1. Power Grid
Still sitting pretty at #1. Some people find the theme of Power Grid (building a power network) boring. I think it's cool and certainly more interesting than most euro-style games that involve trading various goods in the Renaissance. Plus the art that goes with it reminds me of Mr. Burns' power plant in the Simpsons. Beyond theme and aesthetics, though, I love the varied gameplay in PG. It has auctions, an economic engine, resource management, network-building, and an all-important turn order mechanism. I've never seen a game make so many players stand simply out of tension. I've been hooked since coming in 2nd place in a 6-player game at Origins 2008 by just four dollars. I still don't win very often, but will never turn down an opportunity to play Power Grid, and know that I'll have a blast doing it.
2. El Grande
The grandfather of Euro-style area control games is still the best, 20 years after its release and winning the Spiel des Jahres in Germany. Its gameplay is the epitome of elegant design, and yet El Grande can make me even more tense than Power Grid, waiting to see what other people are going to do and just hoping I can make the right play to control those key Spanish provinces and score big points. And just how many cubes are in the Castillo???
3. 1960: Making of the President
This battle between JFK and Nixon remains my favorite exclusively 2-player game. Every contest is a complete reenactment of the 1960 election from start to finish, with players using cards to seize control of various states and win their electoral votes in November. Election Day is simply a great climax, and counting up all the electoral votes to determine the winner is one of my favorite moments in gaming. The cards and map also provide an unparalleled history and civics lesson in American politics.
4. Suburbia
The strongest debut to my updated list, I just can't enough of this tile-laying "SimCity on a board." Making your various residential, commercial, industrial, and civic tiles work together to produce awesome boosts to your income and reputation is truly rewarding, but controlling the limiting effects of your suburb losing its small-town appeal makes for a tense balancing act as well. I recently added the expansion, Suburbia, Inc. to my collection, which introduces more tiles, bonuses, and long borders that can have truly dramatic effects - will you really take the hit to your population in exchange for the easy income boost the Toxic Waste Site offers? Suburbia is the place for any armchair urban planner to live out their wildest designs.
5. Twilight Struggle
TS is similar to 1960 but instead recreates the epic Cold War conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Unlike most gamers, I slightly prefer 1960 because Twilight Struggle can have a wildly uneven play length - maybe you only get to see half of the game, and if you do see it all, it might take 4 hours or so (with slower players). Still, the epic scale and historical detail of this 2-player reenactment of the Cold War are unmatched.
6. Tikal
From Wolfgang Kramer, designer of El Grande and master of tension, Tikal presents players with a bunch of agonizing decisions on every turn, as they use action points to explore the Mayan jungle to uncover temples and treasures. Of course, you can never do as much as you'd like on your turn. It's a great mix of area control, set collection, and wise allocation of scarce actions.
7. Acquire
This ancestor of modern boardgaming endures. Sid Sackson's 1962 classic is still hard to beat for accessible and surprisingly fun stock market games. No victory points needed here - just "acquire" the most cash through strategic tile placement, wise stock purchasing, mergers, and buy-outs to be the king of Hotel Row. It's very popular every time I've brought it to the table.
8. Chinatown
Another strong debut, Chinatown is the best pure negotiation game I've ever played. Trade lots, shop tiles, and cold hard cash with other players to try to build contiguous blocks of businesses - the larger your businesses, the bigger cash bonus you get every round. The haggling mixes true cost-benefit analysis with simple game theory and "I'm gonna jack up the price just to screw him" vendettas. Raucous and always memorable.
9. Manhattan Project
Manhattan Projects wins the award for my favorite worker placement game, a mechanic that basically involves placing dudes on a board to get stuff which you use in some way to earn points. The unique theme in MP has you collecting yellow cake, uranium, plutonium, and the like to build atomic bombs. The simple gameplay keeps the game flowing quickly, which I appreciate, and the various buildings allow you to put together useful combinations as you formulate your strategy of focusing on plutonium or uranium bombs, or a bit of both.
10. Lords of Vegas
Lords of Vegas is a bit like Chinatown, in that it involves building lots and trading, but it's less pure negotiation, as players try to build big casinos on the Vegas Strip and become their boss by rolling higher dice than their opponents. It's the best translation of the Vegas theme to a board game I've played - there's lots of gambling involved, but you always know the odds and can maneuver your position to tilt things in your favor. I've seen games of this come down to a single dice roll for control of a casino, and while more "strategic" gamers might be turned off by that, it really adds to the excitement and flavor of this excellent game.
11. Flash Point: Fire Rescue
Flash Point has unseated Pandemic as my favorite cooperative game. Moving around a burning building trying to rescue victims from Grandma to the pet cat is really appealing, and the multiple firefighting roles and multiple options for gameplay give this one a lot of variety and replayability. Plus the dice-rolling involved in spreading the fire - and firing the powerful deck gun - is just more fun than pulling cards in Pandemic. This is a toughie, as the house is never far from collapsing on you, but that makes pulling off the successful rescue that much sweeter.
12. Kingsburg
Kingsburg is another worker placement game, but has a unique spin in that your "workers" are dice that you roll and then place on various numbered advisers in order to get materials used to build buildings and recruit soldiers to defend the homeland. The sheer number of buildings allows for many different paths to victory - you can't build them all - and the yearly defense against the oncoming hordes is a tense, fun moment. It's also quite accessible and popular with those I've introduced it to.
13. Jet Set
Take the route-connecting of Ticket to Ride and make it so players can build anywhere, but actually have to pay to make routes (instead of collecting sets of same-colored cards that magically turn into routes) and you've got the basics of Jet Set. It's a tense route-building game with a nice little economic engine to boot, where money is always tight so efficiency is rewarded.
14. Rails of Europe
My favorite iteration of the heavier train games, Rails of Europe fixes the issues of the original Railroad Tycoon and offers a deep game of buying stock, delivering goods, and building a railroad network in Europe without the scariness or ruthlessness of its mean cousin, Age of Steam.
15. Vegas Showdown
VS is a great auction and tile placement game in which players bid on different rooms to add in building their ultimate hotel-casino. It's really fun to expand your casino and grow your income by adding such features as the Five Star Steakhouse or High Rollers' Room. The tight auctions ensure that no player is ever out of the game.
16. Ticket to Ride: Marklin
The best Ticket to Ride, in my humble opinion. Two factors that make it so are the even mix of long and short routes as well as your ability to choose how many of each you draw, and the placement and movement of passengers. These elements elevate Marklin above the other TtRs to the next level of strategy and tension. Toss in the game board of Germany and train cards featuring actual cars and locomotives and I'm sold.
17. Airlines: Europe
AE is Alan Moon's third design of essentially the same game. It takes some of the card selection and route-building mechanics of Ticket To Ride (also by Moon) and adds in a stock market very reminiscent of Acquire. This makes for an engaging economic game that's perfect to introduce to new gamers who have played either of its influences and are looking for the next step. What's the difference between this and Jet Set? In Jet Set the airlines are privately owned (you are solely responsible for your fate), in Airlines they are public - as in Acquire's hotels, every player can grow any airline they wish, and hope to capitalize on their investments without helping others too much.
18. Prophecy
I don't care for many fantasy adventure games. In my experience they're too long and convoluted, and downtime between your turns can be excruciating. Prophecy is by no means short (2-3 hours) but it's manageable and the rules are simple enough that you won't spend half the time figuring out modifiers to your dice rolls. You really feel like you're building a character RPG-style as you wander around the board slaying monsters, finding loot, and increasing your strength and magic.
19. Small World
Small World is a euro-style wargame in which players take control of a certain race and use it to take over as much of the land as possible before it's worn out. The clever "In Decline" mechanic then lets you pick a new race while tokens from your old race still earn you points as long as they're on the board. Small World gets top marks for replayability, as each race has a special power, and races are attached to further special abilities that appear in different combinations in every game (Dragon Rider Halflings FTW). Combine that with different maps for different numbers of players - so it scales very well - and it's a sure winner.
20. Pandemic
Pandemic has taken the hardest hit on this updated list, as it's fallen out of favor compared to Flash Point in terms of cooperative games. However, saving the world from nasty diseases remains fun and the many different roles demand different strategies every time. To its credit, I've never taught this to someone that didn't enjoy it and, if we lost, didn't want to play it again.
21. Torres
Sharing a design heritage with El Grande and Tikal, Torres is a fairly thinky abstract strategy game in which each player has action points on their turn that they use to place plastic castle pieces on the board and maneuver their knights onto them to score points and block other players. I'm not that great at it, but it's the kind of game I want to play more and more until I get good at it, and that's a high compliment.
22. On the Underground
Tired of Ticket to Ride? Give this a try. The board is actually modeled after the London subway system. You build tracks wherever you like (again, no train cards here) to connect points on the map and try to get the world's laziest passenger to ride your lines. This makes for a more analytical experience than TtR but it's still quite accessible and a nice change of pace in the route-building genre.
23. Colosseum
Colosseum has a great theme - you are the impresario in a Roman colosseum, trying to put on the best show possible to impress the plebs and nobles - maybe even the emperor himself. To do this you'll engage in auctions, trading, dice rolling, and clever resource management. A bit of a kitchen sink game, but it has some nice variety while maintaining accessibility. Bonus points for awesome names of the shows you put on - Venus' Equestrian Cavalcade, The Dialogues of Pluto, etc.
24. Catan Histories: Settlers of America: Trails to Rails
Trails to Rails breathed new life into Catan for me, the first designer board game I ever played but one that had grown stale and annoying due to its heavy luck factor. Trails mitigates the luck a bit by allowing players who don't collect resources to collect gold that they can trade for such (not to mention increasing the number of resource spaces altogether), and introduces train game mechanics to make the goal to be the first to deliver goods to new cities rather than racing to ten points. I really took to this new direction and added level of strategy. It's not a short game, but I find it much more fulfilling than vanilla Settlers of Catan.
25. Giants
Another "pick up and deliver" game that is essentially a train game in hiding due to the rather unique theme of building Moai statues on Easter Island and moving them across the isle to their rightful place. Also includes some worker placement and uneasy/unwilling cooperation with other players in a race to secure the best statue locations. The highlight is definitely the components, such as the little Moai statues - the game is almost overproduced in that way.
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