My top 10 favorite board games
February 20, 2023
I recently listened to Board Game Barrage’s top 50 games of all time podcast, and it made me want to define my own top board game list of my favorites. But 50 is too many, so I’ll stick with 10 and some honorable mentions.
1. Charterstone
2017, 2-6 players, BoardGameGeek overall ranking #438
- I love legacy games and how this game introduced more elements in each of the 12 sessions
- I mostly like euro style games, defined by Wikipedia as having indirect player interaction and abstract physical components, and less luck, conflict, and drama as American games. So I really enjoyed the victory point optimization here too
- I played through with 6 people, and agree with BGG it’s likely best, if you can put together a group that can commit to it.
2. The Crew
- I played a lot of Spades growing up, so I’m a bit biased towards trick-taking games with trump suits. In Spades, I really liked collaborating with a partner, so Crew being a fully collaborative trick-taking game, I think is a lot of fun.
- Like BGG says, this feels best with 4 players. I’ve played a lot with 2 players (and a robot simulated player), and that’s still fun.
3. Pandemic Legacy
- I’ve played seasons 1&2 of Pandemic Legacy, and both times we’ve sprinted through the whole game in less than a week because it was exciting to see what’s going to get revealed.
- Says it’s best with 4 people, but I’ve only played with 2, and it’s still ranked high for me.
4. Power Grid
- For a while, Power Grid was my favorite game to play. Probably because I love auctions and the race to reach the victory point threshold.
- I’ve mainly played with 4-6 people, and I like being able to have as much of the map open as possible, so I imagine I wouldn’t be as excited about 2-3 players.
5. Isle of Sky
- I’m really surprised this game isn’t more popular because it’s a fun victory-point-soup game that is still easy to explain and onboard friends who aren’t big strategy gamers fairly quickly.
- Another auction game, and this one I think has the fun tradeoff between how much I want your tile vs. how much I don’t want to give you too much money.
6. Trajan
- I went through a phase of playing a lot of Trajan because I really enjoyed the combination of ways to get victory points.
- The mancala mechanism of choosing your action is unique and adds a really fun twist.
7. Biblios
- Biblios is my go-to competitive game for my non-board-gamer friends. It can be pretty quick to explain: 5-10min
- There’s more luck in this game than I would generally like, but that’s fine so the beginners have more of a chance of winning.
- Auction is the main mechanism here, so I like that. I also enjoy the optimization to try to win the very limited victory points.
8. Escape: The Curse of the temple
- I have vague but good memories of playing Escape. It’s a real-time, dice-rolling, collaborative game. The stress of trying to roll the right combination of dice faces to accomplish the tasks in time is fun.
9. Wingspan
- The main reason I like Wingspan is because it’s evidently really popular among my board gaming friends, so a bunch of them own it and want to play it, so I’ve gotten quite a few reps in recently.
- And, as usual, I like victory-point-soup games.
10. Evolution: Climate
- I really enjoyed building up new species in Evolution, but I’d get a bit upset when they’d die or get eaten by someone else’s carnivore.
- I never played the base game of Evolution, but I’d likely enjoy that even more, since I tend to like simplicity rather than expansions.
Runners up
Here are some other games that I considered for my top 10 but didn’t quite make it.
- Codenames
- Azul
- Terraforming Mars
- Caverna / Agricola
- Alchemists
- 7 wonders
- Splendor
- Roam
- Orleans
- Galaxy Trucker
- Acquire
- Castles of Burgundy
- Puerto Rico
- Wavelength
- Dominion
Charterstone, The End.