Top 100 Board Games: 10-1

Hey hey and holy shit! We’re finally here! Welcome to the top 10 of my favorite games of all time. This list has been going so long that this entry was a surprise, even to me. Welcome! Get comfy and settle in. We’re at the tippy top of this tower of terrific tabletop games! What comes after this? I don’t know, but it’ll be a lovely view from the top.

#10 Dune: Imperium
BGG Rank: 15
Plays: 2
My Rating: 8
BGG Rating: 8.053
User Avg Rating: 8.3

I read Dune in high school.  I finished the whole series right before the first book by his son came out.  I never continued reading the series, and I haven’t really cared about Dune at all past that except for the few weeks I was researching Jodorowsky’s Dune, because it sounded like such a fascinating train wreck of a movie that never got made. That said, the combination of worker placement and deck building was enough to get me interested in the world of Arrakis and its precious spice again.

In Dune: Imperium you’re working as one of several houses to be the first to gain ten influence over the precious planet.  You do that by playing cards, winning military maneuvers through a novel conflict mechanism, and manipulating your standings with each of the factions that have sway on the planet.  The Fremen, the Bene Gesserit, and others are happy to aid you if you invest in their causes, and you’re going to have to if you want to get ahead.  

It’s a really tight game that works well with the theme without being a box full of sand that’s as hard to get through as the famous novel.  It’s really a good time, and you don’t even have to care about the source material to enjoy the game.  This one will see many, many more plays in the future, seeing as how it debuted in my top ten.  Yeah, it’s great.

#9 Bunny Kingdom
BGG Rank: 316
Plays: 9
My Rating: 9.6
BGG Rating: 7.119
User Avg Rating: 7.5

This game was one I wrote off as not my thing.  Then I saw a review that explained how this game had one card for every square on the board, plus several more for bonuses and end game scoring, and how you draft these cards during a number of rounds, placing out your faction of bunnies and their castles and goods, ultimately scoring points through simple multiplication.  I knew I had to at least try this one.  It was immediately a hit with Robb and I, and it’s been a hit with everyone else I’ve played it with.  

The two player variant is something special, where you have your own pile of cards to draft from, and instead of taking one card each turn and passing your hand, you get dealt ten cards, then you add one card from your own pile, and you draft two cards before passing to your opponent.  The twist is that you draft one of them to play and one to throw away.  And let me tell you.  Throwing away a card you know your opponent needs is a special kind of glee that I don’t get from most other games.  It’s covert meanness, and I just love that interplay between taking what you want and hate-draft discarding each turn.

It’s an adorable game, and it seems so simple on the surface.  After several plays of it, though, there’s a ton of strategy here.  I have won every single game of this except one, which doesn’t sway my rating of it.  I just love playing it.  If you’ve overlooked this one, go back and give it a try.  It’s simple enough to teach to almost anyone, and it works well at all player counts.  Maybe someday we’ll try the expansion I’ve owned since it came out.  

#8 The King is Dead
BGG Rank: 406
Plays: 2
My Rating: 8.3
BGG Rating: 7.010
User Avg Rating: 7.8

Okay.  I had heard nothing about this one.  I didn’t know anything about it.  I was just bored one day and watched a stream of someone playing it.  After the teach, I was sure it wasn’t for me.  But I watched it anyway.  And as the game unfolded, I couldn’t believe that something like this even existed.  I was immediately eager to get my hands on it.

Y’all.  The king has died.  Who’s gonna take over the throne? This game is a map of England split into territories.  Each person gets the same 8 cards.  The board gets seeded with cubes that represent influence over the throne.  It sounds boring as hell, and, to be honest, it looks like it, too.  But this game!  Basically, everyone has those 8 cards in their hand, and you can play a card and add or move cubes on the map as it instructs, and then you take a cube from a territory somewhere.  The other thing you can do is pass.  If everyone passes, you trigger the next territory to score, and the majority of cubes on the territory will get the influence disk for that territory.  Three factions vie for control of the throne, and you don’t own any of them.  The winner is determined by who has the most cubes of the winning faction when all the territories have been scored.  And you NEVER get your 8 cards back, sop if you’ve done them all before the territories are judged, you just get to come along for the rest of the game ride.  

I know.  I haven’t explained it well, and it sounds like the driest thing ever.  I promise you, this game will FIRE UP YOUR BRAIN and make every single choice mean something.  And that meaning has to sort of be parsed from a big knot of power struggles and actions and stuff.  It’s…it’s just brilliant, and I can’t play this one enough.  Like, I want to play it all the time. 

#7 Lords of Vegas
BGG Rank: 449
Plays: 6
My Rating: 9
BGG Rating: 6.960
User Avg Rating: 7.3

I can’t ignore that Mike Selinker having some not-so-great reports about him online which I’ll leave you to discover on your own, but I fell in love with this game before I knew anything about that.  This was one of the first big games I ever bought without ever having played it.  I saw it on an episode of TableTop with Will Wheaton, and my intrigue about it lasted longer than that show did.  Pity.

This is the game I recommend to people who say they like Monopoly.  Like it all you want, but this game is objectively better and it has you doing somewhat similar things.  You’re building Las Vegas up and out of the desert sands, one casino block at a time.  As you grow those casinos through mergers, hostile takeovers, and redesigns, you’re scoring more and more points to get you across gaps on the score track that require several points to cross.  This score track gimmick is what drives this game.  After several points, you then start to need 2 points to move up on the score track rather than one.  Then three.  Then four.  If you’re not growing your casino empire, you can get left behind people who are earning more points at a time.  

Everything about this game leans into the Vegas theme, from the luck of the draw of the cards that tell you what casino pays out to the gambling you can do to raise a few bucks at someone’s casino to the reorganization based on die rolls.  This game can swing wildly, but that’s all part of the fun when you’re in Vegas.  

#6 Bruges
BGG Rank: 296
Plays: 6
My Rating: 8.5
BGG Rating: 7.143
User Avg Rating: 7.4

Sometimes when people ask me what my favorite game is, I tell them this one.  I guess I owe them an apology.  It’s not even in my top 5.  It’s basically garbage.  But it’s the best damned garbage I’ve ever played  And if I make this list again (and I intend to at some point), it could end up at the top.  It’s magnificent.

This game, for me, is the king of multi-use cards, which I may have said before is my favorite mechanism in games.  You’ve got cards in a bunch of colors, and they all do something corresponding to their color.  They can get you workers, build a canal, get you money, become a house, mitigate a disaster, or be used for their character power.  You have to decide what to do every round to get ahead of other players.  The theme is boring as hell, but you don’t even have to care.  

It’s an ugly game, but the art of people on all 200-ish cards is different.  That’s admirable.  I just really love this game so much.  It’s just been reprinted as Hamburg, which is unnecessary and confusing.  Otherwise it’s impossible to get.  I treasure my copy above most else.  I’d be happy to play this with you any time.

#5 Catan: Starfarers
BGG Rank: 1898
Plays: 3
My Rating: 9
BGG Rating: 6.181
User Avg Rating: 7.6

I remember the moment I pulled this from the top shelf of the game store, walked up to the counter, told them I’d be using my store credit, and leaving the store without paying.  It was glorious, and I was thrilled.  When I got home and opened the box, my heart fell.  Those rules were a BEAR to get through.  And it wasn’t early in my hobby.  But man.  Those rules need help.  

It’s worth it, though.  I really like Catan, but this game feels like a logical next step in terms of theme and complexity. I love that it sort of feels like an adventure, carrying your settlements to a planet and setting up shop there, maybe fighting planetary defenses or space pirates along the way.  The resources you get feel earned, since you traveled to get to where your settlements are.  

At its core, it’s a flashy Catan with some added movement and encounter cards.  But that’s plenty for me.  It also relieves some of the crap actions of regular Catan where you don’t get any cards.  This game gives you picks from a random pile until you’re at a certain point threshold.  It really speeds the game along and eliminates people feeling left out of the fun.  I want to play this game right now.  The only poop about it is the player count minimum is still three, which means Robb and I won’t play it together.

#4 Faiyum
BGG Rank: 1225
Plays: 1
My Rating: 7.6
BGG Rating: 6.439
User Avg Rating: 7.6

What is there to say about Faiyum that hasn’t already been said?  Turns out, a ton, since almost no one is talking about how friggin amazing this game is.  So Faiyum is about developing the titular region of Egypt for the Pharaoh, and since you’re working for the Pharaoh, nothing you build belongs to you.  You’ll be developing fields for grapes, stone, and wheat, building roads and settlements, and ridding the area of alligators for fun and profit.  

The draw of this game is the card market, which is akin to Power Grid.  Only the lowest four ranked of the 8 cards in the market can be bought, and when new cards come out, they’re placed in numerical order, which can lead to some upsets in the marketplace as cards you may have been planning to buy could slide into the off-limits area.  And all your actions are on these cards, so it’s important to buy cards to expand your capabilities.  At some point you’re going to want to get some of your action cards back, and when you take the action that lets you do that, you get up to three cards back from the TOP of your discord pile, meaning you might get the three most recently played cards back.  Anything more than that, you have to pay for.  So through the course of the game you’re going to bury some cards too deep to afford to get back.  It’s a delightful balance.

Some have said the game is ugly, but I love the simplicity of its presentation.  The pieces are simple.  The iconography is easy to understand.  And the game is fairly simple, as far as rules go.  I just adore this game, and I want to play it every dang day.  It’s only hit the table once, which makes me so, so sad.  Soon we’ll get it played again somehow.  I just have to.  And yes.  A game I’ve only played once can be this high on my list.  That’s how good it is.

#3 Sleuth
BGG Rank: 1369
Plays: 14
My Rating: 10
BGG Rating: 6.634
User Avg Rating: 6.9

Sleuth is a deduction game from 1971 that still feels like it could have been designed this year.  I describe it to people as “Clue without the frustration of rolling dice.”  By the time this goes live, I’ll have played it probably 4 or 5 more times.  It’s something we go to often with a specific friend.  And 3 players seems the perfect player count for us.  We tried this once at 5 and it was super miserable.  Too much info going around, and too little progress.  But oh man, at 3 players it just works so well.  

So you have a bunch of gems, three kinds in three configurations in four colors.  So out of red, blue, yellow, and green clusters, pairs, and singles of diamond, opals, and pearls, you set one card aside and deal the rest out equally with leftover cards faceup on the table as open info.  You eliminate the cards you were dealt from your sheet, and then you deal everyone four cards that have lines of inquiries on them.  You can ask the questions on your cards to whatever player you want, and they have to give you the information.  You just narrow down the choices until you figure out what gem is the one on the missing card.  It’s simple, brilliant, and so, so replayable.

As far as deduction games go, which I adore, this is my favorite.  There is nothing extraneous in this box.  We love it so much that I had to copy and print a bunch more sheets for the game, and soon I’ll have to do it again.  It’s ridiculous, as I’ve never run out of score sheets for any game before.  If you like deduction at all, find a copy of this and play it at 3 people.  You’ll discover something that has been missing from your life.

#2 Railways of the World
BGG Rank: 164
Plays: 12
My Rating: 10
BGG Rating: 7.367
User Avg Rating: 7.7

Railways of the World has appeared at the top of this list more than once.  It’s a game I own every bit of.  I have every map, every module, and every card for this behemoth of a train game.  I can’t say that about many games.  It’s the one game I can always get Robb to play with me.  He loves it just as much as I do, even if it makes him grumpy sometimes because I rarely lose.  But he’s gotten so much better at it as we’ve played, learning the right time to stop building and start delivering goods to the matching colored cities to score points.

I just love the route building in this game.  The first few minutes of the game we stare at the board and look at what colored cubes ended up in what destinations, mentally puzzling out how much it’s going to cost to set up a profitable network of rails.  It’s just so satisfying to go from having nothing to having a thriving rail network making 6- and 7-point deliveries.  We’ve only played this with more than 2 players once.  It was a 4-player game and it went really well.  Someday we’ll play the two other maps we’ve neglected and all the Railways Through Time maps.  

It’s another one of those games I’ll always invest in when possible.  And if anyone ever asks me for a game recommendation, I’d gladly tell them to give this a try.  Sure, it’s pricey, but it’s so damned good.  For all the money I’ve spent on this one, I feel I’ve gotten enough enjoyment out of it to make it worthwhile.  Truly a great game.

#1 Traders of Osaka
BGG Rank: 1377
Plays: 9
My Rating: 9.5
BGG Rating: 6.361
User Avg Rating: 6.8

At the top of this list is an unassuming game that sort of defies explanation. When I talk about this game I’m fond of describing it as a tight little knot of a game where everything you do affects every other thing in the game.  I’ve played this game 9 times, and I still don’t really have any idea how to effectively win it.  It’s just a little bit inscrutable.

See, you are merchants taking goods from Osaka to Edo through some dangerous waters.  You can take cards as money, use them as insurance, or use them to buy goods from the market.  Each time you buy a card, the ship of the corresponding color moves on the map.  If a ship gets to edo, that color of good sells, so anyone with that color in their hold can sell it and take a bonus token of that color, which makes future sales more lucrative.  But when a ship gets to Edo, any ships in the dangerous waters sink, and all the good of that color are lost unless they’re insured.

So you have to manage your hand carefully, deliver your goods when it’s most beneficial, and try not to fuck yourself over by sinking ships full of your own goods.  Which I manage to do every game.  It’s hard to play well, but the actions are simple.  I just can’t get enough of it.  And that’s why it’s my favorite game of all time.  At least for now. 

I could redo this list tomorrow and have a completely different shakeout.  That’s just the way board game rankings go!  Some days I feel like trains, and some days I want a mean card game.  The beauty of it all is that I can have have whatever I want when I want it, and with a hundred great games, there’s an almost endless supply to choose from.  Now, let’s get some games to the table!  

I appreciate your eyeballs!

~Justin

More Top Games:
100-91 
90-81 
80-71 
70-61 
60-51 
50-41 
40-31 
30-21 
20-11