Top 100 Board Games: 50-41

Let’s get right to the first chunk of the top half of my list. It’s a good one!

#50 Ride the Rails
BGG Rank: 1638
Plays: 1
My Rating: 6.8
BGG Rating: 6.265
User Avg Rating: 7.2

Yeah, sitting at my halfway point (sorta) is ANOTHER train game.  What can I say?  I really like train games.  Railway expansion and ownership is a nice framework for forcing you into interesting decisions, and there’s nothing I like in board games more than juicy decisions.  Ride the Rails has great components, nice table presence, and tons of tough choices to make.  Do you want to build out the railroad you’ve invested in?  Start a new one in a new city halfway through the game?  Dip your toes in all of them?

A simple scoring mechanism keeps you reaching for more and more every turn, and shrewd decisions will show you coming out ahead of your competition.  Honestly, I’ve only played this one once, and I can’t seem to get it back to the table to play with someone who isn’t me playing 3-handed games.  The 3-player minimum makes this extra hard to get played.  Maybe some day I’ll get it played again.  It’s not that complex, so I’ll bet my game group could handle it.  The time tables shall tell.

#49 Canasta Caliente
BGG Rank: 4579
Plays: 14
My Rating: 8
BGG Rating: 5.742
User Avg Rating: 6.3

Is a classic card game this high on my list?  It really is.  In fact, Canasta Caliente comes with hot pepper cards and some tweaked rules, but we just don’t use them.  We use this set to play vanilla canasta.  No lie.  And it’s THIS high on my list because whether Robb and I play together or we play it in partners, it leads to tense discards and triumphant reveals every single friggin time we play it.  

In fact, some games are so tense they don’t even happen.  There’s a mostly blank page in my scorekeeping notebook with “Canasta” and the date written at the top.  Robb and I got in a disagreement about rules before we’d even started, and I shut the book and put it away.  You can’t play this game when you’re mad.  It’ll just lead to fights.  I’ve had two ugly fights over this game with two different people.  Granted, that was before I was on anxiety meds and went to therapy, so I was dealing with a lot of shit and was prone to angry outbursts.  Look, we can’t learn if we don’t talk about it.  And now, we have hilarious and embarrassing stories to tell about this game.  And even despite fighting, we still love this simple game of collecting sets of cards and discarding til your hand is gone.  Race you to 5,000 points!

#48 Lost Cities
BGG Rank: 329
Plays: 14
My Rating: 9
BGG Rating: 7.103
User Avg Rating: 7.2

I heard Tom Vasel of the Dice Tower raving about this game for a long time before I found a copy.  He said it was his favorite game to play with his wife.  With a strict player count of two, I wasn’t sure I’d get this played very often, as we didn’t play a lot of games that were ONLY for two.  But once I read the rules, understood what we were doing, and found a way to explain it, we were off to the races.  Or…rather…to the expeditions.  

See, you’re drawing and playing cards that represent journeys to find lost civilizations.  The hook of this game is that you MUST draw a card and lay down a card on your turn.  That card can be played to one of five colored columns or a matching discard pile.  You’re trying to play enough cards to score points in some of those columns, but as soon as you put a card down you’re in the hole for at least 20 points.  That means in order to score, you have to lay down at least 20 points worth of cards that match that color before the round is over or you’re going to lose points.  And playing to the discard piles means you might be giving your opponent just what they need to score a boatload of points.

The tension in this game is palpable, and every play, ever discard, and every time you pick up a card, you’re praying that it’s something useful for you and not for the other player.  This is a game I recommend to any couple who is looking for something to play for a while.  It’s truly a game that you can play round after round of, with each time being a new exercise in “please please please let me get what I want this time.”  God, it’s fun!

#47 TEN
BGG Rank: 1986
Plays: 2
My Rating: 7.3
BGG Rating: 6.155
User Avg Rating: 7.2

Push your luck to collect sets of consecutive cards in four colors. All the wild cards are up for auction, too, so getting currency at the right time by taking currency cards is hella important.  Once you’ve gone through the entire deck, pulling cards until you either bust by drawing a value over 10 or stop.  You pick to either take the point-scoring number cards (giving everyone else the currency cards), or you take the currency cards and collect the corresponding currency (sending the numbered cards to the market to be purchased for face value.

It sounds entirely mechanical, I realize.  But man, the choice of pushing your luck or being happy taking a few cards strategically here and there is a compelling one. This game is full of surprises, upsets, and fierce bidding wars for those precious wild cards to complete your runs.  Give it a go.  It’s friggin great.

#46 The One Hundred Torii
BGG Rank: 3586
Plays: 6
My Rating: 8
BGG Rating: 5.843
User Avg Rating: 7.2

The first thing you’ll notice about this game is that it’s absolutely GORGEOUS. The second thing you’ll notice is that it looks a little like Carcassonne.  And sure, you’ll be laying tiles on your turn in a similar fashion, but the similarities stop there.  The One Hundred Torii will break your friggin brain in a way Carcassonne can’t even touch.  

Thematically, you’re going to be building a beautiful garden pathway with landmarks and torii gates along the way.  Mechanically, you’re laying tiles and employing different characters to connect matching landmarks to each other trying to pass through as many torii gates as possible along the way, with each gate giving you bonus tokens.  Essentially, you’re trying to amass more point tokens than your opponents by carefully laying pathways.  

To be fair, I’ve only ever played this at two players.  Robb and I adore this game.  I’d love to try it with more people, but it seems like some of the tension and the planning you can do with two players would be thrown into chaos.  If I could only ever play this game with one other player, I’d be fine with that.  It’s a fantastic two player game, and I’m sad to see that it has sort of flown under the radar.  Fix that.  Buy this game.  Like, today.  Go!

#45 Council of 4
BGG Rank: 1112
Plays: 2
My Rating: 8
BGG Rating: 6.497
User Avg Rating: 7.2

Do you like playing cleverly and collecting resources?  Do you enjoy receiving those earnings in bucketloads by building combos on the map through the manipulation of a board of directors? If you answered no to these questions, what the hell is wrong with you?!  If you’re not a complete monster, you should check out Council of 4.

I don’t have a ton to say about this game, honestly.  The version I have came with miniatures which are completely unnecessary, but the production is gorgeous.  Apparently an earlier version had some really cool bits and art that wasn’t so grotesque.  I, for one, love grotesque art in games.  It’s goofy and weird, but the game is surprisingly good, and it makes you feel like sort of a genius.  Cover the map with your presence.  Please the queen.  Get a shitload of resources and use them to expand your presence.  It goes quick, so make it count.

#44 Camel Up
BGG Rank: 276
Plays: 3
My Rating: 8
BGG Rating: 7.172
User Avg Rating: 7.6

Crazy.  Stacking.  Camels.  You’re going to cheer.  You’re going to make some bad bets.  You’re going to be SURE the purple camel is gonna cross the finish line first and the yellow one will finish last.  And you’re gonna put money on that because it’s a sure thing.  And then it all goes sideways.  And the funny thing is, you might still win.  There’s so much opportunity for making a few bucks in this game that you don’t have to nail your predictions to come out in front.  

Add in the white and black camels that go around the track backward, which seems like a nothing addition to the game until your camels land on them and get carried backward just far enough to ruin everything.  That sounds frustrating and awful, but oh my gosh it’s silly fun.  And it plays so many people, so it’s great to break out in a group.  The teach can be a little bit of a bear because there are a lot of ways to interact with the game, but it’s by no means complicated.

I once swore I’d never play this game because the title on the original box is clearly Camel Cup, and it made sense because it’s a race with camels.  But the crowd decided it was Camel Up because you stack the camels.  I really hated that, so I said I’d never play this.  Then they released a second edition with a clear title, and I watched a playthrough that made this look so dang fun.  I swallowed my idiotic grudge and bought this one, and I’m so glad I did.

#43 Broom Service
BGG Rank: 540
Plays: 1
My Rating: 8
BGG Rating: 6.881
User Avg Rating: 7.2

I have only ever played this game once, for transparency’s sake.  And it was only two players, which is NOT the ideal player count for this game, by common estimation.  That being said, I had so much fun playing Broom Service that it has stayed in the top half of my favorite games since I played that one time.

You play as witches trying to deliver potions to various locations across the map. Your actions each round are determined by playing a card from a selection in your hand.  You declare what strength of action you’re attempting when you play your card to the table by saying you’re taking the brave action or the cowardly action.  If another player has chosen the same brave action as you, you’re boned, and you don’t get to do anything.  The brave action is a risk, but it gives you a more powerful version of each action, whether moving, collecting, or delivering potions.  The cowardly action is a less powerful version of those same actions but is sure to fire off.

It can be a frustrating experience, but it’s more of a fist-shaking, cartoony style of frustration than anything.  I think with more players, this game would be an absolute riot.  I can’t wait to play some more Broom Service in the future.  It’s just a matter of finding the right group to play it with.

#42 So Clover
BGG Rank: 725
Plays: 4
My Rating: 9
BGG Rating: 6.725
User Avg Rating: 7.6

You’re given four sets of words through a novel, clover-shaped delivery method, and you have to come up with a word for each set that will allow players to pair the words you were given after they’re all jumbled up.  It takes seconds to teach, and holy cow does it force your brain in creative directions.  Tree and feather?  How about leaf?  Chicken and Fear? For me, the illegal clue Hogan’s Family (too many words) would get me there. But if you’re not me and you weren’t scarred forever by a coincidental fried chicken and zombie Sandy Duncan incident, you’re on your own for that one.

Family television trauma aside, So Clover is a great cooperative party word game, and you don’t have to have a good vocabulary or be a decent speller to play it well,  Some associations will be easier than others, but if you punt on one term, you can still get people to find the correct configuration of word cards that match your original by giving really good clues for the other word on that card.  Whether you end up proud of your friends for figuring it out or irate because no one else knew about zombie Sandy Duncan, you’re sure to have a lot of laughs with So Clover.

#41 The Downfall of Pompeii
BGG Rank: 592
Plays: 12
My Rating: 7.8
BGG Rating: 6.824
User Avg Rating: 7.1

The final game in this chunk features a cute little volcano you can throw your opponents into if they get in your way.  Make your game more festive by putting an electric votive candle inside.  Bonus points if you make cute little screams when your people get thrown in.  Y’all, this game is MEAN.  You’re seeding the board with your color pieces, placing as close to one of the exits from the city as you can because, unlike the citizens of Pompeii way back in A.D. 79, you know what’s going to happen halfway through your day.  

Kerblooey.  Now there’s lava flowing into the streets at an alarming rate, and you have to get your family out of the city before they’re burned alive.  Complicating matters are your opponents, who get to decide where lava flows based on tiles drawn from a bag.  And since getting the most people out alive is the goal of the game, you know that they’re going to be making sure the lava moves in the most unfortunate direction (for you) possible.

When I teach this game I tell people how mean it is, but I also explain that the game is short enough that it doesn’t leave you feeling miffed at the end.  Mathematical analysis can be your scapegoat as you go after the person who is winning.  At the end of this game there’s always carnage, laughter, and a volcano full of pieces serving as a tie breaker.  Unlike that fateful day in the shadow of the mountain, this is a really good time.

And there’s another 10 games down. Looking at this section of the list, I think I could be happy if these ten games were the only ones I could ever play in my lifetime. The diversity alone here is enough to satisfy any gamer. Thankfully, I don’t have to make a crazy decision like that. Besides, there’s 40 other games I’d rather play than these! We’re getting there. Stay tuned!

As always, I appreciate your eyeballs.

~Justin

More Top Games:
100-91 
90-81 
80-71 
70-61 
60-51 
40-31 
30-21 
20-11 
10-1