Top 100 songs of 2023.

This year’s top 100 was more of a struggle than most years, although by the end of the process I was still about a dozen songs over the limit; I just had to go back over a number of my monthly playlists and revisit some tracks and albums I’d missed before I could reach that point. I’m pretty happy with the outcome, though, and I think the top of the list is strong even if 2023 wasn’t a peak year for great new songs. You can see my previous years’ song rankings here: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012. I posted my ranking of the top 23 albums of 2023 earlier this week.

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100. Griff – Vertigo. Pure pop greatness from Griff, who just doesn’t miss whether she’s going for sunnier sounds (like this track) or melancholy ballads (like her song way farther up this list).

99. Del Water Gap – Quilt of Steam. I am now old enough that my daughter is telling me about artists that end up on my playlists; I hadn’t heard of Del Water Gap, who has been releasing music on his own for over a decade and put out his second album for Mom + Pop Records this fall, until she mentioned him to me, after which Spotify served me this track on my Release Radar. Sometimes the algorithm works.

98. Ghost of Vroom – Still Getting It Done. Mike Doughty’s latest project is the closest thing he’s done to Soul Coughing since the seminal drum-n-bass group called it quits after El Oso, driven by his sung/rapped lyrics and music that’s a little more ornate (and funky) than SC’s but still driven by percussion and heavy bass lines.

97. Beck & Phoenix – Odyssey. These two artists released a one-off collaboration to kick off their joint summer tour, and while I don’t think Beck exactly extended himself here, it’s similar to Phoenix’s musical revival on last year’s Alpha Zulu, and bouncy like a good summer hit should be.

96. bdrmm – It’s Just a Bit of Blood. These guys were about three years ahead of schedule for the shoegaze revival, ending up lumped in more with avant garde noisemakers black midi than with their true brethren. Their second album, I Don’t Know, came out this year and was similar to their first one but a little more upbeat, perhaps with more major keys than its predecessor offered.

95. Etta Marcus – Smile for the Camera. A sultry sophisti-pop track from this 22-year-old London singer’s EP A Heart-Shaped Bruise. I’d recommend this to fans of boygenius but if you like your singers to really sing.

94. Bully – Days Move Slow. The best song you’ll ever hear about a dog’s death. Bully’s album made a lot of top ten lists, but I find her nasal vocals hard to take for more than a song at a time. This had by far the best guitar hook on the record and I think justifies some of the musical comparisons and Nirvana.

93. Queens of the Stone Age – Paper Machete. The top track from In Times New Roman… has a heavy guitar riff appropriate to Josh Homme’s oeuvre, although I found the album as a whole kind of lacking in the rougher edge that characterized a lot of his earlier work.

92. Killing Joke – Full Spectrum Dominance. Jaz Coleman & company have undergone many iterations over their 44-year history, but their final act appeared to be their industrial-metal phase and their incredible swan song LP, 2015’s Pylon. They’re not quite done, however, and have returned with the occasional one-off single, including this one, which certainly would have fit well on Pylon, ahead of their 2023 tour.

91. Brooke Combe – Black is the New Gold. The title track from this Scottish soul singer’s newest album packs some clever turns of phrase and a driving bass line, along with a little flute interpolation that calls back to the genre’s 1970s heyday.

90. SENSES – Drifting. This Coventry four-piece first promised their debut album Little Pictures Without Sound in 2021, after over a decade working together, but the pandemic and other factors delayed its release until April of this year. This is the album’s strongest track, sitting somewhere between the Oasis end of Britpop and the spacier sound of Doves.

89. The Lottery Winners – Worry. I didn’t love their sophomore album Anxiety Replacement Therapy as much as I did their debut, which was absolutely packed with hooks and full of general cheer. This track had the most in common with their first album.

88. Seablite – Melancholy Molly. I was a big fan of Lush in their 1990s heyday and enjoyed member Emma Anderson’s solo debut album this year, so Seablite’s music is catnip to me. I also love that they call themselves “odd pop.” It is poppy, and they’d have every reason to jump on the shoegaze bandwagon, but they appear to have chosen their own path.

87. The Kills – New York. God Games marked this duo’s first album and first original material in seven years, although it was hit or miss for an album that in theory they’d had several years to work on. They’ll never top “Sour Cherry” for me, but if you liked “Doing It to Death,” this track is in that vein.

86. Everything Everything – The Mad Stone. I preferred this to “Cold Reactor” of the two singles EE has released so far ahead of their upcoming album Mountainhead, although both have elements of the band’s manic art-rock style, including Jonathan Higgs’ rapid-fire singing.

85. Folly Group – Big Ground. Speaking of Everything Everything, this track from Folly Group, whose debut album Down There! is due out on January 12th, reminds me quite a bit of early EE, mixed with a little early post-punk in the chorus.

84. Screaming Females – Brass Bell. Screaming Females announced their dissolution earlier this month, about nine months after they released their eighth and presumably final album, Desire Pathway. I don’t know their discography well at all, so I can only say this is a pretty great showcase of singer/guitarist Marissa Paternoster’s voice and guitar skills, enough that I’ll be watching to see if she releases another solo album.

83. Courting – Throw. I can’t place that opening riff, but it reminds me of some other track I liked from maybe 20-25 years ago; the rest of the song is like a smarter, snarkier emo track, and the whole song has a great bounce to it. New Last Name comes out January 26th.

82. swim school – delirious. “swim school” is not an SEO-friendly band name, but this song rocks very hard, bordering on metal, with singer Alice Johnson’s voice a perfect foil for the crushing guitars. They put out a four-song EP this year and ended up opening for the Amazons, a British band known for giant guitar riffs, to close out 2023.

81. Public Image Ltd. – End of the World. PIL’s return this year wasn’t a surprise in and of itself, but the content was – first a touching song, “Hawaii,” about founder John Lydon’s wife, who at that point was dying of Alzheimer’s disease and passed away a few weeks after the song’s release; and then this banger, with a swirling guitar riff and Lydon’s voice as potent and angry as ever.

80. SPRINTS – Adore Adore Adore. I’ve been on the bandwagon for these Irish punks for a few years now, and we’re finally getting their debut album, Letter to Self, on January 5th, including this track, “Up and Comer,” and “Shadow of a Doubt.”

79. Ratboys – Making Noise for the Ones You Love. Many people whose taste in music I respect, including Blake Murphy of Sportsnet/The FAN 590, love Ratboys; I think most of their songs sound like Waxahatchee singing over a shoegaze band and it doesn’t work for either. The combination does work on this track, in part because of how singer Julia Sterner sings between the verse and chorus. (I had a similar but more pronounced objection to Wednesday, whose singer sounds like she’s whining and deliberately goes off key so often I have never made it through the entire album.)

78. The Mysterines – Begin Again. I loved the early singles from Lia Metcalfe’s band, but their debut album, Reeling, didn’t include any of their best songs, so I felt a little let down by the LP. This song, their only new material in 2023, shows off her deep, smoky voice, and has a slow burn to the melody, so while it doesn’t quite rock like their pre-Reeling offerings it’s pretty compelling. Also, this track is part of a sort of Easter egg on the top 100, if you’re paying attention.

77. Arlo Parks – Impurities. My Soft Machine may be the moment that Parks broke out into mainstream success, at least in Europe, as she turned just slightly in the direction of electro-pop without losing her voice or the sparse approach of her debut album. I loved just about everything on the album, but there were two tracks that stood above the rest for their melodies. This was one.

76. Dexys – I’m Going to Get Free. It was a good year for ‘80s bands coming back around; PIL appeared above, Simply Red put out a solid album, Depeche Mode issued their Memento Mori to eulogize the late Andy Fletcher, and Dexys returned with The Feminine Divine, seven years after singer Kevin Rowland appeared to say he was retiring from music. This track brings back the sound of Philadelphia soul with big brass lines and a giant, catchy beat, while Rowland’s voice is still as distinctive as it was on “Come On Eileen” some 41 years ago.

75. Bartees Strange – Tisched Off. Strange issued two tracks as part of a singles series from Sub Pop, with this indignant rocker, ranting about posers in the industry, the better of the two.

74. Noname – Namesake. Picking any tracks off Sundial, my #2 album of 2023, for a singles list was difficult because the album as a whole is such an immersive listen, but I did have two that stood apart enough that I might listen to them on their own (rather than doing the entire album straight through).

73. CHVRCHES – Over. The Scottish trio released this one-off single to commemorate their signing with Island Records and, in their words, to serve as a bridge between 2021’s Screen Violence and whatever comes next.

72. Corinne Bailey Rae – New York Transit Queen. Rae’s genre-hopping on Black Rainbows extended to garage-rock here, bordering on punk, in a song with very little in the way of lyrics beyond Rae chanting the title.

71. Fucked Up – Cicada. The rest of Fucked Up’s latest album, One Day, is much more in their typical vein of hardcore punk, but my God does this sound like a lost track from Hüsker Dü’s Warehouse: Songs and Stories. This is part two of four for that Easter egg I mentioned above. I won’t tag the last two, though.

70. Bombino – Alwane. I admit to having no idea who Bombino was until I heard this track on one of NPR Music’s weekly new music playlists, but that’s on me, as the Nigerien (as in, from Niger) singer/guitarist was the subject of a 2010 documentary called Agadez, the Music and the Rebellion. He’s also the first artist from Niger to receive a Grammy nomination (Best World Music Album, for 2018’s Deran). This track is from his latest album, Sahel, a tribute to the region where he grew up and, on this track, to friends he’s lost in the area’s many armed conflicts.

69. Creeper – Sacred Blasphemy. The first track I heard off Sanguivore is bombastic, theatrical, and throws back to the earliest stages of glam rock (think Mötley Crüe’s Too Fast for Love). Needless to say, it’s right in my wheelhouse.

68. Sampha – Suspended. Sampha’s voice really soars on this track off Lahai, one of the year’s best albums, as he sings about becoming a father over a light piano backing, with some staccato call-and-response to the verses that add texture and a little complexity to the song.

67. Black Honey – Cut the Cord. Black Honey’s third album A Fistful of Peaches was a departure for the Brighton indie-rockers, with some harder-edged songs (notably the 2022 single “Charlie Bronson”), but fewer of the big melodies than they had on their first two albums. “Cut the Cord” was never released as a single, but it was among the 2-3 best tracks on the album.

66. Jungle feat. Erick the Architect – Candle Flame. Jungle’s Volcano was my least favorite album from the English soul-revival duo yet, between the lack of interesting melodies and some experiments that didn’t pay off. Erick the Architect’s verses here are the best stuff on the album, and outside of the slightly annoying falsetto in the chorus, Jungle mostly stays out of his way.

65. boygenius – Satanist. I’m not a huge fan of the solo output of any of the three talented women in boygenius, primarily because of their singing style, which is more undersinging – they just don’t let it rip very often – and their tendency towards melancholy rhythms. This was by far the strongest track for me from their newest record, called the record, which netted them five Grammy nominations (two for the album, three for specific songs).

64. Cloud Nothings – Final Summer. Dylan Baldi & company signed to the punk label Pure Noise and released this new single in November, which … sounds just like Cloud Nothings, with a big hook to open it up and a tempo that makes you want to get behind the wheel and hit the gas.

63. DMA’s – Everybody’s Saying Thursday’s the Weekend. After their first two albums earned them comparisons to Oasis (which Noel Gallagher shat on, but Liam later endorsed), DMA’s shifted to a more electronic sound on their third album, then veered back towards the middle of the two genres on this year’s How Many Dreams?, failing to hit on either cylinder. They’ll never get back to the heights of “For Now” or “Too Soon,” I fear, but this sunnier track gets somewhat close with a hook and guitar work worthy of the Britpop comps.

62. The Japanese House – Sad to Breathe. Amber Mary Bain’s album In the End It Always Does was one of the year’s best, with two songs from it that blew me away back when they came out as singles in the spring. This one starts out like a mournful piano ballad about a lost love, then jumps from first to fourth gear around the 1:15 mark (I think that costs you several Heat cards) with an electronic percussion line and guitar that completely changes the texture of the vocal melody.

61. Blondshell – Salad. Another acclaimed album that just didn’t do it for me, as I don’t think Sabrina Teitelbaum’s melodies or voice are strong enough to support some decent rock hooks and thoughtful lyrics. This track has the album’s best riff and it plays perfectly against the angry lyrics.

60. Peace – Happy Cars. Peace self-released their latest album, Utopia, in the spring via a password-protected website, then issued it on vinyl in November. This single is the only track available via streaming sites right now; to hear the rest you have to purchase it, which the brothers Koisser told NME was “career suicide” according to their mates. I don’t know what to think of that – isn’t streaming killing the industry slowly anyway? Anyway, I love the melody here and have had this song in my head on and off for a month now.

59. Protomartyr – For Tomorrow. Formal Growth in the Desert was one of my favorite albums of 2023 and is an excellent distillation of what post-punk sounds like in its current incarnation, similar to Ceremony and more recent Thrice.

58. Yard Act – Dream Job. Yard Act released three singles this year, with a new album due out in March, and there’s some evolution in their sound already from their 2022 debut The Overload, with more musical elements and some electronic/dance ingredients as well. I also liked “The Trench Coat Museum,” but it’s eight minutes long and even I felt like it wore out its welcome by the end.

57. STONE – I Gotta Feeling. “Shout out to the writers of Peaky Blinders/You inspired a new age of wankers.” There’s a lot of punk to STONE’s lyrics and spoken-sung vocals, but musically they’re somewhere between alternative rock and hard rock, showing some of that range on their latest EP punkadonk2.

56. Slow Pulp – Cramps. Slow Pulp can rock a bit, harkening back to mid-90s alternative rock, and when they do I’m a big fan. Their album as a whole was a little disappointing, as so many of the songs were quiet and slow … I don’t know what I expected, really.

55. Deeper – Glare. The best track from Careful! still has that late ‘70s post-punk vibe, but it’s brighter and catcher, with a real earworm in the main guitar line.

54. Siracuse – Saviour. I compared this track to peak Charlatans when I put it on a playlist in April, and I think that holds, even to some extent to the sound of the vocalist, while the opening guitar riff still gets stuck in my head every time I listen to it.

53. Brad – Hey Now What’s the Problem. Brad’s final album, In the Moment That You’re Born, seems to have landed almost unnoticed this year, which is a shame because it’s both a fitting coda to the band’s unusual and diverse catalog, and a tribute to singer Shawn Smith, who died in 2019. The remaining band members, including Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard, completed tracks where Smith had recorded his vocals, including this funk-rock track that recalls Smith’s work with Pigeonhed.

52. BLOXX – Modern Day. The title track from BLOXX’s August EP is the best thing they’ve done since their debut album, 2020’s Lie Out Loud, another great pop-punk track with a solid harmony in the chorus.

51. Drums – Isolette. Annoyingly catchy, but with a serious undercurrent – the entire album, Jonny, represents Jonathan Pierce’s efforts to reckon with his upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian church, abuse he suffered, and being gay in a community that wouldn’t accept him.

50. milk. – I Think I Lost My Number Can I Have Yours? This Irish pop band put out a few EPs this year, culminating in a seven-track release called 3, the EP, that included everything they’d released in 2023, led by this lilting pop gem that recalls some ‘70s soft-rock icons like 10cc.

49. Altin Gün – Rakiya Su Katamam. One of my two favorite tracks from this Anatolian rock band’s album Ask, along with “Su Siziyor;” this one gets the nod for the top 100 because of that swirling guitar riff that pops back up throughout the song in slightly different forms. Altin Gün’s blend of psychedelia and traditional Turkish music sounds like nothing else I’ve heard, and they have a great sense of melody on top of that to put the Turkish lyrics (which I don’t understand) in my head.

48. Squid – Swing (In a Dream). Squid’s experimental sound generally leaves me cold, even though I respect the ambition and risk-taking; O Monolith, their second album, saw them rein in the sound just enough to introduce some more traditional sense of melodies, particularly on this track, which has a strong hook in the chorus but sees Ollie Judge finish his vocal lines with a little upturn at the end to keep the listener off balance.

47. Nabihah Iqbal – This World Couldn’t See Us. I don’t use the subgenre term “cold wave” very often, but it sure fits here – Iqbal’s album DREAMER spans many genres, but this track, my favorite from the LP, has that detached lyrical style and electronic music that feels dark and gloomy, fitting the themes in her lyrics.

46. Pynch – Tin Foil. “I’m saving up for the apocalypse/Cause there are gonna be deals” remains my favorite line of the year from any song. This London indie-pop quartet put out their debut album Howling at a Concrete Moon in April.

45. Hotline TNT – I Thought You’d Change. As much as Hotline TNT earns the shoegaze tag with their production and heavily distorted guitars, you can still discern specific guitar lines on most of their tracks, and here they’re quite pronounced in a way that feels pretty timeless – these are guitar sounds you’d hear in many rock genres in almost any era of music from the 1970s onward.

44. Sundara Karma – Wishing Well. I need to listen to this band’s latest album, Better Luck Next Time, as I have always liked their brand of guitar-driven indie pop, which reminds me in several ways of early U2. I love the way this track builds to the big guitar distortion in the chorus, which recalls My Bloody Valentine’s “I Only Said” (my favorite song by MBV and one of the few of theirs that I like).

43. Belle & Sebastian – I Don’t Know What You See in Me. Belle & Sebastian aren’t a pop band, and they don’t often veer into poppy territory, but there are few bands in the world who do pop better than these Scots do.

42. Pastel – Your Day. Credit to MLB.com’s Matthew Leach for posting about this song and introducing it to me. It’s very Big Pink, a little Britpop, muscular throughout yet still deeply melodic at its core. It’s the only track they released this year, unfortunately.

41. Geese – Cowboy Nudes. Geese’s 3D Country isn’t an album of singles, but more of a complete experience that bounces across an absurd number of genres and styles. If there’s a ‘hit’ of sorts here, it’s this song, which has a proper hook in the chorus on top of the experimentation beneath it.

40. White Reaper – Fog Machine. Is this “Detroit Rock City?” Maybe a little “The Boys Are Back?” It’s very ‘70s, a little less Maiden/Mötorhead than the rest of Asking for a Ride, so it stands a little more on its own. I really need to see these guys live at some point because it seems impossible that they don’t put on a raucous show.

39. Momma – Bang Bang. Momma’s one original track this year is, uh, a banger, although I think last year’s “Speeding 72” was a little better. They seem like the direct descendants of Veruca Salt, with a little Breeders thrown in.

38. The Libertines – Run Run Run. I’m always surprised when the Libertines return because, well, I suppose that’s obvious if you’ve followed the band at all for the last twenty-odd years. They’ve put out two singles ahead of their upcoming fourth album, their first in nine years and just their second since 2004, including this and “The Night of the Hunter.”

37. Kid Kapichi – Let’s Get to Work. One of three new tracks from Kid Kapichi this year, along with “999” and the oddball “Tamagotchi,” which features some rapping that’s on the border of cringe for me but still has a banger of a chorus. They’ve become one of my favorite active bands over the last three years, a sort of working-class successor to the Arctic Monkeys for me.

36. Caroline Polachek – Blood and Butter. I liked quite a bit of Polachek’s work with Chairlift, including “Ch-Ching” and “I Belong In Your Arms,” but her solo work has been too weird for me, almost anti-pop in some ways, which often doesn’t do justice to her incredible voice. This is my favorite solo track from her so far, though, with several hooks in the vocals and the music to bring me back.

35. Corinne Bailey Rae – Erasure. If you saw CBR’s career detour into garage-punk that bordered on hardcore coming, well, hats off to you. I’ll be over here calling Paul Goldschmidt a platoon bat. Black Rainbows is a real tour de force, and “Erasure” shows her vocal range and gift for theatrics as well.

34. English Teacher – The World’s Biggest Paving Slab. That guitar line is just killer, and then you get to the wry, witty lyrics. English Teacher put out three songs in 2023, two of them strong (this and “Nearly Daffodils”), which I assume is a harbinger of an LP next year now that they’ve signed to Island Records.

33. Genesis Owusu – Stay Blessed. Eddie Murphy had a routine in Delirious where he referred to Teddy Pendergrass’s vocal style, mimicking him shout-singing “YOU GOT, YOU GOT, YOU GOT WHAT I NEED!” and saying he would “scare the (women) into liking him.” Owusu kind of sings like that, except here you feel his rage, and it is very effective.

32. Yves Tumor – Lovely Sewer. A great case of where critical acclaim led me to reassess an album; Yves Tumor has always been so hard to pin down musically that I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a good handle on his previous albums, but Praise a Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume grabbed me on a second (and third) listen. Even as he’s playing with genres and textures, there’s a foundation to most of his songs that compels you to keep going … and then he drops the drum machine for a brief piano interlude to throw you off the scene once again.

31. Slowdive – alife. Not the last Slowdive song on this ranking. I have become a bigger Slowdive fan in their comeback phase than I was in their original heyday around Souvlaki (a great album I appreciate more in hindsight).

30. Baby Queen – We Can Be Anything. Baby Queen’s album was a letdown after this strong lead single that recalls the avant-pop of Grimes’ Art Angels period.

29. The Joy Formidable – Share My Heat. That drum/bass opening gives you some indication of the pulse of the song, and then at the 45-second mark, the guitar riff arrives to knock you out of your seat. I gave you the radio edit here, not the 15-minute version.

28. Daughter – Swim Back. Daughter’s previous album was the soundtrack to the video game After the Storm, and you can hear some of that atmospheric influence here on this track off Stereo Mind Game in the layered synth lines.

27. The Last Dinner Party – Sinner. I couldn’t get on board with the praise for TLDP’s debut album, although it’s not about the excessive hype around the band – I don’t think their songs sound very finished, or their melodies polished. This is by far the best song on the album, and even in the chorus you can hear some of the cracks in the foundation. My glass-half-full side says they’ll produce something better with more time and experience.

26. Creeper – Teenage Sacrifice. They’re so gleefully over the top that it sells me, even though it sounds like Suede mashed up with Dokken doing a concept album about a modern-day vampire. “Can you live without your life?” is a funny one-liner, too.

25. Temples – Cicada. Temples will never leave the 1970s and I’m fine with that. The new album was less consistent than its predecessor, although this track with its spiraling synth hook is as good as anything they’ve done.

24. U.S. Girls – Tux (Your Body Fills Me, Boo). My friend Tim Grierson had U.S. Girls’ Bless This Mess as one of his top albums of the year, so I gave it a fresh listen earlier this month and while the album as a whole doesn’t work for me – I don’t think Meghan Remy can do slower material half as well as she does dance tracks – if the whole LP had been made out of (waves hands) this it would have made my top ten.

23. The Hives – Bogus Operandi. This is how you announce a comeback: With giant guitars and huge riffs bursting at the seams with bravado and testosterone. This track is right up there with peak Hives tracks like “Hate to Say I Told You So” and “Walk Idiot Walk.”

22. Speedy Ortiz – Ranch vs. Ranch. I like Speedy Ortiz for about three songs per album, which was true again for Rabbit Rabbit with this track, “Scabs,” and “You S02.” Sadie Dupuis’s songs always try to strike a balance between melody and their signature dissonant sound, thriving on the contrast when she gets that balance right.

21. Girl Ray – Everybody’s Saying That. Girl Ray’s album Prestige is a fun romp of disco/funk tracks that’s a little one-note, highlighted by this track and “Tell Me.”

20. Jorja Smith – Little Things. I love how this track starts out like it’s going to be a scat jazz song, then shifts into a jazzy R&B track without losing any of its energy. We had to wait a long time for her second album but it was well worth it.

19. Weakened Friends – Awkward. I wrote previously that I thought this might be a Sleater-Kinney track; the vocals here are obviously inspired by Corin Tucker, but it has a generally brighter vibe than S-K’s music.

18. flowerovlove – Next Best Exit. I think the 18-year-old flowerovlove is the youngest artist on the top 100 this year, and she’s already done some modeling for Gucci in addition to releasing an EP and a handful of strong singles, including this one, “Coffee Shop,” and the newest “Girl Like Me,” all of them warm, sophisticated electro-pop.

17. Noname feat. Common and Ayoni – Oblivion. Sundial is strong just about from start to finish on the power of Noname’s skills and incisive, brilliant lyrics, with this track the best on the album because of the beat and because Common isn’t hawking a free iPhone from T-mobile.

16. Grian Chatten – Fairlies. The lead singer of Fontaines D.C. surprised us all with his mostly acoustic, quiet solo album, highlighted by this trick with cynical lyrics over a shuffling Irish jig.

15. Griff – Astronaut. “You said that you needed space/Go on then, astronaut.” This gorgeous collaboration with Coldplay’s Chris Martin is Griff’s most intimate song yet, and I don’t know how it hasn’t become a huge viral hit already. It’s better than “Drivers License.”

14. Sampha – Spirit 2.0. Sampha’s second album, Lahai, is track after track of simple yet inventive music behind Sampha’s vocal acrobatics. This is my favorite song from the album, thanks to the contrast between the frenetic electro-beat and his softer vocals.

13. Charly Bliss – You Don’t Even Know Me Anymore. We got two new tracks from this Brooklyn power-pop band in 2023, their first new music since 2019’s Young Enough, and this is one of the best things they’ve ever done.

12. Slowdive – the slab. Everything Is Alive has been a triumph for these O.G. shoegazers, on par with 1993’s Souvlaki, boosted by the general revival around that niche genre from the early 1990s (so named because the musicians would seldom look at the audience, often looking at their effects pedals or, presumably, their shoes). And while their sound is still shoegaze at heart, there’s melody here, and production that keeps the various instruments and the vocals clear and distinct for most of the record.

11. Daughter – Be On Your Way. “So I’ll meet you on another planet/if the plans change” gets stuck in my head for days every time I hear this, and the various synth lines here come together to create a sense of vaguely unsettling sadness befitting the lyrics.

10. Cody Wong & dodie – Call Me Wild. I enjoyed Wong’s latest album, The Lucky One, with its panoply of collaborations, although Wong is nearly always the star of his own show with his guitar wizardry and genre-hopping. “Call Me Wild” is the one song here that’s a real pop single with funky guitars, a great hook, and vocals by English singer dodie.

9. Billy Porter – Children. A joyous, celebratory dance track about living your truth, from the Emmy & Tony winner’s first pop album, Black Mona Lisa.

8. Megan Thee Stallion – Cobra. Her only solo single of the year is a revealing look at her mental health struggles over the past few years – and an indictment of the hangers-on who didn’t notice or help her – followed by a killer guitar riff to wrap things up.

7. The Beths – Watching the Credits. I can’t remember the last time an extra track from an album’s deluxe edition was this good. “Watching the Credits” came out this spring on the deluxe version of Expert in a Dying Field, my #1 album of 2022, and it’s at least a top 5 track on the LP.

6. Arlo Parks – Blades. The perfect combination of Parks’s sweet, lithe vocals and her new shift into more electro-pop sounds on My Soft Machine.

5. Jessie Ware – Begin Again. Ware’s album That! Feels! Good! earned its way on to many best-of-2023 lists, and this samba-tinged track is easily the best on a record of unabashedly sunny pop material, although I will forever wish horrible things on whoever wrote the vacuous line “give me something good that’s even better than it seems.”

4. Pip Blom feat. Alex Kapranos – Is This Love? Not a cover of the Whitesnake song, fortunately, but a summer banger from this Dutch pop band and the lead singer/guitarist of Franz Ferdinand. It came out in May but has stuck with me all year, from the big arrangements behind “I wanna feel you in my dreams” to the disco/rock blend behind the two singers’ shared choruses.

3. Young Fathers – Rice. My #1 album of the year, Heavy Heavy, included this track and “I Saw,” which made my 2022 list but would be much higher if I re-ranked those songs now. (It’s an issue with songs that come out late in any calendar year – I actively try to avoid recency bias, and often keep those songs lower than they belong, or else I just haven’t had enough time to appreciate them.) I linked this in the albums post as well, but you have to see these guys perform both songs and two more live on KEXP.

2. The Japanese House – Boyhood. A lush, immersive dream-pop track elevated by Amber Mary Bain’s falsetto and her lyrics about the end of a relationship and the void that’s left behind.

1. Brittany Howard – What Now. The former Alabama Shakes singer/guitarist released this title track to her upcoming second album, due out February 2nd, and it is a lightning bolt of funk, blues, and righteous anger, culminating in the chorus’s final line, “If you want someone to hate then blame it on me.” I recognized Howard as a talented guitarist from her time with the Shakes, but this is another level of songcraft and a big shift from her first album, which was mostly blues rock and the odd synth-heavy track. With her follow-up single, “Red Flags,” it seems like she’s going in new directions with What Now. I can’t wait.

Top 23 albums of 2023.

This year turned out to be a very good one for albums, better than last year, but worse for individual tracks, which I’ll talk about a little more when that ranking goes up. I was afraid I’d struggle to keep up my gimmick of doing a ranking as long as the last two digits of the year, which I’ve had to abandon every once in a while, but I ended up with plenty of albums to consider and spent a lot of time listening or re-listening to albums to make some of these final cuts – and to decide on the actual #1, which was very much a game-time choice. Get ready to read a lot about shoegaze and post-punk, although the very top of the list goes in a different direction entirely. Some honorable mentions include Cory Wong – Rocket; Black Honey – A Fistful of Peaches; Emma Anderson – Pearlies; Queens of the Stone Age – In Times New Roman…; Speedy Ortiz – Rabbit Rabbit; Brad – In The Moment That You’re Born; and, of course, The Baseball Project – Grand Salami Time.

You can see my previous year-end album rankings here: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and my top albums of the 2010s. My top 100 songs of 2023 will go up in the next day or two.

23. Egyptian Blue – A Living Commodity. If I told you there was a band that cited Wire, Gang of Four, Radiohead, and Iceage as influences (which Egyptian Blue has), you’d probably imagine something a lot like this Brighton band’s debut album, which wears all of these influences but weaves them into something new enough that it avoids sounding derivative of any of them. There’s a tremendous energy here that powers the album, something I interpreted as the freshness of youth – but maybe that’s just because I’m old now – and that makes the album feel incredibly alive even though it’s underpinned by a sound that’s nearly 50 years old. Standouts include the title track, “Matador,” and “Skin.”

22. Deeper – Careful! The latest add to my list, Careful! only hit my radar a few weeks ago when WXPN music director Dan Reed tabbed it as his #1 album of the year. (His top ten was pretty solid overall.) Deeper’s last album, Auto-Pain, came shortly on the heels of the news that their former guitarist had killed himself, and the album’s darker content reflected that. Careful! is more upbeat, almost ebullient at times, which contrasts with the post-punk sound that they still maintain on this album – with a heavy dose of David Bowie, according to singer/guitarist Nic Gohl. Standouts include “Glare,” “Tele,” and “Build a Bridge.”

21. The Hives – The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons. The Hives’ first new album in eleven years found the Swedish band, down just one of their original members, rejuvenated, sounding as good as they did on their first couple of records nearly twenty years ago. They announce their presence with giant riffs on the opener (and best track) “Bogus Operandi,” and the whole album carries that same sense of bluster and grandeur. There’s plenty of the muscular rock we’re used to from the Hives, plus some diversions into hardcore (the one-minute “Trapdoor Solution”, or the slightly longer “The Bomb”), These guys can rock, and they’re not afraid to do so. I suppose the lesson is to lean into what you do well. Standouts include “Bogus Operandi,” “Two Kinds of Trouble,” and “Countdown to Shutdown.”

20. Daughter – Stereo Mind Game. This Irish trio’s previous album was the soundtrack to the video game Before the Storm, released in 2017, without so much as a single in the interim, to the point where I assumed they’d hung it up. (Bands come and go so quickly these days, and because I’m always trying to keep up with what’s new, I tend to forget even bands I liked.) Daughter’s sound was always ethereal and pensive, one of the few bands I liked who used mostly slower tempos, while here they expand their repertoire just slightly with some stronger melodies and even, dare I say, something a little upbeat like “Future Lover,” one of the standout tracks along with “Swim Back” and “Be On Your Way.”

19. White Reaper – Asking for a Ride. White Reaper’s first three albums were all pretty similar, hard power-pop records with a punk influence but an overriding sense of melody along with a good bit of obnoxious fun in the lyrics. On their fourth record, they actually go … metal. You can’t listen to the first two songs here and not think Motörhead or even some early Bay Area thrash, and even when White Reaper takes their foot off the gas a little bit on the album’s best track, “Fog Machine,” they just shift from early ‘80s metal to the late ‘70s metal sounds (think New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands like Maiden and Priest) from their previous records. Other standout tracks include “Pink Slip,” “Bozo,” and the title track. Also, if you’re into more serious metal, the best albums I heard this year in that genre were Wayfarer’s remarkable American Gothic, Horrendous’s Ontological Mysterium, and Myrkur’s Spine.

18. Grian Chatten – Chaos for the Fly. When I heard the lead singer of Fontaines D.C. would be doing a solo album, I assumed it would be something in the vein of his regular gig, something between punk and post-punk with a strong working-class edge … and Chatten instead delivered a thoughtful, meditative, acoustic record that’s mostly his vocals and a guitar. There’s a little rockabilly here in “Fairlies,” what I can only describe as lounge music on “Bob’s Casino,” and a mournful piano track on “All of the People.” Standouts include “Fairlies,” “The Score,” and “Last Time Every Time Forever.”

17. Belle & Sebastian – Late Developers. A surprise release from the Scottish icons, just eight months after A Bit of Previous, with their trademark wry lyrics along with sunny pop melodies with a dark undercurrent. I’ve been a little surprised to see it omitted from many year-end lists, to which I attribute its release very early in the year (January 13th) and the way we tend to take bands this consistent for granted. Standouts include “Juliet Naked,” “I Don’t Know What You See in Me,” and “Give a Little Time.”

16. Hotline TNT – Cartwheel. Hotline TNT’s second album hits during shoegaze’s big moment, a revival that I’m going to mention more than a few times in this list, and they’re one of the most authentic to the original sound, which dates to the late 1980s and early 1990s in England, led by bands like My Bloody Valentine, Lush, Slowdive, and Ride. Cartwheel borrows quite a bit from those last two bands, with a little Hüsker Dü thrown in for good measure, getting that shimmering wall of distortion sound that’s intrinsic to proper shoegaze. Standouts include “I Thought You’d Change,” “Out of Town,” “Protocol,” and “Spot Me 100.”

15. The Japanese House – In the End It Always Does. Amber Mary Bain wrote much of her second album in the wake of the end of a thruple that also included Art School Girlfriend (who is now in a relationship with Bain’s ex, Marisa Hackman). Anyway, In the End It Always Does showcases Bain’s lovely voice over a substantial amount of piano and keyboard work, grounding the record to support its little experimentations into electronica, dream-pop, and folk, although it always comes back to her vocals for me. Standouts include “Boyhood,” “Sunshine Baby,” and “Sad to Breathe.”

14. Genesis Owusu – STRUGGLER. The Ghanaian-Australian singer/rapper Owusu’s second album blends-hip-hop with sounds from the earliest era of new wave when that genre had just broken away from its punk origins, with songs that are rapped, shouted, and even sung in falsetto (the ironic “See Ya There”). It’s equal parts rage-rock and dance, buoyed by Owusu’s charismatic delivery. Standouts include “Leaving the Light,” “The Roach” (complete with Kafka references), “Freak Boy,” and “Stay Blessed.”

13. Protomartyr – Formal Growth in the Desert. This is actual post-punk, sometimes labeled post-hardcore, in 2023, and I’m being a little pedantic here because I think those labels have some real utility that’s lost when people just throw “post-whatever” on anything. (As opposed to Post Malone, whose music should just be thrown in the trash.) Vocalist and Tigers fan Joe Casey wrote some of the lyrics about his late mother and his grieving process, while other songs focus on existential dread or environmental crises, all over a stark, often detuned guitar-heavy backing. Standouts include “For Tomorrow,” “Elimination Dances,” and “Fun in Hi Skool.”

12. Altin Gün – Ask. I was not familiar with Anatolian rock, which blends traditional Turkish music with psychedelic rock from the late 1960s/early 1970s, until I stumbled on this Netherlands-based outfit and their fifth album, which had a similar effect on me as Mdou Moctar’s Afrique Victime: I was mesmerized by the translation of rock guitar into totally new sounds from other musical cultures. I can’t tell you much about the lyrics, but the music, which is always anchored by interesting and complex guitarwork, is enough to keep me listening even though I don’t know what they’re singing about. Standouts include “Su Siziyor,” “Leylim Ley,” and “Rakiya Su Katamam.”

11. Billy Porter – Black Mona Lisa. I knew of Porter from his work on Pose and at least by reputation from his stellar work on Broadway, but when this album appeared a month ago, it was one of the more pleasant surprises of the year, as Porter brings both his vocal talents and outsized personality to this record that mixes effusive dance numbers with lyrical introspection. The 54-year-old Porter had released four previous albums, but this is his first foray into popular music, a 12-song exploration of much of his personal history through dance, disco, and funk tracks – and it is just a blast to listen to. Standouts include “Children” (two versions), “Funk is on the One,” and “Baby Was a Dancer.”

10. Creeper – Sanguivore. Creeper’s second album, Sex, Death & the Infinite Void, was my #2 album of 2020, and while I think this one is a little less exciting overall, it’s still a very strong effort from this gothic post-punk act that, aside from one awful track, is the rare concept album that keeps you in its thrall from start to finish. (“The Ballad of Spook and Mercy” is just embarrassing.) There’s something extremely ‘80s about the whole endeavor – the opening bars of “Teenage Sacrifice” could easily be a hair-metal band circa 1987, while elsewhere they sound like they’d be on tour with Heaven 17 and the Blow Monkeys about five years earlier. Standouts include “Sacred Blasphemy,” “Teenage Sacrifice,” and “Cry to Heaven.”

9. Yves Tumor – Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds). Sean Lee Bowie’s fifth album melds psychedelic rock and shoegaze-esque guitars with electronica and funk for a record that’s theatrical, bombastic, and utterly compelling. It’s the album everyone thinks Lil’ Yachty made. Standouts include “Lovely Sewer,” “Heaven Surrounds Us Like a Hood,” “God Is a Circle,” and “Echolalia.”

8. Corinne Bailey Rae – Black Rainbows. Rae has moved a long way from the neo-soul sound of “Put Your Records On” and her acclaimed self-titled debut album back in 2006. Black Rainbows might be the most unexpected album of the year, inspired (according to Rae) by an exhibit on Black history she saw at Chicago’s Stony Island Arts Bank. Her voice is still strong and carries songs whether she goes loud or smooth, but the music here is all over the place, even veering into punk/hardcore and electronica, rather than the jazzy soul where she’s typically resided. It’s extremely ambitious and for the most part achieves its goals. Standouts include “New York Transit Queen,” “Erasure,” and “A Spell, A Prayer.”

7. Slowdive – Everything is Alive. Slowdive were darlings in the original shoegaze movement, with their 1993 album Souvlaki one of the peaks of the genre, but after they shifted their sound for 1995’s Pygmalion just as Britpop was exploding, they lost their record deal and broke up for 17 years. They returned to recording with 2017’s Slowdive, a majestic return towards their initial sound, and now have followed it up with an even better album that I think translates 1990s shoegaze through a 2023 lens. I’ve seen at least two stories on the current shoegaze revival from Pitchfork (which includes a lot of artists that aren’t really shoegaze) and Steregum, both of which highlight Slowdive’s place and the fact that they’ve reached new commercial heights since their re-formation. Highlights include “alife,” “the slab,” and “skin in the game.”

6. Sampha – Lahai. Maybe I just missed the boat on Sampha’s debut album Process, which won him the Mercury Prize in 2017, but I am all about this album, his long-awaited follow-up, which follows a theme you’ll see a lot in my top six albums – a real sense of restraint, with simpler and even minimalist arrangements that run so counter to contemporary pop standards. Sampha’s higher-register voice might be drowned out by louder or richer accompaniments, but the electro-soul sounds across Lahai tend to highlight and elevate his vocals instead. Standouts include “Spirit 2.0,” “Only,” “Suspended,” and “Jonathan L. Seagull.”

5. Geese – 3D Country. Geese’s debut album Projector felt like these then-teenagers had been locked in a room with nothing but records by Wire, Gang of Four, and Television for several months, so their follow-up record’s turn into an experimental mélange of post-punk, space country, hillbilly rock, screamo, and more genres that musicians this age have no business knowing so well was a huge surprise. Even more of a surprise was how well it works: 3D Country could have been one big joke, but even when you can hear Geese having fun, they’re still serious musicians and the craft here is evident. They get a lot of “jam band” labels, but I think that’s more about critics who don’t know how to categorize them. Standouts include “Cowboy Nudes,” the title track, and “Mysterious Love,” although I don’t think any three tracks could give you an accurate sense of the overall sound here.

4. Arlo Parks – My Soft Machine. Parks’s follow-up to her Mercury Prize-winning debut album Collapsed in Sunbeams sees the English singer-songwriter expanding her sonic palette to include more electronic elements and richer instrumentation, but her voice and lyrics remain the heart of her music. (She even credited some surprising influences, including shoegaze pioneers My Bloody Valentine and the 2022 album Skinty Fia by Fontaines D.C.) Standout tracks include “Impurities,” “Weightless,” “Devotion,” “Bruises,” and her cover of Jai Paul’s “Jasmine” for the album’s deluxe edition.

3. Jorja Smith – falling or flying. Jorja Smith is a god-damned treasure. The English chanteuse got a Mercury nomination with her 2018 debut album Lost & Found, then teased with an eight-song EP in 2021 called Be Right Back before returning this year with her triumphant second LP. Often miscategorized as just an R&B singer, Smith moves seamlessly across styles from soul to jazz to blues to trip-hop, but the unifying forces here are her vocals and her minimalist approach. Everything she does puts her voice front and center, and even when you know there must be myriad instrumental tracks, it sounds spare, giving the sense that you’re witnessing an intimate performance – a welcome antidote to the overproduced sounds of most popular music today. Standouts include the title track, “Little Things,” and “Try Me.”

2. Noname – Sundial. Noname appeared to have quit the music industry in November of 2019 and cancelled her sophomore album, Factory Baby, but returned to live performances in the summer of 2022 and released a new second album, Sundial, this past August. It’s a tour de force of modern hip-hop, with some of the most intelligent lyrics you’ll hear from any MC and a style that reflects the influences across rap’s fifty-year history, while the music over which she drops her rhymes ranges from R&B to jazz to alternative electronic. Standout tracks include “Oblivion” with Common and Ayoni, “Namesake,” and “Black Mirror.” I couldn’t put this album at #1, however, given the guest appearance of antisemite Jay Electronica, who even drops a reference to the Rothschilds in his verse and claims the Ukraine war is a hoax; Noname said she didn’t care what people said about his inclusion, but I don’t think there’s ever a good reason to platform someone who expresses hateful views.

1. Young Fathers – Heavy Heavy. I loved this album when it came out, then set it aside for much of the year, then revisited it for this list – and because of their stunning performance on KEXP – and fell in love with it again. It’s experimental, exuberant, explosive, and full of great hooks. “I Saw” made my top 100 songs of 2022, and would be in the top 10 this year if I hadn’t already included it last year, while “Rice,” “Geronimo,” and “Drum” are all standouts. The Scottish trio started out as primarily an alternative hip-hop act, but have expanded their sound over the past twelve years to include more elements of soul, indietronica, dance, and Afrobeat in their style. They won a Mercury Prize in 2014 for their debut album Dead, but that is now, at most, their third-best album after this and 2018’s Cocoa Sugar. Nobody sounds like Young Fathers because nobody could.

Top 100 board games, 2023 edition.

I’ve done board game rankings here every winter for sixteen years now, and this is the eighth year when I’ve ranked 100 games, which is a small fraction of the games I’ve played in my life (well 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: Century Spice Road, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Root, Kingdomino, Calico, Seven Bridges, Broom Service, 7 Ronin, Noctilulca, Morels, Living Forest, Furnace. For the record, I still like all of those games. It’s just a space issue.

Key 2023 releases I still need to play: The White Castle, Daybreak, Redwood, Apiary, Spellbook. I won’t even talk about my Shelf of Shame at this point. I need to start a game night again; I haven’t done that or anything like it regularly since the pandemic hit.

A few I considered that didn’t make the cut: Lacrimosa, Planet Unknown, Gartenbau, Distilled, Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road.

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 any 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. 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 seventeen years since this came out. Complexity: Low.

99. 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. Of these designers’ three roll-and-writes (this, Fleet the Dice Game, and Motor City), this is my favorite. Complexity: Medium-low.

98. 3 Ring Circus. Full review. From designer Fabio Lopiano (Merv, Ragusa), this game pits players as operators of small-time traveling circuses in the heyday of Ringling Bros., moving around the northeastern United States to play small, medium, and large cities, hiring performers to fill out their boards for points and taking in cash with larger performances. You gain and lose some things as you add performers and animals to your circus, covering up some benefits while unlocking others. You pay for those cards based on what you’ve already played, only paying the difference between the new card and the next-highest one in the row. There’s some pickup-and-delivery to the game, but it crosses many different styles and mechanics, combining them into an entertaining intellectual challenge, with some racing elements as you try to get to certain cities or regions first. Complexity: Medium.

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. Next Station: London. A fairly abstract flip-and-write where players will draw four routes in different colors to connect stations on their maps, with stations represented by four shapes. Players flip a deck with two cards of each shape plus some wilds, but you’re only guaranteed to see each shape once: After the fifth pink card has appeared (four shapes + wild), that round is over and you move to the next color. Each player plays a different color at the same time, so you won’t all have the same resulting map at game-end. No route can cross another one, as they can only intersect at stations, but those are worth more points. You score points for each route by multiplying the number of sectors it passes through by the number of stations in the sector where it hits the most. There are other bonuses and you can play with two public objectives (recommended) and bonus Pencil Powers (I could take or leave these) as well. I do not care for the sequel, Next Station: Tokyo, which has some scoring rules and restrictions that I think take away the looseness and fun of the original. Complexity: Low.

95. 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.

94. 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.

93. The Wolves. Full review. If you like area-control games – RISK is the granddaddy of these, and I have fond memories of it although it’s not a very good game – The Wolves is one of the best new entries in that genre. Players start with packs of six wolves, two alphas and four small ones, and move them around the board, building dens, upgrading those to lairs, converting neutral lone wolves to your pack, and even dominating opponents’ small wolves and dens to convert them. You score points by expanding your pack, as lairs and some dens give you points, but the big points come when each region is scored. You also take actions by flipping one to three of your six terrain tiles, so your options are limited by what’s showing and you must plan ahead to maximize the efficiency of your turns. It’s a tense game because your opponents can so easily take regions you thought you controlled and even steal your wolves and dens if you’re not careful. Complexity: Medium-low.

92. Juicy Fruits. Full review. This game 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.

91. 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.

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. 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.

88. 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.

87. Cat in the Box. Full review. An ingenious 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.

86. 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.

85. 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 in the U.S. for several years now. Complexity: Low.

84. Hadrian’s Wall. One of the most complex roll/flip-and-writes I’ve ever played, but it’s pretty manageable, and after a lot of plays online I think I got the hang of it. Hadrian’s Wall is a worker placement game played with pen and paper, two scoresheets for each player, as you check off boxes by spending four types of workers or stone (the only resource), moving up four prestige tracks while also giving yourself further stone production and/or extra workers for future rounds. My sense is that it’s always better here to think long-term, with six rounds and plenty of new workers and stone coming to you in every round anyway, rather than going just for short-term gains. The scoresheets are very busy and there is a lot to juggle in your mind as you go, which is why I’ve more or less settled on a fixed strategy that I tweak depending on the small amount of randomness in each game (mostly what extra resources you get for each round, determined by card flips). Complexity: Medium.

83. Fit to Print. Full review. Galaxy Trucker has always stood as the paragon of a strategy game with a real-time element, but I think Fit to Print might do it one better. You’re all editors of newspapers for woodland creatures and will produce three editions over the game’s three rounds, with each slightly larger than the last. The tile-claiming and tile-laying phases go in real time, so there’s a mad dash to grab tiles and lay them out, but there are rules about how you can do so: you can’t place ads next to ads or pictures next to pictures or articles of the same type (color) next to each other. Articles score straight points, photos score if they match neighboring articles, ads bring you money, and you also lose points if you don’t balance happy and sad articles. You also lose if you have the largest area of uncovered white space on your board. The player with the least ad revenue at game-end loses automatically, and the winner is whoever has the highest score of the remaining players. There are variants for two players, solo play, and family play without the timer. The art here is amazing and some of the content on the little tiles is genuinely funny. Complexity: Medium-low.

82. 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.

81. 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 three sequel games, Twice as Clever!, Clever Cubed, and Clever 4ever, but this remains the best one. Complexity: Low.

80. 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.

79. 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.

78. 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.

77. 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.

76. Splito. Short review. The best new small-box game of the year, Splito is a semi-cooperative game, where you play cards between your self and your two neighbors to try to score points jointly, but there’s only one winner at game-end. The deck has cards numbered 1 through 6 in multiple colors, and the scoring cards you’ll play between you ask you to play certain combinations of cards, or to avoid a certain number or color entirely in your shared area. It plays 3 to 8 players and I can vouch that it works well at 8, which is a rarity for non-party games. Complexity: Medium-low.

75. 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.

74. Whistle Stop. Full review. 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.

73. 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.

72. 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).

71. 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.

70. 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.

69. 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.

68. 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.

67. 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 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.

66. Kites. Full review. A great real-time cooperative game that gets everyone involved and usually calls for a fair bit of yelling because someone isn’t pulling their weight. The game has several timers in different colors, and players must play cards from their hands with one or two colors on them, flipping the matching timer(s). The goal is to get through the entire deck and your hands of cards before any timer runs out. Full games take less than ten minutes, and like a lot of cooperative games, sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s unwinnable, and usually you win by the skin of your teeth. It’s very suitable for younger players as long as they have the dexterity to handle the timers. Complexity: Low.

65. 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.

64. 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.

63. Get on Board: New York & London/Paris & Roma. Full review. Two games, one released in 2022 and one in 2023, and I love them both. They’re reimplementations of a Japanese game called Let’s Make a Bus Route, all flip-and-write games where players place their tracks on the streets on the game board, with different maps for 2-3 players and for 4-5 players. Along the way, you’ll pick up passengers, sometimes dropping them off for points, while trying to hit your private objective of running your route through three specific stops and the public objectives of picking up 5 passengers of a specific type or getting to three buildings of a specific type. You have six track shapes you can play and the flipped card determines what you’re playing, which will be a different shape from what your opponents play on the same turn. The original game, New York & London, penalized you for going on streets where your opponents already laid tracks, while the second one, Paris & Roma, gives you extra points for doing so. They’re both fantastic with bright, goofy art, and the challenges haven’t gotten old for me yet. Complexity: Medium-low.

62. 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.

61. 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.

60. 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.

59. Wandering Towers. I will review this in full later in December or early in January, but this is the best new family game of 2023 and playable even with younger kids since there’s no text and the rules are quite simple. Each player has a set of five wizards on the game’s circular track, and five empty potion bottles in front of them. On your turn, you play a card from your hand to either move one of your wizards or to move one of the towers on the board. If you move a tower and it ends up on a space with any wizards on it, they’re trapped under the tower and you get to fill one potion bottle. The goal is to get all five of your wizards into the Ravenskeep tower, which moves around the track every time a wizard enters, and have all five of your potion bottles filled. You can also discard filled potion bottles to use either of the game’s two special actions, which change each game. It’s easy to learn and looks great on the table, plus it has the perfect amount of take-that for playing with your kids. Complexity: Low.

58. 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.

57. SCOUT. Full review. This game first came out in Asia in 2019, but got its first official north American release in 2022 – 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.

56. 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, with the same basic mechanics but change the players’ actions on the path; and now a two-player game, Tokaido Duo (full review), with the same theme but many changes to the rules. Complexity: Medium.

55. 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 several expansions for it. Complexity: Medium.

54. 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. I own but haven’t played the sequel, The Search for Lost Species, yet. Complexity: Medium-low.

53. 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.

52. 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.

51. 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.

50. Earth. Full review. This is Wingspan, squared, in one sense literally – you’re playing cards to your ecosystem in a 4×4 grid, rather than three rows of up to 5 cards, but the gist of the game is very similar. You play cards by spending soil resources equal to their cost, water them, grow them, or compost them, and when you choose one of those actions you activate every card in your ecosystem with the matching action color. You gain points from the cards themselves, from tokens placed on them through growth and watering (sprouts), plus public and private end-game objectives. There’s a lot going on, so the cognitive load of the game is fairly high, but nothing within the mechanics is that complex or even new – you’ve seen most of this before, just never in these combinations. If you love Wingspan and want something a little more challenging, albeit still without player interaction, Earth is your game. Complexity: Medium.

49. 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 new edition coming, probably this winter, that keeps the game play while updating the theme so that the brown “colonists” aren’t so obviously slaves. Complexity: High.

48. 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.

47. 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.

46. 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.

45. Kodama: The Tree Spirits. Full review. Kodama features artwork that looks like it came from the pen of Hayao Miyazaki, but it’s 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.

44. 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.

43. 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.

42. 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.

41. 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. I’ve played this a bunch more online, however, and I think there might be a dominant strategy or at least something close to it, enough that I’ve slid this one down the list a few spots. Complexity: Medium-low.

40. 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.

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. Votes for Women. Full review. As of right now, I think this is my #1 game for 2023, although I have another week-plus to change my mind and play new stuff. Votes for Women is a two-player game that incorporates its theme incredibly well into game play, and adds an area control element that’s absent from a lot of both two-player games and historical games that don’t involve war. One player is the suffragist, and the other the misogynist opposition, competing to meet their respective requirements to pass or defeat the 19th Amendment, convincing enough states to vote your way (by placing four of your tokens there, with none of your opponent’s) and getting Congress to ratify it. You do this by means of large decks of cards that change and become more potent as the game progresses, and can boost your efforts by claiming certain event and state cards if you gain control of any state/area early on in the game. It’s fun, educational, and really bright and easy to look at, which is important given the amount of text involved. Complexity: Medium-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 ten 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 twenty-plus 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. 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 game is also known as Schotten Totten, which has the same rules with different art, but Schotten Totten 2 is different. 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 under the title Vienna, scheduled for 2023 but still not out. 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. 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.

24. 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.

23. 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.

22. 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.

21. 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.

20. 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.

19. 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.

18. 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.

17. 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.

16. 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. Complexity: Medium-high.

15. 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.

14. 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.

13. 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.

12. 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.

11. 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.

10. Heat: Pedal to the Metal. Full review. A 2022 game I didn’t play until June of this year, but which would have easily been my #1 new game of last year if I’d gotten to it in time, and which right now is my top new game of the decade, earning only the second perfect score of 10 I’ve ever given to a game in a review at Paste. Heat takes the bicycle-racing game La Flamme Rouge’s core mechanics and makes some slight tweaks to produce a game that’s easy to learn, always a challenge to play, and that allows players to win with varying strategies and even to come back from early deficits. Each player starts with a small deck of 18 cards, 14 of which are speed cards numbered 0 through 5, plus three ‘stress’ cards and one Heat card (which has no function other than taking up space). On a turn, each player chooses their gear and plays that many cards from their hand, indicating how many spaces their car will move. Shifting up or down two gears adds another Heat card to your deck, as does “boosting,” which lets you draw the top card of your deck after your regular turn to try to move farther. There are corners on every track with speed limits, however, and if you go too fast, you might spin out and add both Heat and stress cards to muck up your deck. The game comes with four tracks on two boards, plus several expansions that allow you to introduce weather conditions or add gear cards to your decks for unique powers. I think the base game by itself is perfect. As of this writing, it’s between printings. Complexity: Medium-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 in 2019. I ranked all 18 Ticket to Ride boards for Ars Technica a few years ago, although that doesn’t include Japan/Italy or Poland.

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 nine 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, Oceania expansion, and Asia expansion (with a two-player Duet mode) are out, although I haven’t tried any yet. 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 an all-timer, 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, Spendor Duel, and Votes for Women, and possibly Sail. I would probably add Seven Bridges if I knew when it was coming back into print.

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, Splito, The Wolves, 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 $16.61) can handle up to 7, and Wavelength plays any number, split into two teams.

Top ten movies of 2022.

I’ve tried to publish some sort of ranking of films in each of the past few years, either on its own or folded into another post, usually tying it to the Oscars or to seeing some specific film that I thought I had to see to make the list more or less complete. This year, I still have too many acclaimed 2022 films left to see to keep putting this off – Living, EO, The Quiet Girl, Saint Omer, and Return to Seoul among them – so I’m just calling it today, and if I see something later that belongs in this top ten, I’ll add a note here at that point.

10. Nope. Jordan Peele’s third feature as writer-director wasn’t quite as good as his debut, Get Out, but also shows that he’s deft at more than just horror, and that his thematic range is much broader than that first film (or the second, Us, based on what I’ve read) implied. Two siblings run a ranch where they train horses for use in films, but a mysterious presence in the sky is spooking their horses and raining down metal objects without warning. As in Get Out, we learn in stages along with Daniel Kaluuya’s main character, with several surprises, a clever dose of humor, and this time some incredible special effects as well.

9. La Caja. Venezuela’s entry for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film is, unfortunately, only available on MUBI, which is how I saw it, but which also seems like it might bury its chances of finding any sort of audience. It follows a young boy who goes to Mexico to claim his father’s remains, only to spot a man he believes to be his father walking around in the same town where he supposedly died. It’s small, but powerful, addressing themes of immigration, economic inequality, and the exploitation of workers.

8. Tár. I was completely on this film’s wavelength until the last twenty minutes or so, when the main character, Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár, experiences her fall from grace, and it’s no longer clear if everything we see is real. She’s a world-famous conductor of classical music, an impossible celebrity in our era, and extremely used to getting whatever she wants, without consequences for her actions. The majority of the film is such a perfectly slow burn that it’s frustrating when the pace gets faster for the final portion, but what comes before is a remarkable work of writing and direction from Todd Field, as well as yet another masterful performance from Blanchett.

7. The Menu. “Rich people are terrible” was a big theme in movies this year, but unlike some of the others, The Menu gets the tone right with its extremely dark comedy that also skewers modern food culture and features an excellent ensemble cast led by Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy. A group of mostly unlikeable people head to a restaurant on an island for a prix fixe dinner that costs $1250 a person, only to find the celebrity chef’s behavior increasingly disturbing until something big happens that makes it clear this is no ordinary meal. It’s funny, and strange, and gives the viewers more to chew on than the diners get.

6. Broker. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2018 film Shoplifters was one of my top 3 films of that year, and this movie, starring Parasite’s Song Kang-ho, has a lot in common with the earlier film, as both revolve around a group of people who form a makeshift family after they find the world has cast them aside. Broker focuses on two men who steal abandoned babies from a ‘baby box’ at their church to sell them on the black market to parents desperate to adopt, but this plan goes awry when one of the mothers comes back the next day, learning about their illicit business and demanding to come along with them as they try to find adoptive parents. It doesn’t quite pack the same punch as Shoplifters, but it’s still lovely in its own way, and the story gives it more of the edge of a thriller.

5. The Eternal Daughter. I wasn’t a huge fan of Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir, and didn’t see The Souvenir Part Two, but this sort-of sequel is a knockout, featuring Tilda Swinton … and Tilda Swinton, as she plays two characters, the main character from The Souvenir films (played by Honor Swinton-Byrne, Tilda’s daughter) and her mother (played by Swinton in the first two films). They travel to the mother’s childhood home, now a creepy bed and breakfast in north Wales, as the daughter tries to learn about her mother’s life to make a film about her and hold on to these memories before her mother is gone. I know Swinton can be a polarizing actress, but this is her at her absolute best.

4. Aftersun. Charlotte Wells’ feature debut about an 11-year-old girl taking a trip to Turkey with her father, who is divorced from her mother and not very present in his daughter’s life, packs a huge emotional punch by doing very little – the camera observes, as we are watching the daughter’s memories from some point later in her life, and we are left to decide what might really have happened. It’s a heartbreaking look at how hard it is for us to understand our parents, especially through the lens of childhood memories, and features two standout performances from Paul Mescal (nominated for Best Actor) and first-time actor Frankie Corio.

3. Decision to Leave. The most ridiculous snub of the year at this year’s Oscars was the omission of Decision to Leave from the Best International Feature Film category – it made the 15-film shortlist, and it was miles better than the two eventual nominees I’ve seen. Director Park Chan-wook’s first film since 2016’s The Handmaiden follows a depressed detective in Busan as he tries to determine whether the death of an immigration officer who fell from a mountain he climbed frequently was an accident or an almost-perfect murder at the hands of his wife. The detective becomes obsessed with the case and the young widow, which sets off a series of events that can only end badly for at least one of them. It’s a masterful plot that eschews easy answers, anchored by two strong lead performances by Park Hae-il as the detective and Tang Wei as the widow/murder suspect.

2. The Banshees of Inisherin. Colin Farrell’s Pádraic and Brendan Gleeson’s Colm are best friends and drinking buddies, but one day, Colm says he doesn’t want to drink with Pádraic any more … or even talk to him, which drives Pádraic, who doesn’t have much going on in his life and lives with his sister (Kerry Condon), to increasingly desperate measures to which Colm responds in turn. This latest film from Martin McDonagh reunites the stars of his In Bruges in a film that is by turns comic and tragic, standing as a parable for the Irish Civil War while also serving as a meditation on male friendship. All four of the film’s most prominent actors, including Barry Keoghan, deserved and earned Oscar nominations, and the dialogue in this film is spectacular.

1. Everything Everywhere All At Once. My favorite film of the year, which isn’t to say it’s the best film of the year except that I think it is. It’s a madcap trip through the many-worlds hypothesis that ends up a poignant and insightful story about parenthood, self-sacrifice, the hopes and dreams we have for our kids that we didn’t fulfill for ourselves, the immigrant experience, and more. It’s also funny, exciting, and laced with cultural references that were right in my wheelhouse. Ke Huy Quan deserves all of the praise and accolades he’s receiving, while Michelle Yeoh gets her best role at least since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I want to watch it again and again, but I also know it’ll never quite hit the same way as the first viewing, where all of that madness turned out to be something magical.

If you’re curious, 11 through 15 on my list right now are Glass Onion, The Wonder, The Fabelmans, After Yang, and Women Talking. My favorite animated film of 2022 was The Sea Beast, on Netflix, and my favorite documentary was probably The Janes, which made the Oscars shortlist but not the final five.

Top 100 songs of 2022.

There was such a flood of new music in the last two months of 2022 that I struggled to keep up with it, even slipping a couple of new albums on my best of 2022 list that I’d only listened to in their entirety in the last couple of weeks. It’s a good outcome, though, as 2022 shaped up to be a better year for new music than I would have said it was coming out of the summer, and I had more songs to put on this list than I could fit (and no, I’m not going past 100, this is work enough for something that’s not my actual job). You can see my previous years’ song rankings here: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.

If you can’t see the Spotify widget below, you can access it here.

100. beabadoobee – 10:36. Beatrice Kristi Laus’s second album, beatopia, refers to a fantasy world she created for herself when she moved with her family from the Philippines to London at age 7. It’s a clear step forward in her songwriting and gets her out of the lo-fi world of her first record. This was my second-favorite track on the album, although “Last Day on Earth,” her one-off single from 2021, isn’t on the LP at all.

99. Stella Donnelly – How Was Your Day? The Welsh-Australian singer-songwriter Donnelly released her second album, Flood, this spring to positive reviews. This track’s witty lyrics, revealing the hidden layers behind that innocuous phrase, and sunny indie-pop make it the album’s best.

98. Young Guv – Nowhere at All. Ben Cook of the Canadian band No Warning released his third album as Young Guv early this year and then followed it up with this one-off jangle-pop single that reminded me quite a bit of last year’s debut record from Chime School.

97. The Linda Lindas – Tonite. I’ve been a bit surprised that the Linda Linda’s debut album Growing Up didn’t appear on any year-end rankings or roundups of the year’s best music that I found, given the hype around the teenage punk band a year or two earlier – and given how good they sound for a bunch of kids. This is a great, vibrant young punk album, just angry enough about the right stuff. I admit it’s not breaking a ton of new ground, but tracks like this one are pretty infectious and point to a promising future.

96. Arlo Parks – Softly. The only music Parks released this year was this track, which brings some electronic music elements to her lovely vocals.

95. Bartees Strange – Wretched. Strange’s second album, Farm to Table, is his big coming-out as a songwriter, bringing him out from under the shadow of his influences (notably the National). This track was one of the album’s standouts, a slower, mournful song that offers thanks to the people who stood by him when he was at his worst.

94. Jungle – Good Times. One of two songs Jungle released this year ahead of an album that didn’t appear in 2022, although I imagine it won’t be that much longer now that their summer/fall tour is over.

93. SAULT – Money. SAULT released six albums this year, five of them at the start of November. One of those five was Today & Tomorrow, the band’s most rock-oriented record to date, even bringing in some punk influences. You can hear it here, where they channel the 1970s punk act Death.

92. The Cool Greenhouse – Get Unjaded. I know this style of very English art-rock music with talk-sung lyrics isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but where else would you find a couplet like “Googling questions like ‘Should I start microdosing?’/And ‘How come I’m standing outside Four Seasons Total Landscaping?’”

91. The Fashion Weak ft. Gruff Rhys – Welsh Words. I admit to some pro-Cymru bias here, but this song is both extremely catch and makes me laugh every time I hear it. Rhys is the lead singer of Super Furry Animals, who’ve recorded entire albums in Welsh, while the Fashion Weak are a new wave revival act whose second single, “Fly Fishing,” featured Miki Berenyi of Lush.

90. Superbloom – Falling Up. The first few seconds are sort of nonsense, the kind of thing the band will grow out of, but I like where the track goes afterwards as these over Nirvana fans expand beyond the well-crafted mimicry of their first album into something more original over the foundation of grunge revival.

89. Stars – Pretenders. Stars’ first album in nearly five years was typically lovely, if perhaps a bit unambitious, featuring plenty of back-and-forth vocals from the two lead singers. They bring an ethereal beauty even to upbeat rock tracks like this one, my favorite on the record.

88. All Them Witches – Hush, I’m on TV. According to Wikipedia, ATW released nine original singles in 2022 plus two covers, but no album. Anyway, I dig their heavy, stoner/blues rock sound, which settles in after the loud, layered riffing that opens this track before the buzzsaw hits in the chorus.

87. The Wombats – Everything I Love is Going to Die. The two best tracks from the Wombats’ 2022 album Fix Yourself, Not the World were both released in 2021, so even though the LP made my best-of-2022 list, this is the only song from the record on this year’s top 100.

86. Preoccupations – Ricochet. The best song from Preoccupations’ fourth album Arrangements is this track, which fuses their typical post-punk/early new wave sound with elements of early ‘90s shoegaze.

85. Porcupine Tree – Rats Return. “Harridan” was my favorite song on CLOSURE/CONTINUATION, but this is a close second, less ambitious but highlighted by the best guitar riff on the entire album, a dark, minor-key line that infuses the whole song with a sense of foreboding.

84. Cory Wong – Power Station. Wong released two albums in 2022, Wong’s Café in January and Power Station in April, with this, obviously from the latter album, sounding like something discovered in Prince’s archives from the early 1980s, just with a better guitar solo.

83. The Afghan Whigs – I’ll Make You See God. The Whigs have always been able to rock, but this track goes 0 to 90 in the opening seconds and never lets up – enough that it ended up in the video game Gran Turismo 7. The lyrics appear to be total nonsense, but man, this sucker rocks.

82. Gojira – Our Time is Now. Gojira put out the best metal song of the year – and it’s the only song they released all year, although I’m hopeful we’re getting a new Gojira album soon. It’s not my favorite Gojira song ever, but it might be their most accessible, if that’s possible.

81. Black Honey – Heavy. I didn’t love their previous single, “Charlie Bronson,” but “Heavy” is more the Black Honey I know and love, indie-rock with a strong melody crossed with a harder edge.

80. Crawlers – I Don’t Want It. Barely over two minutes long, this little earworm from the Liverpudlian quartet Crawlers is their best track to date and one of two strong singles from their second EP, Loud Without Noise, along with “Too Soon.”

79. Sports Team – The Drop. I could have put as many as five songs from Gulp! on this top 100, but ended up with two, adding this track because the main hook is so memorable, and it’s one of the more interesting tracks on the album because of the one right turn it takes at the bridge.

78. Killing Joke – Lord of Chaos. Jaz Coleman is 62, and with his age and seven years passing since Killing Joke’s last album, Pylon, I figured we were done getting new music from the band. Killing Joke defy labels as much as any artist I can think of – I suppose people who know Sparks’ music would say the same, but I don’t know their oeuvre as well – so it was sort of a pleasant surprise to hear this track and “Total” follow in the same heavy-rock vein as that last album, which gave us the incredible single “Euphoria.”

77. Band of Horses – Warning Signs. Band of Horses’ best songs can be pretty great, like “Is There a Ghost,” but I find their albums nearly always let me down, and this year’s Things Are Great was more of the same. This was my favorite track, although I think that’s probably because it reminds me of the way I want Band of Horses to sound all the time.

76. Melt Yourself Down – Balance. I admit to ignorance on Melt Yourself Down, and I need to explore their discography some more, as I liked what I heard from this year as they released their fourth album Pray for Me, I Don’t Fit In. Their music doesn’t just blend genres from around the world, but it does so in a frenetic fashion that holds my interest even when the song doesn’t have a great hook (“Nightsiren”). This was the best track from the album, with three great hooks in the vocals, the saxophone line, and the guitar riff around the 1:30 mark.

75. The Mysterines – Means to Bleed. The Mysterines released their debut album, Reeling, in March, but it didn’t include most of the great singles they’d released over the previous couple of years, like “I Win Every Time,” “Love’s Not Enough,” “Bet Your Pretty Face,” or “Gasoline.” The album has the right vibe, just without the highlights, although this and “Hung Up” are solid examples of their sound and their potential.

74. Jack White feat. Q-Tip – Hi-De-Ho. The Jack White/Q-Tip partnership that first appeared on record with A Tribe Called Quest’s swan song We Got It From Here … Thank You For Your Service continued this year with Q-Tip’s guest spot on this track from the first of White’s two albums released in 2022, Fear of the Dawn. The result here, based on an interpolation of Cab Calloway’s famous scatting phrase, is wonderfully weird and catchy, and by now you probably realize I give 5 bonus points to any track including Kamaal the Abstract.

73. Kid Kapichi – Rob the Supermarket. I can’t avoid thinking of this as some sort of late-stage capitalist response to the Clash’s anti-consumerist “Lost in the Supermarket,” while also marveling at how Kid Kapichi have taken the mantle that Alex Turner dropped somewhere in the late teens.

72. Freddie Gibbs feat. Moneybagg Yo. Gibbs is one of the best technical rappers going now, and pairs it with consistently interesting and often weird backing music; this track, the best from the regular edition of Gibbs’s $oul $old $eparately, shows off his rhyming speed and rhythm better than anything else on the record.

71. beabadoobee – Talk. The best track from beatopia has a little harder of an edge to the music and mixes her vocals up accordingly to pair with the walls of distortion in the chorus, along with the album’s best melody.

70. Talk Show – Cold House. Talk Show, unrelated to the Stone Temple Pilots offshoot from about twenty years ago, released two EPs this year; Touch the Ground had six songs, including last year’s “Underworld” and this track that encapsulates their blend of post-punk, new wave revival, and dark wave.

69. HAIM – Lost Track. I’ve never gotten the hype for HAIM, but man this song has a hell of a hook in the chorus, and it’s the perfect length for a song of this simplicity.

68. FKA twigs featuring Jorja Smith and Unknown T – darjeeling. I love FKA twigs and I love Jorja Smith, so I’m clearly in the target audience for this track from FKA twigs’ album mixtape, and indeed it’s Smith’s vocals that elevate the track.

67. Tei Shi – GRIP. Big year for songs/albums calling out the music industry’s more exploitative practices. Tei Shi pulled her 2021 album La Linda from streaming services after Downtown Records refused to pay her the remainder of her advance two years aft, er its release. “GRIP” is her diss track against that label and the industry as a whole.

66. Editors – Karma Climb. I was a little underwhelmed by EBM, Editors’ latest album and first with Blanck Mass (Benjamin Power) as a member, but the chorus on “Karma Climb” is extremely catchy and I think a good example of their early Interpol-esque dark indie sound.

65. Greentea Peng – Your Mind. Greentea Peng’s eclectic mix of styles can be very hit or miss, missing on “Stuck in the Middle” but hitting here on “Your Mind,” which incorporates traditional soul, jazz, and some rock guitar lines. Both appeared on her mixtape GREENZONE 108 this September. I wonder if it’s more than a coincidence that this song’s length is 4:20.

64. Sudan Archives – Home Maker. The opening track from Natural Brown Prom Queen, my #2 album of the year, fakes you out with a minute-long intro that almost sounds like someone pressed ‘record’ before anyone was ready, but it’s all a matter of building tension before Britt Parks starts up with her mixture of rap and vocals, and by the two-minute mark she’s shipped you back almost fifty years in time with her classic R&B sounds.

63. Sky Ferreira – Don’t Forget. I had forgotten, it turns out, as Ferreira released just one song between 2014 and 2022, 2019’s “Downhill Lullaby.” This track is supposed to herald the release of her long-awaited second album, Masochism, although it’s still unscheduled; if this is where her sound has evolved after the long layoff, into a darker version of synth-pop, I’m all for it.

62. Sprints – Literary Mind. Sprints released an EP earlier in 2022, Modern Job, featuring the title track and “Delia Smith,” while this single came later and might be their catchiest song to date, without losing any of their signature garage or punk elements.

61. Automatic – Skyscraper. Automatic released their second album, Excess, in June, and this third single from the record was actually the first of their songs I’d heard, a pulsing, dark synth-pop track powered by a prominent, wandering bass line.

60. Dry Cleaning – Don’t Press Me. I’m very sensitive to how a vocalist sings, and often it doesn’t even make that much sense to me. I don’t love the vocals from Dry Cleaning, even though that flat, almost toneless style of sing-talking doesn’t necessarily bother me from other singers, just as I can’t stand Porridge Radio’s whiny, cracking vocals. “Don’t Press Me” is a rare example where the vocals on a Dry Cleaning song aren’t enough to deter me from an outstanding Wire-ish track.

59. Hatchie – Quicksand. I was a little … not underwhelmed, but maybe just whelmed by Hatchie’s new album this year, as it seemed like the Aussie singer/songwriter might be stagnating; the best track was last year’s “This Enchanted,” followed by this song, both solid examples of her particular brand of dream pop.

58. CVC – Good Morning Vietnam. CVC have been gigging in Cardiff (that’s Wales) since before the pandemic but didn’t start releasing music until this year, when they dropped a couple of singles, including this odd mélange of psychedelic rock and ‘70s soft rock with a funk-adjacent bass line. “Docking My Pay” is also worth checking out if you like this track, as we wait for CVC to drop a full album.

57. Yard Act – Pour Another. Yard Act’s debut album The Overload dropped in January and its best songs had already appeared, including the superb title track and the peculiar “Payday,” leaving this as the best song from the band in 2022. I’ll forever compare them to Gang of Four, although here there’s a more joyous, almost silly vibe.

56. Crows – Garden of England. The standout track on Slowly Separate, bringing punk energy to their particular brand of hard-rock-verging-on-metal. I’d fly to London tomorrow for a Kid Kapichi/Crows double billing.

55. MUNA – What I Want. MUNA’s self-titled third album made a few best-of-2022 lists, although it didn’t quite make the cut for me. I do like their unabashedly poppy approach; I just feel like they’re often a little short in the hooks department. This was the best track on the record for me, and unsurprisingly I think the most acclaimed as well.

54. shame – Fingers of Steel. shame’s sophomore album Food for Worms is due out February 24th, with this the lead single. I see them tabbed everywhere as “post-punk,” but I don’t think it fits; they’re an alternative rock act in the clearest sense of the word, working with dissonant sounds and unusual rhythms that will probably always keep them out of the mainstream. I’m also in awe of the fact that they named a song “Baldur’s Gate” after my all-time favorite CPRG series.

53. John-Allison Weiss – Different Now. Weiss’ first new music since coming out as non-binary & trans in 2017, and first for Get Better Records, was this aptly titled song that doubles as a bittersweet breakup track.

52. Death Cab for Cutie – Here to Forever. DCFC seem good for one real standout single on every album at this point, such as “Gold Rush” from 2018’s Thank You for Today and “Black Sun” from Kintsugi. That may not quite hit the highs of Codes and Keys or Transatlanticism, but I’d say this is pretty good for a band approaching the 25th anniversary of its first album, and singing about mortality and surviving.

51. STONE – Waste. This Liverpool garage-punk band signed to Polydor earlier in the year and ended it with a banger of a six-song EP, highlighted by this abrasive track that starts angry and ends up furious.

50. Sam Fender – Alright. A tremendous non-album single from the Seventeen Going Under sessions, included in a live version on a bonus version of the 2021 LP released this summer. You’ll notice I don’t include many slower-tempo songs on these lists, especially ones that aren’t acoustic, so that should give you some sense of how much I like this.

49. Foals – Looking High. I thought Foals’ Life is Yours was just a big ol’ mess of danceable fun, but it didn’t receive the plaudits I expected, with a lot of criticism over the lyrics – which has never been a strength of Foals’ songwriter Yannis Philippakis. (“I see a mountain at my gates/I see it more and more each day.” Shades of Keats and Shelley there.) This or “Wake Me Up” vie for my favorite track on the album.

48. GIFT – Gumball Garden. A five-minute opus that starts out in shoegaze territory and then shifts almost to power-pop territory before turning back around on itself. Their album Momentary Presence has a lot of that combination, bigger melodies and faster tempos mixed with shimmering guitars and synths out of shoegaze.

47. Lizzo – About Damn Time. You may have heard this song. Special lists twenty-five different people as producers, and somehow, none of them was Nile Rodgers. This track is so chic Rodgers might as well have produced it and played guitar.

46. Kendrick Lamar feat. Sampha – Father Time. Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers is certainly ambitious, but it’s too long and inconsistent, which led me to leave it off my top albums of the year list. “N95” is solid, and “Auntie Diaries” has a truly incredible and necessary sentiment (although it contains a word best omitted, despite the message). This song was the real highlight for me, thanks to the chorus from Mercury Prize winner Sampha.

45. The Head and the Heart – Shut Up. Every Shade of Blue had its highs and lows for me, which is how I pretty much always feel about H&H’s albums, although I loved this song and “Virginia (Wind in the Night)” from their latest.

44. SAULT – Above the Sky. The best track from the best of the six albums SAULT released this year (Today & Tomorrow), incorporating rock elements into the sound they honed on their first four albums, including a guitar solo with distortion and reverb that evoke Hendrix. Also, it’s kind of nuts that SAULT has released eleven albums in three and a half years.

43. The Lathums – Say My Name. The Arctic Monkeys meet the Amazons? It’s anthemic, muscular rock, and I’m fine with that, even if it’s of a sort we’ve heard before.

42. Anxious – Call From You. It’s post-hardcore, emo, whatever, but with real harmonies, and that little guitar riff you hear in the intro is so unexpected from this subgenre that it has consistently brought me back to this song on a generally great album.

41. Just Mustard – Mirrors. So I’ve said many times I was never a My Bloody Valentine fan, even with their general critical acclaim and my own affinity for shoegaze, because I just hear waves of noise, not individual notes or chords. “I Only Said” is the exception, because there’s an actual melody to latch on to. If you made an even more accessible version of that song, you’d get “Mirrors.”

40. Danger Mouse & Black Thought feat. MF Doom – Belize. Of course, I had to include this track from Cheat Codes, as it’s probably the final recording to feature the late MF Doom (a.k.a Zev Love X), although it’s hard to single out any particular tracks on the generally excellent DM/BT collaboration.

39. Young Fathers – I Saw. The Mercury Prize winners will drop their fourth album, Heavy Heavy, early in 2023, and from the first three singles it looks like we’re in for even more musical experimentation. This was by far my favorite of the three, though, as there’s a hint of their rap origins and a rising sense of indignation as the song progresses.

38. Belle & Sebastian – Unnecessary Drama. I don’t know why people get upset when Belle & Sebastian rock out a little, or hit the dance floor, as long as their essential Belle-and-Sebastian-ness is intact. Stuart Murdoch’s wry, sardonic lyrics are still here, as are the band’s harmonies, so who’s to argue if they have a little more fun?

37. Gang of Youths – in the wake of your leave. I don’t think any album disappointed me more than angel in realtime., which had three incredible singles to tease it (“the angel of 8th ave.” and “unison”) and nothing else of note. The rest of the record felt self-indulgent, even pretentious, and worst of all devoid of energy. But those three tracks … I’m not sure anyone has evoked early U2 so effortlessly.

36. Khruangbin feat. Leon Bridges – B-side. The collaboration that began two years ago with Texas Sun continued this year with Texas Moon, highlighted by this danceable, soulful, and of course jazz-inflected single.

35. The Beths – Expert in a Dying Field. The title track from my #1 album of 2022 is just a perfect Beths song, shiny and bright and poppy and just a little dark around the edges.

34. Sunflower Bean – I Don’t Have Control Sometimes. Sunflower Bean had a moment this year, pun intended, with “Moment in the Sun” appearing in the final episode of Netflix’s Heartstopper, and their latest album Headful of Sugar had a number of similarly melodic lo-fi gems, including this one, which hits you with the melody right out of the chute.

33. The Smile – Thin Thing. The more I listened to the Smile’s debut album, the less I liked it, finding it experimental in some ways but often exactly what you’d expect if you smushed Jonny Greenwood’s soundtrack work with Thom Yorke’s vocals and the drummer from jazz group Sons of Kemet. It turns out it’s not that interesting. This track has the most to offer, starting with that odd syncopated guitar line that opens the song and moves on through it.

32. Blossoms – The Sulking Poet. Good luck getting this chorus out of your head. It’s a bit of Lord Huron, a bit of Head and the Heart, a bit of the Kooks, and oddly American-sounding for a band from Stockport, England.

31. Everything Everything – Bad Friday. If you liked Everything Everything’s early work, like “Cough Cough,” “Kemosabe,” “MY KZ UR BF,” and so on, this would likely be your favorite song from their newest album Raw Data Feel. It’s their most frenetic, most freewheeling track on the record, and we get more of the falsetto vocals that show up on just about all of their best songs.

30. Megan Thee Stallion – Her. I think Megan Thee Stallion is in the uppermost echelon of rappers today when it comes to speed, flow, and verbal dexterity, but I don’t think she picks music that does enough to accentuate her skills – or at least to work with them to make better songs. Only this and “Plan B” really stood out to me from Traumazine as songs that worked on all levels, from rhyme to music.

29. Rina Sawayama – This Hell. Sawayama’s second album, Hold the Girl, sees the singer/songwriter leaning far more into her pop sensibilities, which means it lacks the edge or ambition of her debut record, but also has a few more mainstream-ready tracks like this one. It’s her most overtly pop song yet, opening with a trite callback to Shania Twain and passing through a number of popular catchphrases and allusions, but highlights her idiosyncratic blend of styles and ability to craft a memorable hook.

28. Kae Tempest and Grian Chatten – I Saw Light. A spoken-word track over a hypnotic, minimalist synth line that sees the English poet/rapper Tempest sharing the vocals with Fontaines D.C. singer Chatten. Tempest’s lyrics are superb – a song like this can’t succeed without that – and the sparse music behind them creates a forbidding mood without getting in the way of the two speakers.

27. Griff & Sigrid – Head on Fire. Griff is a rising superstar, taking home a couple of Brit Award nominations last year shortly after she turned 21 (including Best New Artist, which she lost to Little Simz … who won for her fourth album), while Sigrid is already a star in Europe, so it was a little disappointing to see this track, with its catchy-as-hell chorus, fare poorly on the charts even in their home countries.

26. White Lies – Trouble in America. A bonus track on the deluxe edition of As I Try Not to Fall Apart that should have made the record proper given how potent this chorus is. It’s one of my favorite tracks ever from White Lies, six albums in, with some tremendous bass work from Charles Cave.

25. Phoenix feat. Ezra Koenig – Tonight. The best track on Phoenix’s fun, straightforward new album Alpha Zulu, which had a few other standouts, including “All Eyes on Me.” This one features Vampire Weekend lead singer/founder Koenig, but I like it anyway.

24. Christine and the Queens – Je te vois enfin. The best track from Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue) recalls the dark pop sounds from his 2020 EP La Vita Nuova and even parts of his 2018 album Chris.

23. Soccer Mommy – Shotgun. My favorite track from Soccer Mommy’s acclaimed album Sometimes, Forever has some of her strongest vocals – I find her voice can be droning, but here it’s well paired with the music and comes off as more ethereal and dreamy than whiny.

22. Little Simz – Angel. Simz won the Mercury Prize in October for Sometimes I Might Be, my #1 album of 2021, and then released NO THANK YOU, a simpler album that excoriates the music industry,twomonths later. This opener is a six-minute polemic against the exploitation Simz faced over the last year-plus since her magnum opus was first released, although I found in general NO THANK YOU doesn’t have the same degree of musical ambition as the preceding LP.

21. Mandrake Handshake – Emonzaemon. This Oxford-based psychedelic rock band released their second EP, The Triple Point of Water, last month, with three songs that run a total of nearly 20 minutes. I could see them being big on the jam-band circuit with this sound and those running times, but that’s not to dismiss the great guitar lick that opens this track and carries it all the way through until the heavier guitars kick in for the last thirty seconds.

20. Lizzo – 2 Be Loved (Am I Ready). The best track on Special is the one that calls back to Prince both in title and in sound, which couldn’t have been more tailor-made for me.

19. Momma – Speeding 72. There’s a big Veruca Salt vibe to the vocals on this track, but mixed with fuzzier garage-rock production and some heavier bass work from a band that likes to employ the drop-D tuning more associated with metal acts.

18. The Reytons – Avalanche. Sometimes I just want a big, crunchy rock song that announces its presence with authority in the opening seconds and never lets up on the gas pedal until it’s done. So I give you “Avalanche.”

17. Sharon van Etten – Mistakes. As with Soccer Mommy, van Etten’s vocal style often grates on me – she sounds stoned or just disinterested on so many of her songs – even when I like her music. Here she belts it out on the earworm chorus, maybe the best hook she’s ever crafted.

16. Kid Kapichi feat. Bob Vylan – New England. Vylan is the perfect collaborator for Kid Kapichi’s style of bitter, sarcastic attacks on modern British society between the duo’s track “GDP” last year and Kapichi’s … well, their entire catalog to date. “You’re such a fool, Britannia” probably wouldn’t get anyone many votes but it’s certainly sums up the Brexiteers.

15. Wet Leg – Angelica. I know “Chaise Longue” and “Ur Mum” have earned more plaudits, and the former was a legitimate commercial breakout track, but this is their best song by a mile – it’s got a better hook, the sonic interplay between the two vocalists works far better here than on other tracks, and this time the lyrics are actually funny.

14. Spiritualized – The Mainline Song. Everything Was Beautiful, the space-rock pioneers’ first new album in four years and only their second in a decade, came out in April, highlighted by this gorgeous, textured, melancholy song, the only flaw in which is that it could use some additional lyrics.

13. Let’s Eat Grandma – Levitation. I understand this band’s name (think “eats, shoots and leaves”) but it still kind of bugs me. They can write a pretty great synth-pop song, though.

12. Lucius – Next to Normal. One of the year’s best bass lines came on this funky track from Second Nature, Lucius’ first album of new material since 2016.

11. Metronomy – Good to Be Back. What a weirdly happy, bouncy song – it feels like someone slipped it into the TARDIS in the early 1980s, from the new wave-y sound to the sparse production, but that main synth line is so catchy it would fit in any era. The song is so good that Panic Shack’s punk cover of it works just as well.

10. FKA twigs feat. rema – jealousy. The best track from CAPRISONGS includes the Nigerian “Afrorave” singer Rema and has a swirling, Afrobeat-like backdrop to the vocals that feels immersive even with a too-short running time below three minutes.

9. Riverby – Chapel. Riverby is a punk act from Philly, but this song from their latest album Absolution is an absolutely gorgeous ballad that showcases lead singer/guitarist August Greenberg’s beautiful voice. I’d take a whole album made out of this, thanks.

8. Blossoms – Ode to NYC. The most Lord Huron-ish track on Ribbon Around the World also feels like the replacement for Ryan Adams’ “New York, New York.” As someone who grew up in the suburbs of the Big Apple, I was never not in love with New York City, but I’m also always happy to sing along with praises of my favorite place in the U.S.

7. Mattiel – Lighthouse. There are two great hooks in this track, both driven by the powerful voice of lead singer Mattiel Brown, from her new album Georgia Gothic. It reminds me a ton of Swing Out Sister’s breakout hit … uh, “Breakout,” from 1986, which I mean as a high compliment.

6. Jamie T – The Old Style Raiders. In a year when the Arctic Monkeys gave up on rock, we didn’t lack for artists stepping in to fill the void they’ve left behind, from the Lathums to the Reytons to Kid Kapichi, along with this track from British star Jamie T, whose 2022 album The Theory of Whatever hit #1 in the UK.

5. Sports Team – Dig! I loved Sports Team’s new album Gulp! and this is the song I keep coming back to. If I were a big-league reliever, I’d warm up to this track, which brings huge energy with the initial bass line and that three-chord riff, like someone put a cinder block on the gas pedal.

4. Sudan Archives – NBPQ (Topless). The best track from my #2 album of the year refers to that LP’s title, Natural Brown Prom Queen, and wanders through what feels like three different genres while always coming back to the tagline from the chorus, “I’m not average.” She’s anything but.

3. The Beths – When You Know You Know. If anyone ever asked me why I like the Beths so much, I’d just play this song, which has everything that makes them great: a big hook in the chorus, sunny vocals with a great harmony, witty lyrics, and jangly guitars. Almost all of Expert in a Dying Field is like this, but here everything comes together perfectly for the best song the Beths have ever recorded.

2. Spoon – Wild. Man, Lucifer on the Sofa did not live up to this single at all, but for three minutes it felt like we had peak Spoon again. That simple, sparing guitar line in the verse feels like a rubber band about to snap, and the song never quite lets out that tension. I liked the previous single, “The Hardest Cut,” as well, but the rest of the record was just filler after these two songs.

1. Bartees Strange – Heavy Heart. What’s the opposite of the sophomore slump? Strange’s debut album was solid, and promising, but also limited, and it seemed like he might just be another indie-rock singer/songwriter who had a distinct voice but whose music sounded like too much else from indie/college radio of the last decade or so – notably his primary influence, the National. Instead of continuing in that vein, we got Farm to Table, a wide-ranging, genre-skipping, guitar-driven record with sensitive, introspective lyrics, led by this song, which feels like two for the price of one, punctuated by that giant guitar break just after the two minute mark that I would bet brings the house down when he plays it live. I had Strange in the wrong category after the first record, figuring I’d respect his music more than I liked it. His growth as a musician and lyricist is one of the great stories of music in 2022.

Feel free to throw any of your favorites – songs, albums, EPs, mixtapes – in the comments!

Top 22 albums of 2022.

I don’t think 2022 was as strong for albums as 2021 was, where I could have run 30 deep on the rankings, but I had enough that I could keep up this gimmick of ranking a number of LPs equal to the last two digits of the year, and even made a few cuts in the final go. I know streaming has sort of killed the album in a sense, and I’m partly to blame as someone who generally prefers listening to specific songs over full records, but I also appreciate the artist’s vision for an album and am happy to support that in a tiny way here, even if it’s just “I like this collection of songs.” Honorable mentions include Everything Everything’s Raw Data Feel, Foals’ Life is Yours, and the Mysterines’ Reeling (which would have made the cut if they’d included more of their early singles), MUNA’s MUNA, Little Simz’s NO THANK YOU (released just five days ago, and very good, but I need to listen to it more), and beabadoobee’s beatopia.

You can see my previous year-end album rankings here: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and my top albums of the 2010s. My top 100 songs of 2022 will go up in the next day or two.

22. Elder – Innate Passage. A very last-minute addition to the list, as Ian Miller of Kowloon Walled City recommended this LP to me over the weekend, and, since he knows my tastes pretty well, it hit its mark. Elder is a progressive metal band with heavy stoner/doom elements to their music, and this album, their sixth, is their first with vocalist/guitarist Nick DiSalvo as the only remaining founding member. It’s just five tracks and runs 53 minutes, with a solid mix of proggy metal riffing, tempo and tone changes, and even some harmonies in the vocals.

21. Sunflower Bean – Headful of Sugar. I feel like Sunflower Bean are a post-hype prospect at this point; the music press seem to have moved on, or decided the band isn’t going to hit its ceiling, rather than appreciating them for what they are and for the potential they still have. Their brand of sunny jangle-pop with a little bit of garage to it might be a little familiar, but they offer a perfect slice of it on this album. Highlights include “Baby Don’t Cry,” “Who Put You Up to This?,” “I Don’t Have Control Sometimes,” and the bonus track “Moment in the Sun,” a one-off single they added to the album after it was used in Heartstopper.

20. Porcupine Tree – CLOSURE/CONTINUATION. Porcupine Tree returned after a 12-year hiatus as if they’d never left, still proggy after all these years, but without becoming overindulgent as the genre often sees. Founder Steven Wilson has produced three Opeth albums in the interim, and Porcupine Tree previously toured with the prog-metal giants, so it’s hard not to hear the latter’s influence here in some of the strongest guitar riffing. Highlights include “Harridan,” “Chimera’s Wreck,” and “Rats Return.”

19. Danger Mouse and Black Thought – Cheat Codes. Hard to believe, but this was Danger Mouse’s first hip-hop album in 17 years, since the last Danger Doom collaboration with the late MF Doom, whose vocals appear on the track “Belize.” This is peak Black Thought, with solid contributions from Danger Mouse, although the producer gets first billing here. Highlights include “Belize,” of course, as well as “The Darkest Part” and “Aquamarine.”

18. The Wombats – Fix Yourself, Not the World. A return to form for the Wombats after the uneven Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life, the band’s fifth album veers more into an overt pop direction than their best LP to date, Glitterbug, but doesn’t skimp on the witty lyrics or shifts in tone and tempo. The EP they released in November of tracks that didn’t make the album, Is This What It Feels Like to Feel Like This?, has six more songs in a similar vein, several of which probably should have made the cut. Highlights from the LP include “If You Ever Leave, I’m Coming With You,” “Everything I Love Is Going to Die,” and “Method to the Madness,” the last one of the most ornate songs the group has ever released.

17. Belle & Sebastian – A Bit of Previous. The Scottish indie stalwarts’ first new album in seven years, although they’ve released three EPs in the interim, A Bit of Previous doesn’t abandon the sunnier pop melodies and sounds of their last record, the effusive Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, although it’s a bit darker in tone and lyrics. Highlights include “Young and Stupid,” “Talk to Me Talk to Me,” and “Unnecessary Drama.”

16. Lizzo – Special. No record surprised me more than Lizzo’s Special, since I was certainly familiar with her work and her impressive voice, but never connected with her music at all. On her fourth album, Lizzo produced an ebullient record full of musical callbacks to pop, disco, and funk from the 1970s and 1980s, along with more than a little nod to Prince here and there. I guess we’ll always have to wonder what that never-made Lizzo EP that Prince was slated to produce would sound like, but I’d like to think we got some of that sound on Special. Highlights include “2 Be Loved (Am I Ready),” the #1 single “About Damn Time,” “The Sign,” and “Everybody’s Gay.”

15. Anxious – Little Green House. The debut full-length from this Connecticut quintet, which draws on emo and punk with a real dose of pop hooks and harmonies, was one of the best straight-out rock records of the year, and would have fit in quite well on a best-of list from 20 years ago at the height of emo and the absurdly titled “screamo” subgenre. There is a decent bit of screaming here, some of which I could have done without, as there’s plenty of dissonance coming from the guitarwork. The album is a raucous joy straight on through until the shocking closer “You When You’re Gone,” a slow song (!) with vocals from Stella Branstool of Hello Mary. Highlights include that track, “In April,” “Call from You,” and “Afternoon.”

14. Freddie Gibbs – $oul $old $eparately. Gibbs might be the best technical rapper going now, and he is certainly the most interesting, doing far more with the music over which he rhymes than anyone else I can think of. He has a host of guests on this sprawling, hour-long record, including Anderson .Paak, Raekwon, Pusha T, Musiq Soulchild, and Scarface. Highlights include “Too Much,” “Feel No Pain,” and “Dark Hearted,” as well as “Big Boss Rabbit” from the bonus edition.

13. Bartees Strange – Farm to Table. Strange’s sophomore album finds him leaning even more into his trad-rock side, and away from the comparisons to one of his inspirations, The National. The glimpses we had of the real Bartees on his debut are the dominant theme here, with great hooks and wistful lyrics about small things like the meaning of life and the prevalence of death. Highlights include “Heavy Heart,” “Wretched,” and “Black Gold.”

12. White Lies – As I Try Not to Fall Apart. Wikipedia calls White Lies a “post-punk revival” band, but this is new wave, and I will not stand for any erasure of that genre. (Get it? Erasure? Never mind.) Their sixth album feels like a culmination, as if they’ve truly identified their sound and have been working towards this for several records now, with previous albums having similar highlights (“There Goes Our Love Again” from Big TV, “Tokyo” from Five) but lacking this one’s depth and consistent quality. The contrast of melancholic lyrics and darkly joyous music is the strongest callback to 1980s new wave, and it’s practically pandering to an audience of me. The bonus edition includes four more tracks, including the outstanding “Trouble in America.” Highlights include the title track, “Am I Really Going to Die,” “I Don’t Want to Go to Mars,” and “Step Outside.”

11. Crows – Beware Believers. I was surprised how little press this sophomore album from Crows received, given the positive reception for their 2019 debut record Silver Tongues. Crows get billed as a punk band, but that sells them short – they’re a hard rock band in the old style, writing heavy, grinding tracks with distorted guitars, big riffs, and no pretense. Highlights include the title track, “Garden of England,” “Healing,” and “Closer Still.”

10. Christine and the Queens – Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue). Redcar is Christine & the Queens’ latest nom de plume, after he used Chris on his last album and briefly used the name Rahim last year. It’s a breakup album, at least off the lyrics, but the music is anything but depressing. He backs up these tracks about a lost love (or loves?) with soulful music that draws on pop, soul, even elements of jazz. Highlights include “rien dire,” “Ma bien aimée bye bye,” and “Je te vois enfin.”

9. Just Mustard – Heart Under. This Irish shoegaze band showed promise on their 2018 debut album Wednesday, but this album carves out its own post-shoegaze sound, with the same droning guitars but without the inscrutable walls of sound that made My Bloody Valentine critical darlings whose music I couldn’t abide. Highlights here include “Still,” “23,” “Mirrors,” and “I Am You.”

8. Sports Team – Gulp! Coming in at a scant 33:41, this barely full-length record from Sports Team, the band’s second, is ten tracks of raucous, fun, art-punk-inspired rock-and-roll. It gets off to a strong start with “The Game” and never lets up, with hooks and big energy all the way through. Highlights include “Dig!,” “The Drop,” “The Game,” and “R Entertainment.”

7. White Lung – Premonition. The newest album on the list, released just two weeks ago, is also the swan song for this Vancouver punk-metal band, as lead singer Mish Barber-Way decided to call it quits after having her second kid last year. (She’s also apparently still executive editor of Penthouse.) Premonition has apparently been in the works since 2019, but baby #1 and the pandemic pushed the record back, so while they’re going out with a bang, it appears this is the end for this underappreciated act. Highlights include “Tomorrow,” “Date Night,” and “Bird.”

6. Kid Kapichi – Here’s What You Could Have Won. In a year when the Arctic Monkeys confirmed for us all that they’re no longer a rock band – and some critics seemed unwilling to point out that Alex Turner has no clothes – Kid Kapichi are here to take up the mantle of guitar-driven rock with intelligent, sardonic lyrics, here taking aim at the popular targets of those disaffected with late-stage capitalist Britain. Kid Kapichi start off making it very clear where they stand on the snarling opener “New England” – which is not about the changing of the leaves in Vermont – featuring Bob Vylan, and the rage never really slows from there, not even for the acoustic “Party at No. 10.” Highlights include “New England,” “Rob the Supermarket,” “Super Soaker,” and “Cops and Robbers.”

5. SAULT – Today & Tomorrow. SAULT released six albums in 2022, five of them on one day in November. Each of the five explored a different genre or style, with Today & Tomorrow, my favorite of the set, finding the secretive London-based group delving into rock and punk sounds for the first time. Highlights include “The Plan,” “Lion,” “Money,” and “Above the Sky.” If you’re curious about the others, I’d rank the five albums Today & Tomorrow, Earth, 11, Aiir, and God, in order from best to worst.

4. FKA Twigs – CAPRISONGS. She calls this a mixtape, but it’s 17 songs and 48 minutes long. It’s an album. It’s uneven, both in quality and theme, less cohesive than her album Magdalene, but the highs are very high here, and FKA Twigs (Tahliah Barnett) experiments more with tones and styles than on her formal LP. Highlights include “honda,” “darjeeling,” and “jealousy.”

3. Yard Act – The Overload. Thedebutrecord from these likely lads from Leeds might as well be a spiritual sequel to the earliest work of Gang of Four or maybe a lost album from The Fall, but updated with occasional flourishes of hip-hop (which, I concede, don’t always work) and a more modern take on the working class progressivism of their forebears. Highlights include the title track, “Payday,” “Pour Another,” and “The Incident.”

2. Sudan Archives – Natural Brown Prom Queen. Sudan Archives is violinist/singer Brittney Denise Parks, who released her second LP this year to massive and well-deserved acclaim. It’s a genre-bending, world-spanning record that features abrupt tonal shifts within and between songs, lyrics that are by turns smart and frivolous, and a whole bunch of songs that just plain groove. Highlights include “NBPQ (Topless),” “Yellow Brick Road,” the sinister-sounding “Homemaker,” and “Freakalizer.”

1. The Beths – Expert in a Dying Field. This is the album I’ve been waiting for the Beths to make since I first heard “You Wouldn’t Like Me” back in 2018. Expert in a Dying Field is a perfect exemplar of this New Zealand band’s sunny take on power-pop, with perfect harmonies and an endless supply of melodies. They call back to ‘80s power-pop standouts like Jellyfish and Apples in Stereo while adding their own stamp, not least from lead singer/guitarist Elizabeth Stokes’ delightful accent. There’s enough diversity in the tracks here to make it worth listening all the way through, but it’s also the best collection of singles I heard in 2022. Highlights include the title track, “When You Know You Know,” “Knees Deep,” and “Silence is Golden.”

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.

Top 50 novels of the century (so far).

I’ve been planning to do some sort of ranking of the best novels of this century for at least four years now, but for a variety of reasons never sat down to actually do it. I think one reason is the constant sense that I haven’t read enough books to make such a list, although that’s probably silly given how much I read, and since nobody, not even full-time book critics (is there such a job any more?), can read absolutely everything. I can’t read every book, play every game, hear every album, or watch every movie before sitting down to decide which ones are my favorites.

The Twitter replies to my comment about The Netanyahus being the worst Pulitzer winner in at least 25 years finally got me back to the spreadsheet I’d started in 2018, although I ended up trashing it and starting over, to prepare for this post. I originally had about 67 books on the list, cut a few, ranked 50, and put ten honorable mentions at the end. Then I started writing the blurbs and moved a few books around the rankings too, which is, coincidentally, how I do player rankings for work as well. Sometimes you put down some words and realize you liked something more or less than you thought you did. It’s good to be flexible.

I’ve written the rankings in reverse order, so we’ll start at 50, with honorable mentions at the end. The hyperlink on each title goes to Bookshop.org, for which I have an affiliate account (so I get a small commission for each book sold through those links). They give 10% of earnings to local bookstores, and allow stores to sell via their site and keep all of the profits. If you can’t buy a book from your local independent bookstore, this is the next best option.

So, here we go – as of June 20, 2022, here are my top 50 books of this century:

50. The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey. Full review. A novelization of an old folk tale, The Snow Child tells the story of a couple who move to Alaska after their infant dies, where a girl, Faina, appears to have come to life from the snowchild they made. Is she real? A fairy? A hallucination? Ivey’s tale of grief, loss, and hope is haunting while balancing the possibilities of life against its inevitable tragedies.

49. The Teleportation Accident, by Ned Beauman. Full review. A madcap romp of sex, devil-worship, and, yes, teleportation, this book runs through multiple genres, both paying homage to them while sending them up, along with slapstick and other lowbrow humor, such as the side character who can’t tell a person from a painting of that person and keeps talking to the portraits of his ancestors as if they’re real.

48. All Our Names, by Dinaw Mengestu. Full review. A love story wrapped in a tale of identity, as we meet two men in an African country on the brink of civil war, with one later fleeing to America, where he falls in love with Helen, a social worker assigned to help him assimilate. Names and dates are left ambiguous or omitted entirely, while the importance of remembering as well as deliberate forgetting hover over both narratives.

47. Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi. Full review. What begins as a straightforward narrative about a high school play and a team-building exercise turns into metafictional, time-shifting story that asks questions about, to borrow a phrase, who lives, who dies, and who tells your story – and specifically who has the right to tell your story.

46. Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff. Full review. A novel in two distinct halves, the first about the husband, the second about the wife, where the second half reveals unseen truths about the first. It’s ambitious yet feels deeply personal, and the surfeit of literary references actually works in favor of the narrative, rather than coming off as showy.

45. Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. Full review. The use of the first-person plural is gimmicky, but there’s a reason for the conceit in this novel that looks at the decline of the American workplace more than ten years before COVID-19 (may have) killed it off for good. There’s a related but distinct short story in the middle of the novel that breaks things up in a suboptimal way, but the two parts that form the shell are compelling and prescient.

44. The Oracle Year, by Charles Soule. Full review. The debut novel from comic book author Soule, this work speculative fiction gives us bassist Will Dando, who wakes up one day with 108 highly specific predictions in his head … and they start to come true. It’s imperfect in some ways but incredibly well-told, witty, and intense.

43. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon. Full review. I do not agree with the critical and, I think, popular consensus that The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is Chabon’s best work; that book is incredibly imaginative and rich with story, but it’s bloated and loses its focus, while this novel, a neo-noir detective story set in an alternate universe where the world’s Jews have been given a homeland in southeastern Alaska, hits similar themes with precision while hewing closely to its target style.

42. Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. Full review. If you’re going to go sixteen years between novels, the return ought to be something special. Piranesi is far shorter than her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but has the same prose, imagery, and sense of wonder as the earlier work. It’s a mystery in a fantasy novel, as the narrator and the reader try to understand exactly where the narrator is, and how he got there. It’s like reading a dream.

41. HHhH, by Laurent Binet. Full review. Winner of France’s Prix Goncourt Prize, this historical novel has a metafictional element, combining a fictionalized telling of the assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942 with a story about the difficulty of telling that very story. It’s bold and ambitious, not entirely successful, but highly compelling, and of course there’s some satisfaction in reading about the successful assassination of one of the principal architects of the murders of 8 million Jews, Roma, gays, and other minority peoples.

40. From a Low and Quiet Sea, by Donal Ryan. Full review. A scant novel that tells the stories of three men, with no apparent connection, struggling with grief and sadness, until another catastrophe brings them together in the brief, final section. The novel took some criticism for its portrayal of Farouk, a Syrian refugee, in too-generic terms, but Ryan’s tremendous empathy for his characters ruled the day for me.

39. Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi. Full review. A daring structure that follows ten generations of a family through two separate lines takes the reader from west Africa and the enslavement of its people to modern-day American and back to Ghana where the story began. Gyasi’s debut novel manages to develop and humanize its many characters in just a few pages each, allowing the story to build and grow even with this tenuous framework.

38. The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett. Full review. I thought this deserved the Pulitzer in 2021 rather than Louise Erdich’s fine but not award-worthy The Night Watchman. Inspired by Nella Larson’s novella Passing, which was the basis for the superb film directed by Rebecca Hall, this novel covers a pair of sisters, one of whom chooses to pass for white while the other does not, while exploring critical themes of race and identity in our modern society.

37. All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders. Full review. Such a clever concept for a novel – All the Birds gives us two related, intertwined narratives, one from modern fantasy and one from hard science fiction, bringing them together, pulling them apart, and allowing the two main characters to show their flaws as they develop while heading towards a surprising resolution in a world not too far off from our own late-stage capitalist dystopia.

36. Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday. Full review. Halliday takes her romantic relationship with Philip Roth, who was over forty years her senior, and fictionalizes it in this wonderful, multi-part novel that revels in the asymmetry of that affair while giving Halliday’s stand-in, Alice, an unusual agency for the situation. That portion of the novel is followed by an absurdist section on a man with dual Iraqi-US citizenship who gets caught in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic trap at a London airport, a story with no apparent connection to the first one until the coda brings them together.

35. Blackout/All Clear, by Connie Willis. Full review. Published as two novels but sharing a continuous narrative, this time-travel story, sending historians from future Oxford back to World War II, where they get stuck (as often happens in Willis’s time-travel stories) and involved in the action in ways they shouldn’t, is grand, emotional, and evocative of the great British literature of the era it depicts.

34. Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. Full review. Diminishing returns set in quickly with its sequels, but Gilead, which was Robinson’s first novel in over twenty years when it was published, is a marvel of simplicity. It’s an epistolary novel, written as letters from its protagonist, a dying clergyman named John Ames, to his seven-year-old son for the child to read when he’s older. It’s a meditation on forgiveness and our limited capacity to understand the plights of others.

33. Grief is the Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter. Full review. I’m stretching the qualifications here, as this novella – it’s too short to properly call it a novel – is a marvel of wordplay and empathy, poetry in motion on the pages of a book. The Crow visits a father of two whose wife has died suddenly, and who is paralyzed by grief just as his sons need him most. Porter does not shy away from the man’s grief, but the Crow is there for a purpose, and the way Porter plays with language to advance the story is utterly extraordinary.

32. No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood. My favorite book of 2021, Lockwood’s novel is extremely online – or at least her main character is, and it’s not going well, so when something bad happens IRL, she’s not ready to handle it. The novel varies in style from stream-of-consciousness to poetry to standard prose, jumping around in perspective and playing with language in ways that earned the book comparisons to the experimental novels of Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Nabokov.

31. The White Tiger, by Aravind Ariga. Full review. A dark comedy and satire of the upwardly mobile culture of contemporary Indian cities, The White Tiger gives us one of the great anti-heroes of the century in Balram, who rises from poverty through his own determination and a convenient lack of scruples to prosperity – but not without leaving some bodies behind him, figuratively and eventually literally.

30. The Sellout, by Paul Beatty. Full review. The first American-authored novel to win the Booker Prize, The Sellout is a vicious satire that’s also completely bonkers. The narrator, a Black man who lives in an “agrarian ghetto” in Los Angeles County, stands trial for trying to bring back slavery – the conclusion of a series of ill-conceived attempts to resegregate the area so that his unincorporated town, Dickens, will return to the map.

29. An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon. Full review. Set on a massive spaceship with its own highly structured, race-based caste society, this dystopian novel upends conventions of the child-hero genre while exploring racial power dynamics as well as how elites maintain their grip on society through fear and myth.

28. Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid. Full review. From the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist comes a light sci-fi novel where refugees can flee through special portals that appear as actual doors and allow passage through to other places on the globe. The story follows a couple fleeing war in an unnamed country in southeast or south Asia through a series of those doors, allowing them to experience the poor treatment and mistrust refugees face across the world, a journey that also tests their feelings for each other.

27. Bowlaway, by Elizabeth McCracken. Full review. McCracken is Ann Patchett’s primary editor, and there’s some similarity in their fiction as both authors show deep empathy and understanding for their characters. Set in a small town outside Boston, Bowlaway follows a cast of characters through multiple generations, starting with the strange woman who appeared in the town’s graveyard with no memory of where she’d been, after which she founds a candlepin bowling alley and hires a couple of the town’s (many) eccentrics.

26. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. Full (but short) review. Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle­ remains my favorite of his works, with this follow-up novel second for me thanks to similar themes and literary techniques – notably his extensive use of magical realism in a context beyond that seen in the Latin American or African traditions of magical realism.He doesn’t write women well at all, though, a failing that has become more apparent in his novels since this one.

25. Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee. Full review. I’ll quote my own review: “If Dickens or Eliot had written a novel about Koreans living as part of the underclass in Japan, it would probably look a lot like Pachinko.” An epic work of fiction set among the pachinko parlors of Japan, the novel explores themes of alienation and isolation by looking at Koreans living and working in a foreign country that has always viewed them as an inferior minority.

24. The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin. Full review. Jemisin won the Hugo Award for each of the books in her Broken Earth trilogy, but this book, her first after that series ended, is her best so far. Six people find themselves transformed so that each of them is a borough of New York City or the city entire – not metaphorically, but physically, in a sort of transubstantiation, and their personalities match the character of the geographies they have become.

23. Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon. Full review. I have read several Pynchon novels, but none made me laugh like this one did – it’s a sort of slacker noir, a detective novel set in drug-addled California in the 1970s, with a detective who’s seldom sober enough for the job. It is far, far more accessible than Gravity’s Rainbow, and doesn’t require esoteric knowledge to understand it like The Crying of Lot 49.

22. Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. Full review. As ambitious a work of fiction as any I’ve read this century, Cloud Atlas contains six nested novellas, five of them split into two parts (so that the novella that starts the book also finishes it), with one element tying each one to the next. Each novella has a unique style – I’m partial to “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery,” a detective story – and Mitchell moves so deftly from one to the next that the whole work remains cohesive.

21. Lush Life, by Richard Price. Full review. Price has written for The Wire and The Night Of, as well as authoring nine novels, including 1992’s Clockers and this one, a broad, gritty piece of highly realistic fiction that follows a broad ensemble of characters through the ramifications of what appears to be an ordinary (if awful) street crime.

20. The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton. Full review. Another novel with a complex structure, this epic work follows a prospector who arrives in a New Zealand mining town, only to walk into a set of mysteries including a dead hermit, a prostitute who may have attempted suicide, stolen claims, and much more. The structure itself relates to the twelve signs of the zodiac and to the planets in the solar system, although I don’t think you need to see or follow that to appreciate its incredible story and rich characterization.

19. The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson. Full review. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction’s guidelines say it is for a work “by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” Johnson is American, but this remarkable novel definitely does not deal with American life – it is about North Korea, and opens a window on to that most isolated nation, following a young boy in a North Korean orphanage through his military service, time in a prison mine, and then a fantastical life after prison that puts him in the crosshairs of the Dear Leader himself.

18. The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. Full review. A novel that finds hope in hopelessness, giving us Leo Gorsky, perhaps the most ill-fated man in the universe, a Holocaust survivor whose lover thought he was dead and married someone else while carrying Leo’s baby. His story intertwines with two others around a book within the book, also called The History of Love, leading to a deeply emotional, unlikely-but-not-impossible conclusion.

17. The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. Full review. One of the most acclaimed books of the last twenty years (I think), this book reimagines the network of people, including Quakers, free Blacks, and other abolitionists who helped slaves escape the antebellum South as an actual subterranean railroad that served the same purpose – but that exposes the fleeing slaves of the book to the horrors of multiple Confederate states before they get close to freedom.

16. Wizard of the Crow, by Ng?g? wa Thiong’o. wa Thing’o is a revered Kenyan author, playwright, and Fanonist dissident who was imprisoned in the 1970s for writing a play that criticized the government. He’s written only two novels in the last 30 years, but one of them, 2004’s Wizard of the Crow, is an epic work of magical realism, satire, and scathing political commentary. Set in a corrupt African dictatorship, where allegiances change with the wind, a new power emerges in the form of an inadvertent charlatan calling himself the Wizard of the Crow, who threatens the country’s Ruler in the days after the end of colonialism.

15. Among Others, by Jo Walton. Full review. I first read this book because it won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for its year, but that may undersell it, because it’s far from just a genre book – this is a beautiful if somewhat dark coming-of-age novel with just a hint of fantasy in the setting. Calling it a fantasy novel might deter some people from reading it; this isn’t swords and sorcery, or knights and damsels, just a damn good story about growing up when one of the people who should love and protect you turns out to be an evil witch.

14. Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Adichie. Full review. Adichie has received more attention for her novel Americanah and her non-fiction writing, including We Should All Be Feminists (which, yes, we should), but this is her best work to date – a novel set during the Nigerian Civil War, when the Nigerian government blockaded the secessionist state of Biafra, causing a famine that killed two million people. I don’t see any particular parallels to anything happening today, though. Adichie follows five characters, including two couples, from before the war began through the depths of the conflict, through personal losses and the collapse of what had been a reasonably prosperous society.

13. Empire Falls, by Richard Russo. Full review. Russo is one of the funniest writers I’ve read, but in this, his best novel, he also works in wry commentary on how economic declines hit blue-collar American towns (this one in New England, like most of his settings) and affect the people in them at a deeply personal level. His characters are well-built and contribute to the sense of a specific place – you may not live in this town, but you understand it, and picture it, and have your favorites among the people in it. And when the big plot point finally comes in this book, one that could easily happen in a novel set today, you’re affected because the characters you care about are affected.

12. All The Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr. Full review. One of the best-plotted novels I’ve ever read, All The Light runs about 500 pages, yet I read it in two days on a work trip because I absolutely could not wait to see how the novel’s twin storylines would come together – and they do, in almost miraculous fashion, as two children, a blind French girl and a true-believer German boy, navigate the closing windows of Europe on the brink of war.

11. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, by Honorée Fannone Jeffers. Full review. I’m trying to avoid recency bias here, but this is the best book I’ve read in a few years – if we’re just going off this list, I think it’s the best I’ve read in about five years. Jeffers’ debut novel covers centuries of history through the lens of one Black family, from their ancestors in slavery to the contemporary struggles of three sisters, focused on one named Ailey Pearl, to cope with the weight of their racial history and a very personal trauma that has affected all of them. The prose is beautiful and the characters are rich and compelling, even many of the secondary ones.

10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Full review. Gaiman takes forgotten gods from religions around the world and brings them back to modern-day America in a complex fight for the soul of the country. For some reason, this centers on Shadow, a man just out of prison, who runs into Odin incarnate on the flight home. The book also spawned a related work, Anansi Boys, which is also excellent but not as ambitious as this tour de force, which seems to twist the fantasy genre inside-out along with a wildly exciting, action-packed story.

9. Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett. Full review. Inspired by the takeover of the Japanese Embassy in Lima, Peru, by the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, Bel Canto paints a rich portrait of a huge ensemble of characters, both hostages and terrorists, who become a village of sorts, learning about each other as we do, facing their fears and weaknesses, falling in love, becoming oblivious to the outside world. Patchett is always a beautiful writer who creates complex characters and shows empathy for even the worst of them, and her skills were most on display here, a novel she has indicated was inspired by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

8. Station Eleven, by Emily St. John. Full review. How is one of the most lyrical novels I’ve ever read set during a global pandemic that wipes out a huge portion of the planet’s population and leads to the complete collapse of civilized society? Perhaps because St. John focuses so much on the humanity within the crisis, and sees the good and the bad that come about when people are pushed beyond their limits. There’s also a small plot strand that doubles as an ode to the enduring power of great stories to entertain and enrich us.

7. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Full review. Ishiguro wrote two of the best novels I’ve ever read – this one and Remains of the Day, written in 1989. Never Let Me Go starts out like a work of classic British literature, perhaps a coming-of-age drama in the vein of Brideshead Revisited, but then the novel’s big secret is revealed and it turns into a Greek tragedy that confronts impossible questions of identity, ethics, and sacrifice.

6. The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes. Full review. I read this and The Orphan Master’s Son back-to-back in the summer of 2013, finishing this slim novel in just two days; it was such a great week of reading that I still remember it clearly, with two books that were so great, so compelling, that I was just lost in them. The Sense of an Ending gives us Tony Webster, now retired, divorced, living alone, first remembering a period from his school days with his girlfriend Veronica and his precocious friend Adrian. When Veronica’s mother dies, leaving Tony a bit of money, he reconnects with Veronica, and the edifice in his memory starts to crumble as he learns things he never knew about his own past.

5. In the Light of What We Know, by Zia Haider Rahman. Full review. Rahman’s lone novel to date is a knockout, combining the U.S.’s failed war in Afghanistan and the 2007-08 financial crisis in a story that ranges from delving into the roots of one man’s personal crises to blistering attacks on the power of global elites. It’s postcolonial literature through an entirely different, diasporic lens, and the story moves at a brisk pace despite a lack of traditional action. When the ending hits, it is a metaphorical bomb on the page, and throws everything that has come before into question.

4. Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders. Full review. Saunders is a master of the short story, winning awards for his collection Tenth of December, but didn’t publish his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, until he was 59, and all that book did was win the Booker Prize. Set mostly over the course of a single night in the bardo, a Tibetan term for the Buddhist concept of a state between life and rebirth, and follows Abraham Lincoln through his grief over the death of his son Willie, who died at age 11 of typhoid fever, just a year into his father’s first term as President, while working in snippets from real and fictional news stories of the time. It’s a profound look at parenthood and the unendurable loss of a child, from one of our greatest contemporary prose writers.

3. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Full review. Harrowing, dark, and unforgettable in so many ways, The Road is the most powerful book I have ever read on what it is like to be a parent and be willing to give up everything, including yourself, for your child. Set in a post-apocalyptic America where society is gone and humanity may be headed for extinction, The Road follows the Man and the Boy as they walk down abandoned interstates towards the sea and an unknown, possibly nonexistent, hope. It is graphic and horrifying, often difficult to read for its content, but it is the exemplar of how fiction can illuminate core truths about life.

2. White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. Full review. Out of the 1200+ novels I’ve read in my life, this is the one about which I have most changed by opinion from my initial reading. I was so unused to Smith’s incredible storytelling style, dubbed “hysterical realism” by critic James Wood in his review, that my first response was rather negative – but that’s because I was used to very specific styles of literature. The more I thought about the book after finishing, over days and months, the more I realized the incredible genius of it. So much literature of this century owes a debt to Smith and White Teeth and Hortense’s many root canals. It will defy your expectations for a novel in all of the best ways and its themes are both very much of its moment and utterly timeless.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. Full review. A fantasy novel, yes, but so much more, and the fastest 1000-page novel I’ve ever read. (The Executioner’s Song was close, but it’s also not really a novel.) The two characters of the title are magicians in 19th century London, the latter an older, curmudgeonly man who proves that magic still exists centuries after its decline in England, and the former a younger upstart who becomes Norrell’s pupil. The two clash over magic’s use and end up engaged in a public battle of philosophies, while Norrell’s bargain with an underworld fairy known as “the gentleman with the thistle-down hair” has brought curses upon many within London, including Strange’s wife, Arabella. It is a work of stupendous imagination, written very much in the style of literature of that period, but with the very modern touch of fabricated footnotes that contain much of the book’s great wit. The book was also adapted into a seven-part BBC series that contained one of my favorite TV lines ever, and that hewed closely to the story and characters from the original text. Clarke has created a world like ours and yet so very unlike it, with two of the most memorable characters I’ve ever encountered, and uses fantasy as her vehicle but not her raison d’être (d’écrire?): Magic just lets her tell this majestic story of two men and their egos, fighting each other over philosophy while the world around them burns. It is gripping right until the end, and will leave you wanting more.

Honorable mentions, in alphabetical order:

Top 21 albums of 2021.

I have never had this many candidates for a best albums ranking before. I had this idea eight years ago that I’d make the length of my year-end album lists equal to the last two digits of the year, which would probably work until I was about 55 or so and who knew if I’d even still be doing these. Most years, though, I found that while there were always plenty of songs I loved, there were never quite enough albums, even accounting for the fact that every year I seem to find more new music to listen to, between the wonders of Spotify (for the listener, at least) and reader feedback. This year, though, I could have gone 30 deep and still had more to consider, even keeping the bar for inclusion reasonably high. I stopped this list at 21, to return to the old gimmick, but my honorable mentions include Amyl & the Sniffers’ Comfort to Me, Chime School’s Chime School, The Coral’s Coral Island, Deafheaven’s Infinite Granite, Inhaler’s It Won’t Always Be Like This, Khemmis’ Deceiver, Pond’s 9, Thrice’s Horizons/East, TURNSTILE’s GLOW ON, and Willow’s Lately I Feel Everything.

You can see my previous year-end album rankings here: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and my top albums of the 2010s.

21. Death from Above 1979 – Is 4 Lovers. I missed DfA1979’s first album when it first came out, but have been increasingly a fan of their work since they re-formed after a ten-year hiatus, and this is the best thing they’ve ever done – more mature and cohesive without losing the urgency or the fury of their first record. Highlights including “Modern Guy,” “One + One,” and the two-part “N.Y.C. Power Elite.”

20. Susanna Hoffs – Bright Lights. No, really, the lead singer of the Bangles put out one of the best albums of 2021. It’s a mélange of styles more appropriate to her age and this stage of her career, but damn if she doesn’t nail just about all of it, mixing in bits of folk, lite jazz, and torch songs for a record that manages to sound timeless. There’s one really ‘off’ track here (“Take Me with U”), but highlights include the oldies-influenced “You Just May Be the One,” “One of These Things First,” and “Name of the Game,” the last one featuring Aimee Mann.

19. CHVRHCES – Screen Violence. A welcome return to form for the Scottish electro-pop trio, with some of Lauren Mayberry’s best lyrics to date, built around themes of digital harassment and online hate, and better hooks than we heard on their last album, Love is Dead. Highlights include “How Not to Drown,” “Final Girl,” “California,” and “Screaming” (from the Director’s Cut).

18. The War on Drugs – I Don’t Live Here Anymore. This is the tightest, most accessible album from TWoD yet, with much stronger hooks than they’ve had before. I’ve become accustomed to the Bob Dylan impression – at which singer/songwriter Adam Granduciel winks in the lyrics to the title track – although I’m still not a fan of the song lengths. Highlights include “I Don’t Live Here Anymore,” “Harmonia’s Dream,” and “Change.”

17. Maisie Peters – You Signed Up for This. I’ve been a fan of Peters’ work since her first few singles, and while her sound has changed to something far more pop-oriented, the wit and insight of her lyric has only improved as she’s reached her early twenties, and it’s not as if her hooks have suffered from working with Ed Sheeran. Highlights include “Psycho,” “John Hughes Movie,” “Brooklyn,” and the title track.

16. Jungle – Loving in Stereo. Still fairly unknown in the U.S., Jungle have become quite popular in their native U.K. with their American R&B/disco throwback sound. This album, the duo’s third, is their most upbeat by far, a welcome antidote to a year of bad news. Highlights include “Truth,” “Keep Moving,” “Talk About It,” and “All of the Time.”

15. black midi – Cavalcade. The highly experimental English quartet returned with another album of challenging, unexpected, noisy tracks that defy any expectations you might have of a typical rock record … and yet somehow still manage to bring a weird sort of melody to their songs, something you can grab while you’re digesting the bizarre arrangements and tonal shifts. Highlights include “Chondromalacia Patella,” “John L.,” and “Slow.”

14. Emma-Jean Thackeray – Yellow. Thackeray is a trumpeter and bandleader from Yorkshire but is more than comfortable in American jazz and funk traditions, producing an album that refers back decades while still producing something fresh, thanks in no small part to the lush vocal harmonies on most of the tracks on this ebullient record. Highlights include “Say Something,” “Green Funk,” “Third Eye,” and “Sun,” the last of which has a nod to Parliament’s “Flashlight” in the chorus.

13. Mastodon – Hushed and Grim. A sprawling album of 15 tracks and 86 minutes, Hushed and Grim threads a difficult needle, maintaining some of the more mainstream sensibilities of their last album, Emperor of Sand, without giving up some of their more complex arrangements or expansive song lengths (six of the tracks run six minutes plus, and only two are shorter than 4:59). Every review I found was positive except Pitchfork’s, of course. Highlights include “Pushing the Tides,” “Teardrinker,” and “Sickle and Peace.”

12. Wolf Alice – Blue Weekend. I respect the ambition here, and the highlights are very high, but when they go into quietcore territory they tend to lose me for the same reason I was tepid about their Mercury Prize-winning Visions of a Life – those songs lack the beating heart of their best tracks. Highlights include “Smile,” “How Can I Make It OK?,” “Safe from Heartbreak,” “Play the Greatest Hits,” and “No Hard Feelings.”

11. Manchester Orchestra – The Million Masks of God. One of the most unexpected albums of the year was this introspectiverecord from the Georgia quartet whose albums have all been thematic in some way, but who reached a new apex here on a record about death and grieving. The album hums along even as it moves between heavier numbers and mournful acoustic tracks, each of which stands on its own while contributing to a whole that is cohesive in sound and lyrics. Highlights include “Telepath,” “Bed Head,” “Annie,” and “Keel Timing.”

10. Gojira – Fortitude. The best metal album of 2021 came from the group I’d call the best metal band working today. Gojira explores the edges of extreme metal without succumbing to its excesses – an affliction that cursed Carcass’ 2021 album Torn Arteries, which took a step back from their Surgical Steel peak – and without losing track of the guitar riffs that make metal compelling. Highlights include “Another World,” “Born for One Thing,” “Amazonia,” and “Into the Storm.”

9. Cœur de Pirate – Impossible à aimer. Béatrice Martin may be saying she’s impossible to love, but I fell for this album right away – she dives heavily into lush pop sounds from the 1970s, such as the lovely string arrangement that opens “On s’aimera toujours,” while continuing the piano-driven focus from her instrumental EP Perséides, all showcasing her beautiful voice (which continues to impress even after recent surgery on her vocal chords). Highlights include “On s’aimera toujours,” “Tu peux crever là-bas,” and “Tu ne seras jamais là.”

8. The Lottery Winners – Something To Leave the House For. The most recent release on this list, Something to Leave the House For just dropped on December 4th, with most of the fantastic singles they’d released in the prior year appearing on this album, which is a banger all the way through. The Mancunian quartet have a knack for churning out pop tracks with undeniable hooks, the sort of songs that get stuck in your head but you don’t really mind because they’re the feel-good kind of pop tracks. Highlights include “Much Better, “Favourite Flavour,” “Sunshine,” “Start Again” (with Frank Turner), and “Hotel DeVille,” although the March single “Bang” (with the Wonder Stuff) didn’t make the release.

7. Royal Blood – Typhoons. Production help by Josh Homme made a huge difference for the English duo, as their sound here includes more funk and disco elements, similar to the way Homme’s Queens of the Stone Age expanded their song after working with Mark Ronson on their last album. Highlights include “Boilermaker,” the title track, “Oblivion,” and “Trouble’s Coming.”

6. Foxing – Draw Down the Moon. The St. Louis trio’s blend of post-rock, emo, metal, and even more came together on this masterful album that is as ambitious as any record I heard this year – and succeeds, incorporating all manner of styles and genres within songs, demanding that you keep up with the rapid textural and sonic shifts, without forgetting the essential element of melody. It’s a record that rewards careful listening and patience, as so many tracks end somewhere completely unexpected. Highlights include the title track, “Go Down Together,” “Bialystok,” “737,” and “Beacons.”

5. Mdou Moctar – Afrique Victime. One of the most globally acclaimed albums of 2021, Afrique Victime may help introduce Moctar’s blend of traditional Touareg music and western guitar rock to a wider audience. The fretwork here is incredible, more than enough to pull in anyone who plays guitar or enjoys that style of music, but even if you’re not into that specific aspect, this album just flat-out rocks. Highlights include “Chismiten,” the title track, and “Taliat.”

4. Geese – Projector. If I called these Brooklyn teenagers/early twentysomethings the American black midi, would it feel like enough of a compliment? Geese are experimental, but their base sound derives far more from post-punk traditions like Television, Suicide, and Wire than the noise-rock antecedents of black midi – and the result is a more accessible and delightfully weird debut album. Highlights include “Rain Dance,” “Low Era,” “Disco,” and the title track.

3. Kid Kapichi – This Time Next Year. This Hastings quartet blends a strong Arctic Monkeys musical and lyrical sensibility with heavier guitarwork, veering into punk territory, with a series of working-class anthems where singers Jack Wilson and Ben Beetham rage against various machines. The band produced and released the album themselves, which might be why it hasn’t appeared on many year-end lists, but it was clearly the best straight rock album of the year for me, and one of the only truly no-skip albums of 2021. Highlights include “Working Man’s Town,” “Sardines,” “What Would Your Mother Say,” “Don’t Kiss Me (I’m Infected),” and “Self Saboteur.”

2. Arlo Parks – Collapsed in Sunbeams. Winner of this year’s Mercury Prize, this debut album from the 21-year-old British singer-songwriter features nearly all of the singles I’ve included on my playlists from Parks over the last two years. Parks’s voice is gorgeous, soft and somewhat high-pitched, yet able to fill all the spaces left by the minimalist R&B, jazz, and folk music that backs her up across the album. Her lyrics are close and intimate portraits of pain and hope around stories of broken hearts, damaged families, and other stories, replete with little details (“Dragonfruit and peaches in the wine,” “Wearing suffering like a silk garment or a spot of blue ink”) that provide the images to the short films she’s creating with every track. Highlights include “Black Dog,” “Green Eyes,” “Hurt,” “Hope,” and “Caroline.”

1. Little Simz – Sometimes I Might Be Introvert. I called it in September, saying this was the best album of 2021, and that has more than held true, not just on my own list but on the non-scientific compilations over at albumoftheyear.org. The title is a backronym for Simbi, Simz’s nickname among her friends, and also introduces the listener to the profound lyrical themes she’s about to cover, including her difficult relationship with her biological father (“I Love You, I Hate You”), global feminism (“Woman”), the dichotomy required of people with public personae (“Introvert”), death and grief (“Little Q”), and more. The album features spoken-word interludes from Emma Corrin, who played Princess Diana Spencer on seasons 3 and 4 of The Crown, and tremendous guest appearances from Obongjayar and Cleo Sol. And the music, which incorporates elements of Afrobeat, British and American hip-hop, and old-school soul, is compelling just about the entire way through, providing a strong backdrop for Little Simz’s rapping while delivering a series of memorable hooks. It’s one of the best albums of the century so far, and if it doesn’t make Little Simz a star around the world, that’s our loss. Highlights include the songs mentioned above as well as “Point and Kill,” “Rollin Stone,” and “Protect My Energy.”

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.