Top 100 Board Games: 20-11

We’ve reached the top 20 games of my list.  Hooo weeee.  There are some great games on this list, and I can’t wait to tell you about them.  These titles are pretty well cemented in my list, and I don’t expect them to change from this chunk very soon.  Join me for this penultimate list, won’t you?

#20 Flash Point: Fire Rescue
BGG Rank: 393
Plays: 39
My Rating: 9
BGG Rating: 7.025
User Avg Rating: 7.2

If you asked me what my favorite cooperative game is, I’d tell you it’s Flash Point.  I’d be lying, because there’s apparently on in this list that I like better.  But damn it, Flash Point is the one I’ve played more than any other cooperative game I own.  I’ve also probably played it more than most games I own. *goes to check*  Yup.  It’s my 4th most played game (beaten by Five Crowns and Uno, games I’ve been playing forever, and Splendor, which I used to crank out on the app while I was on the treadmill at the gym before the world ended).

Flash Point has you playing as firefighters trying to save at least 7/10 victims trapped in whatever structure you’re exploring.  There are a dozen or so maps throughout a handful of expansions, a stack of jobs to specialize in, and a ton of challenge to be had in fighting the heat death of–well, not the universe…just a small part of it.  Use your action points wisely or the building will collapse on you, the victims will crisp, and you’ll feel like a heel for screwing it up. But you’ll want to go again immediately.

Admittedly, the rule book can be kind of a bear, but there is a simple beginning scenario to get you started.  If you know what you’re doing, skip to the advanced rules, which aren’t much more advanced.  You’ll be carrying victime out, avoiding hazmat explosions, and setting up ladders through damaged floors in no time!  I will buy every expansion that comes out for this game (I currently have everything for it) until they stop making them.  It’s that good.

#19 Orléans
BGG Rank: 31
Plays: 10
My Rating: 9.5
BGG Rating: 7.881
User Avg Rating: 8.1

I read about this game and its main mechanism of bag building, where you throw tokens into your bag and pull them out in order to combine them and pull off actions on a main board.  I was intrigued, but I thought it would be too heavy a game to get anyone to play with me.  After hearing a ton of positive buzz about it, I went ahead and pulled the trigger.  When it showed up and I started reading the rules, I was hella overwhelmed.  This was early in my gaming hobby, and I thought I’d just made a huge $75 mistake.  But I powered through, played a few rounds by myself to learn the ropes, and then taught it to friends.  Y’all.  Everyone LOVED it.  It was a tight race, a fun challenge, and I was thrilled!

It hasn’t faded since then.  I still adore this game and would play it any time.  It’s funny, because it seems like it’s gonna be a long game, but then you’re halfway through and going, “Shit.  I have to step it up or I’m gonna get smoked.”  And then you shift gears, focus down on a strategy, and start making gains.  To say this game is rewarding is an understatement.

There’s a cooperative expansion to this that I didn’t love, but many people really enjoy it.  We won it on our first go, and I KNOW that’s atypical, but it made me not want to go back to it.  It was so friggin hard,  So I don’t really think about that when I consider how much I like this game,  We’ve basically always played the base game with expansion building choices mixed in.  They let you do some odd stuff, and it’s fun to explore them to see what loopholes you can create.  Anyway, it’s a great game that plays faster than you think it will, and the bag building mechanism is brilliant.

#18 Castles of Burgundy
BGG Rank: 17
Plays: 4
My Rating: 8.5
BGG Rating: 8.006
User Avg Rating: 8.1

What can I say that hasn’t already been said about Castles of Burgundy?  Great.  Next game.  

Okay, no.  I can’t be silent despite the volumes that have been preached about how great this game is.  The theme is dry as toast.  The art is awful in every version that exists right now (although I’ve backed a deluxe edition on Kickstarter that looks to fix that issue).  But the gameplay is so, so good.  You roll two dice on your turn and use those numbers you’ve rolled to collect landscapes, to add those tiles to your board, to acquire or sell goods, to bring ships in, and probably things I’m missing.  I just love how the dice limit your choices, and the game is a puzzle about who can do the most with what they’re given, which I know I’ve already said is something I just love.

This isn’t my favorite Stefan Feld game, as you’ll see later, but it’s definitely a prime example of what kind of games he makes: games that give you many avenues to success and let you explore them how you’d like within the bounds of the game’s rules.  I just love it, and chances are good that you will, too.

#17 Ghost Stories
BGG Rank: 319
Plays: 19
My Rating: 8.3
BGG Rating: 7.116
User Avg Rating: 7.3

And now here it is, my favorite cooperative game, apparently.  Sometimes I forget this game exists, but I think that’s mostly because it has traumatized me by crushing us EVERY SINGLE TIME we’ve ever played it.  We won once, maybe.  But maybe not.  We thought we won one other time, but it turned out we’d forgotten to do something, and when we went back to do it, we lost.  It’s so goddamned hard.  

You’re fighting off a seemingly endless assault of evil spirits who are trying to take over a village by haunting the locations that help you succeed.  The combat is dice based with tile mitigation, and if you rely on the luck of the dice, you’ll lose unless you’re a literal magician.  There’s a fun arc to this game where you start off feeling like nothing could possibly go wrong, and then before you know it you’re sacrificing things just to stay afloat, which is not sustainable or recommended, but it’s needed to survive.  

Brutal doesn’t begin to cover it.  We got this game from an auction, and the guys who donated it said they were getting rid of it because they’d never won it.  I thought they were probably just not good at board games.  Well, if that’s the case, then neither am I or anyone we play with.  Someday we’ll beat this game without question, and then we’ll ritualistically burn it.  Or finally play the expansions…I don’t know yet. And if you can’t find a copy, look for Last Bastion. It’s the same game with a different theme and some small tweaks.

#16 Cinque Terre
BGG Rank: 1953
Plays: 4
My Rating: 8
BGG Rating: 6.165
User Avg Rating: 7

Drive your adorable li’l truck in a circle picking up and delivering colorful produce around the Cinque Terre region of Italy.  Be the best delivery person to score points and smoke the competition.  This is maybe the only pick up and deliver game I own, and it’s a smile in a box.  The colors are bright.  The premise is simple.  The cards are cute.  The setup is different every time.  And I just love driving my little delivery vehicle around for fun and profit.

There’s not a ton to this game, but it seems like it should get more notice than it got.  I only know of one big board gaming personality who even mentions this one anymore.  They’re not the measure of success or fun, but sometimes you like to hear about a game you love from someone who knows games.  

Hotly discussed or not, I’ll bring this one out and teach it to basically anyone.  It’s dead simple, beautiful, and breezy.  You can almost feel the wind in your hair and smell the ocean as you zip between these five hungry villages fulfilling orders and making points.

#15 Hanafuda (Koi Koi)
BGG Rank: 3367
Plays: 24
My Rating: 8.8
BGG Rating: 5.870
User Avg Rating: 6.8

I’ve wanted to learn what to do with these cards since I learned that they were how Nintendo got their start as a business.  When they released a pack of 51 table games for the Switch, I leapt on the opportunity to learn to play Koi Koi with these Hanafuda cards.  Now I play it (and sometimes win) on Board Game Arena, but I’ve never played it in person.

I can’t decide if these gorgeously decorated cards in seasonal groups of 4 are more lucky or strategic, but it certainly feels like some games are one-sided with no way to fix it.  So why is it so high on my list?  I just really like learning the sets, making moves toward getting a few points, and sometimes pressing my luck to see if I can get just enough points to double my score for that hand.  It’s good fun, and I’m happy I finally learned this one.

I’m not sure I could ever teach this in person, at least, not easily. There’s a lot of nuance to this one, and learning the sets might require a cheat sheet.  I just think this is one of those games where the more experienced player will CRUSH the competition.  But…maybe not?  I don’t know.  I just know it’s fun, and I love the designs on these cards.

#14 Gold West
BGG Rank: 882
Plays: 4
My Rating: 8
BGG Rating: 6.625
User Avg Rating: 7.3

Gold West is another one, like Cinque Terre, that I think is really good but just never got much buzz.  I friggin love this light euro game.  It has just enough meat on its bones to let me feel like I played a strategic game without breaking my brain.  In Gold West you’re laying claim to various terrain areas, placing tents and settlements and claiming resources to use in expanding, trading, and setting up some kind of carriage…eh…thing.  I don’t know.  Look, the theme is loose, but the game is fun.

The hook in this one is that the resources you collect each turn go into a side area of your player board where the lower you place them the more points you get.  Why does that matter?  Well, at the beginning of your turn you pick up a group of resources from one of the cells in this area and drop one of these resources in each cell, mancala style, until you get to the top. Get a stone or wood out the top and you can place a camp or settlement.  Get gold, silver, or copper out and take some actions on the main board to score points in a few areas.  That’s such a great puzzle, and it makes every turn a meaning ful decision.  It’s also the hardest part to teach for some reason, and Robb has yet to be able to wrap his head around it, despite being involved in every play of this one.  But I get it.  It’s not intuitive.

But that little twist is more than enough to keep me coming back to this one.  There’s also area majority stuff, adjacency scoring in the end game, and variable endgame scoring you can nab if you dredge up the right combination of materials.  It’s just a tight little game that makes me smile every time it hits the table.

#13 Wingspan
BGG Rank: 24
Plays: 6
My Rating: 8.5
BGG Rating: 7.938
User Avg Rating: 8.1

Wingspan is only the most popular and lauded game of the last several years.  It seems weird for a game about building a bird sanctuary for points to have captured the public’s interest so solidly, but it has.  The game is gorgeous.  The production is outstanding, and the strategy hidden under the hood is so, so satisfying.  

You can get food to attract specific birds to your board, have them lay eggs for points, and even adopt hunting birds which eat smaller birds for points.  There’s a lot to this one.  It’s not as simple as it looks on the surface, but it’s still easy enough to grasp for most people.  Just…never play it with more than four.  And, honestly, I like it best at 2 or 3.  It can go on a long time.

It absolutely deserves all the accolades it has gotten, and it’s even sweeter that a game designed by a woman about birds has been topping charts all over the place, because that is certainly not the norm.  It has given rise to many, many more nature-themed games, which has been super refreshing in a world full of trading in old europe and killing each other in some war.  I dig it, and I’m always down to play this one.  Bonus:  it actually got me into real life birding, but that’s a topic for another blog entirely.

#12 The Quacks of Quedlinburg
BGG Rank: 59
Plays: 17
My Rating: 10
BGG Rating: 7.694
User Avg Rating: 7.9

Remember Orleans, the bag builder I mentioned in the #19 spot?  I liked that mechanism so much I had to bite when this game was released.  Quacks is a game about being quack doctors in a fantasy village, vying for the title of best quack doctor by brewing the best potions.  That theme alone is goofy enough to make me take notice, but the game grabbed my attention and has not let go for a second since I popped the seal on the box.

On a turn, you load up your bag with chips that you’ve purchased from the market, each of which does something different and interacts with the other chips in your potion in interesting ways.  You’re trying to brew the most powerful potion you can without pulling too many white ingredients from your bag.  Because what happens when too much white gets together?  Bad things, yall.  If history has taught us anything…

So make an awesome potion, don’t let it explode, and use the proceeds from the brew to buy more ingredients.  They can let you move chits, take extra turns, negate some of those white ingredients, score points, and collect rubies, which can be used to get ahead of your rivals.  In the end, one of you will be the best quack doctor in Quedlinburg, and the rest will just end up with brew on their face.

#11 Hanamikoji
BGG Rank: 219
Plays: 7
My Rating: 7.8
BGG Rating: 7.270
User Avg Rating: 7.5

At the top of this section is a little card game for strictly two people.  You’re two bars trying to attract the best geishas to your establishment on the road that I think is called Hanamikoji.  How do you do this?  Well, through four actions.  You have a hand of cards to start, and you have four action tiles. 

They let you set a card aside to reveal at the end of the round.  They let you discard a card from the round.  They let you set out two pairs, one of which your opponent chooses and one you get.  They let you lay out three cards, one of which your opponent gets, and two of which you get.  That’s the game.  Attract the majority of geishas or get 11 points of geishas, and you win.  

It sounds dead simple, and it is.  It really is.  The art is gorgeous and not exploitative.  The game is well researched, and the historical aspects of the theme are explained in the manual.  The actions don’t seem like much, but with limited cards and actions, this game just makes your head split with choices.  Delicious, meaningful choices.  God, it’s so good, but it JUST missed my top 10 games. 

What does the top of my list contain?  What could possibly be left?  Stay tuned!  I’ll be back to share them soon!  I hope you’ll join me.

As always, I appreciate your eyeballs!

~Justin

More Top Games:
100-91 
90-81 
80-71 
70-61 
60-51 
50-41 
40-31 
30-21 
10-1