I’ve done board game rankings here every winter for sixteen years now, and this is the eighth year when I’ve ranked 100 games, which is a small fraction of the games I’ve played in my life (well over 500 by this point). The definition of a boardgame is nebulous, but I define it for this list by exclusions: no RPGs, no miniatures, no party games, no word games, no four-hour games, nothing that requires advance prep to play well. Board games don’t need boards – Dominion is all cards, played on a tabletop, so it qualifies – but they do need some skill element to qualify. And since it’s my list, I get to decide what I include or exclude.
I’ve put a complexity grade to the end of each review, low/medium/high, to make it easier for you to jump around and see what games might appeal to you. I don’t think there’s better or worse complexity, just different levels for different kinds of players. I’m somewhere between medium and high complexity; super “crunchy” games, as other gamers will say, don’t appeal to me as much as they might to the Boardgamegeek crowd. I’m way behind in my review queue as well, with something like 30-40 games here to try out, many of which I won’t crack open until after the holidays.
Here are the games that came off since last year: Century Spice Road, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Root, Kingdomino, Calico, Seven Bridges, Broom Service, 7 Ronin, Noctilulca, Morels, Living Forest, Furnace. For the record, I still like all of those games. It’s just a space issue.
Key 2023 releases I still need to play: The White Castle, Daybreak, Redwood, Apiary, Spellbook. I won’t even talk about my Shelf of Shame at this point. I need to start a game night again; I haven’t done that or anything like it regularly since the pandemic hit.
A few I considered that didn’t make the cut: Lacrimosa, Planet Unknown, Gartenbau, Distilled, Merv: The Heart of the Silk Road.
If a board game’s title is hyperlinked, it probably goes to the Amazon page for the game, and I would receive a commission from any sales there as a member of Amazon’s affiliate program. Links to any other sites do not generate any commissions. If you see a link is broken, or leads to a page with an outrageous price, please let me know – I’d rather not link to a price-gouging seller on Amazon or any site.
100. Thurn und Taxis: Full review. I love games with very simple rules that require quick thinking with a moderate amount of foresight. Thurn und Taxis players try to construct routes across a map of Germany, using them to place mail stations and to try to occupy entire regions, earning points for doing so, and for constructing longer and longer routes. But over time, and many plays, I’ve cooled on this game quite a bit – there is one optimal strategy, and one strategy that’s a close second, and that’s about it. And the second strategy is the opposite of fun for me. I think route-building has been done better in the seventeen years since this came out. Complexity: Low.
99. Three Sisters. Full review. If I were to rank games based on how well their theme and their gameplay worked together, Three Sisters would be very near the top. It’s a roll-and-write based on the traditional farming method of indigenous American peoples who learned that planting corn, beans, and squash together would allow all three plants to thrive: beans fix nitrogen in the soil for the corn and squash, the corn gives the beans something to climb (increasing yields), and the squash provides ground cover to limit competing weeds. Players here roll custom dice and mark off a series of spaces on two sheets, one showing their fields and the other showing tools, fruit, and other areas where they can gain more bonuses to check off even more things. It’s a brilliant, tight design that works as well as the Clever! series but with the added bonus of a real theme. Of these designers’ three roll-and-writes (this, Fleet the Dice Game, and Motor City), this is my favorite. Complexity: Medium-low.
98. 3 Ring Circus. Full review. From designer Fabio Lopiano (Merv, Ragusa), this game pits players as operators of small-time traveling circuses in the heyday of Ringling Bros., moving around the northeastern United States to play small, medium, and large cities, hiring performers to fill out their boards for points and taking in cash with larger performances. You gain and lose some things as you add performers and animals to your circus, covering up some benefits while unlocking others. You pay for those cards based on what you’ve already played, only paying the difference between the new card and the next-highest one in the row. There’s some pickup-and-delivery to the game, but it crosses many different styles and mechanics, combining them into an entertaining intellectual challenge, with some racing elements as you try to get to certain cities or regions first. Complexity: Medium.
97. Super Mega Lucky Box. Full review. A great flip-and-write that will remind you of bingo, but in a good way, not in a dreadful childhood memories way or a “my grandmother used to play that at the senior citizens’ place” way. Players start the game with three cards that show 3×3 grids with single-digit numbers in each box, although it’s not just 1-9. There’s a deck of 18 cards showing the numbers from 1-9 (two of each), and you flip 9 of those cards in each round, crossing off one box with the number that’s flipped. When you finish a row or column, you get a bonus. It’s easy for anyone from ages 7 to 75, but you can also do better with a little strategy, too. Complexity: Low.
96. Next Station: London. A fairly abstract flip-and-write where players will draw four routes in different colors to connect stations on their maps, with stations represented by four shapes. Players flip a deck with two cards of each shape plus some wilds, but you’re only guaranteed to see each shape once: After the fifth pink card has appeared (four shapes + wild), that round is over and you move to the next color. Each player plays a different color at the same time, so you won’t all have the same resulting map at game-end. No route can cross another one, as they can only intersect at stations, but those are worth more points. You score points for each route by multiplying the number of sectors it passes through by the number of stations in the sector where it hits the most. There are other bonuses and you can play with two public objectives (recommended) and bonus Pencil Powers (I could take or leave these) as well. I do not care for the sequel, Next Station: Tokyo, which has some scoring rules and restrictions that I think take away the looseness and fun of the original. Complexity: Low.
95. Lost Ruins of Arnak. Full review. The perfect game for folks who want a little of everything – it has a little deckbuilding, a little worker placement, a little achievement track scoring, a little resource management – and are okay with a game that doesn’t offer a lot of any one thing. It skims off the top of various mechanics, but if, say, you want a real deckbuilder, you’ll be disappointed. Players have just two workers and will build small decks to determine what actions and how many they can take in each of five rounds as they explore ancient ruins, gaining resources and uncovering monsters to defeat, while also spending resources to buy cards and move two tokens up the extremely important research track. I do like this because it has a lot of features I love, and feels heavy even though it’s fairly accessible. Complexity: Medium.
94. Cryptid. Full review. A really clever deduction game that looks like it’ll be a generic dudes-on-a-map title but actually asks players to solve a sort of logic puzzle. Each player has a clue around the location of the Creature on the map, relating to the terrain type, distance from a landmark, or proximity to the two animal habitats. On each turn, a player asks one other player if the Creature could be on one specific hex, based on the second player’s clue; if yes, the second player places a disc on the hex, but if not, the second player places a cube on the hex AND the asking player places a cube on some other hex on the board where the Creature could not be. You can use the cards and codebooks with the game but it’s easier to use the associated site at playcryptid.com to set up the board and give out the clues. Complexity: Medium-low.
93. The Wolves. Full review. If you like area-control games – RISK is the granddaddy of these, and I have fond memories of it although it’s not a very good game – The Wolves is one of the best new entries in that genre. Players start with packs of six wolves, two alphas and four small ones, and move them around the board, building dens, upgrading those to lairs, converting neutral lone wolves to your pack, and even dominating opponents’ small wolves and dens to convert them. You score points by expanding your pack, as lairs and some dens give you points, but the big points come when each region is scored. You also take actions by flipping one to three of your six terrain tiles, so your options are limited by what’s showing and you must plan ahead to maximize the efficiency of your turns. It’s a tense game because your opponents can so easily take regions you thought you controlled and even steal your wolves and dens if you’re not careful. Complexity: Medium-low.
92. Juicy Fruits. Full review. This game hits the sweet spot (pun intended) for games I like that I can also play with just about anybody, because it’s quick to learn and play. Players collect fruits by moving tokens on their personal island boards, then trade them in for points, to get upgrades, or to launch ships that gain points and make their islands bigger. The mini fruit tokens are cute, and the rules are quite easy to follow. I didn’t think the advanced mode, which adds an achievement track, was really necessary. Complexity: Medium-low.
91. Chronicles of Crime. A cooperative deduction game that uses technology in a new (to me) way – you can examine a crime scene by looking at a 360 degree image on your phone, moving the device around to look for possible clues and objects to investigate further. You scan codes on cards to try to get further clues to solve each mystery, eventually having to answer a few questions to get your score. I’ve only played this solo so far but it works extremely well as a solitaire game. Complexity: Medium-low.
90. Ark Nova. Full review. The best new heavy game of 2022, at least among those I’ve played (I hear good things about Carnegie, FWIW), Ark Nova takes the familiar theme of zoo-building but ups the ante in several ways, borrowing mechanics from Bärenpark and Great Western Trail and more to create an intricate game of tile placement, set collection, and card drafting that can take two hours to play but has fairly quick turns. One beautiful thing about Ark Nova compared to other games of similar weight is that it has just one resource, money, so your cognitive load to play this is lower than it is for games like Tzolk’in or Terraforming Mars. If you want to dip your toes into the water of more complex, longer games, this is a good choice. Complexity: Medium-high.
89. Exit: The Game. Full review. The Kennerspiel des Jahres winner in 2017 is actually a series of games you can play just once, because solving their puzzles requires tearing and cutting game components, writing on them, and just generally destroying things to find clues and answers that will lead you to the next question, at the end of which is the solution to the game. You can’t really lose, but you can grade your performance by looking at how many game hints you had to use over the time you played. The various titles in the series have varying levels of difficulty, and some are better than others, but my daughter and I keep playing the newest titles and most are fun and engaging. I didn’t care for the one longer Exit game, The Catacombs of Horror, which I think got its length and difficulty from making some puzzles too esoteric or hard to solve. I tried one of the new Exit games with a jigsaw puzzle included, which made the game a little longer but I’m not sure it made it better, just different. Complexity: Medium-low.
88. Galaxy Trucker. Full app review. I have only played the iOS app version of the game, which is just amazing, and reviews of the physical game are all pretty strong. Players compete to build starships to handle voyages between stations, and there’s an actual race to grab components during the building phase, after which you have to face various external threats and try to grab treasures while completing missions. It’s a boardgame that has a hint of RPG territory; the app has a long narrative-centric campaign that is best of breed. Complexity: Medium-low.
87. Cat in the Box. Full review. An ingenious trick-taking game that draws its inspiration from the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, incorporating that concept – that something is unknown until it’s observed. Here, cards have numbers but no colors (suits) until they’re played, at which point you must say what suit it is, and then place one of your tokens on the shared board that indicates that that specific color/number combination has been played. Each player bets on how many tricks they’ll win at the start of each round, and if they nail their bet, there’s a bonus for contiguous tokens on the board at the end of each round. Most rounds end because someone can’t make a legal play, with four suits but five cards of each number in the deck, causing a paradox and ending the round immediately. It’s a simple rule set but highly entertaining both for fun and intellectual value. It’s between printings right now. Complexity: Medium-low.
86. Ecosystem. Full review. A steal at $15, Ecosystem works with 3 players but it’s great at 5-6 because you get most of the game’s 120-card deck, depicting animals or habitats, involved. It’s a card-drafting game where each player will end up creating a 4×5 grid in front of them of those cards, with each card type scoring differently, often based on what cards are adjacent to it or in the same row or even what cards are not near it. It’s easy to learn, very portable, and highly replayable. The new sequel game, Ecosystem: Coral Reef, is more of the same, about as good as the original but with a whole new set of scoring rules for its species. Complexity: Low.
85. Jambo. Full review. A two-player card game where the deck is virtually everything, meaning that there’s a high element of chance based on what cards you draw; if you don’t draw enough of the cards that allow you to sell and purchase wares, it’ll be hard for you to win. Each player is an African merchant dealing in six goods and must try to buy and sell them enough times to go from 20 gold at the game’s start to 60 or more at the end. I played this wrong a few times, then played it the right way and found it a little slow, as the deck includes a lot of cards of dubious value. It’s one of the best pure two-player games out there. It’s also among my favorite themes, maybe because it makes me think of the Animal Kingdom Lodge at Disneyworld. Out of print in the U.S. for several years now. Complexity: Low.
84. Hadrian’s Wall. One of the most complex roll/flip-and-writes I’ve ever played, but it’s pretty manageable, and after a lot of plays online I think I got the hang of it. Hadrian’s Wall is a worker placement game played with pen and paper, two scoresheets for each player, as you check off boxes by spending four types of workers or stone (the only resource), moving up four prestige tracks while also giving yourself further stone production and/or extra workers for future rounds. My sense is that it’s always better here to think long-term, with six rounds and plenty of new workers and stone coming to you in every round anyway, rather than going just for short-term gains. The scoresheets are very busy and there is a lot to juggle in your mind as you go, which is why I’ve more or less settled on a fixed strategy that I tweak depending on the small amount of randomness in each game (mostly what extra resources you get for each round, determined by card flips). Complexity: Medium.
83. Fit to Print. Full review. Galaxy Trucker has always stood as the paragon of a strategy game with a real-time element, but I think Fit to Print might do it one better. You’re all editors of newspapers for woodland creatures and will produce three editions over the game’s three rounds, with each slightly larger than the last. The tile-claiming and tile-laying phases go in real time, so there’s a mad dash to grab tiles and lay them out, but there are rules about how you can do so: you can’t place ads next to ads or pictures next to pictures or articles of the same type (color) next to each other. Articles score straight points, photos score if they match neighboring articles, ads bring you money, and you also lose points if you don’t balance happy and sad articles. You also lose if you have the largest area of uncovered white space on your board. The player with the least ad revenue at game-end loses automatically, and the winner is whoever has the highest score of the remaining players. There are variants for two players, solo play, and family play without the timer. The art here is amazing and some of the content on the little tiles is genuinely funny. Complexity: Medium-low.
82. Acquire. Monopoly for grown-ups, and one of the oldest games on the list. Build hotel chains up from scratch, gain a majority of the shares, merge them, and try to outearn all your opponents. The game hinges heavily on its one random element – the draw of tiles from the pool each turn – but the decisions on buying stock in existing chains and how to sell them after a merger give the player far more control over his fate than he’d have in Monopoly. There’s a two-player variant that works OK, but it’s best with at least three people. The game looks a lot nicer now; I have a copy from the mid-1980s that still has the 1960s artwork and color scheme. Complexity: Low.
81. That’s Pretty Clever! This game, originally called Ganz Schön Clever, is the best roll-and-write game ever developed. You roll six dice, each in its own color, and choose one to score. Then you remove dice lower than the one you chose, roll the remainder, and choose another to score. Do this one more time. Each die scores in a unique way on your scoresheet, which has five separate scoring areas (the white is wild, and also is paired with the blue die for scoring that color). It works extremely well as a solo game, or with two players, or up to four; you also get to choose one leftover die after each opponent’s turn. There are three sequel games, Twice as Clever!, Clever Cubed, and Clever 4ever, but this remains the best one. Complexity: Low.
80. Stone Age: Full review. I’ve cooled on Stone Age over the last few years, because other games have adopted aspects of it – Everdell in particular – and improved them, or just put them into shorter games. Stone Age has a lot of real-time decision-making and simple mechanics and goals that first-time players always seem to pick up quickly. Each player is trying to build a small stone-age civilization by expanding his population and gathering resources to construct buildings worth varying amounts of points, but must always ensure that he feeds all his people on each turn. You place workers and then roll one die per worker to see how many resources you’ll get, which tends to flatten out differences in playing skills. But the game can be very long, depending on playing styles – you need one or more players who target the cards to try to speed to end-game. The iOS app is strong – they did a nice job reimagining the board for smaller screens – and is now updated and playable on newer devices. Complexity: Medium.
79. Coffee Roaster. Full review. The best purely solo board game I’ve ever played, Coffee Roaster is exactly what it sounds like: You pick a bean from the game’s deck, each of which has a specific moisture content, and unique combination of green beans and other tokens, and has an optimal roast level. On each turn, you crank up the roast and draw tokens from the bag that you can then deploy to the board to try to remove any bad beans or smoke tokens while gradually increasing the roast level of the good beans. There are all sorts of bonus moves you can make to try to improve your results, but eventually you move to the cupping stage and draw (roughly) ten tokens from the bag, adding up their roast values to see how close you got to the bean’s optimal number. Like the caffeine in the beverages, the game is quite addictive, especially since it’s easy to score something but hard to get to that one optimal roast number. I have the original edition but Stronghold Games has brought it back in an all-new version new art. Complexity: Medium.
78. Ingenious. Full app review. Ingenious is another Reiner Knizia title, a two- to four-person abstract strategy game that involves tile placement but where the final scoring compares each player’s lowest score across the six tile colors, rather than his/her highest. That alters gameplay substantially, often making the ideal play seem counterintuitive, and also requires each player to keep a more careful eye on what the other guy is doing. The app, which I owned and reviewed, is now gone from all app stores, because of a trademark dispute, although other versions exist. Complexity: Low.
77. Charterstone. Full review. Charterstone brings the legacy format to old-school Euro games of resource collection, worker placement, and building stuff for points, and unlike most legacy games, this is an original concept. Players all play on the same board but focus on building in their own areas, scoring points within each game by trading in resources or gold, achieving objectives, building buildings, opening chests (which is how you add new rules), or gaining reputation. At game-end, there’s a final scoring that considers how many times each player won individual games, and also adds points for things like the buildings in your charter when the last game was over. The board and rules change as the game progresses, with new meeples appearing, new ways to score points, and entirely new game concepts added, so that without you realizing it the game has gone from something very simple to a moderately complex strategy game that taught you all the rules as you played it. The base game gives you twelve plays to complete the story; you can buy a recharge pack to play with the other side of the board and most of the same components a second time through. Once you’ve done that, you can continue playing it as a single-play game. The app, from Acram Digital, is very good, although it’s such a long process that I haven’t gone back to replay it. Complexity: Starts low, ends medium to medium-high.
76. Splito. Short review. The best new small-box game of the year, Splito is a semi-cooperative game, where you play cards between your self and your two neighbors to try to score points jointly, but there’s only one winner at game-end. The deck has cards numbered 1 through 6 in multiple colors, and the scoring cards you’ll play between you ask you to play certain combinations of cards, or to avoid a certain number or color entirely in your shared area. It plays 3 to 8 players and I can vouch that it works well at 8, which is a rarity for non-party games. Complexity: Medium-low.
75. Fort. Full review. Fort has a kids’s game sort of theme, as players compete to build the best treehouse fort by attracting neighborhood kids to join their clubs, but it’s a game for more seasoned players because you have to make some long-term strategic choices to play it well. It’s a deckbuilder where you can take cards from other players for free any time they draw a card but choose not to use it on that turn – but they can do the same to you. The art is amazing, from the same artist who does all of Leder’s games (Root, Vast). Complexity: Medium.
74. Whistle Stop. Full review. Whistle Stop is a train game that takes a little bit from lots of other train games, including Ticket to Ride, Steam, and Russian Railroads, without becoming bogged down by too many rules or scoring mechanisms. It also has gloriously fun, pastel-colored pieces and artwork, and the variable board gives it a ton of replay value. It was an immediate hit in my house, although I think the game’s length has kept it on the shelf for some time. Complexity: Medium.
73. Diplomacy. Risk for grown-ups, with absolutely zero random chance – it’s all about negotiating. I wrote about the history of Diplomacy (and seven other games) for mental_floss in 2010, concluding with: “One of a handful of games (with Risk) in both the GAMES Magazine and Origin Awards Halls of Fame, Diplomacy is an excellent choice if you enjoy knife fights with your friends and holding grudges that last well beyond the final move.” I think that sums it up perfectly. I haven’t played this in a few years, unfortunately, although that’s no one’s fault but my own. Complexity: Medium.
72. Power Grid: Full review. This might be the Acquire for the German-style set, as the best business- or economics-oriented game I’ve found. (I own a copy of London, but haven’t played it. Brass is pretty close.) Each player tries to build a power grid on the board, bidding on plants at auction, placing stations in cities, and buying resources to fire them. Those resources become scarce and the game’s structure puts limits on expansion in the first two “phases.” It’s not a simple game to learn and a few rules are less than intuitive, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a game that does a better job of turning resource constraints into something fun. I’d love to see this turned into an app, although the real-time auction process would make async multi-player a tough sell. Complexity: High (or medium-high).
71. Citadels. Full review. First recommended to me by a reader back in my first rankings in 2008, Citadels only reached me when Asmodee reissued the game in one box with all of the existing expansions. It’s a fantastic game for five or more players, still workable at four, not so great below that. It’s a role selection game where players pick a role and then work through those actions by the role’s number, with some roles, of course, that do damage to specific roles that might come later in the turn. It’s the best mix of a party game and a traditional boardgame I’ve seen. Complexity: Medium-low.
70. Glen More. Full review. Build your Scottish settlement, grow wheat, make whiskey. Sure, you can do other stuff, like acquire special tiles (including Loch Ness!) or acquire the most chieftains or earn victory points by trading other resources, but really, whiskey, people. The tile selection mechanic is the biggest selling point, as players move on a track around the edge of the central board and may choose to skip one or more future turns by jumping further back to acquire a better tile. Unfortunately, this game might be permanently out of print; it’s been replaced by a “sequel” game, Glen More II: Chronicles, which is longer, more complex, and a lot more expensive. Complexity: Medium.
69. Riftforce. Full review. Riftforce is an asymmetrical dueling game, where each player has a deck of cards in four factions, and the players play cards to five locations in a row between them. The cards are valued 5, 6, and 7, representing their hit points. You can play up to three cards of a color, or three of the same value, or you can play a card to activate up to three matching cards, using their actions usually to blast a card on the other side of the same location. You duel until one player gets 12 Riftforce points, mostly from destroying an opponent’s cards. The game comes with ten factions, which gives it more variety than most folks will ever need, with eight more in the Beyond expansion, which allows for solo or team play. Complexity: Medium-low.
68. Lanterns. Full game and app review. A tile-placement and matching game where players are also racing to collect tokens to trade in for bonuses that decline in value as the game goes on. Each tile has lanterns in any of seven colors along the four edges; placing a tile gives you one token of the color facing you … and each opponent one token of the color facing him/her. If you match a tile side to the side it’s touching, you get a token of that color too. There are also bonus tokens from some tiles, allowing you to trade tokens of one color for another. Bonuses come from trading in one token of each color; three pairs; or four of a kind. The art is great and the app adds some wonderful animations. Complexity: Medium-low.
67. Silver & Gold. Full review. Phil Walker-Harding is some sort of genius, with Imhotep, the Sushi Go! series, Bärenpark, Gizmos, and this all hits under his name, along with Summer Camp, the lighter Gingerbread House, and more. Silver & Gold is a polyomino flip-and-write game where there are just eight shapes to choose from in each round, with seven of them displayed in random order (the eighth isn’t used), and players fill in those small shapes on the larger ones on their two objective cards, using dry-erase markers. You score for finishing shapes, with three small bonuses available each game that do usually end up mattering in the final score. It’s portable, easy, lightly strategic, and undeniably fun. Complexity: Low.
66. Kites. Full review. A great real-time cooperative game that gets everyone involved and usually calls for a fair bit of yelling because someone isn’t pulling their weight. The game has several timers in different colors, and players must play cards from their hands with one or two colors on them, flipping the matching timer(s). The goal is to get through the entire deck and your hands of cards before any timer runs out. Full games take less than ten minutes, and like a lot of cooperative games, sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s unwinnable, and usually you win by the skin of your teeth. It’s very suitable for younger players as long as they have the dexterity to handle the timers. Complexity: Low.
65. Thebes: Full review. A fun family-oriented game with an archaelogy theme and what I think of as the right amount of luck: it gives the game some balance and makes replays more interesting, but doesn’t determine the whole game. Players collect cards to run expeditions to five dig sites, then root around in the site’s bag of tokens to try to extract treasure. Back in print at the moment. Complexity: Medium-low.
64. Coup. Full review. A great, great bluffing game if you have at least four people in your gaming group. Each player gets two cards and can use various techniques to try to take out other players. Last (wo)man standing is the winner. Guaranteed to get the f-bombs flowing. Only $7 for the whole kit and caboodle. The expansion, Coup: Reformation, lets you boost the maximum player count from 6 to 10. Complexity: Low.
63. Get on Board: New York & London/Paris & Roma. Full review. Two games, one released in 2022 and one in 2023, and I love them both. They’re reimplementations of a Japanese game called Let’s Make a Bus Route, all flip-and-write games where players place their tracks on the streets on the game board, with different maps for 2-3 players and for 4-5 players. Along the way, you’ll pick up passengers, sometimes dropping them off for points, while trying to hit your private objective of running your route through three specific stops and the public objectives of picking up 5 passengers of a specific type or getting to three buildings of a specific type. You have six track shapes you can play and the flipped card determines what you’re playing, which will be a different shape from what your opponents play on the same turn. The original game, New York & London, penalized you for going on streets where your opponents already laid tracks, while the second one, Paris & Roma, gives you extra points for doing so. They’re both fantastic with bright, goofy art, and the challenges haven’t gotten old for me yet. Complexity: Medium-low.
62. Dragomino. Full review. This reimagining of Kingdomino for younger players, aged 4 and up, is bar none the best game I’ve played for kids that young – and if you don’t believe me, I have at least four kids aged 4 or 5 who would back up my opinion, including my youngest stepdaughter. It takes the domino terrain tiles of the original and just asks players to take one tile on each turn, place it in their area next to an existing tile, and draw one dragon egg for each place where they’ve matched adjacent terrain types. Some dragon eggs have baby dragons, and some are empty. Whoever ends the game with the most baby dragons wins. It’s not a good game for kids. It’s a good game, one that kids can play easily. If you’re the adult at the table, that is exactly what you’re looking for. Complexity: Low.
61. Watergate. Full review. It’s a pure two-player game that pits one player as Nixon and the other as “the journalists,” each with a unique deck, where the latter player tries to place evidence tokens connecting at least two witnesses to the President, and Tricky Dick tries to block them. It’s fun, incredibly well-written, and a real thinker, with actual educational value and some additional reading content at the back of the rule book. Complexity: Medium.
60. Canvas. Full review. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more visually stunning game, starting with the box itself. It’s also surprisingly simple to learn and play. Players will select cards from the display to build three works of art, crafting them by placing three cards into a clear sleeve so that up to five distinct elements of the artwork are visible for scoring. The value of those elements can vary in each game, while some things are always worth points. It plays in about a half an hour and is far easier than any other card-crafting game I’ve seen. Plus the game’s artwork is off the charts. Complexity: Low.
59. Wandering Towers. I will review this in full later in December or early in January, but this is the best new family game of 2023 and playable even with younger kids since there’s no text and the rules are quite simple. Each player has a set of five wizards on the game’s circular track, and five empty potion bottles in front of them. On your turn, you play a card from your hand to either move one of your wizards or to move one of the towers on the board. If you move a tower and it ends up on a space with any wizards on it, they’re trapped under the tower and you get to fill one potion bottle. The goal is to get all five of your wizards into the Ravenskeep tower, which moves around the track every time a wizard enters, and have all five of your potion bottles filled. You can also discard filled potion bottles to use either of the game’s two special actions, which change each game. It’s easy to learn and looks great on the table, plus it has the perfect amount of take-that for playing with your kids. Complexity: Low.
58. Nidavellir. Full review. Nidavellir is a bidding game, with set collection, and a kind of silly Nordic dwarves theme that’s kind of fun. But the way it handles the bidding is novel: Every player has five money tokens and will bid with two of them in each round on the three rows of dwarf cards (one per player in each row). You take the two coins you didn’t use, combine their value, and swap the higher one for a new coin showing that sum – so sometimes it’s better to underbid and get a better coin for future rounds. I’m a fan already. Complexity: Medium-low.
57. SCOUT. Full review. This game first came out in Asia in 2019, but got its first official north American release in 2022 – there were scattered used copies available before then, but I never saw a new one anywhere until Gen Con this year. SCOUT is an amazing game in a tiny box, where players get hands of cards that they can’t reorganize at all, only flipping the entire hand, as is, upside down if they prefer. Players play sets or runs of cards to the table, but they must be contiguous in their hands to play them, and must be longer or have a higher value than the set or run currently there. If you can’t, you ‘scout’ a card from the table, giving a point to whoever played it. You capture all the cards you beat for one point each. You play one round per player, with rounds ending when someone’s out of cards. It’s fast, fun, a constant brain challenge, and highly portable. Complexity: Medium-low.
56. Tokaido. Full review. Another winner from the designer of 7 Wonders, Takenoko, and one of my least favorite Spiel des Jahres winners, Hanabi, Tokaido has players walking along a linear board, stopping where they choose on any unoccupied space, collecting something at each stop, with a half-dozen different ways to score – collecting all cards of a panorama, finishing sets of trinkets, meeting strangers for points or coins, or donating to the temple to try to get the game-end bonus for the most generous traveler. It’s a great family-level game that requires more thought and more mental math than most games of its ilk. The app is excellent as well. There’s a sequel game, Namiji, with the same basic mechanics but change the players’ actions on the path; and now a two-player game, Tokaido Duo (full review), with the same theme but many changes to the rules. Complexity: Medium.
55. Concordia: Full review . It’s a map game, set in Ancient Rome, built around trade and economics rather than conflict or claiming territories. Much better with four players than with two, where there isn’t enough interaction on the map to force players to make harder decisions. Runner-up for the Kennerspiel des Jahres (Connoisseur’s game of the year) in 2015 to Istanbul. The app from Acram Digital is solid and they’ve already published several expansions for it. Complexity: Medium.
54. The Search for Planet X. Full review. This competitive deduction game is like a logic puzzle that’s been streamlined and converted to the tabletop by limiting the kinds of questions you can ask on a turn to try to solve the core mystery. Players are astronomers looking for the hypothesized ninth planet (a real thing) in either 12 or 18 sectors of the sky, depending on whether you play the basic or advanced version. Every sector has one object, except for those that scan as ’empty’ … but the one with Planet X also appears empty, so you can only find it via deduction once you know enough of the rules governing where other planets are located. You get points for identifying where other objects are too, so you can guess Planet X’s location second or third or later and still win. I own but haven’t played the sequel, The Search for Lost Species, yet. Complexity: Medium-low.
53. Love Letter: Full review. The entire game is just sixteen cards and a few heart tokens. Each player has one card and has to play it; the last player still alive wins the round. It requires at least three players to be any good and was much better with four, with lots of laughing and silly stare-downs. It’s the less serious version of Coup, and it’s only $9. Complexity: Low.
52. Through the Desert. Full app review, although it hasn’t been updated for the newest iOS version. Another Knizia game, this one on a large board of hexes where players place camels in chains, attempting to cordon off entire areas they can claim or to connect to specific hexes worth extra points, all while potentially blocking their opponents from building longer or more valuable chains in the same colors. Very simple to learn and to set up, and like most Knizia games, it’s balanced and the mechanics work beautifully. Finally reprinted in 2018 by Fantasy Flight, but it’s out of print again, as they spiked their Euro Classics line. Horse with no name sold separately. Complexity: Low.
51. Clank! A Deck-building Adventure & Clank! Legacy. I’ve been playing the Clank! Legacy game recently, about halfway through the campaign, and it has helped me appreciate the original game quite a bit more. Clank! is a deckbuilding dungeon crawler that doesn’t take itself very seriously, even mocking the dungeon crawl in its premise, as it’s every player for themselves – as opposed to the D&D style of crawl, where players work as a party to move through a dungeon, killing monsters and gathering treasure. Players draw five cards from their decks, taking the actions the cards indicate and using their movement, attack, and money points to advance into the dungeon, kill monsters, and buy more cards. Once one player grabs one of the big treasures and gets back up to the surface, the clock is ticking, and it’s a race for other players at least get above ground to avoid elimination. The legacy game is also great, adding some new components and mechanics that Dire Wolf has now added to the new Clank! Catacombs game, which features a modular board as well. I’ll review Clank! Legacy once I’ve played it at least two more times. Complexity: Medium-low.
50. Earth. Full review. This is Wingspan, squared, in one sense literally – you’re playing cards to your ecosystem in a 4×4 grid, rather than three rows of up to 5 cards, but the gist of the game is very similar. You play cards by spending soil resources equal to their cost, water them, grow them, or compost them, and when you choose one of those actions you activate every card in your ecosystem with the matching action color. You gain points from the cards themselves, from tokens placed on them through growth and watering (sprouts), plus public and private end-game objectives. There’s a lot going on, so the cognitive load of the game is fairly high, but nothing within the mechanics is that complex or even new – you’ve seen most of this before, just never in these combinations. If you love Wingspan and want something a little more challenging, albeit still without player interaction, Earth is your game. Complexity: Medium.
49. Puerto Rico: Full review. One of the highest-rated and most-acclaimed Eurogames of all time, although I think its combination of worker-placement and building has been done better by later designers. You’re attempting to populate and build your own island, bringing in colonists, raising plantations, developing your town, and shipping goods back to the mother country. Very low luck factor, and just the right amount of screw-your-neighbor (while helping yourself, the ultimate defense). Unfortunately, the corn-and-ship strategy is really tough to beat, reducing the game’s replay value for me. There’s a new edition coming, probably this winter, that keeps the game play while updating the theme so that the brown “colonists” aren’t so obviously slaves. Complexity: High.
48. The Mind. Full review. The Mind may drive you crazy; I haven’t beaten it yet, playing with several different people already, but I still find it really enjoyable and something that nearly always ends up with everyone laughing. This Spiel des Jahres-nominated game has just a deck of cards numbered 1 to 100, and in each round, every player gets a set number of cards dealt from the shuffled deck. All players must play their cards to the table in one pile, ascending by card number … but you can’t talk to anyone else, or even gesture. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. Complexity: Low.
47. Vikings: Full review. A very clever tile placement game in which players place island and ship tiles in their areas and then place vikings of six different colors on those tiles to maximize their points. Some vikings score points directly, but can’t score unless a black “warrior” viking is placed above them. Grey “boatsman” vikings are necessary to move vikings you’ve stored on to unused tiles. And if you don’t have enough blue “fisherman” vikings, you lose points at the end of the game for failing to feed everyone. Tile selection comes from a rondel that moves as tiles come off the board, with each space on the rondel assigning a monetary value to the tiles; tiles become cheaper as the number remaining decreases. You’re going to end up short somewhere, so deciding early where you’ll punt is key. Great game that still gets too little attention. It’s been out of print for a while now. Complexity: Medium.
46. Targi. Full review. Moderately complex two-player game with a clever mechanic for placing meeples on a grid – you don’t place meeples on the grid itself, but on the row/column headers, so you end up blocking out a whole row or column for your opponent. Players gather salt, pepper, dates, and the relatively scarce gold to enable them to buy “tribe cards” that are worth points by themselves and in combinations with other cards. Some tribe cards also confer benefits later in the game, and there at least two that are super-powered and you’ll fight to get. Two-player games often tend to be too simple, or feel like weak variants of games designed for more players. Targi isn’t either of those things – it’s a smart game that feels like it was built for exactly two people. Complexity: Medium.
45. Kodama: The Tree Spirits. Full review. Kodama features artwork that looks like it came from the pen of Hayao Miyazaki, but it’s a quick-playing game that has something I hadn’t seen before in how you place your cards. Players start with a tree trunk card with one ‘feature’ on it, and must add branch cards to the trunk and beyond, scoring whenever a feature appears on the card just placed and the card (or trunk) to which it connects. You can score up to 10 points on a turn, and will add 12 cards to your tree. You get four secret bonus cards at the start of the game and play one at the end of each season (4 turns), and each season itself has a special rule that varies each game. It’s light, portable, and replays extremely well. The base game also includes Sprout cards for simpler play with younger children. The two-player spinoff Kodama Duo isn’t great on its own but includes cards to expand the base game for a sixth player. Complexity: Low.
44. Terraforming Mars. Full review. One of the most acclaimed games of the last decade, Terraforming Mars is big and long, but so imaginative that it provides an engrossing enough experience to last the two hours or so it takes to play. The theme is just what the title says, based on the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (which I loathed), as the players compete to rack up points while jointly transforming the planet’s surface. The environment is tracked with three main variables – oxygen levels, surface temperature, and water supply – that alter the effects of various moves and buildings as the game progresses. The cards are the heart of the play itself, as they can provide powerful points bonuses and/or game benefits. It’s already been expanded at least four times, with Hellas & Elysium, Venus Next, Prelude, and Colonies. Complexity: High.
43. Tzolk’in. Tzolkin is a fairly complex worker-placement game where the board itself has six interlocked gears that move with the days of the Mayan calendar; you place a worker on one gear and he cycles through various options for moves until you choose to recall him. As with most worker-placement games, you’re collecting food, gold, wood, and stone; building stuff; and moving up some scoring tracks, the latter of which is the main source of strategic complexity. I like designer Simone Luciani’s games, and this is one of his best, even though I’m pretty bad at it – I never seem to get the rhythm of adding and removing workers right. The gears, though, are kind of badass. Complexity: High.
42. Orient Express. An outstanding game that’s long out of print; I’m lucky enough to still have the copy my father bought for me in the 1980s, but fans have crafted their own remakes, like this one from a Boardgamegeek user. It takes those logic puzzles where you try to figure out which of five people held which job and lived on which street and had what for breakfast and turns them into a murder mystery board game with a fixed time limit. When the Orient Express reaches its destination, the game ends, so you need to move fast and follow the clues. The publishers still sell the expansions, adding up to 30 more cases for you to solve, through this site, but when I asked them about plans for a reprint they gave me the sense it’s not likely. There’s a 2017 game of the same name, but it’s unrelated. Complexity: Low.
41. Gizmos. Full review. Phil Walker-Harding’s engine-builder plays very quickly for a game of this depth, and doesn’t skimp on the visual appeal – the ‘energy tokens’ you’ll collect to buy more cards are colored marbles, and they’re dispensed by what looks like a cardboard gumball machine. The engine-building aspect is a real winner, though, as it’s very easy to grasp how you’ll gain things from certain cards and how to daisy-chain them into very powerful engines before the game ends. I have yet to find anyone who’s played this game but didn’t love it. I’ve played this a bunch more online, however, and I think there might be a dominant strategy or at least something close to it, enough that I’ve slid this one down the list a few spots. Complexity: Medium-low.
40. The Quacks of Quedlinburg. Full review. The Kennerspiel des Jahres winner from 2018 came to my attention too late for my top ten list of its release year, but it would have made the cut if I had played it in time. Designed by Wolfgang Warsch, who has The Mind also on this list and is also behind the co-op game Fuji and dice-rollers That’s Pretty Clever! and Twice As Clever!, the Quacks is a press-your-luck game with vaguely ridiculous artwork where players fill their bags with ingredients for their potions, drawing as many as they want to try to gain points and benefits before their potions explode because they drew too many white tokens. All other tokens are ‘bought’ through the draws in each round – if you explode, you don’t get points, but you do get money – and each confers some kind of benefit. The press-your-luck part is a lot of fun, though, and even though it’s competitive there’s a sort of aspect where you find yourself rooting for someone else who decides to keep drawing after you’re done. It plays well with five players, and the Mega box, which includes the base game and two expansions, lets you add a sixth. Complexity: Medium-low.
39. Takenoko. Full review. If I tell you this is the cutest game I own, would you consider that a negative? The theme and components are fantastic – there’s a panda and a gardener and these little bamboo pieces, and the panda eats the bamboo and you have to lay new tiles and make sure they have irrigation and try not to go “squeeeeee!” at how adorable it all is. There’s a very good game here too: Players draw and score “objective” cards from collecting certain combinations of bamboo, laying specific patterns of hex tiles, or building stacks of bamboo on adjacent tiles. The rules were easy enough for my daughter to learn when she was about eight, but gameplay is more intricate because you’re planning a few moves out and have to deal with your opponents’ moves – although there’s no incentive to screw your opponents. Just be careful – that panda is hungry. Complexity: Medium-low.
38. Votes for Women. Full review. As of right now, I think this is my #1 game for 2023, although I have another week-plus to change my mind and play new stuff. Votes for Women is a two-player game that incorporates its theme incredibly well into game play, and adds an area control element that’s absent from a lot of both two-player games and historical games that don’t involve war. One player is the suffragist, and the other the misogynist opposition, competing to meet their respective requirements to pass or defeat the 19th Amendment, convincing enough states to vote your way (by placing four of your tokens there, with none of your opponent’s) and getting Congress to ratify it. You do this by means of large decks of cards that change and become more potent as the game progresses, and can boost your efforts by claiming certain event and state cards if you gain control of any state/area early on in the game. It’s fun, educational, and really bright and easy to look at, which is important given the amount of text involved. Complexity: Medium-low.
37. Cacao. Full review. A simpler Carcassonne? I guess every tile-laying game gets compared to the granddaddy of them all, but Cacao certainly looks similar, and you don’t get to see very far ahead in the tile supply in Cacao, although at least here you get a hand of three tiles from which to choose. But the Cacao board ends up very different, a checkerboard pattern of alternating tiles between players’ worker tiles and the game’s neutral tiles, which can give you cacao beans, let you sell beans for 2-4 gold pieces, give you access to water, give you partial control of a temple, or just hand you points. One key mechanic: if you collect any sun tiles, you can play a new tile on top of a tile you played earlier in the game, which is a great way to make a big ten-point play to steal the win. I haven’t explored the expansions beyond the volcanoes, but the Diamante one is well-received. Complexity: Low.
36. Patchwork: Full review. A really sharp two-player game that has an element of Tetris – players try to place oddly shaped bits of fabric on his/her main board, minimizing unused space and earning some small bonuses along the way. It’s from Uwe Rosenberg, better known for designing the ultra-complex games Agricola, Le Havre, and Caverna. I’ve played this a ton, and the way you have to think ahead just a little bit, looking at what tiles you can take and what tile(s) your opponent might take, is perfect for two-player play. Complexity: Low.
35. (The Settlers of) Catan: It’s now just called Catan, although I use the old title because I think more people know it by that name. I don’t pull this game out as much as I did ten years ago, and I’ve still got it ranked this high largely because of its value as an introduction to Eurogames, one of the best “gateway games” on the market. Without this game, we don’t have the explosion in boardgames we’ve had in the last twenty-plus years. We don’t have Ticket to Ride and 7 Wonders showing up in Target (where you can also buy Catan), a whole wall of German-style games in Barnes & Noble, or the Cones of Dunshire on network television. I believe only three games on this list predate Settlers, from an era where Monopoly was considered the ne plus ultra of boardgames and you couldn’t complain about how long and awful it was because you had no basis for comparison. The history of boardgames comprises two eras: Before Catan, and After Catan. Complexity: Medium-low.
34. Imhotep. Full review. Nominated for the Spiel des Jahres in 2016, Imhotep lost out to Codenames – a solid party game, not quite good enough for this top 100 between the language dependence and the lack of a strategic element – but in my opinion should have won. Imhotep is a quick-playing game with lots of depth as players gather stones, place them on ships, and sail ships to any of five possible destinations, each with a different benefit or point value. You can place a stone on any ship, and you can use your turn to sail a ship without any of your stones on it – say, to keep someone else from blocking your path or from scoring a big bonus. Each destination tile has two sides so you can vary the game, mixing and matching for up to 32 different configurations. Complexity: Medium-low.
33. Terraforming Mars: Ares Edition. Full review. This is probably heretical to fans of the original Terraforming Mars game, but I like this shorter version better. It’s smaller, and plays in an hour, but still keeps the theme and general concepts from the first game. Each player represents a unique corporation that is working both to terraform the red planet and to be the most profitable one while doing so. You do all that through drawing cards and paying to play them to your tableau, with most cards providing either one-time bonuses or, more commonly, ongoing benefits that make it easier to get more money, resources, or points as the game goes on. When the planet is fully terraformed, the game ends. It’s the Terraforming Mars experience, distilled in a far more digestible format. Complexity: Medium.
32. King of Tokyo. Full review. From the guy who created Magic: the Gathering comes a game that has no elfs or halflings or deckbuilding whatsoever. Players are monsters attempting to take control of Tokyo, attacking each other along the way while trying to rack up victory points and maintain control of the city space on the board. Very kid-friendly between the theme and major use of the dice (with up to two rerolls per turn), but good for the adults too; it plays two to six but I think it needs at least three to be any good. It offers many expansions, but the power-ups that give each player a unique power & unique cards to buy are worthwhile. Complexity: Medium-low.
31. Istanbul. Full review. Not Constantinople. Istanbul won the 2014 Kennerspiel des Jahres, but it’s not that complex a game overall; my then eight-year-old daughter figured out a basic strategy right away (I call it the “big money” strategy) that was surprisingly robust, and the rules are not that involved or difficult. Players are merchants in a Turkish marketplace, trying to acquire the rubies needed to win the game through various independent channels. There’s a competitive element in that you don’t want to pursue the same methods everyone else is, because that just raises the costs. It’s also a very visually appealing game. There’s a new dice game coming at the end of December, with a similar theme but with new mechanics, ditching the pathfinding/backtracing element of the original game and concentrating on goods trading and dice manipulation. Acram Digital’s app version is tremendous and highly addictive, as you can randomize the tile layout, giving you over a billion possible boards on which to play. Complexity: Medium.
30. Caylus: Full app review. Another game I’ve only played in its now-defunct app version, Caylus is among the best of the breed of highly-complex games that also includes Agricola and Le Havre, with slightly simpler rules and fewer pieces, yet the same lack of randomness and relatively deep strategy. I’ve also found the game is more resilient to early miscues than other complex strategy games, as long as you don’t screw up too badly. In Caylus, players compete for resources used to construct new buildings along one public road and used to construct parts of the main castle where players can earn points and special privileges like extra points or resources. If another player uses a building you constructed, you get a point or a resource, and in most cases only one player can build a specific building type, while each castle level has a finite number of blocks to be built. There are also high point value statues and monuments that I think are essential to winning the game, but you have to balance the need to build those against adding to the castle and earning valuable privileges. Even playing the app a dozen or more times I’ve never felt it becoming monotonous, and the app’s graphics were probably the best I’ve seen alongside those of Agricola’s. It’s in and out of print, apparently out right now, although a newer, streamlined edition, Caylus 1303, is available. Complexity: High.
29. Tigris & Euphrates: Full review. The magnum opus from Herr Knizia, a two- to four-player board game where players fight for territory on a grid that includes the two rivers of the game’s title, but where the winning player is the one whose worst score (of four) is the best. Players gain points for placing tiles in each of four colors, for having their “leaders” adjacent to monuments in those colors, and for winning conflicts with other players. Each player gets points in those four colors, but the idea is to play a balanced strategy because of that highest low score rule. The rules are a little long, but the game play is very straightforward, and the number of decisions is large but manageable. It’s kind of mean, though – you can’t win without screwing with your opponents. Fantasy Flight also reissued this title in 2015, with a much-needed graphics update and smaller box, but that entire line of updated Euro Classics is now out of print again. Knizia himself revised this game as Yellow & Yangtze, which has a digital port from Dire Wolf that I also liked quite a bit. Complexity: Medium.
28. Battle Line: Full review. Among the best two-player games I’ve found, designed by Reiner Knizia, who is also behind a bunch of other games on this list. Each player tries to build formations on his/her side of the nine flags that stand in a line between him and his opponent; formations include three cards, and the various formation types resemble poker hands, with a straight flush of 10-9-8 in one color as the best formation available. Control three adjacent flags, or any five of the nine, and you win. But ten tactics cards allow you to bend the rules, by stealing a card your opponent has played, raising the bar for a specific flag from three cards to four, or playing one of two wild cards that can stand in for any card you can’t draw. There’s a fair amount of randomness involved, but playing nine formations at once with a seven-card hand allows you to diversify your risk. The game is also known as Schotten Totten, which has the same rules with different art, but Schotten Totten 2 is different. Complexity: Low.
27. La Isla. Full review. I’ve owned this game for a while, but didn’t play it until this past year, and it turns out that I love it – it’s right in my wheelhouse in terms of its complexity/fun combination, not too complex to be enjoyable, not too simple to be boring. Players are scientists trying to spot five endangered species on the island board, which is modular and thus changes every game, and do so by placing their 5 explorer tokens on the board to surround animal tiles. There’s a separate board with scoring tracks for the five animal types, determining what each tile is worth at game-end while also letting you re-score animals you’ve collected when you gain another one of that type, so you can try to set yourself up to boost the value of the animal you’re targeting and then grab all that you can of that type. There’s also a 10-point bonus if you get a set of all five, giving you an alternate path if the first doesn’t work. Designer Stefan Feld has gone too far into point-salad world with recent titles but this one, which often sells for just $20, is a hit. It’s available again at the moment, but it’s getting a retheme under the title Vienna, scheduled for 2023 but still not out. Complexity: Medium-low to medium.
26. Cascadia. Full review. One of the best new games of 2021, Cascadia is simple, challenging, and extremely fun – plus you can play it with kids as young as 8. Cascadia’s mechanics are simple: take a tile and an animal token from the market and add them, separately if you wish, to the ecosystem you’re building in front of you. The five animal types each score in different ways, and the game comes with five possible scoring methods for each of the animals, including a simple “family” method for each if you want to start out with a basic game. You also score at game end for your largest contiguous area of each of the five terrain types, with a bonus if you have the largest of all players’ boards. And that’s it. It takes maybe 45 minutes at the most, and offers a ton of replayability. Complexity: Low to medium-low.
25. Imhotep: The Duel. Full review. This strictly two-player version of Imhotep is even better than the original by taking the feel of the original but rethinking the mechanics to make it much more direct – the interaction here is constant, and a huge part of the game is thinking about how your opponent will react to any move you make. Players gain the tiles on six ships by placing meeples on a 3×3 grid, and may unload any row or column that has at least two meeples on it. The tiles go to the four scoring areas on their own player boards, along with four kinds of special tiles (place 2-3 meeples, place 1 meeple and unload 1-2 ships, swap two tiles and unload, take any one tile straight from a ship) that let you disrupt your opponent’s plans. The player boards are modular and pieces are two-sided, so you get 16 combinations for to scoring. It’s fantastic. Complexity: Medium-low.
24. New Bedford. Full review. I adore this game, which is about whaling, but somehow manages to sneak worker-placement and town-building into the game too, and figures out how to reward people who do certain things early without making the game a rout. Each player gets to add buildings to the central town of New Bedford (much nicer than the actual town is today), or can use one of the central buildings; you pay to use someone else’s building, and they can be worth victory points to their owners at game-end. The real meat of the game is the whaling though – you get two ships, and the more food you stock them with, the more turns they spend out at sea, which means more turns where you might grab the mighty sperm whale token from the bag. But you have to pay the dockworkers to keep each whale and score points for it. For a game that has this much depth, it plays remarkably fast – never more than 40 minutes for us with three players. Complexity: Medium.
23. The Red Cathedral. Full review. A tremendous game in a fairly small box, The Red Cathedral is a resource-management game where players compete to build the cathedral of the game’s title, which contains six sections per player, and to add decorations to it – even to sections completed by their opponents. You gather resources by moving dice around an eight-part circular track, and can plan your moves to double or triple your return. There are also two points tracks overlaid on each other that allow you to jump more quickly or give a point or two back to gain money. It’s about 90 minutes, but moves quickly, and it hits the perfect level of complexity for this sort of game – I don’t really want anything heavier or more difficult than this. Complexity: Medium-high.
22. Sagrada. Full review. I tried Sagrada too late for my 2017 rankings, which is a shame as it would have made my top ten for sure. It’s a dice-drafting game where players select dice from a central pool and place them on their boards, representing stained-glass windows, to try to match specific patterns for points. It sounds simple, but rules on how you can place the dice and the need to plan ahead while hoping for specific colors or numbers to appear make it much harder than it seems. There’s also an expansion that lets you play with 5 or 6 players that also adds ‘personal’ dice to the game, so that the player who drafts dice last in each round doesn’t get penalized so badly, reducing the randomness a little bit; and now a slew of new smaller expansions with new boards, dice, and rules changes. I still love the base game, and the superb digital port. Complexity: Medium-low.
21. Egizia. I’m not even sure how I first heard about Egizia, a complex worker-placement game that has a great theme (ancient Egypt) and, despite some complexity in the number of options, hums along better than most games of this style. In each round, players place meeples on various spots on and along the Nile river on the board. Some give cards with resources, some give cards with bonuses, some allow you to boost the power of your construction crews, and some tracks allow you to build in the big points areas, the monuments found in one corner of the board. You also can gain a few bonus cards, specific to you and hidden from others, that give you more points for certain game-end conditions, like having the most tiles in any single row of the pyramid. Best with four players, but workable with three; with two you’re playing a fun game of solitaire. I own the original game, but the amazon link above goes to Indie Boards & Cards’ 2020 edition, Egizia: Shifting Sands, which has changed the board but kept the original’s core mechanics. Complexity: High.
20. Welcome To… Full review. I don’t know if it was the first flip-and-write title, but Welcome To… was the first one I encountered, and I think it’s spawned a few imitators because it’s so good. In each round, there are three cards from which players can choose, each showing a house number and one of six colors; each player chooses one of those three houses to fill in and takes the benefit of that particular color. The goal is to fill out as much of your own ‘neighborhood’ as you can, scoring points for clusters of adjacent houses, for providing green space, for adding pools to certain houses, and more. It’s simple to learn and has huge replay value. I prefer the original to any of the expansion packs (with themed neighborhoods and new rules) I’ve played. Complexity: Low.
19. Small World: Full review. I think the D&D-style theme does this game a disservice – that’s all just artwork and titles, but the game itself requires some tough real-time decisions. Each player uses his chosen race to take over as many game spaces as possible, but the board is small and your supply of units runs short quickly, forcing you to consider putting your race into “decline” and choosing a new one. But when you choose a new one is affected by what you stand to lose by doing so, how well-defended your current civilization’s position is, and when your opponents are likely to go into decline. The iPad app is outstanding too. Complexity: Medium.
18. Agricola: I gained a new appreciation for this game thanks to the incredible iOS app version developed by Playdek, which made the game’s complexity less daunting and its internal sophistication more evident. You’re a farmer trying to raise enough food to feed your family, but also trying to grow your family so you have more help on the farm. The core game play isn’t that complex, but huge decks of cards offering bonuses, shortcuts, or special skills make the game much more involved, and require some knowledge of the game to play it effectively. I enjoy the game despite the inherent ‘work’ involved, but it is undeniably complex and you can easily spend the whole game freaking out about finding enough food, which about a billion or so people on the planet refer to as “life.” Mayfair reissued the game in 2016 with some improved graphics and a lower price point, although the base game now only plays 1-4. Complexity: High.
17. Hadara. Full review. I recommend Hadara to anyone who loves 7 Wonders and wants something similar, as it has several key points in common – card drafting, light engine building, and a civilization theme – but also has some distinct features (including the second phase of card drafting in each era) that make it a worthy game in its own right. Players get to choose ten cards per era, in five different colors, allowing them to bump up their four resource tracks (gold, culture, military, and food), with cards becoming cheaper as you buy more of that color. Military lets you gain colonies for points and more resource gains; culture lets you build statues for bigger point gains; you have to have 1 food point per card in your kingdom at the end of each era. There are also “medals” that reward you for each complete set of five cards you gain. It’s best with 3+ players but fine with 2 if you can accept the higher degree of randomness in card availability. Complexity: Medium.
16. Grand Austria Hotel. Full review. I was late to this game, and have still only played it online, although I own the physical game. It’s a brilliant medium-heavy game of dice-drafting and resource management, with a theme that’s probably inspired by a certain Wes Anderson movie (although no cats will be defenestrated during the course of the game). Each player tries to prepare rooms in their personal hotels and then fill them with guests, whom they can draft from the board and eventually place in those rooms by serving them the right combination of four resources. Each guest has its own bonus in addition to a point value, with many guests named for other games (including E. Gizia, the most powerful guest card because it gives you another turn). You also have to keep an eye on the emperor track, however, or you can lose a ton of points at any of the three check-ins there. My only knock on it is that it lacks player interaction, but it’s a tremendous thinker of a game with a lot of replayability. Complexity: Medium-high.
15. Everdell. Full review. This was my #1 game of 2018 and has held up well since I gave it that honor. Everdell takes the worker placement and resource collection mechanic of Stone Age and adds what amounts to a second game on top of that, where the buildings you build with those resources actually do stuff, rather than just giving you points. Players build out their tableaux of cards and gain power as the game progresses. Some cards grant you the right to build subsequent cards for free; some give resources, some give points bonuses, and some do other cool things. The artwork is stunning and the theme, forest creatures, is very kid-friendly. The game also crescendos through its “seasons,” with players going from two meeples in the spring to six by game-end, so that no one can get too big of a lead in the early going and new players get time to learn the rhythm. It’s quite a brilliant design, and consistently plays in under an hour. Complexity: Medium-low.
14. Samurai: Full review. I bought the physical game after a few months of playing the app (which, as of December 2020, is still not updated for the newest iOS version), and it’s a great game – simple to learn, complex to play, works very well with two players, plays very differently with three or four as the board expands. Players compete to place their tiles on a map of Japan, divided into hexes, with the goal of controlling the hexes that contain buddha, farmer, or soldier tokens. Each player has hex tiles in his color, in various strengths, that exert control over the tokens they show; samurai tokens that affect all three token types; boats that sit off the shore and affect all token types; and special tokens that allow the reuse of an already-placed tile or allow the player to switch two tokens on the board. Trying to figure out where your opponent might screw you depending on what move you make is half the fun. Very high replayability too. Fantasy Flight updated the graphics, shrank the box, and reissued it in 2015, but they’ve sunsetted the whole Euro Classics line, so it’s out of print yet again. Complexity: Medium/low.
13. Azul. Full review. The best new family-strategy game of 2017 and winner of the Spiel des Jahres, Azul comes from the designer of Vikings and Asara, and folds some press-your-luck mechanics into a pattern-matching game where you collect mosaic tiles and try to transfer them from a storage area to your main 5×5 board. You can only put each tile type in each row once, and in each column once, and you lose points for tiles you can’t place at the end of each round. It’s quite addictive and moves fairly quickly, even when everyone starts playing chicken with the pile left in the middle of the table for whoever chooses last in the round. Complexity: Medium.
12. Splendor: Full review. A Spiel des Jahres nominee in 2014, Splendor has fast become a favorite in our house for its simple rules and balanced gameplay. My daughter loves the game, and even from age eight was able to play at a level pretty close to the adults. It’s a simple game where players collect tokens to purchase cards from a 4×3 grid, and where purchased cards decrease the price of other cards. Players have to think long-term without ignoring short-term opportunities, and must compare the value of going for certain in-game bonuses against just plowing ahead with purchases to get the most valuable cards. The Splendor app is defunct, unfortunately, although you can play it on Board Game Arena. There is a four-in-one expansion for the base game, Cities of Splendor, although I have found I prefer to play it without. Complexity: Low.
11. Dominion: Full review. I’ve condensed two Dominion entries into one, since they all have the same basic mechanics, just new cards. The definitive deck-building game, with no actual board, Dominion comes with a base set – there are over a dozen expansions now available, so you could spend a few hundred dollars on this – that includes money cards, action cards, and victory points cards. Each player begins with seven money cards and three victory cards and, shuffling and drawing five cards from his own deck each turn, must add cards to his deck to allow him to have the most victory points when the last six-point victory card is purchased. I don’t think I have a multi-player game with a smaller learning curve, and the fact that the original set alone comes with 25 action cards but each game you play only includes 10 means it offers unparalleled replayability even before you add an expansion set. I’ll vouch for the Dominion: Intrigue expansion, which includes the base cards so it’s a standalone product, and the Seaside expansion, which is excellent and really changes the way the game plays, plus a standalone expansion further up this list. The base game is appropriate for players as young as six. Complexity: Low.
10. Heat: Pedal to the Metal. Full review. A 2022 game I didn’t play until June of this year, but which would have easily been my #1 new game of last year if I’d gotten to it in time, and which right now is my top new game of the decade, earning only the second perfect score of 10 I’ve ever given to a game in a review at Paste. Heat takes the bicycle-racing game La Flamme Rouge’s core mechanics and makes some slight tweaks to produce a game that’s easy to learn, always a challenge to play, and that allows players to win with varying strategies and even to come back from early deficits. Each player starts with a small deck of 18 cards, 14 of which are speed cards numbered 0 through 5, plus three ‘stress’ cards and one Heat card (which has no function other than taking up space). On a turn, each player chooses their gear and plays that many cards from their hand, indicating how many spaces their car will move. Shifting up or down two gears adds another Heat card to your deck, as does “boosting,” which lets you draw the top card of your deck after your regular turn to try to move farther. There are corners on every track with speed limits, however, and if you go too fast, you might spin out and add both Heat and stress cards to muck up your deck. The game comes with four tracks on two boards, plus several expansions that allow you to introduce weather conditions or add gear cards to your decks for unique powers. I think the base game by itself is perfect. As of this writing, it’s between printings. Complexity: Medium-low.
9. The Castles Of Burgundy: Full review. Castles of Burgundy is the rare game that works well across its range of player numbers, as it scales well from two to four players by altering the resources available on the board to suit the number of people pursuing them. Players compete to fill out their own boards of hexes with different terrain/building types (it’s like zoning) by competiting for tiles on a central board, some of which are hexes while others are goods to be stored and later shipped for bonuses. Dice determine which resources you can acquire, but you can also alter dice rolls by paying coins or using special buildings to change or ignore them. Setup is a little long, mostly because sorting cardboard tiles is annoying, but gameplay is only moderately complex – a little more than Stone Age, not close to Caylus or Agricola – and players get so many turns that it stays loose even though there’s a lot to do over the course of one game. I’ve played this online about 50 times, using all the different boards, even random setups that dramatically increase the challenge, and I’m not tired of it yet. Complexity: Medium.
8. 7 Wonders Duel. Full review. Borrowing its theme from one of the greatest boardgames of all time, 7W Duel strips the rules down so that each player is presented with fewer options. Hand cards become cards on the table, revealed a few at a time in a set pattern that limits player choices to one to four cards (roughly) per turn. Familiarity with the original game is helpful but by no means required. There’s a brand-new app version out from Repos this fall. Complexity: Medium-low.
7. Great Western Trail. Full review. It’s a monster, but it’s an immaculately constructed game, especially for its length and complexity. It’s a real gamer’s game, but I found an extra level of satisfaction from admiring how balanced and meticulous the design is; if there’s a flaw in it, beyond its weight (which is more than many people would like in a game), I didn’t find it. You’re rasslin’ cows, collecting cow cards and delivering them along the board’s map to Kansas City, but you’re doing so much more than that as you go, hiring workers, building your own buildings, and moving your train along the outer track so that you can gain more from those deliveries. The real genius of the design is that you only have a few options on each turn even though the game itself has a massive scope. That prevents it from becoming overwhelming or bogging down in analysis paralysis on each player’s turn. This higher ranking reflects the 2021 second edition, with better components, no more problematic art, and a true solo mode. Complexity: High.
6. Jaipur: Full review. Jaipur is my favorite two-player game, just as easy to learn but with two shades of additional complexity and a bit less randomness. In Jaipur, the two players compete to acquire collections of goods by building sets of matching cards in their hands, balancing the greater point bonuses from acquiring three to five goods at once against the benefit of taking one or two tokens to prevent the other player from getting the big bonuses. The game moves quickly due to a small number of decisions, like Lost Cities, so you can play two or three full games in an hour. It’s also incredibly portable. The new app is also fantastic, with a campaign mode full of variants. Complexity: Low.
5. Ticket To Ride: Full review. Actually a series of games, all working on the same theme: You receive certain routes across the map on the game board – U.S. or Europe, mostly – and have to collect enough train cards in the correct colors to complete those routes. But other players may have overlapping routes and the tracks can only accommodate so many trains. Like Dominion, it’s very simple to pick up, so while it’s not my favorite game to play, it’s my favorite game to bring or bring out when we’re with people who want to try a new game but either haven’t tried anything in the genre or aren’t up for a late night. I do recommend the 1910 Expansion to anyone who gets the base Ticket to Ride game, as it has larger, easier-to-shuffle cards and offers more routes for greater replayability. I also own the Swiss and Nordic boards, which only play two to three players and involve more blocking than the U.S. and Europe games do, so I don’t recommend them. The iPad app, developed in-house, is among the best available. The newest expansion, Japan and Italy, came out in 2019. I ranked all 18 Ticket to Ride boards for Ars Technica a few years ago, although that doesn’t include Japan/Italy or Poland.
There’s also a kids’ version, called Ticket to Ride First Journey, with a separate app for that as well. Complexity: Low.
4. Pandemic: Full review. The king of cooperative games. Two to four players work together to stop global outbreaks of four diseases that spread in ways that are only partly predictable, and the balance between searching for the cures to those diseases and the need to stop individual outbreaks before they spill over and end the game creates tremendous tension that usually lasts until the very end of the event deck at the heart of the game. The On The Brink expansion adds new roles and cards while upping the complexity further. The Pandemic iOS app is among the best out there and includes the expansion as an in-app purchase.
I’m bundling Pandemic Legacy, one of the most critically acclaimed boardgames of all time, into this entry as well, as the Legacy game carries the same mechanics but with a single, narrative storyline that alters the game, including the board itself, as you play. To be completely honest, though, I prefer the non-legacy version. Complexity: Medium for the base game, medium-high for the Legacy game.
3. Wingspan. Full review. The only game to which I’ve given a perfect score of 10 since I started reviewing games for Paste nine years ago, Wingspan is one of the best examples I can find of immaculate game design. It is thoroughly and thoughtfully constructed so that it is well-balanced, enjoyable, and playable in a reasonable amount of time. The components are all of very high quality and the art is stupendous. And there’s some real science behind it: designer Elizabeth Hargrave took her love of bird-watching and built a game around the actual characteristics of over 100 species of North American birds, such as their habitats, diets, and breeding habits. The European expansion, Oceania expansion, and Asia expansion (with a two-player Duet mode) are out, although I haven’t tried any yet. Wingspan won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2019, which it more than deserved, making Hargrave the first woman to win that honor as a solo designer and just the second solo woman to win any Spiel des Jahres prize. It’s a marvel. There’s a great app for Wingspan, and it’s on Board Game Arena too. Complexity: Medium.
2. Carcassonne: Full review. Carcassonne brings ease of learning, tremendous replayability (I know I use that word a lot here, but it does matter), portability (you can put all the tiles and meeples in a small bag and stuff it in a suitcase), and plenty of different strategies and room for differing styles of play. You build the board as you go: Each player draws a tile at random and must place it adjacent to at least one tile already laid in a way that lines up any roads or cities on the new tile with the edges of the existing ones. You get points for starting cities, completing cities, extending roads, or by claiming farmlands adjacent to completing cities. It’s great with two players, and it’s great with four players. You can play independently, or you can play a little offense and try to stymie an opponent. The theme makes sense. The tiles are well-done in a vaguely amateurish way – appealing for their lack of polish. And there’s a host of expansions if you want to add a twist or two. I own the Traders and Builders expansion, which I like mostly for the Builder, an extra token that allows you to take an extra turn when you add on to whatever the Builder is working on, meaning you never have to waste a turn when you draw a plain road tile if you sit your Builder on a road. I also have Inns and Cathedrals, which I’ve only used a few times; it adds some double-or-nothing tiles to roads and cities, a giant meeple that counts as two when fighting for control of a city/road/farm, as well as the added meeples needed to play with a sixth opponent. Complexity: Low/medium-low for the base game, medium with expansions.
1. 7 Wonders: Full review. 7 Wonders swept the major boardgame awards (yes, there are such things) in 2011 for good reason – it’s an all-timer, combining complex decisions, fast gameplay, and an unusual mechanic around card selections where each player chooses a card from his hand and then passes the remainder to the next player. Players compete to build out their cities, each of which houses a unique wonder of the ancient world, and must balance their moves among resource production, buildings that add points, military forces, and trading. I saw no dominant strategy, several that worked well, and nothing that was so complex that I couldn’t quickly pick it up after screwing up my first game. The only negative here is the poorly written rules, but after one play it becomes far more intuitive. Plays best with three or more players, but the two-player variant works well. The brand-new iOS version is amazing too, with an Android port I haven’t tried. Complexity: Medium.
I have a separate ranking of games for two players that I published at the start of the pandemic. Air, Land, and Sea would make the cut now, as would Riftforce, Spendor Duel, and Votes for Women, and possibly Sail. I would probably add Seven Bridges if I knew when it was coming back into print.
Also, I get frequent requests for games that play well with five or more; I can confidently recommend 7 Wonders, Citadels, Ecosystem, King of Tokyo, Welcome To, Splito, The Wolves, and Sushi Go Party!, all of which handle 5+ right out of the box. Ticket to Ride is tight with five players, but that’s its maximum; the same applies to Hadara. Catan can handle 5 or 6 with an expansion, although it can result in a lengthy playing time. Kodama can play 5 out of the box, and 6 with the Duo expansion. For more social games, One Night Ultimate Werewolf is best with five or more also, and Deception: Murder in Hong Kong also benefits from more players. Coup needs 3, but with the Reformation expansion can handle up to 10. The cooperative party game Just One (on sale today for just $16.61) can handle up to 7, and Wavelength plays any number, split into two teams.
Thanks KLaw! FYI, think the Jaipur link is broken. I’m going to buy it for my sister this year bc we love it. Let me know if you get a fresh affiliate link and I’ll purchase through there.
Keith been following these for years, thanks. My daughter turned four a couple of months ago and I’m curious what game you used to introduce your daughter to board games and at what age? Excited to flip that switch for her.
Thanks Keith! My favorite article of the year. It has become our game group’s bible when figuring out what to play next.
Just received my Kickstarter copy of Elizabeth Hargrave’s The Fox Experiment last weekend and gave it a couple playthroughs. Really enjoyed it!
Keith,
As someone who regularly hosts game nights with my friends and family, I’m curious whether you’ve ever had fans of your work and your blog attend any of your game nights that you alluded to in your post. (I’m unsure exactly how that would work logistically, since you would certainly have far more people willing to attend than you can possibly host.)
My husband designed Ecosystem. This is very cool to see it on your list and that you regularly recommend it for 5+.Thank you, Keith!
I look forward to this list ever year. Its my favorite place to get new boardgame ideas and how I found most of my favorites like Castles of Burgundy, Wingspan and 7 Ronin ect ect. Any chance of a full updated 2 player list sometime soon?
Some of your links issues I found are below.
Thurn und Taxi is out of print so link goes to a high priced reseller on Amazon.
Acquire goes to an old version that is overpriced on Amazon when there is a new version available on Amazon.
Cat in the box is available on Amazon but not Hyperlinked.
Galaxy Trucker’s link is broken, it is available on Amazon.
Thurn und Taxi is out of print so link goes to a high priced reseller on Amazon.
Every time I play Cascadia I think to myself that it’s perhaps not the most mechanically engaging game of all time, but it is SO SATISFYING to build that ecosystem. And I like the way you’re thinking about multiple factors with each pull while also planning ahead and eyeing everyone else’s plans.
I always look forward to this list to see what shakes out. I backed Perch on Kickstarter based on your newsletter and hope it gets a full review at release.
I have a copy of Thurns and Taxis that was played once, I thought it was super engaging, but no one ever wants to play. And I keep wondering if it’s time to sell it to someone who might play it.