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Top 10 Games I Played this Year
I played about 70 new games this year - full list at the bottom. I tend to like both simple and complex, highly interactive games.
Top 10 Games Played this Year:
1. **Stationfall**: I haven't really ever liked hidden role games. Resisitance, Mafia, Secret Hitler, Coup, etc. I'm both bad at lying and bad at telling if others are lying. I'm usually not much of a hidden movement fan either. Beast, Mind MGMT, Sniper Elite, etc. The consequences of rules mistakes are so high and there's performance pressure all around to make it close, because it's rarely fun if it isn't. These preferences almost kept me from playing my favorite game of 2023, Stationfall. The differences here are key: the "lying" is mechanical rather than social, and anyone can move any figure, making rules much easier to ask about without revealing (also, the player aids are great!). It's also hilarious. This is Loony Tunes the board game. Stealing, sabotaging, telepathy, corpse eating plants, clones, corpsicles, and so much more. This game is a toy box absolutely overflowing with ideas. It sits with my all time favorites - games like Roads & Boats, Oath, and John Company 2 (and video games like Breath of the Wild) - sandboxes full of systems to explore, prankster playgrounds, canvases for creative play. Whether you are winning or losing, you're almost always having a blast. Played and enjoyed at 3, 4, and 5
​
2. **Ra**: My biggest gaming endeavor of 2023 was a deep dive into Reiner Knizia. (I told myself, "I'll stop when they start getting bad." 47 games later... we are still going.) Ra by no means is a Reiner deep cut, it just became avaiable again. My god. What a game. My parents are playing it. My sister is playing it. The guys at game night are begging for it. How is it so good? Everyone's turn is just as exciting as your own. You know all the possible bids and you can see everyone's positions. The opportunities to call an auction at just the right time are just delicious. Who doesn't love to see their friend have to bid a 13 on a single flood tile? A dissertation on human psychology could be written on the way Reiner pushes every lizard-brain button with the different scoring tiles - Like collecting things and building something? Bid on the monuments. Hate falling behind your neighbors? Bid on pharoahs. Do you like safety nets? Have a god tile. Safe investments? Take a coin. Hate missing out? You're going to need a civ tile. Want to snipe your opponent in the knee? Make sure they don't get that flood tile. One of the greats. Played and enjoyed at 2, 3, 4, and 5 players.
3. **Antiquity**: What a full meal of a board game. The first half of 2023 was spent chasing down and playing the remainder of the big Splotter games. Roads and Boats was the best game I played in 2022, so I was hot, heavy, and ready for some Antiquity. Inside a box that looks like Legal Volume 6 of the United States Tax Code, is a brutal take on a civilization-ish game. You get to tetris together a city, while jostling for resources on a shared map. Sounds fun! We get to build something cool... except you're almost immediately on your back foot. The bodies are piling up, pollution's out of control, and your friends want those same resources you do. If you like something like Feast for Odin, but want some more interaction, more pressure, and more meanness this might be for you. This is the type of game, that if you can just win this one, you'd be fine with losing the next 50 game nights. Played and enjoyed at 2 and 3 players.
​
4. **Zoo Vadis**: I hadn't found a negotiation game I loved until I played Zoo Vadis. Sidereal Confluence? Requires a Herculean effort to get to the table. Chinatown? Too calulable and not enough to grease deals with. Bohnanza? I love it, but I think it's hard to feel any stakes. Zoo Vadis packs so much drama and so many deals into 45 minutes. It's just killer. Deals are easy to make. Everybody wants in on them. If you're not dealing you're losing. The peacocks and player powers that you can't use yourself are such brilliant wrinkles to the game that make it sing at a wide range of player counts. This one is a classic. Thank you again, Reiner Knizia. Played and enjoyed at 3, 4, 5, and 6.
​
5. **Botswana**: You can teach this game in 3 sentences. Play any card and take any animal. The game ends when all six cards of an animal have been played. Each animal is worth the value of the last card played. Similar to Oink Games's Start Ups, this is a light, fun stocks game. We had an absolute blast with this. Play while drinking (or not! Still fun). Play while listening to Jordan Belfort's speech in Wolf of Wall Street. Invest in Giraffes. This game is responsible for our biggest laughs of the year. If you go in with the right mood it's magic. Every card played and animal grabbed is a piece of information. Is it a signal to buy? Who knows? Thank you again, Reiner Knizia. Get the Japanese edition if you can. Played and enjoyed at 3, 4, and 5. Don't play at 2.
​
6. **Viking See-Saw**: My favorite dexterity game since Crokinole. It's a stacking game with more than one climax and there's a winner rather than just one loser (I'm making both comparisons to Jenga-like games). It's all inside an adorable little box with excellent components including different density metals and rubber hair ties to hold your pieces. Anyone can play this game, and everyone wants to buy it (not easy) or play more. I like that you can set delicate stacking traps that so often come back around to bite you. Just a delightful little package. Good job again, Reiner Knizia. Played and enjoyed at 2, 3, and 4.
​
7. **Spirit Island: Nature Incarnate**: I've made my way through about 3/4 of the Spirits in this set and I'm loving it. I don't play as much as some of you out there, but the mechanical variety paired with theme just continues to be unmatched. There's a dancing earthquake horse that lets you queue up cards to go off on future turns (I loved being able to say, "I guarantee they will lose on turn 7."). There's a new Ocean aspect that lets you erode the island, literally turning it into ocean. You can be a big stompy Godzilla turtle. They even brought in the angry sun from World 2 of Super Mario Bros 3. This game continues to be my brain's favorite puzzle. Played and enjoyed at 2.
​
8. **Mille Fiori**: Do you like combos? Do you like points? Hey, it's Reiner Knizia again, finding the purest essence of fun in yet another genre. Mille Fiori plays in an hour or less. You're making a salad out of points and actually really care about the points in your opponent's salad because you're drafting opportunities to get points. In a lot of games this might be a decision between 4 points this turn or 4.5 points next turn... Scraps. No one likes fighting over scraps. Here there are opportunities out there that will feel like your point tracker strapped a rocket to its back and let it rip. Are you going to take it? Or are you going to hate draft that card your opponent needs for 30 points. Fun, fun, fun. Points, points, points. Combos, combos, combos. Played and enjoyed at 2, 3, and 4.
​
9. **Horseless Carriage**: I feel like people aren't talking about this one as much and I think I know why. This game requires at least 3 players and huge portions of it are heads down this-is-the hardest-decision-of-life type play. If it could work at 2, I think it would have found a bigger audience, but it's just not what I usually reach for with a group where we want to be social AND game. Thankfully, I've gotten to play this several times. This is next-level spacial puzzling where you certainly can't do everything you want so your next best option is to find a way to be just slightly better than your opponents. Once everyone gets the hang of the scatter plot-like board and figuring out who is going to get control of which stats are evaluating, this gets cutthroat. I haven't played anything else like it, and I love that. The graphic design is excellent this time. Yeah, it's fiddly. You signed up to play a Splotter, this is par fiddliness for them. Played and enjoyed at 3 and 4.
​
10. **Orongo**: The Reiner Knizia Enthusiasts Discord is great. You learn about great games like Orongo! If you enjoy Reiner's tile layers and Reiner's auction games, this is the crossover event you've been waiting for. Auctions are a single closed bid for the chance to place the most tiles first. Bidding nothing gets you the shells ($) spent in the current winning bid and previous winning bids if they haven't been claimed yet. This makes it very fun to have a hotly contested spot up for grabs that people know they are going to have to spend for....but the more they bid, the more they could hand an opponent who bids nothing. Tension, tension, tension. And so quick and rules light. In and out in an hour. Played and enjoyed at 2, 3, and 4.
Would have probably made the Top 10 once I play it more: **Thunder Road Vendetta** \- pure fun.
**And on the other end, 3 personal stinkers:**
**Fit to Print**: Playing this game made me realize how brilliant Galaxy Trucker is by having you fly your ships instead of point tallying for longer than it took to play the actual game. The decision of when to switch from grabbing tiles to placing tiles feels like it is 70% of the game - too much pressure on a single decision point!
**Scythe: Expeditions**: Knowing my tastes, I shouldn't have even played this. This game has no business putting 4 or 5 players on the box. Huge amounts of downtime. Also, we are fighting the mechs even less than in Scythe? If you give me a metal mech figure, I want to be smashing something.
**The White Castle**: Randomize your own Eurogame with zero thematic coherence. So much recrunching required if new cards have come out since your last turn.
**Full list of games played this year:**
Cat in the Box
Similo
Equinox
Brass Lancashire
Exceed
Oros
Wonderlands War
Point Salad
Mille Fiori
Indigo
Can't Stop
Antiquity
Great Western Trail: Rails to the North
Mosaic
Puerto Rico
Indonesia
Bohnanza: The Duel
Crokinole: Imperium
City of the Big Shoulders
Age of Steam
Horseless Carriage
Ares Expedition: Coop
Sniper Elite
Ra
King of Tokyo: Wickedness
Trailblazers
My City: Roll & Build
Turing Test
Spots
Illiterati
Gang of Dice
Sea Salt & Paper
Lacuna
Underwater Cities
The Search for Lost Species
Lisboa
IKI
Tiletum
Viking See-Saw
Zamek
Kingdoms
Zoo Vadis
Medici
Chomp
Cotour
Mind Space
Sail
Penguin Party
Millennium Blades
Shikoku 1889
Chartae
Kariba
Cat Blues
Orongo
Seige of Runedar
Pikomino Deluxe
Municipium
Botswana
Qin
Fit to Print
Sagrada Artisans
Scythe Expeditions
My City
Dark Tower: Covenant
Dark Tower: Alliances
Snakes of Wrath
Stationfall
Great Western Trail New Zealand
Terraforming Mars: Dice Game
Thunder Road Vendetta
Sky Team
Caylus
#games
source
I played about 70 new games this year - full list at the bottom. I tend to like both simple and complex, highly interactive games.
Top 10 Games Played this Year:
1. **Stationfall**: I haven't really ever liked hidden role games. Resisitance, Mafia, Secret Hitler, Coup, etc. I'm both bad at lying and bad at telling if others are lying. I'm usually not much of a hidden movement fan either. Beast, Mind MGMT, Sniper Elite, etc. The consequences of rules mistakes are so high and there's performance pressure all around to make it close, because it's rarely fun if it isn't. These preferences almost kept me from playing my favorite game of 2023, Stationfall. The differences here are key: the "lying" is mechanical rather than social, and anyone can move any figure, making rules much easier to ask about without revealing (also, the player aids are great!). It's also hilarious. This is Loony Tunes the board game. Stealing, sabotaging, telepathy, corpse eating plants, clones, corpsicles, and so much more. This game is a toy box absolutely overflowing with ideas. It sits with my all time favorites - games like Roads & Boats, Oath, and John Company 2 (and video games like Breath of the Wild) - sandboxes full of systems to explore, prankster playgrounds, canvases for creative play. Whether you are winning or losing, you're almost always having a blast. Played and enjoyed at 3, 4, and 5
​
2. **Ra**: My biggest gaming endeavor of 2023 was a deep dive into Reiner Knizia. (I told myself, "I'll stop when they start getting bad." 47 games later... we are still going.) Ra by no means is a Reiner deep cut, it just became avaiable again. My god. What a game. My parents are playing it. My sister is playing it. The guys at game night are begging for it. How is it so good? Everyone's turn is just as exciting as your own. You know all the possible bids and you can see everyone's positions. The opportunities to call an auction at just the right time are just delicious. Who doesn't love to see their friend have to bid a 13 on a single flood tile? A dissertation on human psychology could be written on the way Reiner pushes every lizard-brain button with the different scoring tiles - Like collecting things and building something? Bid on the monuments. Hate falling behind your neighbors? Bid on pharoahs. Do you like safety nets? Have a god tile. Safe investments? Take a coin. Hate missing out? You're going to need a civ tile. Want to snipe your opponent in the knee? Make sure they don't get that flood tile. One of the greats. Played and enjoyed at 2, 3, 4, and 5 players.
3. **Antiquity**: What a full meal of a board game. The first half of 2023 was spent chasing down and playing the remainder of the big Splotter games. Roads and Boats was the best game I played in 2022, so I was hot, heavy, and ready for some Antiquity. Inside a box that looks like Legal Volume 6 of the United States Tax Code, is a brutal take on a civilization-ish game. You get to tetris together a city, while jostling for resources on a shared map. Sounds fun! We get to build something cool... except you're almost immediately on your back foot. The bodies are piling up, pollution's out of control, and your friends want those same resources you do. If you like something like Feast for Odin, but want some more interaction, more pressure, and more meanness this might be for you. This is the type of game, that if you can just win this one, you'd be fine with losing the next 50 game nights. Played and enjoyed at 2 and 3 players.
​
4. **Zoo Vadis**: I hadn't found a negotiation game I loved until I played Zoo Vadis. Sidereal Confluence? Requires a Herculean effort to get to the table. Chinatown? Too calulable and not enough to grease deals with. Bohnanza? I love it, but I think it's hard to feel any stakes. Zoo Vadis packs so much drama and so many deals into 45 minutes. It's just killer. Deals are easy to make. Everybody wants in on them. If you're not dealing you're losing. The peacocks and player powers that you can't use yourself are such brilliant wrinkles to the game that make it sing at a wide range of player counts. This one is a classic. Thank you again, Reiner Knizia. Played and enjoyed at 3, 4, 5, and 6.
​
5. **Botswana**: You can teach this game in 3 sentences. Play any card and take any animal. The game ends when all six cards of an animal have been played. Each animal is worth the value of the last card played. Similar to Oink Games's Start Ups, this is a light, fun stocks game. We had an absolute blast with this. Play while drinking (or not! Still fun). Play while listening to Jordan Belfort's speech in Wolf of Wall Street. Invest in Giraffes. This game is responsible for our biggest laughs of the year. If you go in with the right mood it's magic. Every card played and animal grabbed is a piece of information. Is it a signal to buy? Who knows? Thank you again, Reiner Knizia. Get the Japanese edition if you can. Played and enjoyed at 3, 4, and 5. Don't play at 2.
​
6. **Viking See-Saw**: My favorite dexterity game since Crokinole. It's a stacking game with more than one climax and there's a winner rather than just one loser (I'm making both comparisons to Jenga-like games). It's all inside an adorable little box with excellent components including different density metals and rubber hair ties to hold your pieces. Anyone can play this game, and everyone wants to buy it (not easy) or play more. I like that you can set delicate stacking traps that so often come back around to bite you. Just a delightful little package. Good job again, Reiner Knizia. Played and enjoyed at 2, 3, and 4.
​
7. **Spirit Island: Nature Incarnate**: I've made my way through about 3/4 of the Spirits in this set and I'm loving it. I don't play as much as some of you out there, but the mechanical variety paired with theme just continues to be unmatched. There's a dancing earthquake horse that lets you queue up cards to go off on future turns (I loved being able to say, "I guarantee they will lose on turn 7."). There's a new Ocean aspect that lets you erode the island, literally turning it into ocean. You can be a big stompy Godzilla turtle. They even brought in the angry sun from World 2 of Super Mario Bros 3. This game continues to be my brain's favorite puzzle. Played and enjoyed at 2.
​
8. **Mille Fiori**: Do you like combos? Do you like points? Hey, it's Reiner Knizia again, finding the purest essence of fun in yet another genre. Mille Fiori plays in an hour or less. You're making a salad out of points and actually really care about the points in your opponent's salad because you're drafting opportunities to get points. In a lot of games this might be a decision between 4 points this turn or 4.5 points next turn... Scraps. No one likes fighting over scraps. Here there are opportunities out there that will feel like your point tracker strapped a rocket to its back and let it rip. Are you going to take it? Or are you going to hate draft that card your opponent needs for 30 points. Fun, fun, fun. Points, points, points. Combos, combos, combos. Played and enjoyed at 2, 3, and 4.
​
9. **Horseless Carriage**: I feel like people aren't talking about this one as much and I think I know why. This game requires at least 3 players and huge portions of it are heads down this-is-the hardest-decision-of-life type play. If it could work at 2, I think it would have found a bigger audience, but it's just not what I usually reach for with a group where we want to be social AND game. Thankfully, I've gotten to play this several times. This is next-level spacial puzzling where you certainly can't do everything you want so your next best option is to find a way to be just slightly better than your opponents. Once everyone gets the hang of the scatter plot-like board and figuring out who is going to get control of which stats are evaluating, this gets cutthroat. I haven't played anything else like it, and I love that. The graphic design is excellent this time. Yeah, it's fiddly. You signed up to play a Splotter, this is par fiddliness for them. Played and enjoyed at 3 and 4.
​
10. **Orongo**: The Reiner Knizia Enthusiasts Discord is great. You learn about great games like Orongo! If you enjoy Reiner's tile layers and Reiner's auction games, this is the crossover event you've been waiting for. Auctions are a single closed bid for the chance to place the most tiles first. Bidding nothing gets you the shells ($) spent in the current winning bid and previous winning bids if they haven't been claimed yet. This makes it very fun to have a hotly contested spot up for grabs that people know they are going to have to spend for....but the more they bid, the more they could hand an opponent who bids nothing. Tension, tension, tension. And so quick and rules light. In and out in an hour. Played and enjoyed at 2, 3, and 4.
Would have probably made the Top 10 once I play it more: **Thunder Road Vendetta** \- pure fun.
**And on the other end, 3 personal stinkers:**
**Fit to Print**: Playing this game made me realize how brilliant Galaxy Trucker is by having you fly your ships instead of point tallying for longer than it took to play the actual game. The decision of when to switch from grabbing tiles to placing tiles feels like it is 70% of the game - too much pressure on a single decision point!
**Scythe: Expeditions**: Knowing my tastes, I shouldn't have even played this. This game has no business putting 4 or 5 players on the box. Huge amounts of downtime. Also, we are fighting the mechs even less than in Scythe? If you give me a metal mech figure, I want to be smashing something.
**The White Castle**: Randomize your own Eurogame with zero thematic coherence. So much recrunching required if new cards have come out since your last turn.
**Full list of games played this year:**
Cat in the Box
Similo
Equinox
Brass Lancashire
Exceed
Oros
Wonderlands War
Point Salad
Mille Fiori
Indigo
Can't Stop
Antiquity
Great Western Trail: Rails to the North
Mosaic
Puerto Rico
Indonesia
Bohnanza: The Duel
Crokinole: Imperium
City of the Big Shoulders
Age of Steam
Horseless Carriage
Ares Expedition: Coop
Sniper Elite
Ra
King of Tokyo: Wickedness
Trailblazers
My City: Roll & Build
Turing Test
Spots
Illiterati
Gang of Dice
Sea Salt & Paper
Lacuna
Underwater Cities
The Search for Lost Species
Lisboa
IKI
Tiletum
Viking See-Saw
Zamek
Kingdoms
Zoo Vadis
Medici
Chomp
Cotour
Mind Space
Sail
Penguin Party
Millennium Blades
Shikoku 1889
Chartae
Kariba
Cat Blues
Orongo
Seige of Runedar
Pikomino Deluxe
Municipium
Botswana
Qin
Fit to Print
Sagrada Artisans
Scythe Expeditions
My City
Dark Tower: Covenant
Dark Tower: Alliances
Snakes of Wrath
Stationfall
Great Western Trail New Zealand
Terraforming Mars: Dice Game
Thunder Road Vendetta
Sky Team
Caylus
#games
source
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