My Top 10 Favourite Games

I watch a lot of board gaming related top ten lists, even for genres that usually don’t interest me much, I still check them out. There’s just something really psychologically satisfying about seeing games ordered in lists like that, and also, who knows I might discover something that could change my mind about certain genres or mechanisms. My own early board gaming ‘education’ happened primarily though three channels, one being my local gaming group, two being the show Table Top, and the third being top ten lists. Of course, sometimes it did lead to a few missteps in terms of game purchases, but mostly it was a helpful source for information.

I haven’t made many attempts to make my own lists, and I wasn’t really sure if I was at a point where I could make a proper list that I could stand for. Even though you are practically a seasoned gamer by the time you’re a year or two into the hobby, your taste hasn’t yet stood the test of time. I’ve now been actively gaming for nearly four years, but I’m still discovering games all the time, so there’s no guarantee the list will stay the same five or ten years from now, in fact I can almost guarantee it won’t.

Still, I think I know myself and my gaming preferences well enough now that I can at least make that first initial list. How it changes in the year to come, if at all, depends on what this year has to offer. Either way, I’m excited to find out.

A lot of people like to reveal their pick from the bottom and up, but having the list in reverse just doesn’t make sense in blog form, like it does in videos, so instead I will in fact reveal my number one first, and move down. I do think in the long run this might become more interesting, as the top picks for a person will rarely change that much. It’s generally the runner-ups, really that changes the most.

My Current Top Ten Games (as of February, 2017)

1.) Terra Mystica

Currently the fourth highest ranked game on Boardgame Geek, in this game you have a world that is divided into a lot of hexagonal areas with different terrain types. Each player is a fantasy race that can only build and expand onto one specific terrain, so in order to build up your own area, you need to transform other terrains into your own, and then stake your claim by building on them before your opponents can transform them back. When building, you may only build dwellings, but you may later upgrade them to trading houses, sanctuaries, stronghold and temple, when you upgrade a building you must return the previous building back to your player board, as the open spaces left when you build or upgrade will show an income for the coming round. Each type of building has a specific type of income, and some unlock special powers for your race. You also wield political power in the land, which can be used to take certain bonus actions or be traded in for certain resources. There is also a cult track, which you may influence both to earn further power, and to score majorities on at the end of the game.

I know my description of the game play really doesn’t do it justice, because the excitement lies in the delicious strategy it comes with. The income system is one thing. Every building you put out unlocks a specific type of income; dwellings give workers, trading houses give money and political power, sanctuaries and temples give you priests, and a favour token upon building them, and the stronghold unlocks a new faction-specific ability. The whole game is centred on cost and effect. It might be tempting to go all in to unlock your special stronghold ability early on, but you will then not necessarily have many resources to use in coming rounds, alternatively you might want to build up some resource generating before unlocking the stronghold ability, but you will then not get to take as much advantage of it as you would early on in the game. You might want to focus on earning points by using the round’s rewarded action, but then you might be giving up other things you want to get done in order to either secure crucial spots on the board or to get a resource income you desperately need. This game engages me every single time I play it, it’s like a great puzzle to solve every single time and I love it.

2.) Scythe

When I initially checked out the Kickstarter page for this game, I was not enamoured with it. It looked like just another combat game, so I didn’t really look that much closer. I still heard the buzz about it, so when someone in my group brought their copy to game night, I decided I needed to at least have played it once, just to see what the buzz was all about, and I ended up falling heads over heels. This is a game that proves looks can really be deceiving. It may have mechs among your player pieces, but this is mainly a combination of resource management and race to finish, with some minor combat elements thrown into the mix. You actually don’t want to engage more than maybe 2-3 battles in any single games, because doing more isn’t likely to earn you anything.

This game, while different from Terra Mystica in many ways, has certain similar aspects, certain things I appreciate that are in both games. The board management is one thing; it’s not really comparably similar, as in Scythe you are upgrading your actions and not managing your income. There’s this neat upgrade action that allows you to improve one of your top actions, while at the same time reducing cost to one of your bottom actions. And the boards themselves come with dents where these upgrades can be done, so they perfectly hold all of your pieces where they need to be. Seriously, more games should do this! It’s wonderful.

If I was to say anything negative about this game, it’s the way it abruptly ends the moment a player places their last star on a goal. It does make for a tense end-game where you are never sure if you’re going to accomplish what you plan to accomplish, but it can be devastating to be one turn away from placing your last star when an opponent places theirs. However, even with this negative, the game has quickly become my second favourite game out of them all. I’m always up for playing it.

3.) The Voyages of Marco Polo

When I first played this game, I was not aware that the set-up was merely an introduction scenario, so I left the table having enjoyed the game, but not necessarily gung ho to get it back to the table. In the introduction scenario you decide a player order and then give players a specific character based on their position around the table. Each character in the game has an almost game breaking special ability, and while I did think the one I had been given was great (I didn’t have to roll my dice, instead I decided exactly what die number to place on each action I took), the whole first game I had been envious about another player’s ability to get free goods every single time another player went to the market (that player often being me).

It was later on when I researched the game some more and got another chance to play it (this time getting to freely choose my character out of a randomly drawn selection) that I fell properly in love with this; enough to buy my own copy, and push for the game to hit the table more. I absolutely love the many different abilities featured in the game; the travelling from place to place to set up trading posts and getting new options to place a die, the dice manipulation you can do to mitigate any luck from your rolls, the way the travelling and the fulfilment of contracts is balanced out so you generally want to do one to benefit from the other. And it also doesn’t hurt that the game is stunningly beautiful.

4.) Great Western Trail

This is a very premature pick for me, since I only just played this game for the first time last weekend. But I was so completely and utterly engaged with everything in this game the whole time we played, that I just knew this game will be one of my favourite games overall. I absolutely love how everything works. You move yourself along a path with the intention to sell and ship your cattle to earn money and upgrade your home board (which is something I absolutely love in games). Along the way you stop at various locations to manage your hand of cattle cards to try and have only different kinds, as well as earning money and doing actions, like hiring people to add to your board, building buildings, buying better types of cattle, upgrading your train route, clearing obstacles, engaging in trade, grabbing new scoring objectives, and gaining certificates for your beef to help boost the sale of your cattle at the end of the route. Every time you reach the end, you sell and ship your cattle, choose what new tiles are to be added to the boards (people for hire, tents, and obstacles), and then you move your worker back to the start and draw a new hand of cattle from your deck. Basically it’s a large rondel game, just with forked roads, and options to add new spots to land on.

I am madly in love with this game, and I am desperate to get my own copy of it. I love every aspect of it. It’s a game where you want to do everything, but you are forced to choose, which to me is the ultimate sign of a really good game. I don’t care that I have only played it once. I wanted to play it again immediately despite the fact that playing it four players had taken up almost the entire game night. I think I might even love it more than my number three pick on this list, but since that game has been validated to me through multiple plays, I’m dropping the position of this game by one to compensate.

5.) Five Tribes

This is such a delightful puzzle of a game. Before each turn, in current turn order, players choose whether to pay to place their token on a specific point in the turn order track, or to not pay and place their token on the top free spot on the track. If you pay, the next players have to pay more than you to go ahead of you in the new turn order, but if you choose not to, then any player who then also chooses not to pay will place their token on the top free spot and shift yours down. Once the new turn order has been determined, you will in turn be picking up and dropping meeples mancala style onto adjacent tiles and the final meeple’s colour and location determines your two main actions. The meeples used for the action are removed from the tile (and either placed in front of you or returned to the bag, depending on the colour and action they provide) and if you emptied the tile or through the assassin action emptied another tile, you get to claim it by placing a camel onto it (if an opponent hasn’t done so already).

The whole goal of the game is to be the player with the most victory points, and you do this through placing camels on locations, buying djinn cards (which also give you game abilities), collecting sets of commodity cards (which can be converted into money during the game as well), gaining majorities for yellow (and in the expansion also purple) meeples, and left-over money (and in the expansion, jewellery tokens as well). There are many different strategies you can take, and no player can do them all, which is one of the reasons I really love this game, another is how the game becomes more or less a dynamic puzzle as every time someone makes a move, they may either set up or block moves for the following player. If you play the game with two players (which is how I prefer to play), you get two actions every turn and may manage to set up so you get two moves in a row, meaning you can use the first turn to set up a good move for the second turn. I really love that, it keeps the game interesting throughout, and the expansion works incredibly well, not only expanding the board size with additional locations, but several powerful one-time abilities that may be earned through getting artefact tokens.

6.) Bora Bora

I’m a big fan of Stefan Feld’s designs, and this game is my favourite out of them so far. It may have a chaotic and intimidating player board/aid, but once you have learned to read the iconography it gets really useful. This is a dice placement game, where high rolls will give you better actions, but if someone has already taken a specific action, the next player taking it needs to provide a die that’s of lower value to be able to do so, unless they can play a god card to let them place it regardless of its value. As a typical Feld game, you aim to get the most points, and while there are many paths to victory, the crux of this game is to manage at least a couple of the end-game bonuses, some are harder to achieve, like completing the maximum amount of tasks (one per round, plus your remaining three at the end of the game) or buying a piece of jewellery (of which you can only buy one each round, and only one of the four laid out for that specific round). And some can be combined, like getting all your huts out and then filling each space with a man or woman tile, or filling up your board with building materials and then placing building tiles on top of them.

I love this game because the mechanisms are solid, and they take shape of a beautifully looking game. I love challenging myself to see how far I can push to get those end bonuses, even though I know there’s a limit to how many I can get with only three actions in a round, but it’s just fun to try, and that’s what keeps me interested.

7.) Viticulture

This game is still fairly new to my collection, so it might just move up on the list with time as I’m utterly fascinated with it. I really love how the whole game comes together. How player order is determined with each player choosing a wake-up time with each slot apart from the very top one giving you some kind of bonus, and each bonus getting gradually more tempting the further down you choose to go. How the worker placement phase is split into seasons and you need to hold on to some workers to be able to do anything in coming seasons. How you age your grapes and wine at the end of each round, so that you can eventually get the wines you need to fulfil orders to score the necessary bonus points and get income at the end of every year.

It surprised me how engaging it was, as I have zero interest in wine or winemaking in general, but the mechanisms here are solid, the game sets itself apart with the split worker placement phases, and I’m so intrigued by the different modules that are in it and in the expansion (I really hope one day to get the out of print modules as well) that I can’t wait to get them to the table to see how they measure up.

8.) Suburbia

This is another game with the potential to climb on the list, as I have only ever played the base game so far, and I’m eager to get the expansions to the table. This game is basically what Sim City would be if it was a board game. I love how everything connects, how you can benefit from not only the way you build your suburb, but also from the way your opponents build theirs. You want to grow your population, as population is the same as points, but as your income and reputation could actually go negative in this game (and as your population grows, your income and reputation will be lowered at certain intervals), you have to be careful not to expand so fast you wind up bankrupting yourself, as you need that money to be able to expand further.

I love building up the ‘engine’ for this, even though you are essentially only affecting three aspects; how much income you earn at the end of your turn, how much your population grows at the end of your turn, and what building types you earn cash for when either you or an opponent builds it. It’s thrilling to find out what buildings will come onto the market, whether a building you want will still be there by the time it’s your turn again, or if another player will build or trash it because they pick up on you wanting it. There’s never a guarantee that the tiles you want will actually be in the game at all, even at a full player count, so there’s a lot of variability from game to game, even without the large amount of different goals that could be drawn.

9.) Valeria: Card Kingdoms

The first time I ever played this game, the immediate reaction was to play another round. This is such a delightful game of hiring citizens, fighting monsters and gaining domains. Every player has a secret duke card, which is a scoring objective that awards you for focusing on one or two specific things in the game. During a turn a player will roll two dice, which determines what the active player and all other players can activate out of their citizens. Generally the reward is higher when it happens on your own turn. Each die result is activated separately, and then the total is activated. Afterwards the active player gets two actions, which can be hiring a citizen, fighting a monster, buying a domain or simply taking a resource. You need citizens to better your income and/or up your chances to get income, also citizens are needed to get the required icons in order to be able to purchase a domain. Monsters will earn you a reward immediately and will score you points at the end of the game, if you also manage to be the one to fight the big boss at the end of one of the monster decks, you will also get an instant reward based on how many monsters of said type you have already beaten. Domains will give you either a one-time benefit or a game-lasting ability; they will also score you points at the end of the game.

One of the many things I love about this game is how open and plentiful it is. It isn’t hard to earn the resources you need to do what you want; the only thing that can stop you is if an opponent gets there first. It has also a decent amount of variability in the base game alone, with two character choices for each die roll (apart from the two starting characters), there’s a decent amount of monster types, and a good deck of domains and dukes to keep things varied. I am really looking forward to the expansion, though, as it will introduce even more variability as well as new elements to the game – it isn’t needed to keep the game fresh, but it’s both wanted and welcomed on my part. An absolutely fantastic game, that works brilliantly regardless of player count, which is an additional plus.

10.) Oh My Goods

It was tough placing this game at only number 10 (which to be honest is still pretty darn good), because I absolutely adore this game, especially with the expansion that introduced not only many new interesting buildings, but also a campaign mode, which is pretty unique for a euro style card game. In this game, you are using multi-use cards for building up production buildings and manufacturing goods to either sell to build new buildings or hiring assistants, or to use to make even higher valued goods.

Each round players have access to any resource showing up in the market, but may sometimes need to supplement with cards from their hand to produce goods. Before the full market is revealed, you choose whether your worker will be diligent or lazy in the round (also on which building they will be assigned to), the former requires the full amount of resources to produce, the lazy worker requires one resource less, but will in turn only produce one (the diligent worker produces two), so it’s a bit of a gamble sometimes for players to decide whether to do a safe bet, or to take a chance that what you need will show up on the market. The buildings also have a ‘chain effect’ which means players may feed one or two resources or goods into the building to produce another good. This can be done as many times as the player wants to and has the resources to do. At the end of the game, in the last round after a player has built their 8th building, players get to activate the ‘chain effect’ for every production building they own, and if they then have managed to produce buildings that work well in a production chain, it will exponentially increase the value of their remaining goods. Goods are sold off for points, which are then totaled with the points on the buildings and assistants you have acquired.

The base game alone is terrific, but the expansion is what makes the game especially shine. You can play through the whole campaign, which is five chapters long, or you may go for the all-inclusive set-up, which gives you a random set of event cards and a special goal. When playing the expansion, the game ends in the round when the last event card is drawn. It gives more variability to the game, makes rounds different from one another, and gives you an objective to meet if you don’t want to suffer the penalty. Absolutely love this one.

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Now that I've told you mine, how about you? Have you reached the point where you find it possible to make yourself a top ten list of games? Are you only comfortable choosing a top five? Or a single favourite game? Or do you not like to play favourites and just go with whatever mood you're in that day?