quick ranking of the 30 tabletop games i played in-person in 2023

i played a ton of games on boardgamearena and my plays there will influence my rankings here, but i'm only including the games i played face-to-face in this list

list begins shortly

30. What Do You Meme?
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/226610/what-do-you-meme

1 play with 6 people in 2023

This game is one of those games in the Apples to Apples/Cards Against Humanity vein, where you select a caption from some pre-determined options to try to create the funniest caption-image combo. It's a lot less bad than Cards Against Humanity, but it's still not great. One player judging the best caption just isn't a very fun mechanic to me. Maybe these games would benefit from voting for the funniest caption instead.

29. Nemesis
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/167355/nemesis

1 play with 4 players in 2023

I moved recently and discovered that there's a board game meetup right near my new place. But the cafe is small and game slots are competitive. I was late to sign up for the event and there was only one game with vacancies - Nemesis.

Nemesis is a "semi-co-op" game where multiple players are capable of winning, but some game conditions can cause all players to lose. It's loosely themed around Alien, where there are intruders on a spaceship, and you spend most of the game wandering the spaceship, taking small actions like checking the direction of the ship or the condition of the engines, and try to fulfill a secret personal objective in addition to trying to bring the ship home without getting slaughtered by the alien intruders. There's a lot of randomness as you roll for noise and a lot of fiddliness, and in general I'm just not a big fan of the semi-co-op game genre.

One of our crew got blasted by the aliens with about 20-30 minutes left out of a 2+ hour game. One escaped. The remaining player and I went down with the ship, with him preventing me from leaving out of spite and the ship blew up. I really didn't find the game very fun despite the kinda neat story that arose from it, but it was good to get back into the meetup scene a little.

28. Reef
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/244228/reef

1 play with 4 players in 2023

Here's another meetup game. I showed up too late to get into a game so I pulled one off the shelf of the cafe and learned the rules on the spot, then taught it.

In this game, you have a 4x4 personal board on which you stack 4 types of colored tiles. The game is driven by drafting and playing cards, which contain both a pattern of tiles, which you score if your board contains it, and new tiles, which you play onto your board.

Ultimately I don't love abstract strategy games that much, and despite its great visual appeal I didn't find too much to this one. Do really appreciate the super-fast (less than 40 minutes on the first playthrough!) playtime though.

27. Planet Unknown
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/258779/planet-unknown

1 play with 6 players in 2023

Planet Unknown has a simultaneous play feature, where you draft and lay polyominos on your personal board, which is supposed to represent a planet. You gather some resources and score some points by doing it. It has some pretty amazing production value with a central wheel, but overall the game doesn't have a lot of bite for me.

I played Nemesis one time, and the second room I moved into locked me in with the Alien Queen and I died by like my third or fourth turn

good times

26. Birds of a Feather
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/169341/birds-feather

1 play with 4 players in 2023

I guess you might call this a set collection game? It's mostly a game I don't remember very well. It's a simple little filler-weight game, but I just didn't feel very strongly about it (nor did it make much of an impression, evidently!)

25. Hive
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/154597/hive-pocket

2 plays with 2 players in 2023

Despite the relatively low ranking, I actually like Hive. My partner got it for me for Christmas 2023. It suffers from being an abstract strategy game with zero luck, a genre where I'm not too interested in improving. But it benefits from being quick, easy, and kind of ingeniously designed. There's no real reason this can't be as good as Chess, which admittedly I don't love either!

This is always the best series on board 8, thank you

tag. love getting board game recommendations

SeabassDebeste posted...

30. What Do You Meme?

I have similar feelings about this game. I've been done with that genre for a long time and that's a "me" problem.

SeabassDebeste posted...

29. Nemesis

I played this once and had a somewhat similar experience. I won (escaped with an alien egg), but it was a feels-bad because I had to ruin another player's chance to escape in the process. Someone was also killed way too early in my game- sent out the airlock by another player with a PvP objective.

Again, the game does generate an interesting story to tell. Just feels bad in execution for some reason. You get to partially choose your objectives, the beginning feels cooperative, and the game is really long - all of that adds up to make feelings of betrayal cut deeper. I'd play it again, but I'm not so sure about the rest of the group!

SeabassDebeste posted...

26. Birds of a Feather
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/169341/birds-feather

1 play with 4 players in 2023

I guess you might call this a set collection game? It's mostly a game I don't remember very well. It's a simple little filler-weight game, but I just didn't feel very strongly about it (nor did it make much of an impression, evidently!)

I'm impressed that you remember it enough to even rank it!

24. Pixelate
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/363677/pixelate

2 plays with 4 players

I have this game in my notes as "Pixel Art" for some reason. Basically you're just supposed to use a limited number of cubes (kinda like pixels!) to make pictures. It's a neat idea and a fun activity, but there's not a ton of game to it. Enjoyable, even if I suck at it.

thanks for the kind comments all! gonna plow through a few more tonight...

23. Worldbreakers: Advent of the Khanate
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/351991/worldbreakers-advent-khanate

2 plays with 2 players in 2023

My friend's husband designed this game! He was a national champion of Netrunner, the extremely asymmetric LCG series. The Kickstarter fulfilled this year. The game is a dueler in the vein of Magic the Gathering, with economic systems, high-cost dudes, combat, and the like. It comes with four pre-built decks, and my partner and I played two games together. The art and theme are really nice and the mechanics of the game seem pretty solid (as you'd expect from a veteran card game player).

The downside is that I also kind of feel like a lot of the joy in games like these is in the deck construction, the metagame, reading your opponent, etc. - and I wasn't going to access that depth just in two plays over the course of a week, with no extra cards to construct the deck with. The one game in this vein I played as an adult - the Game of Thrones LCG - was incredibly fun while I was actively participating in the community, playing in tournaments, and the like - but I fell behind and out of it; it wasn't nearly as good before it became a lifestyle game for me. That said if I internalize the rules more, I could see this being a game I bring out once in a while when I have a single friend over, and one that I play a few more times with my partner.

22. Pax Pamir 2nd Edition
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/256960/pax-pamir-second-edition

1 play with 5 players in 2023; 1 more turn-based play on BGA with 4 players

Pax Pamir 2nd Edition comes from Cole Wehrle, the mind behind Root. It's a tableau-builder where your tableau grants you the ability to put dudes both on a map and on your opponents' tableaux, where they can do battle to control territory or your opponents' cards. The game is set during the Great Game era of Afghani history, and you attempt to control your local tribe's destiny while the English, Russians, and Afghan kingdoms vie for control over the greater lands.

Despite my not ranking it super-high, I think Pax Pamir 2e is absolutely brilliant game design. It's extremely interactive without being that fiddly. It can be relatively quick to play (though I'd imagine 90-120 minutes to still be typical at 4-5 players). It's got an incredible theme, and for the most part the gameplay reflects it; your methods to ensure your clan's relative supremacy can feel like crabs in a bucket or desperately trying to curry favor with the big guns who are sweeping through your lands. Dramatic plays can involve switching allegiances, but intrigue can bring down the strongest tribal courts - but then, such an attack also costs the perpetrator their own spies. Throw in some lovely production, with a wonderful burlap-like woven game map, and it makes me want to buy it just out of respect.

And yet, I'm not sure if it's really my thing. This perhaps is one step too interactive for me. Like Root, it's extremely in-your-face, and I imagine it's likely enhanced by table-talk and negotiation, which is something I stray away from, especially with my personal gaming groups. Feels-bad moments can abound if your court or leader takes a beating before its time. It must surely shine if a single group plays it a dozen times in a row due to the possibility for emergent gameplay, but there's just no way I'll ever be in a position to play it even five straight times without a teach for someone, so that's a depth I will likely never access. Oh well!

pax pamir is fantastic. especially the map and the tiles you put on it

21. Mombasa
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/172386/mombasa

1 play with 4 players in 2023

Especially compared to Pax Pamir 2e, Mombasa is likely the most thematically problematic game on this list. You play trading companies in colonial Africa, gleefully raping the lands and establishing trading posts and warring with other trading companies as you distribute the goods and spoils of the land. Compare that to Pax Pamir's meditation on the difficulty of surviving as the exploited natives of the lands. It's rough, and it's a singular reason I am very unlikely to ever own this game.

On the other hand, I really find many of its mechanisms interesting, even while they're not the most cohesive. At the heart of the game is a unique card-based action selection mechanism: you get three programmed actions per round, represented by your personal action hand of cards. But those three cards are discarded into three selected piles, and you get to take one of the three piles back to your hand at the end of the round. This essentially breaks up your combo - play A, B, and C together this round, and you'll only have one of those three available to you next round. These actions will have economic consequences and allow you to spread your companies' influence across the map and possibly reduce the influence of other companies.

Which leads to the game's other interesting mechanism - you don't represent one trading company, but an investor in trading companies. So the game has shared incentives; in the end your score is based off the shares you own in the four different companies, so if "your" company isn't doing well, you can attempt to recoup your score by trying to invest in the "winning company" instead. Stock systems in games date at least back to Acquire in 1964 and they're really fascinating.

So you've got unique action selection, territory control, and stock valuations (linked to that territory control!) - that's the backbone of a great game. But Alexander Pfister - who also designed Great Western Trail and others - sadly doesn't stop there. There's also a goods system that functions as some sort of economy, a diamonds track to score some VP on your own player board, and a contract fulfillment system that plays like a complete sidequest. I'm not saying that that's not an effective way to score points and win; however, winning through that method essentially ignores the on-map game, and ultimately it feels bloated and complex for complexity's sake.

The game was re-themed, and I found it interesting enough to take a look. But the re-theme is apparently space-based and I read that it's less visually coherent, so Mombasa and its gameplay systems will probably remain a relatively fond memory for me.

SeabassDebeste posted...

29. Nemesis
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/167355/nemesis

1 play with 4 players in 2023

I moved recently and discovered that there's a board game meetup right near my new place. But the cafe is small and game slots are competitive. I was late to sign up for the event and there was only one game with vacancies - Nemesis.

Nemesis is a "semi-co-op" game where multiple players are capable of winning, but some game conditions can cause all players to lose. It's loosely themed around Alien, where there are intruders on a spaceship, and you spend most of the game wandering the spaceship, taking small actions like checking the direction of the ship or the condition of the engines, and try to fulfill a secret personal objective in addition to trying to bring the ship home without getting slaughtered by the alien intruders. There's a lot of randomness as you roll for noise and a lot of fiddliness, and in general I'm just not a big fan of the semi-co-op game genre.

One of our crew got blasted by the aliens with about 20-30 minutes left out of a 2+ hour game. One escaped. The remaining player and I went down with the ship, with him preventing me from leaving out of spite and the ship blew up. I really didn't find the game very fun despite the kinda neat story that arose from it, but it was good to get back into the meetup scene a little.

Played this with my buddy and his family back over the summer. Absolute blast and relatively simple to learn.

Pax pamir looked quite interesting when it was launched on bga but i haven't had a chance to give it a go yet

20. Cross Clues
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/300753/cross-clues

2+ plays with 4 players in 2023, first played 2022

We're starting to get into games I really like here! I first played Cross Clues in 2022. It's a neat little co-op, casual/party game where you want everyone to guess all the words in a Codenames-esque grid. Along each axis are words like "animal," "gold," "house," and the like. Each person draws a secret card which tells you the position of their secret word, and on their turn they give a one-word clue, and others try to guess the corresponding point for those two words (i.e. if your intersection features "animal" and "house" crossing, you might give "zoo" as your word).

Codenames is one of my favorite games of all time. I just love cooperative/team-based clue-giving/guessing games overall (as you'll see later). I think some of the games like Cross Clues that have come out have kind of distilled out a lot of the clue-giving while filtering out some of the more game-y elements like in Codenames. That reduces the skill-cap and length/depth of the experience by a bit. But on the plus side, it makes it more instantly accessible, takes away think-y turns (this one is real-time so you don't even need to act solely on your turn), and speeds the game up - taking away or minimizing any potential feels-bad moments. I don't own Cross Clues but it's one I think I'd like to - kind of an ideal modern type of filler-weight game for me.

last one for now since i got a late start to the day

19. Daybreak
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/334986/daybreak

Daybreak is the latest cooperative game from Matt Leacock, the mind behind Pandemic/Legacy and Forbidden Island. It's a significant step up from those games, as it's a tableau-builder with a million moving pieces.

The game has each player controlling a major "power of the world" - America, Europe, China, and the Global South/Emerging Markets/whatever it's called - as we attempt to try to reach carbon neutrality in the fight against climate change. There's a free-flowing, simultaneous-action player-turn where you draw a bunch of policy cards and play them onto your tableau, usually on top of your existing tableau (which makes those previously-played cards no longer playable). The trick is that you generally want to play these cards anyway since you can activate each card in your tableau, even right after playing or right before you cover it up; plus some cards can benefit from having other cards underneath them. The game fights back with event cards (such as oil lobbyists) that are simulated by an event deck.

My one play of this game was damned difficult. We didn't get super-close to winning. Like in other Leacock games, there's a constant struggle between the immediate threats you're facing that will cause you to lose - melting ice caps and communities in crisis as you're unable to produce enough power for your citizens due to population growth and moving off of dirty power - and the ultimate goal, which is to attain carbon neutrality, mostly by decreasing dirty power generation and carbon-generating industry.

The game is messy. But it's thematically very powerful, with evocative art and QR codes on each card that explain the policy/issue at hand. And for people who find Pandemic too easy to quarterback (i.e. one player bossing the others around because the optimal strategy is too simple) but Spirit Island complex enough not to quarterback (because individual tableaux are too complex to track) - this game IMO falls into the latter category. The less "clean" game design makes me a little wary about it, but I really would also like to win the game at some point, and I wonder if after repeated plays the messiness would fade away and the gameplay/theme could emerge more. I really appreciate this ambitious project.

Love reading these!

Hive frustrates me so much because it seems like everything I want in a board game: 2 player focus, portable, interesting....but I hate insect aesthetics so much, especially from a bird's-eye perspective. So I really cannot play it.

I just finished a game of Pax Pamir. It's pretty good. I played it async on BGA and thank goodness I did. There were turns where I spent at least 20 minutes trying to figure out my move because I had so many options and so many of them were flawed. My game didn't utilize the allegiance switching much at all, though.

Always good to look for new coop games for my partner and I to try. Daybreak sounds fun

Oh and I love hive

banananor posted...

I have similar feelings about this game. I've been done with that genre for a long time and that's a "me" problem.

I like the genre but WDYM still feels like maybe the worst variant of it.

I barely played anything last year...

tag

Do you save these writeups anywheres? I always love reading them, and they are great resources for figuring out new board games to play

I recently just played Spirit Island and Betrayal at House on the Hill and they were pretty fun experiences.

CoolCly posted...

Do you save these writeups anywheres? I always love reading them, and they are great resources for figuring out new board games to play

traditionally i save either the topics or the writeups in my own googledocs yeah! i haven't saved this year's yet but probably will Kenri posted...

I like the genre but WDYM still feels like maybe the worst variant of it.

it's definitely better than cards against humanity...

Bitto posted...

I just finished a game of Pax Pamir. It's pretty good. I played it async on BGA and thank goodness I did. There were turns where I spent at least 20 minutes trying to figure out my move because I had so many options and so many of them were flawed. My game didn't utilize the allegiance switching much at all, though.

i actually think it's better in person! you just have to be prepared for a longer game

anyway, got home late so i'll just do 1-2 tonight

18. Azul
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/230802/azul

1 play with 4 players in 2023

Was waiting for people to show up at a meetup and decided to teach this one. Azul is a relatively abstract game played over the course of around five rounds, during which everyone drafts all the Starburst-like tiles from the common area in the table and places it on the "staging areas" of their personal mats. Depending on how well you fill out your staging area, you can then score them once all the tiles are drafted each round, but bad planning can lead to negative points and decreased future flexibility.

The pros to Azul - it's fast, it's beautiful, it's tactile, and it's easy-to-teach. The cons are that I suck at it, it's abstract to the point of pointlessness at times, and there's just not as much happening as you might want. I've played Azul probably double-digit counts in person and it's always decent, but never mind-blowing, and at this point it truly is a filler for me that just fills a slot. It ranks above most of these games that I just learned this year for the first time, but below most of the other repeat games. And to be fair, repeated games inherently will be higher, since I'm less likely to replay bad games!

17. Ark Nova
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/342942/ark-nova

2 plays with 3 players in 2023

In Ark Nova you run a zoo and attempt to get the best combination of appeal (via cool animals) and conservation (via conservation projects, animals, and random other bonuses). In order to play an animal card, you generally need an enclosure for it, cash on hand to purchase it, and sometimes other prerequisites for it. You take all these actions and more via the game's action selection mechanism - you choose one of five each time it's your turn, but the longer you don't choose one,

I learned Ark Nova in 2022 and found it interesting and thought my partner might enjoy it. It's an extraordinarily solitaire game with a cute theme, which feels right up her alley. (There is interaction available ). In the end, space and time considerations had me leaning against it, especially with its not being one of my absolute favorites. The game is a gigantic splurge of mechanics - it's got a giant deck and like three separate boards to pay attention to, but no centralized board where the action takes place. I'd say all of that works against it.

But my third play of it - my last play this year - has me wondering again about its potential, if you really do play very quickly. Once you've played a few times, you begin to develop more sensible short- and long-term goals. That's not to say that I have any good strategy, but at least I have like a three-turn plan now, and then pulling all those levers becomes more guided. It doesn't feel quite as sandbox-y as something like A Feast For Odin due to how tight money and the right cards can be, but at the same time there are lots of little rewards you keep hitting for going up the conservation track, or partnering with other zoos, that feel really satisfying to hit.

Ultimately this is never going to be a game that to me is as highly rated as BGG has it. But it's got a cool theme and some cool components and leads to some satisfaction, and that has me interested in giving it a few more gos, especially if I can find the right time to play with my partner. (That said, it feels pretty damn daunting on Board Game Arena...)

SeabassDebeste posted...

you choose one of five each time it's your turn, but the longer you don't choose one,

Think you missed a thought here!

I'm conflicted on Ark Nova. I love the theme and the mechanic of "ability gets stronger the longer you wait to use it" but the complexity of everything going on is a huge hurdle. Like you mention, not having one single place to focus on for the information you need to plan things out for even just one turn can make it feel very obtuse and chaotic.

The bga interface felt very weird to me at first. Like info was presented in less than ideal ways, same as in person. After a few solo plays and figuring things out, i came to really understand and appreciate it. I played a lot of solo games on mobile and i actually prefer the mobile layout to the desktop layout, since it's more condensed.

But once i began to get to that understanding, a lot of the complexity and depth began to feel a hair self-defeating. I'm not sure how else to describe it. I still have a ton of fun with it and i enjoy introducing others to it, but it's far from the top of my list. If it didn't have the awesome theme, it would absolutely fall further.

ah yeah, thanks for the catch! of course that should read the more effective the action will be when you do take it . it's a very simple overview but it's by far the most complex game mentioned on the list so far!

16. Celestia
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/175117/celestia

2 plays in 2023 with 6 players

Celestia is a push-your-luck game where everyone is sailing on an airship through the mystical titular land. Each stage of the airship, a different player becomes the pilot and must overcome an increasing number of obstacles (hazards on dice faces) using their cards in hand. But other players can choose whether or not to stay in the airship. Eventually the airship will likely crash, and those on board get no compensation, but the deeper you wait before jumping ship the more points you get.

This game is a mainstay in my group. It's freaking adorable with the little airship and nice dice. You can pop your little pawn out of the ship and make a parachuting sound when you leave. And it's super-fun when the table goes "IN" "IN" "IN" rapidly during the early stages.

I've cooled on Celestia quite a bit since I first played it, like I have with Azul. It remains extremely accessible and cute, but somehow the game just doesn't feel as exciting when I really suck at it - I think I've probably played 20+ games in my life and never won, and it's not just because of bad luck - someone just usually has better luck than I do! I also find that with a high player count, where nominally it should be the best, it feels like it takes a bit too long. Or maybe it's that my group often asks for a second game after the first (which is what happened for my two plays this year), and that really hits the limit for me.

That said - the principle of the whole thing remains fantastic, and it's very good for an ultra-light push-your-luck. I've long since realized that that's not exactly my genre but I still appreciate both the design and the novelty of moving a little airship along a magical land.

15.5 Ghost Blitz
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/83195/ghost-blitz

1 play in 2023 with 2 players

Whoops, forgot about my single play with my visiting friend on this one! Ghost Blitz is a more-activity-than-game type of game, where you simply flip a card and all players have to compete to grab the correct object (out of five) that corresponds to the card's image. As long as no one gets hurt and no components get damaged, it's always fun - the illustrations are adorable, as are the little wooden objects (a white ghost, a grey mouse, a blue book, a red chair, and a green bottle).

Like Celestia, or like games without continuity, the game has no "game arc," and that hurts it a bit - i.e. the last turn will play much like the first. Plus it's a pattern recognition/reflex game, which definitely can be pretty punishing. However, if you play long enough, there's a definite mind-meld where it can feel really cool to "git gud" like in an NES game and hit the zone where you're instantly snapping up the correct object. And it's always fairly funny when someone grabs the wrong object; a fourth or so of the cards switch up the pattern recognition by depicting the exact object you need to grab instead of two objects that indirectly lead you to it, and I love when it results in people making mistakes or having their brains melt when those get flipped. It's not a game I'll bring out much anymore but it's done more than its duty for me.

15.25. Splendor
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/148228/splendor

1 play in 2023 with 2 players

Oops, forgot this one as well! Played it on the same day that I played Ghost Blitz.

Splendor is a super-simple set collection/engine-builder where you can take your turn to either collect gems (resources) from the limited supply, reserve a card from an open market for yourself to purchase, or purchase one of the cards either from the market or from your supply.

This was one of the first few dozen games I played when a friend got me jump-started in the hobby and one of the most famous games on this list. I actually disliked the passive-aggressive silence of it back then, but since then I've eased up on taking eurogames as seriously and can chat and play quickly with it, win or lose. The game plays very quickly and has meaningful decisions. It's not big on visuals but has a fantastic tactile element with heavy poker chips to represent your resources, and it's got both a nice engine-building arc and a nice sense of tension since it's a VP-race (which goes against trying to extend the game by building a giant engine).

I have played a little Splendor on BGA, and it's a good implementation, but I don't think I'm willing to invest the time to become truly great at it. High-level play seems to be fairly block-y, which is not something I enjoy much in games. However, at the level where I play, I enjoy the quick bit of tension and utter simplicity of the setup and gameplay. If only my partner enjoyed it, but the lack of theme or "cool stuff" to do is a turnoff for her.

15. Viticulture (and optional Tuscany expansion)
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/183394/viticulture-essential-edition

1 play in 2023 with 6 players

Viticulture has you running a winery - planting and harvesting grapes, aging them, brewing them into wines, and selling those wines as contracts. The actions are filtered through a worker placement system and you'll need to build structures such as wine cellar upgrades and trellises in order to plant the grape vines. The biggest twists on the worker placement formula are a unique turn-order track, which links turn order with rewards, and the ability for the first player to take an action each round to get a powerful bonus.

I actually addresed my thoughts in a fair bit of depth in NBIceman's topic: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/80607833

But, I'll post it again here quickly.

pros
- the production is wonderful
- the theme makes a ton of sense in many regards and is linked closely with mechanics
- it's accessible because you only have to read the cards you actually draw instead of evaluating a marketplace
- the grande worker also makes the worker placement less punishing
- the extra bonuses when you play with more than 2 players are great
- the wakeup track is really neat
- seasons are a good idea

cons
- in the 2p game it sucks not having the extra-action spaces
- turn order is doubly important due to having two seasons
- not having a card marketplace makes the game very luck-based
- other than the bonus powers, the worker placement is fairly uninspired
- the game is not very "tightly" designed - the way the money economy works in particular is kind of shoddy (super-important early; later in the game you have almost nothing to spend it on)

Overall I feel it has a lot of great ideas and makes them super-accessible. I kind of resent its popularity because i think the execution and tightness of the design are sacrificed in some ways for that overhead ease (e.g. no mitigation of the swingy cards).

Tuscany (just the board) adds complexity which is nice and gives some more options on actions you can do when you've otherwise run out of useful stuff to do, which is also nice. I like thematically that there are four seasons. But it amplifies one of the bigger annoyances of VC, which is the importance of being first - now you're first in all four seasons.

It's also just more complex than "base" viticulture and isn't available online, so I've just played base a lot more than Tuscany. Not sure the game needs that sort of complexity. I played this game over the table just once in 2023, with the Tuscany expansion. But I played it a few dozen times with my partner on BGA. The 2p game is lovely for its speed (6p probably requires a much faster group than mine on that play), but it unfortunately does lose one of the best parts of the game in the extra-powerful actions .

I had no idea that viticulture had an expansion. I did always find it weird that there are only two seasons, but I chalked it up to just stretching the definitions of summer and winter a bit.

I've played a good amount of solo Ark Nova. Took a couple rounds to get used to where everything is on BGA but overall a very good implementation I'd say

14. Terra Nova
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/364186/terra-nova

1 play with 4 players in 2023

Terra Nova simplifies the 2012 heavyweight euro Terra Mystica. You play a fantasy race bound to one type of terrain and attempt to build and upgrade your houses. The game is played over the course of five rounds and takes place on a shared hex map, and building a house requires you either to access one of your native terrains or to terraform a foreign terrain to your own.

As a randomization element, each round, taking a different type of action is rewarded with VP - e.g. building houses, upgrading houses to trading posts, advancing sailing, etc. The structures you build provide you income during these rounds.

I've played a lot of Terra Mystica, and Terra Nova comes as a nice simplified version that plays in like thirty minutes online and that plays more nicely at a small player count than TM. The game feels less strategic and more tactical than TM; instead of being a heavily economic game, its relative paucity of scoring options (four generically: building according to the track, scoring off of the bonus tiles you choose when you pass each round, advancing sailing, and building and upgrading directly adjacent hexes to form towns) means that scores are relatively low and that playing "points-greedy" is important over simply maximizing economy. The game thus feels flatter and more accessible, though pressure on hexes can feel a little higher. I'm a little bothered by the colors of terrains they chose, which have three shades of blue across five colors and can be hard to distinguish.

I really like the simplicity and accessibility of Terra Nova, even while the game provides nice strategic and tactical avenues. It's still fun and pretty to spread across a map and feel your income gradually snowballing and your points marker race up the track. There are three main areas of competition: securing hexes, passing to grab the more useful bonuses with economy or points, and taking the once-per-round power actions that make your coins go way further than they otherwise would. But there is also positive subtle interaction - adjacency to neighbors lets you form cheaper trading posts, and even more importantly, when a player builds or upgrades next to you, you gain power tokens - and thus you're constantly seeking out one another's company. That increases the indirect action as you'll then want to compete for the hexes next to opponents, and it incentivizes you to help one another.

So my logger says I've got one play with this game this year, but like Viticulture, I played it many times online after learning it in person. However, unlike Viticulture, I have mostly played this with strangers, but async and live. I've enjoyed a lot of my online plays, but I will say that its appeal has been limited by the fact that the factions and terrain locales (as the map is fixed) vary pretty greatly in power. There are ten races, but about 4-5 of them almost never get chosen in competitive 3-player games unless I'm the one doing it. However, I've still gotten a few dozen plays out of it pretty happily. If only my partner would be willing to give it a second chance...

I've been interested in Celestia for a while but never seem to see anyone talk about it. I can see how it wouldn't have a lot of staying power but it sounds like it'd definitely be worth checking out eventually.

I'll spring Terra Nova on my group at some point, too. Terra Mystica (and Gaia Project by extension) is another one I've always been very intrigued by, but I do wonder if the more accessible version actually suits our collection better.

I've been head over heels with Terra Mystica since i was introduced to it in 2016. But it's difficult to get others as invested, since it's a lot to take in. I've been wondering how Nova plays, since its simplified design appeals less to me but might be better for others in the group.

13. Just One
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/254640/just-one

2 plays with 4-9 players in 2023

I don't remember precisely all my Just One plays, but I guess I did do a few online as well. I'd say it's still fun online but more fun in person and of course with friends.

The principle of Just One is fantastic - there's one guesser and one secret word (like "fish"), and all other players then have to try to clue that guesser by writing down a single word as well (like "tuna"). The trick is that before revealing to the guesser what the clue-givers have written, they have to check one another's words - and any duplicates are removed entirely. So if your five clue-givers wrote "tuna-tuna-bass-bass-bass," then the guesser will have zero basis to guess at all!

Just One occupies a nebulous spot on this list and is arguably a case for not using the PubMeeple ranking engine. It's a fantastic concept and good for lots of laughs, but the way we play it, it essentially isn't really a game with any sort of continuity. A word is completely independent of any other word, and you just rotate the person guessing. It's super-fun and you can technically "keep score" but that feels besides the point. Because I always have fun with it, I've given it a decent ranking, but I have questions about how much of a game it really is.

Which reminds me of a few more games I've forgotten I played this year due to poor logging! Those are getting retroactively added a little lower in the list next.

so my take on terra nova vs terra mystica is this - if you haven't played either and you're curious about it, try out nova and you'll definitely get a really nice taste of the interaction and decision space of TM, in a way less rules-bloaty, long, cutthroat game.

i love terra mystica but i haven't made it a priority to play gaia project or age of innovation simply because i don't think i quite have the appetite for their complexity. but i'm fairly certain that often i just gravitate toward the game i play first or more. TN feels a little oversimplified to me, but if i'd started with TN, then TM would probably feel bloated and inelegant instead.

15.7. Wavelength
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/262543/wavelength

1 play in 2023 with 5-8 players

Wavelength is a guessing game played on teams. One player is the clue-giver and is given a prompt of a scale ("good president vs bad president") and is then shown a position of a needle on a dial, like a fuel gauge or speedometer. Then based on the position of the needle, that player gives an answer to the prompt ("William Taft") and the team must guess where on the spectrum the prompting needle was. Then you reveal where the needle actually was and assign points.

I forget exactly how many players we were when we played Wavelength this year, but it was a pretty good time. For all the raucousness this game can seem to provide - "hot much of a sandwich is a hot dog?!" - it also lacks any sort of game-i-ness. The scorekeeping technically makes sense but feels rather beside the point, and it's the sort of "activity" where I'd almost always rather just give each player on the team a chance to be clue-giver X times instead of playing to 11 points (rather similar to Just One).

The fun part of Wavelength of course is the table-talk it facilitates, as well as the occasional illusion of mind-melding (or being on the same mental Wavelength). That said, I think a huge part of its appeal comes from the components - that needle dial is utterly fantastic and so incredibly satisfying to operate, providing the prompt-position, a shield for the prompt-position, and a guesser's needle. The shield rolls back very nicely for the dramatic reveal. Absolutely key element to the game's success.

15.6. Skull
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/92415/skull

2 plays with 4-6 players in 2023

I'm not sure where to rank Skull either. It could conceivably go above Just One and even higher, but this feels about right as it isn't a personal sentimental favorite but is almost always great fun during the time it's on the table.

The game is a classic bluffing game. Everyone starts with three rose cards and one skull card. Everyone starts with one selected card face down in front of them, and then in turn, players can put down another card face down or start the betting by declaring how many roses they think they can flip over, starting with their own cards. The round ends when no one wants to escalate a bet any further, and that player either succeeds in flipping all roses (scoring one of the two VPs needed to win) or flips a skull and blows up, losing one of their cards. The goal is either to succeed in two quests or to be the last man with cards remaining.

I played a reasonable amount of Skull online with friends last year. It's definitely more fun face-to-face and physically handling those components, but if you're on a video-call you can still experience a lot of the laughs with your friends. To be clear, the physical components of the common version of this game are not really "cards" but instead beautiful, round coasters (even though you can 100% play with a deck of cards). That adds a ton of table presence to the game and like with so many other of these simple games, adds just a little flair to the proceedings that can elevate the experience.

Other than the obviously entertaining bluffing - it's a classic move to bid high when you actually have a skull, hoping someone else will take it from you - there's of course a push-your-luck element to the gameplay. The one downside I see in the game is that the player elimination can get kind of tedious in a super-skull-happy meta. But due to the self-balancing nature of this, it shouldn't really become too big an issue in smaller games with repeated plays.

Splendor is one of my gateway board games for newcomers. I really like the weight of the gem chips.

Just One and Wavelength are both excellent party games. Love both of them.

I played Skull once and I just don't think me and my friends enjoy bluffing that much. Nice design, though.

12. Power Grid
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2651/power-grid

1 play with 6 players in 2023

I know a lot of eurogames get this rap, but Power Grid has to be the closest to a spreadsheet simulator game on this list! (Okay, maybe Splendor is, but PG has so much more going on). It's an economic game where you establish outposts of your power company in different cities across Germany but have to purchase progressively better power plants at an auction as well as the fuel (coal, oil, uranium). The winner is decided not just by who builds the most, by who powers the most cities.

There are so many cool systems in Power Grid. The auction is cool, the map/area control is cool, the rubber-band mechanic is cool, and the variable resource market is cool. It doesn't fit together particularly cohesively - other than all operating with your cash supply, each phase of a round feels almost completely distinct in identity - but they do somewhat coalesce into a fun experience. The joke of course is that there's a lot of arithmetic to do because you ideally want to plan out your whole round at the time of the auction phase. The turn order is quite interesting; it's very punishing to go last, but going last means you've built the most cities, and having cities down early is great because of the usual area control reasons - getting into or through occupied cities is much more expensive.

Overall, Power Grid is old and clunky and can be kind of rough to lose and occasionally, you can get kinda screwed by others' decisions or luck of the draw. It's a pain to refill the resource market for sure. But it's got a cool theme and lots of unique gameplay elements and it's really satisfying to pump that power! One of the cooler old-school euros.

I saw a talk from that game's designer, really wild and smart design that was way over my head. Awesome guy.

Found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w23nt_YNYs

11.5. Grand Austria Hotel
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/182874/grand-austria-hotel

1 play with 2 players in 2023

In Grand Austria Hotel you manage a hotel and its restaurant, attracting guests, fulfilling their orders, and prepping their rooms so they can stay after they've eaten. The game is played over the course of seven rounds, and each round you get two main actions, which you get by drafting dice that are rolled each round. The die's face tells you what action you're taking and the frequency of that die from the roll tells you the strength of the action, so with each action taken, the remaining action becomes weaker.

It would be pretty fair to call GAH a multiplayer solitaire - you can interact by competing for guests, racing for common objectives, and drafting dice, but overall you're focused largely on taking what's best for your hotel and what's the most efficient action available to you. It's a classic eurogame in that you'll always feel resource-constrained - whether that's cash, food items, available rooms, or especially the Emperor Track (a check similar to feeding workers that happens three times a game). Like so many of these games where you have a super-limited number of actions, your actions can trigger combos and give you a pretty great payoff.

I only played GAH once with four players, and that was my first go. I think the downtime is probably too significant, especially because turn order goes snake-draft style (1-2-3-4-4-3-2-1), which is too much for such a solitary game. But at two it's definitely a nice go-to for a couple that doesn't particularly need a ton of player interaction in their games, and it's got a super-cute theme to go with it.