It's been almost seven years since I updated my favorite board game list so I figured it was time. It's great to live in a golden age of board gaming, though I don't follow the "new hotness" too much, and while there are several new additions to the list, some of my all-time classics just can't be topped. For a list of my top 15 "small box" games, which is still pretty accurate, go here.
1. Power Grid
Fifteen years after I first played it and 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. I couldn’t bring myself to play this game for a long time after the 2016 election, when it became abundantly clear that while the electoral college design makes for a fun board game, it really sucks for electing a president. I think I can get back to it now though. Also, I took it off this list as an official entry, but I need to mention Twilight Struggle, the more expansive version of this system that reenacts the entire Cold War. Of course, given recent events that one may be rough to play for a while as well…
4. Suburbia
Simply put, this is 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 The expansion, Suburbia Inc., 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. 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.
6. Roll Player
The strongest debut in 2022, the focus on Roll
Player is creating the best possible Dungeons and Dragons-like character by drafting
dice and fitting them the best way possible into your different attribute slots
depending on your class goals. You also
have alignment, skills, and equipment to worry about. Character creation is sometimes my favorite
part of video game RPGs, and bringing it into board game form works incredibly
well.
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
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.
A little on the heavy side but this is probably my favorite worker placement game. You operate a winery in a way that integrates theme pretty well for a Euro-style game – plant grapes, harvest grapes, turn them into wine and fill orders. Construct buildings to make your winery more efficient and even give tours. Plus, this is one of the few board games I like to play solo, as the “Automa” included makes it a simple process with a clear win/lose goal, not just “see how high of a score you can get” which makes solo variants pointless to me.
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. Concordia
Concordia is a big winner in the “complex game hidden behind a simple turn structure” department. All you do on your turn is play a card from your hand and carry out its action, with the goal being of expanding your network of cities and goods production across ancient Rome. It flows very well, making for generally quick player turns, and is up there in the “elegant” design category with El Grande. Also I really enjoy the quasi-deck building aspect in which you have some control over how you build your hand of available cards through the game.
12. Pan Am
Pan Am is a great “kitchen sink” game, in that
it combines worker placement, auctions, and a bit of engine building for a fun.
Thematic experience as players compete for air routes against each other and
the steadily encroaching Pan Am. Lots of
great tradeoff decisions need to be made, such as balancing your cash into the
next round vs buying shares of Pan Am, which are victory points, or when you
need to keep a route vs sell out to Pan Am for the cash infusion. I’m also a sucker for the retro, very clean
graphic design. Pan Am is the perfect “next
step” game for players who have been introduced to the various concepts it
contains and are ready to combine them into one great game.
13. Manhattan Project
Manhattan Project is a worker placement game with a unique theme that 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.
14. 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. To be honest, a couple years ago Kingsburg might have fallen off my list, feeling that it was “played out,” but then I got the new version that includes several expansions that introduce a bunch more variety into the game (like more building rows) and redoes how soldiers work, making that process less random and more strategic. Integration of the expansions make Kingsburg a long-standing worker placement classic.
15. 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.
16. Vegas Showdown
Vegas Showdown 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.
17. Flash Point: Fire Rescue
I’m not too big on cooperative games, and it shows as Flash Point is now the only one on my top 25. Guess I just like competition too much (also, Pandemic got a little too real in the past couple years). Moving around a burning building trying to rescue victims from Grandma to the pet cat is really appealing, and the multiple firefighting roles and 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.
18. 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.
19. Catan Histories: Settlers of America: Trails to Rails
This game achieved the rare feat of moving up in the list since last time, after a mental reevaluation. 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.
20. Airlines: Europe
Airlines: Europe 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 (a game I enjoy but has fallen off my top 25)? 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.
21. Le Havre
As I become more experienced with Le Havre I think it has potential to move further up the list in my next reckoning (5 years from now? Who knows). Le Havre is another “simple turn, complex game” entry, as all you usually do on your turn is either get resources or use a building card. However you have to do a lot of planning, as the general goal is to get more buildings (worth VP) and you have to figure out how you’re going to efficiently get the resources you need for them which often involves using other buildings, in addition to feeding your people every round. There’s a lot going on, but it’s undoubtedly a great design, and I look forward to getting more plays.
22. 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.
23. 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.
24. Dice City
Dice City is perhaps the ultimate tactical game, as you roll dice, put them on assigned building spaces, and then figure out what you can do with them to get resources, new buildings, or points. Of course, you can try to mold your city with new buildings in a certain direction depending on your long-term strategy, but it always boils down to staring at your dice results and thinking “ok, now what.” It’s a bit of a puzzle to get things to work out the best way, and the definite highlight of the game.
25. Downforce
A
great redesign of a Wolfgang Kramer classic, Downforce is a simple racing game
with auction and betting elements that is always a hit when I introduce it to
new players. The trick comes in that on
your turn you’re generally moving several cars, not just your own, so you’re
trying to manuuever your car(s) to finish well, getting other cars blocked, but
also having some concerns for the cars you bet on, which may not be your
own. The different tracks add a little
variety without complexity, and the fact that it can easily play up to 6 makes
it a frequent addition to game night.
