Top 100 Board Games: 40-31

Here we go again! The next ten titles cover everything from party games to card games to heavy euros, nature games to economic simulations to themeless masterpieces. It’s all here. See how it unfolds below.

#40 Dream Crush
BGG Rank: 4630
Plays: 3
My Rating: 8
BGG Rating: 5.739
User Avg Rating: 7.2

I say this with deadly seriousness: If you want to have fun with a group of your friends, buy this game right now. I’m serious. It seems like a stupid concept. It might remind you of ’80s games with plastic malls and pink phones and stuff. Let me assure you, though, that this game is EXACTLY that dumb, but somehow it’s so, so, so fun.

You have a deck of 90 eligible crushes, all of them gloriously costumed and posed humans who graciously stepped in front of a camera to bring us this masterpiece. You’ll choose three of them randomly to be in the game. Then, over a series of five rounds, you learn more about each of them and try to predict who your friends around the table will pick each round as their dream crush.  

The great thing about this game is that it sort of devolves into a game of “who could I stomach” as you find out that some people dream of ranching and beef jerky, and that cool girl with the bangs and the leather jacket voted for a vile human and is super into Crossfit. And not to kink shame, but the third guy? He seemed super normal and fun until you learned about his adult baby fetish. It’s pure laughs, as you fight with yourself and others to determine just who presents the best option for coupling. Get it now. Play it now. Elijah Wood is in it!

#39 Altiplano
BGG Rank: 323
Plays: 5
My Rating: 7
BGG Rating: 7.112
User Avg Rating: 7.5

There’s an adorably derpy llama on this vibrantly striped box. I’d love to stop there and just let that be my entry about this one, but we both know I can’t physically shut up about board games, so here we go. Altiplano is the followup to Orleans, and it features a lot of the same mechanisms: pulling chits from a bag to activate spaces on a board, allowing you to fulfill goals, move around the board, and commit items to storage. This one is longer, bigger, and a little harder (heyo!) than Orleans, though. For that reason, it’s lower on the list (spoiler alert).

Robb and I have played this game several times together, and every time I go in with a plan, and that plan almost immediately changes because you can’t tell what you’re going to pull from your bag. Often, the best move you can make doesn’t align with your original strategy, so you pivot. The most compelling part of this game is figuring out when to store things in the warehouse, as that is a puzzle that can be worth tons of points if you can pull it off.  

The Traveler expansion makes it even easier to get things done, but it does complicate the actual gameplay just a bit. I’m still not sure if this will rise or fall in my estimation as time goes by, but it’s different enough from its bigger brother that I decided to keep both in my collection. And that funky llama just melts my cold, dead heart.  

#38 Team Play
BGG Rank: 3181
Plays: 5
My Rating: 8
BGG Rating: 5.900
User Avg Rating: 7

What an absolute stinker of a name for a game. This game is the antithesis of a looker. I passed this up on the shelf several times until I saw the Game Night folks play it on YouTube. I immediately went out and got this game, but it’s sort of a hard sell. Nobody picks it out of a pile of games except to look at it and put it back. The art is awful. There is nothing compelling about the concept, and yet…it’s still really fun.

In Team Play you play in up to three teams of two players, drafting cards from a central market and trying to complete either your private goals or the public ones in the middle of the table. You take cards, play if you can, and then end your turn by passing up to 2 cards to your teammate. That’s it. That’s the game. First to fulfill a certain number of goal cards ends the game. Those goal cards can be anything from a run of three cards in blue or three odd number cards in red to wacky things like any number of like-colored cards that add up to twelve or three ascending pairs of cards. The harder the goal, the more points it’s worth. You can trigger the end of the game and not win. It’s not likely, but it happens.

I like to end a game night with this game, since it wouldn’t get played otherwise. It’s simple, relatively quick, and really satisfying when you can pull off two or more goals in a turn. It may be ugly as hell, and it may have the worst name in board games, but damn it all if it isn’t a super fun little game. If you’ve passed it up before, give it a second look. I keep hoping they’ll reprint it with literally any design sensibilities. Fingers crossed.

#37 Endeavor: Age of Sail
BGG Rank: 131
Plays: 2
My Rating: 8
BGG Rating: 7.438
User Avg Rating: 7.9

This one can be a polarizing choice. The theme is full scale colonization, which can be icky if not done in a way that is sensitive to the truth of how awful that history was. In hindsight, I sort of wish I hadn’t bought it, but not necessarily because of its depiction of slavery. In fact, I actually like the way they dealt with that. You can choose to use the slavery option or not, but if you do you are heavily penalized later when slavery is abolished. It’s a pretty accurate picture of what happened, and no one I know will opt in to slavery, since it’s awful. The reason I wish I hadn’t bought it is that a new version of this game with an undersea theme is coming out, and it throws out the whole icky theme entirely.  

The slow build of this game is super compelling, and each branch of actions, whether exploring or trading or building out your town, works together in interesting ways. Slowly spreading out and increasing the scope of what you can accomplish feels really great in the end. And we play a variant where no one can win until slavery is abolished. If no one takes care of that, no one wins. Because let’s face it, there’s no way we can let that go uncorrected.

So yeah, I think I’m gonna get rid of this one when the new theme comes out. That way I won’t have to try to spin the slavery aspect into something acceptable. Until then, though, this game will stay where it is.

#36 Arboretum
BGG Rank: 294
Plays: 4
My Rating: 8
BGG Rating: 7.146
User Avg Rating: 7.4

On to something a little less controversial but no less dense, which is surprising, since this game is just a deck of cards. Granted, they’re cards in ten suits illustrated with gorgeous trees you’ll want to sit under and read. Well, maybe not the fir. No one likes a needlebum. I mean, maybe someone does. Again, I won’t kink shame. This is a game about arranging trees into lovely paths in an arboretum. It sounds breezy and sweet. It is cutthroat and a real logic pretzel.

See, you score points by laying a bunch of the same tree in a path, but you have to have some of those trees in your hand at the end to score them. Not only do you have to have SOME of the trees in your hand, you have to have the highest VALUE of those cards in your hand at the end of the game to score a type of tree. Yes, you could score exactly nothing at the end. Hopefully, you’re better than that.

So you’re taking cards blindly or from one of your opponent’s discard piles, playing a single card, and praying that you can cobble something together. It sounds simple, but this game isn’t rated higher for me because it is SO HARD TO TEACH. You basically have to fail someone through a game of it to teach them how it works. But when they get it, it’s such a tense experience. I can’t think of a more tense game, to be honest.

#35 Clank!: A Deck-Building Adventure Game
BGG Rank: 72
Plays: 3
My Rating: 8
BGG Rating: 7.646
User Avg Rating: 7.8

This game blew people away, me included, by making deck building part of a game instead of the whole game. You’re churning through your deck of cards, adding movement distance and buying power and fighting strength to that deck to more efficiently traverse the caves under the castle, find some treasure, and get the hell out before the dragon hears you and thrashes you senseless.

I wasn’t into deck builders before I tried this game. I’d played the DC Deckbuilding Game (such an original title) and found it a boring combofest, which was super not my thing. I thought I didn’t like deck builders. Turns out, what I didn’t like was a game where someone’s turn is half an hour of chaining actions together and then your turn comes around and you punch something, get blocked, and discard. Clank has some cards that combo, but no one’s turns are going to feel interminable. You move a few spaces, get a token, generate some Clank (that’s noise cubes that get thrown into a bag and become damage when they’re drawn), and maybe fight something and buy a card.  

Honestly, this is a great one to teach the concept of deck building. It’s clear what went wrong with a deck when one player is zooming through the dungeon to scrape up the lowest value treasure and get out and one player is plodding  through the dungeon with no hope of ever even getting to a treasure. A balanced deck is a good deck in this game, and I’d play it any day of the week. The expansions are great, and the legacy version is one of my favorite gaming experience of all time. Can’t go wrong!

#34 The Mind
BGG Rank: 759
Plays: 18
My Rating: 8.3
BGG Rating: 6.707
User Avg Rating: 6.8

Deal everyone a number of cards based on what round it is. Play those cards out in numerical order. It sounds super simple. In the first round, everyone has three cards apiece. Each card has a number between 1 and 100 on it. Your task is to play these cards out in order from 1 to 100. Where’s the game in this? Where’s the fun or the challenge? And why would it be so dang high on my list? Well, the hook is that you can’t communicate. That’s right. No talking. No gesturing. No counting off nonverbally. You just have to…feel…when the appropriate amount of time has gone by to let others play the cards that may have come before yours.  

Each round reshuffles the deck and deals one more card than the previous round. Get through a set number of rounds depending on player count, and you win! Simple! Except…we’ve never won this game. We’ve barely ever even come close. I imagine if you play with the same group a ton, you may develop a feeling for how long to wait if your lowest card is, say, 13. What if your lowest card is in the 30s? What if everyone’s cards are over 40? How long do you wait? What do you do?!

There’s a lot of awkward staring at each other and waiting, laughing nervously, and sliding a card toward the center of the table. Inevitably, the game ends in groans of defeat as you somehow played the 87 when your friend still had the 86. But equally frequent are the cheers where you are at a standoff with the last two cards, you decide to play yours after much hesitation, and it turns out to be the 22, when your friend had the 23. How did you DO that?! It’s amazing, and nothing else comes close to matching the feeling of this game.

#33 Burgle Bros.
BGG Rank: 287
Plays: 14
My Rating: 9.5
BGG Rating: 7.153
User Avg Rating: 7.5

This is almost a perfect game for me. We played half a game of it at GenCon, and I wasn’t sure it would be fun as much as it would be hella difficult. And it’s pretty hard. But once we got it back to the table, just Robb and I, we played this game as often as we could for weeks. It’s such a fun little puzzle that we just kept losing at.

So, you play as a team of burglars, each with a special power (two for each character depending on whether you play on the simple or advanced side). Your mission is to break into a bank, which is a three-floored layout of 16 tiles on each floor, and loot three different safes, take the treasure inside (which hinders you in some way as you carry it), and get out to the helicopter waiting for you on the roof. All the while there are guards pursuing you, and each time they run through their destination decks, they get faster and more dangerous.  

We discovered a random floor layout generator online after we won our first game of this (after many, many failed attempts), and it has prolonged our enjoyment of this cooperative heist so much. The game gets harder the more people you play with, so I think it’s best at 2, but we’ve played successfully with 3 people. It can have an armchair quarterbacking problem since a lot of the info is open, so play with someone who doesn’t do that and you should enjoy this one.

#32 Cascadia
BGG Rank: 68
Plays: 2
My Rating: 8
BGG Rating: 7.660
User Avg Rating: 8

I think this game winning the Spiel des Jahres award sorta says all you need to know about this. It’s a fantastic game with great art that is approachable for the masses. I could teach this game to anyone, and they would understand its concepts without needing too much explanation. You put animals in their habitats to score points, and you try to arrange those habitats in contiguous groups. The basic scoring cards are simple for anyone to grasp, and they vary enough to leave room for more explanation without being wildly different. It’s a great entry point.

Basically, you’re taking pairs of land tiles and animal tokens, placing them on an ever-growing board, and working to score a buttload of points. It’s fairly standard, but that’s why it has such mass appeal. It can make you feel like a genius when a draft gives you exactly what you need. Conversely, it can make you feel like an idiot when you get to the end of the game and realize you screwed up something you were going for.  

I imagine the hubbub over this one is going to fade relatively quickly, although I could see sequels and expansions for this carrying the idea far into the future if they decide to go that route. It will be interesting to see. I’d just be happy getting this to the table again with some friends of mine.  

#31 Smartphone Inc.
BGG Rank: 402
Plays: 3
My Rating: 9
BGG Rating: 7.013
User Avg Rating: 7.7

Lastly in this chunk of games is the first board game I ever backed on Kickstarter. I’d heard good things, seen the way you select your actions through the overlapping of boards, and thought the theme was unique and interesting. It was a scary thing to throw money at a game that I wouldn’t see for almost a year afterward, but in the end I’m glad I did. And my list of upcoming crowdfunded projects laughs at this early trepidation.  

The artwork in this game is really nice. The multi-layered board is functional and clean, leaving room for the cubes and other bits to really shine. The bearded hipster on the box is cute, too, which doesn’t hurt. But really, the major draw is in the smooth gameplay. When you start explaining things, the game seems like it’s gonna be long and complex, but most of the many steps each turn are simple actions and upkeep. And the actual taking of actions, the bit where you research technologies and spread your influence and set your stock and pricing for each round, is so easy to understand that it astounds me every time. The game isn’t that long, either. With differing boards for smaller player counts, it’s a hit no matter how many are playing.  

If I could get this to the table more often, it might be rated even more highly. There’s a lot to explore here, whether deciding if you want to sell cheap phones to a bunch of people or expensive phones with lots of features to those who can afford it, figuring out what market to corner, or investing in technologies to please your customers and give you an edge. Every game I’ve played has been close, and none of them have overstayed their welcome.

Only three more entries to go in the series. Any guesses as to what’s in my top 10? Stay tuned. The games are getting better, and the remaining titles are all games I’d play with you right now. Stay tuned!

I appreciate your eyeballs!
~Justin

More Top Games:
100-91 
90-81 
80-71 
70-61 
60-51 
50-41 
30-21 
20-11 
10-1