Sail.

Sail was one of the most unusual new games I played in 2023: a cooperative trick-taking game where you’re trying to jointly steer a ship around obstacles and sea monsters to reach the end of the path before you run out of turns or your ship takes too much damage. It’s a retheme of a Japanese game called Hameln Cave, published in a tiny box by the folks at Allplay, who specialize in publishing ‘big’ games in small boxes, including Pollen (a retheme of Reiner Knizia’s Samurai: the Card Game) and the underrated little dice-rolling game Sequioa.

Sail has a deck of cards in three suits where each number has a specific symbol on it, and the combination of symbols on the two cards played in each trick determines what happens on the map. You and your partner will each get a hand of cards, exchanging some before the first turn, and then you’ll play a series of tricks – without communicating with your partner – where you must follow suit if possible, which of course means trying to get rid of a suit and/or find a way to indicate what you have to your partner.

The map varies by game, and you can pick a scenario to suit your desired difficulty level, play through them in sequence as a campaign, or even design your own. Every map has obstacles in rocks and Kraken monsters, plus lines you must cross by the end of the Nth turn to stay in the game. You have a set number of turns to reach the finish line, the distance to which also varies by scenario. One major catch is that the spaces on the map are diamonds, so moving to an adjacent space isn’t the same as moving in a straight line, and you’ll have to try to tack back and forth to keep moving while also trying to avoid the islands and monsters. One great card combination lets you move straight to the diamond that only touches your current space at one point, but as you might imagine it’s hard to pull that off. If moving the ship would put the ship on an island or off the map, it doesn’t move at all, which results in a wasted turn.

The remaining combinations can run from the ‘not too bad’ to the ‘very bad,’ with many of them dealing damage to your ship. Cards numbered 1-3 have a Kraken symbol and when played with other cards numbered 1-3 or cards that just move your ship to an adjacent space, they damage your ship. The game begins with all cards numbered 1 or 2 in a separate Kraken deck, but those will enter the player deck any time you take damage from the Kraken. You might even take two damage if you both play a card numbered 1-3 in the same trick. You can deal damage to the Kraken, which allows you to take the lower card in the trick and discard it to the Kraken deck, improving your deck for the next round and also giving you more time, as you can lose the game when the Kraken deck is exhausted. If you both play cards with cannon symbols, you flip the next card in the deck and get something positive – moving the ship either to an adjacent space or forward, or discarding a low-numbered card to the Kraken deck.

Each round ends when one player wins their fourth trick, so you can extend rounds by trying to balance the number of tricks each player wins. When a round ends, you take damage based on where the Kraken meeple is on its board; this meeple moves up any time you take damage but the top card in the Kraken deck isn’t a numbered card but the Kraken card itself, after which you move that to the bottom of its deck and bump up the Kraken meeple so you take more damage after each round. If you ever take damage from the Kraken but there’s nothing else in its deck, you lose.

If you steer the ship on to the End Token on the map, you win immediately. As in most coop games, there are more ways to lose than to win: If you haven’t reached the End Token after 5 rounds, haven’t passed the checkpoints after rounds 2/4, exhaust the Kraken deck, or move the Kraken meeple to the final space, kindly labeled as “Dead.”

What really, really works about Sail is that it’s extremely tight – I don’t think this is a game you can ever win easily. I played this with my father, an experienced bridge player, and once we got the rhythm going, we did quite well … yet whenever we won a scenario, it was by the skin of our teeth. It made for an intense but fun gaming experience: there’s such satisfaction in pulling off the series of moves you need to win without being able to communicate. After a few rounds, we started to ‘read’ each other a bit more as well, so we could strategize without communicating, which I think is also key to this sort of game (The Mind would be the best-known example, I think).

You can buy it directly from Allplay for $1 cheaper than you’d pay on Amazon, including shipping, and you could check out Sequoia as well. I also just learned that they’re reprinting the Reiner Knizia classic Through the Desert, a top 100 game for me since I started making those lists, but which has gone out of print twice in the last decade or so. I own a copy of a prior printing but I’m excited that folks will be able to buy it later this year.

Match of the Century.

The World Chess Championship between Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky, the defending champion at the time, and American Bobby Fischer in 1972 was dubbed the “match of the century,” with Fischer winning after 21 games over 50 days to become the first American-born world champion in the honor’s history. Now you can relive this matchup – sort of – in the two-player board game Match of the Century, published in the U.S. by Capstone. It’s played with two decks of cards over a series of games to determine the champion. It’s a clever, tightly designed game, but unfortunately it’s very dry, and relies on a mechanic that both my opponent and I found very confusing. (My opponent was my father, who holds two master’s degrees, spent forty-plus years as an electrical engineer, and is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.)

Each player has a small deck of cards that have two values, one for when the player is white and the other for when the player is black. Your hand size can vary from 5 to 7, and you also start each game by taking one to three pawns from the general supply. The board has four spaces for cards on each side, with a number from 1 to 4 in the middle row. The white player starts each game by playing one card to any of the four spaces on their side, and the black player must respond with a card. The cards’ values are compared – the white player’s card value for white against the black player’s card value for black – with each side adding up to two pawns to boost their strength. The winner gains those 1 to 4 points shown in between the cards, while the loser gets to execute the action or power on their card. A game ends when all spaces are filled, or when one player has gained enough points that the other can’t catch up. The winning player gains one match point; in case of a draw, each player gains one. The first player to six match points wins.

While the game isn’t from the same designer as the amazing two-player game Watergate, it has a similar look and feel, with asymmetrical decks and cards that can be played in several different ways. Watergate remains one of the most thematic games I’ve ever played – the effects of the cards tie so well to the characters and events from the actual scandal that I have always found it impossible not to get swept up in the story while playing, even though the actual third-rate burglary happened a year or so before I was born. Here, the theme doesn’t quite work as well, in part because chess is a game itself, and the game we’re playing here doesn’t look like chess at all – cards are labeled as knights, rooks, and so on, but it has no bearing on how those cards work. I thought far more of Battle Line or Air, Land, & Sea, two fantastic capture-the-flag games, than of chess, and I thought Match of the Century suffered a little in that comparison as well.

The confusion came about because you keep any unplayed cards from one game to the next (and unplayed pawns as well), so you have to flip your hand over when a new game begins, so your white cards become black or vice versa. I can’t tell you how often this screwed one of us up. Even if we both reoriented our cards, one of us would either play a card upside down (for the wrong color/action), or we’d play it correctly and then read the wrong side because of how they’re oriented on the board. I understand the intent, and I don’t see a better way to implement it, but in practice it was frustrating and detracted from the fun of the game.

The general reaction to this game has been very positive, and I think I’m in the minority here. My dad and I both enjoy games and puzzles, but we actually called this one after seven games (he won, 4 to 3, with a pretty masterful parry to my last move on the fourth ‘flag’ of the last game) because it was dragging and neither of us was having enough fun to justify playing it to the end. I’d much rather play Watergate, or even Riftforce, another capture-the-flag game, both of which are published in the U.S. by Capstone.

Hanamikoji.

I’ve owned the small two-player game Hanamikoji for probably seven or eight years now, and played it maybe twice when I first got it, but I set it aside and did what I unfortunately do with a lot of games I own but didn’t get as a review copy – I forgot about it. It popped up recently on Board Game Arena, so I got to play it a bunch of times, since a full game takes less than ten minutes, and I was reminded how elegant and great it is. It’s a capture-the-flag game, like Battle Line or Riftforce, with a simple scoring method and a strict set of possible actions that forces you to try to figure out what your opponent might be trying to do.

The theme of Hanamikoji isn’t that relevant except for the art, mostly by the wonderful Taiwanese artist Maisherly, who has also provided art for Walking in Burano, Realm of Sand, and Mystery of the Temples. The game itself is so simple you could make your own version with a bunch of index cards, although I would say just buy the game since it’s only about $17: The game has a deck of cards numbered 2 through 5 in seven different colors. The 2s come in purple, red, and yellow; 3s in blue and orange; 4s in green; and 5s in pink. A card’s frequency matches its value, so there are 21 cards in the deck.

Before each round, you shuffle all cards, remove one without showing it to either player, and then deal six cards to each player. The first player must draw one card and then take one of the four possible actions, which they will then not be able to take for the rest of that round. The second player does the same, and the play goes back and forth, with each player drawing one card and taking a previously unused (by them) action, until each player has had four turns.

In between the players sits a row of geisha cards, one in each color, and players will play cards to their side by the matching geisha to try to win each geisha’s favor with gifts. The four possible actions are to reserve a card to be played to the table at the end of the round (so a final, secret move); to discard two cards from your hands so they’re out of the round entirely; to present your opponent with three cards, where they choose one to play to their side, leaving two for you to play to your side; and to present your opponent with two pairs of cards, where they choose one to play and you then play the other. At the end of the round, you see who has more cards on their side of each of the geishas. Whoever has more cards on their side gains that geisha’s favor, and if the players have the same number on both sides, the favor doesn’t move. If one player gets the favor of four geishas, or gets the favor of three geishas worth a total of 11 or more (for example, the 5 and both 3s), they win.

If, as is most common, you complete the first round and neither player wins, the start player switches and you play a new round, but you retain the favor you won in the previous round, so if, say, you had the favor of the purple 2 geisha, and each player plays a purple card to the table, you would keep her favor. Play continues until someone meets either victory condition. If both conditions are achieved in the same round, the player with the 11+ points is the winner.

There are two tremendous strategic bits to Hanamikoji – when to use which actions, and predicting what your opponent might do. The order of your actions is entirely up to you, and in some sense depends on the cards you get. You may want to save the discard action until second or third, when you might already know some cards are worthless to you either way (e.g., the blue 3 geisha is already decided either way with two cards on one side, so the last card won’t change anything), but saving it till last might cause you to discard a card that would help you. Many players like to use the three-card action with three cards of the same color, since no matter what you get two and your opponent gets one, but that cedes the possibility of gaining control of two geishas rather than just one. The little decisions here go on and on in a way I find incredibly satisfying – like chess, but on a smaller scale.

Anticipating your opponent’s choices is, of course, inherent in lots of games with direct interaction, and here it comes into play in two ways. One is just trying to infer what geishas they might be trying to win, so you can choose where to parry and where to put cards to win your own geishas. You also need to understand their thinking, or at least try to do so, when choosing which cards to present to them in the three-card and two-pair actions, so that they’ll choose what you want them to choose. You can’t do this perfectly, since the card draws are random and you don’t see the cards they reserve or discard, but you can at least think about the odds of different scenarios. I love this part of the game, because, again, it’s a bit like chess, but with smaller trees of possible outcomes and a little randomness to help balance out small gaps in skill levels.

I’m due to revise my list of my favorite two-player games, and I have at least two newish ones in the basement to try (The Hunt & Broken and Beautiful, both from 2023) before I do so, but I think Hanamikoji has earned its way (back) on to the list. It’s so easy to teach, highly portable, has lovely art, and seems to be highly replayable, everything I’d want in a true two-player experience.

Tokaido Duo.

I love the 2012 game Tokaido, from 7 Wonders designer Antoine Bauza, both for its gameplay and its art by the French illustrator known as Naïade, which echoes the Edo period of Japanese culture in which the game is set. (More on that in a moment.) It plays two to five players but is definitely better with more, and worst with two, because the game board sends players on a walk along the Tokaido Road, one of the Five Routes of that time period in Japan, and if you’re on a space, I can’t go there – I have to pass you. More players thus means more spaces each player has to skip, and harder choices of where to land. Tokaido even has a sequel, Namiji, which borrows the core movement mechanic from the first game but changes all of the actions available.

Now we have a two-player version of the game, Tokaido Duo, that is almost completely different beyond the theme. Here the two players each have three different meeples – a pilgrim, a merchant, and an artist – who move in different ways around the smaller board, with only the pilgrim’s movement restricted by direction. The scoring is also greatly simplified from the original, and changes what you might be trying to collect or otherwise do. It’s excellent, but it’s pretty different, at least as different as 7 Wonders Duel is from 7 Wonders, if not more so.

The Tokaido Duo board has a track around the outer edge of the island for the pilgrims, tracks connecting four mountain towns in the center to eight coastal towns around the perimeter for the merchants, and sectors formed by the outer pilgrim track and interior pilgrim tracks. The artists can move from sector to sector, with each one showing one of four types of paintings that can be ‘gifted’ there. On each turn, the first player rolls the three dice – one per meeple type – and chooses one, after which the other player chooses one, and the first player gets the last one. The dice show movement values from 1-3 or 1-4, and when a player chooses a die they must use the entire movement value.

The merchants collect goods at the mountain towns and sell them at the coastal towns. You grab 2-4 from the bag of wares when you go to a mountain town, and each coastal town has a token showing one of the four goods and a sale price. You can only hold five wares at a time, so you have to plan out your moves for maximum efficiency, but in a coastal town you can sell all of your goods of that type at once. You get points based on how many 10-coin gold bars you gain in the game. The artist paints paintings and gifts them to the gods; when your artist moves to a new sector, you flip over a number of painting tokens from your board equal to the number of other meeples (yours and your opponent’s) in/around that sector. You can only gift one at a time, however. Your points here are based on how many painting tiles you flipped and gifted, increasing in value as you go.

The pilgrim track has at least five different types of spaces, but I’ll just focus on the two that score. Your pilgrim board has three tracks, temple and garden. You move up a track when your pilgrim lands on a matching space. At game end, your points from the pilgrim equal the product of your places on the two tracks. The pilgrim is also blocked from stopping at any space occupied by the other pilgrim or either merchant, which does recall the original game.

When either player reaches the end of one pilgrim track, gains their sixth gold bar, or gifts their final painting, the game ends. Each player adds up their scores from the three boards. It takes maybe 30 minutes, probably less with more experience.

I haven’t quite figured out if it’s better to push hard to finish the game with one of the three types, which also implies a high score from that one board, or strive for balance; the original Tokaido did a great job of forcing you to find a middle ground between the two, with some specialization required to win … but not too much. I think it’s better here to finish a little sooner than I like to, but I also just like playing the game and doing things even if it’s not great strategy.

It’s a very satisfying game, because almost every turn gets you something, and you’re always left wishing you could just do one more thing before your next turn. There isn’t much direct player interaction here, just some tokens that can get passed back and forth with no real take-that mechanic, with public scores that at least make it easy to see if you’re in the lead. This is, however, a huge example of cultural appropriation in gaming. Neither Bauza nor Naïade is even a little bit Japanese, and they’ve dropped this game into perhaps the most significant period in Japanese history, the time when Japan was largely united under a stable government and experienced economic and cultural growth for over 250 years. If you know much about Japanese culture prior to the last half of the 20th century, you know about the Edo period, its shoguns and its art (The Great Wave off Kanagawa) and theater (kabuki) and more. I personally love the artwork here, and if it’s disrespectful to its theme, I am unaware of it. I’m just increasingly uncomfortable with how easily designers grab themes from well beyond their cultures without at least acknowledging it, or better still incorporating ideas or feedback from people from those cultures.

That won’t bother most folks; if anything, I think the majority of players will love the look of the game. The illustrations are fun and distinctive, while there’s a lot of white space to keep everything easy to see and understand. We’ve had a slew of new two-player games this year, and Tokaido Duo is one of the better ones.

Top 100 boardgames, 2022 edition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paris: La Cite de Lumiere & Eiffel.

Paris: La Cité de Lumière is a short but involved two-player game from 2019, bringing polyominos, tile-laying, and a unique drafting mechanism into a tight 30-minute playing time. It received a major expansion late last year in Paris: Eiffel, which debuted at Gen Con 2021 but hit the mass market this year, bringing further scoring cards to allow players to change strategies – but it doesn’t address my core issue with the game, the way the drafting forces you to potentially stop selecting building tiles.

Each player begins the game with eight square cobblestone tiles, each of which is divided into four squares that can be blue, orange, or purple, or just show a streetlight. One player is blue and the other is orange, while purple squares can belong to either player; you can only place a building on squares of your color or grey. In phase one, you may either place one of your cobblestone tiles on the game board, which is actually set inside the bottom of the box, or take one of the polyomino-shaped building tiles from the supply – but once you’ve placed all 8 of your tiles, you can’t take another building.

Paris: La Cité de Lumière base game.

In phase two, players alternate placing the building tiles they’ve taken on to the board. There are also eight Action cards placed around the board/box in each game, out of a set of 12 possible cards in the base game, which you can use to gain additional points or sometimes violate some of the rules of the game; each player has four action tokens that they will use to claim those cards during this phase, and once used a card can’t be reused. At game-end, you score for each of your buildings that is adjacent to a streetlight, earning the product of the number of lights and the number of squares covered by that building; and for your largest contiguous group of buildings, one point per square. You also gain a point for each postcard you used that shows a stamp, and lose 3 points for each building you took but failed to place (surprisingly easy to do).

The postcards are a huge part of the game because they’re so powerful. One allows you to place a fountain tile on cobblestones of your color or the neutral color, and then you get 3 points for each of your buildings that touches it. Another gives you a giant streetlight that lights up buildings two squares away rather than just adjacent spaces. Another gives you a purple cobblestone to place on a square of your opponent’s color, after which you immediately place a building on it. The game comes with a recommended set of eight cards for your first game or two, leaving some of the cards with complicated scoring for experienced players, although I don’t think there’s that much of a gap.

Paris: Eiffel adds eight more action cards, mostly based on actual landmark buildings in the city, and add new ways to score along with 3-D cardboard buildings you might place on the board. You still use just eight cards in the game, but can now mix and match from 20 choices rather than 12. The Eiffel Tower card lets you place the tower on a 4×4 area that contains at least one streetlight, after which those lights double their point value for scoring, while you also get two points for squares of your player color under the tower. The Obelisk (found in the Place de la Concorde) gives each player two points for every building they place that falls in the same row or column as the obelisk sits. Notre Dame and the Catacombs let you piggyback on one of your opponents’ buildings for more points or to count it in your largest building group. Quartres Pauvières lets you score for the number of board edges your buildings touch – 1, 2, 4, or 8 points.

The soring is definitely point salad-y, although the cards mean that the players get to pick their own scoring methods to some extent, and I think that’s probably the game’s greatest strength. It’s a novel approach to the asymmetrical two-player game. The weird drafting mechanism at the start just sinks the game for me, unfortunately. People do really love this game, though – it’s highly rated on BGG, which skews towards more complex games, but also has sold well enough to merit an expansion. It just isn’t my cup of thé.

Top 100 boardgames, 2021 edition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fox in the Forest app.

The Fox in the Forest is a great trick-taking game for two players in a small box, working primarily with just a small deck of 33 cards, numbered 1 to 11 in three suits. Odd-numbered cards have special powers that can upend the traditional trick-taking rules – you must follow suit, and if you can’t, one of the suits is the trump and you can win the trick by playing that suit instead – such as by letting you swap a card from your hand for the card that determines the current trump suit, or letting you start the next trick even if you lose. You also have to try not to win too many tricks or you’ll be “greedy” and get zero points for the round; your opponent has to win at least four of the tricks for you to score anything. Play continues, with points awarded in each round, until one player amasses 21 points for the victory.

We now have a beautiful new app version ($4.99 for iTunes, Android, and Steam.) of the game from Dire Wolf Digital, the studio that has created a whole string of outstanding adaptations of tabletop games, including Root, Sagrada, and Lanterns. As you might expect, the graphics and animations here are superb, and there’s a small challenge mode for solo play. The AI player is a little disappointing, however, as even on its hardest setting it still misses some easy strategies like deliberately losing all remaining tricks to make you Greedy and thus leave you with zero points.

The app’s setup is clean and easy to see even on the small screen of a phone. Your cards are laid out at the bottom of the screen, and you can drag and drop one to your play area on the left when it’s your turn. You can see a card’s effects with a simple tap and hold on the card, although the text may still be a little small for some players (I didn’t need my glasses, but I at least thought about it). The animations and sound effects were similar to those in Lanterns – they don’t specifically add to game play, but they’re fun and short enough that they enhance it without slowing anything down.

The AI player isn’t great – I’ve had no trouble beating it on hard mode, usually by a fair margin, as the focus seems to be on winning the next trick more than a holistic strategy that considers all of the ways to win in Fox in the Forest. The challenges are also a mixed bag – some are great, like the one that adds a fourth suit or another that requires you to win the treasure points you get when you win a trick with a 7 in it, while some are silly, like the one that randomizes all of your card values after each trick.

Online play wasn’t available until release day (October 18th), so I haven’t been able to test those out, but the local version doesn’t include a pass-and-play option, which I think would be a huge addition for a two-player game like this – it’s perfect for passing the phone back and forth on a plane or in the car (preferably while neither of you is driving). Dire Wolf says that feature is under consideration for the future, and I’d put that at the top of my wish list. In the meantime, it’s a fun distraction for solo play, and I hope an improved AI is coming as well – Dire Wolf did tighten the AI in their Raiders of the North Sea app after release – to give the app more replay value.

The victory screen

Top 100 boardgames, 2020 edition.

I believe this is now my thirteenth all-time board game ranking on this site, and it’s the fifth time I’ve ranked 100 games, which is probably a quarter of the total number of games I’ve played in some fashion so far. 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 Clank! Legacy, Tekhenu, Paleo, Gods Love Dinosaurs, Holi, Cloud City, New York Zoo, and Traintopia.

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. Quadropolis, Asara, Discoveries, Valeria, Photosynthesis, Bärenpark, and more titles slid off the list this year. The toughest omissions for 2020 were Oceans, the new Evolution game from North Star; Azul Summer Pavilion, the third game in Michael Kiesling’s Azul series; and Nova Luna, the Uwe Rosenberg reboot of Habitats and a Spiel nominee this year.

If a board game’s title is hyperlinked, that goes to the Amazon page for the game, and I would receive a commission from any sales there as a member of Amazon’s affiliate program.

100. Raiders of the North Sea. App review. The second Shem Phillips game on this list was the first of his five (so far) worker-placement titles, a Viking-themed game of resource collection where you’ll send out raiding ships to collect stones, gold, and points, but might have to send one or more of your various helper cards to Valhalla. Phillips cooks up different ways to place workers in many of his games; here the meeples are all shared, and you have one at any time, placing it to start your turn to take one action, then taking another meeple already on the board to take a different action. The Dire Wolf app version is tremendous other than a too-simple AI (which I think has been upgraded since I last played). Complexity: Medium.

99. Sushi Go Party! This is the massively multiplayer – okay, two to eight players – version of Sushi Go!, a game I actually haven’t played. Players draft cards, 7 Wonders-tyle, and try collect images representing different kinds of sushi and other accoutrements to score points, scoring for sets, or for having the most of some specific type, or even having cards of different colors. The dice version Sushi Roll (my review) is good, although I prefer Sushi Go Party! to that one. Complexity: Low.

98. Mystic Market. Full review. This game has fallen below most folks’ radar but deserves a wider audience as a smart family game that’s very simple to learn with a modest amount of take-that strategy available to you. Players collect cards from the central market to turn them into potions, which sell for prices that vary over the game. When a player sells a potion of one color, that color’s price drops to the lowest level, and the prices of all other potions go up one spot each on the track. There are also some action cards that can give you a brief leg up, but the heart of the game is set collection and timing the market. Complexity: Medium-low.

97. The Taverns of Tiefenthal. Full review. Wolfgang Warsch’s follow-up to his Kennerspiel des Jahres-winning The Quacks of Quedlinburg was a big departure in theme and mechanics, pitting players as tavern owners who build a deck that will allow them to upgrade their tavern boards. It’s very strategic, and you will have something to do on every turn, but the game is so tight that it seems to end too soon. The art is very Bard’s Tale, which warms my ’80s heart. Complexity: Medium-high.

96. My City. Full review. This legacy game from Reiner Knizia continues to grow on me, and since we haven’t finished the full 24-episode cycle yet this game could be higher next year. It’s a polyomino placement game that adds another rule, either restricting placement or giving more points for specific locations, and a few times adds more tiles to your set. There’s a deck with all of the shapes depicted, and it’s shuffled each game; you must place the shape shown on each card as it’s drawn or pass and lose a point, and if you ever can’t place a piece, your game ends. The winner of each game gets two progress points and the player with the most progress points at the end of the 24 episodes is the winner. Complexity: Medium-low.

95. 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.

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

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

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

91. 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.

90. Pendulum. Full review. The publisher, Stonemaier Games, calls this a “worker placement, time optimization game,” and that’s a pretty apt description. You have just two workers at the start of the game and will place them on the board to get resources that let you trigger more powerful actions, but where you can place them and when you can move them is determined by three sand timers that run from 45 seconds to 3 minutes. It’s a turnless game, so everyone can move at the same time, and comes with a solo mode and rules for playing without the timers. It’s intense because it never stops, but it’s also one of the most ingenious games I’ve come across. Complexity: Medium.

89. Five Tribes. Full review. A very strong medium-strategy game from Days of Wonder that 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.

88. 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.

87. Ex Libris. 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.

86. 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. The app version is also very good. Complexity: Low.

85. 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.

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

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

82. Noctiluca. Full review. The third Shem Phillips game on the list, and my favorite, isn’t one of his worker-placement titles at all, but a dice-drafting game with clever rules on how you place your tokens to pick dice from a specific row on the board to try to fill out either of your two objective cards at any given time. The dice come in four bright colors and the turns move quickly, with the entire game comprising two rounds where you fill the entire board from scratch. There’s a solo mode that isn’t too bad, but it’s definitely best as a two- to four-player game. Complexity: Medium-low.

81. 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.

80. 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.

79. 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.

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

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

76. Lost Cities: Full review. This was once my 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. I’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.

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

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

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

72. 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.

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

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

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

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

67. 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.

66. 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.

65. 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).

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

63. Sonora. Full review. The first-ever “flick and write” game is just what it sounds like – you’ll flick your discs on to the shared board, which is bounded by a plastic frame so your tokens (probably) won’t end up on the floor, and then check or mark boxes on your player sheet based on where the discs ended up. You can also bump others’ discs with your own, by accident or as strategy, and your discs have different values so you have some choices to make when flicking. That last bit might make it tough for players under 10 but you can always advise them and let them just enjoy the flicking. Complexity: Medium.

62. 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.

61. 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.

60. 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.

59. 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.

58. 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.

57. 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, but requires a minimum of three players, I don’t think it’s worth the $45 list price it has at amazon right now. Complexity: Medium.

56. Watergate. Full review coming this week at Paste. It’s a pure two-player game that pits one player as Nixon and the other as “the journalists,” each with a unique deck, where the latter player tries to place evidence tokens connecting at least two witnesses to the President, and Tricky Dick tries to block them. It’s fun, incredibly well-written, and a real thinker. Complexity: Medium.

55. 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.

54. 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. Complexity: Medium.

53. 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.

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

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

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

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

48. Tzolk’in. Tzolkin is a fairly complex worker-placement game where the board itself has six interlocked gears that move with the days of the Mayan calendar; you place a worker on one gear and he cycles through various options for moves until you choose to recall him. As with most worker-placement games, you’re collecting food, gold, wood, and stone; building stuff; and moving up some scoring tracks. The gears, though, are kind of badass. Complexity: High.

47. 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.

46. 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.

45. 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 and a steal at $13. Complexity: Medium-low.

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

43. 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.

42. 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.

41. 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.

40. 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. The digital port is also very good. Complexity: High.

39. 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.

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

37. 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.

36. 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.

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

34. 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.

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

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

31. 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.

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. Acram Digital’s app version is tremendous and highly addictive, as you can randomize the tile layout, giving you over a billion possible boards on which to play. Complexity: Medium.

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

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

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

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

25. 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.

24. 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.

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

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

21. (The Settlers of) Catan: It’s now just called Catan, although I use the old title because I think more people know it by that name. I don’t pull this game out as much as I did a few years ago, and I’ve still got it ranked this high largely because of its value as an introduction to Eurogames, one of the best “gateway games” on the market. Without this game, we don’t have the explosion in boardgames we’ve had in the last fifteen years. We don’t have Ticket to Ride and 7 Wonders showing up in Target (where you can also buy Catan), a whole wall of German-style games in Barnes & Noble, or the Cones of Dunshire on network television. 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. Complexity: Medium-low.

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

18. 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. Knizia himself revised this game as Yellow & Yangtze, which has a digital port coming from Dire Wolf that’s already on Steam Early Access and is very promising. Complexity: Medium.

17. 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.

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

15. Takenoko.Full review. If I tell you this is the cutest game I own, would you consider that a negative? The theme and components are fantastic – there’s a panda and a gardener and these little bamboo pieces, and the panda eats the bamboo and you have to lay new tiles and make sure they have irrigation and try not to go “squeeeeee!” at how adorable it all is. There’s a very good game here too: Players draw and score “objective” cards from collecting certain combinations of bamboo, laying specific patterns of hex tiles, or building stacks of bamboo on adjacent tiles. The rules 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.

14. 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.

13. 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. I 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.

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

11. 7 Wonders Duel. Full review. Borrowing its theme from one of the greatest boardgames of all time, 7W Duel strips the rules down so that each player is presented with fewer options. Hand cards become cards on the table, revealed a few at a time in a set pattern that limits player choices to one to four cards (roughly) per turn. Familiarity with the original game is helpful but by no means required. There’s a brand-new app version out from Repos this fall. Complexity: Medium-low.

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

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

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

8. 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.

7. 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.

6. 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.

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

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

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

3. Wingspan. Full review.The only game to which I’ve given a perfect score of 10 since I started reviewing games for Paste five years ago, Wingspan is one of the best examples I can find of immaculate game design. It is thoroughly and thoughtfully constructed so that it is well-balanced, enjoyable, and playable in a reasonable amount of time. The components are all of very high quality and the art is stupendous. And there’s some real science behind it: designer Elizabeth Hargrave took her love of bird-watching and built a game around the actual characteristics of over 100 species of North American birds, such as their habitats, diets, and breeding habits. The European expansion comes out this week. Wingspan won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2019, which it more than deserved, making Hargrave the first woman to win that honor as a solo designer and just the second solo woman to win any Spiel des Jahres prize. It’s a marvel. Complexity: Medium.

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

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

I have a separate ranking of games for two players that I published in March, which I’ll update again in the next few months. Air, Land, and Sea would make the cut now. I do have two new two-player games in the house, Curious Cargo and The Shores of Tripoli, that I haven’t played yet.

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

Air, Land, and Sea.

Air, Land, and Sea is a great, simple, quick-to-learn, and highly portable two-player game that manages to bring something new despite the fact that the game is really just a deck of 18 cards. It’s very clever and reveals quite a bit more strategy with increased plays, yet it’s elegant and simple enough that almost anyone could play it.

Each player in Air, Land, & Sea will get a hand of six cards to start the game, and unless they get a card that allows them to draw another, that’s all they get. The cards have the values 1 through 6, one set for the Air, one for the Land, and one for the Sea. Players play one card at a time and may play them face up, using the value and text on the card’s face, to the theater matching the color on the card; or face down, getting a flat value of 2 and no benefit from the text, to any theater. They play each card to one of the three theaters of battle, the three names in the title of the game, and the sum of the values on their cards will be compared at end-game to the cards on their opponent’s side, taking into account any adjustments from face-up cards elsewhere on the table. If you play to a theater that already has one of your cards, the new card covers most of it, which matters for certain card abilities. If one player wins two of the three theaters, they win the game; the start player wins any ties. The winning player gets some number of points, up to 6, and the players play further games until one of them has 12 points.

There are two major twists, of course. One is that the cards with values from 1 to 5 have extra abilities that can range from invalidating an opponent’s card to allowing you to flip any uncovered card on the table (face-up or face-down) to changing the values of other cards in the same or adjacent theaters. Thus, the timing of when you play your cards is a huge part of strategy in Air, Land, & Sea, both in terms of lining up your own cards so that you can maximize the benefits of those card texts, and in hoping your opponent will play cards you can counteract with cards still in your hand.

Air, Land, and Sea set up on the tabletop

The other twist is that you can concede the game before it ends and deny your opponent the full 6 points they’d get if you played until both players had exhausted their hands. The number of points you receive for winning depends on how many cards are unplayed and whether you were the first or second player (which alternates in each game). It’s often clear early on that you can’t win at least one theater, because you didn’t get the right cards in your hand or because your opponent has stronger cards, and I’ve had several games where I had two cards left in my hand and realized they weren’t enough to win two of the three theaters for me, so concession was the right strategy. It lets you stop a game early so you live to fight another day.

The game does have a few quirks that might send you back to the rulebook or just require a few plays to get accustomed to them. One is that some cards, like Maneuver, require you to take the action in the text, rather than giving you the option. Another is that cards can be moved to another theater when covered, but never flipped. And there is a distinction between playing a card, which may trigger other card abilities, and moving one, which generally does not. Once you get the hang of those, though, the game flies by – no pun intended – rather quickly, and you can easily play an entire match in 20 minutes. And despite the short ruleset and small deck, there’s a lot of replay value because of the sheer number of possible combinations (my quick calculations show over 18,000 possible sets of 12 cards from 18, without considering the two different hands of 6, but I suck at combinatorics). I missed Air, Land, and Sea when it first came out – it was self-published in 2018, then picked up by Arcane Wonders and published in early 2019 – but at $15 on amazon it’s an easy addition to my best two-player games list.