Top 25 restaurants in Philly for 2019.

I’ve wanted to put this post together for ages, but wanted also to be sure I’d tried enough restaurants in the city for my list to make some sense. I think I’ve done that now, although there’s always more to try, and living a bit outside the city I’m at a slight disadvantage.

1. High Street on Market (Old City). My favorite spot in the city for breakfast or lunch, and they do dinner as well, although it’s the one meal I haven’t eaten there. The menus are built around their amazing, old-world breads; the breakfast Forager sandwich is to die for, and they make the best roast pork sandwich in the city. Their sister restaurant, Fork, is also on the list.

2. Suraya (Fishtown). Recently named the #1 restaurant in the city by Philly magazine, this all-day Lebanese restaurant, with a café/market in front and fine-ish dining in back, does Levantine cooking right, with classic preparations of the mezze (small starters, like hummus and muhammara) served with piping-hot pitas. There are a few non-traditional items here too, but go with a gang and stuff yourselves with a bunch of mezze.

3. Vedge (Midtown Village). A vegan restaurant to satisfy almost any omnivore; they do incredible things with vegetables so that the dishes are satisfying and visually stunning, and so you won’t think about the absence of meat. I still can’t believe the sunchoke bisque amuse bouche didn’t have dairy in it, and the toasted marshmallows in my dessert were indistinguishable from those made with egg whites.

4. Bud & Marilyn’s (Midtown Village). Marcie Tunney’s best-rated restaurant does American comfort food with upscale twists, including various fried chicken dishes and outstanding salads – I’ve recreated a fennel, brussels sprout, and green apple salad I had there in December 2017 a dozen times at home.

5. Cheu (Fishtown). I’d say “best ramen in Philly” but I haven’t had it many places. They do make great ramen, and have great cocktails. It’s near Suraya; parking is a pain on that whole stretch.

6. Hungry Pigeon (Queen Village). My birthday dinner last year was here, and we ordered a strange assortment of dishes, but everything was excellent (well, my daughter might disagree on the asparagus). They use fresh pasta from the Little Noodle Pasta Company, a spinoff of the now-closed Ela in the same neighborhood. The dessert, a ‘diner-style’ coconut cream cake, was four large portions by our standards.

7. Fork (Old City). High Street’s sister and neighbor does superb fine dining in a quieter, more upscale atmosphere, with a great wine/cocktail list.

8. Abe Fisher (Rittenhouse). I haven’t been to Zahav, Michael Solomonov’s flagship restaurant, but I’ve been here, which is still on the high end but more affordable and I think a bit more accessible. The menu is inspired by but not limited to Jewish-American cooking traditions. The gougères they serve instead of a bread basket are superb, and my daughter will tell you it’s the best Shirley Temple in the city.

9. Osteria (Fairmount). Osteria was a Marc Vetri restaurant, included in the sale of most of Vetri’s portfolio to Urban Outfitters, then purchased last year by the owners of Sampan and Double Knot. Most of their signature dishes, including house-made pastas and pizzas, are still on the menu, including the chicken liver rigatoni that my daughter once described as “it sounds gross, but it’s really good.” (She was 8.)

10. Royal Boucherie (Old City). Top Chef winner Nicholas Elmi’s second restaurant in Philly – I haven’t been to Laurel – is an “American brasserie” with a lot of French influence on the menu and a very lively bar. Their desserts are superb and they have one of the best lists of amari (potable bitters) I’ve come across.

11. Pizzeria Vetri (Arts District & Rittenhouse). I’ve only been to the original location, going many, many times since it first opened, and they do a small list of Neapolitan pizza options very well, as long as their signature rotolo, pizza dough rolled like a buche de noel with mortadella, cheese, and pistachios; as well as light, house-made soft-serve ice cream. Service here has always been excellent for a fast-casual spot.

12. Brigantessa (East Passyunk). Pizzas and house-made pastas from southern Italian peasant food traditions. They did have an issue last fall that resulted in the firing of their chef de cuisine, later than they should have, over anti-Semitic comments and mistreatment of staff.

13. Le Virtu (East Passyunk). Abruzzese cuisine – that’s east central Italy – which contains many dishes and ingredients you’d recognize as “Italian” but sometimes in different combinations. It’s a region I associate especially with mushrooms and that was indeed the pasta dish that most stood out to me when I ate there last month.

14. V Street (Rittenhouse). Vedge’s ‘vegan street food’ offshoot; the fried tofu taco with two slaws manages to deliver the satisfying crunch of a fish taco and make me forget I’m eating tofu, a food that I’ll consume but would rarely describe as memorable. I wish they were open more hours.

15. Royal Izakaya (Queen Village). An izakaya that takes its sake and shochu very seriously, with an intimidating menu of small plates to go along with the booze.

16. Amis (Washington Square). Another former Vetri outpost, amis focuses on the cuisines of Rome and the surrounding Lazio region in a quirky converted warehouse-like setting. When I went, I had two specials, both involving duck, that were superb.

17. Pizzeria Stella (Society Hill). A Stephen Starr outpost very close to I-95 and the waterfront, Stella does traditional Neapolitan-style pizzas with a few pasta and starter options and home-made gelato for dessert.

18. Barbuzzo (Midtown Village). Marcie Tunney’s flagship, still known for great pasta dishes (the ricotta gnocchi are superb), good pizzas, seasonal vegetable dishes, and that salted caramel budino.

19. Stock (Fishtown/Rittenhouse). A BYOB with two locations – I’ve only been to Fishtown – that serves the best banh mi I’ve had here, as well as southeast Asian soups and cold noodle dishes.

20. Dinic’s (Reading Terminal Market). This is where you go if you want a very classic Philly roast pork sandwich (with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe, please). They do other sandwiches I don’t eat, but why bother?

21. Poi Dog (Rittenhouse). If you want poke, this is your place. They have spam musubi too if that’s how you roll.

22. Dizengoff (Rittenhouse Square). Solomonov’s hummus outpost, with shakshuka on the weekends, will often have a line out the door. His Federal Donuts is across the street but I don’t care for their donuts and haven’t tried their Korean fried chicken.

23. Lolita (Midtown Village). Marcie Tunney’s upscale Mexican spot has great margaritas, tacos, taquizas, enchiladas, and a few fun sides like elote and maduros.

24. El Vez (Midtown Village). Stephen Starr’s straightforward Mexican spot with a large menu of guacamole options and very good if predictable American-Mexican food.

25. Farmicia (Old City). Farm-to-table food with a wide menu that I find great if you don’t know if your fellow diners are adventurous eaters, since they offer plenty of accessible options plus some quirky dishes for the more daring eaters.

I still haven’t made it to Zahav; I’ve twice had reservations and had to cancel, once for work (still mad), once because of illness. I’ve been to Double Knot, but only for happy hour, which is a different menu than dinner but still very good. I haven’t been to Laurel, Friday Saturday Sunday, Noord eetcafe, or Serpico. I can’t eat at South Philly Barbacoa, and I’m not paying what Vetri Cucina is asking.

Places I’ve tried and didn’t like: Vernick Food & Drink (they sent out a dish that was actually burned, enough that I sent it back, which I almost never do), Res Ipsa (ordered a hot sandwich that arrived cold), Sate Kampar (spicy food, but not flavorful at all).

Finally, for coffee, Re-Animator is my favorite roaster in Philly, with Elixr second. I love the Menagerie coffee shop across the street from Farmicia, where they use Dogwood espresso and a few third-wave roasters from around the country for pourovers.

Top ten movies of 2018.

I’ve seen everything I think would likely make this top ten list other than several foreign titles, including Cold War and Capernaum, although I’ll still continue watching 2018 releases for a few more months as they hit theaters or streaming. I’ve seen 40 movies that count as 2018 theatrical releases, not counting the HBO movie The Tale, which would have made my top ten but isn’t eligible for awards because it went straight to television after the network purchased it at Sundance.

With those caveats in place, here’s my top ten as of this morning, and it still could change as I continue to see more 2018 films this winter. Links on the films’ titles go to my reviews.

10. The Endless. A thriller, or perhaps a psychological horror movie, that garnered positive reviews with a modest release, The Endless follows two brothers who, having escaped a cult where they grew up, revisit the compound to try to find some closure, only to discover that a mysterious presence has kept their old cultmates from aging and seems to prevent anyone from leaving.

9. First Man. Considered something of a box-office flop, Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to La La Land goes in a completely different direction, telling the quiet, almost painfully restrained story of Neil Armstrong, from the death of his young daughter to cancer to his landing on the moon. Ryan Gosling and Clare Foy are excellent as the two leads, although the emphasis on accuracy in depicting space flight made some scenes very hard for me to watch.

8. Isle of Dogs. This should win the Best Animated Feature Oscar, although I fear the silly Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse will win (I admit Spider-ham is pretty funny, though) instead. Wes Anderson’s second animated film, his first from an original story, is brilliant, emotional in the right ways, often funny, and extremely well-voiced by a cast of Wes usuals along with the welcome addition of Bryan Cranston.

7. The Favourite. Yorgis Lanthimos’ follow-up to the The Lobster is a bawdy, lowbrow comedy in nice clothes, and it’s hilarious, thanks to the combined efforts of Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, and Rachel Weisz, all three of whom deserve awards consideration. The story itself isn’t new – it’s a power struggle combined with a bizarre love triangle – but the dialogue sparkles and the three stars, aided by a strong supporting turn from Nicholas Hoult, all slay in their respective roles.

6. If Beale Street Could Talk. A lovely, languid adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel by Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, Beale Street stars Stephan James (of Homecoming) and Kiki Layne as young lovers who find they’re expecting just as he’s headed to jail for a crime he didn’t commit.

5. You Were Never Really Here. A taut modern noir thriller, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a damaged private eye who rescues kidnapped girls and ends up caught in a case that threatens his safety and his sanity. Lynne Ramsay’s latest film, her first feature since 2011’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, clocks in at a spare 90 minutes, leaving no slack in the tension.

4. Beast. Driven by a star turn by relative newcomer Jessie Buckley, Beast follows a young woman in her late 20s who falls for the local outcast, who is himself a potential suspect in the murders of three other teenaged girls in their small town. The contrast between the idyllic setting and the darkness throughout the plot further drives the viewer’s sense of unease at every turn.

3. Shoplifters. My top three films are all foreign films, which is purely coincidental, and all made the Academy Award’s shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2019 Oscars. Japan’s entry is a simple, intimate portrait of a makeshift family of grifters who take in a neglected four-year-old girl they find playing outside in the cold in their tenement. Director/writer Hirokazu Kore-eda took hold the Palme d’Or at Cannes for this film, which has a huge heart and explores the essentially human need for the connections and security of family through a group of well-rounded characters.

2. Roma. Alfonso Cuarón’s passion project for Netflix lived up to the lofty expectations set for it. Based on his own childhood in Mexico City, including the life of his nanny/housekeeper Cleo, Roma is told from her perspective, as she gets pregnant by a man who abandons her and sees the marriage of her employers crumble, all amidst the tumult of protest-torn Mexico in the early 1970s. The story can be a shade slow, and Cleo is the only real character of depth, but the cinematography is the best of the year – maybe in several years – and the film seems set to win awards for its sound as well.

1. Burning. Adapted from a scant Haruki Murakami story called “Barn Burning,” this Korean-language film creates an air of uncertainty from the start, and its three main characters remain unknowable to the dramatic conclusion. Lee Jong-su meets a girl, Shin Hae-mi, who says she knew him in grade school, and after a few days he’s clearly in love with her, only to have her go to Africa on a trip and ask him to watch her cat for her. When she comes back, she’s with a suave, wealthy guy, Ben, who might be her new boyfriend, and Jong-su can’t figure out what to do – or what exactly Ben does for his strange hobby. It’s a hypnotic slow burner anchored by one of the year’s best performances from Steven Yeun as Ben.

Top 100 songs of 2018.

This is now my sixth annual ranking of the top 100 songs of the year, and while I wrote yesterday on my ranking of my favorite albums of 2018 that I thought it was a down year for albums, especially ones by artists I already liked, it was still a great year for new music overall, with far more than a hundred songs I thought worthy of mention on this list. As always, this is subjective: It’s what I liked, so it’s probably not what you like, and that’s fine.

Previous lists: 20172016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.

You can view the Spotify playlist of all 100 songs here if you can’t see the widget below.

100. YONAKA – Teach Me to Fight. This Brighton quartet made my list last year with the snarling “Wouldn’t Wanna Be Ya,” and continued this year with several more solid singles, including this similarly raucous, indignant rocker, along with another song further up the list.

99. Swervedriver – Mary Winter. Swervedriver returned a few years ago after a 17-year layoff with I Wasn’t Born to Lose You, but this track, from their next album Future Ruins, is the best thing they’ve done since 1998’s “99th Dream.”

98. HAERTS – Fighter. My second-favorite track from HAERTS’ solid yet safe second album New Compassion, a strong showcase for Nini Fabi’s voice with some urgency to the backing track.

97. whenyoung – Silverchair. This Irish trio recently dropped a cover of the Cranberries’ “Dreams,” with singer Aoife Power doing a damn good impression of Dolores O’Riordan; this song is my favorite of their original songs so far, going from an almost dissonant line in the verse to a power-pop chorus with a hook that stayed with me all year.

96. Drenge – Autonomy. The duo are now a trio, still building songs around a guitar-and-drum skeleton, but adding enough additional elements, like this song’s electronic line, to keep their sound interesting and show real growth since their sophomore album.

95. Sarah Chernoff – You’re Free. Chernoff has one of the best voices of anyone recording today, but is still looking for that breakout song to get more mainstream attention; this new single from the summer showcases her range and ability to work in different vocal styles, with a solid hook in the chorus.

94. DMA’S – Break Me. I love DMA’S’ unapologetic throwback sound to late-90s Oasis, although their newest album, For Now, had too few rockers like this one and the title track, even though it’s what this Aussie band does best.

93. Wheel – Vultures. A new Finnish prog metal band with an English lead singer, Wheel plans to release its debut album in 2019, with this single a very promising debut. I think it’s the heaviest song on my top 100, although there were certainly some good metal tracks and albums in 2018 that didn’t make it (Riverside’s “Vale of Tears” comes to mind).

92. Darlingside – Singularity. The best track from this Boston-based indie-folk group’s latest album, Extralife, buoyed by gorgeous harmonies in the chorus.

91. Are We Static – Weight of Water. Featuring a guest vocal from Talitha Rise, this latest track from these Mancunian rockers also has that late-90s Britpop vibe, a little more pop-oriented than their 2017 album Embers was.

90. Lauren Ruth Ward – Blue Collar Sex Kitten. Ward’s debut album Well, Hell made my top albums of the year post, with this sneering track, showing Ward’s smoky, powerful voice, the best on the album. It’s the song Elle King wishes she had the talent to make.

89. Jungle – Smile. One of three songs from Jungle’s For Ever to make my top 100, this track thrives on the syncopated drum riff that opens the song and competes with the vocals for primacy until the track ends.

88. Anderson .Paak – Til It’s Over. I’ve never been a fan of A.P’s music but enjoyed this soulful, two-step track both on its own and for the video/HomePod advert featuring singer FKA Twigs, directed by Spike Jonze.

87. Speedy Ortiz – Lucky 88. I liked Speedy Ortiz’s album Twerp Verse but didn’t love it; I didn’t find enough of the tracks memorable or immediate enough to keep me coming back to it. But Sadie Dupuis’ off-kilter vocal style and lyrical wit are still as endearing as ever and when she hits on a good hook, like here or “Lean In When I Suffer,” it’s still peak Speedy Ortiz.

86. Drenge – This Dance. See above. I feel like Drenge’s next album will feel more like the first record plus something than their last album, which shifted direction too abruptly and lost what made their debut so compelling.

85. Sundara Karma – One Last Night on this Earth. Sundara Karma’s sophomore album, Ulfilas’ Alphabet, drops in March; this lead single brings a strong melodic hook and their now-familiar, slightly rough around the edges sort of sound.

84. Thrice – Only Us. Thrice’s album Palms just missed my top albums list, but put two songs on this top 100; this is the slower of the two, bringing almost a doom-metal note to Thrice’s post-hardcore sound.

83. CLOVES – Hit Me Hard. I love Kaity Dunstan’s voice in any style of song, although I think ballads suit her better (like 2015’s “Frail Love,” re-recorded for her new album. This is more upbeat, more overtly dramatic, but the constant sense in her voice that she’s about to let ‘er rip helps to highlight the tension beneath the vocals and the main piano riff.

82. Body Type – Palms. This Australian quartet calls their music “scuzz // rock,” but this song is pure jangle-pop with a little distortion in the deep background, building up to a tremendous chorus that comes back at the end of the song over staggered vocals, so that three of the women are all singing at once.

81. Art Brut – Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out!. Never been a huge Art Brut fan, so it figures that when they write a song that, by their standards, feels like a ridiculous novelty track … but it’s also kind of fun in its own dumb way.

80. Ten Fé – Not Tonight. Ten Fé dropped this single in August, about eighteen months after their superb debut album, Hit the Light, appeared, and this is more of the same – it’s ’70s-influenced soft rock, just a little faster, a little more atmospheric, a little more timeless.

79. Acid Dad – Living with a Creature. Brooklyn psychedelia with a digital delay on the vocals to turn the whole thing into a sort of danse macabre, frantic and creepy, as if the Butthole Surfers decided to make a song you could dance to.

78. Port Noir – Old Fashioned. A Swedish trio making heavy rock with progressive elements, here with notes of groove metal, an ’80s synth line, and even hints at rap-metal in the verse (with a nod to the Beastie Boys, worth five extra points in my book).

77. Cut Chemist/Chali 2Na – Work My Mind. Cut Chemist was the primary DJ for Jurassic 5, and Chali 2Na was their strongest technical MC, so this collaboration on Cut Chemist’s solo record was a pleasant surprise, the best thing either of them has done since J5 split up.

76. The Twilight Sad – I/m Not Here (Missing Face). These Scots make being bummed out sound good, with driving keyboard and guitar riffs in minor keys to evoke a mood that’s mirrored in the simple lyrics here about the end of a relationship.

75. White Lies – Believe It. I’m not afraid to say I love ’80s new wave and alternative music, even now thirty-plus years after first discovering it on America’s Top 40 some Sunday morning. White Lies appear to share that affinity, and while their last album was lighter on hooks than 2013’s BIG TV, this lead single from their next record has a much more memorable chorus and keyboard riff to get it stuck in your head.

74. Broods – Peach. Broods became a pop act on their second album, which is a little disappointing given their quiet, pensive debut, but they do still craft some strong hooks and stick to their minimalist musical approach – although autotuning Georgia Nott’s voice ought to be a crime.

73. BILK – Spiked. A punk song about getting a spiked drink at a party. Sometimes simple is just better.

72. Belly – Shiny One. Another big comeback this year. Belly put out two albums in the early 1990s, after Tanya Donnelly left Throwing Muses, and then nothing for 23 years until this spring’s Dove, which felt like two decades had passed. The older, mellower sound wasn’t the Belly I remembered, but they did have some high points on this song and “Stars Align.”

71. YONAKA – Creature. I like Yonaka’s snarky sound, but this song lets singer Theresa Jarvis stretch out a little bit, showing a sultrier side to her voice without giving up the band’s harder rock edges.

70. Artificial Pleasure – I Need Something More. One of my favorite albums of the year, Artificial Pleasure’s The Bitter End draws on influences from post-punk to new wave to Britpop, all of which can be heard in this track, which gives me a strong Gang of Four vibe.

69. Wombats – Oceans. One of the two bonus tracks on the deluxe edition of Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life, Oceans is a very unfussy Wombats tune: simple melody, memorable synth lines, witty lyrics.

68. Alkaline Trio – Blackbird. A good Alkaline Trio song – nothing we haven’t heard before a bunch of times, but still a guilty power-pop pleasure.

67. Zurich – My Protocol. I get a lot of emails from indie music promoters, and try to listen to anything that looks interesting, but the truth is most of it just doesn’t grab me in the least. Zurich’s “My Protocol” came to my attention that way, and turned out to be very much to my tastes – post-punk, anthemic, with a baritone vocalist with some swagger to his voice in a way that reminded me of White Lies’ singer. Their second EP is due out in early 2019.

66. Courtney Barnett – Charity. The best song on Barnett’s second album, Tell Me What You Really Mean, is its most rock-oriented, uptempo track. I’d say upbeat but I don’t think Barnett really does “upbeat.”

65. San Cisco – When I Dream. An acoustic number from the band behind “Awkward” and “Too Much Time Together,” one I can only hope presages a 2019 album release. They remind me a good bit of the Wombats with their sunny melodies and darker-than-you-expect lyrics, which holds true on this track.

64. The Arkells – Relentless. I usually have a few unabashed pop songs on the list every year. This is one. How can you hear that opening keyboard riff and not move your feet?

63. St. Lucia – Walking Away. I heard this and was sure Nile Rodgers was involved – that guitar riff is in his signature style. It’s the most funk-infused song St. Lucia has released to date across three albums and I think a needed expansion to his sound.

62. Maisie Peters – Best I’ll Ever Sing. How is she writing songs like this at just 18 years old? Her voice is young, but her lyrics often aren’t, and the songcraft here is that of someone twice her age. There should always be a place in the music world for a singer who can play guitar and/or piano and has something to say.

61. Bicurious – Sleep. Instrumental, experimental, heavy rock. Or maybe metal. They remind me of Battles, but without vocals and with more purpose to their songs. Their EP I’m So Confused also has a track “Fake News,” with a (doctored) sample of Donald Trump saying “I am the worst president ever!”

60. Lady Bird – Spoons. Signed by the duo Slaves to their new label Girl Fight Records, Lady Bird had the misfortune to debut just as a movie of the same name appeared on the scene. This punk-oriented track with spoken lyrics might be the most British song I’ve ever heard.

59. Johnnyswim with Drew Holcomb & the Neighbors – Ring the Bells. A folk duo from Nashville who gained notice when one of their songs became the theme to some HGTV show based in Waco, Texas, Johnnyswim collaborated with Drew Holcomb & the Neighbors here on this rousing protest anthem that sounds like something you might hear in a southern church.

58. Keuning – Restless Legs. That’s Dave Keuning of the Killers, set free of the bombastic style of Brandon Flowers to produce this modest pop gem from his debut solo album, Prismism, which has similarly simple ambitions and channels the arena rock of guitarists like Billy Squier and Ian Hunter.

57. The Beths – You Wouldn’t Like Me. The Beths’ album Future Me Hates Me appeared on a few best-of-2018 lists on the strength of the New Zealand indie-pop trio’s combination of classic vocal harmonies and punk-ish riffing.

56. Brockhampton – Honey. Critics seem to prefer other songs on the band’s album iridescence, with “San Marcos” coming up most often, but this was easily the standout for me, with strong rhyming over a pulsing beat that gives way to a psychedelic bridge with new-age chanting.

55. Ghost – Rats. I think Ghost has finally given up the Satanic trappings that made it hard to take them too seriously, so while their new album Prequelle had some missteps – let’s not talk about the lyrics to “Danse Macabre” – this song is easily the most accessible thing they’ve ever done, a perfect encapsulation of the kind of early heavy metal they’ve always emulated behind the silly masks.

54. Van William – Cosmic Sign. Van Pierszalowski of WATERS released his first full solo album , Countries, under the name Van William this year, including the earlier singles “Revolution” and “Fourth of July” as well as this folk-rock track, which makes me feel like I should be driving down an endless highway somewhere in the flat middle of the country.

53. Beth Orton & The Chemical Brothers – I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain. Orton’s voice still moves me twenty years after I first heard “Stolen Car,” and the Chemical Brothers play to her strength here, with production that manages to feel sparse even as they add layers between her vocals.

52. Interpol – The Rover. Interpol’s Marauder was a step up from El Pintor for me, still kind of uneven but with more high points, including this lead single. I think I just keep expecting them to return to the sound of their first few albums, but that’s obviously never going to happen.

51. Radkey – Rock & Roll Homeschool. The three brothers in Radkey were indeed homeschooled, and obviously listened to some punk records along the way, which shows in the title of this song (I assume a Ramones homage) and high velocity.

50. Wye Oak – Join. Wye Oak’s lo-fi sound doesn’t always hit for me – I mean, a little more fi would be okay – but their latest album, The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs, had some strong moments, including the title track and this swirling, melancholy track.

49. Young Fathers – Fee Fi. That piano riff is absolutely menacing, and one of the best examples of how Young Fathers’ experimental approach to music goes well beyond the confines of modern hip-hop.

48. Janelle Monáe – Make Me Feel. Monáe is ridiculously talented – she’s been a revelation on screen in her handful of acting appearances – but Dirty Computer felt a little mailed-in to me, certainly not the follow-up album we’ve waited five years to hear. This is the one track on the album I kept coming back to, especially because of the way that chromatic scale in the lead-up to each chorus defies your mind’s expectations, even after you’ve heard it before.

47. Hinds – Tester. Hinds are a bit of an acquired taste, since their entire appeal is how raw they sound, as if everything was recorded in a tiny garage rather than a studio, and it’s just four girls having fun with nobody listening. “Tester” might be the best distillation yet of that sound.

46. Drenge – Outside. Of all of Drenge’s singles this year, this is the one that most evoked their debut album for me, songs like “Bloodsport” and “Backwaters,” fast and loud and angry but still with a memorable hook.

45. Okkervil River – Love Somebody. It takes about 30 seconds to get going, but the way the song builds in sound and tempo as it progresses makes it my favorite OR song to date. The line “I get a tightness ’bout right here in my chest” just stuck with me the first time I heard the song.

44. Turbowolf – Cheap Magic. Turbowolf’s album is just a giant “fuck yeah” because of huge riffs like this one.

43. Unknown Mortal Orchestra – American Guilt. UMO put out two records this year – Sex & Food, a proper album released in April, and IC-01 Hanoi, a seven-track instrumental album that’s far more experimental. This track comes from the first album, built on a tremendous, heavy guitar lick that someone imported from 1972.

42. Post Animal – Ralphie. Featuring Stranger Things star Joe Keery on guitar, Post Animal released their debut album this past April, with this sunny, bouncy rocker the lead single and best track on it.

41. The Voodoo Children – Tangerines & Daffodils. Garage rock from a Nashville duo, both members of multiple other projects. It’s a real banger albeit a little too close to the Von Bondies’ 2004 hit “C’mon C’mon.”

40. Kid Astray – Joanne. Kid Astray have become regulars on my year-end lists for their consistent ability to churn out indie-pop earworms like this one, with another track from their five-song EP, Ignite, appearing further up this list.

39. Iceage – Hurrah. The first time I heard this song, I thought it was seven minutes long – not because I didn’t like it, but because the sound is so immersive that I was completely absorbed in it. If you remember the short-lived Norwegian band The Soundtrack of Our Lives, Iceage (from Denmark) builds on that group’s classic-rock sound with more of a post-punk or even post-hardcore lean.

38. Jungle – Heavy, California. Every good Jungle song sounds like a party is just getting started.

37. Soft Science – Undone. Soft Science’s album made my best-of-2018 list for its breadth; this opening track recalls My Bloody Valentine’s “I Only Said,” but with a stronger melodic foundation, comprehensible vocals, and less emphasis on the wall of noise that marked MBV’s output, instead leaning into that whinging keyboard line to turn it into something brighter.

36. Jealous of the Birds – Plastic Skeletons. Naomi Hamilton sounds like she’s reciting beat poetry over multiple guitar lines that spend the verses circling each other until they collide in the cathartic chorus.

35. Allie X – Science. Allie X’s EP Super Sunset was a mixed bag of ideas – but ideas mark her output, and I can’t fault an artist for being overly ambitious. This slower track has her usual electronica foundation but with the tempo and thumping bass line of classic R&B beneath her coquettish vocals.

34. Khruangbin – Maria También. Yep, that’s the theme to the superb Crimetown podcast’s first season (and you should listen to that if you haven’t). Khruangbin do instrumental music that combines genres from around the world, with their latest album, Con Todo El Mundo combining funk and jazz with Middle Eastern and Caribbean sounds. It’s a great trick to produce an instrumental single like this that never misses vocals for a second.

33. Everything Everything – Breadwinner. E2 are better when they go a little nuts, which is absolutely what’s happening here, the way they did back on their first two albums with songs like “Cough Cough,” “Kemosabe,” and “MY KZ UR BF.”

32. Snail Mail – Pristine. Lindsey Jordan recorded her debut album Lush at 18, although she rarely sounds close to that young, and evokes music recorded before she was even born. This was my top track from the record and reminded me most of a somewhat obscure ’90s band Lotion, who were probably best known for getting Thomas Pynchon to write the liner notes for one of their albums.

31. Sunflower Bean – Come for Me. Sunflower Bean’s album Twentytwo in Blue dropped in March, but they’re already back with a four-song EP due out in January, led by this strutting track that gets singer and occasional model Julia Cumming out in front where she belongs.

30. Wombats – Bee-Sting. The second of the two bonus tracks from Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life to make this top 100 should have been on the album proper, which has a solid six singles worthy of airplay (if anyone listened to terrestrial radio any more, that is).

29. Thrice – The Grey. Thrice get a little proggy here on this lead single from 2018’s Palms, and I love it. The opening guitar riff and off-beat drum line keep me off balance from the first few bars and it never resolves until all parts unite in the chorus.

28. Joy Williams – Canary. The former Civil Wars singer returned this fall with a few new singles ahead of her upcoming album Front Porch, led by this track that sounds like the anthem for a #MeToo march.

27. Belle & Sebastian – Show Me the Sun. If anything on How to Solve Our Human Problems (Parts 1-3) would have fit on their previous album, it’s this song, which is almost distractingly upbeat for these Scottish stalwarts – until they hit the bridge and abruptly downshift, like Hamlet walking to the edge of the stage to offer an aside to the audience.

26. Sunflower Bean – Crisis Fest. Julia Cumming channels some Debbie Harry here; in an earlier era she’d be a media darling, and maybe that’s still in her future if more people discover the reinvented post-punk Sunflower Bean have churned out through two albums and an upcoming EP. Is it terrible of me that I want Cumming to dye her eyebrows? The platinum blonde hair and dark brows looks always looks like a visual tritone to me.

25. Foxing – Nearer My God. The title track from this St. Louis band’s latest album soars on the power of the vocals, almost overshadowing the driving guitar work beneath them.

24. Gang of Four – Lucky. Granted, this isn’t really Gang of Four any more without Jon King on vocals, but this song effectively bridges that gap between their sound from Entertainment! – which turns forty (!) next year – and a more modern sound and level of production, while still raging against the machine as you’d expect Andy Gill to do.

23. Django Django – Marble Skies. The Djangos released their third record, also called Marble Skies, at the start of the year, and both this and last year’s “Tic Tac Toe” show off their ability to marry layered vocals, drum machines, and synth/guitar lines atypical for dance or electronica hits.

22. The Weeknd/Kendrick Lamar – Pray for Me. The Black Panther soundtrack was justifiably lauded on its release and has since been showered with awards praise, including eight Grammy nominations. The song getting most of that attention has been “All the Stars” (featuring SZA), rather than this, easily my favorite from the record, which really makes great use of the Weeknd’s voice over music that evokes images of water flowing or falling, a central motif in the film.

21. Spirit Animal – World War IV. The new Spirit Animal album is such a mixed bag – there are tracks that sound like Twenty One Pilots (not a compliment), and then a handful of crushers like this one that boast huge guitar riffs and traditional vocals.

20. HAERTS – New Compassion. HAERTS returned with their first album in four years, also called New Compassion, down two members and without including their best single from the interim, “Animal.” The new record has some highlights – this song, “Fighter,” “The Way” – but didn’t have the same urgency or consistent pop hooks of their debut. Nini Fabi’s voice shows off better on “Fighter” while this song has the better melody.

19. Black Honey – Midnight. Black Honey’s self-titled debut album is a cornucopia of indie-pop delights, with the deluxe edition boasting all of the great singles they’ve released over the previous two years plus new hits like this silly pop gem that shows off the quartet’s ability to craft hooks that grab you without overstaying their welcome.

18. TV AM – These Are Not Your Memories. TV AM’s album Psychic Data is mostly instrumental, and generally excellent, but this song’s huge riff, repeated on guitar and then keyboard, mirrors the pattern in the vocals as well for the album’s best track.

17. Death Cab for Cutie – Gold Rush. The best song DCFC has put out since “You Are a Tourist,” if not longer, envelops you with layer upon layer, from the backing vocal repeating the song’s title to the maracas-like percussion to the rich textures of guitar and keyboards throughout.

16. Joy Oladokun – Sober. This Arizona-born singer/songwriter had an album, Carry, that I missed back in 2016, but this one-off single shows the power of her voice, both its sound and her lyrics, with a ’70s soul vibe. I wish the song were two minutes longer so I could bask in her vocals for longer.

15. Kid Astray – Can’t Stop. The second song from their EP Ignite on my list. They really have a knack for catchy alternative-pop songs – “The Mess,” “Diver,” “Cornerstone,” “Joanne,” “The Roads,” and now this earworm over the last six years.

14. Christine & the Queens – 5 dollars. Héloïse Letissier’s 2018 album Chris received wide acclaim and is all over year-end lists for its smart approach to pop, with decades of influences apparent across the record, even when she deals with heavier or darker themes as she does here.

13. Spirit Animal – The Truth. Man, that opening guitar/drum line … just inject it right into my veins, please.

12. Young Fathers – Toy. The song is great, my favorite off their experimental hip-hop album Cocoa Sugar, but if any song this year was elevated by its video, it’s this one. It might have the album’s most straightforward rapping, although as with all Young Fathers tracks, it’s the interplay of vocals and music that makes it so compelling.

11. Wombats – Cheetah Tongue. The Wombats put three songs on this list from Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life, although this is the only one that was actually on the original tracklist – the other two were bonus tracks added for Japan and the deluxe edition. (Why Japan always gets the bonus tracks is not clear to me.) Maybe this time the good stuff can last.

10. Hatchie – Sleep. The Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan passed away in January, but the year ended up full of music that showed her lasting influence on other singers in the genre, including the Crab Apples’ “Open Your Eyes,” whenyoung’s cover of “Dreams,” and pretty much everything the Australian singer-songwriter Hatchie does. Harriet Pillbeam writes dreampop songs that feel like direct descendants of the Cranberries’ debut record, including 2017’s outstanding single “Sure” and this song from her debut EP Sugar & Spice.

9. The Internet – Roll (Burbank Funk). The Internet – I mean, really, is there a less search-friendly name this side of !!! – are a five-piece neo-soul and funk project out of California who received a Grammy nomination for their 2015 album Ego Death and further praise for this year’s Hive Mind, which is too heavy on the soul and light on the funk for me. This track brings the funk, though. Give me a whole album of this and I will stop making fun of the band’s name.

8. Cœur de Pirate – Prémonition. Béatrice Martin returned to singing in her native French for her latest album, a beautiful meditation on failed relationships and poor choices, highlighted by this one true pop track that gives the album its brightest moment.

7. Childish Gambino – This is America. NPR’s top song of the year and the moment when Donald Glover became President, “This is America” hit hardest because of its shocking video, which only served to accentuate what he’s already saying in the lyrics about gun violence in the United States and police brutality against African-Americans.

6. The DMA’s – For Now. This is the sound I want from Britpop revivalists who drank deeply of Oasis’s discography and recast it with just modest modifications for 2018. The opening riff sucks me in every time, like water swirling towards a drain, into a song that feels like it should never end.

5. Lemaitre featuring Betty Who – Rocket Girl. This song deserved a far wider audience than it received, although I don’t think either artist here was well-known enough in the U.S. to propel the song out of the shadows. It’s a feminist anthem over an updated disco backdrop that wouldn’t be out of place on a Daft Punk record, absolutely carried by Betty Who’s powerful performance in the chorus.

4. Jade Bird – Love Has All Been Done Before. Bird just turned 21 in October, but sings like Janis Joplin and writes like someone twice her age, comfortably moving here between twee-folk and a harder chorus that suits the raspy character in her voice when she really belts it out.

3. Frank Turner – 1933. Don’t go mistaking your house burning down for the dawn.

2. Turbowolf featuring Mike Kerr – Domino. If this sound is a bit familiar, it’s probably because that’s Mike Kerr of Royal Blood bringing his distinctive bass-with-octave-pedal to Turbowolf’s already heavy psychedelia for a song that just absolutely fucking rocks from the first chord to the last.

1. Jungle – Happy Man. It was worth the four years wait for this song, which is Jungle at their absolute best, a song that simultaneously sounds like you heard it on a Soul Train rerun from 1979 and like it was just recorded last week. Revisiting the same theme of empty materialism they covered on “Busy Earnin,” Jungle employ their now signature layered falsetto vocals over a minimalist funk jam that seems better with each listen.

Top 18 albums of 2018.

It was a year of huge disappointments, with albums from CHVRCHES and Arctic Monkeys that fell far short of their previous highs – or even their previous lows. Even Judas Priest returned with an album of one good song and a bunch of tracks that just made them sound old. HAERTS finally made it back, but their second album was just solid, nowhere close to the revelation of their debut. St. Lucia’s return was sort of in between his tremendous, unabashedly poppy first album and the inexplicable follow-up. A number of highly acclaimed albums (Mitski comes to mind) did absolutely nothing for me – and let’s not even talk about how the 1975 have suddenly become critical darlings.

In the midst of the wreckage there were a few albums I enjoyed, although I have to admit my little gimmick of pushing the list’s length to the last two digits of the year is getting harder as I go. Some other albums I did like, just not enough for the list, include the Black Panther soundtrack, Alkaline Trio’s Is This Thing Cursed?, Interpol’s Marauder, Khruangbin’s Con Todo El Mundo, Cœur de Pirate’s en cas de tempête, ce jardin sera fermé, Thrice’s Palms, Hinds’ I Don’t Run, Van William’s Countries, and Iceage’s Beyondless.

Previous years’ album rankings: 20172016, 2015, 2014, 2013.

18. Pinkshinyultrablast – Miserable Miracles. Formerly a shoegaze band, this St. Petersburg (Russia, not the one with the baseball tomb) trio made a hard left into spacey, electronica-heavy dream pop on their third album, which didn’t have a standout track for me (maybe the lead single, “Dance AM”) but works better as a cohesive listen across its nine tracks and 37 minutes.

17. Jorja Smith – Lost & Found. Shortlisted for this year’s Mercury Prize – which went to Wolf Alice’s sophomore album, a record I found very disappointing – Smith’s debut record blends her soulful voice with classic R&B sounds and contemporary electronic elements. Her vocal style reminds me of part Alicia Keys, part Erykah Badu, with her English accent seeping through at times. The album works well as a whole, rather than for individual singles, but I’d recommend the title track, “Teenage Fantasy,” and “The One.”

16. Courtney Barnett – Tell Me How You Really Feel. The Australian singer/songwriter’s sophomore album was less hook-filled than her debut, but her lyrics remain a highlight throughout, and her laconic delivery remains unique even in a music world where every other singer is trying to carve out her own distinct style. Highlights include “Charity,” “City Looks Pretty,” and “Nameless, Faceless.”

15. Django Django – Marble Skies. A bit of a return to form for the lads who were shortlisted for the Mercury Prize in 2012 after their debut album had a global hit with “Default,” here featuring a handful of radio-worthy singles, including the title track, “Tic Tac Toe” (released in 2017), “Surface to Air,” and “In Your Beat.” Their style of electronica doesn’t always crank up the BPM, often tending to minimal arrangements and layered vocals; the closing track, “Fountains,” has a simple vocal line, a drum machine, and maybe someone’s little Casio keyboard, but still manages to craft a compelling melody and enough depth to the sound so it doesn’t sound like your teenaged neighbor’s demo tape.

14. Belle & Sebastian – How to Solve Our Human Problems (Parts 1-3). Originally released as three EPs before the band packaged them together as one fifteen-song album, this Belle & Sebastian record is truly all over the place in style, format, even feel, a retrenching after the poppy Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance but still boasting some big hooks on songs like “The Girl Doesn’t Get It,” “Show Me the Sun,” “The Same Star,” “We Were Beautiful,” and the throwback closer “Best Friend.” Some tracks here just don’t work (“Cornflakes” comes to mind), but the positives outweigh the negatives.

13. Toundra – Vortex. This progressive instrumental metal band from Madrid released their fifth album this year, the first that didn’t have a Roman numeral as its title. Other metal albums I liked in 2018: Tribulation’s Down Below, Riverside’s Wasteland, Horrendous’s Idol, High on Fire’s Electric Messiah, and the fascinating Stranger Fruit from Zeal & Ardor, who blend Negro spirituals with blackened death metal.

12. Lauren Ruth Ward – Well, Hell. The last album on this list I heard this year, even though it came out back in May, Ward’s debut record showcases her smoky voice as she goes from slithering on the opener “Staff Only” to sultry on “Make Love to Myself” to snarling on the LP’s best track, “Blue Collar Sex Kitten.” She’s an openly queer singer who sings a lot about being openly queer, about coming to terms with her sexuality and being comfortable in her own skin. It’s a record deserving of a lot more attention than it’s received, especially given the (deserving) critical acclaim for Courtney Barnett, who produces similarly thoughtful lyrics and slides between indie-rock genres.

11. CLOVES – One Big Nothing. Kaity Dunstan finally dropped her full-length debut, three years after “Frail Love,” which appears on this record, made my year-end top 10. Her voice is stunning, even with some of her quirky intonations, although I think she’s best suited to minimalist songs that bring her vocals to the front, regardless of tempo. This includes a re-recorded version of “Frail Love” as well as “Bringing the House Down” and “Don’t You Wait.”

10. Artificial Pleasure – The Bitter End. They made my top 100 last year with “Wound Up Tight,” an upbeat dance/rock number that appears here after the slamming opener “I Need Something More” and takes us into the frenetic “All I Got,” a trio of high-energy songs that sound like someone rebooted The Human League and shot them full of coke. They dial the energy down on a few tracks, as in “On a Saturday Night” – for these guys, the drop in tempo makes it sound like a dirge – but most of this record gets the right blend of darkwave and danceable rhythms. The six-minute track “People Get Everywhere” even veers into a little classic funk for a perfect change of pace in the middle of the album.

9. Snail Mail – Lush. Lindsey Jordan recorded this when she was just 18, and it’s been all over best-of lists; Pitchfork and Paste both placed it fifth on their year-end lists, and it appeared on rankings by the Guardian, AV Club, and NPR. Her vocals might be an acquired taste, but her music feels surprisingly timeless for someone so young – something you’d hear on college radio in virtually any decade, varying just by the quality of production, although women singing and playing this kind of indie-rock is a more modern phenomenon. “Pristine” is the breakout single, although “Heat Wave” and “Golden Dream” are also strong.

8. Sunflower Bean – Twentytwo in Blue. Well, when one of your band members is a dead ringer for a young Bob Dylan, I guess you lean into it and title your sophomore album as an homage to “Tangled Up in Blue.” Their second record is tighter than their first, with better songwriting and a little more swagger on tracks like “Burn It,” “Crisis Fest,” and “Human For,” and more purpose to slower tracks like “Twentytwo” and closer “Oh No, Bye Bye,” which sounds like a lost track by the Church.

7. Soft Science – Maps. Soft Science’s third album was the first I’d heard of their music, ten short songs with one-word titles, adding up to all of 33 minutes that run the gamut of alternative music styles, from the smashing opener “Undone,” which redoes My Bloody Valentine for 2018 with audible vocals, to mid-90s Lush-like Britpop on “Breaking,” to ethereal post-new wave on “Diverging,” on to the country-tinged closer “Slip.” There isn’t a bad track in the mix, which is a rare thing in our era of two good songs and 45 minutes of filler; if anything, I find myself wishing the record were longer whenever I finish it.

6. Jungle – For Ever. Jungle first appeared on my 2014 year-end top 100 with “Busy Earnin’,” their debut single, but the rest of the album fell a little flat to me, lacking enough bangers to balance out the slower tempo neo-soul stylings of the remainder of the record. Their second album strikes that balance much more effectively, with plenty of upbeat, ’70s R&B/dance numbers like “Heavy, California,” “Happy Man,” “Smile,” and “Beat 54 (All Good Now)” along with slower jams like “Cherry” and the orchestral “House in LA.”

5. Wombats – Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life. The fourth full-length from the wry post-Britpoppers was a bit short on hit singles, but the extended version, which included two bonus tracks I loved (“Bee-Sting” and “Oceans”), ended up with a solid half-dozen above-average songs, which is rare for me to find. The album also includes 2017’s “Turn” and “Lemon to a Knife Fight” as well as this year’s “Cheetah Tongue,” but there are a few absolute duds on here, which was definitely not true for their previous album, Glitterbug.

4. Turbowolf – The Free Life. Hard rock with occasional electronic elements from a Bristol quartet that seem delightfully anachronistic in their willingness to just rock out – similar in feel to The Darkness but not in sound. This album, their third, features “Domino,” “Cheap Magic,” and “No No No,” but most of the songs just flat-out rock.

3. Black Honey – Black Honey. The Brighton indie-pop quartet’s debut album was several years in the making, but the deluxe edition, which has 21 tracks now includes all the singles I’ve recommended over the last four years – “Midnight,” “Bad Friends,” “I Only Hurt the Ones I Love,” “Hello Today,” “Crowded City,” “Somebody Better,” and “All My Pride.”

2. TVAM – Psychic Data. Electronica, mostly instrumental, almost entirely weird … except every once in a while Joe Oxley, who records as TVAM, slips in an utterly memorable hook, as on my favorite track from the record, “These Are Not Your Memories,” or on the searing “Porsche Majeure,” or the massive six-minute closer “Total Immersion,” which feels like a huge hit in 1986 in an alternate universe where new wave spawned another generation of rock musicians.

1. Young Fathers – Cocoa Sugar. The winners of the 2014 Mercury Prize returned with their best album yet, a genre-busting album with hip-hop elements that rest on a lo-fi foundation of neo-soul, dub, and experimental music. Pigeonholing these guys as a rap act does them and the genre a disservice, and since their debut album, Dead, they’ve moved even further into experimental territory, often dispensing with traditional song structures while playing with textures and sounds. Some songs have little to no rap content; some mix noises you might associate with late ’80s industrial music into lo-fi electronic jams. “Toy” was a modest breakout single thanks to a clever video, while “Fee Fi” isn’t far behind thanks to the menacing tone of the repeated piano riff. Sometimes my album of the year is comfortable, something I just enjoy start to finish because it’s full of strong melodies or reminds me of a particular style of music from when I was younger. Cocoa Sugar is the opposite: It’s great because it makes me so uncomfortable, diverging constantly from what I expect and from the confines of conventional popular music with which I grew up.

Top 100 boardgames for 2018.

I first posted a list of favorite boardgames in November of 2008, just ten titles, only a couple of which were Eurogames, because I’d really barely started on the hobby at that point. I had seen a list somewhere else that I thought was bad, so I made my own list, which in hindsight wasn’t very good either, but it turned out to be an inflection point for me because so many of you responded with suggestions. I started to play some of those, and got a few as gifts, and the more I played, the more I realized how much I enjoyed the games themselves and just the hobby as a whole. I’d liked games as a kid, but games back then were mostly terrible, and the ones on the shelf in the coat closet – Monopoly, Scrabble, Sorry! – were all kind of terrible. (Don’t get me started on Scrabble; any game that requires preparation, such as memorizing word lists, is no longer a game. It is work. I have enough work in my life, thanks.)

The best boardgames combine some kind of puzzle that gets me thinking (or scheming), some social interaction, and that hard-to-define element of fun. I like learning, I like math, I like coming up with ideas and seeing how they work out – especially in the no-consequences world of boardgames. And while I enjoy playing games on mobile devices against AI players, just for the mental workout, I’d much rather play games live, which puts more emphasis on the last two criteria. Now that my daughter is twelve (I have to update that every year and oh my God the child is now nearly as tall as I am), and old enough to play any game I might bring home, it’s become an even more central part of my life. She even came with me to day three of PAX Unplugged last year, and told me as we walked out near closing time that she wished we had a few more hours to keep playing.

This year’s list is my eleventh one, so I should probably stop counting now. I rank 100 games, although I think I’ve played more than 250 in total if we count demos, apps, and online play. 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 have omitted some titles I’ve tried that are not available at all in the U.S. yet, and have several games here or en route to play that I haven’t played at all or enough to rank, including The River, Kero, Shadows over Amsterdam, Welcome To…, Reef, Coimbra, Century Eastern Wonders, Mercado, Cryptid, Wildlands, The Quacks of Quedlinburg, and more.

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. Mole Rats in Space came off the list this year. So did Seikatsu. Russian Railroads is a brilliant, high-strategy game, but I couldn’t justify including it again. For 2018, Forbidden Sky and Mesozooic are both very good, but again, they just couldn’t crack the top 100.

100. Maori: A light two- to four-player game, relatively high in the luck department for this list, with more opportunities to screw your opponent in a two player game, whereas with four players you’re focusing more on your own strategy and less on others’. In the game, players compete to fill out their own boards of 16 spaces by drawing island tiles from a central 4×4 grid, where the available selections depend on the movement of a boat token that travels around that grid’s perimeter. Players must form completed islands to receive points, and lose points for open spaces. Currently out of print, but amazon frequently has copies through marketplace sellers as does boardgamegeek. Complexity: Low.

99. Petrichor. Full review coming soon. I saw this at Gen Con 2017, but it came out over a year later, so I didn’t play it until the fall of 2018. It’s a gorgeous game where players place clouds on a variable board, filling them with their own raindrops – and can put drops into other players’ clouds too (I know, phrasing, boom). When clouds are saturated, the raindrops go on the crop tiles below them, and players earn points in different ways for each crop. The twist is that players also get to vote on what weather will occur after each round, and there are big bonuses for winning the votes too. It’s a little point salady but the theme is great and the scoring isn’t too complex in the end. Complexity: Medium.

98. Port Royal. I believe this was just released in the U.S. for the first time in 2017, and it’s great value at about $14. Port Royal is a push-your-luck card game where you’re trying to collect points by buying point cards and completing expedition cards, gaining money by drawing ship cards with gold on them … but if you keep drawing and two ships of the same color appear, you bust. There’s also an engine-building element here that does give it a strategic element beyond shouting “No whammy!” Complexity: Medium-low.

97. Santorini. Full review. Abstract two-player game invented by a math professor, with a pasted-on Greek mythology theme that opens up a number of variants that tweak the base game’s rules. Very chess-lite, which I mean as a compliment. Complexity: Medium.

96. Brass. Full app review. Also known as Brass: Lancashire. Designer Martin Wallace has two major high-strategy games on his C.V. in Brass and Steam, and you could argue for either or both to be on this list. Brass is a game of economic development in England in the Industrial Revolution, where players build rail routes and factories and try to ship or sell goods so they can keep upgrading facilities to rack up more points. One key to the game is borrowing money from the bank early in the game to keep financing your expansion. Steam is a little simpler to learn, sort of a Ticket to Ride for more serious players, where you build your own rail routes and then deliver goods along those for points and other rewards, with Brass having the better theme and more well-rounded design of the two.. Both also have strong app versions, but again I think Brass’ is stronger. Complexity: Medium-high.

95. 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.

94. Tak. Full review. This very simple, chess-like (or chess-lite) two-player game is based on a description in Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles novels, but unlike those massive tomes, this game is quick to get into and to play. There’s some strategic density here below the surface despite the limited number of pieces. Each player tries to be the first to construct a path across the board (usually 5×5), but players can stack certain tiles and knock some over, and you quickly end up in a back-and-forth pattern that forms the meat of the game. Complexity: Medium-low.

93. Photosynthesis. Full review. One of the most visually arresting games I’ve ever seen – you’re placing trees of three different sizes on a board, with each player playing with a different color of trees, so anyone who should happen to walk by as you play is guaranteed to stop and ask what you’re doing. The game play is quite simple – the sun rotates around the board through six spots, and from each spot it directs rays on the board from a different perspective, so different trees catch the light and give their owners light points. You can also be blocked from the sun by a taller tree between you and that side of the board. Eventually you harvest your trees for big points, with rewards higher the closer to the center of the board you plant. Replay value is a little low because the rules are so simple, but it’s still a fun, quick family game. Complexity: Medium-low.

92. Eight Minute Empire. App review. Haven’t played the physical game yet, but the app is great. I love the idea of a quick game that can satisfy the 4X itch – that’s eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate – in a few minutes with just a handful of rules. Players move out on the map from a central starting region, adding units, collecting goods for points, and trying to control regions or continents before the game ends. The money you start with is all you get, so managing that is a huge part of the game. Complexity: Medium.

91. Valeria: Card Kingdoms. Full review. This game knocked Machi Koro off my list completely, because it fixes that game’s major flaw – players can get totally left behind by a few bad dice rolls. In Valeria, you acquire cards that pay out on certain rolls, with each individual die counting as well as the sum of the two. You gain strength and magic tokens, and then use them to defeat monsters or capture domains for victory points and new benefits. It also has a bit of the Dominion feel in its expansions and ability to mix and match the available cards for enough combinations to last several lifetimes. Complexity: Medium-low.

90. Forbidden Desert. Full review. A medium-weight cooperative game from the designer of Pandemic (a top ten game for me, and the best coop game I’ve played), Forbidden Desert has players trying to escape a sandstorm on a board that changes every game, on which a sandstorm threatens to kill them all if dehydration doesn’t get them first. It’s more luck-driven than Pandemic, which doesn’t suit my particular tastes, but overall is a little quicker to learn. The iOS app is great, but it’s a bastard. The family now includes the lighter Forbidden Island and the new Forbidden Sky, which has players work to complete a circuit as they build out the board before they escape. Complexity: Medium.

89. Bruges. Full review. An indirect descendant of Agricola, Bruges also has players adding abilities from a giant deck, encouraging long-range planning that racks up points if you get the right cards played in the right combinations. You don’t have to feed your family here; instead you’re a noble in the beautiful Belgian town of (fookin’) Bruges, building stuff for points, because that’s how these games all work. It’s a pretty game as well, although I take a few points off for the disjointed scoring mechanisms. Possibly out of print. Complexity: Medium to medium-high.

88. Arkham Horror. I’ve played this game’s 2018 (third) edition now twice, both times solitaire, so its placement here is more of a rough guess, and I have no experience with earlier versions. It’s a cooperative game set in an H.P. Lovecraft-themed universe where players are detectives of a sort, trying to move around the board to gather clue tokens while fighting monsters and staving off insanity. If you collect enough clue tokens and get them ‘researched’ to the collective scenario board, you can win the game, but there are a few ways to lose as well. The smartest part of the design is that your investigator can be killed off without ending the game; you just lose that character and any items or goodies it had, and then pick a new one while continuing the game play. Complexity: Medium, with a long setup.

87. Asara. Full review. Light strategy game that feels to us like a simpler, cleaner implementation of Alhambra’s theme and even some of its mechanics, without the elegance of the best family-strategy games like Stone Age or Small World. Players compete to build towers in five different colors, earning points for building the tallest ones or building the most, while dealing with a moderate element of randomness in acquiring tower parts. It’s also among the best-looking games we own, if that’s your thing. Just $25 as of this writing. Complexity: Low.

86. The Blood of an Englishman. Full review. An asymmetrical two-player game where one player is Jack and the other the Giant, playing on a tableau of five columns of cards. Each player has specific goals to win and distinct actions to take by moving or removing cards that either complete his/her own sets or make the opponent’s task more difficult. Tremendous artwork too. It’s $9 right now. Complexity: Low.

85. Alhambra: Full review. One of my least favorite Spiel winners, with a good tile-placement and scoring system, but the method used to acquire money is an awful mechanic that really screws the game up (for me) with more than two players. One of the cooler-looking games in our collection. There are many, many expansions, but I haven’t tried any. Complexity: Medium.

84. Saint Petersburg. A classic Eurogame, recently reissued in German with better artwork, at which I am particularly bad for some reason. It’s all money and cards – you buy cards from the central supply, and each round has three separate scoring events, some of which provide money and some of which provide points. The unique aspect to Saint Petersburg is that you can gain discounts on future purchases by virtue of what you buy now: further copies of the same card cost one coin less for each copy you have, and some cards can be upgraded to more valuable versions, saving you the cost you paid for the card in the first place. I’ve played online a few times, and I found it becoming a bit repetitive over regular plays. You also have to play well in the first round as the game has no real mechanism for players to come from behind. Out of print in English, unfortunately. Complexity: Medium-low.

83. A Game of Thrones: The Card Game. Full review. A very rich deckbuilder and “Living Card Game” (meaning there will be frequent expansion packs) that is extremely true to its theme, with fairly simple mechanics that lead to very intricate gameplay and maneuvering … kind of like the source material. I hated the book, but love this game. The only negative is time, as it takes well over an hour to play a full game, as much as two hours with four players if no one gets an early lead. Complexity: Medium.

82. Scotland Yard: App review. One of the few old-school games on the board, and one I’ve only played in app form. One player plays the criminal mastermind (I don’t know if he’s really a mastermind, but doesn’t he have to be for the narrative to work?) trying to escape the other players, playing detectives, by using London’s transportation network of cabs, buses, the Tube, and occasionally a boat along the Thames. It’s recommended for ages 10 and up but there’s nothing on here a clever six- or seven-year-old couldn’t handle if playing alongside an adult, and like Tobago has a strong deductive-reasoning component that makes it a little bit educational as well as fun. Complexity: Low.

81. Baseball Highlights: 2045: Full review. I was floored at how much I enjoyed this game; it is baseball-themed, but it’s really a fast-moving deckbuilder where your deck only has 15 cards in it and you get to upgrade it constantly between “games.” The names on the player cards are all combinations of names of famous players from history – the first name from one, the last from another, like “Cy Clemens” – except for the robots. It’s not a baseball simulation game, but that might be why I liked it, because it was easier to just let the theme go and play the game for what it is. It’s down from previous years as we’ve found the replay value is limited, even with the expansions. Complexity: Medium-low.

80. Bärenpark. Full review. A bit of Patchwork or Tetris but for more than two players. Each player tries to build out his/her zoo – for bears, of course – by placing tiles of various shapes and dimensions. Most tiles earn points, and there are bonuses for filling in entire boards. Covering certain squares allows a player to take better tiles from the central supply. End game is a little wonky, as it’s too easy for players to end up without a legal move in the last turn or two. Currently out of stock everywhere. Complexity: Medium-low.

79. Lords of Waterdeep. I have only reviewed the app version of this game, and it apparently hews very closely to the physical version. Despite the grafted-on Dungeons and Dragons theme, it’s just a worker-placement game where players compete across eight rounds to acquire scarce resources, build buildings worth victory points, and occasionally sabotage other players. Agricola has similar mechanics and constraints, but its greater complexity makes for a more interesting game; Lords is better if you don’t want to spend an hour and a half playing one session. Complexity: Medium.

78. Ra. Full review. One of Reiner Knizia’s classics and one of the great auction games in the genre, Ra got a well-deserved reissue earlier in 2016 from Asmodee. Players collect Egyptian artifacts in groups of tiles. On a turn, a player may bid on the group on display or choose to add another tile; most tiles are worth acquiring but the bag has a few ‘disaster’ tiles that force you to discard something of value. It’s a little long, but it’s a deep economic game with many paths to victory. Complexity: Medium-high.

77. Five Tribes. Full review. A very strong medium-strategy game from Days of Wonder, but one that hit some early backlash because of the heavy use of slaves within the game’s theme – as currency, no less. That’s been fixed in subsequent printings. The game uses an unusual mechanic where all of the meeples start the game on the board and players have to use a funky kind of move to remove as many as they can to gain additional points, goods, or powers. There’s a lot going on, but once you’ve learned everything you can do it’s not that difficult to play. Complexity: Medium.

76. Quadropolis. Full review. This Days of Wonder title has the company’s usual set of outstanding graphics and well-written rules, but as their games go this is on the more complex end of the spectrum. You’re trying to fill out your city board with tiles representing six or seven different building types; you’ll never be able to do or get everything you want, so the game requires some early decisions and some compromises. It’s a well-designed, well-balanced game, but I have it ranked here because it’s a little workish. Building a city is supposed to be fun, isn’t it, Mr. Sim? Complexity: Medum.

75. 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 in general we find them really fun and engaging. Complexity: Medium-low.

74. 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.

73. Century Spice Road. Full review. A fun, light, family game from a new but very prolific designer who already has a sequel out to this game (Century Eastern Wonders) and several other new titles out in 2018 alone. Century Spice Road is the perfect game 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. Complexity: Medium-low.

72. Morels. Full review for Paste. A 2012 release, 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. Complexity: Low.

71. Forged in Steel. Full review. A late 2016 release that has been consistently hard to find – it’s out of stock everywhere right now, without so much as a listing on amazon – Forged in Steel is a very complex economic and engine-building game that works because it’s so imaginative and integrates its citybuilding theme so well into game play. Players are building out a Colorado mining town, putting up different building types, controlling mines, and competing for votes to be the town’s Mayor. There’s also a newspaper stand on the board, with three headlines visible at a time, most of which alter game play in significant ways for that round. Complexity: High.

70. Yamataï. Full review. One of the most maligned releases of the year because … reasons? A Days of Wonder release from a well-regarded designer, Yamataï is a stunning game to look at, and manages to make some quirky mechanics work well over a game of manageable length, which I’d consider a big achievement considering how many games fail to do all that in a game under 90 minutes. Players place boats along tracks among the archipelago of islands on the board, but they can build on any island, even if they didn’t place those boats there – it’s the colors of the boats that matters, not who set them afloat. The ninja cards players can acquire are the real key, as many offer players greater benefits for certain core actions that can reap huge rewards if bought early in the game. Complexity: Medium.

69. Discoveries. A nice little gem recommended to me by someone on a boardgame forum I no longer frequent – how’s that for an explanation – with a Lewis & Clark theme of exploration where the players build up skills that allow them to undertake longer or more complicated exploration routes. I will say that I liked this game a lot more than my daughter did, even though I thought up front this would be a fast favorite for her; I think the theme didn’t grab her enough at first sight. Complexity: Medium.

68. Ex Libris. I used spot #50 as a placeholder last year for a game I loved on first play; I’m doing that again with Ex Libris, of which I saw a demo at GenCon, then played in full (and won!) in the new games section at PAX Unplugged. I have a review copy and have it in my queue for a full review soon. Players collect cards showing (fake) books to go into that player’s library, which must be organized in alphabetical order to score at game-end. There are six categories of books, and in any game, one will be “banned” and cost you a point per book, while another will be a priority category that scores extra points for everyone. Each player will have his/her own special category to also collect for bonus points. There’s also a stability bonus for arranging your bookshelves well. You use action tiles to do everything in the game, sometimes just drawing and shelving cards, but often doing things like swapping cards, stealing them, sifting through the discards, or moving a shelf left or right. Just make sure you know your ABCs. Complexity: Medium.

67. Lost Cities: Full review. This was once our favorite two-person game, a simple title from the prolific designer Reiner Knizia, and it’s quite portable since it can be played with nothing but the game cards. We’ve since moved on to some more complex two-player games, but for simplicity (without becoming dumb) this one is still an easy recommendation for me to give folks new to the genre. The deck comprises 12 cards in each of five colors, including cards numbered 2 through 10 and three “investment” cards to double, triple, or quadruple the profit or loss the player earns in that color. Players take turns drawing from the deck but may only place cards in increasing order, so if you draw a green 5 after you played the 6, tough luck. You can knock out a game in 15 minutes or less, so it’s one to play multiple times in a sitting. The iOS app is very slick and plays really quickly – a great one for killing a minute while you’re waiting in line. There is a Lost Cities board game, but I have never played it. Complexity: Low.

66. 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. Complexity: Medium.

65. 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. We 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.

64. 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.

63. Tobago. Full review. Solid family-strategy game with a kid-friendly theme of island exploration, hidden treasures, and puzzle-solving, without a lot of depth but high replay value through a variable board. Players place clue cards in columns that seek to narrow the possible locations of four treasures on the island, with each player placing a card earning a shot at the coins in that treasure – but a small chance the treasure, like the frogurt, will be cursed. The deductive element might be the game’s best attribute. The theme is similar to that of Relic Runners (a Days of Wonder game from 2014 that I didn’t like) but the game plays more smoothly. A bit overpriced right now at $50, though. Complexity: Low.

62. 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.

61. Agamemnon. Full review. An absolute gem of an 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. Complexity: Low.

60. 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.

59. 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.

58. 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.

57. 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.

56. 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. Complexity: Medium.

55. Citadels. Full review. First recommended to me by a reader back in that 2008 post, Citadels didn’t hit my shelves until last winter, 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.

54. 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 about $8 for the whole kit and caboodle. Complexity: Low.

53. 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. 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).

52. 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. Complexity: Medium-low.

51. 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.

50. 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. Out of print again. I’ve never played the designer’s next game, Lancaster, even though I have a used copy, but I just noticed it’s $13 on amazon. Complexity: Medium.

49. 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.

48. Skyward. Full review. One of the most visually striking new games of the year, Skyward also has a novel card-drafting mechanic where one player, the Warden, draws a fixed number of cards and then separates them into piles, one per player, in any way s/he wishes – so if the Warden wants to try to get a certain card, s/he would try to put it in a pile with less attractive cards. Players then take a pile apiece and can discard cards and/or point tokens to build, trying to maximize their points by playing cards that share colors or bonuses. It plays very quickly and the artwork is stellar. Complexity: Medium-low.

47. 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. 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. 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. T’zolkin. T’zolkin 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 gears, though, are kind of badass. Complexity: High.

44. 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.

43. 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. Complexity: Low.

42. 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.

41. 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. Go figure. And go get it. Complexity: Low.

40. 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. Complexity: Medium-high, due to the asymmetrical play.

39. Through the Desert. Full app review. 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. Horse with no name sold separately. Complexity: Low.

38. 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.

37. 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. Complexity: Medium.

36. Thurn und Taxis: Full review. I admit to a particularly soft spot for this game, as I love games with very simple rules that require quick thinking with a moderate amount of foresight. (I don’t care for chess, which I know is considered the intellectual’s game, because I look three or four moves ahead and see nothing but chaos.) 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. I’ve played this a ton online, and there’s a clear optimal strategy, but to pull it off you do need a little help from the card draws. Complexity: Low.

35. Terraforming Mars. Full review. The best complex strategy game of 2016, 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.

34. 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.

33. 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. Complexity: Medium-low.

32. 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. Complexity: Medium.

31. 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. 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. More than half off today at amazon at $19.59. Complexity: Medium.

30. 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.

29. Ingenious. Full app review. Ingenious another Reiner Knizia title, a two-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 catch: The app, which I owned and reviewed, is now gone from all app stores, because of a trademark dispute (and maybe more). It may return under a new name, Axio Hexagonal, but it’s not anywhere yet. Boo. Complexity: Low.

28. 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.

27. Kodama: The Tree Spirits. Full review. Definitely among the cutest games we’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. Complexity: Low.

26. Battle Line: Full review. Reissued this year as Schotten Totten – same game, different theme, better art, $5 cheaper. Among the best two-player games we’ve found, designed by Reiner Knizia, who is also behind half the 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. 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. Complexity: Medium-low.

24. 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. Complexity: Starts low, ends medium to medium-high.

23. 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.

22. Caylus: Full app review. Another game I’ve only played in its 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 are probably the best I’ve seen alongside those of Agricola’s. Complexity: High.

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. Currently out of print; I was lucky to score a copy in trade. Complexity: High.

20. 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.

19. (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. We don’t pull this game out as much as we 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. Only four 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. We are fortunate to be in 22 A.C. Complexity: Medium-low.

18. Everdell. Full review. This is the best new game of 2018 for me, so far, although I still have a bunch to play and could change my mind between this and Charterstone. 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.

17. 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. Complexity: Medium.

16. 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.

15. 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. My wife felt this game felt way too much like work; I enjoyed it more than that, 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.

14. Takenoko.Full review. If I tell you this is the cutest game we 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 are easy enough for my daughter to learn, 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.

13. 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. Complexity: High.

12. Stone Age: Full review. Really a tremendous game, with lots of real-time decision-making but simple mechanics and goals that first-time players always seem to pick up quickly. It’s also very hard to hide your strategy, so newbies can learn through mimicry – thus forcing veteran players to change it up on the fly. 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. We introduced my daughter to the game when she was 10 and she took to it right away, beating us on her second play. 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.

11. Samurai: Full review. I bought the physical game after a few months of playing the app (which, as of November 2018, 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. Complexity: Medium/low.

10. 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. Complexity: Medium-low.

9. Jaipur: Full review. Jaipur is now our go-to 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.

8. 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. We 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, France and The Old West, came out in the winter of 2018, with two new rules tweaks, one for each board.

There’s also a kids’ version, available exclusively at Target, with a separate app for that as well. Complexity: Low.

7. 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.

6. 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, now eight, loves the game and is 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, made by the team at Days of Wonder, is amazing, and is available for iOS, Android, and Steam. I also like the four-in-one expansion for the base game, Cities of Splendor. Complexity: Low.

5. 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 are didn’t finish season one, just because we got caught up in other games, but season two is out already. Complexity: Medium for the base game, medium-high for the Legacy game.

4. 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 we 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.

3. 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.

2. 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. We saw no dominant strategy, several that worked well, and nothing that was so complex that we couldn’t quickly pick it up after screwing up our 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 iPad app version is amazing too, with an Android port released early in 2018. Complexity: Medium.

1. Carcassonne: Full review. The best-of-breed iOS app has only increased my appreciation for Carcassonne, a game I still play regularly by myself, with my wife and daughter, and with friends here or online. 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. We 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. We also have Inns and Cathedrals, which we’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.

And, as with last year, my rankings of these games by how they play with just two players:

1. Jaipur
2. 7 Wonders Duel
3. Carcassonne
4. 7 Ronin
5. Azul
6. Stone Age
7. Ticket to Ride
8. Splendor
9. Patchwork
10. Everdell
11. The Mind
12. Agamemnon
13. Dominion/Intrigue
14. Small World
15. Battle Line/Schotten Totten
16. Samurai
17. Castles of Burgundy
18. Morels
19. Ingenious
20. New Bedford
21. Cacao
22. Targi
23. Lost Cities
24. Pandemic (and the Forbidden games, which all use the same mechanic)
25. Jambo
26. Baseball Highlights: 2045
27. Blood of an Englishman
28. Through the Desert
29. San Juan
30. Tak: A Beautiful Game
31. Santorini
32. Tak
33. Photosynthesis
34. Maori

Also, I get frequent requests for games that play well with five or more; I can confidently recommend 7 Wonders and Citadels, both of which handle 5+ right out of the box. Ticket to Ride is tight with five players, but that’s its maximum. Catan can handle 5 or 6 with an expansion, although it can result in a lengthy playing time. For more social games, One Night Ultimate Werewolf is best with five or more also, and I believe Crossfire requires five players. Sagrada with the expansion plays up to 6, but I haven’t played it with more than three.

Top 55 pizzerias in the U.S., ranked.

I’ve updated this list for the first time since the original version went up three years ago, and again, I expect this will start quite a few debates.

I adore all kinds of pizza – New York-style, Neapolitan-style (thin crust, wet center), Roman-style (also thin-crust but with a cracker-like crust), Sicilian, coal-fired, wood-fired, whatever. Except “deep dish,” which is just a bread casserole and which I actively dislike. I try to find good artisan pizzerias everywhere I travel, and I’ve hit just about all of the most highly-regarded places in Manhattan and Brooklyn too. I grew up on Long Island, eating by the slice and folding as I did so, but a couple of trips to Italy convinced me of the merits of those very thin crusts and superior toppings. We’re the beneficiaries of a huge boom in high-end pizza joints in this country, and while I haven’t tried all of the good ones, I’ve been to enough to put together a ranking of the 55 best that I’ve tried. There is, I admit, a bias to this list – I’ve tried more places in greater Phoenix than any other metro area other than New York – and I’m sure I’ll get some yelling over where I put di Fara or Paulie Gee’s, but with all of that out of the way, here’s how I rank ’em.

(I’ve removed two entries that closed since the last ranking, but if I missed another one, please put it in the comments.)

1. Pizzeria Bianco, Phoenix
2. Kesté, New York
3. Motorino, New York
4. Roberta’s, Brooklyn
5. Una Pizza Napoletana, New York (relocated from San Francisco)
6. Pizzeria Vetri/Osteria, Philadelphia
7. Frank Pepe’s, New Haven
8. del Popolo, San Francisco
9. Garage Bar, Louisville
10. Pizzeria Mozza, Los Angeles
11. Pizzeria Lola, Minneapolis
12. cibo, Phoenix
13. Lucali, Brooklyn
14. Forcella, New York
15. Pizzeria Stella, Philadelphia
16. Spacca Napoli, Chicago
17. Paulie Gee’s, Brooklyn
18. Don Antonio by Starita, New York
19. Pizzaiolo, Oakland
20. ‘Pomo, Phoenix
21. Brigantessa, Philadelphia
22. Marta, New York
23. Ribalta, New York
24. flour + water, San Francisco
25. Totonno’s, Brooklyn
26. Federal Pizza, Phoenix
27. La Piazza al Forno, Glendale, AZ
28. Via Tribunali, New York/Seatte
29. Il Cane Rosso, Dallas
30. Antico, Atlanta
31. Ravanesi, Concordville, PA
32. City House, Nashville
33. Tarry Lodge, Port Chester, New York
34. Desano, Nashville
35. Grimaldi’s, Phoenix
36. Jon & Vinny’s, Los Angeles
37. Timber Pizza, Washington, DC
38. Di Fara, Brooklyn
39. All-Purpose, Washington, DC
40. Il Bosco, Scottsdale, AZ
41. Co., New York (closed February 2018)
42. Rubirosa, New York
43. Punch Pizza, St. Paul
44. Toro, Durham
45. Craft 64, Scottsdale, AZ
46. Harry’s Bar, Miami, FL
47. 800 Degrees, Los Angeles
48. Firestarter, Dennis, MA
49. Forno 301, Phoenix
50. Dolce Vita, Houston
51. Stella Rosa, Santa Monica
52. Grimaldi’s, Brooklyn
53. Basic, San Diego
54. Nicoletta, New York (closed as of 1/2019)
55. Taconelli, Philadelphia

There’s a long list of pizzerias I still need (okay, want, but where I’m concerned pizza is a need) to try, so they’re not on the list: Razza in Jersey City, Apizza Scholls in Portland, Area Four near Boston, 2 Amy’s in DC (temporarily closed), Menomale in DC, Sottocasa in Brooklyn, al Forno in Providence, Mani Osteria in Ann Arbor, Vero in Cleveland, Iggie’s in Baltimore, and more. It’s a good time to be a pizza lover, and unless you have to be gluten-free, how could you not love pizza?

Ranking the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners.

Today, the Pulitzer Prize Board will announce the winners of the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes, including that for Fiction, which – assuming they give one out this year – will give us the 91st honoree in this category (which was known as the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel until 1948) in the 101 years since the awards began. The Board declined to give this award to any title in 1920, 1941, 1946, 1954, 1957, 1964, 1971, 1977, and most recently in 2012.

I have read all 90 winners to date – thank you, thank you, hold your applause till the end, please – and have now presumed to rank them, because ranking is a thing I do. As the list goes on, the writeups get shorter, because you really don’t need to read them all, or even half of them, and even the bad ones at the end aren’t so-bad-they’re-good, just bad, and I chose instead to spend my words up top on the good ones. I’ll update this post each year when we get a new winner and I’ve had a chance to read it.

Linked book titles go to amazon; links to my reviews, all on this site, are separate and come after the author’s name. If there’s no link to a review, I didn’t write one.

1. Beloved – Toni Morrison. (1988) Beloved has a strong case for the greatest American novel ever written; a 2006 New York Times poll of authors, critics, and editors, asking them to name the best novel of the last 25 years, and Morrison’s magnum opus won. It is a searing story of a runaway slave woman who sees the toddler she killed (to save her from a life in bondage) reappear as a ghost, calling herself Beloved, wreaking havoc among their poor black community. Rich in metaphor and symbol, Beloved is the most acclaimed novel by any African-American author, and the greatest novel we have to describe our country’s greatest shame and its still-extant ramifications.

2. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee. (1961) Call it a children’s novel if you like – as if that’s some sort of putdown – or claim that Lee had to have had a little help to craft it, To Kill a Mockingbird is a little slice of prose perfection, capturing the dialect of a specific time and place to tell us the story of a great injustice as seen through one little girl’s eyes.

3. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole. (1981) Perhaps as famous for how it ended up getting published – after the author’s suicide, his mother harassed Walker Percy to read the manuscript, and a skeptical Percy was blown away – as it is for its content, this modern picaresque gave the world Ignatius J. Reilly and his uncooperative pyloric valve, an actual large adult son who is a walking case of arrested development and whose comic misadventures have made him a favorite since the book’s publication. This is one of two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction awarded posthumously.

4. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton. (1921) A subtly witty sendup of the changing American aristocracy and the serious novels describing it that were popular for the preceding century, The Age of Innocence made Wharton the first woman to win the Pulitzer, and remains one of the great works of irony in American letters.

5. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck. (1940) My review. The final scene is the one most readers remember, but Steinbeck was a masterful writer, showing incredible empathy towards his characters even as he puts them through the wringer.

6. Empire Falls – Richard Russo. (2002) My (brief) review. Russo’s peak output, led by this novel, combines strong characterization – although after a while you notice he has certain archetypes to which he regularly returns – with brilliant, wry humor even over serious plots. This one is probably his most serious, set in a declining mill town where tragedy is just around the corner, populated by a cast of eccentrics.

7. The Road – Cormac McCarthy. (2007) Don’t do what I did, listening to this in audiobook form while doing some long, dark drives to and from Cape Cod League games. It is dark, grim, misanthropic, and also one of the best fictional depictions of the lengths to which a parent will go for his child I have ever seen.

8. The Reivers – William Faulkner. (1963) Okay, it’s Discount Faulkner, but you still get Yoknapatawpha County, and even simplified Faulkner prose is award-worthy. I can only assume that this was, in some part, a lifetime achievement award, as it turned out to be Faulkner’s final novel, but this modern picaresque of the Mississippi underclass is a much more satisfying read than more famous works like As I Lay Dying.

9. All the Light We Cannot See – Doerr, Anthony. (2015) My review. Three intertwined stories, where the main characters don’t meet until the final few pages, built around the tiniest of connections, all packing an enormous emotional wallop.

10. The Color Purple – Alice Walker. (1983) Walker became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with this brutal novel of poor black Southerners in the early 1900s, with particular attention on the plight of black women, doubly disadvantaged in society at that time.

11. The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer. (1980) My review. This is one of the most controversial winners in the award’s history because it’s almost certainly not fiction – it’s a non-fiction novel, but the content is driven by Mailer’s interviews of the subjects of the book, including Gary Gilmore, the first man to be put to death after the restoration of capital punishment in 1976. It’s also the longest winner by page count, over 1000 pages, but is so well-written and compelling that I flew through it.

12. The Orphan Master’s Son – Johnson, Adam. (2013) My review. The Pulitzer Prize criteria for this award are: “For distinguished fiction published in book form during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” That’s true of most winners, but not this one, a breathtaking work of fiction set in North Korea, as un-American a place as you could find. The story is gripping, the main character extremely well-developed, and the prose moves you through the very dark material so that you’ll still hang on every word.

13. The Stories of John Cheever – John Cheever. (1979) My review. A massive collection of more than fifty stories, this book runs the gamut of Cheever’s career and hits on all of the major themes found in his writing, including conflicted sexuality, the ruinous effects of alcohol, and the vacuous nature of suburban middle-class life.

14. The Caine Mutiny – Herman Wouk. (1952) I loved this book, but never reviewed it because I finished it while trying not to end up in the hospital with a respiratory infection that required a fluoroquinolone, an antibiotic of last resort. Anyway, this book, based on Caine’s own experiences at sea in World War II, tells of a coup d’etat aboard a destroyer when the captain, Lt. Commander Queeg, appears to be unfit to lead, followed by a climactic court-martial of the soldiers involved.

15. All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren. (1947) My review. Loosely based on the rise of Louisiana politician Huey Long, All the King’s Men tells the story of Willie Stark, an ambitious populist who runs for governor of a southern state, and the reporter, Jack Burden, who is embedded in Stark’s campaign and covers his tenure in the state house.

16. A Bell for Adano – John Hersey. (1945) My review. Hersey is best remembered today for Hiroshima, a short book originally printed in the New Yorker as the issue’s sole content, telling the stories of six survivors of the American attack on the Japanese city. A Bell for Adano also covers World War II, but in a serio-comic fashion, as an American officer tries to secure a new church bell for the Italian town of Adano after the fascist regime appropriated their old one to melt it down.

17. Elbow Room – James Alan McPherson. (1978) A short story collection by an African-American essayist who just died in 2016 without much notice, Elbow Room deserves a much wider audience than it has today, telling stories of the black experience that examine and question contemporary notions of race.

18. Interpreter of Maladies – Jhumpa Lahiri. (2000) My review. Lahiri has published two short story collections and two novels, with her strength clearly in the shorter form; this debut collection focuses on the dual identities and conflicts faced by Indian emigrants to America and their children, as Lahiri herself was born to Bengali parents in London and grew up in the United States from age two.

19. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz. (2008) My review. One of the most widely acclaimed novels of this century, Oscar Wao incorporates magical realism, Dominican politics and folk traditions, and inventive, acrobatic language that bridges English, Spanish, and whatever came out of Diaz’s own head. The title character is something of a Latino Ignatius P. Reilly, less maddening and a bit more pathetic, which is the main thing keeping this out of the top ten.

20. The Keepers of the House – Shirley Ann Grau. (1965) My review. This novel’s takes on race, from its condemnation of old South racism to its equal treatment of white and black characters, are so strident I was sure the author had to be African-American, but Grau, who will turn 89 this year, is white, born and raised in New Orleans. It’s an angry novel, and with good reason.

21. Gilead – Marilynne Robinson. (2005) My review. I still think Housekeeping, her debut novel, is her best work, but this book, which kicked off a trilogy of stories about one family in a small Iowa town, also showcases Robinson’s beautiful writing and deeply empathetic characterizations, written as a journal from Reverend John Ames to his young son.

22. The Magnificent Ambersons – Booth Tarkington. (1919) The Ambersons become less magnificent as the novel progresses, tracing the decline of the wealthy, aristocratic Indianapolis family, usurped by industrialists who earned their riches. Orson Welles adapted it for his acclaimed 1942 film.

23. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon. (2001) My review. Too long by 150 pages, K&C still brings the boundless imagination of Chabon’s Hugo-winning novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union in a complex plot that involves comic books, professional magicians, the Nazis, and the problems faced by Jewish emigrants and closeted gays in mid-20th century America.

24. The Late George Apley – John Phillips Marquand. (1938) My review. Marquand created the detective character Mr. Moto, who appeared in six novels and numerous stories and films, but this was a more serious work, a devious satire of Boston’s upper class and the suffocating nature of privilege and the need to keep up appearances.

25. The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead. (2017) My review. The most recent winner was an obvious choice, an imaginative alternate history where the Underground Railroad was an actual railroad, built underground, that ferried escaping slaves out of the deep south, but often brought them into equally difficult circumstances as they fled north.

26. Lonesome Dove – Larry McMurtry. (1986) My review. The sweeping western epic that launched a critically acclaimed TV mini-series and is now part of a quartet of books that run 2600 pages, its wide scope contrasts with the very simple story at its heart of a friendship between two very different men. I am still mad that Gus had to leave his sourdough biscuit starter behind, though.

27. Foreign Affairs – Alison Lurie. (1985) My review. Lurie’s short novel of two Americans abroad in London embarking on different, unexpected love affairs is a beautiful study of a pair of characters and a meditation on loneliness even in the busiest of locales.

28. Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell. (1937) My review. Yep, it’s pretty racist, and that’s hard to overlook from today’s vantage point. The story itself is a sweeping epic of the ante- and postbellum American South, and Mitchell created two of literature’s most memorable characters in Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler.

29. Journey in the Dark – Martin Flavin. (1944) Mostly out of print at this point, Journey gives us Sam Braden, an ambitious young man in 1880s Iowa who wants material and social success but finds they don’t fulfill him when he achieves everything he sought.

30. The Hours – Michael Cunningham. (1999) My one-paragraph review. Combining three related narratives that share ideas but neither time nor place, The Hours builds on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway literally and thematically, even improving it by making it more accessible without undermining her emphasis on the beauty of quotidian details.

31. The Bridge of San Luis Rey – Thornton Wilder. (1928) Wilder won three Pulitzers, two for Drama and one for the Novel for this book, in which a Peruvian friar attempts to learn all he can about five victims of a bridge collapse in 1714 so he can find evidence of divine providence in the catastrophe.

32. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway. (1953) An old fisherman heads out to sea. He hasn’t caught a fish in months. He and a boy talk about Joe DiMaggio. The man catches a fish. Some sharks eat it. Life is pointless. Subordinate clauses are for the weak.

33. The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters – Robert Lewis Taylor. (1959) A darker picaresque that alternates humorous and graphic elements, Taylor’s book, which later became an ABC television series, follows the title character on a wagon train headed from Missouri to California in the wake of the gold rush, along with his dissolute doctor father, a journey which brings them disaster, fortunes, and many very bad decisions.

34. The Killer Angels – Michael Shaara. (1975) My review. Shaara might be familiar to the baseball fans among you for his book For the Love of the Game, published posthumously and later adapted into a sappy movie. The Killer Angels is a historical novel of the battle of Gettysburg that hews closely to actual events and has earned praise for its accurate depiction of war.

35. Arrowsmith – Sinclair Lewis. (1926) A debatable entry, as Lewis declined the prize, but unlike later controversies like Gravity’s Rainbow (recommended by the committee, rejected by the board), the Board actually did sign off on this title winning in its year. The book tells the story of a young, idealistic doctor, Martin Arrowsmith, who faces a real-world ethical dilemma during a breakout of bubonic plague when he has an untested, unproven treatment available to him. I thought the setup was strong, but Lewis couldn’t figure out how to stick the landing. Also, I keep hearing Dr. Dre saying, “And no, this ain’t Arrowsmith.”

36. The Sympathizer – Nguyen, Viet Thanh. (2016) My review. Nguyen, a professor of English and American Studies at USC, won with this debut novel narrated by a Vietnamese double agent who has returned to Vietnam and been captured as an enemy of the very state he helped to win the war against the United States.

37. Tales of the South Pacific – James A. Michener. (1948) My review A short story novel, where they’re all tightly connected but each has a self-contained narrative, this winner was later adapted into the hit Rodgers & Hammerstein musical South Pacific. It’s a very ‘inside baseball’ look at American sailors in World War II, interacting with natives on various islands that had no actual stake in the war, and preparing for an amphibious invasion of an unnamed island.

38. Early Autumn – Louis Bromfield. (1927) Bromfield’s depiction of a decaying wealthy Protestant family in Massachusetts takes square aim at the hypocrisy of old-world values, incorporating Shakespearean romantic tragedy but suffering somewhat from the dated nature of the plot.

39. Ironweed – William Kennedy. (1984) My review. The final book in Kennedy’s Albany trilogy gives us Francis Phelan, a broken-down alcoholic ex-ballplayer trying to make amends with estranged son Billy, the protagonist of the preceding book in the series.

40. A Summons to Memphis – Peter Taylor. (1987) My review. The summons of the title brings Phillip Carver back to Memphis to see his father, now 81, remarry a younger woman, much to the consternation of his spinster sisters, reopening old wounds from childhood in a plot that borrows slightly from King Lear.

41. American Pastoral – Philip Roth. (1998) My review. Probably higher on most others’ rankings, but I can’t get past Swede, the main character, leaving his daughter in that flophouse once he has finally found her. The development of his character grinds to a halt at that point and it swamped the positives that came before.

42. The Way West – A. B. Guthrie, Jr.. (1950) My review. If the video game Oregon Trail were a book, this would be it.

43. The Yearling – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. (1939) The only young adult novel to win the Pulitzer, The Yearling is the story of a boy and the fawn he takes in as a pet, only to find that he can’t tame the wild creature.

44. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides. (2003) My review. Although the protagonist, an intersex person named Cal, is memorable, the tangled narrative here never quite came together for me, and there’s a weirdly moral aspect as if the genetic mutation is some sort of divine punishment for the act that sets the novel in motion.

45. The Fixer – Bernard Malamud. (1967) My review. The novel that gave us the quote “There’s no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew.” This is a fictionalized version of the story of a Jewish man falsely accused of killing a 13-year-old boy and then imprisoned for two years before he was given a trial.

46. The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt. (2014) My review. One of the most criticized winners since I started paying attention to this stuff for its pop-fiction leanings, The Goldfinch is actually quite well-plotted and doesn’t talk down to its readers, although Tartt, like Sinclair Lewis, can’t quite figure out how to wrap up the book.

47. The Known World – Edward P. Jones. (2004) My review. A novel of slavery, and of slave stories, none more gripping than the true tale of Henry “Box” Brown, the slave who mailed himself to abolitionists in Philadelphia. And the known world loves it when you don’t get down…

48. The Confessions of Nat Turner – William Styron. (1968) My review. Although this novel frequently appears on “greatest books” lists, including TIME‘s list of the 100 greatest novels since the magazine began publication, the cultural appropriation here is itself offensive, as is the portrayal of some white slaveowners as kind and black men as the violent rapists that white Southerners long made them out to be.

49. A Death in the Family – James Agee. (1958) My review. The other posthumous winner of this award, Agee died of a heart attack at 45, leaving a wife and three children (plus another by a previous marriage). This autobiographical novel fictionalizes the death of Agee’s own father in a car accident when he was just five years old. I loathed it when I read it, but I do understand it more today now that I’m older.

50. So Big! – Edna Ferber. (1925) My review. A somewhat dated novel of the battle between materialist and artistic values, the book draws its title from the sing-song line parents and grandparents say to infants.

51. Dragon’s Teeth – Upton Sinclair. (1943) My review. One of Sinclair’s Lanny Budd novels, Dragon’s Teeth is the closest thing to an adventure story among the winners, with Budd heading into the hornet’s nest of Nazi Germany to try to save a Jewish friend who has been sent to a concentration camp.

52. The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck. (1932) The first Pulitzer winner I ever read, back in seventh grade, which likely colors my view of the novel today; I do remember understanding protagonist Wang Lung’s single-minded ambition, but not his betrayal of his faithful wife.

53. Andersonville – MacKinlay Kantor. (1956) My review.A dense historical novel retelling the horrors of the Confederate prison camp in Georgia by this name; it’s an arduous read, but for what it is, and what Kantor wanted to say, it’s well done.

54. March – Geraldine Brooks. (2006) My review. I’ve never been a huge fan of continuation works or parallel novels, even when the source material is something I enjoyed. March is the story of the father in Little Women, absent for much of that work while serving as a chaplain in the Civil War. The story is marred by the introduction of an absurd romance between the title character and a slave he meets.

55. The Optimist’s Daughter – Eudora Welty. (1973) My review. A short novel about a woman who goes home to care for her dying father, who had surgery for a detached retina, and encounters both his unpleasant second wife and her own memories of childhood.

56. Alice Adams – Booth Tarkington. (1922) Alice may have been more of a feminist hero at the time of the novel’s publication, but the novel, still boosted by Tarkington’s prose, hasn’t aged well at all.

57. A Visit from the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan. (2011) My review. The best example on this list of a good book ruined by a bad ending, as the final chapter-story here is just embarrassing to read (in a “hello, fellow kids!” way).

58. Independence Day – Richard Ford. (1996) I didn’t like The Sportswriter, to which this is a sequel; at least here, Bascombe has grown up and recognized his agency in his own life.

59. Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner. (1972) If you wanted to know all about the mining business in the Old West, well, this is the novel for you.

60. Olive Kitteridge – Elizabeth Strout. (2009) My review. The book behind the HBO miniseries, this one fell flat for me because the title character is kind of a shrew.

61. The Edge of Sadness – Edwin O’Connor. (1962) My review. A dark but not hopeless novel about a Catholic priest who is also a recovering alcoholic as he tries to put his career back together with a return to his hometown.

62. His Family – Ernest Poole. (1918) Three books on this list borrowed (or at least appeared to) structural elements from King Lear; here the crotchety family patriarch can’t get his three adult daughters to listen to him, but they do largely reconcile before his death.

63. A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain – Robert Olen Butler. (1993) My review. A collection of short stories written from the perspective of Vietnamese immigrants living in Louisiana in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, written by a white American who served three years there and fell in love with Vietnamese culture.

64. Advise and Consent – Allen Drury. (1960) My review. It’s so cute to think about the Senate actually considering the merits of any nominee put before it for confirmation. What lovely days those must have been.

65. Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer – Steven Millhauser. (1997) My one-paragraph review. A hackneyed story of an ambitious young American entrepreneur who keeps aiming for the next big thing and finds the goal illusory.

66. House Made of Dawn – N. Scott Momaday. (1969) My review. More notable for the fact that Momaday was the first Native American to win the prize than for the book itself.

67. Honey in the Horn – Harold L. Davis. (1936) A seriocomic novel of pioneer life in Oregon around the turn of the 20th century; its humorous elements have not aged well.

68. A Thousand Acres – Jane Smiley. (1992) My review. A direct adaptation of King Lear into modern-day Iowa, told from the perspective of Ginny (Goneril), with an added layer of hidden sexual abuse and twisted family hatred.

69. Humboldt’s Gift – Saul Bellow. (1976) I’ve never understood the critical acclaim for Bellow’s novels, having now read four of them and liked just one, Henderson the Rain King. This bloated book, built out of a short story, criticizes the commercial world’s encroachment on the fine arts, but it feels like it won because Bellow was a three-time bridesmaid by the time of its nomination.

70. Breathing Lessons – Anne Tyler. (1989) The story of the cracks that have grown in a long-term marriage, packaged in the sort of novel you might find in an airport bookstore.

71. One of Ours – Willa Cather. (1923) Not Cather’s best, or second best, but her top two books were both published before the awards existed.

72. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter – Katherine Anne Porter. (1966) Porter had a commercial success in her novel Ship of Fools, but won the Pulitzer for this collection of relatively long stories, many focused on the American South, which also won the National Book Award.

73. In This Our Life – Ellen Glasgow. (1942) My review. Depressing as hell.

74. Laughing Boy – Oliver La Farge. (1930) A Navajo boy falls in love with another Native American girl, but her education in white schools aimed at assimilation complicates their relationship.

75. Tinkers – Paul Harding. (2010) My review. Never judge a book by its cover, as the packaging for Tinkers is far more appealing than the dull book within.

76. The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields. (1995) A long, meandering fictional autobiography of a woman in search of her purpose in life, which is marred from the start by the death of her mother while giving birth.

77. Scarlet Sister Mary – Julia Peterkin. (1929) My review. Peterkin made a valiant effort here to tell the story of a poor black woman unrepentant about her desire to live life on her own terms, but the dialect she uses is painful to read now, and the depiction of the title character is stilted.

78. Lamb in His Bosom – Caroline Miller. (1934) An overly earnest historical novel of the antebellum South.

79. The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford – Jean Stafford. (1970) The Guardian called the tone of her writing “lugubrious,” as if that were some sort of compliment.

80. The Able McLaughlins – Margaret Wilson. (1924) My review. A moralizing novel that seems to blame a rape victim for the assault, and suffers from a staccato unfurling of the plot as well.

81. Years of Grace – Margaret Ayer Barnes. (1931) My review. A decent idea that never really goes anywhere, possibly because it was published at a time when more freedom for women was inconceivable.

82. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love – Oscar Hijuelos. (1990) I read this ages ago, and remember being distinctly turned off by how women were depicted in the novel and treated by the characters within it.

83. Now in November – Josephine Winslow Johnson. (1935) This is the story of a poor farming family slowly starving to death. Hard pass.

84. The Town – Conrad Richter. (1951) Boring. Granted, it’s part of a trilogy, and I didn’t read the rest, but I doubt the other two parts were action-packed.

85. The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx. (1994) This also won the National Book Award, but I found it crass and aimless.

86. Rabbit Is Rich – John Updike. (1982) My review. Rabbit was an asshole.

87. Rabbit At Rest – John Updike. (1991) My review. And he certainly didn’t deserve four books or two Pulitzers.

88. A Fable – William Faulkner. (1955) My review. I love me some Faulkner, but let’s call this what it is – a failed experiment. Faulkner wanted to write his Ulysses, but this book is just as impenetrable without the humor or insight of Joyce.

89. The Store – Thomas Sigismund Stribling. (1933) My review. It’s not a terrible book, but it’s terribly racist, even when Stribling may have thought he was being fair.

90. Guard of Honor – James Gould Cozzens. (1949) An absolutely dreadful read in every respect – prose, plot, and character – and one that does a disservice to the members of the armed forces you might expect it to honor. Despite receiving praise in its day, it has sunk without a trace beneath a cavalcade of superior novels of World War II.

Ranking 2017 movies.

So I finally saw Loveless, the one film I thought I had to see before I could put together a ranking of all the 2017 films I saw, which can also serve as an index of my reviews. I still have a few I’m waiting to see in theaters or on demand, including The Insult, Foxtrot, In the Fade, The Other Side of Hope, and Mary and the Witch’s Flower, which I’ll add to this post when I see & review them. I have seen all nine Academy Award for Best Picture nominees, all five Best Animated Feature nominees, all five Best Documentary Feature nominees, and four of the five Best Foreign Language Film nominees. All links go to my reviews on this site; there are a few animated films I never bothered to review near the bottom.

1. The Florida Project.
2. Dunkirk.
3. Loveless.
4. A Fantastic Woman.
5. The Shape of Water.
6. Columbus.
7. Phantom Thread.
8. The Big Sick.
9. Call Me By Your Name.
10. Get Out
11. Logan Lucky.
12. The Girl Without Hands.
13. Lady Bird.
14. On Body and Soul.
15. City of Ghosts.
16. The Sense of an Ending.
17. Coco.
18. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
19. In This Corner of the World.
20. A Ghost Story.
21. The Wound.
22. Icarus.
23. The Breadwinner.
24. Faces Places.
25. I, Tonya.
26. Graduation.
27. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail.
28. Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
29. Dealt.
30. Marjorie Prime.
31. Ethel & Ernest.
32. Our Souls at Night.
33. Last Men in Aleppo.
34. The Square.
35. I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore.
36. The Beguiled.
37. The Lego Batman Movie.
38. The Post.
39. Loving Vincent.
40. Darkest Hour.
41. War Machine.
42. In Search of Israeli Cuisine.
43. Good Time.
44. The Lost City of Z.
45. Ferdinand.
46. Birdboy: The Forgotten Children.
47. Strong Island.
48. Baby Driver.
49. My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea.
50. Boss Baby.

Top 17 albums of 2017.

Better late than never, I hope: here’s my somewhat delayed ranking of my top albums of 2017. I thought it was a good year on the album front, better than 2016, including a lot of albums that I’d say I liked halfway – records with maybe two to four really good songs on them but that couldn’t sustain it through the deeper tracks – and twenty-odd records good enough for me to consider here. You can also see my ranking of the top 100 songs of 2017 for reference.

Other albums I liked but didn’t rank: White Reaper, Wavves, Ride, Queens of the Stone Age, Japandroids.

Previous years’ album rankings: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013.

17. Afghan Whigs – In Spades. I had missed the Whigs’ comeback album in 2014, but this year’s release delivered in the same way, a more mature, refined sound without losing that essential energy that made them indie darlings in the 1990s.

16. Phoenix – Ti Amo. I thought 2013’s Bankrupt! was a huge letdown after their Grammy-winning Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, but this year’s album, the band’s tribute to Italian disco music, was a bit of a bounceback, not quite up to their magnum opus’s heights but a stronger record throughout with more memorable singles, including the title track and “J-Boy.”

15. Akercocke – Renaissance in Extremis. I’d long thought of this British extreme metal act as something of a joke, as they seemed more interested in causing controversy with their black-metal lyrics and album covers than in writing great music … but this album, released after a decade-long breakup, is a masterpiece of highly technical death metal. I could do with fewer blast beats, but that’s just the price of entry for the genre. Other metal albums I liked in 2017 that didn’t make the list included Pallbearer’s Heartless and Satyricon’s Deep Calleth Upon Deep.

14. WATERS – Something More!. Van Pierszalowski’s group returns with a record full of concise power-pop tunes, putting two songs on my top 100 along with several other great tracks like “Molly is a Babe” and “Modern Dilemma.”

13. Washed Out – Mister Mellow. Ernest Greene’s third record is my favorite of his so far, still a bit uneven, but that’s because there are almost too many ideas on the album. This also landed two songs on my top 100, and I’d also recommend “Floating By” and “Burn Out Blues.”

12. Hundred Waters – Communicating. Not quite up to the level of their debut The Moon Rang Like a Bell, Communicating works more as an expansion of the band’s unusual sound than as a collection of singles. “Particle,” “Wave to Anchor,” “Prison Guard,” “Blanket Me,” and the title track are all highlights, but I think this record is best enjoyed as a listen straight through.

11. Quicksand – Interiors. There were some great comeback albums this year from bands that hadn’t released records in over twenty years, including releases from Ride and Slowdive, but none surprised me more than Quicksand’s Interiors, which put two songs on my top 100 in “Fire This Time” and “Illuminant” and is a tremendous document of a band that hasn’t lost its signature sound yet has also matured, at least on record, during its 22-year absence.

10. Ten Fe – Hit the Light. This album is almost too anachronistic to find an audience in 2017, as the band’s indie-pop sound has a soft-rock vibe that would have been right at home in the 1970s or early 1980s. They had one song on my 2016 list, “Overflow,” that’s on this album, plus two more on this year’s list, “Twist Your Arm” and “In the Air,” with “Elodie” and “Turn” also highlights.

9. Death from Above – Outrage! Is Now. A bit like Royal Blood with a little more dance/rhythm sensibility … or maybe Sleigh Bells with some actual sense of melody … but man does it work, a huge step forward from their previous record. Pitchfork describes them as “dance-punk,” but I don’t hear that at all; they’re too polished to be punk, too hard-edged to be dance, but live somewhere in the grey areas between multiple genres. DfA had two songs on my top 100 this year, “Freeze Me” and “Never Swim Alone,” while “Nomad” and “Statues” are also strong.

8. Mastodon – Emperor of Sand. My favorite Mastodon album to date, with some more accessible tracks that don’t sacrifice any of the group’s trademark progressive-metal sound. “Show Yourself” is their most radio-friendly single ever, but “Steambreather,” “Sultan’s Curse,” and “Andromeda” are high points. Lest you think they’ve gone straight commercial, the album ends with an eight-minute epic track for the diehards.

7. Royal Blood – How Did We Get So Dark? “Lights Out” made my top ten, but unlike their debut record, this album has more good ideas than just the one that powers the lead single; “Hook, Line & Sinker” made my top 100, and I also keep going back to “Hole in Your Heart” and “Where Are You Now?” I did think the second single, “I Only Lie When I Love You,” was below the media on the album, but no one consults me on these decisions.

6. Daughter – Music from Before the Storm. I don’t think I’ve ever included a soundtrack on any of my year-end lists, but this record, recorded for a video game that was released in September, works extremely well on its own, a dense, atmospheric listen that molds Daughter’s dream-pop sound around a core idea to produce a compelling listen straight through. “Burn It Down” was my favorite track, but this record is much better enjoyed as a whole than in pieces.

5. INHEAVEN – INHEAVEN. The second-best debut album of the year for me, a record full of bombastic, old-fashioned heavy rock tracks that harken back to ’90s grunge, ’70s hard rock, and even earlier, led by “World on Fire” and “Bitter Town.”

4. New Pornographers – Whiteout Conditions. Do we just take A.C. Newman & Co. for granted at this point? This album sank with nary a trace, but it carried forward the tremendous pop sensibility of its predecessor, 2014’s Brill Bruisers, and I thought was a little better off for the absence of Dan Bejar, whose sound never quite melded with the rest of the group’s. The title track, “High Ticket Attractions,” and “Darling Shade” all made my top 100.

3. Sløtface – Try Not to Freak Out. These Norwegian punk-popsters first appeared on my radar with their 2016 EP Empire Records, and from there released a steady stream of great singles with witty, clever lyrics beyond their years. “Backyard,” “Pitted,” and “Nancy Drew” made my top 100, with “Magazine” a near miss, and there really aren’t any duds on the record at all.

2. Portugal. the Man – Woodstock. “Feel It Still” was my #1 song of the year, with two more songs on my top 100 and three more that I strongly considered (“Live in the Moment,” “Rich Friends,” “Tidal Wave”). I liked the sheer ambition of 2011’s In the Mountain In the Cloud, but it wasn’t until this record that Portugal. the Man converted their big ideas into a set of accessible pop gems that could give them mainstream success.

1. Beck – Colors. Featuring my #1 song of 2015, “Dreams,” plus three songs from this year’s list, and really just one song I would say I don’t like (“Wow” doesn’t really fit this record’s exuberance), this was an easy call for my top album of 2017. Beck is such a musical genius that he can go from 2014’s maudlin Morning Phase to this record’s enormously textured, uptempo, worldly sound and still maintain his essential … um, Beck-ness. Even when he produces something I don’t care for, I can still appreciate the brilliance behind it. Colors, however, is a masterpiece, probably my favorite album of his thirteen to date, the best representation of his complex, imaginative sound so far.

Top 100 boardgames, 2017 edition.

I first posted a list of favorite boardgames in November of 2008, just ten titles, only a couple of which were Eurogames, because I’d really barely started on the hobby at that point. I had seen a list somewhere else that I thought was bad, so I made my own list, which in hindsight wasn’t very good either, but it turned out to be an inflection point for me because so many of you responded with suggestions. I started to play some of those, and got a few as gifts, and the more I played, the more I realized how much I enjoyed the games themselves and just the hobby as a whole. I’d liked games as a kid, but games back then were mostly terrible, and the ones on the shelf in the coat closet – Monopoly, Scrabble, Sorry! – were all kind of terrible. (Don’t get me started on Scrabble; any game that requires preparation, such as memorizing word lists, is no longer a game. It is work. I have enough work in my life, thanks.)

The best boardgames combine some kind of puzzle that gets me thinking (or scheming), some social interaction, and that hard-to-define element of fun. I like learning, I like math, I like coming up with ideas and seeing how they work out – especially in the no-consequences world of boardgames. And while I enjoy playing games on mobile devices against AI players, just for the mental workout, I’d much rather play games live, which puts more emphasis on the last two criteria. Now that my daughter is eleven, and old enough to play any game I might bring home, it’s become an even more central part of my life. She even came with me to day three of PAX Unplugged this weekend, and told me as we walked out near closing time that she wished we had a few more hours to keep playing.

This year’s list is my tenth one, the second year I’ve ranked 100 games, which is probably fewer than half of the games I’ve ever tried if we count demos, apps, and online play. 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 hit my table.

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 have omitted some titles I’ve tried that are not available at all in the U.S. yet, and have several games here to review or test that I haven’t played at all or enough to rank, including Raiders of the North Sea, Photosynthesis, London, Wasteland Delivery Express, Clank!, and more.

100. Seikatsu. A new abstract game with gorgeous, well-made components, where two or three players compete to fill out a board with tiles that score once when they’re placed but score a different way at game-end – and where each player’s perspective on the board changes the scoring. My only complaint here is that it’s a bit pricey at $40 for this kind of game; you’re paying for components, but not for the gaming experience. Complexity: Low.

99. Hey That’s My Fish. The rare kids’ boardgame that is still a fun play for adults, where players compete to score points by placing and moving their penguins across a board of hexagonal ice tiles … but the hitch is that the tile you leave then drops into the ocean, so the board changes as you go and you can even trap an opponent’s penguin if you plan it right. The app version, the only way I’ve played this game, includes some great animations, and you can unlock a number of alternate boards via achievements, most of which are low-hanging fruit. This and Blokus are the two best games specifically aimed at younger players that we’ve tried. Complexity: Low.

98. Russian Railroads. Heavy, no-luck strategy game that combines some engine-building with an extremely well-balanced scoring system that allows multiple paths to the 300-point range where you’ll typically finish. Your board has three tracks that you will try to build with multiple train colors, each worth more points than the previous one, while you can also hit various bonuses on those tracks or on the separate factory track, and you can hire engineers that give you additional action types that tend to be even more beneficial. And then there are locomotives, which you need to get to earn any points for your track advancement, but which are scarce (in fact, my one complaint is that they’re too scarce) and become hotly contested. If you like luck-free, complex strategy games, this is up your alley. Complexity: High.

97. Maori: A light two- to four-player game, relatively high in the luck department for this list, with more opportunities to screw your opponent in a two player game, whereas with four players you’re focusing more on your own strategy and less on others’. In the game, players compete to fill out their own boards of 16 spaces by drawing island tiles from a central 4×4 grid, where the available selections depend on the movement of a boat token that travels around that grid’s perimeter. Players must form completed islands to receive points, and lose points for open spaces. Currently out of print, but amazon frequently has copies through marketplace sellers as does boardgamegeek. Complexity: Low.

96. Spyrium. Full review. The steampunk theme didn’t do much for me, but there’s a decent game underneath it of very long-term planning – what you build in phase one really determines how much you’ll be able to accomplish in phase three. From the designer of Caylus, Spyrium requires players to collect the fictional energy-dense crystal of that name (dilithium much?) to build factories that produce more of it or convert it into cash. The real key to the game are the technologies available early in the game that can lead to lower costs later on; skip those, or buy the wrong ones, and you’re sunk. Complexity: Medium-high.

95. Port Royal. I believe this was just released in the U.S. for the first time this year, and it’s great value at about $14. Port Royal is a push-your-luck card game where you’re trying to collect points by buying point cards and completing expedition cards, gaining money by drawing ship cards with gold on them … but if you keep drawing and two ships of the same color appear, you bust. There’s also an engine-building element here that does give it a strategic element beyond shouting “No whammy!” Complexity: Medium-low.

94. Santorini. Full review. Abstract two-player game invented by a math professor, with a pasted-on Greek mythology theme that opens up a number of variants that tweak the base game’s rules. Very chess-lite, which I mean as a compliment. Complexity: Medium.

93. 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.

92. Flash Point: Fire Rescue. Full review. A new cooperative boardgame that borrows very heavily from Pandemic but shifts to a new setting – a burning building with victims to be rescued – and includes different constraints and tools for fighting the common foe. I think Pandemic does this better, not just because Matt Leacock invented this subgenre but because the play itself, especially the way the foe (viruses) spreads across the board, so Flash Point is better if you love Pandemic and want more of the same but on a different board. A good deal right now at $24. Complexity: Medium.

91. Tak. Full review. Not yet in print, although it’s supposed to be delivered to Kickstarter backers this month. This very simple, chess-like (or chess-lite) two-player game is based on a description in Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles novels, but unlike those massive tomes, this game is quick to get into and to play. There’s some strategic density here below the surface despite the limited number of pieces. Each player tries to be the first to construct a path across the board (usually 5×5), but players can stack certain tiles and knock some over, and you quickly end up in a back-and-forth pattern that forms the meat of the game. Complexity: Medium-low.

90. Bottom of the 9th. Yep, it’s a baseball game, but a very simple, streamlined one that just focuses on one half-inning of “play” and works primarily as a game-theory, deduction exercise – one player is the team at bat, the other in the field, and each is really trying to guess what the other player will choose to do. Each player has cards representing the ballplayers, with certain abilities and bonuses depending on the outcome of the two players’ choices – a pitch low or high, inside or away. Very quick to play, with many expansions that add some quirks to the action. Complexity: Low.

89. The Battle for Hill 218. A simple-not-that-simple two-player card game with a high degree of blowing-stuff-up-ness. Two players compete to take control of the hill of the game’s title by placing cards representing different military units that have specific attack and defense skills – some merely attacking an adjacent card, some able to attack deep behind enemy lines. The Kickstarter was a success, and they reprinted this game and the rethemed Battle for Sector 219, but it appears that copies aren’t easy to find. I’ve played and liked the iOS app version. Complexity: Medium-low.

88. Bora Bora. Bora Bora is one of the best-looking games we own and plays like a more complex version of the Castles of Burgundy. Two to four players compete to occupy territories on a central board of five islands, then using resources they acquire there to build on their individual player cards … but that’s just one of many ways to gain points in this game, where you can also hire natives to perform tasks or earn shells or status points, and you can trade in shells for jewelry worth points at game-end, and you can get bonuses for collecting certain combinations of cards, natives, or resources. It’s almost too much – you have so many options the game can slow down if players start overthinking it – but if you like Castles of Burgundy this is a good follow-up purchase. Complexity: Medium.

87. Saloon Tycoon. Full review. A great-looking game that plays well too. Players are indeed saloon owners and must build their taverns across and up – buying cubes that allow them to add second and third floors to their establishments, adding rooms that confer different values and often work in concert with other rooms or certain cards to rack up more points. It’s fun, it’s just lightly competitive – most of what you’re doing is building your own site, but there are a couple of small chances to steal something from an opponent or hand him/her a damaging card. And if you’re comfortable with the presence of a Brothel card (it’s not explained), it’s fine for kids too. Complexity: Medium-low.

86. Mole Rats in Space. Full review. A cooperative game from the designer of Pandemic and Forbidden Desert, this title is specifically aimed at kids, stripping out most of the complexity of those games and reducing the cooperative mechanism to its most basic parts, with players representing astronaut mole-rats on a ship that has been invaded by snakes. The snakes keep coming while the players must try to bring four objects to the center of the board so they can escape.

85. Eight Minute Empire. App review. Haven’t played the physical game yet, but the app is great. I love the idea of a quick game that can satisfy the 4X itch – that’s eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate – in a few minutes with just a handful of rules. Players move out on the map from a central starting region, adding units, collecting goods for points, and trying to control regions or continents before the game ends. The money you start with is all you get, so managing that is a huge part of the game. Complexity: Medium.

84. Valeria: Card Kingdoms. Full review. This game knocked Machi Koro off my list completely, because it fixes that game’s major flaw – players can get totally left behind by a few bad dice rolls. In Valeria, you acquire cards that pay out on certain rolls, with each individual die counting as well as the sum of the two. You gain strength and magic tokens, and then use them to defeat monsters or capture domains for victory points and new benefits. It also has a bit of the Dominion feel in its expansions and ability to mix and match the available cards for enough combinations to last several lifetimes. Complexity: Medium-low.

83. Forbidden Desert. Full review. A medium-weight cooperative game from the designer of Pandemic (a top ten game for me, and the best coop game I’ve played), Forbidden Desert has players trying to escape a sandstorm on a board that changes every game, on which a sandstorm threatens to kill them all if dehydration doesn’t get them first. It’s more luck-driven than Pandemic, which doesn’t suit my particular tastes, but overall is a little quicker to learn. The iOS app is great, but it’s a bastard. Complexity: Medium.

82. Bruges. Full review. An indirect descendant of Agricola, Bruges also has players adding abilities from a giant deck, encouraging long-range planning that racks up points if you get the right cards played in the right combinations. You don’t have to feed your family here; instead you’re a noble in the beautiful Belgian town of (fookin’) Bruges, building stuff for points, because that’s how these games all work. It’s a pretty game as well, although I take a few points off for the disjointed scoring mechanisms. Possibly out of print. Complexity: Medium to medium-high.

81. La Flamme Rouge. Full review. A bike-racing game for two to four players, where each player runs a team of two racers on the board, and must move both of them each turn by working through a small deck of movement cards that, over the course of the game, becomes bogged down with Exhaustion cards. You can also ride in another player’s wake and gain free movement points each turn if you play it correctly, so making a big move for an early lead may not be such a hot idea. The game comes with several alternate board configurations, which gives it more replayability. Complexity: Medium-low.

80. Asara. Full review. Light strategy game that feels to us like a simpler, cleaner implementation of Alhambra’s theme and even some of its mechanics, without the elegance of the best family-strategy games like Stone Age or Small World. Players compete to build towers in five different colors, earning points for building the tallest ones or building the most, while dealing with a moderate element of randomness in acquiring tower parts. It’s also among the best-looking games we own, if that’s your thing. Just $25 as of this writing. Complexity: Low.

79. The Blood of an Englishman. Full review. An asymmetrical two-player game where one player is Jack and the other the Giant, playing on a tableau of five columns of cards. Each player has specific goals to win and distinct actions to take by moving or removing cards that either complete his/her own sets or make the opponent’s task more difficult. Tremendous artwork too. It’s $9 right now. Complexity: Low.

78. Alhambra: Full review. One of my least favorite Spiel winners, with a good tile-placement and scoring system, but the method used to acquire money is an awful mechanic that really screws the game up (for me) with more than two players. One of the cooler-looking games in our collection. There are many, many expansions, but I haven’t tried any. Complexity: Medium.

77. A Game of Thrones: The Card Game. Full review. A very rich deckbuilder and “Living Card Game” (meaning there will be frequent expansion packs) that is extremely true to its theme, with fairly simple mechanics that lead to very intricate gameplay and maneuvering … kind of like the source material. I hated the book, but love this game. The only negative is time, as it takes well over an hour to play a full game, as much as two hours with four players if no one gets an early lead. Complexity: Medium.

76. Scotland Yard: App review. One of the few old-school games on the board, and one I’ve only played in app form. One player plays the criminal mastermind (I don’t know if he’s really a mastermind, but doesn’t he have to be for the narrative to work?) trying to escape the other players, playing detectives, by using London’s transportation network of cabs, buses, the Tube, and occasionally a boat along the Thames. It’s recommended for ages 10 and up but there’s nothing on here a clever six- or seven-year-old couldn’t handle if playing alongside an adult, and like Tobago has a strong deductive-reasoning component that makes it a little bit educational as well as fun. Complexity: Low.

75. Baseball Highlights: 2045: Full review. I was floored at how much I enjoyed this game; it is baseball-themed, but it’s really a fast-moving deckbuilder where your deck only has 15 cards in it and you get to upgrade it constantly between “games.” The names on the player cards are all combinations of names of famous players from history – the first name from one, the last from another, like “Cy Clemens” – except for the robots. It’s not a baseball simulation game, but that might be why I liked it, because it was easier to just let the theme go and play the game for what it is. It’s down this year as we’ve found the replay value is limited, even with the expansions. Complexity: Medium-low.

74. Bärenpark. Full review. A bit of Patchwork or Tetris but for more than two players. Each player tries to build out his/her zoo – for bears, of course – by placing tiles of various shapes and dimensions. Most tiles earn points, and there are bonuses for filling in entire boards. Covering certain squares allows a player to take better tiles from the central supply. End game is a little wonky, as it’s too easy for players to end up without a legal move in the last turn or two. Currently out of stock everywhere. Complexity: Medium-low.

73. Camel Up: Full review. Winner of the Spiel des Jahres award in 2014, Camel Up revolves around the “Camel Cup,” a race around the board involving … well, camels, yes, but camel meeples that stack, so when one lands on a space occupied by one or more camels already, they form a pile that moves as one. Players get to place little bets on each round of the race and on the ultimate winner and loser. Strategy is light, and it works for up to 8 players – the more the merrier in our experience, because it just gets sillier (in a good way). My daughter loves this; I would say I just like it, but I ranked it here because any game that she asks to play is a good one in my book. Complexity: Low.

72. Lords of Waterdeep. I have only reviewed the app version of this game, and it apparently hews very closely to the physical version. Despite the grafted-on Dungeons and Dragons theme, it’s just a worker-placement game where players compete across eight rounds to acquire scarce resources, build buildings worth victory points, and occasionally sabotage other players. Agricola has similar mechanics and constraints, but its greater complexity makes for a more interesting game; Lords is better if you don’t want to spend an hour and a half playing one session. Complexity: Medium.

71. Ra. Full review. One of Reiner Knizia’s classics and one of the great auction games in the genre, Ra got a well-deserved reissue earlier this year from Asmodee. Players collect Egyptian artifacts in groups of tiles. On a turn, a player may bid on the group on display or choose to add another tile; most tiles are worth acquiring but the bag has a few ‘disaster’ tiles that force you to discard something of value. It’s a little long, but it’s a deep economic game with many paths to victory. Complexity: Medium-high.

70. Five Tribes. Full review. A very strong medium-strategy game from Days of Wonder, but one that hit some early backlash because of the heavy use of slaves within the game’s theme – as currency, no less. That’s been fixed in subsequent printings. The game uses an unusual mechanic where all of the meeples start the game on the board and players have to use a funky kind of move to remove as many as they can to gain additional points, goods, or powers. There’s a lot going on, but once you’ve learned everything you can do it’s not that difficult to play. Complexity: Medium.

69. 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.

68. Mysterium. Full review. A truly unique co-op game where one player plays the ghost of a murder victim and must communicate clues to the other players, who play mediums, using vision cards which are, by design, ambiguous. It’s a game that tests your creativity and rewards imagination, rather than piling on complexity to increase its difficulty. It’s already been expanded as well with more cards, some of which are just more suspects or weapons but most of which are new vision cards which make for an even more oneiromantic evening. Complexity: Low.

67. Morels. Full review for Paste. A 2012 release, 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. Complexity: Low.

66. Forged in Steel. Full review. A late 2016 release that has been consistently hard to find – it’s out of stock everywhere right now, without so much as a listing on amazon – Forged in Steel is a very complex economic and engine-building game that works because it’s so imaginative and integrates its citybuilding theme so well into game play. Players are building out a Colorado mining town, putting up different building types, controlling mines, and competing for votes to be the town’s Mayor. There’s also a newspaper stand on the board, with three headlines visible at a time, most of which alter game play in significant ways for that round. Complexity: High.

65. Yamatai. Full review. One of the most maligned releases of the year because … reasons? A Days of Wonder release from a well-regarded designer, Yamatai is a stunning game to look at, and manages to make some quirky mechanics work well over a game of manageable length, which I’d consider a big achievement considering how many games fail to do all that in a game under 90 minutes. Players place boats along tracks among the archipelago of islands on the board, but they can build on any island, even if they didn’t place those boats there – it’s the colors of the boats that matters, not who set them afloat. The ninja cards players can acquire are the real key, as many offer players greater benefits for certain core actions that can reap huge rewards if bought early in the game. Complexity: Medium.

64. Discoveries. A nice little gem recommended to me by someone on a boardgame forum I no longer frequent – how’s that for an explanation – with a Lewis & Clark theme of exploration where the players build up skills that allow them to undertake longer or more complicated exploration routes. I will say that I liked this game a lot more than my daughter did, even though I thought up front this would be a fast favorite for her; I think the theme didn’t grab her enough at first sight. Complexity: Medium.

63. Saint Petersburg. A classic Eurogame, recently reissued in German with better artwork, at which I am particularly bad for some reason. It’s all money and cards – you buy cards from the central supply, and each round has three separate scoring events, some of which provide money and some of which provide points. The unique aspect to Saint Petersburg is that you can gain discounts on future purchases by virtue of what you buy now: further copies of the same card cost one coin less for each copy you have, and some cards can be upgraded to more valuable versions, saving you the cost you paid for the card in the first place. I’ve played online a few times, and I found it becoming a bit repetitive over regular plays. Out of print in English, unfortunately. Complexity: Medium-low.

62. Lost Cities: Full review. This was once our favorite two-person game, a simple title from the prolific designer Reiner Knizia, and it’s quite portable since it can be played with nothing but the game cards. We’ve since moved on to some more complex two-player games, but for simplicity (without becoming dumb) this one is still an easy recommendation for me to give folks new to the genre. The deck comprises 12 cards in each of five colors, including cards numbered 2 through 10 and three “investment” cards to double, triple, or quadruple the profit or loss the player earns in that color. Players take turns drawing from the deck but may only place cards in increasing order, so if you draw a green 5 after you played the 6, tough luck. You can knock out a game in 15 minutes or less, so it’s one to play multiple times in a sitting. The iOS app is very slick and plays really quickly – a great one for killing a minute while you’re waiting in line. There is a Lost Cities board game, but I have never played it. Complexity: Low.

61. 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. We 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. I’ve moved this up a few spots this year after some replays, as 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.

60. 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.

59. Tobago. Full review. Solid family-strategy game with a kid-friendly theme of island exploration, hidden treasures, and puzzle-solving, without a lot of depth but high replay value through a variable board. Players place clue cards in columns that seek to narrow the possible locations of four treasures on the island, with each player placing a card earning a shot at the coins in that treasure – but a small chance the treasure, like the frogurt, will be cursed. The deductive element might be the game’s best attribute. The theme is similar to that of Relic Runners (a Days of Wonder game from 2014 that I didn’t like) but the game plays more smoothly. A bit overpriced right now at $50, though. Complexity: Low.

58. 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.

57. Agamemnon: (Link is not to amazon.) Full review. An absolute gem of an 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. Complexity: Low.

56. 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.

55. Quadropolis. Full review. The latest title from Days of Wonder has the company’s usual set of outstanding graphics and well-written rules, but as their games go this is on the more complex end of the spectrum. You’re trying to fill out your city board with tiles representing six or seven different building types; you’ll never be able to do or get everything you want, so the game requires some early decisions and some compromises. It’s a well-designed, well-balanced game, but I have it ranked here because it’s a little workish. Building a city is supposed to be fun, isn’t it, Mr. Sim? Complexity: Medum.

54. 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.

53. 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.

52. 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.

51. 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. Complexity: Medium.

50. Ex Libris. I used spot #50 as a placeholder last year for a game I loved on first play; I’m doing that again with Ex Libris, of which I saw a demo at GenCon, then played in full (and won!) in the new games section at PAX Unplugged. I have a review copy and have it in my queue for a full review soon. Players collect cards showing (fake) books to go into that player’s library, which must be organized in alphabetical order to score at game-end. There are six categories of books, and in any game, one will be “banned” and cost you a point per book, while another will be a priority category that scores extra points for everyone. Each player will have his/her own special category to also collect for bonus points. There’s also a stability bonus for arranging your bookshelves well. You use action tiles to do everything in the game, sometimes just drawing and shelving cards, but often doing things like swapping cards, stealing them, sifting through the discards, or moving a shelf left or right. Just make sure you know your ABCs. Complexity: Medium.

49. Citadels. Full review. First recommended to me by a reader back in that 2008 post, Citadels didn’t hit my shelves until last winter, 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.

48. 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 about $8 for the whole kit and caboodle. Complexity: Low.

47. 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. 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).

46. Kingdomino. Full review. This year’s 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. Complexity: Medium-low.

45. 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. Out of print again. I’ve never played the designer’s next game, Lancaster, even though I have a used copy, but I just noticed it’s $13 on amazon. Complexity: Medium.

44. 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.

43. Skyward. Full review. One of the most visually striking new games of the year, Skyward also has a novel card-drafting mechanic where one player, the Warden, draws a fixed number of cards and then separates them into piles, one per player, in any way s/he wishes – so if the Warden wants to try to get a certain card, s/he would try to put it in a pile with less attractive cards. Players then take a pile apiece and can discard cards and/or point tokens to build, trying to maximize their points by playing cards that share colors or bonuses. It plays very quickly and the artwork is stellar. Complexity: Medium-low.

42. 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. Complexity: Medium.

41. 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. 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. Back in print for 2017. Complexity: Medium.

40. T’zolkin. T’zolkin 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 gears, though, are kind of badass. Complexity: High.

39. 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.

38. 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. Complexity: Low.

37. 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.

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. Go figure. And go get it. Complexity: Low.

35. Through the Desert: Full app review. 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. Out of print at the moment, but I heard at GenCon this year that it’s getting a reissue in 2018. Horse with no name sold separately. Complexity: Low.

34. 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.

33. 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. Complexity: Medium.

32. Thurn und Taxis: Full review. I admit to a particularly soft spot for this game, as I love games with very simple rules that require quick thinking with a moderate amount of foresight. (I don’t care for chess, which I know is considered the intellectual’s game, because I look three or four moves ahead and see nothing but chaos.) 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. I’ve played this a ton online, and there’s a clear optimal strategy, but to pull it off you do need a little help from the card draws. Complexity: Low.

31½. Terraforming Mars. Full review. The best complex strategy game of 2016, 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 twice, with Hellas & Elysium last year and Venus Next appearing at PAX Unplugged. Complexity: High.

31. Whistle Stop. Full review coming soon. 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.

30. 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. Complexity: Medium.

29. 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. 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. More than half off today at amazon at $19.59. Complexity: Medium.

28. 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.

27. Ingenious. Full app review. Ingenious another Reiner Knizia title, a two-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 catch: The app, which I owned and reviewed, is now gone from all app stores, because of a trademark dispute (and maybe more). It may return under a new name, Axio Hexagonal, but it’s not anywhere yet. Boo. Complexity: Low.

26. 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.

25. Kodama: The Tree Spirits. Full review. Definitely among the cutest games we’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. Complexity: Low.

24. Battle Line: Full review. Reissued this year as Schotten Totten – same game, different theme, better art, $5 cheaper. Among the best two-player games we’ve found, designed by Reiner Knizia, who is also behind half the 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.

23. 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. Complexity: Medium-low.

22. 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.

21. Caylus: Full app review. Another game I’ve only played in its 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 are probably the best I’ve seen alongside those of Agricola’s. Complexity: High.

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. Currently out of print; I was lucky to score a copy in trade. Complexity: High.

19. 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.

18. (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. We don’t pull this game out as much as we 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. Only four 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. We are fortunate to be in 22 A.C. Complexity: Medium-low.

17. Azul. Full review. The best new family-strategy game of 2017 (so far, I guess), 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.

16. 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. Complexity: Medium.

15. 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.

14. 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. My wife felt this game felt way too much like work; I enjoyed it more than that, 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.

13. Takenoko.Full review. If I tell you this is the cutest game we 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 are easy enough for my daughter to learn, 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.

12. 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. It’s the best new game I’ve seen this year. Complexity: High.

11. Stone Age: Full review. Really a tremendous game, with lots of real-time decision-making but simple mechanics and goals that first-time players always seem to pick up quickly. It’s also very hard to hide your strategy, so newbies can learn through mimicry – thus forcing veteran players to change it up on the fly. 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. We introduced my daughter to the game this year and she took to it right away, beating us on her second play. The base game has been out of print for over a year now, and a reader tells me the iOS app died with the 64-bit app-ocalypse. Complexity: Medium.

10. Samurai: Full review. I bought the physical game after a few months of playing the app, 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. Complexity: Medium/low.

9. 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. Complexity: Medium-low.

8. Jaipur: Full review. Jaipur is now our go-to 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.

7. 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. We 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, France/The Old West, comes out in February.

There’s also a kids’ version, available exclusively at Target, with a separate app for that as well. Complexity: Low.

6. 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, now eight, loves the game and is 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, made by the team at Days of Wonder, is amazing, and is available for iOS, Android, and Steam. I also like the four-in-one expansion for the base game, Cities of Splendor. Complexity: Low.

5. 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 are in April of season one, but season two is out already, so we are slackers. Complexity: Medium for the base game, medium-high for the Legacy game.

4. Dominion: Full review. I’ve condensed two Dominion entries into one this year, 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 we 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.

3. 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.

2. 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. We saw no dominant strategy, several that worked well, and nothing that was so complex that we couldn’t quickly pick it up after screwing up our 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 iPad app version is amazing too, with an Android port coming soon. Complexity: Medium.

1. Carcassonne: Full review. The best-of-breed iOS app has only increased my appreciation for Carcassonne, a game I still play regularly by myself, with my wife and daughter, and with friends here or online. 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. We 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. We also have Inns and Cathedrals, which we’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.

And, as with last year, my rankings of these games by how they play with just two players:

1. Jaipur
2. 7 Wonders Duel
3. Carcassonne
4. 7 Ronin
5. Baseball Highlights: 2045
5. Stone Age
6. Ticket to Ride
7. Splendor
8. Patchwork
9. Agamemnon
10. Dominion/Intrigue
11. Small World
12. Battle Line/Schotten Totten
13. Samurai
15. Castles of Burgundy
16. Morels
17. Ingenious
18. Azul
19. New Bedford
20. Cacao
21. Targi
22. Lost Cities
23. Pandemic
24. Blood of an Englishman
25. Jambo
26. Through the Desert
27. San Juan
28. Tak: A Beautiful Game
29. Santorini
30. The Fox in the Forest

Also, I get frequent requests for games that play well with five or more; I can confidently recommend 7 Wonders and Citadels, both of which handle 5+ right out of the box. Ticket to Ride is tight with five players, but that’s its maximum. Catan can handle 5 or 6 with an expansion, although it can result in a lengthy playing time. For more social games, One Night Ultimate Werewolf is best with five or more also, and I believe Crossfire, which I have yet to play but am planning to review, requires five players.