I Need This Board Game...

# of Players:  1-4 Playtime:  2-3 Hours Core Mechanic:  Tile Placement/Auction Theme:  Castle Building Type: Euro Weight: Medium - Heavy Year:  2014 Rating: 9* I played the Suburbia app a lot when it came out and while I enjoyed the game, there were two things I noticed that held it back for me at the time - there was a lot of bookkeeping with three tracks (reputation, income, and population) and after many plays, my cities generally looked the same from game to game.  However, this isn’t a review of Suburbia, even though I will need to make a few comparisons, and needless to say Castles of Mad King Ludwig fixed both of these issues, which is why it sits quite high in my personal rankings. This is a tile placement game where each player builds a castle. The game takes place over several rounds until the room pool is exhausted. Each round, one player is the Master Builder and sets the prices for the available rooms that round...

# of Players:  2 Playtime: 0-30 Minutes Core Mechanic: Set Collection Theme:  Market Type:  Card Weight: Light Year:  2009 Rating: 8.5* I first played Jaipur well after I played Splendor countless times. Maybe it was the poker chip style pieces combined with set collection mechanics but it felt a lot like a two-player version of Splendor in some ways. I thought to myself that this seems like a nice twist on Splendor only to find out that Jaipur was released five years before Splendor. This really took me by surprise and was further impressed by how Jaipur was a game that felt like it was very recently released but is really almost 10 years old. Each player is a merchant in India trying to make the most money by selling goods. On your turn you can either take one good or all the camels from the market, sell one or more of the same good from your personal supply, or trade an equal number of goods and/or camels from your personal supply with goods...

For a brief recap of how I came up with my list, refer back to my previous post: 2018 Top 100 Games of All-Time - #100-91 Here we go with #80-71! #80 - Tsuro I was very impressed by this elegant and relaxing route-building game, which at first glance did not look like much but won me over once I started playing. This has led me to look at other applications of the mechanics, such as Whistle Stop, as I am very interested in what happens when combined with some deeper gameplay. #79 - Tokaido This is an interesting game - it is a relaxing, zen-like experience that doesn't really seem to have much strategy at first, but then once you start playing you realize there is some when deciding how far along the path you want to walk, knowing you can't turn back and knowing others can take advantages of openings behind you. A bit odd, but growing on me. #78 - Coup This is a fun, bluffing social deduction game set in The Resistance universe and now that I think of it,...

# of Players:  1-5 (unreleased for Revised Edition) Playtime:  3-4 Hours Core Mechanic:  Worker Placement Theme:  Farming Type: Euro Weight:  Heavy Year:  2009 Rating: 9.5* When I found out there was an expansion for Agricola, I went and bought it right away. Agricola was my favorite game at the time, so I was really interested in seeing what new mechanics the expansion brought to the table. In the end, it is a great expansion and any person who loves Agricola needs to try it out, but it might push Agricola a bit too far into the heavy end, which may be why even though I will recommend it, I have played it many more times without it than with. There are several new things that this expansion adds. My favorite of these are the moor and forest tiles that get added to your board at the start of the game through a random Start card. The spaces these tiles are located now count as occupied, so they won't be worth negative victory points...

# of Players:  2 Playtime:  2-3 Hours Core Mechanic:  Hand Management Theme:  Cold War Type: War Weight:  Heavy Year:  2005 Rating: 10* When I first started playing modern board games, I remembered seeing Twilight Struggle near the top of the charts, behind Puerto Rico and Agricola, but it was a two-player game with a theme that didn’t seem too interesting to me so I passed it over.  Then it became #1 on BGG and remained there for almost five years before being replaced by Pandemic: Legacy.  Well about a year into its run at the top, I decided that I needed to look into what all the fuss was about.  I ended up playing this multiple times over a couple nights, eventually with the correct rules, and walked away amazed.  This was my longest reigning #1 game and only recently was it dislodged and pushed down to second place. One player takes control of the United States while the other plays as the USSR....

For a brief recap of how I came up with my list, refer back to my previous post: 2018 Top 100 Games of All-Time - #100-91 Here we go with #90-81! #90 - Pandemic Probably the most popular co-operative game out there and the game that really kicked the co-operative game into high gear, I think I need to give this another chance since I really enjoyed the Legacy implementation of it. It is a great gateway game as well because of its appealing theme and has become a modern classic. #89 - 7 Wonders I was very wrong about this game. My first few plays of this popular card-drafting game fell flat, but I like Duel and once the app came out, realized how great this game is. With my newfound appreciation and the great things I hear about the expansions, this game is sure to rise next year. #88 - The Resistance I like the Avalon re-implementation so much more that I would not play this one again, but I appreciate that it is a great game that really seemed to take the new ba...

# of Players:  2-4 Playtime:  0-30 Minutes Core Mechanic:  Hand Management Theme:  Renaissance Type : Filler Weight:  Light Year:  2012 Rating: 7* When this game first came out, I kept hearing what a great, short game it was - seemingly the perfect filler. I didn't read much more into this game before buying it, since it had already shot up the rankings and was very cheap to purchase. Once I opened the box and subsequent bag, I understood why it was so cheap - how can so few components, 16 cards and a few tokens, be that much fun? I was about to find out. The rules could not be more simple - on your turn, draw cards until your hand has two cards and then play a card. This continues until everyone but one person is knocked out, who is the winner of the round, or until the deck of cards being drawn from runs out and everyone compares cards to see who has the highest-ranking card, who is the winner of the round. The winne...

This is a new series that will look at miscellaneous board game topics. The first topic in this series will be board game inserts. My first euro game was Catan, which had a decent plastic insert to hold the hexes and some plastic bags to hold all the player pieces, of which there were not many. However, when I acquired Agricola, it was painful to separate out all the pieces - player pieces, resources, cards - and I longed for a better organization system. The first thing I tried was buying one of those Plano-style boxes from Michael's. I ended up with two of them due to the sheer number of pieces, especially since I had the Farmers of the Moor and The Goodies expansions. I also had to put one box in the original box and the second one inside one of the expansion boxes. Although this system kind of worked and it was a lot easier than using a bunch of plastic bags, it was not the most elegant. Still, I continued doing this for games that I thought needed the extra organization, ...

# of Players:  1-5 Playtime:  2-3 Hours Core Mechanic:  Worker Placement Theme:  City Building Type: Euro Weight:  Heavy Year:  2008 Rating: 9.5* Hot on the heels of discovering Agricola, I looked up the designer Uwe Rosenberg and found out he had released another game the year after and that it also ranked in the Top 10 Games of All-Time on BoardGameGeek at the time. Naturally, I had to try it out and it turned out to be another fantastic worker placement game that also became one of my first solo game endeavours as I tried to continually push the limits of the maximum VP score I could achieve. In this game set in a French harbour, you take the role of a business owner trying to accumulate the most money to win the game by purchasing buildings and shipping goods. The gameplay is very simple - either move your single worker to an unoccupied building and use its effect or take one of the goods offers on the main board, which a...

This year I finally played enough games to create a decent Top 100 Games of All-Time list. Part of what helped me reach this milestone was new app releases and heading to my first game convention, SHUX '17. I was also able to knock quite a few games off of my 2017 Top 75 Games I Want to Play list. Most significantly, there was a new #1 game that toppled my longstanding favorite Twilight Struggle. Just a bit of background on how I came up with the rankings, first I looked through all the titles in the Top 2200 Games of All-Time on BoardGameGeek during the last week of 2017 and listed all the games I had played enough of to warrant ranking. Then I used the Board Game Ranking Engine on Pub Meeple to compare all the games in my list. After the engine spat out its ranking, I reviewed it and re-ranked a few games as I saw fit. Anyway, onto #100-91! #100 - Bohnanza Before Agricola, there were beans. This Uwe Rosenberg set collection game came out years before he transitioned into...