all their apps are. Complexity: Medium-high, due to the asymmetrical play.

78. Jambo. Full review. A two-player card game where the deck is virtually everything, meaning that there’s a high element of chance based on what cards you draw; if you don’t draw enough of the cards that allow you to sell and purchase wares, it’ll be hard for you to win. Each player is an African merchant dealing in six goods and must try to buy and sell them enough times to go from 20 gold at the game’s start to 60 or more at the end. I played this wrong a few times, then played it the right way and found it a little slow, as the deck includes a lot of cards of dubious value. It’s one of the best pure two-player games out there. It’s also among my favorite themes, maybe because it makes me think of the Animal Kingdom Lodge at Disneyworld. Out of print for several now. Complexity: Low.

77. Acquire. Monopoly for grown-ups, and one of the oldest games on the list. Build hotel chains up from scratch, gain a majority of the shares, merge them, and try to outearn all your opponents. The game hinges heavily on its one random element – the draw of tiles from the pool each turn – but the decisions on buying stock in existing chains and how to sell them after a merger give the player far more control over his fate than he’d have in Monopoly. There’s a two-player variant that works OK, but it’s best with at least three people. The game looks a lot nicer now; I have a copy from the mid-1980s that still has the 1960s artwork and color scheme. Complexity: Low.

76. That’s Pretty Clever! This game, originally called Ganz Schön Clever, is the best roll-and-write game ever developed. You roll six dice, each in its own color, and choose one to score. Then you remove dice lower than the one you chose, roll the remainder, and choose another to score. Do this one more time. Each die scores in a unique way on your scoresheet, which has five separate scoring areas (the white is wild, and also is paired with the blue die for scoring that color). It works extremely well as a solo game, or with two players, or up to four; you also get to choose one leftover die after each opponent’s turn. There are two sequel games, Twice as Clever! and Clever Cubed, but this is the best one. Complexity: Low.

75. Coffee Roaster. Full review. The best purely solo board game I’ve ever played, Coffee Roaster is exactly what it sounds like: You pick a bean from the game’s deck, each of which has a specific moisture content, and unique combination of green beans and other tokens, and has an optimal roast level. On each turn, you crank up the roast and draw tokens from the bag that you can then deploy to the board to try to remove any bad beans or smoke tokens while gradually increasing the roast level of the good beans. There are all sorts of bonus moves you can make to try to improve your results, but eventually you move to the cupping stage and draw (roughly) ten tokens from the bag, adding up their roast values to see how close you got to the bean’s optimal number. Like the caffeine in the beverages, the game is quite addictive, especially since it’s easy to score something but hard to get to that one optimal roast number. I have the original edition but Stronghold Games has brought it back in an all-new version new art. Complexity: Medium.

74. Fort. Full review. Fort has a kids’s game sort of theme, as players compete to build the best treehouse fort by attracting neighborhood kids to join their clubs, but it’s a game for more seasoned players because you have to make some long-term strategic choices to play it well. It’s a deckbuilder where you can take cards from other players for free any time they draw a card but choose not to use it on that turn – but they can do the same to you. The art is amazing, from the same artist who does all of Leder’s games (Root, Vast). Complexity: Medium.

73. Ingenious. Full app review. Ingenious is another Reiner Knizia title, a two- to four-person abstract strategy game that involves tile placement but where the final scoring compares each player’s lowest score across the six tile colors, rather than his/her highest. That alters gameplay substantially, often making the ideal play seem counterintuitive, and also requires each player to keep a more careful eye on what the other guy is doing. The app, which I owned and reviewed, is now gone from all app stores, because of a trademark dispute, although other versions exist. Complexity: Low.

72. Diplomacy. Risk for grown-ups, with absolutely zero random chance – it’s all about negotiating. I wrote about the history of Diplomacy (and seven other games) for mental_floss in 2010, concluding with: “One of a handful of games (with Risk) in both the GAMES Magazine and Origin Awards Halls of Fame, Diplomacy is an excellent choice if you enjoy knife fights with your friends and holding grudges that last well beyond the final move.” I think that sums it up perfectly. I haven’t played this in a few years, unfortunately, although that’s no one’s fault but my own. Complexity: Medium.

71. Power Grid: Full review. This might be the Acquire for the German-style set, as the best business- or economics-oriented game I’ve found. (I own a copy of London, but haven’t played it. Brass is pretty close.) Each player tries to build a power grid on the board, bidding on plants at auction, placing stations in cities, and buying resources to fire them. Those resources become scarce and the game’s structure puts limits on expansion in the first two “phases.” It’s not a simple game to learn and a few rules are less than intuitive, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a game that does a better job of turning resource constraints into something fun. I’d love to see this turned into an app, although the real-time auction process would make async multi-player a tough sell. Complexity: High (or medium-high).

70. Citadels. Full review. First recommended to me by a reader back in my first rankings in 2008, Citadels only reached me when Asmodee reissued the game in one box with all of the existing expansions. It’s a fantastic game for five or more players, still workable at four, not so great below that. It’s a role selection game where players pick a role and then work through those actions by the role’s number, with some roles, of course, that do damage to specific roles that might come later in the turn. It’s the best mix of a party game and a traditional boardgame I’ve seen. Complexity: Medium-low.

69. Glen More. Full review. Build your Scottish settlement, grow wheat, make whiskey. Sure, you can do other stuff, like acquire special tiles (including Loch Ness!) or acquire the most chieftains or earn victory points by trading other resources, but really, whiskey, people. The tile selection mechanic is the biggest selling point, as players move on a track around the edge of the central board and may choose to skip one or more future turns by jumping further back to acquire a better tile. Unfortunately, this game might be permanently out of print; it’s been replaced by a “sequel” game, Glen More II: Chronicles, which is longer, more complex, and a lot more expensive. Complexity: Medium.

68. Charterstone. Full review. Charterstone brings the legacy format to old-school Euro games of resource collection, worker placement, and building stuff for points, and unlike most legacy games, this is an original concept. Players all play on the same board but focus on building in their own areas, scoring points within each game by trading in resources or gold, achieving objectives, building buildings, opening chests (which is how you add new rules), or gaining reputation. At game-end, there’s a final scoring that considers how many times each player won individual games, and also adds points for things like the buildings in your charter when the last game was over. The board and rules change as the game progresses, with new meeples appearing, new ways to score points, and entirely new game concepts added, so that without you realizing it the game has gone from something very simple to a moderately complex strategy game that taught you all the rules as you played it. The base game gives you twelve plays to complete the story; you can buy a recharge pack to play with the other side of the board and most of the same components a second time through. Once you’ve done that, you can continue playing it as a single-play game. The app, from Acram Digital, is very good, although it’s such a long process that I haven’t gone back to replay it. Complexity: Starts low, ends medium to medium-high.

67. Thurn und Taxis: Full review. I love games with very simple rules that require quick thinking with a moderate amount of foresight. Thurn und Taxis players try to construct routes across a map of Germany, using them to place mail stations and to try to occupy entire regions, earning points for doing so, and for constructing longer and longer routes. But over time, and many plays, I’ve cooled on this game quite a bit – there is one optimal strategy, and one strategy that’s a close second, and that’s about it. And the second strategy is the opposite of fun for me. I think route-building has been done better in the fifteen years since this came out. Complexity: Low.

66. Riftforce. Full review. Riftforce is an asymmetrical dueling game, where each player has a deck of cards in four factions, and the players play cards to five locations in a row between them. The cards are valued 5, 6, and 7, representing their hit points. You can play up to three cards of a color, or three of the same value, or you can play a card to activate up to three matching cards, using their actions usually to blast a card on the other side of the same location. You duel until one player gets 12 Riftforce points, mostly from destroying an opponent’s cards. The game comes with ten factions, which gives it more variety than most folks will ever need, with eight more in the Beyond expansion, which allows for solo or team play. Complexity: Medium-low.

65. Lanterns. Full game and app review. A tile-placement and matching game where players are also racing to collect tokens to trade in for bonuses that decline in value as the game goes on. Each tile has lanterns in any of seven colors along the four edges; placing a tile gives you one token of the color facing you … and each opponent one token of the color facing him/her. If you match a tile side to the side it’s touching, you get a token of that color too. There are also bonus tokens from some tiles, allowing you to trade tokens of one color for another. Bonuses come from trading in one token of each color; three pairs; or four of a kind. The art is great and the app adds some wonderful animations. Complexity: Medium-low.

64. Juicy Fruits. Full review. I might be prey to a little recency bias here, but I am pretty confident this game belongs in this range on the list – it hits the sweet spot (pun intended) for games I like that I can also play with just about anybody, because it’s quick to learn and play. Players collect fruits by moving tokens on their personal island boards, then trade them in for points, to get upgrades, or to launch ships that gain points and make their islands bigger. The mini fruit tokens are cute, and the rules are quite easy to follow. I didn’t think the advanced mode, which adds an achievement track, was really necessary. Complexity: Medium-low.

63. Silver & Gold. Full review. Phil Walker-Harding is some sort of genius, with Imhotep, the Sushi Go! series, Bärenpark, Gizmos, and this all hits under his name, along with 2021’s Summer Camp, the lighter Gingerbread House, and more. Silver & Gold is a polyomino flip-and-write game where there are just eight shapes to choose from in each round, with seven of them displayed in random order (the eighth isn’t used), and players fill in those small shapes on the larger ones on their two objective cards, using dry-erase markers. You score for finishing shapes, with three small bonuses available each game that do usually end up mattering in the final score. It’s portable, easy, lightly strategic, and undeniably fun. Complexity: Low.

62. Stone Age: Full review. I’ve cooled on Stone Age over the last few years, because other games have adopted aspects of it – Everdell in particular – and improved them, or just put them into shorter games. Stone Age has a lot of real-time decision-making and simple mechanics and goals that first-time players always seem to pick up quickly. Each player is trying to build a small stone-age civilization by expanding his population and gathering resources to construct buildings worth varying amounts of points, but must always ensure that he feeds all his people on each turn. You place workers and then roll one die per worker to see how many resources you’ll get, which tends to flatten out differences in playing skills. But the game can be very long, depending on playing styles – you need one or more players who target the cards to try to speed to end-game. The iOS app is strong – they did a nice job reimagining the board for smaller screens – and is now updated and playable on newer devices. Complexity: Medium.

61. Whistle Stop. Full review. One of the best new games of 2017, Whistle Stop is a train game that takes a little bit from lots of other train games, including Ticket to Ride, Steam, and Russian Railroads, without becoming bogged down by too many rules or scoring mechanisms. It also has gloriously fun, pastel-colored pieces and artwork, and the variable board gives it a ton of replay value. It was an immediate hit in my house, although I think the game’s length has kept it on the shelf for some time. Complexity: Medium.

60. SCOUT. Full review. This game first came out in Asia in 2019, but I believe the 2022 edition is the first officially available in North America – there were scattered used copies available before then, but I never saw a new one anywhere until Gen Con this year. SCOUT is an amazing game in a tiny box, where players get hands of cards that they can’t reorganize at all, only flipping the entire hand, as is, upside down if they prefer. Players play sets or runs of cards to the table, but they must be contiguous in their hands to play them, and must be longer or have a higher value than the set or run currently there. If you can’t, you ‘scout’ a card from the table, giving a point to whoever played it. You capture all the cards you beat for one point each. You play one round per player, with rounds ending when someone’s out of cards. It’s fast, fun, a constant brain challenge, and highly portable. Complexity: Medium-low.

59. Dragomino. Full review. This reimagining of Kingdomino for younger players, aged 4 and up, is bar none the best game I’ve played for kids that young – and if you don’t believe me, I have at least four kids aged 4 or 5 who would back up my opinion, including my youngest stepdaughter. It takes the domino terrain tiles of the original and just asks players to take one tile on each turn, place it in their area next to an existing tile, and draw one dragon egg for each place where they’ve matched adjacent terrain types. Some dragon eggs have baby dragons, and some are empty. Whoever ends the game with the most baby dragons wins. It’s not a good game for kids. It’s a good game, one that kids can play easily. If you’re the adult at the table, that is exactly what you’re looking for. Complexity: Low.

58. Coup. Full review. A great, great bluffing game if you have at least four people in your gaming group. Each player gets two cards and can use various techniques to try to take out other players. Last (wo)man standing is the winner. Guaranteed to get the f-bombs flowing. Only $7 for the whole kit and caboodle. The expansion, Coup: Reformation, lets you boost the maximum player count from 6 to 10. Complexity: Low.

57. Thebes: Full review. A fun family-oriented game with an archaelogy theme and what I think of as the right amount of luck: it gives the game some balance and makes replays more interesting, but doesn’t determine the whole game. Players collect cards to run expeditions to five dig sites, then root around in the site’s bag of tokens to try to extract treasure. Back in print at the moment. Complexity: Medium-low.

56. Watergate. Full review. It’s a pure two-player game that pits one player as Nixon and the other as “the journalists,” each with a unique deck, where the latter player tries to place evidence tokens connecting at least two witnesses to the President, and Tricky Dick tries to block them. It’s fun, incredibly well-written, and a real thinker, with actual educational value and some additional reading content at the back of the rule book. Complexity: Medium.

55. Nidavellir. Full review. Nidavellir is a bidding game, with set collection, and a kind of silly Nordic dwarves theme that’s kind of fun. But the way it handles the bidding is novel: Every player has five money tokens and will bid with two of them in each round on the three rows of dwarf cards (one per player in each row). You take the two coins you didn’t use, combine their value, and swap the higher one for a new coin showing that sum – so sometimes it’s better to underbid and get a better coin for future rounds. I’m a fan already. Complexity: Medium-low.

54. Tokaido. Full review. Another winner from the designer of 7 Wonders, Takenoko, and one of my least favorite Spiel des Jahres winners, Hanabi, Tokaido has players walking along a linear board, stopping where they choose on any unoccupied space, collecting something at each stop, with a half-dozen different ways to score – collecting all cards of a panorama, finishing sets of trinkets, meeting strangers for points or coins, or donating to the temple to try to get the game-end bonus for the most generous traveler. It’s a great family-level game that requires more thought and more mental math than most games of its ilk. The app is excellent as well. There’s a sequel game, Namiji, due out this winter, that will take the same basic mechanics but change the players’ actions on the path. Complexity: Medium.

53. Concordia: Full review . It’s a map game, set in Ancient Rome, built around trade and economics rather than conflict or claiming territories. Much better with four players than with two, where there isn’t enough interaction on the map to force players to make harder decisions. Runner-up for the Kennerspiel des Jahres (Connoisseur’s game of the year) in 2015 to Istanbul. The app from Acram Digital is solid and they’ve already published at least one expansion for it. Complexity: Medium.

52. The Search for Planet X. Full review. This competitive deduction game is like a logic puzzle that’s been streamlined and converted to the tabletop by limiting the kinds of questions you can ask on a turn to try to solve the core mystery. Players are astronomers looking for the hypothesized ninth planet (a real thing) in either 12 or 18 sectors of the sky, depending on whether you play the basic or advanced version. Every sector has one object, except for those that scan as ’empty’ … but the one with Planet X also appears empty, so you can only find it via deduction once you know enough of the rules governing where other planets are located. You get points for identifying where other objects are too, so you can guess Planet X’s location second or third or later and still win. Complexity: Medium-low.

51. Love Letter: Full review. The entire game is just sixteen cards and a few heart tokens. Each player has one card and has to play it; the last player still alive wins the round. It requires at least three players to be any good and was much better with four, with lots of laughing and silly stare-downs. It’s the less serious version of Coup, and it’s only $9. Complexity: Low.

50. Through the Desert. Full app review, although it hasn’t been updated for the newest iOS version. Another Knizia game, this one on a large board of hexes where players place camels in chains, attempting to cordon off entire areas they can claim or to connect to specific hexes worth extra points, all while potentially blocking their opponents from building longer or more valuable chains in the same colors. Very simple to learn and to set up, and like most Knizia games, it’s balanced and the mechanics work beautifully. Finally reprinted in 2018 by Fantasy Flight, but it’s out of print again, as they spiked their Euro Classics line. Horse with no name sold separately. Complexity: Low.

49. Clank! A Deck-building Adventure & Clank! Legacy. I’ve been playing the Clank! Legacy game recently, about halfway through the campaign, and it has helped me appreciate the original game quite a bit more. Clank! is a deckbuilding dungeon crawler that doesn’t take itself very seriously, even mocking the dungeon crawl in its premise, as it’s every player for themselves – as opposed to the D&D style of crawl, where players work as a party to move through a dungeon, killing monsters and gathering treasure. Players draw five cards from their decks, taking the actions the cards indicate and using their movement, attack, and money points to advance into the dungeon, kill monsters, and buy more cards. Once one player grabs one of the big treasures and gets back up to the surface, the clock is ticking, and it’s a race for other players at least get above ground to avoid elimination. The legacy game is also great, adding some new components and mechanics that Dire Wolf has now added to the new Clank! Catacombs game, which features a modular board as well. I’ll review Clank! Legacy once I’ve played it at least two more times. Complexity: Medium-low.

48. Puerto Rico: Full review. One of the highest-rated and most-acclaimed Eurogames of all time, although I think its combination of worker-placement and building has been done better by later designers. You’re attempting to populate and build your own island, bringing in colonists, raising plantations, developing your town, and shipping goods back to the mother country. Very low luck factor, and just the right amount of screw-your-neighbor (while helping yourself, the ultimate defense). Unfortunately, the corn-and-ship strategy is really tough to beat, reducing the game’s replay value for me. There’s a solid iOS app as well, improved after some major upgrades. Complexity: High.

47. The Quacks of Quedlinburg. Full review. The Kennerspiel des Jahres winner from 2018 came to my attention too late for my top ten list of its release year, but it would have made the cut if I had played it in time. Designed by Wolfgang Warsch, who has The Mind also on this list and is also behind the co-op game Fuji and dice-rollers That’s Pretty Clever! and Twice As Clever!, the Quacks is a press-your-luck game with vaguely ridiculous artwork where players fill their bags with ingredients for their potions, drawing as many as they want to try to gain points and benefits before their potions explode because they drew too many white tokens. All other tokens are ‘bought’ through the draws in each round – if you explode, you don’t get points, but you do get money – and each confers some kind of benefit. The press-your-luck part is a lot of fun, though, and even though it’s competitive there’s a sort of aspect where you find yourself rooting for someone else who decides to keep drawing after you’re done. It plays well with five players, and the Mega box, which includes the base game and two expansions, lets you add a sixth. Complexity: Medium-low.

46. The Mind. Full review. The Mind may drive you crazy; I haven’t beaten it yet, playing with several different people already, but I still find it really enjoyable and something that nearly always ends up with everyone laughing. This Spiel des Jahres-nominated game has just a deck of cards numbered 1 to 100, and in each round, every player gets a set number of cards dealt from the shuffled deck. All players must play their cards to the table in one pile, ascending by card number … but you can’t talk to anyone else, or even gesture. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. Complexity: Low.

45. Targi. Full review. Moderately complex two-player game with a clever mechanic for placing meeples on a grid – you don’t place meeples on the grid itself, but on the row/column headers, so you end up blocking out a whole row or column for your opponent. Players gather salt, pepper, dates, and the relatively scarce gold to enable them to buy “tribe cards” that are worth points by themselves and in combinations with other cards. Some tribe cards also confer benefits later in the game, and there at least two that are super-powered and you’ll fight to get. Two-player games often tend to be too simple, or feel like weak variants of games designed for more players. Targi isn’t either of those things – it’s a smart game that feels like it was built for exactly two people. Complexity: Medium.

44. Vikings: Full review. A very clever tile placement game in which players place island and ship tiles in their areas and then place vikings of six different colors on those tiles to maximize their points. Some vikings score points directly, but can’t score unless a black “warrior” viking is placed above them. Grey “boatsman” vikings are necessary to move vikings you’ve stored on to unused tiles. And if you don’t have enough blue “fisherman” vikings, you lose points at the end of the game for failing to feed everyone. Tile selection comes from a rondel that moves as tiles come off the board, with each space on the rondel assigning a monetary value to the tiles; tiles become cheaper as the number remaining decreases. You’re going to end up short somewhere, so deciding early where you’ll punt is key. Great game that still gets too little attention. It’s been out of print for a while now. Complexity: Medium.

43. Terraforming Mars. Full review. One of the most acclaimed games of the last decade, Terraforming Mars is big and long, but so imaginative that it provides an engrossing enough experience to last the two hours or so it takes to play. The theme is just what the title says, based on the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (which I loathed), as the players compete to rack up points while jointly transforming the planet’s surface. The environment is tracked with three main variables – oxygen levels, surface temperature, and water supply – that alter the effects of various moves and buildings as the game progresses. The cards are the heart of the play itself, as they can provide powerful points bonuses and/or game benefits. It’s already been expanded at least four times, with Hellas & Elysium, Venus Next, Prelude, and Colonies. Complexity: High.

42. Tzolk’in. Tzolkin is a fairly complex worker-placement game where the board itself has six interlocked gears that move with the days of the Mayan calendar; you place a worker on one gear and he cycles through various options for moves until you choose to recall him. As with most worker-placement games, you’re collecting food, gold, wood, and stone; building stuff; and moving up some scoring tracks, the latter of which is the main source of strategic complexity. I like designer Simone Luciani’s games, and this is one of his best, even though I’m pretty bad at it – I never seem to get the rhythm of adding and removing workers right. The gears, though, are kind of badass. Complexity: High.

41. Orient Express. An outstanding game that’s long out of print; I’m lucky enough to still have the copy my father bought for me in the 1980s, but fans have crafted their own remakes, like this one from a Boardgamegeek user. It takes those logic puzzles where you try to figure out which of five people held which job and lived on which street and had what for breakfast and turns them into a murder mystery board game with a fixed time limit. When the Orient Express reaches its destination, the game ends, so you need to move fast and follow the clues. The publishers still sell the expansions, adding up to 30 more cases for you to solve, through this site, but when I asked them about plans for a reprint they gave me the sense it’s not likely. There’s a 2017 game of the same name, but it’s unrelated. Complexity: Low.

40. Kodama: The Tree Spirits. Full review. Kodama features artwork that looks like it came from the pen of Hayao Miyazaki, but also a quick-playing game that has something I hadn’t seen before in how you place your cards. Players start with a tree trunk card with one ‘feature’ on it, and must add branch cards to the trunk and beyond, scoring whenever a feature appears on the card just placed and the card (or trunk) to which it connects. You can score up to 10 points on a turn, and will add 12 cards to your tree. You get four secret bonus cards at the start of the game and play one at the end of each season (4 turns), and each season itself has a special rule that varies each game. It’s light, portable, and replays extremely well. The base game also includes Sprout cards for simpler play with younger children. The two-player spinoff Kodama Duo isn’t great on its own but includes cards to expand the base game for a sixth player. Complexity: Low.

39. Takenoko. Full review. If I tell you this is the cutest game I own, would you consider that a negative? The theme and components are fantastic – there’s a panda and a gardener and these little bamboo pieces, and the panda eats the bamboo and you have to lay new tiles and make sure they have irrigation and try not to go “squeeeeee!” at how adorable it all is. There’s a very good game here too: Players draw and score “objective” cards from collecting certain combinations of bamboo, laying specific patterns of hex tiles, or building stacks of bamboo on adjacent tiles. The rules were easy enough for my daughter to learn when she was about eight, but gameplay is more intricate because you’re planning a few moves out and have to deal with your opponents’ moves – although there’s no incentive to screw your opponents. Just be careful – that panda is hungry. Complexity: Medium-low.

38. Canvas. Full review. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more visually stunning game, starting with the box itself. It’s also surprisingly simple to learn and play. Players will select cards from the display to build three works of art, crafting them by placing three cards into a clear sleeve so that up to five distinct elements of the artwork are visible for scoring. The value of those elements can vary in each game, while some things are always worth points. It plays in about a half an hour and is far easier than any other card-crafting game I’ve seen. Plus the game’s artwork is off the charts. Complexity: Low.

37. Cacao. Full review. A simpler Carcassonne? I guess every tile-laying game gets compared to the granddaddy of them all, but Cacao certainly looks similar, and you don’t get to see very far ahead in the tile supply in Cacao, although at least here you get a hand of three tiles from which to choose. But the Cacao board ends up very different, a checkerboard pattern of alternating tiles between players’ worker tiles and the game’s neutral tiles, which can give you cacao beans, let you sell beans for 2-4 gold pieces, give you access to water, give you partial control of a temple, or just hand you points. One key mechanic: if you collect any sun tiles, you can play a new tile on top of a tile you played earlier in the game, which is a great way to make a big ten-point play to steal the win. I haven’t explored the expansions beyond the volcanoes, but the Diamante one is well-received. Complexity: Low.

36. Patchwork: Full review. A really sharp two-player game that has an element of Tetris – players try to place oddly shaped bits of fabric on his/her main board, minimizing unused space and earning some small bonuses along the way. It’s from Uwe Rosenberg, better known for designing the ultra-complex games Agricola, Le Havre, and Caverna. I’ve played this a ton, and the way you have to think ahead just a little bit, looking at what tiles you can take and what tile(s) your opponent might take, is perfect for two-player play. Complexity: Low.

35. (The Settlers of) Catan: It’s now just called Catan, although I use the old title because I think more people know it by that name. I don’t pull this game out as much as I did a few years ago, and I’ve still got it ranked this high largely because of its value as an introduction to Eurogames, one of the best “gateway games” on the market. Without this game, we don’t have the explosion in boardgames we’ve had in the last fifteen years. We don’t have Ticket to Ride and 7 Wonders showing up in Target (where you can also buy Catan), a whole wall of German-style games in Barnes & Noble, or the Cones of Dunshire on network television. I believe only three games on this list predate Settlers, from an era where Monopoly was considered the ne plus ultra of boardgames and you couldn’t complain about how long and awful it was because you had no basis for comparison. The history of boardgames comprises two eras: Before Catan, and After Catan. Complexity: Medium-low.

34. Imhotep. Full review. Nominated for the Spiel des Jahres in 2016, Imhotep lost out to Codenames – a solid party game, not quite good enough for this top 100 between the language dependence and the lack of a strategic element – but in my opinion should have won. Imhotep is a quick-playing game with lots of depth as players gather stones, place them on ships, and sail ships to any of five possible destinations, each with a different benefit or point value. You can place a stone on any ship, and you can use your turn to sail a ship without any of your stones on it – say, to keep someone else from blocking your path or from scoring a big bonus. Each destination tile has two sides so you can vary the game, mixing and matching for up to 32 different configurations. Complexity: Medium-low.

33. Terraforming Mars: Ares Edition. Full review. This is probably heretical to fans of the original Terraforming Mars game, but I like this shorter version better. It’s smaller, and plays in an hour, but still keeps the theme and general concepts from the first game. Each player represents a unique corporation that is working both to terraform the red planet and to be the most profitable one while doing so. You do all that through drawing cards and paying to play them to your tableau, with most cards providing either one-time bonuses or, more commonly, ongoing benefits that make it easier to get more money, resources, or points as the game goes on. When the planet is fully terraformed, the game ends. It’s the Terraforming Mars experience, distilled in a far more digestible format. Complexity: Medium.

32. King of Tokyo. Full review. From the guy who created Magic: the Gathering comes a game that has no elfs or halflings or deckbuilding whatsoever. Players are monsters attempting to take control of Tokyo, attacking each other along the way while trying to rack up victory points and maintain control of the city space on the board. Very kid-friendly between the theme and major use of the dice (with up to two rerolls per turn), but good for the adults too; it plays two to six but I think it needs at least three to be any good. It offers many expansions, but the power-ups that give each player a unique power & unique cards to buy are worthwhile. Complexity: Medium-low.

31. Istanbul. Full review. Not Constantinople. Istanbul won the 2014 Kennerspiel des Jahres, but it’s not that complex a game overall; my then eight-year-old daughter figured out a basic strategy right away (I call it the “big money” strategy) that was surprisingly robust, and the rules are not that involved or difficult. Players are merchants in a Turkish marketplace, trying to acquire the rubies needed to win the game through various independent channels. There’s a competitive element in that you don’t want to pursue the same methods everyone else is, because that just raises the costs. It’s also a very visually appealing game. There’s a new dice game coming at the end of December, with a similar theme but with new mechanics, ditching the pathfinding/backtracing element of the original game and concentrating on goods trading and dice manipulation. Acram Digital’s app version is tremendous and highly addictive, as you can randomize the tile layout, giving you over a billion possible boards on which to play. Complexity: Medium.

30. Caylus: Full app review. Another game I’ve only played in its now-defunct app version, Caylus is among the best of the breed of highly-complex games that also includes Agricola and Le Havre, with slightly simpler rules and fewer pieces, yet the same lack of randomness and relatively deep strategy. I’ve also found the game is more resilient to early miscues than other complex strategy games, as long as you don’t screw up too badly. In Caylus, players compete for resources used to construct new buildings along one public road and used to construct parts of the main castle where players can earn points and special privileges like extra points or resources. If another player uses a building you constructed, you get a point or a resource, and in most cases only one player can build a specific building type, while each castle level has a finite number of blocks to be built. There are also high point value statues and monuments that I think are essential to winning the game, but you have to balance the need to build those against adding to the castle and earning valuable privileges. Even playing the app a dozen or more times I’ve never felt it becoming monotonous, and the app’s graphics were probably the best I’ve seen alongside those of Agricola’s. It’s in and out of print, apparently out right now, although a newer, streamlined edition, Caylus 1303, is available. Complexity: High.

29. Tigris & Euphrates: Full review. The magnum opus from Herr Knizia, a two- to four-player board game where players fight for territory on a grid that includes the two rivers of the game’s title, but where the winning player is the one whose worst score (of four) is the best. Players gain points for placing tiles in each of four colors, for having their “leaders” adjacent to monuments in those colors, and for winning conflicts with other players. Each player gets points in those four colors, but the idea is to play a balanced strategy because of that highest low score rule. The rules are a little long, but the game play is very straightforward, and the number of decisions is large but manageable. It’s kind of mean, though – you can’t win without screwing with your opponents. Fantasy Flight also reissued this title in 2015, with a much-needed graphics update and smaller box, but that entire line of updated Euro Classics is now out of print again. Knizia himself revised this game as Yellow & Yangtze, which has a digital port from Dire Wolf that I also liked quite a bit. Complexity: Medium.

28. Battle Line: Full review. Reissued a few years ago as Schotten Totten – same game, different theme, better art, half the price right now. Among the best two-player games I’ve found, designed by Reiner Knizia, who is also behind a bunch of other games on this list. Each player tries to build formations on his/her side of the nine flags that stand in a line between him and his opponent; formations include three cards, and the various formation types resemble poker hands, with a straight flush of 10-9-8 in one color as the best formation available. Control three adjacent flags, or any five of the nine, and you win. But ten tactics cards allow you to bend the rules, by stealing a card your opponent has played, raising the bar for a specific flag from three cards to four, or playing one of two wild cards that can stand in for any card you can’t draw. There’s a fair amount of randomness involved, but playing nine formations at once with a seven-card hand allows you to diversify your risk. The iOS app is among the best as well. Complexity: Low.

27. La Isla. Full review. I’ve owned this game for a while, but didn’t play it until this past year, and it turns out that I love it – it’s right in my wheelhouse in terms of its complexity/fun combination, not too complex to be enjoyable, not too simple to be boring. Players are scientists trying to spot five endangered species on the island board, which is modular and thus changes every game, and do so by placing their 5 explorer tokens on the board to surround animal tiles. There’s a separate board with scoring tracks for the five animal types, determining what each tile is worth at game-end while also letting you re-score animals you’ve collected when you gain another one of that type, so you can try to set yourself up to boost the value of the animal you’re targeting and then grab all that you can of that type. There’s also a 10-point bonus if you get a set of all five, giving you an alternate path if the first doesn’t work. Designer Stefan Feld has gone too far into point-salad world with recent titles but this one, which often sells for just $20, is a hit. It’s available again at the moment, but it’s getting a retheme for 2023 under the title Vienna. Complexity: Medium-low to medium.

26. Cascadia. Full review. One of the best new games of 2021, Cascadia is simple, challenging, and extremely fun – plus you can play it with kids as young as 8. Cascadia’s mechanics are simple: take a tile and an animal token from the market and add them, separately if you wish, to the ecosystem you’re building in front of you. The five animal types each score in different ways, and the game comes with five possible scoring methods for each of the animals, including a simple “family” method for each if you want to start out with a basic game. You also score at game end for your largest contiguous area of each of the five terrain types, with a bonus if you have the largest of all players’ boards. And that’s it. It takes maybe 45 minutes at the most, and offers a ton of replayability. Complexity: Low to medium-low.

25. Gizmos. Full review. Phil Walker-Harding’s engine-builder plays very quickly for a game of this depth, and doesn’t skimp on the visual appeal – the ‘energy tokens’ you’ll collect to buy more cards are colored marbles, and they’re dispensed by what looks like a cardboard gumball machine. The engine-building aspect is a real winner, though, as it’s very easy to grasp how you’ll gain things from certain cards and how to daisy-chain them into very powerful engines before the game ends. I have yet to find anyone who’s played this game but didn’t love it. Complexity: Medium-low.

24. Imhotep: The Duel. Full review. This strictly two-player version of Imhotep is even better than the original by taking the feel of the original but rethinking the mechanics to make it much more direct – the interaction here is constant, and a huge part of the game is thinking about how your opponent will react to any move you make. Players gain the tiles on six ships by placing meeples on a 3×3 grid, and may unload any row or column that has at least two meeples on it. The tiles go to the four scoring areas on their own player boards, along with four kinds of special tiles (place 2-3 meeples, place 1 meeple and unload 1-2 ships, swap two tiles and unload, take any one tile straight from a ship) that let you disrupt your opponent’s plans. The player boards are modular and pieces are two-sided, so you get 16 combinations for to scoring. It’s fantastic. Complexity: Medium-low.

23. New Bedford. Full review. I adore this game, which is about whaling, but somehow manages to sneak worker-placement and town-building into the game too, and figures out how to reward people who do certain things early without making the game a rout. Each player gets to add buildings to the central town of New Bedford (much nicer than the actual town is today), or can use one of the central buildings; you pay to use someone else’s building, and they can be worth victory points to their owners at game-end. The real meat of the game is the whaling though – you get two ships, and the more food you stock them with, the more turns they spend out at sea, which means more turns where you might grab the mighty sperm whale token from the bag. But you have to pay the dockworkers to keep each whale and score points for it. For a game that has this much depth, it plays remarkably fast – never more than 40 minutes for us with three players. Complexity: Medium.

22. The Red Cathedral. Full review. A tremendous game in a fairly small box, The Red Cathedral is a resource-management game where players compete to build the cathedral of the game’s title, which contains six sections per player, and to add decorations to it – even to sections completed by their opponents. You gather resources by moving dice around an eight-part circular track, and can plan your moves to double or triple your return. There are also two points tracks overlaid on each other that allow you to jump more quickly or give a point or two back to gain money. It’s about 90 minutes, but moves quickly, and it hits the perfect level of complexity for this sort of game – I don’t really want anything heavier or more difficult than this. Complexity: Medium-high.

21. Sagrada. Full review. I tried Sagrada too late for my 2017 rankings, which is a shame as it would have made my top ten for sure. It’s a dice-drafting game where players select dice from a central pool and place them on their boards, representing stained-glass windows, to try to match specific patterns for points. It sounds simple, but rules on how you can place the dice and the need to plan ahead while hoping for specific colors or numbers to appear make it much harder than it seems. There’s also an expansion that lets you play with 5 or 6 players that also adds ‘personal’ dice to the game, so that the player who drafts dice last in each round doesn’t get penalized so badly, reducing the randomness a little bit; and now a slew of new smaller expansions with new boards, dice, and rules changes. I still love the base game, and the superb digital port. Complexity: Medium-low.

20. Egizia. I’m not even sure how I first heard about Egizia, a complex worker-placement game that has a great theme (ancient Egypt) and, despite some complexity in the number of options, hums along better than most games of this style. In each round, players place meeples on various spots on and along the Nile river on the board. Some give cards with resources, some give cards with bonuses, some allow you to boost the power of your construction crews, and some tracks allow you to build in the big points areas, the monuments found in one corner of the board. You also can gain a few bonus cards, specific to you and hidden from others, that give you more points for certain game-end conditions, like having the most tiles in any single row of the pyramid. Best with four players, but workable with three; with two you’re playing a fun game of solitaire. I own the original game, but the amazon link above goes to Indie Boards & Cards’ 2020 edition, Egizia: Shifting Sands, which has changed the board but kept the original’s core mechanics. Complexity: High.

19. Welcome To… Full review. I don’t know if it was the first flip-and-write title, but Welcome To… was the first one I encountered, and I think it’s spawned a few imitators because it’s so good. In each round, there are three cards from which players can choose, each showing a house number and one of six colors; each player chooses one of those three houses to fill in and takes the benefit of that particular color. The goal is to fill out as much of your own ‘neighborhood’ as you can, scoring points for clusters of adjacent houses, for providing green space, for adding pools to certain houses, and more. It’s simple to learn and has huge replay value. I prefer the original to any of the expansion packs (with themed neighborhoods and new rules) I’ve played. Complexity: Low.

18. Small World: Full review. I think the D&D-style theme does this game a disservice – that’s all just artwork and titles, but the game itself requires some tough real-time decisions. Each player uses his chosen race to take over as many game spaces as possible, but the board is small and your supply of units runs short quickly, forcing you to consider putting your race into “decline” and choosing a new one. But when you choose a new one is affected by what you stand to lose by doing so, how well-defended your current civilization’s position is, and when your opponents are likely to go into decline. The iPad app is outstanding too. Complexity: Medium.

17. Agricola: I gained a new appreciation for this game thanks to the incredible iOS app version developed by Playdek, which made the game’s complexity less daunting and its internal sophistication more evident. You’re a farmer trying to raise enough food to feed your family, but also trying to grow your family so you have more help on the farm. The core game play isn’t that complex, but huge decks of cards offering bonuses, shortcuts, or special skills make the game much more involved, and require some knowledge of the game to play it effectively. I enjoy the game despite the inherent ‘work’ involved, but it is undeniably complex and you can easily spend the whole game freaking out about finding enough food, which about a billion or so people on the planet refer to as “life.” Mayfair reissued the game in 2016 with some improved graphics and a lower price point, although the base game now only plays 1-4. Complexity: High.

16. Hadara. Full review. I recommend Hadara to anyone who loves 7 Wonders and wants something similar, as it has several key points in common – card drafting, light engine building, and a civilization theme – but also has some distinct features (including the second phase of card drafting in each era) that make it a worthy game in its own right. Players get to choose ten cards per era, in five different colors, allowing them to bump up their four resource tracks (gold, culture, military, and food), with cards becoming cheaper as you buy more of that color. Military lets you gain colonies for points and more resource gains; culture lets you build statues for bigger point gains; you have to have 1 food point per card in your kingdom at the end of each era. There are also “medals” that reward you for each complete set of five cards you gain. It’s best with 3+ players but fine with 2 if you can accept the higher degree of randomness in card availability. Complexity: Medium.

15. Grand Austria Hotel (at Boardlandia). Full review. I was late to this game, and have still only played it online, although I own the physical game. It’s a brilliant medium-heavy game of dice-drafting and resource management, with a theme that’s probably inspired by a certain Wes Anderson movie (although no cats will be defenestrated during the course of the game). Each player tries to prepare rooms in their personal hotels and then fill them with guests, whom they can draft from the board and eventually place in those rooms by serving them the right combination of four resources. Each guest has its own bonus in addition to a point value, with many guests named for other games (including E. Gizia, the most powerful guest card because it gives you another turn). You also have to keep an eye on the emperor track, however, or you can lose a ton of points at any of the three check-ins there. My only knock on it is that it lacks player interaction, but it’s a tremendous thinker of a game with a lot of replayability. Complexity: Medium-high.

14. Everdell. Full review. This was my #1 game of 2018 and has held up well since I gave it that honor. Everdell takes the worker placement and resource collection mechanic of Stone Age and adds what amounts to a second game on top of that, where the buildings you build with those resources actually do stuff, rather than just giving you points. Players build out their tableaux of cards and gain power as the game progresses. Some cards grant you the right to build subsequent cards for free; some give resources, some give points bonuses, and some do other cool things. The artwork is stunning and the theme, forest creatures, is very kid-friendly. The game also crescendos through its “seasons,” with players going from two meeples in the spring to six by game-end, so that no one can get too big of a lead in the early going and new players get time to learn the rhythm. It’s quite a brilliant design, and consistently plays in under an hour. Complexity: Medium-low.

13. Samurai: Full review. I bought the physical game after a few months of playing the app (which, as of December 2020, is still not updated for the newest iOS version), and it’s a great game – simple to learn, complex to play, works very well with two players, plays very differently with three or four as the board expands. Players compete to place their tiles on a map of Japan, divided into hexes, with the goal of controlling the hexes that contain buddha, farmer, or soldier tokens. Each player has hex tiles in his color, in various strengths, that exert control over the tokens they show; samurai tokens that affect all three token types; boats that sit off the shore and affect all token types; and special tokens that allow the reuse of an already-placed tile or allow the player to switch two tokens on the board. Trying to figure out where your opponent might screw you depending on what move you make is half the fun. Very high replayability too. Fantasy Flight updated the graphics, shrank the box, and reissued it in 2015, but they’ve sunsetted the whole Euro Classics line, so it’s out of print yet again. Complexity: Medium/low.

12. Azul. Full review. The best new family-strategy game of 2017 and winner of the Spiel des Jahres, Azul comes from the designer of Vikings and Asara, and folds some press-your-luck mechanics into a pattern-matching game where you collect mosaic tiles and try to transfer them from a storage area to your main 5×5 board. You can only put each tile type in each row once, and in each column once, and you lose points for tiles you can’t place at the end of each round. It’s quite addictive and moves fairly quickly, even when everyone starts playing chicken with the pile left in the middle of the table for whoever chooses last in the round. Complexity: Medium.

11. Splendor: Full review. A Spiel des Jahres nominee in 2014, Splendor has fast become a favorite in our house for its simple rules and balanced gameplay. My daughter loves the game, and even from age eight was able to play at a level pretty close to the adults. It’s a simple game where players collect tokens to purchase cards from a 4×3 grid, and where purchased cards decrease the price of other cards. Players have to think long-term without ignoring short-term opportunities, and must compare the value of going for certain in-game bonuses against just plowing ahead with purchases to get the most valuable cards. The Splendor app is defunct, unfortunately, although you can play it on Board Game Arena. There is a four-in-one expansion for the base game, Cities of Splendor, although I have found I prefer to play it without. Complexity: Low.

10. Dominion: Full review. I’ve condensed two Dominion entries into one, since they all have the same basic mechanics, just new cards. The definitive deck-building game, with no actual board, Dominion comes with a base set – there are over a dozen expansions now available, so you could spend a few hundred dollars on this – that includes money cards, action cards, and victory points cards. Each player begins with seven money cards and three victory cards and, shuffling and drawing five cards from his own deck each turn, must add cards to his deck to allow him to have the most victory points when the last six-point victory card is purchased. I don’t think I have a multi-player game with a smaller learning curve, and the fact that the original set alone comes with 25 action cards but each game you play only includes 10 means it offers unparalleled replayability even before you add an expansion set. I’ll vouch for the Dominion: Intrigue expansion, which includes the base cards so it’s a standalone product, and the Seaside expansion, which is excellent and really changes the way the game plays, plus a standalone expansion further up this list. The base game is appropriate for players as young as six. Complexity: Low.

9. The Castles Of Burgundy: Full review. Castles of Burgundy is the rare game that works well across its range of player numbers, as it scales well from two to four players by altering the resources available on the board to suit the number of people pursuing them. Players compete to fill out their own boards of hexes with different terrain/building types (it’s like zoning) by competiting for tiles on a central board, some of which are hexes while others are goods to be stored and later shipped for bonuses. Dice determine which resources you can acquire, but you can also alter dice rolls by paying coins or using special buildings to change or ignore them. Setup is a little long, mostly because sorting cardboard tiles is annoying, but gameplay is only moderately complex – a little more than Stone Age, not close to Caylus or Agricola – and players get so many turns that it stays loose even though there’s a lot to do over the course of one game. I’ve played this online about 50 times, using all the different boards, even random setups that dramatically increase the challenge, and I’m not tired of it yet. Complexity: Medium.

8. 7 Wonders Duel. Full review. Borrowing its theme from one of the greatest boardgames of all time, 7W Duel strips the rules down so that each player is presented with fewer options. Hand cards become cards on the table, revealed a few at a time in a set pattern that limits player choices to one to four cards (roughly) per turn. Familiarity with the original game is helpful but by no means required. There’s a brand-new app version out from Repos this fall. Complexity: Medium-low.

7. Great Western Trail. Full review. It’s a monster, but it’s an immaculately constructed game, especially for its length and complexity. It’s a real gamer’s game, but I found an extra level of satisfaction from admiring how balanced and meticulous the design is; if there’s a flaw in it, beyond its weight (which is more than many people would like in a game), I didn’t find it. You’re rasslin’ cows, collecting cow cards and delivering them along the board’s map to Kansas City, but you’re doing so much more than that as you go, hiring workers, building your own buildings, and moving your train along the outer track so that you can gain more from those deliveries. The real genius of the design is that you only have a few options on each turn even though the game itself has a massive scope. That prevents it from becoming overwhelming or bogging down in analysis paralysis on each player’s turn. This higher ranking reflects the 2021 second edition, with better components, no more problematic art, and a true solo mode. Complexity: High.

6. Jaipur: Full review. Jaipur is my favorite two-player game, just as easy to learn but with two shades of additional complexity and a bit less randomness. In Jaipur, the two players compete to acquire collections of goods by building sets of matching cards in their hands, balancing the greater point bonuses from acquiring three to five goods at once against the benefit of taking one or two tokens to prevent the other player from getting the big bonuses. The game moves quickly due to a small number of decisions, like Lost Cities, so you can play two or three full games in an hour. It’s also incredibly portable. The new app is also fantastic, with a campaign mode full of variants. Complexity: Low.

5. Ticket To Ride: Full review. Actually a series of games, all working on the same theme: You receive certain routes across the map on the game board – U.S. or Europe, mostly – and have to collect enough train cards in the correct colors to complete those routes. But other players may have overlapping routes and the tracks can only accommodate so many trains. Like Dominion, it’s very simple to pick up, so while it’s not my favorite game to play, it’s my favorite game to bring or bring out when we’re with people who want to try a new game but either haven’t tried anything in the genre or aren’t up for a late night. I do recommend the 1910 Expansion to anyone who gets the base Ticket to Ride game, as it has larger, easier-to-shuffle cards and offers more routes for greater replayability. I also own the Swiss and Nordic boards, which only play two to three players and involve more blocking than the U.S. and Europe games do, so I don’t recommend them. The iPad app, developed in-house, is among the best available. The newest expansion, Japan and Italy, came out earlier this year but is out of stock at amazon right now. I’ve ranked all 18 Ticket to Ride boards for Ars Technica.

There’s also a kids’ version, called Ticket to Ride First Journey, with a separate app for that as well. Complexity: Low.

4. Pandemic: Full review. The king of cooperative games. Two to four players work together to stop global outbreaks of four diseases that spread in ways that are only partly predictable, and the balance between searching for the cures to those diseases and the need to stop individual outbreaks before they spill over and end the game creates tremendous tension that usually lasts until the very end of the event deck at the heart of the game. The On The Brink expansion adds new roles and cards while upping the complexity further. The Pandemic iOS app is among the best out there and includes the expansion as an in-app purchase.

I’m bundling Pandemic Legacy, one of the most critically acclaimed boardgames of all time, into this entry as well, as the Legacy game carries the same mechanics but with a single, narrative storyline that alters the game, including the board itself, as you play. To be completely honest, though, I prefer the non-legacy version. Complexity: Medium for the base game, medium-high for the Legacy game.

3. Wingspan. Full review.The only game to which I’ve given a perfect score of 10 since I started reviewing games for Paste five years ago, Wingspan is one of the best examples I can find of immaculate game design. It is thoroughly and thoughtfully constructed so that it is well-balanced, enjoyable, and playable in a reasonable amount of time. The components are all of very high quality and the art is stupendous. And there’s some real science behind it: designer Elizabeth Hargrave took her love of bird-watching and built a game around the actual characteristics of over 100 species of North American birds, such as their habitats, diets, and breeding habits. The European expansion and Oceania expansions are both out, although I don’t own either. Wingspan won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2019, which it more than deserved, making Hargrave the first woman to win that honor as a solo designer and just the second solo woman to win any Spiel des Jahres prize. It’s a marvel. There’s a great app for Wingspan, and it’s on Board Game Arena too. Complexity: Medium.

2. Carcassonne: Full review. Carcassonne brings ease of learning, tremendous replayability (I know I use that word a lot here, but it does matter), portability (you can put all the tiles and meeples in a small bag and stuff it in a suitcase), and plenty of different strategies and room for differing styles of play. You build the board as you go: Each player draws a tile at random and must place it adjacent to at least one tile already laid in a way that lines up any roads or cities on the new tile with the edges of the existing ones. You get points for starting cities, completing cities, extending roads, or by claiming farmlands adjacent to completing cities. It’s great with two players, and it’s great with four players. You can play independently, or you can play a little offense and try to stymie an opponent. The theme makes sense. The tiles are well-done in a vaguely amateurish way – appealing for their lack of polish. And there’s a host of expansions if you want to add a twist or two. I own the Traders and Builders expansion, which I like mostly for the Builder, an extra token that allows you to take an extra turn when you add on to whatever the Builder is working on, meaning you never have to waste a turn when you draw a plain road tile if you sit your Builder on a road. I also have Inns and Cathedrals, which I’ve only used a few times; it adds some double-or-nothing tiles to roads and cities, a giant meeple that counts as two when fighting for control of a city/road/farm, as well as the added meeples needed to play with a sixth opponent. Complexity: Low/medium-low for the base game, medium with expansions.

1. 7 Wonders: Full review. 7 Wonders swept the major boardgame awards (yes, there are such things) in 2011 for good reason – it’s the best new game to come on the scene in a few years, combining complex decisions, fast gameplay, and an unusual mechanic around card selections where each player chooses a card from his hand and then passes the remainder to the next player. Players compete to build out their cities, each of which houses a unique wonder of the ancient world, and must balance their moves among resource production, buildings that add points, military forces, and trading. I saw no dominant strategy, several that worked well, and nothing that was so complex that I couldn’t quickly pick it up after screwing up my first game. The only negative here is the poorly written rules, but after one play it becomes far more intuitive. Plays best with three or more players, but the two-player variant works well. The brand-new iOS version is amazing too, with an Android port I haven’t tried. Complexity: Medium.

I have a separate ranking of games for two players that I published at the start of the pandemic. Air, Land, and Sea would make the cut now, as would Riftforce. I would probably add Seven Bridges if I knew when it was coming back into print. Splendor Duel and Botanik are two great new purely two-player games from 2022.

Also, I get frequent requests for games that play well with five or more; I can confidently recommend 7 Wonders, Citadels, Ecosystem, King of Tokyo, Welcome To, and Sushi Go Party!, all of which handle 5+ right out of the box. Ticket to Ride is tight with five players, but that’s its maximum; the same applies to Hadara. Catan can handle 5 or 6 with an expansion, although it can result in a lengthy playing time. Kodama can play 5 out of the box, and 6 with the Duo expansion. For more social games, One Night Ultimate Werewolf is best with five or more also, and Deception: Murder in Hong Kong also benefits from more players. Coup needs 3, but with the Reformation expansion can handle up to 10. The cooperative party game Just One (on sale today for just $17.50) can handle up to 7, and Wavelength plays any number, split into two teams.

Dungeons, Dice, & Danger.

Richard Garfield created two of the best-known properties in tabletop gaming – Magic: the Gathering, the original collectible card game and the most popular deckbuilding game ever; and King of Tokyo, a dice-rolling, push-your-luck game that I think is fantastic for family game nights. Now he’s joined the roll-and-write craze with Dungeons, Dice, and Danger, which takes the format and marries it to that classic of role playing games, the dungeon crawl.

Dungeons, Dice, and Danger comes with five dice, four white and one black. On each player’s turn, they’ll roll all five dice and then must create two pairs from the five to mark off two spaces on their scoresheets, which show one of four different dungeons. The scoresheets have maps, with a number in each regular room space, and some spaces that show monsters and have one or more numbers and various boxes to fill. You can only check off a box adjacent to one you’ve already marked, or one of the green start boxes around the edges of the map. The other players may also mark off rooms, but they only get to use the white dice to form those pairs, unless they use one of their three special black die markers to use the black one on that particular turn.

Monsters require multiple turns to defeat; you must roll any of the numbers shown in the monster’s room, and then mark off one small box in that room each time you get a matching number. Once you’ve filled in all of the boxes, you’ve killed the beast, earning several gems (marked on a track at the bottom of the page), and may proceed to any rooms through that one. Some monsters show numbers that are only outlined; you have to visit the adjoining room with that number to ‘activate’ that number in the monster’s room, allowing you to use that roll to deal damage to the monster.

The first player to defeat a monster gets 2-3 gems as a reward; subsequent players will still get one. Every player can also gain a gem by marking off any room with a gem in it, and can gain 3 gems by completing either of the two objectives in the lower left of the scoresheet, which vary by map. At game end, you get three points per gem, and on maps with gold in certain rooms, you get two points per gold pile marked.

There are also two treasure rooms on each map, and when you mark one of those rooms, you get to choose one of the three special benefits on the right side of the map. You can get three extra black die spaces for the rest of the game; you can absorb three damage points without marking the spaces on your health track; or you can mark off two rooms adjacent to ones you’ve already visited. There are also spaces where you just have to have two matching numbers on the dice, but it can be any pair, which isn’t explained in the rulebook.

There’s a catch, however: As in dungeon crawl games, you can ‘die’ in DD&D. If you can’t mark off two rooms or squares on any turn, you lose one health point for each dice pair you couldn’t use. There are ten spaces in the health track, and if you lose all ten, you’re out of the game. There’s also a points penalty after the first two lost health points, going up to 20 points off in the last space. You can also lose health points for being the first person to defeat the big foozle on each map, usually two boxes checked, although you get up to 6 gems for the achievement.

There’s also a solo mode, as in most roll-and-write games. Here, you are always the “passive” player – you can never use the black die without marking off one of those spaces on the right side of your sheet. You always get the maximum reward for defeating a monster, and always take the damage when you beat the biggest one on a map. You can avoid the damage from failing to use one pair of dice if you used the other pair to deal damage to a monster.

There’s some strategy to DD&D, because you’re trying to set yourself up to have as many possibilities as you can for the next roll. There aren’t that many 7s on any map, and not enough 6s and 8s. Mapping out future moves is the one bit of control you can have in the game … but ultimately, I think there’s too much randomness. Planning only gets you so far when the maps are drawn in such a way that as the game nears its end, you’re going to have only a few options available to you, and you don’t have any way to alter the dice. That’s not to say that the game is too difficult; I played all four of the maps, solo, and scored 90+ on three of them, topping out at 111 on the third map, all of which put me in the top two tiers in the scoring guide. I busted completely on the fourth one, which I think requires a fair bit of luck on the dice to complete, and busted at the very end of the second one, still scoring in the 90s because I defeated every monster but the last one. In most turns, though, I had one valid choice. There was just a single set of pairs that would both mark off rooms or boxes on my scoresheet without requiring me to take damage. The result was that the game felt rote, rather than one where I was in reasonable control of things. I love roll-and-writes, and I could see why someone might love this, especially with a theme I haven’t seen in the genre before, but this was just below the bar for me, a C+ game rather than a B-.

The Red Cathedral.

The Red Cathedral slipped through the cracks of my reviews over at Paste, as it came out at the very end of 2020, and I didn’t get a copy until Gen Con of 2021, so it missed my 2020 best-new-games list but was ineligible for the 2021 list. I’ve played it a few times now, including its very good solo mode, and I have to say it’s one of the best games of its weight (sort of medium-heavy) I’ve ever played, and is both great value at under $35 and for such a small box.

Players in the Red Cathedral will work to construct the building of the game’s title, which has six sections per player and varies slightly in shape in each game, with base, middle, and top sections that can be accentuated with different ornaments. Players move dice in six colors around a rondel to gather resources they can use to build sections or ornaments, or to collect coins, but choosing which die to move isn’t as simple as just figuring out what resource you want – you can get much more stuff if you pick the right one, or you might not move a die to prevent your opponents from getting an even bigger windfall. You gain points mostly for building cathedral sections and ornaments, although there are other ways to gain a point here or there.

There are two scoring tracks in The Red Cathedral, although they’re overlaid on each other and you don’t have to keep track of two separate point totals (like in Rajas of the Ganges, although I like how that determines the end of the game). There’s the Reputation point track, which just looks like a regular scoring track around the edge of any game board; and the Prestige track, which starts out with a marker every 4-5 spots, but those gaps quickly drop to 3 spots and then 2, eventually lining up with the Reputation track in the 40s. This matters a lot early in the game, because you can drop down one Prestige point to gain two coins, and because placing ornaments gains you one or three Prestige points depending on whether you add one gem or two (in the two colors) to the cost. You can only build an ornament on a section that’s already completed, although you can do so on someone else’s section. You’re limited to four ornaments, two for middle sections and one each for the top and bottom sections.

The dice rondel is the real heart of the game and its most clever aspect. There are eighteen spaces on the circular track, divided into six zones. At the start of the game, the five dice go into five separate zones after someone has rolled them all. On your turn, you may pick any die and move it forward the number of zones shown on its face (1 to 6). Then you collect the reward for that zone, resources, coins, or points, times the number of dice currently in that zone, which can be up to three – so you might get, say, 6 bricks, or 3 green gems. Then you re-roll all dice in that zone for the next player.

Each zone also has a “guild” card next to it that offers you a choice of two benefits when you move a die to that quadrant of the rondel. For most of those cards, which change every game, you can choose either something for free, or you can pay coins/exchange resources for something better. Thus every time you choose moving a die as your main action, you have to consider where the other dice are, what resources you’ll get, what guild card is there, and how this might leave the dice for the next player.

Your other choices of actions are to place one of your six banners on an unclaimed segment of the cathedral or deliver resources to a building site to complete a section or build an ornament. Four of those six banners start out in spaces in your inventory, which can hold up to ten resources when all the banners are placed, so you have a strong incentive to get out and claim some sections early on to free up room on your board. Delivering resources is the one frustrating part of the game: you can only deliver up to three resources in one turn, but many sections require four or five resources to complete, so it’ll take you two separate turns to do it. You can, however, deliver to multiple sites at once, so a little more planning can make this less inefficient.

The game ends when someone completes their sixth section, after which you add up the scores. Most of your points come from completing sections, which vary in their returns and may give you some coins but fewer points rather than just a higher point total; and ornaments, which, as I wrote above, come in the form of Prestige points and are more valuable earlier in the game. Ornaments only require one or two resources to build, but if you can also spend one green and one purple gem when building one, you max out your turn with three Prestige points.

The box suggests a game time of 80 minutes, which is probably true when everyone knows the game; the last time I played, with two friends who hadn’t played before, we ran closer to two hours for the full game, although I can say all three of us felt like it was a great game. (I lost, though.) There is a smart solo mode here that works well to mess with you by limiting your options, although I think it’s far more satisfying to play this with at least one other person so that the competitive aspect of dice selection comes into play.

There is an expansion called Contractors that came out earlier this year, which adds a lot of new elements, including another game board, diamonds as a wild resource, an additional (black) die, and more. The more games I play, the more skeptical I become of the majority of expansions; a few are good, like Pandemic’s On the Brink, Ticket to Ride’s 1910 (even if just for the full-sized cards), or Carcassonne’s Traders and Builders, but most just complicate the original’s game play without making it truly better. I can’t tell you if Contractors does that, because I saw it on a table at Gen Con and watched a little bit of game play, after which I thought, “I don’t need that.”

Ready Set Bet.

Ready Set Bet is a raucous betting game that’s great for a larger group, with up to 9 folks able to play at once (and if you have ten, once can serve as the race’s announcer), from John D. Clair, the designer of Mystic Vale, Cubitos, Dead Reckoning, and Space Base. He’s also a Dodgers fan, if memory serves correctly, but regardless, all of his previous games have been more gamers’ games, while Ready Set Bet is much lighter and is more of a party game at heart – but a surprisingly fun one given how common and boring the betting theme can be.

Ready Set Bet involves four horse races, and players will bet in real time, placing their tokens on the giant central board, as someone rolls the dice to move the nine horses along the race track, betting until three horses pass the red line on the track. At the end of each round, all bets are paid off, and some bets require players to pay a penalty if those bets didn’t come through. After the first three rounds, each player gets their choice of two cards to give them an extra power through the rest of the game or a one-time bonus. After four rounds, the player with the most money wins.

The horses are represented by the numbers 4 through 10, plus two more horses that bear two numbers, 2 and 3 as well as 11 and 12. The dice you roll to move the horses are just two regular six-sided dice, so the horses in the middle (6, 7, and 8) have a natural advantage, but in Ready Set Bet, if you roll any total twice in a row other than 7, that horse moves several extra spaces to try to compensate. I’ve had the 4 horse win because I happened to roll it three times in a row, which moved it nine extra spaces and gave it an insurmountable lead.

There are two major tweaks to the common betting-game formula in RSB, both of which work quite well. The board has betting spaces for every horse to win, places, or show, and each space has a multiplier on it to represent the payout if that bet comes off. The multipliers are higher on horses farther away from the middle numbers of 6-8, but many of those bets also have a small penalty if you bet on them and the horse lets you down, although it’s generally just a dollar or two. There are also some betting spaces on the board beyond individual horses – betting that a horse in a certain color group will win, or betting on one of the “unusual scenario” cards that appear in rounds 2-4 that have conditions like one horse winning by a certain amount or at least four horses not getting past the one-quarter mark.

The other big tweak is that once someone places one of their tokens on a betting space, it’s occupied for the remainder of that race. Each player has a set of betting tokens numbered 2, 3, 4, and 5, and with fewer than seven players each player gets a second 3 token. To place a bet, you take one of those tokens and place it on any betting space that isn’t currently occupied. If your horse comes through, you get the value of your token times the multiplier on the betting space. There’s no benefit to keeping any of your tokens, so the incentive is to place them all before the third horse crosses the red line – roughly two-thirds of the way across the race board – and to do so sooner than other players do, since most of the betting spaces are limited to just one token.

I’ve played Ready Set Bet as a player, but also played it with family and served as the dice-roller and announcer, including my niece and nephew, who are now 10 and 6, respectively … and my nephew ended up winning outright, because he just bet big on any horse that got an early lead, and at one point got an extra 7 token by way of one of those end-of-round bonus cards, placing it on a 7x betting space for a horse that won. That points to the game’s accessibility, and the way that a little luck can balance things out. I didn’t expect to like this game all that much given the premise, but the simplicity of play and the way everyone, with folks aged 6 to 75 when I played with family, got into it ended up selling me on the game after all.

Corrosion.

I’m a fan of midweight engine-building games, from Gizmos to Fantastic Factories to Wingspan to Everdell to Furnace; it doesn’t seem to matter what else is in the game, as long as there’s a straightforward engine-building mechanic and the game doesn’t take two hours or require a 20-page rulebook, I’m interested.

Corrosion appeared in the U.S. last winter, another import by Capstone Games (publishers of Ark Nova, one of the best games of 2022 so far), and seems to have slipped a bit under the radar, but I like its twist on engine-builders: Most of the machines you build, and even some of the parts you use to build them, will rust after a few turns and must be discarded. Only the most expensive machines, which require chrome gears that don’t rust, last for the remainder of the game. It reminded me in theme of the CPRG Baldur’s Gate, where weapons and other items you get in the early part of the game randomly fall apart because of impurities in the iron mined in that region, but here is seamlessly integrated into an engine-building game with some contract bonuses and very light deckbuilding elements as well.

Players in Corrosion are trying to build the most valuable factories, using three types of gears (small, medium, and chrome) and steam to do so, taking actions by playing engineer cards from their hands and placing them in the sector matching their number. You can recruit better engineers to improve your deck, and you can build “one-shot” machines that work one time and are discarded, “turning” machines that operate several turns until they rust, and two levels of permanent machines that require chrome to build but are also worth victory points at game-end. You can also take bonus certificates that give you game-end points for certain conditions, although doing so requires trashing an engineer card from your hand.

Each player’s board has four sectors on it and a wheel that you will turn one sector at a time; when the wheel’s fourth segment, marked X, passes a sector, the player discards all gears stored in that sector and all one-shot or turning machines built in that sector, retrieves any engineers played to that sector, and then activates all turning machines in other sectors and all permanent machines on their player boards.

The game ends when the supply of award certificates or of special victory point markers (which players can get in several ways) is about to run out, which means you don’t actually get that many of your own turns, so Corrosion also lets you follow other players’ actions if you want. When one player plays an engineer card, any other player can mimic that card’s action by playing an engineer from their own hands of the same color and a higher value (cards are 1-4 and 4+, which is wild and matches any color). It allows you to fine-tune some of your action choices during the game so you’re not just restricted to the engineers in your hand, while also giving more value to the recruiting action, as all of the engineers you’ll add to your hand are valued 2 and up.

Corrosion also comes with an excellent solo mode where you’re just trying to maximize your score before you run through the automa deck four times; all the automa player does is remove some engineers and machines from the display, which can include the chrome machines that also carry special victory points. It’s more a matter of cycling through the machines and engineers, occasionally tripping you up by removing something you wanted but also giving you more options, and testing your ability to build a productive engine. I haven’t cracked 50 points yet, which is a low bar to clear, but I do find the solo mode fun.

The art is great here, but I do think the darker industrial theme makes this look heavier than Gizmos or Fantastic Factories despite being of similar weight, possibly even lighter weight than FF is; those games, which I do like better than Corrosion for other reasons, have bright colors and almost goofy artwork that make them seem lighter. Gizmos is definitely easier to learn, but the engines you build aren’t any less complex, maybe even more complex than those here but without the rust mechanic. Games should take 60-75 minutes once everyone has the idea. I give it a thumbs up, even though I would probably always pull Gizmos off the shelf before this one.

Get on Board: New York & London.

Get On Board: New York & London is the latest game from the designer Saashi, whose solitaire game Coffee Roaster is the best purely solo game I’ve ever played (and very accurate to its theme – the man clearly knows his coffee). This one is a two to five player game, a flip-and-write game with a fun route-building mechanic on a shared central board, as players compete to build bus routes to pick up and deliver passengers in the most efficient way for victory points.

The board here has two sides, New York for 2-3 players and London for 4-5, with only one rule difference between them (put a pin in that for a moment). Players start at different traffic lights on the map, and then will build a route from there by adding their own road pieces to cover individual blocks, never branching or doubling back, and marking off every icon their route touches on their personal scoresheets. There are twelve ticket cards that will determine how many pieces each player places per turn, and in what shape, with each player placing a different number/shape for tickets from what their competitors place.

Every intersection on the map has something there, and you score just about everything. Little old ladies are just happy to be there, so you score 1 to 3 points just for picking them up; everyone else has to be dropped off in some way, though. Tourists want to be delivered to tourist sites, and you get more points if you gather more tourists on your bus, up to 4 at a time, before getting to one of those sites. Workers want to go to office buildings, up to 3 at a time, with a bonus when you do so. Students don’t need to be dropped off in order at schools, but you do need to get your route to both to score, because your points are the product of the number of students you picked up and the number of schools on the route.

When you place a piece on a street where your opponent already has one, or, on the New York map, on a midtown block that’s marked in black, you cause Traffic, and you fill in one of the circles on the bottom of your scoresheet. The first few are just -1 point for every other circle, but eventually it’s -1 every time, and if you place a piece on a block that has multiple opponents’ pieces on it, guess what? It’s one circle for every piece already there. You can also choose to lose points if you want to alter the shape of pieces called for by the ticket – for example, if the ticket’s number calls for you to place three pieces all in a straight line, but you want to make one turn, you’d mark off one of the five spots at the top of the sheet. The first costs you 1 point, the next three cost you 2 points each, and the last one costs 3, after which, you’re stuck.

There are two other bonuses available, which can be worth up to 10 points each. Every player gets a card showing three lettered spots on the board, and will score 10 points if they get their bus route to hit all three of them. There are also two common objective cards in every game, where you have to pick up five students/tourists/workers or visit all three light blue or dark blue tourist sites, worth 10 points each for the first player to achieve it and 6 points for everyone after. Finally, there are four named sites on each map, a university, two tourist sites, and an office building, and when you reach one of those, you get a bonus equal to the number of matching people you’ve picked up in total to that point in the game.

It’s a lot of scoring rules, but the game play itself is simple and quick. Flip the next ticket. Add to your route, from the endpoint, matching the shape given by the ticket number and the guide on your scoresheet. You place those pieces, marking off everyone you pick up and every building you cross on your sheet, and if your route ends at a traffic light, you get to place a bonus piece for free. After twelve rounds, you’re done – add up your points (six categories), make your deductions (two), and you get your total. For two people it can take under a half an hour; for four, the most I’ve played with, it can take 45-50 minutes.

I do think the game shines at four players; the London map is a little better than the New York one, because it’s wider and gives you more flexibility. It’s worst with three, as the New York map gets too crowded, although I haven’t tried London with five. It’s probably fine for players 10 and up, maybe even as young as 8 if they know games, and I love the way the game encourages cognitive flexibility. You can also play this online at Board Game Arena, which has a great implementation. I think it’s likely to make my best games of 2022 list when I do that in December.

Top 100 boardgames, 2021 edition.

I’ve done board game rankings here every winter for fourteen years now, and this is the sixth year when I’ve ranked 100 games, which is a small fraction of the games I’ve played in my life (which I think is approaching 500, if not past it). The definition of a boardgame is nebulous, but I define it for this list by exclusions: no RPGs, no miniatures, no party games, no word games, no four-hour games, nothing that requires advance prep to play well. Board games don’t need boards – Dominion is all cards, played on a tabletop, so it qualifies – but they do need some skill element to qualify. And since it’s my list, I get to decide what I include or exclude.

I’ve put a complexity grade to the end of each review, low/medium/high, to make it easier for you to jump around and see what games might appeal to you. I don’t think there’s better or worse complexity, just different levels for different kinds of players. I’m somewhere between medium and high complexity; super “crunchy” games, as other gamers will say, don’t appeal to me as much as they might to the Boardgamegeek crowd. I’m way behind in my review queue as well, with something like 30-40 games here to try out, many of which I won’t crack open until after the holidays.

Finally, I’m at the point with this list now that there are games that I still like and would recommend that don’t crack the list. Raiders of the North Sea, My City, Scotland Yard, The Taverns of Tiefenthal, Five Tribes, Mystic Market, and more titles slid off the list this year. They’re good games, Brent. I just didn’t have room for all of them.

If a board game’s title is hyperlinked, it probably goes to the Amazon page for the game, and I would receive a commission from any sales there as a member of Amazon’s affiliate program. Links to Miniature Market do not generate any commissions.

100. The Isle of Cats. I’ve played this once, and enjoyed it quite a bit, even though I got trounced by two people who’d played before. It’s a medium-weight game of card drafting and polyomino tiles, where you try to rescue cats, on tiles of varying shapes, and use them to cover as much of your personal board as you can, scoring bonuses for covering specific squares or areas. The box is massive, though, which might lead folks to think it’s a heavier game than it actually is. I probably should rank this higher, but I want to play it again.

99. Air, Land, & Sea. Full review. A pure two-player game where each player has a hand of six cards, drawn from the main deck of 18, and will play the entire match with those by placing those cards in their matching theaters – air, land, or sea. Timing matters tremendously in each game, including the choice to surrender before all cards are played, which reduces your opponent’s point total for winning. You play several matches until one player gets to 15 points. It’s fast but gets you thinking several turns ahead, and it’s highly portable. Complexity: Low.

98. Downforce. Full review. Perhaps the best of Restoration Games’ restorations – bringing back older, long out-of-print games with updated graphics and rewritten rules – Downforce is a car-racing game where you bid on the different colors of cars, gaining one or sometimes two as your own, but then can also bet at three different stages on who will ultimately win, so your car doesn’t have to win the entire race for you to win the game. Definitely fine for younger kids (7, maybe even 6) who are familiar with games. Complexity: Medium-low.

97. San Juan: Full review. The card game version of Puerto Rico, but simpler, and very portable. I like this as a light game that lets you play a half-dozen times in an evening, but all it really shares with Puerto Rico is a theme and the concept of players taking different roles in each turn. It plays well with two players but also works with three or four. I get that saying this is a better game than Race for the Galaxy (they were developed in tandem before RftG split off) is anathema to most serious boardgamers, but the fact that you can pick this game up so much more easily is a major advantage in my mind, more than enough to balance out the significant loss of complexity; after two or three plays, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how to at least compete. The app version is very strong, with competent AI players and superb graphics. Complexity: Low.

96. Xenon Profiteer. Full review. Okay, perhaps not the best name, but it’s a really good game even if you weren’t obsessed with the periodic table like I was as a kid. Players are indeed profiting off xenon – the point is that you’re “refining” your hand of cards each turn to get rid of other gases and isolate the valuable xenon, then building up your tableau of cards to let you rack up more points from it. It’s a smarter deckbuilder with room for expansions, with at least one currently available. Out of print at the moment. Complexity: Medium.

95. Cryptid. Full review. A really clever deduction game that looks like it’ll be a generic dudes-on-a-map title but actually asks players to solve a sort of logic puzzle. Each player has a clue around the location of the Creature on the map, relating to the terrain type, distance from a landmark, or proximity to the two animal habitats. On each turn, a player asks one other player if the Creature could be on one specific hex, based on the second player’s clue; if yes, the second player places a disc on the hex, but if not, the second player places a cube on the hex AND the asking player places a cube on some other hex on the board where the Creature could not be. You can use the cards and codebooks with the game but it’s easier to use the associated site at playcryptid.com to set up the board and give out the clues. Complexity: Medium-low.

94. Agamemnon. Full review. An underappreciated abstract two-player game, with very little luck and a lot of balancing between the good move now and holding a tile for a great move later. Players compete to control “threads of fate” – connected lines on a small hub-and-spoke board – by placing their tokens at the hubs, but there are three different types of lines and control of each is determined in its own way. The board has alternate layouts on the other side for infinite replayability, but the main board is elegant enough for many replays, because so much of the game involves outthinking your opponent. Probably one of the least-known games on this list, unfortunately. Complexity: Low.

93. Morels. Full review. Morels is an easy-to-learn two-player card game with plenty of decision-making and a small amount of interaction with your opponent as you try to complete and “cook” sets of various mushroom types to earn points. The artwork is impressive and the game is very balanced, reminiscent of Lost Cities but with an extra tick of difficulty because of the use of an open, rolling display of cards from which players can choose. The app version is also very good. Most of these mushrooms are also delicious. Complexity: Low.

92. One Night Ultimate Werewolf. Needs at least five people to play well, but otherwise it’s a great social deduction game that can really play in under ten minutes, especially with the companion app to help you along. Each player gets a role, and then everyone closes their eyes; one role is called at a time, and those players “wake up” and do some action. At the end, everyone opens their eyes and tries to guess which players are werewolves – while the werewolves try to deke everyone else out. Complexity: Low.

91. Noctiluca. Full review. Shem Phillips’ Raiders of the North Sea just fell off the list this year – it would be in the 101-110 range – so this is now his only game on this ranking, a dice-drafting game with clever rules on how you place your tokens to pick dice from a specific row on the board to try to fill out either of your two objective cards at any given time. The dice come in four bright colors and the turns move quickly, with the entire game comprising two rounds where you fill the entire board from scratch. There’s a solo mode that isn’t too bad, but it’s definitely best as a two- to four-player game. Complexity: Medium-low.

90. 7 Ronin: Full review. An asymmetrical two-player game with a Seven Samurai theme – and when I say “theme,” I mean that’s the whole story of the game. One player is the seven ronin of the title, hired to defend a village against the invading ninjas, controlled by the other player. If the ninjas don’t take the village or wipe out the ronin before eight rounds are up, the ronin player wins. But the ninja can gain a decisive advantage in the first four rounds with the right moves. It’s very clever, the art is fantastic, and the theme is completely integrated into the game itself. It also plays in about 30 minutes. Complexity: Medium-low.

89. Calico. Full review. A surprisingly hard tile-laying game with a cute (maybe cutesy) theme of cats and quilts. You place tiles on your board to create patterns that will match your objective tiles or attract cats to your board for points. Your individual board has a frame around it, limiting your options and making every decision critical – place the wrong thing at the start and you might make scoring points extremely difficult later on. There’s some luck in the tile draws as well, so even a good plan might not come to fruition, but without that randomness I’m not sure you could play this well with inexperienced players. There’s a spiritual sequel game called Cascadia that came out this summer, although I’ve played it just once. Complexity: Medium, at least.

88. Villainous. Full review. Technically called Disney Villainous, a fully licensed Disney product that uses substantial Disney IP, so I must remind you that I have been a Disney cast member for over twelve years but received no input or consideration on this product beyond the review copy I got from the publisher. Villainous plays like a deckbuilder, but where you already have your whole deck at the start of the game, and have to figure out how to work through your deck to get the key cards you need while also fighting off the Hero cards opponents will sic on you. Each player plays as a unique Disney villain with its own card deck, board, and victory conditions; the base game has six, but this concept is as extensible as it gets and the designers are already talking about expansion decks. The theme will appeal to some younger kids, but this is not just a game for young Disney fans. Both expansions, Evil Comes Prepared (Scar, Ratigan, and Yzma) and Wicked to the Core (Hades, Dr. Facilier, the Evil Queen), are also standalone titles, each containing three new villains to play. There are also two Marvel versions, Infinite Power and Mischief & Malice, which can be played together but aren’t compatible with the original game. I much prefer the original versions, as the Marvel game has some shared goals that make the game more difficult and longer. Complexity: Medium.

87. Elder Sign: Full review. Another cooperative game, this one set in the Cthulhu realm of H.P. Lovecraft’s works, Elder Sign takes a different tack on teamwork by emphasizing individual actions within the larger rubric of coordinating actions to reach a common goal. Players represent detectives seeking to rid a haunted mansion of its evil spirits, room by room, earning certain rewards while incurring risks to their health and sanity, all to take out the big foozle before he returns to life and threatens to devour them all. Player actions take place via dice rolls, but players can use their unique skills as well as various cards to alter rolled dice or reroll them entirely to try to achieve the results necessary to clear a room. There’s still a heavy luck component and you’ll probably swear at some point that Cthulhu himself has possessed the dice, but that just makes killing your supernatural enemy all the more satisfying. Complexity: Medium-low.

86. Galaxy Trucker. Full app review. I have only played the iOS app version of the game, which is just amazing, and reviews of the physical game are all pretty strong. Players compete to build starships to handle voyages between stations, and there’s an actual race to grab components during the building phase, after which you have to face various external threats and try to grab treasures while completing missions. It’s a boardgame that has a hint of RPG territory; the app has a long narrative-centric campaign that is best of breed. Complexity: Medium-low.

85. Seven Bridges. Full review. Seven Bridges came out right before Christmas of 2020, too late for my best games of the year post, but it is one of the best roll-and-write games I’ve ever played, and certainly the best one that I would say is at all complex. The title refers to the Seven Bridges of Königsberg, a famous problem in mathematics eventually solved by Leonard Euler – could you walk a path through the city, crossing each of its seven bridges exactly once? (The answer is no.) Here, you roll dice showing segments of paths, and must fill out parts of the roads and footpaths on your personal scoresheet, showing a city map with those seven bridges. You get points for crossing bridges, passing monuments, and other achievements, and you can unlock bonuses on the left side of the sheet that can help you get specific shapes you need. It’s extremely easy to teach, but I believe it’s hard to master because of how many ways you can score. The first print run sold out; it’s unclear when the next one will be. Complexity: Medium.

84. Exit: The Game. Full review. The Kennerspiel des Jahres winner in 2017 is actually a series of games you can play just once, because solving their puzzles requires tearing and cutting game components, writing on them, and just generally destroying things to find clues and answers that will lead you to the next question, at the end of which is the solution to the game. You can’t really lose, but you can grade your performance by looking at how many game hints you had to use over the time you played. The various titles in the series have varying levels of difficulty, and some are better than others, but my daughter and I keep playing the newest titles and most are fun and engaging. I didn’t care for the one longer Exit game, The Catacombs of Horror, which I think got its length and difficulty from making some puzzles too esoteric or hard to solve. I have but haven’t yet tried one of the new Exit games with a puzzle included. Complexity: Medium-low.

83. Ecosystem. Full review. A steal at $15, Ecosystem works with 3 players but it’s great at 5-6 because you get most of the game’s 120-card deck, depicting animals or habitats, involved. It’s a card-drafting game where each player will end up creating a 4×5 grid in front of them of those cards, with each card type scoring differently, often based on what cards are adjacent to it or in the same row or even what cards are not near it. It’s easy to learn, very portable, and highly replayable. Complexity: Low.

82. Century Spice Road. Full review. A fun, light, family game that’s perfect if you liked Splendor and want something similar but that has at least a few little differences. The core engine-building component is very similar, but instead of collecting jewels to pay for cards, you collect goods to trade and acquire them by playing cards from your hand, eventually using a turn to replenish that hand with cards you’ve already played. You win by gaining enough resources to buy bonus cards from the table that will refresh as the game goes along, and there’s always a conflict between trying to grab a bunch of those early for a quick victory and going more slowly to gain higher-point cards. It’s not quite Splendor good, but it should appeal to everyone who liked Splendor already. The second Century game, (Century Eastern Wonders, is a solid pathfinding game with the same resource ladder, but I thought the third game, Century A New World, didn’t work at all. Complexity: Medium-low.

81. Chronicles of Crime. A cooperative deduction game that uses technology in a new (to me) way – you can examine a crime scene by looking at a 360 degree image on your phone, moving the device around to look for possible clues and objects to investigate further. You scan codes on cards to try to get further clues to solve each mystery, eventually having to answer a few questions to get your score. I’ve only played this solo so far but it works extremely well as a solitaire game. Complexity: Medium-low.

80. Broom Service. Full review. The Kennerspiel des Jahres winner for 2015, Broom Service is lighter than most games in that category, but still complex enough to be more than just a family-strategy game, although the theme appealed to my daughter and she didn’t have any trouble understanding the base game’s rules when she was nine. Players take on various roles to move their witch tokens around the board, gathering potions or delivering them to various towers for points, or collecting wands and clouds to gain other bonuses. There are multiple paths to win, but they’re all fairly straightforward; the role selection process is unique and takes some getting used to for younger players. It was a well-deserving winner, but requires a minimum of three players. It’s hard to find right now, but a few places have it for $45, which is more than I’d pay. Complexity: Medium.

79. 7 Summits. Full review. I got to play a prototype of this game at PAX Unplugged in 2019, and I was already hooked – the finished game is pretty much the same as what I played, in fact. Players draft dice on each turn to move their mountaineers up the seven mountains of the game’s title, referring to the tallest peak on each continent. You can continue rolling, but if you press your luck, you might fall all the way to the bottom. You can also get various power tokens along the way to make your ascents easier, or just more profitable. It plays well with any player count from two to five. Complexity: Low.

78. Jambo. Full review. A two-player card game where the deck is virtually everything, meaning that there’s a high element of chance based on what cards you draw; if you don’t draw enough of the cards that allow you to sell and purchase wares, it’ll be hard for you to win. Each player is an African merchant dealing in six goods and must try to buy and sell them enough times to go from 20 gold at the game’s start to 60 or more at the end. I played this wrong a few times, then played it the right way and found it a little slow, as the deck includes a lot of cards of dubious value. It’s one of the best pure two-player games out there. It’s also among my favorite themes, maybe because it makes me think of the Animal Kingdom Lodge at Disneyworld. Out of print for over two years now. Complexity: Low.

77. Acquire. Monopoly for grown-ups, and one of the oldest games on the list. Build hotel chains up from scratch, gain a majority of the shares, merge them, and try to outearn all your opponents. The game hinges heavily on its one random element – the draw of tiles from the pool each turn – but the decisions on buying stock in existing chains and how to sell them after a merger give the player far more control over his fate than he’d have in Monopoly. There’s a two-player variant that works OK, but it’s best with at least three people. The game looks a lot nicer now; I have a copy from the mid-1980s that still has the 1960s artwork and color scheme. Complexity: Low.

76. That’s Pretty Clever! I’m not sure why I didn’t include this on last year’s list, but I think this game, originally called Ganz Schön Clever, is the best roll-and-write game ever developed. You roll six dice, each in its own color, and choose one to score. Then you remove dice lower than the one you chose, roll the remainder, and choose another to score. Do this one more time. Each die scores in a unique way on your scoresheet, which has five separate scoring areas (the white is wild, and also is paired with the blue die for scoring that color). It works extremely well as a solo game, or with two players, or up to four; you also get to choose one leftover die after each opponent’s turn. There are two sequel games, Twice as Clever! and Clever Cubed, but this is the best one. Complexity: Low.

75. Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra. Full review. The first half of this game is just like the original Azul, but how and where you place the tiles you take is completely different. Each player has a set of stained-glass columns with five colored spaces to fill. When you fill a column, you drop one tile to the bottom track, flip the column over, and try to fill it again. You score for columns you fill plus re-score columns you filled previously to its right, and then score at game-end if you fill in 2-4 spots in the squares in your bottom track. If you love Azul, maybe this game feels superfluous … or maybe it just lets you keep playing Azul in a fresh way? Whatever, I like it, I recommend it, I recommend everything on this list even if I look at the rankings a few months later and think I got them all wrong. I will say, at least, that I think this game runs a little longer than the original Azul because you have to do more on your personal boards to get to the end-game. Complexity: Medium-low.

74. Seasons: Full review. A hybrid game of deckbuilding and point accumulation, where the decks are very small, so understanding the available cards and the interactions between them (some of which create exponentially better effects) is key to playing the game well. Players play wizards who start the game with nine spell cards to play, divided into three groups of three, and use them to gain energy tokens and crystals that can eventually be converted into points. The seasons change according to a time wheel on the board, and each of the four energy types has a season in which it’s scarce and two in which it’s plentiful. Seasons has a very dedicated fan base and two popular expansions, and I agree with that in that once you get up the steep learning curve it’s a great game due to the number of possibilities for each move and differences from game to game. Complexity: Medium-high.

73. Coffee Roaster. Full review. The best purely solo board game I’ve ever played, Coffee Roaster is exactly what it sounds like: You pick a bean from the game’s deck, each of which has a specific moisture content, and unique combination of green beans and other tokens, and has an optimal roast level. On each turn, you crank up the roast and draw tokens from the bag that you can then deploy to the board to try to remove any bad beans or smoke tokens while gradually increasing the roast level of the good beans. There are all sorts of bonus moves you can make to try to improve your results, but eventually you move to the cupping stage and draw (roughly) ten tokens from the bag, adding up their roast values to see how close you got to the bean’s optimal number. Like the caffeine in the beverages, the game is quite addictive, especially since it’s easy to score something but hard to get to that one optimal roast number. I have the original edition but Stronghold Games has brought it back in an all-new version new art. Complexity: Medium.

72. Kingdomino. Full review. The 2016 Spiel des Jahres winner, Kingdomino is a great family-strategy game, perfect for playing with a mix of adults and kids, perhaps a little light for the adult gamer crowd, which I think the publishers are hoping to target with the standalone sequel game Queendomino. Players take turns selecting two-square tiles from the display of four, and then place them next to the tiles they’ve already played, trying to fill out a 5×5 grid without going over any boundaries. You score points for creating contiguous areas of the five terrain types in the game, scoring multiples if you have more than one crown in an area. It’s under $20 on amazon now, which is a bargain. The brand-new kids’ version, Dragomino, is also very good for players as young as 4. Complexity: Medium-low.

71. Fort. Full review. Fort has a kids’s game sort of theme, as players compete to build the best treehouse fort by attracting neighborhood kids to join their clubs, but it’s a game for more seasoned players because you have to make some long-term strategic choices to play it well. It’s a deckbuilder where you can take cards from other players for free any time they draw a card but choose not to use it on that turn – but they can do the same to you. The art is amazing, from the same artist who does all of Leder’s games (Root, Vast). Complexity: Medium.

70. Root. Full review. Super cute theme and artwork, vicious game. Two to four players each play unique forest creatures, each with its own tokens, abilities, themes, and methods of earning points, while fighting for control of the forest on the board. Some species will battle in forest clearings; some do better with trade or building items; one, the Vagabond, has no troops, but runs around stealing stuff and racking up points for items and for creating alliances with other players. It’s a deceptively rich game in a theme that looks like it would appeal to little kids. The Dire Wolf app is great, as all their apps are. Complexity: Medium-high, due to the asymmetrical play.

69. Diplomacy. Risk for grown-ups, with absolutely zero random chance – it’s all about negotiating. I wrote about the history of Diplomacy (and seven other games) for mental_floss in 2010, concluding with: “One of a handful of games (with Risk) in both the GAMES Magazine and Origin Awards Halls of Fame, Diplomacy is an excellent choice if you enjoy knife fights with your friends and holding grudges that last well beyond the final move.” I think that sums it up perfectly. I haven’t played this in a few years, unfortunately, although that’s no one’s fault but my own. Complexity: Medium.

68. Power Grid: Full review. This might be the Acquire for the German-style set, as the best business- or economics-oriented game I’ve found. (I own a copy of London, but haven’t played it. Brass is pretty close.) Each player tries to build a power grid on the board, bidding on plants at auction, placing stations in cities, and buying resources to fire them. Those resources become scarce and the game’s structure puts limits on expansion in the first two “phases.” It’s not a simple game to learn and a few rules are less than intuitive, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a game that does a better job of turning resource constraints into something fun. I’d love to see this turned into an app, although the real-time auction process would make async multi-player a tough sell. Complexity: High (or medium-high).

67. Citadels. Full review. First recommended to me by a reader back in my first rankings in 2008, Citadels only reached me when Asmodee reissued the game in one box with all of the existing expansions. It’s a fantastic game for five or more players, still workable at four, not so great below that. It’s a role selection game where players pick a role and then work through those actions by the role’s number, with some roles, of course, that do damage to specific roles that might come later in the turn. It’s the best mix of a party game and a traditional boardgame I’ve seen. Complexity: Medium-low.

66. Glen More. Full review. Build your Scottish settlement, grow wheat, make whiskey. Sure, you can do other stuff, like acquire special tiles (including Loch Ness!) or acquire the most chieftains or earn victory points by trading other resources, but really, whiskey, people. The tile selection mechanic is the biggest selling point, as players move on a track around the edge of the central board and may choose to skip one or more future turns by jumping further back to acquire a better tile. Unfortunately, this game might be permanently out of print; it’s been replaced by a “sequel” game, Glen More II: Chronicles, which is longer, more complex, and a lot more expensive. Complexity: Medium.

65. Riftforce. Full review. Riftforce is the best new purely two-player game I’ve tried this year (2021). It’s an asymmetrical dueling game, where each player has a deck of cards in four factions, and the players play cards to five locations in a row between them. The cards are valued 5, 6, and 7, representing their hit points. You can play up to three cards of a color, or three of the same value, or you can play a card to activate up to three matching cards, using their actions usually to blast a card on the other side of the same location. You duel until one player gets 12 Riftforce points, mostly from destroying an opponent’s cards. The game comes with ten factions, which gives it more variety than most folks will ever need, although I’m sure there will be expansions. Complexity: Medium-low.

64. Thurn und Taxis: Full review. I love games with very simple rules that require quick thinking with a moderate amount of foresight. Thurn und Taxis players try to construct routes across a map of Germany, using them to place mail stations and to try to occupy entire regions, earning points for doing so, and for constructing longer and longer routes. But over time, and many plays, I’ve cooled on this game quite a bit – there is one optimal strategy, and one strategy that’s a close second, and that’s about it. And the second strategy is the opposite of fun for me. I think route-building has been done better in the fifteen years since this came out. Complexity: Low.

63. Ingenious. Full app review. Ingenious is another Reiner Knizia title, a two- to four-person abstract strategy game that involves tile placement but where the final scoring compares each player’s lowest score across the six tile colors, rather than his/her highest. That alters gameplay substantially, often making the ideal play seem counterintuitive, and also requires each player to keep a more careful eye on what the other guy is doing. The app, which I owned and reviewed, is now gone from all app stores, because of a trademark dispute, although other versions exist. Complexity: Low.

62. Lanterns. Full game and app review. A tile-placement and matching game where players are also racing to collect tokens to trade in for bonuses that decline in value as the game goes on. Each tile has lanterns in any of seven colors along the four edges; placing a tile gives you one token of the color facing you … and each opponent one token of the color facing him/her. If you match a tile side to the side it’s touching, you get a token of that color too. There are also bonus tokens from some tiles, allowing you to trade tokens of one color for another. Bonuses come from trading in one token of each color; three pairs; or four of a kind. The art is great and the app adds some wonderful animations. Complexity: Medium-low.

61. Juicy Fruits. Full review. I might be prey to a little recency bias here, but I am pretty confident this game belongs in this range on the list – it hits the sweet spot (pun intended) for games I like that I can also play with just about anybody, because it’s quick to learn and play. Players collect fruits by moving tokens on their personal island boards, then trade them in for points, to get upgrades, or to launch ships that gain points and make their islands bigger. The mini fruit tokens are cute, and the rules are quite easy to follow. I didn’t think the advanced mode, which adds an achievement track, was really necessary. Complexity: Medium-low.

60. Dragomino. Full review. This reimagining of Kingdomino for younger players, aged 4 and up, is bar none the best game I’ve played for kids that young – and if you don’t believe me, I have at least four kids aged 4 or 5 who would back up my opinion, including my youngest stepdaughter. It takes the domino terrain tiles of the original and just asks players to take one tile on each turn, place it in their area next to an existing tile, and draw one dragon egg for each place where they’ve matched adjacent terrain types. Some dragon eggs have baby dragons, and some are empty. Whoever ends the game with the most baby dragons wins. It’s not a good game for kids. It’s a good game, one that kids can play easily. If you’re the adult at the table, that is exactly what you’re looking for. Complexity: Low.

59. Silver & Gold. Full review. Phil Walker-Harding is some sort of genius, with Imhotep, the Sushi Go! series, Bärenpark, Gizmos, and this all hits under his name, along with 2021’s Summer Camp, the lighter Gingerbread House, and more. Silver & Gold is a polyomino flip-and-write game where there are just eight shapes to choose from in each round, with seven of them displayed in random order (the eighth isn’t used), and players fill in those small shapes on the larger ones on their two objective cards, using dry-erase markers. You score for finishing shapes, with three small bonuses available each game that do usually end up mattering in the final score. It’s portable, easy, lightly strategic, and undeniably fun. Complexity: Low.

58. Coup. Full review. A great, great bluffing game if you have at least four people in your gaming group. Each player gets two cards and can use various techniques to try to take out other players. Last (wo)man standing is the winner. Guaranteed to get the f-bombs flowing. Only $7 for the whole kit and caboodle. The expansion, Coup: Reformation, lets you boost the maximum player count from 6 to 10. Complexity: Low.

57. Thebes: Full review. A fun family-oriented game with an archaelogy theme and what I think of as the right amount of luck: it gives the game some balance and makes replays more interesting, but doesn’t determine the whole game. Players collect cards to run expeditions to five dig sites, then root around in the site’s bag of tokens to try to extract treasure. Back in print at the moment. Complexity: Medium-low.

56. Whistle Stop. Full review. One of the best new games of 2017, Whistle Stop is a train game that takes a little bit from lots of other train games, including Ticket to Ride, Steam, and Russian Railroads, without becoming bogged down by too many rules or scoring mechanisms. It also has gloriously fun, pastel-colored pieces and artwork, and the variable board gives it a ton of replay value. It was an immediate hit in my house. Complexity: Medium.

55. Tokaido. Full review. Another winner from the designer of 7 Wonders, Takenoko, and one of my least favorite Spiel des Jahres winners, Hanabi, Tokaido has players walking along a linear board, stopping where they choose on any unoccupied space, collecting something at each stop, with a half-dozen different ways to score – collecting all cards of a panorama, finishing sets of trinkets, meeting strangers for points or coins, or donating to the temple to try to get the game-end bonus for the most generous traveler. It’s a great family-level game that requires more thought and more mental math than most games of its ilk. The app is excellent as well. There’s a sequel game, Namiji, due out next year, that will take the same basic mechanics but change the players’ actions on the path. Complexity: Medium.

54. Nidavellir. I haven’t reviewed this yet, as I don’t actually own the game in any form, but I played it once at Gen Con and a couple of times online, and man, this is a winner. It’s a bidding game, with set collection, and a kind of silly Nordic dwarves theme that’s kind of fun. But the way it handles the bidding is novel: Every player has five money tokens and will bid with two of them in each round on the three rows of dwarf cards (one per player in each row). You take the two coins you didn’t use, combine their value, and swap the higher one for a new coin showing that sum – so sometimes it’s better to underbid and get a better coin for future rounds. I’m a fan already. Complexity: Medium-low.

53. Concordia: Full review . It’s a map game, set in Ancient Rome, built around trade and economics rather than conflict or claiming territories. Much better with four players than with two, where there isn’t enough interaction on the map to force players to make harder decisions. Runner-up for the Kennerspiel des Jahres (Connoisseur’s game of the year) in 2015 to Istanbul. There’s a brand-new app version from Concordia I hope to try out this week. Complexity: Medium.

52. The Quacks of Quedlinburg. Full review. The Kennerspiel des Jahres winner from 2018 came to my attention too late for my top ten list of last year, but it would have made the cut if I had played it in time. Designed by Wolfgang Warsch, who has The Mind also on this list and is also behind the co-op game Fuji and dice-rollers That’s Pretty Clever! and Twice As Clever!, the Quacks is a press-your-luck game with vaguely ridiculous artwork where players fill their bags with ingredients for their potions, drawing as many as they want to try to gain points and benefits before their potions explode because they drew too many white tokens. All other tokens are ‘bought’ through the draws in each round – if you explode, you don’t get points, but you do get money – and each confers some kind of benefit. The press-your-luck part is a lot of fun, though, and even though it’s competitive there’s a sort of aspect where you find yourself rooting for someone else who decides to keep drawing after you’re done. It plays well with five players, and the expansion (out of print right now) lets you add a sixth. Complexity: Medium-low.

51. The Search for Planet X. Full review. This competitive deduction game is like a logic puzzle that’s been streamlined and converted to the tabletop by limiting the kinds of questions you can ask on a turn to try to solve the core mystery. Players are astronomers looking for the hypothesized ninth planet (a real thing) in either 12 or 18 sectors of the sky, depending on whether you play the basic or advanced version. Every sector has one object, except for those that scan as ’empty’ … but the one with Planet X also appears empty, so you can only find it via deduction once you know enough of the rules governing where other planets are located. You get points for identifying where other objects are too, so you can guess Planet X’s location second or third or later and still win. Complexity: Medium-low.

50. Watergate. Full review. It’s a pure two-player game that pits one player as Nixon and the other as “the journalists,” each with a unique deck, where the latter player tries to place evidence tokens connecting at least two witnesses to the President, and Tricky Dick tries to block them. It’s fun, incredibly well-written, and a real thinker, with actual educational value and some additional reading content at the back of the rule book. Complexity: Medium.

49. Love Letter: Full review. The entire game is just sixteen cards and a few heart tokens. Each player has one card and has to play it; the last player still alive wins the round. It requires at least three players to be any good and was much better with four, with lots of laughing and silly stare-downs. It’s the less serious version of Coup, and it’s only $9. Complexity: Low.

48. Charterstone. Full review. Legacy games aren’t quite my thing, given the time commitment usually involved for them, but I do enjoy Pandemic Legacy, and absolutely love Charterstone, which brings the legacy format to old-school Euro games of resource collection, worker placement, and building stuff for points. Players all play on the same board but focus on building in their own areas, scoring points within each game by trading in resources or gold, achieving objectives, building buildings, opening chests (which is how you add new rules), or gaining reputation. At game-end, there’s a final scoring that considers how many times each player won individual games, and also adds points for things like the buildings in your charter when the last game was over. The board and rules change as the game progresses, with new meeples appearing, new ways to score points, and entirely new game concepts added, so that without you realizing it the game has gone from something very simple to a moderately complex strategy game that taught you all the rules as you played it. The base game gives you twelve plays to complete the story; you can buy a recharge pack to play with the other side of the board and most of the same components a second time through. Once you’ve done that, you can continue playing it as a single-play game. The app, from Acram Digital, is very good, although it’s such a long process that I haven’t gone back to replay it. Complexity: Starts low, ends medium to medium-high.

47. Through the Desert. Full app review, although it hasn’t been updated for the newest iOS version. Another Knizia game, this one on a large board of hexes where players place camels in chains, attempting to cordon off entire areas they can claim or to connect to specific hexes worth extra points, all while potentially blocking their opponents from building longer or more valuable chains in the same colors. Very simple to learn and to set up, and like most Knizia games, it’s balanced and the mechanics work beautifully. Finally reprinted in 2018 by Fantasy Flight, but it’s out of print again, as they spiked their Euro Classics line. . Horse with no name sold separately. Complexity: Low.

46. Stone Age: Full review. I’ve cooled on Stone Age over the last few years, because other games have adopted aspects of it – Everdell in particular – and improved them, or just put them into shorter games. Stone Age has a lot of real-time decision-making and simple mechanics and goals that first-time players always seem to pick up quickly. Each player is trying to build a small stone-age civilization by expanding his population and gathering resources to construct buildings worth varying amounts of points, but must always ensure that he feeds all his people on each turn. You place workers and then roll one die per worker to see how many resources you’ll get, which tends to flatten out differences in playing skills. But the game can be very long, depending on playing styles – you need one or more players who target the cards to try to speed to end-game. The iOS app is strong – they did a nice job reimagining the board for smaller screens – and is now updated and playable on newer devices. Complexity: Medium.

45. Puerto Rico: Full review. One of the highest-rated and most-acclaimed Eurogames of all time, although I think its combination of worker-placement and building has been done better by later designers. You’re attempting to populate and build your own island, bringing in colonists, raising plantations, developing your town, and shipping goods back to the mother country. Very low luck factor, and just the right amount of screw-your-neighbor (while helping yourself, the ultimate defense). Unfortunately, the corn-and-ship strategy is really tough to beat, reducing the game’s replay value for me. There’s a solid iOS app as well, improved after some major upgrades. Complexity: High.

44. The Mind. Full review. The Mind may drive you crazy; I haven’t beaten it yet, playing with several different people already, but I still find it really enjoyable and something that nearly always ends up with everyone laughing. This Spiel des Jahres-nominated game has just a deck of cards numbered 1 to 100, and in each round, every player gets a set number of cards dealt from the shuffled deck. All players must play their cards to the table in one pile, ascending by card number … but you can’t talk to anyone else, or even gesture. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. Complexity: Low.

43. Targi. Full review. Moderately complex two-player game with a clever mechanic for placing meeples on a grid – you don’t place meeples on the grid itself, but on the row/column headers, so you end up blocking out a whole row or column for your opponent. Players gather salt, pepper, dates, and the relatively scarce gold to enable them to buy “tribe cards” that are worth points by themselves and in combinations with other cards. Some tribe cards also confer benefits later in the game, and there at least two that are super-powered and you’ll fight to get. Two-player games often tend to be too simple, or feel like weak variants of games designed for more players. Targi isn’t either of those things – it’s a smart game that feels like it was built for exactly two people. Complexity: Medium.

42. Vikings: Full review. A very clever tile placement game in which players place island and ship tiles in their areas and then place vikings of six different colors on those tiles to maximize their points. Some vikings score points directly, but can’t score unless a black “warrior” viking is placed above them. Grey “boatsman” vikings are necessary to move vikings you’ve stored on to unused tiles. And if you don’t have enough blue “fisherman” vikings, you lose points at the end of the game for failing to feed everyone. Tile selection comes from a rondel that moves as tiles come off the board, with each space on the rondel assigning a monetary value to the tiles; tiles become cheaper as the number remaining decreases. You’re going to end up short somewhere, so deciding early where you’ll punt is key. Great game that still gets too little attention. It seems to be out of print again this year. Complexity: Medium.

41. Terraforming Mars. Full review. One of the most acclaimed games of the last decade, Terraforming Mars is big and long, but so imaginative that it provides an engrossing enough experience to last the two hours or so it takes to play. The theme is just what the title says, based on the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (which I loathed), as the players compete to rack up points while jointly transforming the planet’s surface. The environment is tracked with three main variables – oxygen levels, surface temperature, and water supply – that alter the effects of various moves and buildings as the game progresses. The cards are the heart of the play itself, as they can provide powerful points bonuses and/or game benefits. It’s already been expanded at least four times, with Hellas & Elysium, Venus Next, Prelude, and Colonies. The digital port is also very good. Complexity: High.

40. Tzolk’in. Tzolkin is a fairly complex worker-placement game where the board itself has six interlocked gears that move with the days of the Mayan calendar; you place a worker on one gear and he cycles through various options for moves until you choose to recall him. As with most worker-placement games, you’re collecting food, gold, wood, and stone; building stuff; and moving up some scoring tracks, the latter of which is the main source of strategic complexity. I like designer Simone Luciani’s games, and this is one of his best, even though I’m pretty bad at it – I never seem to get the rhythm of adding and removing workers right. The gears, though, are kind of badass. Complexity: High.

39. Orient Express. An outstanding game that’s long out of print; I’m lucky enough to still have the copy my father bought for me in the 1980s, but fans have crafted their own remakes, like this one from a Boardgamegeek user. It takes those logic puzzles where you try to figure out which of five people held which job and lived on which street and had what for breakfast and turns them into a murder mystery board game with a fixed time limit. When the Orient Express reaches its destination, the game ends, so you need to move fast and follow the clues. The publishers still sell the expansions, adding up to 30 more cases for you to solve, through this site, but when I asked them about plans for a reprint they gave me the sense it’s not likely. There’s a 2017 game of the same name, but it’s unrelated. Complexity: Low.

38. Kodama: The Tree Spirits. Full review. Definitely among the cutest games I’ve played, with artwork that looks like it came from the pen of Hayao Miyazaki, but also a quick-playing game that has something I hadn’t seen before in how you place your cards. Players start with a tree trunk card with one ‘feature’ on it, and must add branch cards to the trunk and beyond, scoring whenever a feature appears on the card just placed and the card (or trunk) to which it connects. You can score up to 10 points on a turn, and will add 12 cards to your tree. You get four secret bonus cards at the start of the game and play one at the end of each season (4 turns), and each season itself has a special rule that varies each game. It’s light, portable, and replays extremely well. The base game also includes Sprout cards for simpler play with younger children. The two-player spinoff Kodama Duo isn’t great on its own but includes cards to expand the base game for a sixth player. Complexity: Low.

37. Takenoko. Full review. If I tell you this is the cutest game I own, would you consider that a negative? The theme and components are fantastic – there’s a panda and a gardener and these little bamboo pieces, and the panda eats the bamboo and you have to lay new tiles and make sure they have irrigation and try not to go “squeeeeee!” at how adorable it all is. There’s a very good game here too: Players draw and score “objective” cards from collecting certain combinations of bamboo, laying specific patterns of hex tiles, or building stacks of bamboo on adjacent tiles. The rules were easy enough for my daughter to learn when she was about eight, but gameplay is more intricate because you’re planning a few moves out and have to deal with your opponents’ moves – although there’s no incentive to screw your opponents. Just be careful – that panda is hungry. Complexity: Medium-low.

36. Canvas. Full review. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more visually stunning game, starting with the box itself. It’s also surprisingly simple to learn and play. Players will select cards from the display to build three works of art, crafting them by placing three cards into a clear sleeve so that up to five distinct elements of the artwork are visible for scoring. The value of those elements can vary in each game, while some things are always worth points. It plays in about a half an hour and is far easier than any other card-crafting game I’ve seen. Plus the game’s artwork is off the charts. Complexity: Low.

35. Cacao. Full review. A simpler Carcassonne? I guess every tile-laying game gets compared to the granddaddy of them all, but Cacao certainly looks similar, and you don’t get to see very far ahead in the tile supply in Cacao, although at least here you get a hand of three tiles from which to choose. But the Cacao board ends up very different, a checkerboard pattern of alternating tiles between players’ worker tiles and the game’s neutral tiles, which can give you cacao beans, let you sell beans for 2-4 gold pieces, give you access to water, give you partial control of a temple, or just hand you points. One key mechanic: if you collect any sun tiles, you can play a new tile on top of a tile you played earlier in the game, which is a great way to make a big ten-point play to steal the win. I haven’t explored the expansions beyond the volcanoes, but the Diamante one is well-received. Complexity: Low.

34. Patchwork: Full review. A really sharp two-player game that has an element of Tetris – players try to place oddly shaped bits of fabric on his/her main board, minimizing unused space and earning some small bonuses along the way. It’s from Uwe Rosenberg, better known for designing the ultra-complex games Agricola, Le Havre, and Caverna. I’ve played this a ton, and the way you have to think ahead just a little bit, looking at what tiles you can take and what tile(s) your opponent might take, is perfect for two-player play. Complexity: Low.

33. (The Settlers of) Catan: It’s now just called Catan, although I use the old title because I think more people know it by that name. I don’t pull this game out as much as I did a few years ago, and I’ve still got it ranked this high largely because of its value as an introduction to Eurogames, one of the best “gateway games” on the market. Without this game, we don’t have the explosion in boardgames we’ve had in the last fifteen years. We don’t have Ticket to Ride and 7 Wonders showing up in Target (where you can also buy Catan), a whole wall of German-style games in Barnes & Noble, or the Cones of Dunshire on network television. I believe only three games on this list predate Settlers, from an era where Monopoly was considered the ne plus ultra of boardgames and you couldn’t complain about how long and awful it was because you had no basis for comparison. The history of boardgames comprises two eras: Before Catan, and After Catan. Complexity: Medium-low.

32. Imhotep. Full review. Nominated for the Spiel des Jahres in 2016, Imhotep lost out to Codenames – a solid party game, not quite good enough for this top 100 between the language dependence and the lack of a strategic element – but in my opinion should have won. Imhotep is a quick-playing game with lots of depth as players gather stones, place them on ships, and sail ships to any of five possible destinations, each with a different benefit or point value. You can place a stone on any ship, and you can use your turn to sail a ship without any of your stones on it – say, to keep someone else from blocking your path or from scoring a big bonus. Each destination tile has two sides so you can vary the game, mixing and matching for up to 32 different configurations. Complexity: Medium-low.

31. Terraforming Mars: Ares Edition. Full review. This is probably heretical to fans of the original Terraforming Mars game, but I like this shorter version better. It’s smaller, and plays in an hour, but still keeps the theme and general concepts from the first game. Each player represents a unique corporation that is working both to terraform the red planet and to be the most profitable one while doing so. You do all that through drawing cards and paying to play them to your tableau, with most cards providing either one-time bonuses or, more commonly, ongoing benefits that make it easier to get more money, resources, or points as the game goes on. When the planet is fully terraformed, the game ends. It’s the Terraforming Mars experience, distilled in a far more digestible format. Complexity: Medium.

30. King of Tokyo. Full review. From the guy who created Magic: the Gathering comes a game that has no elfs or halflings or deckbuilding whatsoever. Players are monsters attempting to take control of Tokyo, attacking each other along the way while trying to rack up victory points and maintain control of the city space on the board. Very kid-friendly between the theme and major use of the dice (with up to two rerolls per turn), but good for the adults too; it plays two to six but I think it needs at least three to be any good. It offers many expansions, but the power-ups that give each player a unique power & unique cards to buy are worthwhile. Complexity: Medium-low.

29. Istanbul. Full review. Not Constantinople. Istanbul won the 2014 Kennerspiel des Jahres, but it’s not that complex a game overall; my then eight-year-old daughter figured out a basic strategy right away (I call it the “big money” strategy) that was surprisingly robust, and the rules are not that involved or difficult. Players are merchants in a Turkish marketplace, trying to acquire the rubies needed to win the game through various independent channels. There’s a competitive element in that you don’t want to pursue the same methods everyone else is, because that just raises the costs. It’s also a very visually appealing game. There’s a new dice game coming at the end of December, with a similar theme but with new mechanics, ditching the pathfinding/backtracing element of the original game and concentrating on goods trading and dice manipulation. Acram Digital’s app version is tremendous and highly addictive, as you can randomize the tile layout, giving you over a billion possible boards on which to play. Complexity: Medium.

28. Caylus: Full app review. Another game I’ve only played in its now-defunct app version (the developer appears to be out of business), Caylus is among the best of the breed of highly-complex games that also includes Agricola and Le Havre, with slightly simpler rules and fewer pieces, yet the same lack of randomness and relatively deep strategy. I’ve also found the game is more resilient to early miscues than other complex strategy games, as long as you don’t screw up too badly. In Caylus, players compete for resources used to construct new buildings along one public road and used to construct parts of the main castle where players can earn points and special privileges like extra points or resources. If another player uses a building you constructed, you get a point or a resource, and in most cases only one player can build a specific building type, while each castle level has a finite number of blocks to be built. There are also high point value statues and monuments that I think are essential to winning the game, but you have to balance the need to build those against adding to the castle and earning valuable privileges. Even playing the app a dozen or more times I’ve never felt it becoming monotonous, and the app’s graphics were probably the best I’ve seen alongside those of Agricola’s. It’s in and out of print, apparently out right now, although a newer, streamlined edition, Caylus 1303, is available. Complexity: High.

27. Tigris & Euphrates: Full review. The magnum opus from Herr Knizia, a two- to four-player board game where players fight for territory on a grid that includes the two rivers of the game’s title, but where the winning player is the one whose worst score (of four) is the best. Players gain points for placing tiles in each of four colors, for having their “leaders” adjacent to monuments in those colors, and for winning conflicts with other players. Each player gets points in those four colors, but the idea is to play a balanced strategy because of that highest low score rule. The rules are a little long, but the game play is very straightforward, and the number of decisions is large but manageable. Fantasy Flight also reissued this title in 2015, with a much-needed graphics update and smaller box, but that entire line of updated Euro Classics is now out of print again. Knizia himself revised this game as Yellow & Yangtze, which has a digital port coming from Dire Wolf that’s already on Steam Early Access and is very promising. Complexity: Medium.

26. Battle Line: Full review. Reissued a few years ago as Schotten Totten – same game, different theme, better art, half the price right now. Among the best two-player games I’ve found, designed by Reiner Knizia, who is also behind a bunch of other games on this list. Each player tries to build formations on his/her side of the nine flags that stand in a line between him and his opponent; formations include three cards, and the various formation types resemble poker hands, with a straight flush of 10-9-8 in one color as the best formation available. Control three adjacent flags, or any five of the nine, and you win. But ten tactics cards allow you to bend the rules, by stealing a card your opponent has played, raising the bar for a specific flag from three cards to four, or playing one of two wild cards that can stand in for any card you can’t draw. There’s a fair amount of randomness involved, but playing nine formations at once with a seven-card hand allows you to diversify your risk. The iOS app is among the best as well. Complexity: Low.

25. La Isla. Full review. I’ve owned this game for a while, but didn’t play it until this past year, and it turns out that I love it – it’s right in my wheelhouse in terms of its complexity/fun combination, not too complex to be enjoyable, not too simple to be boring. Players are scientists trying to spot five endangered species on the island board, which is modular and thus changes every game, and do so by placing their 5 explorer tokens on the board to surround animal tiles. There’s a separate board with scoring tracks for the five animal types, determining what each tile is worth at game-end while also letting you re-score animals you’ve collected when you gain another one of that type, so you can try to set yourself up to boost the value of the animal you’re targeting and then grab all that you can of that type. There’s also a 10-point bonus if you get a set of all five, giving you an alternate path if the first doesn’t work. Designer Stefan Feld has gone too far into point-salad world with recent titles but this one, which sells for just $20, is a hit. (Out of print at the moment, although Ravensburger has been redoing some of its Feld titles as they hit their tenth anniversaries.) Complexity: Medium-low to medium.

24. Gizmos. Full review. Phil Walker-Harding’s engine-builder plays very quickly for a game of this depth, and doesn’t skimp on the visual appeal – the ‘energy tokens’ you’ll collect to buy more cards are colored marbles, and they’re dispensed by what looks like a cardboard gumball machine. The engine-building aspect is a real winner, though, as it’s very easy to grasp how you’ll gain things from certain cards and how to daisy-chain them into very powerful engines before the game ends. I have yet to find anyone who’s played this game but didn’t love it. Complexity: Medium-low.

23. Imhotep: The Duel. Full review. This strictly two-player version of Imhotep is even better than the original by taking the feel of the original but rethinking the mechanics to make it much more direct – the interaction here is constant, and a huge part of the game is thinking about how your opponent will react to any move you make. Players gain the tiles on six ships by placing meeples on a 3×3 grid, and may unload any row or column that has at least two meeples on it. The tiles go to the four scoring areas on their own player boards, along with four kinds of special tiles (place 2-3 meeples, place 1 meeple and unload 1-2 ships, swap two tiles and unload, take any one tile straight from a ship) that let you disrupt your opponent’s plans. The player boards are modular and pieces are two-sided, so you get 16 combinations for to scoring. It’s fantastic. Complexity: Medium-low.

22. New Bedford. Full review. I adore this game, which is about whaling, but somehow manages to sneak worker-placement and town-building into the game too, and figures out how to reward people who do certain things early without making the game a rout. Each player gets to add buildings to the central town of New Bedford (much nicer than the actual town is today), or can use one of the central buildings; you pay to use someone else’s building, and they can be worth victory points to their owners at game-end. The real meat of the game is the whaling though – you get two ships, and the more food you stock them with, the more turns they spend out at sea, which means more turns where you might grab the mighty sperm whale token from the bag. But you have to pay the dockworkers to keep each whale and score points for it. For a game that has this much depth, it plays remarkably fast – never more than 40 minutes for us with three players. Complexity: Medium.

21. Sagrada. Full review. I tried Sagrada too late for my 2017 rankings, which is a shame as it would have made my top ten for sure. It’s a dice-drafting game where players select dice from a central pool and place them on their boards, representing stained-glass windows, to try to match specific patterns for points. It sounds simple, but rules on how you can place the dice and the need to plan ahead while hoping for specific colors or numbers to appear make it much harder than it seems. There’s also an expansion that lets you play with 5 or 6 players that also adds ‘personal’ dice to the game, so that the player who drafts dice last in each round doesn’t get penalized so badly, reducing the randomness a little bit; and now a slew of new smaller expansions with new boards, dice, and rules changes. I still love the base game, and the superb digital port. Complexity: Medium-low.

20. Egizia. I’m not even sure how I first heard about Egizia, a complex worker-placement game that has a great theme (ancient Egypt) and, despite some complexity in the number of options, hums along better than most games of this style. In each round, players place meeples on various spots on and along the Nile river on the board. Some give cards with resources, some give cards with bonuses, some allow you to boost the power of your construction crews, and some tracks allow you to build in the big points areas, the monuments found in one corner of the board. You also can gain a few bonus cards, specific to you and hidden from others, that give you more points for certain game-end conditions, like having the most tiles in any single row of the pyramid. Best with four players, but workable with three; with two you’re playing a fun game of solitaire. I own the original game, but the amazon link above goes to Indie Boards & Cards’ 2020 edition, Egizia: Shifting Sands, which has changed the board but kept the original’s core mechanics. Complexity: High.

19. Welcome To… Full review. I don’t know if it was the first flip-and-write title, but Welcome To… was the first one I encountered, and I think it’s spawned a few imitators because it’s so good. In each round, there are three cards from which players can choose, each showing a house number and one of six colors; each player chooses one of those three houses to fill in and takes the benefit of that particular color. The goal is to fill out as much of your own ‘neighborhood’ as you can, scoring points for clusters of adjacent houses, for providing green space, for adding pools to certain houses, and more. It’s simple to learn and has huge replay value. I prefer the original to any of the expansion packs (with themed neighborhoods and new rules) I’ve played. Complexity: Low.

18. Small World: Full review. I think the D&D-style theme does this game a disservice – that’s all just artwork and titles, but the game itself requires some tough real-time decisions. Each player uses his chosen race to take over as many game spaces as possible, but the board is small and your supply of units runs short quickly, forcing you to consider putting your race into “decline” and choosing a new one. But when you choose a new one is affected by what you stand to lose by doing so, how well-defended your current civilization’s position is, and when your opponents are likely to go into decline. The iPad app is outstanding too. Complexity: Medium.

17. Agricola: I gained a new appreciation for this game thanks to the incredible iOS app version developed by Playdek, which made the game’s complexity less daunting and its internal sophistication more evident. You’re a farmer trying to raise enough food to feed your family, but also trying to grow your family so you have more help on the farm. The core game play isn’t that complex, but huge decks of cards offering bonuses, shortcuts, or special skills make the game much more involved, and require some knowledge of the game to play it effectively. I enjoy the game despite the inherent ‘work’ involved, but it is undeniably complex and you can easily spend the whole game freaking out about finding enough food, which about a billion or so people on the planet refer to as “life.” Mayfair reissued the game in 2016 with some improved graphics and a lower price point, although the base game now only plays 1-4. Complexity: High.

16. Hadara. Full review. I recommend Hadara to anyone who loves 7 Wonders and wants something similar, as it has several key points in common – card drafting, light engine building, and a civilization theme – but also has some distinct features (including the second phase of card drafting in each era) that make it a worthy game in its own right. Players get to choose ten cards per era, in five different colors, allowing them to bump up their four resource tracks (gold, culture, military, and food), with cards becoming cheaper as you buy more of that color. Military lets you gain colonies for points and more resource gains; culture lets you build statues for bigger point gains; you have to have 1 food point per card in your kingdom at the end of each era. There are also “medals” that reward you for each complete set of five cards you gain. It’s best with 3+ players but fine with 2 if you can accept the higher degree of randomness in card availability. Complexity: Medium.

15. Grand Austria Hotel. Full review. I was late to this game, and have still only played it online, although I own the physical game. It’s a brilliant medium-heavy game of dice-drafting and resource management, with a theme that’s probably inspired by a certain Wes Anderson movie (although no cats will be defenestrated during the course of the game). Each player tries to prepare rooms in their personal hotels and then fill them with guests, whom they can draft from the board and eventually place in those rooms by serving them the right combination of four resources. Each guest has its own bonus in addition to a point value, with many guests named for other games (including E. Gizia, the most powerful guest card because it gives you another turn). You also have to keep an eye on the emperor track, however, or you can lose a ton of points at any of the three check-ins there. My only knock on it is that it lacks player interaction, but it’s a tremendous thinker of a game with a lot of replayability. Currently out of print, though. Complexity: Medium-high.

14. Everdell. Full review. This was my #1 game of 2018 and has held up well since I gave it that honor. Everdell takes the worker placement and resource collection mechanic of Stone Age and adds what amounts to a second game on top of that, where the buildings you build with those resources actually do stuff, rather than just giving you points. Players build out their tableaux of cards and gain power as the game progresses. Some cards grant you the right to build subsequent cards for free; some give resources, some give points bonuses, and some do other cool things. The artwork is stunning and the theme, forest creatures, is very kid-friendly. The game also crescendos through its “seasons,” with players going from two meeples in the spring to six by game-end, so that no one can get too big of a lead in the early going and new players get time to learn the rhythm. It’s quite a brilliant design, and consistently plays in under an hour. Complexity: Medium-low.

13. Samurai: Full review. I bought the physical game after a few months of playing the app (which, as of December 2020, is still not updated for the newest iOS version), and it’s a great game – simple to learn, complex to play, works very well with two players, plays very differently with three or four as the board expands. Players compete to place their tiles on a map of Japan, divided into hexes, with the goal of controlling the hexes that contain buddha, farmer, or soldier tokens. Each player has hex tiles in his color, in various strengths, that exert control over the tokens they show; samurai tokens that affect all three token types; boats that sit off the shore and affect all token types; and special tokens that allow the reuse of an already-placed tile or allow the player to switch two tokens on the board. Trying to figure out where your opponent might screw you depending on what move you make is half the fun. Very high replayability too. Fantasy Flight updated the graphics, shrank the box, and reissued it in 2015, but they’ve sunsetted the whole Euro Classics line, so it’s out of print yet again. Complexity: Medium/low.

12. Azul. Full review. The best new family-strategy game of 2017 and winner of the Spiel des Jahres, Azul comes from the designer of Vikings and Asara, and folds some press-your-luck mechanics into a pattern-matching game where you collect mosaic tiles and try to transfer them from a storage area to your main 5×5 board. You can only put each tile type in each row once, and in each column once, and you lose points for tiles you can’t place at the end of each round. It’s quite addictive and moves fairly quickly, even when everyone starts playing chicken with the pile left in the middle of the table for whoever chooses last in the round. Complexity: Medium.

11. Splendor: Full review. A Spiel des Jahres nominee in 2014, Splendor has fast become a favorite in our house for its simple rules and balanced gameplay. My daughter loves the game, and even from age eight was able to play at a level pretty close to the adults. It’s a simple game where players collect tokens to purchase cards from a 4×3 grid, and where purchased cards decrease the price of other cards. Players have to think long-term without ignoring short-term opportunities, and must compare the value of going for certain in-game bonuses against just plowing ahead with purchases to get the most valuable cards. The Splendor app is defunct, unfortunately, with no indication that it’s coming back. I also like the four-in-one expansion for the base game, Cities of Splendor. Complexity: Low.

10. Dominion: Full review. I’ve condensed two Dominion entries into one, since they all have the same basic mechanics, just new cards. The definitive deck-building game, with no actual board. Dominion’s base set – there are ten expansions now available, so you could spend a few hundred dollars on this – includes money cards, action cards, and victory points cards. Each player begins with seven money cards and three victory cards and, shuffling and drawing five cards from his own deck each turn, must add cards to his deck to allow him to have the most victory points when the last six-point victory card is purchased. I don’t think I have a multi-player game with a smaller learning curve, and the fact that the original set alone comes with 25 action cards but each game you play only includes 10 means it offers unparalleled replayability even before you add an expansion set. I’ll vouch for the Dominion: Intrigue expansion, which includes the base cards so it’s a standalone product, and the Seaside expansion, which is excellent and really changes the way the game plays, plus a standalone expansion further up this list. The base game is appropriate for players as young as six. Complexity: Low.

9. The Castles Of Burgundy: Full review. Castles of Burgundy is the rare game that works well across its range of player numbers, as it scales well from two to four players by altering the resources available on the board to suit the number of people pursuing them. Players compete to fill out their own boards of hexes with different terrain/building types (it’s like zoning) by competiting for tiles on a central board, some of which are hexes while others are goods to be stored and later shipped for bonuses. Dice determine which resources you can acquire, but you can also alter dice rolls by paying coins or using special buildings to change or ignore them. Setup is a little long, mostly because sorting cardboard tiles is annoying, but gameplay is only moderately complex – a little more than Stone Age, not close to Caylus or Agricola – and players get so many turns that it stays loose even though there’s a lot to do over the course of one game. I’ve played this online about 50 times, using all the different boards, even random setups that dramatically increase the challenge, and I’m not tired of it yet. Complexity: Medium.

8. 7 Wonders Duel. Full review. Borrowing its theme from one of the greatest boardgames of all time, 7W Duel strips the rules down so that each player is presented with fewer options. Hand cards become cards on the table, revealed a few at a time in a set pattern that limits player choices to one to four cards (roughly) per turn. Familiarity with the original game is helpful but by no means required. There’s a brand-new app version out from Repos this fall. Complexity: Medium-low.

7. Great Western Trail. Full review. It’s a monster, but it’s an immaculately constructed game, especially for its length and complexity. It’s a real gamer’s game, but I found an extra level of satisfaction from admiring how balanced and meticulous the design is; if there’s a flaw in it, beyond its weight (which is more than many people would like in a game), I didn’t find it. You’re rasslin’ cows, collecting cow cards and delivering them along the board’s map to Kansas City, but you’re doing so much more than that as you go, hiring workers, building your own buildings, and moving your train along the outer track so that you can gain more from those deliveries. The real genius of the design is that you only have a few options on each turn even though the game itself has a massive scope. That prevents it from becoming overwhelming or bogging down in analysis paralysis on each player’s turn. This higher ranking reflects the 2021 second edition, with better components, no more problematic art, and a true solo mode. Complexity: High.

6. Jaipur: Full review. Jaipur is my favorite two-player game, just as easy to learn but with two shades of additional complexity and a bit less randomness. In Jaipur, the two players compete to acquire collections of goods by building sets of matching cards in their hands, balancing the greater point bonuses from acquiring three to five goods at once against the benefit of taking one or two tokens to prevent the other player from getting the big bonuses. The game moves quickly due to a small number of decisions, like Lost Cities, so you can play two or three full games in an hour. It’s also incredibly portable. The new app is also fantastic, with a campaign mode full of variants. Complexity: Low.

5. Ticket To Ride: Full review. Actually a series of games, all working on the same theme: You receive certain routes across the map on the game board – U.S. or Europe, mostly – and have to collect enough train cards in the correct colors to complete those routes. But other players may have overlapping routes and the tracks can only accommodate so many trains. Like Dominion, it’s very simple to pick up, so while it’s not my favorite game to play, it’s my favorite game to bring or bring out when we’re with people who want to try a new game but either haven’t tried anything in the genre or aren’t up for a late night. I do recommend the 1910 Expansion to anyone who gets the base Ticket to Ride game, as it has larger, easier-to-shuffle cards and offers more routes for greater replayability. I also own the Swiss and Nordic boards, which only play two to three players and involve more blocking than the U.S. and Europe games do, so I don’t recommend them. The iPad app, developed in-house, is among the best available. The newest expansion, Japan and Italy, came out earlier this year but is out of stock at amazon right now. I’ve ranked all 18 Ticket to Ride boards for Ars Technica.

There’s also a kids’ version, called Ticket to Ride First Journey, with a separate app for that as well. Complexity: Low.

4. Pandemic: Full review. The king of cooperative games. Two to four players work together to stop global outbreaks of four diseases that spread in ways that are only partly predictable, and the balance between searching for the cures to those diseases and the need to stop individual outbreaks before they spill over and end the game creates tremendous tension that usually lasts until the very end of the event deck at the heart of the game. The On The Brink expansion adds new roles and cards while upping the complexity further. The Pandemic iOS app is among the best out there and includes the expansion as an in-app purchase.

I’m bundling Pandemic Legacy, one of the most critically acclaimed boardgames of all time, into this entry as well, as the Legacy game carries the same mechanics but with a single, narrative storyline that alters the game, including the board itself, as you play. My daughter and I didn’t finish season one, just because we got caught up in other games, but season two is out already. To be completely honest, though, I prefer the non-legacy version. Complexity: Medium for the base game, medium-high for the Legacy game.

3. Wingspan. Full review.The only game to which I’ve given a perfect score of 10 since I started reviewing games for Paste five years ago, Wingspan is one of the best examples I can find of immaculate game design. It is thoroughly and thoughtfully constructed so that it is well-balanced, enjoyable, and playable in a reasonable amount of time. The components are all of very high quality and the art is stupendous. And there’s some real science behind it: designer Elizabeth Hargrave took her love of bird-watching and built a game around the actual characteristics of over 100 species of North American birds, such as their habitats, diets, and breeding habits. The European expansion and Oceania expansions are both out, although I don’t own either. Wingspan won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2019, which it more than deserved, making Hargrave the first woman to win that honor as a solo designer and just the second solo woman to win any Spiel des Jahres prize. It’s a marvel. Complexity: Medium.

2. Carcassonne: Full review. The best-of-breed iOS app has only increased my appreciation for Carcassonne. It brings ease of learning, tremendous replayability (I know I use that word a lot here, but it does matter), portability (you can put all the tiles and meeples in a small bag and stuff it in a suitcase), and plenty of different strategies and room for differing styles of play. You build the board as you go: Each player draws a tile at random and must place it adjacent to at least one tile already laid in a way that lines up any roads or cities on the new tile with the edges of the existing ones. You get points for starting cities, completing cities, extending roads, or by claiming farmlands adjacent to completing cities. It’s great with two players, and it’s great with four players. You can play independently, or you can play a little offense and try to stymie an opponent. The theme makes sense. The tiles are well-done in a vaguely amateurish way – appealing for their lack of polish. And there’s a host of expansions if you want to add a twist or two. I own the Traders and Builders expansion, which I like mostly for the Builder, an extra token that allows you to take an extra turn when you add on to whatever the Builder is working on, meaning you never have to waste a turn when you draw a plain road tile if you sit your Builder on a road. I also have Inns and Cathedrals, which I’ve only used a few times; it adds some double-or-nothing tiles to roads and cities, a giant meeple that counts as two when fighting for control of a city/road/farm, as well as the added meeples needed to play with a sixth opponent. Complexity: Low/medium-low for the base game, medium with expansions.

1. 7 Wonders: Full review. 7 Wonders swept the major boardgame awards (yes, there are such things) in 2011 for good reason – it’s the best new game to come on the scene in a few years, combining complex decisions, fast gameplay, and an unusual mechanic around card selections where each player chooses a card from his hand and then passes the remainder to the next player. Players compete to build out their cities, each of which houses a unique wonder of the ancient world, and must balance their moves among resource production, buildings that add points, military forces, and trading. I saw no dominant strategy, several that worked well, and nothing that was so complex that I couldn’t quickly pick it up after screwing up my first game. The only negative here is the poorly written rules, but after one play it becomes far more intuitive. Plays best with three or more players, but the two-player variant works well. The brand-new iOS version is amazing too, with an Android port I haven’t tried. Complexity: Medium.

I have a separate ranking of games for two players that I published at the start of the pandemic. Air, Land, and Sea would make the cut now, as would Riftforce. I would probably add Seven Bridges if I knew when it was coming back into print. I’ll update that this offseason – I said I would do it last year and then never got around to it.

Also, I get frequent requests for games that play well with five or more; I can confidently recommend 7 Wonders, Citadels, Ecosystem, King of Tokyo, Welcome To, and Sushi Go Party!, all of which handle 5+ right out of the box. Ticket to Ride is tight with five players, but that’s its maximum; the same applies to Hadara. Catan can handle 5 or 6 with an expansion, although it can result in a lengthy playing time. Kodama can play 5 out of the box, and 6 with the Duo expansion. For more social games, One Night Ultimate Werewolf is best with five or more also, and Deception: Murder in Hong Kong also benefits from more players. Coup needs 3, but with the Reformation expansion can handle up to 10. The cooperative party game Just One (on sale today for just $17.50) can handle up to 7, and Wavelength plays any number, split into two teams. Snakesss! is a new bluffing/party game from this year and requires 4 players as a mininum.