My Top 25 Board Games of All Time, 2015 Update

It's been a few years since I first created this list, so with several new additions and reorderings I figured it was a good time to post an update.  I'm nowhere near as enamored to the "new hotness" as many board gamers, so my favorites tend to have staying power, and it takes a truly great game to wrestle its way onto this list.  Rules for appearing here - I have to own the game and played it at least twice, and card games were excluded.

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.

A Tribute to Parks and Recreation

(Warning: Some spoilers ahead.)

I don't watch much TV nowadays; what free time I have is mainly divided among spending time with my girlfriend, board games, and video games.  Fortunately the advent of online streaming (and downloading episodes to my Kindle to watch offline on my commute) has eased my ability to watch what does pique my interest, but for a TV show to make it onto my priority list, it has to be something special.

I do give shows "test runs," and so it was initially with Parks and Recreation on Netflix.  It seemed like an ideal sitcom for me, about the mundanities of work in a government office.  But the short first season presented itself as a clunky Office ripoff, with main character Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) a poor woman's Michael Scott, only slightly more competent and annoying.  So I dropped it, and didn't give it another try until I read online somewhere that one should simply skip the first season and start with the second.  I tried that, and was immediately hooked, and binge-watched through Season 6 in a couple months to finish in time for the current airing of the final Season 7.

Parks and Recreation (or Parks and Rec, or just PnR) has had a somewhat similar history to the only other sitcom I've really cared about this century - Community; both on NBC, humor geared towards a slightly nerdy audience but capable of reaching more, never hugely popular but with devoted, loyal fanbases, and always under threat of cancellation.  While Community's fate has been more tumultuous, with its likely last season soon to air on Yahoo of all places, PnR gets to go out on a high note, with an hour-long finale on NBC, while the show is still going strong and yet approaching its conclusion with a finality that all great works deserve.  It's bittersweet, but I will always savor the memories and laughs the show evoked - and hope that history remembers Parks and Rec as one of the all-time great TV comedies.

PnR tells the story of the Parks and Recreation Department of fictional Pawnee, Indiana, and its incomparably enthusiastic Deputy Director, Leslie Knope.  The department is staffed with an ensemble of memorable characters brought to life by supremely talented comedic actors, from loveable goofball Andy Dwyer (Chris Pratt, in the role that put him on the road to megastardom) to wannabe baller Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari, who I'm pretty sure is just playing himself).  (More on the cast shortly.)  Over the course of seven seasons these characters grow and engage in all sorts of crazy adventures in their beloved hometown, though the plot remains just-barely grounded in reality, never quite approaching the sheer wackiness of Community.  Through it all, the core focus remains on Leslie, who grew on me through the show's run, as she portrays the impeccable civil servant who will not be discouraged in her quest to help people.  Her evolution is believable and well-earned, and the show is ending with her having accomplished a tremendous amount but with the road still wide open before her.  In my book, Leslie cemented her status as a modern feminist badass in the last season by staring down a bunch of "men's rights" activists (currently a plague on the video game community) and telling them "you're ridiculous, and men's rights is nothing."  That the show was willing to tackle the issue head-on, but in a superbly funny way, is a true testament to its greatness.

Giggle.

"I would rather bleed out than sit here and talk about my feelings for ten minutes."  - Ron Swanson

While the entire cast is fantastic, I don't want to go too long running through all of them, and so two members deserve special mention as my favorites.  The first is, of course, Ron Swanson, portrayed by Nick Offerman who also quite obviously brings a tremendous amount of his real-life personality to the role (watch his Netflix comedy special, American Ham, for proof).  Ron is the director of the Parks department and Leslie's boss, who as a staunch libertarian is on a permanent mission to prevent government from accomplishing anything - the perfect foil to Leslie's much more progressive ideas about the role of government.  And yet, despite their differences Leslie and Ron form a close bond as "workplace proximity associates" (Ron's words) out of mutual respect and admiration for each other's principles - this clearly becomes the core relationship of the show (sorry, Ben).  Probably my favorite episode from this last season was a bottle episode in which Leslie and Ron are locked inside their old office overnight and finally, painstakingly, work out all their differences.  Ron is a private man with old-fashioned desires and interests, but respects the passions and diversity of others as well (he just won't pretend to understand your diversity).  Over the course of the show he may soften and adapt his core principles just a bit, but he never abandons them, and I respect that.  In real life I think Ron would be my ideal political adversary - we may disagree thoroughly on most political issues, but at the end of the day we could forget over differences over a few beers (or scotch) at the tavern and go out for a late-night steak and/or huge pile of breakfast food.  Ron the Libertarian Bureaucrat, I salute you.  (Shout-out to the occasional cameos by the legendary Sam Elliot as Ron's tree-hugging, New Age opposite; the interaction between the two is just the best.)

Ben and his Cones

"I hope that high school auditorium is big enough because I’m bringing 10,000 Maniacs." - Ben Wyatt

The second character to highlight is basically myself.  Towards the end of the second season, Chris Trager (Rob Lowe, and literally the only person on earth more enthusiastic than Leslie Knope) and Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) are brought from the state budget office in Indianapolis to fix Pawnee's financial woes.  In the transition to regular cast members, Chris becomes Pawnee's city manager and Ben is slowly revealed to be a nerd of fairly epic proportions.  As this occurred I was struck by the similarities between Ben and myself, to the point where I felt like the show's writers were following me around.  We're both budget analysts by trade, a bit socially awkward, and avid board gamers, with Ben's "Cones of Dunshire" design a hilarious parody of overly complicated board games.  He's a bit more of an accountant and Game of Thrones fan than I am (I'd pass at having an actual Iron Throne in my house), but Ben and I are kindred spirits who revel in our nerdiness but try not to let it dominate our lives and thus turn us into hopelessly awkward loners.  For his part, Adam Scott does a great job of portraying Ben as a part-time straight man who can also get in some pretty great jokes of his own.

But there's one more character that clearly stands out in PnR - the town of Pawnee itself.  I think it's the best realized sitcom setting since Springfield in the Simpsons' glory years.  Like Springfield, it's chock full of memorable locations and side characters that make this fictional place seem very real and give the main characters ample opportunities for interaction with the town they love so much.  Also like the Simpsons' hometown, its fictionality gives it the advantage of being portrayed as a "small town" and yet seemingly having everything it might need to move the plot forward, without seeming too contrived.  It is quintessentially Midwestern, and a place I would feel right at home in.

Above all, Parks and Rec has been a sitcom capable of hearty laughs and genuine spirit and optimism during this "Golden Age of Television" when so much of the most-lauded programs have been quite dark.  Don't get me wrong, darkness has its place and I loved Breaking Bad - but Pawnee was a place to visit that was guaranteed to put you in a good mood, but with nothing overly cheesy or contrived out of poor writing.  It succeeded on its sharp, intelligent wit, the talent of its ensemble cast, and the slow evolution of the storyline that kept viewers wanting to know what would happen next, rather than each episode being a one-off adventure of Leslie and the gang.

Like all good things, though, Parks and Recreation must end, and I'm really glad it's going out on top, rather than being dragged on for long past its prime.  The finale of the sixth season was truly epic, with Leslie finally accomplishing her goal of opening the park she had dreamed about since the very first episode and landing a great job with the U.S. Parks Service.  It could have served as the series finale itself, but this final farewell season has been really special, moving the timeline forward three years to show how the characters and Pawnee itself have evolved.  This was a very smart move on the writers' part, as it provided new opportunities for storylines rather than going back to the same wells of the previous seasons.  Knowing they're crafting the final episodes has enabled the producers to give appropriate sendoffs to characters we've grown to love or lovingly hate, from the final episode of Andy's "Johnny Karate" cable access show to the torrid affair between nefarious Councilman Jamm and Ron's horrid ex-wife Tammy.  It's been truly special to watch, and I expect no less from the hour-long finale tonight.

If you have Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu Plus and have never given Parks and Recreation a try, I highly recommend it.  You can either power through the short first season or skip it entirely.  I am not one who is easily entertained by movie or TV comedies, but I think Parks and Rec has given me more laugh-out-loud moments than anything I've watched in a long time.  Each is well-earned and placed within a show that just exudes heart and makes you root for the characters no matter what they're going through.  It's guaranteed to leave you in a good place, and that's the strongest endorsement I can give it.