I believe this is now my thirteenth all-time board game ranking on this site, and it’s the fifth time I’ve ranked 100 games, which is probably a quarter of the total number of games I’ve played in some fashion so far. The definition of a boardgame is nebulous, but I define it for this list by exclusions: no RPGs, no miniatures, no party games, no word games, no four-hour games, nothing that requires advance prep to play well. Board games don’t need boards – Dominion is all cards, played on a tabletop, so it qualifies – but they do need some skill element to qualify. And since it’s my list, I get to decide what I include or exclude.

I’ve put a complexity grade to the end of each review, low/medium/high, to make it easier for you to jump around and see what games might appeal to you. I don’t think there’s better or worse complexity, just different levels for different kinds of players. I’m somewhere between medium and high complexity; super “crunchy” games, as other gamers will say, don’t appeal to me as much as they might to the Boardgamegeek crowd. I have omitted some titles I’ve tried that are not available at all in the U.S. yet, and have several games here or en route to play that I haven’t played at all or enough to rank, including Clank! Legacy, Tekhenu, Paleo, Gods Love Dinosaurs, Holi, Cloud City, New York Zoo, and Traintopia.

Finally, I’m at the point with this list now that there are games that I still like and would recommend that don’t crack the list. Quadropolis, Asara, Discoveries, Valeria, Photosynthesis, Bärenpark, and more titles slid off the list this year. The toughest omissions for 2020 were Oceans, the new Evolution game from North Star; Azul Summer Pavilion, the third game in Michael Kiesling’s Azul series; and Nova Luna, the Uwe Rosenberg reboot of Habitats and a Spiel nominee this year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

89. Five Tribes. Full review. A very strong medium-strategy game from Days of Wonder that uses an unusual mechanic where all of the meeples start the game on the board and players have to use a funky kind of move to remove as many as they can to gain additional points, goods, or powers. There’s a lot going on, but once you’ve learned everything you can do it’s not that difficult to play. Complexity: Medium.

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

87. Ex Libris. Players collect cards showing (fake) books to go into that player’s library, which must be organized in alphabetical order to score at game-end. There are six categories of books, and in any game, one will be “banned” and cost you a point per book, while another will be a priority category that scores extra points for everyone. Each player will have his/her own special category to also collect for bonus points. There’s also a stability bonus for arranging your bookshelves well. You use action tiles to do everything in the game, sometimes just drawing and shelving cards, but often doing things like swapping cards, stealing them, sifting through the discards, or moving a shelf left or right. Just make sure you know your ABCs. Complexity: Medium.

86. Morels. Full review for Paste. A 2012 release, Morels is an easy-to-learn two-player card game with plenty of decision-making and a small amount of interaction with your opponent as you try to complete and “cook” sets of various mushroom types to earn points. The artwork is impressive and the game is very balanced, reminiscent of Lost Cities but with an extra tick of difficulty because of the use of an open, rolling display of cards from which players can choose. The app version is also very good. Complexity: Low.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

59. Coup. Full review. A great, great bluffing game if you have at least four people in your gaming group. Each player gets two cards and can use various techniques to try to take out other players. Last (wo)man standing is the winner. Guaranteed to get the f-bombs flowing. Only about $8 for the whole kit and caboodle. Complexity: Low.

58. 7 Ronin: Full review. An asymmetrical two-player game with a Seven Samurai theme – and when I say “theme,” I mean that’s the whole story of the game. One player is the seven ronin of the title, hired to defend a village against the invading ninjas, controlled by the other player. If the ninjas don’t take the village or wipe out the ronin before eight rounds are up, the ronin player wins. But the ninja can gain a decisive advantage in the first four rounds with the right moves. It’s very clever, the art is fantastic, and the theme is completely integrated into the game itself. It also plays in about 30 minutes. Complexity: Medium-low.

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

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

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

54. Glen More. Full review. Build your Scottish settlement, grow wheat, make whiskey. Sure, you can do other stuff, like acquire special tiles (including Loch Ness!) or acquire the most chieftains or earn victory points by trading other resources, but really, whiskey, people. The tile selection mechanic is the biggest selling point, as players move on a track around the edge of the central board and may choose to skip one or more future turns by jumping further back to acquire a better tile. Out of print again. Complexity: Medium.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

45. Thebes: Full review. A fun family-oriented game with an archaelogy theme and what I think of as the right amount of luck: it gives the game some balance and makes replays more interesting, but doesn’t determine the whole game. Players collect cards to run expeditions to five dig sites, then root around in the site’s bag of tokens to try to extract treasure. Back in print at the moment and a steal at $13. Complexity: Medium-low.

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

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

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

41. Thurn und Taxis: Full review. I admit to a particularly soft spot for this game, as I love games with very simple rules that require quick thinking with a moderate amount of foresight. (I don’t care for chess, which I know is considered the intellectual’s game, because I look three or four moves ahead and see nothing but chaos.) Thurn und Taxis players try to construct routes across a map of Germany, using them to place mail stations and to try to occupy entire regions, earning points for doing so, and for constructing longer and longer routes. I’ve played this a ton online, and there’s a clear optimal strategy, but to pull it off you do need a little help from the card draws. Complexity: Low.

40. Terraforming Mars. Full review. The best complex strategy game of 2016, Terraforming Mars is big and long but so imaginative that it provides an engrossing enough experience to last the two hours or so it takes to play. The theme is just what the title says, based on the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (which I loathed), as the players compete to rack up points while jointly transforming the planet’s surface. The environment is tracked with three main variables – oxygen levels, surface temperature, and water supply – that alter the effects of various moves and buildings as the game progresses. The cards are the heart of the play itself, as they can provide powerful points bonuses and/or game benefits. It’s already been expanded at least four times, with Hellas & Elysium, Venus Next, Prelude, and Colonies. The digital port is also very good. Complexity: High.

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

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

37. Patchwork: Full review. A really sharp two-player game that has an element of Tetris – players try to place oddly shaped bits of fabric on his/her main board, minimizing unused space and earning some small bonuses along the way. It’s from Uwe Rosenberg, better known for designing the ultra-complex games Agricola, Le Havre, and Caverna. Go figure. And go get it. Complexity: Low.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14. Great Western Trail. Full review. It’s a monster, but it’s an immaculately constructed game, especially for its length and complexity. It’s a real gamer’s game, but I found an extra level of satisfaction from admiring how balanced and meticulous the design is; if there’s a flaw in it, beyond its weight (which is more than many people would like in a game), I didn’t find it. You’re rasslin’ cows, collecting cow cards and delivering them along the board’s map to Kansas City, but you’re doing so much more than that as you go, hiring workers, building your own buildings, and moving your train along the outer track so that you can gain more from those deliveries. The real genius of the design is that you only have a few options on each turn even though the game itself has a massive scope. That prevents it from becoming overwhelming or bogging down in analysis paralysis on each player’s turn. Complexity: High.

13. Stone Age: Full review. Really a tremendous game, with lots of real-time decision-making but simple mechanics and goals that first-time players always seem to pick up quickly. It’s also very hard to hide your strategy, so newbies can learn through mimicry – thus forcing veteran players to change it up on the fly. Each player is trying to build a small stone-age civilization by expanding his population and gathering resources to construct buildings worth varying amounts of points, but must always ensure that he feeds all his people on each turn. I introduced my daughter to the game when she was 10 and she took to it right away, beating us on her second play. The iOS app is strong – they did a nice job reimagining the board for smaller screens – and is now updated and playable on newer devices. Complexity: Medium.

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Splendor: Full review. A Spiel des Jahres nominee in 2014, Splendor has fast become a favorite in our house for its simple rules and balanced gameplay. My daughter, now eight, loves the game and is able to play at a level pretty close to the adults. It’s a simple game where players collect tokens to purchase cards from a 4×3 grid, and where purchased cards decrease the price of other cards. Players have to think long-term without ignoring short-term opportunities, and must compare the value of going for certain in-game bonuses against just plowing ahead with purchases to get the most valuable cards. The Splendor app, made by the team at Days of Wonder, is amazing, and is available for iOS, Android, and Steam. I also like the four-in-one expansion for the base game, Cities of Splendor. Complexity: Low.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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