Tag: bang! the dice game

Kyle Hanley’s Top 100 Games of All Time (2020 Edition): 50-41

And so it begins…my top 50 games of all time. If you’ve made it this far, you may as well keep going. Sure, you could argue is a fallacy of sunken costs kind of situation to which I say, yeah, probably, but what else are you going to do as the world burns around us? It’s much better in here than out there and that’s saying something.

On with the show!

50. Dixit

Previous ranking: 25 (-25)

What I said last year

One of the go to gateway party games, Dixit is quietly one of the most influential games in the hobby. Its art style has been aped and copied in countless games since and people still refer to it as “Dixit-style art” despite how long it’s been since Dixit’s release. It is also one of the first games to popularize the idea of communicating concepts without being too forthcoming, something that party games today still revolve around.

To tighten the scope of Dixit’s influence, it’s also one of the most important games in my collection. It was one of the first games I ever went out and bought myself and was therefore a keystone in the early days of my collection. It was easily one of the most played games for me and my various groups at that time and was even the first hobby game I ever taught to my parents. You could argue that Dixit gets a big bump in the ranking on this list for nostalgia purposes, but I think that’s unfair to say. Both Pandemic and Carcassonne were games I played quite often around the same time and yet I’ve suffered some degree of burnout on both, resulting in neither game even cracking my top 50. Dixit has no such burnout. I still adore this game as much as the first day I played it and will never turn down a chance to get it to the table.

I suppose I should describe the game at this point? I’m sure most of you know what it is anyway. You have tarot sized cards of surreal, dream like art and one player, called the storyteller, gives a clue for one of their cards. It can be a phrase, a word, even a sound. Then everyone else picks a card from their hand that they think matches the clue, they’re all shuffled up and then put on display for a vote: which one was the original card chosen by the Storyteller?

The brilliance in Dixit lies in its scoring system. If you want people to guess your clue, why not be obvious? Why not just say, “Married couple playing chess underwater as an octopus checks its pocket watch in the background”? Because in Dixit, the Storyteller scores no points if either everyone guesses the card OR if nobody guesses the card. So be too obvious or too vague and you’re just giving your opponents free points. It’s such a clever, sharp system that has, as I mentioned, laid the groundwork for dozens and dozens of party games since.

I love games that require you to stretch your creative muscles over your logical ones and Dixit was one of the first games to scratch that itch for me. Being the Storyteller and having free reign on what clue to give allows for such boundless creative choices, while trying to play a card that matches the Storyteller’s clue allows for equal amounts of devious imagination.

I know many have cooled on the game as time has passed and they’ve moved onto shinier, newer party experiences but for me, Dixit will always have a place in my heart and in my collection. If this is still one you haven’t played, what the hell are you waiting for!?

What I say now

Dixit is no longer in my top 25 and is now *merely* in my top 50. That ‘merely’ is sarcastic, by the way. Number 50 out of all the games I’ve played is still good, especially when you consider how long Dixit has been in my collection and how much I’ve played it over the years. The pandemic has made party games tough (read: impossible) to play, so it hasn’t gotten much table time lately. Perhaps the reason behind its fall, though one could wonder if a tiny bit of Dixit’s shine is finally starting to dull after all these years. I’m interested to see how it plays out over the next year and to discover where I rank Dixit in 2021.

Till then, kicking off my top 50 is still a laudable place to be.

49. When I Dream

Previous ranking: 21 (-28)

What I said last year

In When I Dream, players take turns being the Dreamer, someone who will don a sleeping mask and be given clues, one at a time, by the rest of the players to guess words. Sounds like a straight up word association game, so where’s the twist? The twist is that the other players, who are giving the clues, are given hidden roles and those roles determine how helpful they want to be to the Dreamer.

There are Fairies, Boogiemen and Sandmen. Fairies want the Dreamer to guess the words as they come up, so they have a very straightforward task. They simply want to link their clues as strongly to the clue as possible. Boogiemen, however, are a little more insidious. They do NOT want the Dreamer to guess the word, so they’ll be giving clues to throw off the Dreamer. The Sandman, meanwhile, is the Thanos of this world and they want the number of correct guesses and incorrect guesses to be as even as possible.

What this means then is that the Dreamer has to be wary of which clues they trust because the person giving the clue may not have their best interests at heart. There is no phase in which the Dreamer accuses someone of being a Boogieman or Sandman; they simply have to internalize the information and make guesses based on clues given by the people they think they can rely on. If someone is consistently appearing out of left field with nonsense words compared to the rest of the group, then it’s safe to say the Dreamer will ignore them like everyone ignores the “let sit for one minute” instructions on the back of a freezer meal.

On the clue giving side of thing, it’s perhaps even more interesting. Fairies admittedly have a pretty unexciting task but having a chance to be a Boogieman or Sandman involves a fun game of misdirection and subtle deceit. In order to be effective as a Boogieman, you have to fool the Dreamer into thinking you’re a trusted voice. This means giving clues that kind of fit the word but are just distanced enough that the Dreamer may go the wrong way. I use this example in my review, but imagine the word is ‘lion’. If one player says, ‘big’ and another says ‘cat’, a cunning Boogieman will throw out a word like ‘stripes’ or ‘Asia’. This suddenly points the Dreamer towards ‘tiger’ and unless the Fairies can redirect towards ‘lion’ with enough clues, there’s a good chance the Dreamer will guess incorrectly. Since the Dreamer has no idea which ones they’ve gotten wrong, clues like that essentially give no information to the Boogieman’s true identity.

It’s like the Dreamer is being led through a dark tunnel where the clue givers are taking turns grabbing them by the shoulders and pushing them in a certain direction. It’s amazing fun to see how the clues develop and how to best use your role given the information. One or two awful clues from the Boogieman will be all it takes for the Dreamer to essentially mute them like a Twitter troll, making their job the most tense but also the most fun. I always love being the Boogieman, trying to figure out clever ways to introduce small amounts of chaos to the proceedings. The Sandman is also very interesting to play as, since you’re hopping from side to side like a dream world Littlefinger, and it requires constantly being aware of when to shift gears when one side starts overtaking the other.

When I Dream is just so great because it takes elements many gamers are familiar with (word association, hidden roles) mixing them together in a way we’ve never seen before while also maintaining an extremely accessible ruleset for non-gamers to join in. It also scales amazingly well, a very odd quality for a social deduction-esque to have. I played this at the lowest player count of four and found it still surprisingly works while the higher player counts flourish even more. 

What I say now

Another game falling from my top 25 and it’s fitting that this one is right after Dixit, since When I Dream’s artwork clearly takes a cue from Dixit’s surreal, deamy style. This is another party game that feels like it might be unfairly tarnished due to the cruelty of 2020 since I haven’t played it in well over a year. BUT even with that considered, I will admit the last time I played When I Dream it started to feel a bit…same-y? It felt like a lot of clues and misdirection from previous games were being used and it’s very easy to burn through the deck of cards in just a few plays which compounds the problem. I think this sudden discovery/concern bubbling up to the surface has hurt When I Dream’s standing in the list.

That doesn’t stop this from being one of the cleverest party games in my collection, though. When I can play games with big groups again, this is sure to be one of the first party games to hit the table. I can’t wait to see if my aforementioned fears were misguided or if maybe this is a game in dire need of expansion (which I actually think may be on the way? I would check but what do you expect from me, it’s not like I’m getting paid for this). Either way, it’s sure to be a blast.

48. High Society

Previous ranking: 43 (-5)

What I said last year

High Society is a small little card game built around auctions. Everyone gets a hand of identical money cards which they then use to bid on point cards which are drawn randomly from a deck. Like many auction games, you raise the bid or you pass. When everybody’s passed, the person remaining spends their money cards and takes the points in front of them.

Sounds a little straightforward and maybe even a little boring, huh. Well, it would be, if it were not for that good old fashioned Knizia Twist ™. High Society has a very important rule. At the end of the game, everyone counts how much money they have left. Whoever has spent the most money over the course of the game is IMMEDIATELY disqualified. They can’t win, even if they have the most points.

And just that tiiiiny little wrinkle takes a vanilla game of bidding on points and turns it into one of the most clever, exquisitely tense card games money can buy.

Every choice is fraught with anxiety and indecision. Do you raise bids, hoping to get people to waste as much cash as possible but risk getting caught spending the money yourself? When you do want a point card, how much are you willing to spend? Do you focus on taking smaller point cards for super cheap, hoping it’s enough to get you where you need to be? Or do you spend big on one or two of the larger amounts, going quiet for the rest of the game as everyone else is lulled into a false sense of spending security? In just a mere 15 minutes, you’ll have these thoughts racing through your head like a prize horse you just spent way too much money on, why did you spend that much money, WHY DID YOU SPEND THAT MUCH MONEY!?!?

To further add to the agony, there are negative penalty cards which do things like remove a point card you’ve already bought or cut your total points in half. When those are up for auction you are bidding to pay money to NOT take it and the person who ultimately decides to fall on the grenade is the only one who doesn’t have to spend cash. This means you always feel like you have to subconsciously stash money away for the purpose of avoiding those penalties because it’ll make any money you’ve already spent on points seem worthless. Yet another way in which Knizia takes a subtle little rule change and uses it to make his game into an instant classic.

What I say now

High Society remains my favorite Knizia game. For what is essentially a dry auction game, it packs a lot of laughter and tension in its brisk 15-20 minutes. One recent game had a memorable moment where my friend sat on his money the entire game, refusing to pay for anything until the last couple cards, thinking he could go on an uncontested spending spree since everyone else would be bled dry by that point. Hilariously, even though he did just that, he STILL ended up being the one who spent the most money because he was too aggressive in trying to get those final point cards. It’s moments of hubris and schadenfreude like this that really make High Society shine.

It has moved down, but only five spots. This is mostly because of some of the new games that have entered the list rather than any inherent problems I’m starting to spot with High Society. The only worrying thing that could cost High Society is how easy it’ll be to get to the table. You see, I’ve introduced this to two groups: one group absolutely loved it, wanting to play games of it back to back to back. The other? They didn’t care for it, like, at all. And it just so happens that the group that didn’t like it is my main gaming group, so, uh, this is awkward.

Will High Society’s stock diminish due to lack of play time? I sure hope not, but time will tell!

47. Longhorn

Previous ranking: N/A

As if my top 100 needed more Bruno Cathala, here is another ‘new to the list’ game that he designed. Interestingly, it’s not even a recent game from him. Longhorn, my number 47 game, is alllll the way back from 2013, which in board game terms means it might as well be mummified in a tomb somewhere.

Don’t let this game’s age fool you. Throughout this list, I’ve mentioned a couple of games as being some of the industry’s most hidden gems and I think Longhorn deserves a similar title; it’s a game that rarely gets talked about and I only heard of this year. I wouldn’t be shocked if you hadn’t heard of it, so please step into the Church of Cathala, grab an empty pew, and allow me to spread the Gospel of Longhorn.

Longhorn is a two player only game of collecting cows in the Old American West. The game uses a quasi-mancala style mechanism. Players alternate moving a shared token around a grid of tiles, collecting cow meeples (or should I say MOOples hahaha someone please drown me) as they do so. The mancala style twist is that the token gets moved as many spaces as cows collected; so, when you collect cows from a space (choosing all of one color present) you’ve got to keep in mind where that will allow you to move the token.

Sure, you can take three white cows but the only tiles three spaces away will give your opponent something good. But hey, maybe that’s not so bad? Because what makes Longhorn such an unexpectedly juicy puzzle is that you not only need to keep in mind what you’re immediately giving to your opponent, but also to what your opponent can give to YOU. For example, I know moving the token to that tile gives my opponent a cow color they’ve been collecting all game BUT their options for moving the token afterwards may give me something nice in return. Is it worth setting up your opponent if it then sets you up in return? It’s a dilemma that constantly teases you throughout Longhorn’s swift but surprisingly dense 10-15 minutes runtime.

And that’s just the game’s basic mechanism! I haven’t even mentioned all the other wrinkles Cathala has managed to sneak in. For example, there are special action tokens on each tile. When you clear a tile of its last cow, you then take the token. Some are simply end game points, while others let you steal cows from your opponents or take an immediate extra turn. BUT some are bad, like the rattlesnake that scares some of your cattle away or the Sheriff badge which causes you to automatically lose the game if you collect it. These tokens make the game’s tough decisions that much more painful, because you never want to give your opponent the chance to get a good token OR to saddle you with a negative one.

Oh, oh! And the scoring system! So, at the end of the game you’re going to get points for the cows you’ve collected. Duh, you probably say, but mind your tongue because I’m getting to the good part. Cows are worth points equal to the number of cows of that color left on the board; if there are 2 orange cows left, each orange cow you have is worth 2 points. This means that the more you collect of a certain color the more you’re diluting its point value, adding the slightest hint of market manipulation to this already deceptively thinky game. This can even result in your opponent completely tanking the color you’ve collected a lot of by taking the last cows off the board, meaning their worth is now ‘0’. This is balanced by the fact that if one player collects all of one color, they automatically win the game, adding yet ANOTHER cool layer to this parfait of a game.

I’ve gone on much longer than I anticipated about this unassuming and small two player game, which clearly shows how much I enjoy it. I could easily see it moving up the ranks by 2021, considering this is a game I’ve only added to my collection earlier in the year.

46. Jamaica

Previous ranking: 44 (-2)

What I said last year

Jamaica is a game where you and your opponents are racing around the titular island, using a mixture of card play and dice placement to efficiently collect resources and move your ship. It’s yet another game on the resume of one Bruno Cathala, who will somehow show up on this list even more frequently than he already has. Every turn an active player referred to as the Captain rolls two dice and then chooses to place them on spots representing a day action and a night action. Whatever the pips on the dice show denotes how powerful the action will be.

What are day actions and night actions? Those are the actions you’ll be activating throughout the game and those are selected by playing cards. Everybody has their own personal deck of cards which they draw from for a hand of three. The decks are all identical, but through shuffling everybody will obviously get different cards at different times. When the Captain decides where to place the dice, everyone simultaneously chooses a card and then reveals. On one side of the card is the day action and on the other is the night action. Everyone takes turns resolving their cards based on the dice and the round ends. That’s basically the game until someone crosses the finish line.

Like many of Cathala’s games, Jamaica is rich with tactical play. Taking a look at the board, at your hand of cards and what the dice can give you requires constantly adapting your plans to what is most effective for that turn. Maybe you really wanted to move forward, but you only have that available as a day action and the day action die has a weak value. Perhaps you move backward instead, to minimize the damage from such an action? There’s also some surprisingly puzzley resource management involved as well. Traveling around the board requires one of two types of currency: food and gold. If you’re short on the cost to end your turn on that space, you get pushed back to a space you can afford and that can be devastating. Everyone has a ship hold of six squares but those fill up fast, and a devious mechanism wherein you can’t add to squares (you either have to fill a new square or completely replace the resource) means you’ll be pulling your hair out trying to figure out the best course to sail.

As if that isn’t enough, there’s also combat to worry about. Landing on the same space as another pirate is apparently an act of war because those ships need to fight. Combat is resolved by a simple dice roll, made more intriguing by the presence of gunpowder. Players can choose to add gunpowder to their combat roll, giving an addition of one point per gunpowder token used. It creates a nice sense of push your luck as you try to figure out the odds so that you give yourself a comfortable buffer without overspending. Hilariously, there is an insta-kill side of the die that completely blows up your plans anyway. The winner of the fight gets to rob a player of one of their holds’ squares or to steal a treasure card (bonus point cards seeded throughout the race track), adding a nice bit of interaction to the game.

Like many games on this list, Jamaica is just pure fun. The charming art adds to the fun pirate theme and helps give the game a lighthearted attitude (just like real piracy, right). Watching your best laid plans falter because of a bad die roll or an inopportune combat would seem frustrating, but here it’s part of the game’s appeal. Everybody is getting screwed over and that’s what makes the moments when you chain together a couple of well-timed card plays to get you zipping ahead of the pack so satisfying. Even better, winning the race doesn’t necessarily mean winning the game. Yes, you most likely will BUT people get a certain amount of points for where they finished and they also get points for gold in their hold. Knowing when it’s time to gun for the finish line and when it’s time to pace yourself and hoard gold can be the difference between a last second loss or a surprising win from nowhere.

My only complaint with Jamaica is that it can go a little long, especially if there are a lot of combats dragging the pace of the game down. But that nitpick aside, Jamaica is a game I will always want to play, especially if it’s with a group of five or six.

What I say now

Not much to add about Jamaica, as it’s only dropped an almost imperceptible 2 spots. I love Jamaica as much as I did last year and would be interested to see if it would have had a chance to rise ever so slightly had I had the chance to play it this year. As a game that is best with at least 4 players, it’s another one of those COVID casualties. Really looking forward to the day I can play this again.

45. Concordia

Previous ranking: 26 (-19)

What I said last year

God bless Shut Up & Sit Down. If it wasn’t for their glowing review of Concordia, I likely would have never given it a second look. Even after their review, I honestly still wasn’t convinced. How could this game, with its bland cover and bland theme and bland sounding rule set, be anywhere near as good as everyone is saying?? But more and more people continued to keep raving about it and I had to get a copy just to satiate my curiosity.

For like the 87th time on this Top 100, it’s time to admit I was wrong. Concordia IS as good as everyone says.

I’ll try to get through describing the game without falling asleep. (I promise this game is good! It just sounds so dry and boring!) Players are playing cards in order to complete actions that include producing resources, selling and trading those resources, building little outposts to further your production power, and zzzzzzzzz OH, shit, I got so close! Listen, this is game is Euro 101, so let’s get into what makes this game different and great.

First off is the hand management and hand building aspect. In Concordia, everyone starts off with an identical hand of actions cards. How you use those cards is entirely up to you. Once you use a card, it’s in your discard until you play another card that allows you to pull your discard pile back in your hand. That card rewards you for pulling up more cards, so timing it till the last possible moment while not waiting TOO long is a constant dilemma that teases you throughout the game.

Managing your hand is a tense efficiency puzzle, but Concordia also offers you a chance to build your hand. Throughout the game, a display of cards will be oozing along a track at the top, offering players a chance to buy cards to add to your arsenal of potential actions. Many of them provide more efficient versions of the cards everyone starts with, allowing everyone to laser in and focus on an avenue to victory they find fun and/or advantageous to pursue.

This is all made even more intriguing when you internalize how the game scores. It’s a little tricky to explain, but basically all the cards have a certain Roman God or Goddess listed on its bottom and those cards score in specific ways. Whatever points you get from that God or Goddess based on your board state is then multiplied by the number of cards you have of that God or Goddess. So, if you get 8 points from your Mars cards and you have 3 of them in your hand by game’s end, that’s 24 points. I looove this scoring system, even if it’s a bit of a bastard to teach to newcomers. It makes you really think about what cards you want and also makes for the most exciting final scoring round in any game I’ve played. Since you technically don’t score throughout the game, it’s just an explosion of points after points as you and your opponents tally everything in your hand, your score markers sprinting around the board like it’s the Kentucky Derby.

It doesn’t hurt that this is all contained in one of the most superbly elegant rulesets in any game I’ve played. You literally play a card, do what it says, and there’s your turn. There aren’t any edge cases nagging at you like a stubborn hangnail and referencing the rulebook is almost never needed. Scoring can sometimes trip up players but even that requires just an example for them to understand it. The absolutely only thing keeping this from being higher on my list is simply lack of play. I haven’t played this game in over a year and a half and it felt weird putting a game that’s suffered that long a drought much higher than this spot. When I finally do get a chance to play this again, I see it being in my top 15, easily.

What I say now

Ohh, Concordia. What am I gonna do with you. I’ll be honest, I have no clue where to rank this game. In terms of the one play I’ve had of it and how much of a masterclass in design this is, this feels like a top 20 game for me. BUT, and it seems like there’s always a BUT, I haven’t played this game since the summer of 2018. It is incredibly tough to rank a game sorely off of one play from two and a half years ago, no matter how good it is.

With that in mind, I guess you can say 45 is a pretty good spot for it. If I don’t get a chance to play this by next top 100, I dread Future Kyle having to rank this. If I DO get to play it, which I am going to try like hell to, then don’t be surprised if Concordia finds itself back up in the top 25 area of the list.

44. Spyfall

Previous ranking: 24 (-20)

What I said last year

In this game, players are given a secret location as well as some sort of occupation or person you’d find there. That is except for one person, who is given a card that merely says ‘Spy’. Then, players simply begin asking each other questions. Things like, “Are we outside or inside?” or “What do you do here?” or “ARE YOU THE SPY, TELL ME YOU TRAITEROUS COWARD”. Players need to answer the question in a way that lets people know that they’re aware of the location they’re in.

However, like Sir Mix-a-Lot, I like big BUTs and I cannot lie and Spyfall has a very big BUT. Players want to let others know that they are clued in on the location BUT they don’t want to be too obvious or else the spy might catch on. If at any point the spy can declare what the mystery location is, they automatically win the game. Even if they don’t get to that point, giving the spy possible ammunition to fit in with good answers of their own is enough to torpedo a win for the non-spy players. If the non-spies can’t suss out the spy and accuse them before time runs out, then that’s another way for the spy to win.

I believe Spyfall was the first pure social deduction game I ever played and it has continued to be my favorite. One of the big reasons is just how damn funny this game is. Everybody is trying to be as cagey as possible, which leads to hysterically vague answers. Even funnier, though, is when the spy thinks the location is one thing and gives an outrageously out of left field answer, shining a huge spotlight on their cluelessness. One time I was the spy and I was confident we were at the zoo, so when asked what my favorite time of day was I said, “Feeding hour.” Turns out we were NOT at a zoo but at a casino, which led to everyone staring blankly for five seconds before simultaneously saying, “Kyle’s the spy.” It also created an image of people at slot machines hearing a dinner bell and rushing over to a feeding trough that had the table rolling in laughter.

Another reason I love Spyfall so much is its snappy length. Whereas games like The Resistance has players relentlessly bickering for close to an hour, Spyfall has a timer of eight minutes. This swiftness not only keeps things from getting too heated and barbaric but allows multiple rounds of it to be played in quick succession. This means more people get a chance to be the spy and an ever shifting meta can grow and evolve like an aggressive flu virus. It makes the game hopelessly addicting and one game of Spyfall easily melts into seven or eight over the course of an hour.

Sure, Spyfall has its warts. Like any social deduction game, it is very group dependent and is maybe the most polarizing game in my collection. I have friends who outright hate this game and refuse to play it because they find it too stressful. For me, I don’t find it stressful because the stress is what makes this game fun. Sweating it out as you try to bullshit your way through a question you have NO clue how to answer is a riotous good time to me but others find it a lot less funny. This is also a game that can grind to a halt if people keep giving the same vague responses, not allowing any new information to enter the game state. There’s a running joke in my group that if somebody asks “What do you do around here?”, you respond, “My job.” It gets a lot less funny, though, when it actually interferes with the game.

What I say now

Had you asked me in 2019 where I thought Spyfall could potentially be in 2020, I would have said I could see it falling out of my top 25. Those negatives I mentioned above-its polarizing nature and the occasional logjam of a game state-certainly portended an eventual decline. But 20 spots? Definitely more than I anticipated.

The reasons are the ones mentioned above but also one that I did not foresee: there are two social deduction games I now rank higher than Spyfall and have more or less replaced it in my collection.

Now, I don’t want to sound too extreme. I still LOVE Spyfall and if given the chance, I’d play it in a heartbeat. But it’s already a game that was already tough to get played and now with two new games that are both more well liked between me and my friends? That’s not helping Spyfall’s standing.

That being said, Spyfall is still one of the funniest and most addictive party games in my collection. I have no clue where it’ll end up on this list in 2021 but it’ll always have a special place in my heart.

43. Bang! The Dice Game

Previous ranking: 39 (-4)

What I said last year

Back when I was in college, when I wasn’t too busy being either awkward or drunk (wow, things haven’t changed much), my friends and I consistently played the card game Bang!. I guess you could technically say that was my first hobby game but I didn’t realize it was part of a bigger picture at the time. Fast forward to 2017 and I got to play Bang! The Dice Game, the dice version of Bang!. I wasn’t in love with it, which surprised me because I had heard that Bang! The Dice Game had replaced the original for pretty much everybody.

Luckily, I gave the game another chance later that same year and ever since I’ve considered it one of my top 100 games. I don’t know what clicked in between those plays but I will officially never go back to the original.

People familiar with the original card game will recognize the same basic skeleton. It’s a hidden role game set in the Wild West where one person is a Sheriff and the other players are a mixture of Deputies, Outlaws and Renegades. Deputies want the Sheriff to stay alive till the end, Outlaws want to kill the Sheriff and Renegades just want to be the last ones standing. Whereas the original was built around playing cards that helped you achieve these objectives, this one features a Yahtzee style dice rolling mechanism. The custom dice have icons which allow you to complete actions such as shooting other players and drinking beer to heal (remember kids, beer solves EVERYTHING).

What makes Bang! The Dice Game feel more immediately engaging and exciting than the card game is the push your luck aspect that this game brings. You’re trying to roll the dice to get the actions you need BUT there are negative icons that loom over every reroll. There are dynamite which lock your dice and make you blow up as well as Native American arrows which can cause you to take a lot of damage if you take too many of them. Knowing when to stop and be content with what you have is a key part of the game and one of the reasons it’s so fun and addictive.

And not to keep comparing this to the original, but this game is waaay quicker. The original had a long build up period of people setting up their arsenal and then the actual fighting could drag on as well. A game of this could take as little as ten minutes and certainly no longer than twenty. This makes the somewhat archaic mechanism of player elimination present in the game much more palatable, as people who get killed rarely have long to wait for the next game to begin. And believe me, you will want to play this game again. Many a party has started with three or four consecutive games of this and it never fails to be a rootin’ tootin’ good time.

What I say now

Boringly, I don’t have a whole lot to say here. If I have a game night with a big group, Bang! The Dice Game remains of my favorite games to open with and I can’t wait till that sort of thing is possible again.

42. Air, Land & Sea

Previous ranking: N/A

The second ‘new to the list’ game in the 50-41 range is a 2 player only card game called Air, Land & Sea. It is in the same mold of card games like Lost Cities (which appeared earlier on this list) and Schotten Totten (which has fallen off my top 100 but is still an excellent game); I’m talking games where you and your opponent are on opposite sides of a line and playing cards to specific columns, often in an effort to ‘win’ them.

In the game, players have three columns they’ll be battling over: the titular Air, Land and Sea theatres. When you play a card to a column, you can play it face up for its face value (but it must match the theatre type) or play it face down for a base 2 points (but then it acts as a wild). The sum of the values determines your score in that theatre and whoever has the highest score in two of the three theatres wins the round.

So far so 2-player-Lost Cities-style-card-game, right? Ahh, yes, but here’s where Air, Land & Sea takes this proven 2-player recipe and adds some of its own herbs and spices, making it the Colonel Sanders of the genre (which is definitely a comparison no one asked for, including Air, Land & Sea itself).

Let’s go back to what happens when you play cards face up. When you do so, you often get more points for them than when playing them face down for a mere ‘2’ but you also get to activate a special ability. You see, every card has a power that allows you to either break a rule or manipulate cards on either side or to change up how the column scores. The true strategy and tactics in Air, Land & Sea lie in making the most of these powers and triggering them at the right time for maximum potency. Puzzling out the various combos that bubble beneath the surface of this game’s tiny 18 card deck is one of the pure joys of playing this game. Even after double digit plays, I still find new ways to link up cards and time their abilities for powerful swings in my favor (and, sadly, so do my opponents).

And that’s not even the coolest part of the game! By far my favorite rule is that you can literally just quit. During the round, if you see that with the cards in your hand and with how things are playing out on the table that you’re likely going to lose, you can surrender the round. Doing so gifts your opponent points but if you do it early enough in the round, it’s less points than they would have gotten had it been played out to the end.

This idea of ‘tactical retreats’ is such a brilliant, sharp mechanism and one that leads to lots of sweaty palms and darting eyes as you and your opponent math out how imminent defeat could be. It makes you feel surprisingly clever when you retreat early with a bad hand and it’s exhilarating when you’re about to retreat but your opponent beats you to it. Plus, quitting things is one of my favorite things to do in life, so it’s about time a board game rewarded me for doing so.

The main thing keeping this game from my breaking the top 40 is its generic art and theme. I don’t necessarily mind the World War II theme but it’s partnered with art that is tofu levels of bland and uninspiring. A fresh, flashier coat of paint could go a long way for this game.

Make no mistake, though. This game’s smart, engaging mechanisms more than make up for any of its boring art. It’s one of the best 2-player only card games I’ve played and deserves a spot in just about anybody’s collection.

41. Cyclades

Previous ranking: 36 (-5)

What I said last year

Cyclades is the first of a trilogy of games put out by publisher Matagot. The games in the trilogy-Cyclades, Kemet and Inis-are all loosely related in that they’re all Euro style troops on a map games set in some sort of ancient mythology. The similarities end there, however, as all the games have different designers and fairly different mechanisms. Will Kemet and Inis appear later on my list? STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT.

Enough about that, let’s dive into Cyclades. As I said, it’s set in the world of Ancient Greek mythology and players are trying to win the favor of the different Greek gods and goddesses as they aim to build two metropolises on the board. Once somebody has two metropolises under their control at the end of the round, they win. Players accomplish this by building fleets of ships, sending soldiers over to conquer islands, and building different types of buildings, such as forts and temples.

These actions are given to you by the gods and goddesses available for that round who are essentially put up for auction. Players bid to try and take control of that god or goddess so that they can use the actions associated with them. Most of them are thematic as well, making it easy to remember who does what. Poseidon builds ships and lets you control your fleet, Ares lets you create soldiers and move them to battle, Zeus demands you buy priests and temples while Athena attracts philosophers and universities.

I won’t go much deeper than that because there’s a lot of minutiae to talk about with what those actions do and the implications they carry. The main thing you need to worry about is that auction. Shrewd bidding is the key to winning this game, not storming around the map, conquering islands. A clever rule states that if you get outbid for a god, you cannot immediately rebid on that god. You have to find someone else to bid on and the only way you can go back that original is if you get outbid AGAIN on that 2nd god. This means if you really want to activate a certain god this round, you want to try and price it high enough so nobody wants to bother outbidding you. But spend too much and you might have enough gold to do anything impactful on your turn, because everything requires gold in this game. This push and pull of trying to decide what gods and actions are worth spending your precious gold on is one of the delightful dilemmas that this game pressures you with.

Another aspect I love about this game are the creatures, who come out one at a time from a big deck. The creatures are all from Greek mythology, obviously, and, like the gods, feature thematic powers. Medusa freezes soldiers in place while the Sirens attract ships to their doom and the Cyclops builds you a building because apparently he’s a contractor in the Greek myths? Whatever, MOST of them have thematic powers, and it’s always fun to pay for a card and then use it on an unsuspecting opponent.

Cyclades also has a surprising number of effective ways to win. You need two metropolises but how you get there is up to you. Want to focus on military, constantly using Ares to invade other islands and take their hard earned buildings for your own? Go ahead, ya big jerk. Want to go early on Zeus so that you can load up on priests and temples, which provide big discounts on bidding and buying monsters? Sure, you do you. Want to sneak a victory with Athena, recruiting philosophers that give you an automatic metropolis when you obtain four of them? You think therefore you can.

Really, I love Cyclades enough to almost consider it for my top 25 but one thing holds me back: Pegasus. Seasoned veterans of the game probably already know where I’m going with this. Pegasus is one of the cards in the creature deck and his ability is that he’s able to teleport all the soldiers off one of your islands to an opponent’s island, basically paratrooping them into battle. It’s the only way someone can invade an island without winning Ares and in the right context, it is EXTREMELY powerful. A common strategy at the end of the game when somebody already has two metropolises and is about to win, is to win Zeus and then use his ability to mill through the creature deck until you find Pegasus so that you can then teleport an army in order to steal one of those metropolises at the buzzer.

You probably think that’s an incredibly specific scenario, but this is how HALF of my games of Cyclades have ended. It’s gotten to the point where I warn players about Pegasus at the start and say, “Here’s what this card does and why it can ruin the ending of the game” and yet it still occurs. I could remove Pegasus from the deck, I guess, but I hate doing that sort of thing. And outside of the end, the threat of having Pegasus attack is integral to the rest of the game. It just sucks that it can be used to anti climactically take the game away from someone, even if it does seem to require specific context.

What I say now

A shallow drop of five spots for Cyclades. The main reason behind Cyclades failing to hold strong in the mid-30s is the criticism I ended last year’s write-up with: Pegasus. He still feels like a borderline broken card/mechanism and I have yet to grab myself a copy of the Titans expansion which purportedly fixes it (and irons out a few other wrinkles too).

If I get a copy of Titans, I would love to see if Cyclades makes a run at the top 25 because it truly feels like a game of that caliber for me. Till then, Cyclades faces a slow but steady decline down the list.

*

And so it goes for the first installment of the top 50 of the top 100 (there’s probably a more elegant way to say that). Come back soon for the start of the top 40!

Kyle Hanley’s Top 100 Games of All Time (2019 Edition): 40-31

Last entry we cautiously dipped our toes into my top 50. By the end of this entry, we’ll be ankle deep, wading peacefully through waves of amazing games as the soft summer breeze of opinion blows through your hair and yanno what, this metaphor isn’t working, let’s get on with it.

RECAP:

100-91

90-81

80-71

70-61

60-51

50-41

40. The Blood of an Englishman

blood of an englishman cover

Another game that I’m sure loyal readers (lol) will remember me featuring for a full review. You can read it right here. Though I’m sure you’ve read it already, right?

The Blood of an Englishman is pound for pound maaaybe the most underrated game on this list. It’s sitting at a ho hum 6.7 on BGG and it is NEVER talked about by anyone. I take in a LOT of content from the board game media sphere and I have heard about a lot of hidden gems because of that but TBoaE is never mentioned.

I guess it’s up to me then, huh. After all, I’m technically a board game content creator, right? HEY, stop laughing!

TBoaE is an asymmetrical 2 player only game with a Jack and the Beanstalk theme, where one player is Jack and the other is the Giant. The deck of cards that makes up the entire game is dealt out into five stacks of ten cards each, and then the entire game is Jack and the Giant trying to manipulate those stacks of cards in order to achieve their objectives.

Jack is trying to create three beanstalks of ascending order, capping them off with a treasure card at the top. The Giant is trying to align cards that say ‘Fee’, ‘Fi’, ‘Fo’, and ‘Fum’ next to each other OR to make it impossible for Jack to finish off a beanstalk. I really harp on about this in my review, but the asymmetry in this game is fantastic. Not only do the players have different objectives, but the actions they can accomplish are also different. Jack has three actions, but they’re very minor. The Giant only gets one action, but the choices they have drastically alter the board state. This feels immensely thematic, with Jack feeling nimble, quick and annoying while the Giant is slow but incredibly powerful.

And wow, this game is balanced. Once again, I mention this in my review but in 10 plays of this game, I have seen five of those go to Jack and five of those go to the Giant. Thanos would be proud. Anytime anything this asymmetrical manages to strike a 50/50 win rate deserves celebration.

The gameplay itself is excellent as well. Players are basically taking cards from various parts of the stacks and moving them around, hoping to either set themselves up for a big turn or to trap their opponent into unwittingly helping them. It has an abstract feel, for sure, but the thematic way in which the characters behave and the sheer cleverness of the puzzle at hand help this game feel immersive and engaging with every turn.

There’s a solid chance you haven’t heard of or played this game, so let me dust off this diamond in the rough on your behalf. Give it a shot because it really deserves more love and attention.

39. Bang! The Dice Game

bang the dice game

Back when I was in college, when I wasn’t too busy being either awkward or drunk (wow, things haven’t changed much), my friends and I consistently played the card game Bang!. I guess you could technically say that was my first hobby game but I didn’t realize it was part of a bigger picture at the time. Fast forward to 2017 and I got to play Bang! The Dice Game, the dice version of Bang!. I wasn’t in love with it, which surprised me because I had heard that Bang! The Dice Game had replaced the original for pretty much everybody.

Luckily, I gave the game another chance later that same year and ever since I’ve considered it one of my top 100 games. I don’t know what clicked in between those plays but I will officially never go back to the original.

People familiar with the original card game will recognize the same basic skeleton. It’s a hidden role game set in the Wild West where one person is a Sheriff and the other players are a mixture of Deputies, Outlaws and Renegades. Deputies want the Sheriff to stay alive till the end, Outlaws want to kill the Sheriff and Renegades just want to be the last ones standing. Whereas the original was built around playing cards that helped you achieve these objectives, this one features a Yahtzee style dice rolling mechanism. The custom dice have icons which allow you to complete actions such as shooting other players and drinking beer to heal (remember kids, beer solves EVERYTHING).

What makes Bang! The Dice Game feel more immediately engaging and exciting than the card game is the push your luck aspect that this game brings. You’re trying to roll the dice to get the actions you need BUT there are negative icons that loom over every reroll. There are dynamite which lock your dice and make you blow up as well as Native American arrows which can cause you to take a lot of damage if you take too many of them. Knowing when to stop and be content with what you have is a key part of the game and one of the reasons it’s so fun and addictive.

And not to keep comparing this to the original, but this game is waaay quicker. The original had a long build up period of people setting up their arsenal and then the actual fighting could drag on as well. A game of this could take as little as ten minutes and certainly no longer than twenty. This makes the somewhat archaic mechanism of player elimination present in the game much more palatable, as people who get killed rarely have long to wait for the next game to begin. And believe me, you will want to play this game again. Many a party has started with three or four consecutive games of this and it never fails to be a rootin’ tootin’ good time.

If you tried the original and liked it, I absolutely recommend Bang! The Dice Game. Even if you didn’t like the original I’d still recommend it, because this version streamlines a lot of the fiddliness out of the card game and massages out its flaws into a much smoother, more fun package.

38. Histrio

histrio cover

Just a few entries ago I mentioned that The Blood of an Englishman was the most underrated game on my list but my number 38 game is a VERY close second. That game is Histrio, yet another codesign from Bruno Cathala. Sitting at a bafflingly low 6.6 on BGG, this game also doesn’t get enough attention and love. The main reason I consider The Blood of an Englishman more underrated, though, is because Histrio does have some evangelists in board game media who have helped bring this game a little bit more in the public eye.

Histrio is set in a Shakespearian world of anthropomorphic animals where you are trying to make a troupe of actors to put on a play that fits the king’s mood. This is done through a simultaneous selection system. There is a long board of eight different cities which are then populated with cards representing different things players can collect, such as actors, coins or characters with special abilities. Players have a hand of eight cards, one for each city, and every round you choose one to secretly play. Players reveal and travel to that city with an adorable blimp pawn. If you’re there alone, you collect all the cards, being as smug as you want in the process. If others also chose that city, however, then all the cards are discarded and you and the others get a consolation prize in the form of a secret objective card that can be scored at the end of the round.

You’ve probably noticed games with simultaneous selection have started popping up more as we get deeper into the list, including Cathala’s own Mission: Red Planet a few posts back. It’s a mechanism I really like. It includes lots of suspense and double think as you try to figure out what other players are doing and then making sure you exploit that. One thing Histrio does well with this is that if you do make a boo boo and go to the same spot as someone, it’s not a total loss. The secret objective cards you receive can actually be pretty powerful, and I’ve won games solely because of the points they supplied. There’s still plenty of tension in getting the cards you want, but Histrio allows you to adapt when things don’t go as planned.

Another thing I think Histrio does brilliantly is its king’s mood mechanism. At the end of the round, you score points if you managed to make a troupe of actors of the type of play the king demands to see. He either wants a comedy or a tragedy and like your average Millennial trying to choose something on Netflix, he has no clue what he wants. Players can manipulate his mood by adjusting a dial throughout the round, which is done by discarding an actor of that type whenever you collect one or more actor cards from a city. The value of the actor dictates how far the dial moves towards that genre’s direction. So, if I discard a level three comedian, the dial moves three ticks towards comedy.

Of course, in pure Cathala fashion this cleverly presents a dilemma that players are wrestling with the whole game. Discarding high value actors is the best way to make drastic changes to the King’s mood BUT that means you’re losing out on that high value actor in your troupe. You only score big points from actors if the King is in the mood for them, meaning that level 5 tragedian will be awfully useful when the King is in the mood for a tragedy. But then you’re risking him NOT even wanting a tragedy and you can see why this game offers such tasty decisions.

Of course, I’d be remiss if I talked about Histrio and didn’t mention its lavish production values. The game is beautiful, with playful, colorful art and wonderfully chunky pieces. And the stage…my god, that stage. It’s a cardboard, 3-D stage that has the King’s mood dial on top and a rotating backdrop that you can twist around whenever the King changes said mood. It’s got incredible table presence and adds to the gleeful nature of this game. I have heard many call this overproduced, especially considering the game’s weight (it’s barely a Gateway+ style game), but I find it really adds to the experience.

If you’re looking for a game that provides surprisingly tense decision making and gorgeous production values, Histrio is one that you can’t ignore any longer.

37. The Grimm Forest

grimm forest cover

My number 37 is a game that has some similarities to Histrio. They both have out of this world production values and they both are centered on a simultaneous selection mechanism where you’re trying to go to locations by yourself. This game is The Grimm Forest, a game of fairy tale characters, building houses, and just so many god damned wolves.

In The Grimm Forest, you are a relative of one of the original Three Little Pigs, who have gotten too old and demented to keep up with their rock star lifestyle of building houses. Your job is to go out and build three houses to continue their legacy because that’s what pigs do, dammit. I don’t know if this is canon, but that’s the premise for the game.

Like I briefly mentioned earlier, the game features a similar Histrio style system, where you’ll be choosing one of three to four locations (depending on player count) in secret and then revealing at once to see where everybody goes. The locations all produce a resource of some type, with the fields providing straw, the forest providing trees and the brick yard producing bricks. If you go there alone, you get everything, just like Histrio. But if you go there with others, the resources are split equally with the remainder being left on there for the next round.

So that part of the game is awesome, capturing what makes simultaneous selection so great. Having only three/four locations really narrows the scope of your options and means the chances of clumsily butting into somebody feels like a constant threat. But after that resource gathering phase, there’s another phase where you actually manage the resources. In this phase, called the Build Phase, you can use those resources to construct parts of your houses, gather small amounts of extra resources or draw cards with special powers known as Fable cards.

Speaking of Fable cards, those cards are what really spice the game up. Fable cards are cards featuring different fairy tale creatures or tropes that allow you to pull off a special ability in a later round. Many of them are placed face down at locations and then are revealed after everyone has already picked their destination, allowing either a boon to whoever is at that location or, more likely, a destructive power to really screw with an opponent who was foolish enough to go there.

I’m usually not a fan of ‘take that’, but when it’s so baked into the design of a game I find it much more agreeable. Also, since you generally target locations rather than players, it feels much less direct and confrontational. It’s more like, “Well, how was I supposed to know you’d be at the forest!?” as you slyly grin. There’s also plenty of times when you misjudge a player’s destination and end up targeting nobody with your Fable card which is often hilarious, especially when that happens to the other players.

Another batch of zany powers you’re able to get access to are from the Friends cards. Friends cards are like Fable cards, except they are rewarded whenever you build the walls section of a house, because they’re coming to shack up with you. Unlike Fable cards, which are basically one use, Friend cards stay in front of you and provide a passive bonus or special ability of some sort. They’re all modeled after fairy tale characters such as Pinocchio, Snow White and Tom Thumb, and the cool thing is that when you procure a Friend, you choose to either put it in front of you or in front of someone else. This means that if somebody is absolutely killing it with a super powerful Friend card, you can force them to discard it by giving them someone less useful. It also allows you to avoid giving yourself a crappy Friend card if you’re really attached to the one you have. The Friend cards are very obviously not balanced but this mechanism allows players to do the balancing themselves, which I found to be a very sharp design decision.

Last thing I’ll rave about are the production values. The game includes minis for everyone’s pig character as well as a couple of the monsters BUT I will say I actually find them superfluous. I would have, in fact, preferred standees featuring the game’s art because wow, talking about amazing. The art in this game is phenomenal, featuring a warm, vibrant color palette that never fails to give me a feeling of comfort and peace when looking at it. It perfectly fits the whimsical fairy tale theme of the game and it’s easily among my favorite art in all of board games. And while the minis feel unnecessary, the game does include another 3-D component that I feel IS crucial to the experience. The houses you build throughout the game are chunky plastic pieces, which you literally build piece by piece like LEGO blocks. Not only is this insanely tactile, but it’s also practical. Being able to look around the table and clearly see the progress on everyone’s houses helps you plan and strategize as to where you need to go and who might need to be knocked down a peg.

Simply put, The Grimm Forest is fantastic and it’s a game I’ve grown to love more and more with each play. This game had a lot of buzz when it was Kickstarted and it has unfortunately died down since then. Don’t let that dissuade you, this game is a treasure.

36. Cyclades

cyclades cover

This section of the top 100 has so far been populated by lighter, more Gateway level games so let’s beef it up a bit with something heavier. My number 36 is Cyclades, a mid weight area control game set in Ancient Greek mythology. It happens to be codesigned by…(checks notes)…ahh, yes, Bruno Cathala. Who could have guessed.

Cyclades is the first of a trilogy of games put out by publisher Matagot. The games in the trilogy-Cyclades, Kemet and Inis-are all loosely related in that they’re all Euro style dudes on a map games set in some sort of ancient mythology. The similarities end there, however, as all the games have different designers and fairly different mechanisms. Will Kemet and Inis appear later on my list? STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT.

Enough about that, let’s dive into Cyclades. As I said, it’s set in the world of Ancient Greek mythology and players are trying to win the favor of the different Greek gods and goddesses as they aim to build two metropolises on the board. Once somebody has two metropolises under their control at the end of the round, they win. Players accomplish this by building fleets of ships, sending soldiers over to conquer islands, and building different types of buildings, such as forts and temples.

These actions are given to you by the gods and goddesses available for that round who are essentially put up for auction. Players bid to try and take control of that god or goddess so that they can use the actions associated with them. Most of them are thematic as well, making it easy to remember who does what. Poseidon builds ships and lets you control your fleet, Ares lets you create soldiers and move them to battle, Zeus demands you buy priests and temples while Athena attracts philosophers and universities.

I won’t go much deeper than that because there’s a lot of minutiae to talk about with what those actions do and the implications they carry. The main thing you need to worry about is that auction. Shrewd bidding is the key to winning this game, not around the map, conquering islands. A clever rule states that if you get outbid for a god, you cannot immediately rebid on that god. You have to find someone else to bid on and the only way you can go back that original is if you get outbid AGAIN on that 2nd god. This means if you really want to activate a certain god this round, you want to try and price it high enough so nobody wants to bother outbidding you. But spend too much and you might have enough gold to do anything impactful on your turn, because everything requires gold in this game. This push and pull of trying to decide what gods and actions are worth spending your precious gold on is one of the delightful dilemmas that this game pressures you with.

Another aspect I love about this game are the creatures, who come out one at a time from a big deck. The creatures are all from Greek mythology, obviously, and, like the gods, feature thematic powers. Medusa freezes soldiers in place while the Sirens attract ships to their doom and the Cyclops builds you a building because apparently he’s a contractor in the Greek myths? Whatever, MOST of them have thematic powers, and it’s always fun to pay for a card and then use it on an unsuspecting opponent.

Cyclades also has a surprising number of effective ways to win. You need two metropolises but how you get there is up to you. Want to focus on military, constantly using Ares to invade other islands and take their hard earned buildings for your own? Go ahead, ya big jerk. Want to go early on Zeus so that you can load up on priests and temples, which provide big discounts on bidding and buy monsters? Sure, you do you. Want to sneak a victory with Athena, recruiting philosophers that give you an automatic metropolis when you obtain four of them? You think therefore you can.

Really, I love Cyclades enough to almost consider it for my top 25 but one thing holds me back: Pegasus. Seasoned veterans of the game probably already know where I’m going with this. Pegasus is one of the cards in the creature deck and his ability is that he’s able to teleport all the soldiers off one of your islands to an opponent’s island, basically paratrooping them into battle. It’s the only way someone can invade an island without winning Ares and in the right context, it is EXTREMELY powerful. A common strategy is to get Zeus at the end of the game when somebody already has two metropolises and is about to win, to then use Zeus’ ability to mill through the creature deck until you find Pegasus so that you can then teleport an army in order to steal one of those metropolises at the buzzer, effectively winning the game for yourself.

You probably think that’s an incredibly specific scenario, but this is how HALF of my games of Cyclades have ended. It’s gotten to the point where I warn players about Pegasus at the start and say, “Here’s what this card does and why it can ruin the ending of the game” and yet it still occurs. I could remove Pegasus from the deck, I guess, but I hate doing that sort of thing. And outside of the end, the threat of having Pegasus attack is integral to the rest of the game. It just sucks that it can be used to anti climactically take the game away from someone, even if it does seem to require specific context.

Outside of Pegasus, this game is awesome. I love dudes on a map games, especially when they’re driven by Euro style mechanisms. Cyclades is exactly that and will probably be in the top 50 of this list for a couple more years.

35. Arkham Horror: The Card Game

arkham horror the card game cover

I’m one of the many people that find the use of the Lovecraft mythos in the hobby as completely overdone BUT I think it’s law that I must include at least one Lovecraft game on my list so this is my choice. Arkham Horror: The Card Game is, in my opinion, easily the best of FFG’s Arkham series and the best Lovecraft game in the industry, period. It is an LCG, or Living Card Game, which means you buy scenario packs and booster packs with preset cards in them over the course of a campaign. This allows you to experience a cohesive story with decisions and consequences that matter from scenario to scenario.

This game has been difficult for me to rank because there are some things I really don’t like about it. Let me get those out of the way. For one, the LCG model is predatory, plain and simple. To even get into the game you need a core set, which includes starter cards and a mini campaign that spans three scenarios. But something that many people don’t realize is that if you really want to get into the deck building aspect of the game, you’ll need to buy a SECOND core set so that you can get extra copies of starter cards. Not having those extra copies to construct your deck with means you’ll be playing with a sub-optimal deck and making an already brutally hard game into a nigh impossible one. If you don’t care about deckbuilding, then fine! You don’t need a second core set. But if you want to explore the rich possibilities that constructing a deck can offer and to truly experience the game for what it’s meant to be, then a second core set is a necessity. So that’s $80 MSRP right there.

After buying two core sets, you’ll soon realize that the three scenarios can be played rather quickly, especially since one of them is ostensibly a tutorial scenario that’s much shorter than the other two. To really experience Arkham Horror: TCG you need to dive into the other campaigns, which are broken up into things called ‘cycles’. To get into a cycle, you need to buy the core set for THAT cycle ($30) and then the booster packs which offer the rest of the campaign’s scenarios (usually 8 of them at $15 each). Did I mention there’s like 4-5 cycles to choose from?

What’s that sound? Oh, nothing. Just the sound of my bank account plummeting to zero like Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to begin a rant on the rampant exploitation of consumerism that FFG exhibits with this game. Let’s go onto my next big negative and that is the set up this game requires. Since this game is scenario based, you have to set up the scenario and that requires sifting through cards and looking for matching symbols and compiling them into decks. Sometimes the scenario even requires very specific cards from past scenarios that’ll have you going, “where the hell did I put that”, and you’ll find yourself digging through your boxes of past sets and scenarios, helplessly trying to find the exact character or item. THEN there’s often more set up, trying to get the locations in the proper order and choosing some cards to set aside while others get shuffled and god, it’s just really tedious. I often have long hiatuses between scenarios because the thought of setting up the next scenario just fills me with dread, and not the kind Lovecraft intended.

By this point I’m sure you’re wondering, “Kyle, how on earth is this game on your top 100, let alone at number 35 if you’re whining this much about it.” I’ll tell you why. Because outside of the predatory business practices this game is a poster child for and outside of the fiddly set up scenarios often require, this is one of the most superbly immersive, atmospheric and cinematic games in the hobby.

The basic gameplay structure of AH: TCG is nothing special. It’s fairly Pandemic-like in its approach, featuring an action point system and a deck of mean cards that try to ruin your day. You could even argue it’s a little mechanical, but the stories and settings this system takes place in more than make up for that. The scenarios all take place in their own unique setting, such as a university campus or a museum or literally the whole town of Arkham. This, along with special objectives that differ from scenario to scenario, provide a feeling of freshness with each new episode you play and they do a great job of immersing you into the story.

That’s not to mention the cool cinematic moments that AH: TCG manages to create using just cards and generic tokens. One scenario has you rushing towards the front of a train as the cars in the back slowly get ripped into a portal, the location cards being discarded as this happens. A night time trek in a museum is made all the more frightening as you find yourself being stalked by an enemy that randomly respawns and happens to be stronger each time it appears. One scenario has you sneaking around a club owned by the mob, with mobsters that only react if they see you doing something odd in a location, turning the experience almost in to a stealth game. AH: TCG has provided me with some of the most truly memorable moments in gaming and I still have so many scenarios to explore.

The art, supplied by a deep roster of artists from within the industry, also does a great job of immersing you in the world. The locations, characters and items are drawn in an incredibly evocative way and help add atmosphere to a game that is already dripping with it. Thrown a soundtrack from any number of survival horror games, and you have an experience that is almost oppressively atmospheric.

So yes, this game is flawed, but most of my problems come from OUTSIDE the actual design of the game. When I’m actually playing the game, I’m fully drawn into the world and story, experiencing something that is truly one of a kind.

34. Ethnos

ethnos cover

Okay, so that last entry was a little packed with lots of wildly rambling thoughts, so I promise it’ll be smoother from here on out. My number 34 doesn’t have near the baggage as Arkham Horror: The Card Game came with, and that’s because it’s an exceptionally clean, fun design. My number 34 is Ethnos, a game that’s popular for not being as popular as it should be.

Designed by Paolo Mori (one of the most underrated designers in the business), Ethnos feels like Ticket to Ride with splashes of Small World in it. It’s a fantasy area control game of collecting sets and playing them on a map and it’s tough to think of a game on my top 100 that moves as smoothly and quickly as this one.

Turns are very simple. Either draw a card (from the deck or a face up display) OR play a set. Playing a set involves you playing a set of either the same color or the same fantasy race and includes a couple of clever wrinkles that help make this game feel so fresh and special.

First up is the leader mechanism. When you play a set, you choose one of the cards to be your ‘leader’, which does two things. One, the location on the card determines where you’re going to put your disc, which is used for area majority purposes. Two, your leader choice determines the special power you get to activate. The cards all represent different fantasy races, all with unique special abilities. Whichever race your leader is, allows you to activate that race’s power.

Another clever aspect of Ethnos’ card play is that the size of the set you must play is determined by the number of discs you have on the location the set is being played to. Your set must contain, at minimum, a number of cards equal to the number of discs on that location. So, if you’re playing a set to add a disc to the blue area and you already have two discs there, your set must contain at LEAST two cards. This is a  design choice because it means the stronger you are in a location, the harder it is to get even stronger allowing a natural way for players to catch up and contest it.

The final twist in Ethnos’ Rummy-esque set collection and card play is that when you play your set, ALL remaining cards in your hand are discarded to a face up display. That’s right, years of Ticket to Ride training you to hoard cards like a doomsday prepper with canned beans means absolutely NOTHING here. Keeping cards for the future is useless, so Ethnos is a superbly tactical game of adapting to card draws and figuring out when it’s time to strike and when it’s time to hold out for just oooone more card.

This is made even more tense by the push your luck mechanism that decides when it’s time to move onto the next round. Randomly strewn throughout the second half of the game deck are dragon cards and when the 3rd dragon card is drawn, the round IMMEDIATELY ends. Nobody gets an extra turn to play one last set. Once the first dragon card is drawn, tension immediately descends upon the table like a pop-up Florida thunderstorm, drenching everyone in angst with each draw of a card from the deck. It’s a small but brilliant touch and makes the somewhat simple decisions of Ethnos feel a bit weightier.

The main criticism levied at Ethnos is its theme and aesthetics. It’s got a generic pasted on fantasy theme and look to it, with somewhat dull art that evokes a bygone era of Tolkienesque dwarves, elves and orcs. I will admit the art is somewhat drab looking and could have used some more color and vibrancy, but I take issue with all the other complaints. The fantasy theme doesn’t bother me because I love fantasy so I may be biased, but I wouldn’t even say it’s pasted on. Sure, some of the races have abstract powers, but plenty of them have thematic powers. The Wingfolk fly to anywhere on the map while powerful Minotaurs count as an extra card when cashing in a set. Playing Giants rewards you with playing bigger sets than other players and Skeletons crumble into dust when it’s time to score sets at the end of each round. Could Ethnos have been themed something else? Sure, the theme doesn’t run THAT deep but to call it lazy and pasted on as so many people have is a disservice to this game.

Luckily, the ostensibly tepid sales and outspoken groaning towards the game’s looks and themes hasn’t been enough to kill off Ethnos outright. It’s still in print and plenty of people in the hobby have spread the Gospel about its stellar quality. If you passed by this one because you were turned off by the look, it’s not too late to try this amazing game.

33. Tybor the Builder

tybor the builder cover

While I haven’t reviewed Tybor the Builder, I have briefly discussed it in a previous blog article. That article is here, and it’s a recap of some gaming I did over the course of St. Paddy’s Day weekend in 2019. In that article, I rave about Tybor and it was easily my favorite game from that weekend. Almost a whole year later from that first play and I still absolutely adore this card drafting game.

Tybor the Builder marks the first appearance by Alexander Pfister, who is my second favorite designer in the hobby. This game is an installment in his Oh My Goods Universe, which is kind of like the MCU but instead of superheroes it’s generic European medieval people. I quite like Oh My Goods, the progenitor of this ‘universe’, but some pacing issues keep it from my top 100. Tybor the Builder, however, finds itself firmly implanted here at number 33, mixing simple but tactical decisions with fast flowing, smooth card drafting.

In Tybor, you’re drafting cards and using them to build out a little tableau. The cards in the game are multi use, meaning when you choose one to draft you can do one of multiple things with them. You can either put them at the top of your player board to station them as villagers, which helps with scoring end game points based on symbols they provide as well as providing discounts for buildings. You can hire them as part of your workforce, which allows you to spend them later on building buildings. Which brings me to the last thing you can do: actually building things. After all, it’s called Tybor the Builder, not Tybor the Union Rep. When this is done, you simply discard the card you drafted as well as the necessary amount of strength from your work force and choose a building from a face up display to put in your village. These buildings provide the bulk of your points, as well as the occasional power to activate.

This multi-use card mechanism gives a lot of versatility not seen in other drafting games. It never feels like a card you draft is wasted since you’re always able to use it for something. This also makes hate drafting feel a lot more impactful. In so many drafting games, hate drafting (which is when you take something that’s less useful for you simply to keep it out of the hands of an opponent) feels like you’re punting away your turn and that you’re better off just trying to bolster your own points rather than subtracting potential points from an opponent. In Tybor, hate drafting is a viable option as there’s usually something you can do with the card as well.

I love games that do a lot with very little and that’s very much the case with Tybor. You essentially have three options on your turn but trying to puzzle out the best course is surprisingly satisfying. The game also moves at a very brisk pace, allowing you to build up a village quickly but ending at just the right time.

I don’t have much more to say about Tybor. If card drafting is something you enjoy, it’s tough to find a game that does it better than this one.

32. Hardback

hardback cover

I briefly mentioned how much I like pool building in a previous post and deckbuilding is probably the most common/popular form of pool building. It just so happens my number 32, Hardback, is one of my favorite deckbuilders.

Hardback is a word-based deckbuilder that is the spiritual successor to Paperback, which is also a word-based deckbuilder. Both are published by Fowers Games and both are great, but I prefer Hardback to Paperback. I’ll touch on why throughout this entry, but first let’s talk about Hardback on its own terms.

Casting players as Dickensian authors in Victorian times, Hardback is all about trying to build words with cards. The cards in Hardback have letters on them and players must make words with said letters as they also attempt to build a deck that allows them to consistently make even more powerful, higher scoring words. Cards also grant rewards such as points and money, with points getting you closer to winning the game and money allowing you to buy cards to add to your ever-fattening library of letters.

At the beginning of your turn, you draw your hand of five cards (because that is apparently a mandatory rule in every deckbuilder) and that is your selection of letters that you’re trying to make a word with. Can’t make a word with those letters? Don’t worry! Hardback has a very clever mechanism where you can play any card facedown as a wild card with the caveat that you won’t be given the rewards that card grants. This is already one thing that I much prefer over Paperback, where wild cards were actual cards that you had to hope to draw if you wanted to use them. This extra versatility means you’re rarely backed into a corner and trying to decide what cards to sacrifice for wilds is a constant, interesting decision in this game.

Another cool,   mechanism in this game is ink. In many deckbuilders, drawing more cards to supplement your hand of five is generally done by playing cards that allow that ability. Not so in Hardback. There is no “Draw ‘x’ amount of cards” action in this game. Instead, you need to buy ink which you can then spend to draw an extra card at a 1:1 rate. The catch is, whatever cards you draw with ink you MUST use in your word. If you’re unable to use the letter(s) you drew in a word, you essentially forfeit your turn. This simple bit of push your luck feels incredibly fresh in this genre and makes yet another thing that I vastly prefer in Hardback over Paperback.

The last great mechanism I’ll discuss is slightly less original, and that’s the idea of building combos in Hardback. In Hardback, each card you buy is part of a genre, such as horror or romance (but really, what’s the difference between those?? *snare roll*). If you combine cards of the same genre within the same word, you often get to activate a bonus ability on those cards, thus encouraging the synergizing of like genres within your deck. Like I said, this is far from original (it’s pretty much lifted straight from another deckbuilder called Star Realms) but the way this combo building is partnered with letters helps make it a little more thoughtful. Sure, you have a couple of cards in the mystery genre in your deck but do you really need another ‘Y’? Building a deck in Hardback isn’t as simple as just blindly buying cards of the same type, because you still need to actually make words with those cards.  You’ll be cursing yourself when you have a hand of cards that looks more like the name of a Lovecraftian Old One than an actual word.

Hardback would likely be higher on my list if I played it more in its competitive multiplayer form. Truth be told, I’ve gotten the vast majority of my plays in its solo mode and when I have played it with others, it’s mostly been with the cooperative variant. And while these modes are surprisingly excellent, I can’t help but feel like I’m not playing the game the way it is truly meant to be experienced.

Therefore, I’m quite interested to see where Hardback is next year. I have a feeling it could sneak into my top 25 if I get to play it against others a few more times.

31. Skull King

skull king

I’ve had a lot of great trick takers across this top 100 and Skull King is one of the best. The funny thing is that this is one of my highest-rated trick takers on the list and it also happens to be the most traditional trick taker. It’s modeled after a traditional trick taker called Oh Hell, though there are some slight twists to make it its own beast.

Skull King is played over ten rounds, with players being dealt a number of cards equal to the round number (so 1 card for round 1, 2 cards for round 2, and so on). Once everyone gets a good look at their hands, wagering begins and this is where the heart of the game lies. You’re trying to bet the number of tricks you think you can win that round, with big points rewarded for nailing it and increasingly steep penalties for those who are farther away from it.

It’s fair to wonder how one can be expected to precisely predict how many tricks they think they can win with just a passing glance at your hand and guess what? You’re right! But that’s what makes Skull King so fun. Wagering in this game is like jostling a backpack and going, “I think there’s a parachute in here?” before jumping out of plane. You never know if you pull the ripcord and will happily float down to safety or if you will end up popping like a water balloon on the ground.

Skull King is controlled chaos in the best possible way. You can make guesses on what’s in your opponents’ hands by taking note of how aggressive their bid is along with what kind of cards they played so far, using those inferences to better time what cards you play. BUT winning tricks in this game can still feel like trying to grab a brass ring on a merry-go-round as it’s going at 80 miles per hour. When you manage to pinpoint it and nab the exact number of tricks you predicted, it’s an absolute rush. When you don’t, all you can do is laugh at the senselessness of it all and take solace that mostly everybody else is in the same boat as you.

I’m probably making this game sound like it’s just a cacophony of randomness and luck but Skull King is far from it. Like all great trick takers, there is a method to the madness which demands subtle strategy and constantly shifting tactics. There’s almost a push your luck feel to the proceedings as you try to determine when to play your best cards, especially if the titular Skull King, who automatically wins a trick, hasn’t been seen yet.

All in all, Skull King is amazing fun. The fact that it has a pirate theme is great, yes, and suuure, there is a rule that involves everyone yelling, “Yo ho ho!” at the same time but even with these things aside, Skull King is a masterclass in trick taking design.

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We’re getting there, people. Just three more posts to go! Next stop: the top 30!

Top Ten Board Game Soundtracks

You know what’s nerdier than playing board games for hours on end, with no sunlight and only pizza and pretentious craft beer for sustenance? Doing that exact thing, but with thematic soundtracks in the background for each board game you play.

I dunno about you, but when I play board games, I like, nay, require, a soundtrack in the background. This soundtrack can’t be any old soundtrack, no. I’m not talking about playing Bruce Springsteen while I bust out a game of Sheriff of Nottingham. Both because that makes no thematic sense and also because I would never subject anyone’s ear drums to Bruce Springsteen unless they were like a war criminal or something (and even then, I’m pretty sure it’s against the Geneva Convention). When I choose a soundtrack, it’s lovingly chosen and well thought out, perfectly matching the theme and feel of whatever game we’re playing. In a previous review of Biblios (on this very site, check it out!), I briefly mentioned that I play Gregorian chant in the background. This is a perfect example of the type of soundtracks I choose. As I play Biblios, the soft hum of monks singing in the background transports me to the Middle Ages, where I can practically hear the sound of footsteps echoing down the monastery’s stone hallway. Suddenly, this game about collecting sets of cards becomes more than that. It becomes a trip to another era and an extremely atmospheric experience that I remember fondly time and time again.

If it sounds like I’m way too passionate about this, it’s because I am. I have gotten so bad with soundtracks and games that my enjoyment is somewhat hindered if I’m unable to play one in the background. One time I went out of town to a friend’s place, and he sheepishly told me upon my arrival that his wi fi was going to be out until the next day. This is bad because YouTube is my main source of soundtracks. Fast forward a couple hours later where we are about to play a game set in Ancient Egypt, and we’re furiously searching throughout his roommate’s extensive movie collection, yelling, “THERE HAS TO BE SOMETHING EGYPTIAN THEMED TO PLAY IN THE BACKGROUND, DOESN’T HE OWN THE MUMMY??”

Soundtracks are serious business, people.

To show why, I’ve compiled a top ten list of my favorite soundtrack and board game combinations. As you’re about to see, these soundtracks range from movie and video game soundtracks, to a couple of random playlists on YouTube that just happen to have generic instrumental music that happens to work well with that board game. Picking only ten was agonizing, and I am absolutely sure I missed or even forgot of a couple combos that I really love, so this list is by no means 100% definitive. But what it does do is give you a good peek into my brain and thought process when picking soundtracks. I’m not sure anyone should get a peek into my brain and thought process at any point, but this should be safe and should definitely not reveal any of the deep seeded psychoses that plague me every day and every hour and the crushing anxiety and the oh dear I’m starting to ramble, onto the list!

10. Board Game: Fuse
Soundtrack: The Metal Gear Solid alert music

Fuse Soundtrack

Fuse is a cooperative dice drafting game where you and your teammates try to defuse a certain amount of bombs in real time. This makes it seem a lot calmer than it actually is, as Fuse is actually ten minutes of you and your teammates yelling, “AHHHHHH, I WANTED THE BLUE DIE, AHHHHHH”. It’s exhausting and intense, and as such needed a soundtrack that was equally as relentless and heart pumping. My choice for this one is the Metal Gear Solid alert music, which is the music that plays in the video game when Solid Snake gets caught by guards in between its forty minute long cutscenes.

It’s perfect because the pace of the music never slows down, much like the game, and also because it is super iconic. While I’m sure a lot of people won’t recognize this music, enough people should so that their pulses will instantly start pumping and they’ll be looking for the nearest cardboard box.

9. Board game: Literally anything Western themed
Soundtrack: Red Dead Redemption OST

Western Themed Board Game Soundtrack

Okay, this is a bit of a cop out. I’m not going to choose a specific board game for this one and am instead going to open an umbrella and just say that anything with a cowboy/western theme deserves the incredible Red Dead Redemption soundtrack as its background music. The ominous violin that starts the OST off, accompanied with the mournful whistling that’s eventually broken by a sharp, craggly guitar riff gives me gooesbumps every time I fire this one up. Whether I’m playing Dice Town, Bang! The Dice Game or Colt Express, this masterpiece of a soundtrack fits it like whiskey in a shot glass, pardner.

Since this entry was kinda cheap, I promise I won’t just pick a general theme and will only focus on specific games from here on out.

8. Board game: Literally anything archaeological themed
Soundtrack: Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune OST

Archaeological Themed Board Game Soundtrack

Right, so, uh, I lied. Just one more time, I’m gonna go for a general theme rather than a specific game. Hey, don’t blame me, blame the fact that archaeology and treasure hunting is represented by more games than numbers that exist. For every one of those games, whether it’s the amazing two player card game Lost Cities or the wonderful deckbuilder The Quest for El Dorado or the imaginatively named Archaeology: The New Expedition, my go to soundtrack is that of the classic PlayStation series, Uncharted. In this example, I use Drake’s Fortune, but Uncharted 2 and 3 work just as well, so dealer’s choice.

7. Board Game: The Grimm Forest
Soundtrack: Trine 2 OST

The Grimm Forest Soundtrack

The Grimm Forest whisks you away to a land of fairy tales living together, where magic and wonder hides around every corner. So what are you doing in this game? Building houses, of course!

Despite the fact that the game has you doing housework like you’re some sort of fairy tale contractor, the art and characters in this game really do help engross you in a world where fairy tales are real, and I needed to find a soundtrack that also captures that magical feeling. Turns out, it wasn’t me who would find that soundtrack. This soundtrack was actually at the suggestion of a friend I was playing The Grimm Forest with, so credit is due to him. That soundtrack is the OST for Trine 2.

What the hell is Trine 2 you ask? Trine 2 is a somewhat obscure video game where you and up to two other players cooperatively navigate a fantasy world, solving puzzles and exploring mystical locales. It isn’t fairy tale themed, but the music the game provides has a whimsy and charm that pairs extremely well with the fairy tale world of The Grimm Forest.

I know some of you are probably asking, “Kyle, why not the Shrek soundtrack?” Well, I can’t find the actual score to Shrek on YouTube and instead it has the official film soundtrack which means you’ll be listening to “All Star” by Smashmouth as you play this game so unless you want that…actually that sounds awesome, feel free to replace any soundtrack on this list with “All Star”.

6. Board Game: Decrypto
Soundtrack: The Imitation Game OST

Decrypto Soundtrack

Decrypto is a cool spin on the word association party game craze that was started by Codenames. Codenames is one of my favorite games of all time and while Decrypto doesn’t quite live up to its lofty standards, it is still a fantastic game that deserves an equally excellent soundtrack. Enter The Imitation Game, the movie where Benedict Cumberbatch beats Hitler up in a fight using the Time Stone and his supernatural powers of deduction.

Wait a sec, please. (checks Wikipedia)

Okay, yeah, I mixed up a couple of Cumberbatches in my head, this is the one where he leads a bunch of codebreakers in World War II to try and crack the Nazi enigma machine. In all seriousness, this is one of my favorite movies and surprisingly fits this word association party game very well. As you and your teammates huddle around a notepad, stressing out over what your opponent’s code is, you’ll hear the haunting strings and tinkling keyboards of this fantastic score.

Fun fact time! I read a designer diary for this game, an apparently the box’s cover art was heavily inspired by The Imitation Game, as it looks quite a bit like the switchboard heavy machine Cumberbatch’s Alan Turing builds in the movie. Just wanted to add that here for a little vindication.

5. Board Game: Bohnanza
Soundtrack: Stardew Valley OST

Bohnanza Soundtrack

Before he was making two hour long worker placement games about EVERY type of farming, Uwe Rosenberg made a little card game that was about farming oh my god, is this guy serious?

Sigh. Okay, farming aside, Bohnanza is a masterpiece of game design. It’s a card game where you and your opponents are rival bean farmers and the only way to victory is to wheel and deal your way to the most efficient payouts possible, trading cards from your hand to manipulate the fact that you can’t change the order of your cards. I could go on and on about this game, so I’ll stop it there and just saw that the Stardew Valley soundtrack and this game are *chef’s kiss gesture*

The banjo that pops in and out of the music helps add to the farming theme, while the general mellow and optimistic tone of the whole package really jives with the lighthearted and cartoony art of Bohnanza‘s cards. Sure, a lot of this game is ruthlessly ripping off poor Grandma of her stink beans so that you can get rid of the one pesky card that is clogging your hand, but it’s still a pretty chill game otherwise, also fitting for Stardew Valley‘s soundtrack. Sorry, Grandma, but you kinda had it coming when you made those vaguely racist comments over dinner.

4. Board Game: Port Royal
Soundtrack: Sea Shanties

Port Royal Soundtrack

This is my first soundtrack selection that isn’t selected from a video game or movie, and is in fact just a YouTube playlist made by some good Samaritan. Port Royal is one of the most underrated games in the hobby, an Alexander Pfister design that mixes push your luck and tableau building in a Klemens Franz illustrated pirate theme. It’s a game I adore and will likely be writing one of my upcoming reviews for it (HOW’S THAT FOR A TEASE, EH?).

For this one, I loooove playing sea shanties in the background, courtesy of the YouTube video I linked. As I said, it’s just a random assortment collected by someone on YouTube, and there’s not much else to say about it. Just some pirates singing while working, and it really gels with the theme.

Now, as much as I love sea shanties, I understand that they’re an, uhh, acquired taste, so if this idea of listening to an off tune band of scallywags singing with no instruments to guide them, I would suggest either the Pirates of the Carribeans OST or the soundtrack for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.

3. Board Game: Viticulture
Soundtrack: Sicilian Mandolin Music

Viticulture Soundtrack

And this is my second selection that is just a generic collection of music rather than an actual soundtrack from something. And oohh, is it a good one. I listened to the first minute or so of this soundtrack after I found it on YouTube for the sake of providing the link in this article and I felt a swell of happiness and nostalgia for games of Viticulture, games that immediately bubbled to the surface of my memory at the first twang of this video’s mandolin.

It helps that Viticulture is one of my top two favorite games of all time and even the game I consider my favorite depending on the day you ask me. What’s the other game? Guess you’ll have to stay tuned to my blog to find out. HOW’S THAT FOR ANOTHER TEASE, EH?

(It’s Scythe, by the way)

Viticulture is a worker placement game set in Italy where you own a vineyard and make wine, trying to be the best at owning a vineyard and making wine. This game is already one of the most immersive board gaming experiences I’ve played. Thanks to the thematic and methodical way in which you make the wine, and the warm, inviting art by the supremely talented Beth Sobel, I actually feel like I’m in the beautiful, sun soaked landscape of Italy. It’s as if I’m there, plucking grapes from vines, crushing them down into juice and preparing them for sale so that your Aunt Sally can get sloshed up at the family Christmas party. When you add to this formula the wonderful Sicilian and Mediterranean music found in the video above (and maybe even a glass of wine yourself), and you will have a gaming experience you will never forget. Well, maybe you will forget it if you have enough of that wine, you naughty lush you!

2. Board Game: Skull
Soundtrack: Guacamelee! OST

Skull Soundtrack

Back to official soundtracks, the silver medal goes to the oh so awesome combination of Skull and the soundtrack for Guacamelee!. Skull is a masterpiece, a brilliant bluffing game that will have you and your friends hooting and hollering and cheering and groaning like no other. Guacamelee! is a sidescroller beat ’em up, and is something in the video game world known as a Metroidvania. I won’t go into it here, but suffice to say that Guacamelee! is an incredibly fun game that is set in Mexican mythology and draws off the folklore of that region. The soundtrack takes mariachi and salsa music and combines it with electronica in a way that easily makes it one of my top three video game soundtracks of all time. Tying it back to Skull, Skull‘s heavily draws off of the sugar skull motifs that have come from Mexico, and was one of the reasons why I was drawn to Guacamelee! as its backing music.

From the first bombastic blare of the mariachi horns in this soundtrack, you’ll be tossing aside that wine from Viticulture and replacing it with some tequila as you buckle up for an incredible party game experience. Skull has no theme, so this soundtrack is purely for the aesthetics of the game but I’ll be damned if it isn’t a near perfect match.

1. Board Game: The Grizzled
Soundtrack: Valiant Hearts: The Great War OST

The Grizzled Soundtrack

I mentioned earlier that I when I play games without soundtracks or some sort of background music, that it actually can hamper the experience for me. That being said, I will never turn down a game because there is no soundtrack present and I obviously still have lots of fun playing board games, even if there is no ambient music available.
There is juuuust one exception. And that is my number one choice for board game and soundtrack combination: The Grizzled and Valiant Hearts.

The Grizzled is a cooperative game set in World War I and it is my favorite cooperative game that I’ve ever played. One of my favorite things about it is its art. The hand scrawled art style, created by the tragically late Tignous, looks like it was taken straight from a sketchbook, perhaps even one used by someone in the very trenches of the first World War. This art is fairly similar to the hand drawn art of Valiant Hearts, which is an indie video game also set in World War I.

Neither of these games are exactly what you’d call uplifting or lighthearted. After all, The Grizzled is game where you can go home as a selfish, demoralized mute with a life long, crippling fear of whistles and can still technically win. Not exactly a party game. They both deal in very heavy themes of war in one of history’s worst. This strong thematic link already makes the two a perfect pairing and it is even more apparent when you actually listen to the soundtrack as you play.

The somber piano that permeates Valiant Hearts‘ soundtrack tugs at your heartstrings as your play cards in The Grizzled. Melancholy strings buzz in the background as you and your teammates struggle to deal with the obstacles being thrown in your way. The music takes an already amazing cooperative game and helps it transcend the bits of cardboard that make it up. I probably sound like I’m exaggerating, and maybe I’m just weird, but this board game and soundtrack combo is such an important part of my gaming memories. And no, I’m not crying, YOU’RE CRYING. Okay, maybe I’m sobbing a little but it’s just so damn beautiful.

Do yourself a favor and play The Grizzled and then do it with this soundtrack. I hope it’s as moving for you as it is for me.