10 - 1 :: My Favorite Board Games (2024 Edition)

the top 10 my of my favorite top 100 board games I am informal geek and we're going to get into it uh and just before I show you the table with all the games on it uh just to support spoilers for anybody or anyone who might be clicking in at the wrong time I got you covered so the description will have links to both the playlist as well as uh a way to jump straight into the number 100 just in case you want to start over without being spoiled um as well as a reminder to anyone who's watching this video please please if you're going to leave comments try not to mention the game titles instead reference the number so like hey I I thought all about your number seven or your number four is amazing to me whatever that is going to make it simpler for anyone who's jumping in right now to just enjoy this video and as well as enjoy the game that we that I've built into it so uh with that said that's the end of the spoiler warning we're going to get into it right now all right you can see everything uh on on the table here everything that we've uncovered so far all the games we've talked about uh now it's time to have some fun so um what we're going to do differently this time around is instead of showing you a certain number of teasers and reveals uh in order to see if you can guess what the game is based off of the component I'm going to do them one at a time so starting with my number number 10 that uses this component can you guess the game can you guess the game My Number 10 is Horizons Horizons from daily Magic game who makes who's really really known for games like uh like the Valeria Kingdom series and so on but Horizons is one of my favorite 4X style games uh this one does it in a pretty clean and simple way uh the actually the components are a little bit different than what you're seeing here but not by much um there are these stars or or or Suns if you want that are placed out in the center of the of the game area and over the course of the game players are going to be adding uh from a bag they're going to be pulling um a new planet and it's it's double-sided totally random but you do have a little bit of choice it's it's going to be two out of the possible six planets that are available and you're going to put it in a in a in a solar or in a system okay now why would you want to that why does any of that matter uh because at the end of the game we're going to be looking at majorities so this particular planet has I think all of them have three spots for uh player buildings but based on the type of buildings that you build they're going to be worth different points at the end of the game the game immediately ends I believe it's immediate once all of our once one player's colonies are all out um but there are or collectors and energy collectors which are the two major resources and uh so that's what you're trying to do is get planets put into system systems and then put your uh buildings onto them so that you have overall influence of majority of the entire system as well as individually for each planet uh the way that you do that is through uh through cards so you're always and everything on your player board is already out here so you're going to choose any two actions mix and match them and do them in any order you can Harvest explore adapt build and conspire so um basically you have cards that match there's there a deck of cards that matches each of the types of actions that you can take so in addition to taking the action here you can play a card from your hand that matches that symbol to do a boosted version of that um this this game is really clever with the decks of cards here uh so for example let's say you take an explore action that says draw and playe a planet gain a gain a victory point which can also be used to uh pay as a resource so you're going to draw a card from any of the stacks that you want from that what's showing revealing a new card with different abilities and such and then you're going to like that action of gaining a card also brings out an advances the game towards its conclusion um you can activate all different types of things you can build um one of the types of buildings that are out there or you can draw uh draw cards uh and take different types of actions so this does have a very abstracted 4X appeal to it but it still very much plays in that same Vin it doesn't have a whole bunch of components it's not overwhelmingly crazy um but it does have all that Forex strategy it is competitive you're trying to race and rush and get resources and interact with each other the players um there I do have the expansion that does include the exterminate side of things it's still not very heavy but I think it does add what you need to to round out this game experience so uh I believe this game is pretty much out of print but if you are able to find it and if you can find its expansion I would say that it expansion is a musthave to add that that fourth X of exterminate into the equation but yeah you're going to exploit and and expand like crazy though and um it's really fun and surprisingly I think you can get knock once you have a game under your belt you can easily knock this out in about an hour so that's Horizons my number 10 love this game all right let's take a look and see if you can guess what my number nine is this is that token recognize it hopefully you do it's pretty popular got a lot of Buzz last couple years and that is Ark Nova this is the economic Zoo Builder Sim uh actually maybe not the Sim but it's a zoo Builder this uses the really clever card system that you that I was mentioning about earlier when I was talking about civilization New Dawn where the strength of the car depends on whatever slot it's in and then once you use it it goes back to a a number one like the worst one so it's got like a charging element almost to these cards you can upgrade these to take better actions But ultimately you're trying to build a zoo um when the first time you play it's recommended everyone uses the same map but you can quickly jump into um any having unique maps and try to build the best do with with the layout that get um there's all different types of actions that you can take um that are most I mean I have this expansion now but I've only played it with the expansion ones the expansion does give you um some asymmetry between players because normally everyone has the same exact cards with the same Powers so I do like the expansion so far but I don't have enough to say if this is going to boost the game up high or not um but even without that it's still really really really fun game it's my number nine at this point right so what makes this game the most most interesting for me is not only are the cards fun to look at um but this has what I would consider like the terraforming Mars aspect of trying to manage um a really tight economy of income with um matching up tags like for example if you want to build this Jaguar you need to have at least one of these one of these icons out there already even though it gives you gives you one um so you kind of have to build towards certain animals especially the big powerful ones and that gives you a theme to go after um and I think that that is something that I like to do now this game does have an insanely amount of cards so you you never really are going to you're going to have a strategy that gives you a vision but really it's like doing well in this game is going to come down to um how well you adapt to what you get and what's available the expansion does add some mitigation techniques into the game which I do appreciate but I've only got one game under my belt so I can't recommend it just yet but check out a review on that by someone else cuz I'm not covering it but you're trying to you're trying to build the best zoo you're trying to be the first to complete certain objectives you're uh constantly fighting over um you know these these things are tight these are first come first serve and you only get one of these to start with one of these um I forget the name of the assistants or so that you put out so where are you going to go you're going to build an alliance with a different nation and that gives you access to building those cards you're going to um invest into some early science or abilities to or ways to generating uh or having a a bigger hand size you're going to in uh invest in putting a cube down in one of these tracks assuming you meet the criterias like it's one once uh person can go there like it can get pretty tight uh pretty quickly um so yeah that's the game I think it's I think it's a lot of fun it's way more complex than than I'm doing to touch this game and explain it oh I didn't even mention the Crux of this game is you've got these two tracks that you're managing and the conservation and the um attraction so one the attraction is really really really incremental you're getting tickets to come see you and then the overall conservation is how well you're doing um in the grand scheme of what you're doing with your animals and once those two tracks meet right and and eventually cross and go farther you're looking at the gap between those two tracks so if this one goes all the way around here and and passes this red marker and ends here then I'm looking at what the difference is between this red and this red and counting that as my points and whoever has the highest spread in between those two once they cross is the winner and yeah I think that is it's not used in a lot of games but every game that it is used I tend to like and I don't have Rogers of the gas on my list right now but that would be another one I think if I played that more it would definitely bump up because I do like dice placement if you as you've noticed but yeah Arc Nova is a really excellent game uh it's my number eight I'm sorry my number nine moving on to my number eight though is a game that uses this token I'm be surprised if you don't guess this one because it has been out for a little while and it has had a lot of Buzz it's very very popular by a lot of Gamers and that is viticulture I'm showing you the essential because this is what you can buy right now and it's all you need it's essential now I go go back and forth between this and the tuskany board although I like elements of the tusky board I don't like playing with it all the time um I think that this game is is really fun I also have because I played this game so many times I've used we do have a household that we use that uh I think is pretty common I found it on um on Board Game Geek in one of the forums I think or one of the files where whenever you draw cards you draw two and keep one um that just like I guess that's game group dependent like if you are playing with people who who generally don't like Randomness or maybe like swings of luck then that would be helpful to kind of have a more controllable experience and ultimately you're going to do whatever you need to do uh to have a good time with your friends so that's one way to look at it I do appreciate that variant exists but I'm okay with you know losing do the bad draws because I did the best I could with what I got I think that's okay there's no instant you know I don't think this game would be as popular today if if that were such a major problem so I I'm I'm spending way more time talking about it than I think the actual game this is work placement game uh it's split up into two phases you've got summertime and wintertime for the base game here uh you've got this workup track which is based off of Turn order you can you you call dibs on what bonus you want to get and whatever bonus you get determins what the actual round order will be for that for that round so if you go late you get some pretty good good stuff but you're also going late so other players are going to be blocking up these faces before you there's a a nice moment where you have to decide to um pass uh with whatever workers you have left over because you don't anyone that you put out in the summer is locked in until the end of the round so whoever you have left is what you get to use in the winner and the actions are very different like this is mostly going to be around dealing with Summer visitors and planting grapes uh over here you're going to be harvesting them turning them into wine and then selling them like those three big actions are wrapped up into a single tightly contested um space of the board what I'm not showing you here in the tusy board that I do like a lot is the board in which splits this up into four seasons that is my favorite element of the tusky board but there are some other pieces in there for you to explore but if you don't get any of that you only get the this essential Edition for vulture you're still having a great time this is such a fun accessible game to a lot of people and I think what does it a lot of benefits is that everyone can understand and respect the process of creating wine it makes sense it's logical and so yeah upgrading your there's lots of nice successful feelings when you're upgrading and building buildings on your board out and getting a good amount of bonuses so VI culture is an awesome game I still love it to this day um I don't know if anyone else does this but I learned this from one of my one of my first gaming groups we were playing with Kudos you guys you know who you are where we um whenever we sell grapes as wine we would refer to that as um boxed wine and uh the Winter Soldier was popular so we called the white that that one worker the Winter Soldier so when we still do that to the day I think it's fun to have a little bit of meta in there anyways that's F culture my number eight hope you enjoy it too let's take a look at my number seven do you recognize oh I don't want to quit but do you recognize this token this piece I hope you do because it's an awesome game it's distilled it's a spirited strategy game it's basically it's a different actually I I didn't do it on purpose but I did not realize I put two processing style games back to back holy smokes I can't believe I just did that so going from building uh and crafting and building wine we're doing we're doing Spirits instead whis rums and all sorts of stuff but the gameplay is so different this is not a worker placement game um here is a push your luck style of game with elements of resource management and stuff like that so on your turn uh you're going it's a market phase everyone goes around turn order doing something you're going to be getting some basic ingredients you're going to get special items B premium ingredients or you're going to hire up hire uh you're going to be building upgrades so it's like upgrades to your Warehouse or or hiring assistance that let you do better stuff this uh does not resemble like a really really true to to hearted Spirit of what what it takes to make uh spirits but I think it do a good idea to put you in the theme because you're going to um be required to have at least one element of of yeast I believe and one element of water which turns into alcohol cards that kind of mucks up the or just adds variability into the deck that you have and then you add in all of your ingredients your plants and your um grains and so on and and you're going to shuffle this little deck up and take the top card and the bottom card out of the out of the deck and whatever you have left is the recipe for your uh your your your drink so you're going to look at your chart over here and decide if you made something great like rum or whiskey or you ended up just making somewhere moonshine instead so they all have benefits and costs um you do not have access to everything over here you do have to spend money to earn or I'm sorry to learn the recipe but once you've learned it then you can craft it assuming you have the right recipes I'm sorry the right ingredients but The Pusher luck element is really fun and there are plenty of ways of mitigating it so don't think it's like a giant random Fest it's not this game is one of those games that Teeters on overproduced which I think helps to get it played man but the it's really figuring out how to get the right ingredients and special and then you know try to get like you can play Super conservative and almost guarantee that you're always going to be able to get what you need um but I don't know if you're going to do very well so there there is a need for that Pusher Lu to exist uh even though there are plenty of ways of trading in cards basic cards to get you whatever you might need like the things that you might be missing so a lot of mitigation uh this is a solo J that's being shown right now um but you know it check it out this is this is such a really fun game distilled my number uh seven can't believe I put so close to video culture it's funny all right here we go number six can you come on can you figure out what the what my number six is based off of this token well it's the other animal game that I happen to like a lot and it's life of the Amazonia now I do want to preface that although this is higher on my list I don't think it's I it's it's a really good design but it can be definitely clunky to learn um so in this game you're building your own jungle um so this is not like Arc Nova where you're building your own Zoo but it is kind of similar that you're building something but game to game game to game Sorry my dogs are just like up and about they must know it's like lunchtime um game to game you're going to choose a configuration of these there's a couple of I think there's three side or two sides to these uh I'm sorry there's two cards which gives you four sides to use and some are easier and some are harder than others and that is what varies from game to game but also can swing the complexities from these games and a lot of these are are different types of patterns so like this MAA version I don't exactly know what it is but it wants to it looks like wants to be you know um next to uh trees so however many trees it's next to is a certain number of points that you can get so player count dictates how many of these animals are available from game to game two so there's a little bit of that you know try to get try to build a strategy to build a jungle that that meets what you can so you can get the most of those animals in your in your jungle but I think what makes this game so fun is it's similar to orle maybe not not so much Orleans but uh similar to like quacks of Quin bird in a way where you you do have a bag that you're pulling these tokens from and that determines what you can do so you buy if you get if you pull a couple of leaves then you can go up the waterfall track to either put out some new trees or or to um grow your your jungle out by pulling more of the by getting a tile out here from the market uh you can get water tokens which will uh let you put water the water flowers out into the river spaces or you can increase your backpack and that right there the backpack I think is the cleverest thing for a game like this I think every game in the future should have something like this in it what the backpack does is you draw whenever you draw chips and you and you have the five chips that you have for the round right assuming you don't have techniques to get you some additional chips sometimes you're just going to get a bad draw well what the backpack does by default its value is one it says that no matter what you draw you can keep one chip until your next round so you might keep your best one or you might keep something you're just not using right now well you can upgrade this to eventually have four I believe it's no it's four water you can have three so you draw five right and you might draw exactly what you you don't draw exactly enough so for example to build a two can it look like you need five fruit and two water so you drew all the fruit but no water no worries you can keep three of you can keep three tokens up there so maybe keep all the whatever gave you all the fruit and a little bit of water until your next turn when your next turn comes by you're drawing another five tiles you're going to have eight tiles to work or eight chips to work with that turn so although it does suck to be like well I didn't do much on of this turn boy are you ramping up to have a super turn and it does that all the time so there's a lot of things to sort of Gro here it's the you know you're pulling gold chips to buy better chips very much like qu qu Linberg and other style games you've got some mitigation for when you get the bad draws in there kind of like Orleans where you can keep workers behind and you still have capacity to draw more you've got um optional cards you can go after for Boost and endgame scoring or instant use cards you've got all these fun uh fully screen printed animals to put into your jungles this is a presentation game and it's so fun I do have the Marine worlds expansion nothing to be real that's the arcn NOA expansion whatever I have the expansion for this which includes another variant of cards for each of the animals and it does include a family variant which are simpler cards to use Unfortunately they did bundle that into an expansion which kind of shame on them in a way uh because that family variant is what makes this uh accessible to a couple of my older kids who are in that like 9 to 12y old range and because of that that's why we're playing the game as much as we are I really wish that was not an expansion but if you've got an age group of people that you want to play that's not super complex Gamers like that's the way to go but if you are you know into more heavier thinker games you can you can figure out how to deal with the terminology and groupings and stuff uh this can be this this can then swing up the scale of complexity and I like that um I like the Spectrum there a lot which is I think why this game is so high in the list because I can have so much fun playing it in different ways and the solo is pretty good actually so there's that that's out there for you unfortunately I have to have one more ding to it uh component quality is not fantastic for this game it's really easy to bend some of the some of the cardboard um and stuff I did put a little bit of superg glue to help hold these things together uh and most importantly I bought uh coin capsules they sell upgraded um upgraded chips for these I don't like them they stick to they still stick to each other because of the the the the sticker that they're using does have some I guess some static charge when you put it into the bag I don't know they seem to still stick to each other it's not terrible but it's a problem that's annoying if you were just Dro another the $35 for an already expensive game so I I dropped um I think another 12 bucks um to buy all the coin capsules that I needed and it sure it you know just like sleeping can take time it's an investment but those coin capsules they look good they fit everything totally fits in the trays and it's easier to pull so I would recommend that too there just no going in it's a super cool game is a little overpriced especially for the quality that you get um so that's a barrier here but it I love that game so much all right we're going to go into number five territory now here we go my number five game my favorite top five game is using I almost said it it uses this um this symbol I should say not always this token because it's for a specific thing but uh but yeah it uses uses that that logo there it's Cosmic Encounter this game is almost as old as I am um it's been around forever it is definitely stood the test of time because you know what people like to be silly with people and they like to play a game that is also relying on some strategy um there is really not much else like this out there either which I think helps cosic encounter is such a flexible game uh but the goal of the game is that you playing you playing alien faction and you've got five planets in your home system and you've got ships on all of them you're trying to get ships on any five other colonies or have colonies on five different planets I should say so if I were the yellow player I've got one here I've got one here I have one here and I have one here I have four points I'm one point away from winning right um so how do you do that so there is a you're going to you're going to draw draw a card and it tells you who you encounter so you don't get to choose it is random and it does help with the themes of the game you're going to have some crazy alien power that breaks the rules in some way it's crazy to think that there's over 150 probably closer to 200 different aliens out there now throughout all the expansions but even in the base game box I think there's 80 or so there's a lot of aliens and they all do different things they're all really well written on their on their cards you don't have to look up the rule books for for for many things and you interact with them you you have an encounter you say all right I've got this warp gate I'm bringing in x amount of ships from any of my locations and then the defense is you know going to have a chance well both teams are going to have a chance to call in for allies like hey who wants to piggy back on this on this attack over here hey who wants to come and you know try and defend with me and then both of the main people people are going to play one card face down from their hand has to be an encounter card but you can be encounters vary between morps and negotiates and attacks and you can have a little table talk here like hey let's negotiate I have a negotiate card do you have a negotiate card yeah sure maybe you do and you flip them over and if they happen to both be negotiates you have one minute to strike a deal and usually early game it's let's just trade planet for Planet I'll let you put a ship on my planet you let me put one on yours sometimes it'll be you know what I'm not going to let you do that but if you let me put one of my ships on one of your planets cuz clearly you're in the lead and I'm not I'll trade you a couple of cards sometimes you can negotiate just to purposefully not come to an a deal and if you don't strike a deal in a minute all of the ships all of the ships uh the main character ships are lost to the warp so there's you can kind of Hose someone on that way too so if you have a group that can mess around with each other and have a little bit fun interactive wise this game is so good it like it's a Memory generator let's put it that way oh man it's crazy and you know and there's ways of you know fighting against each other like um you know this person plays an eight this person plays a 12 you count up your ships who has the majority they win oh actually but I'm the alien that says you know losers win or I'm the alien that says you know before you flip those over I'm going to randomly choose what I think my card will be like there's so many spin-offs of this stuff it's such a silly silly game um but that's Cosmic Encounter my number uh my number five I love this game I probably always love this game my kids a couple of my older kids are at that age where we're getting ready to play we just haven't had the right time for me to introduce it to them yet but we're in the summer now so I guarantee you this summer we're playing Cosmic Encounter at least at least a couple times we'll probably bring some of their friends in too it's going to be nuts works great with teenagers uh it's a great family style game because again it does have some complexities to learn but I think a lot I play I played this game with brand new Gamers before and um I did have to piggyback them and help them out because you know there's a lot of like you you do need to know how the game plays to do well and questions can kind of ruin that for you but if you're willing to play that role as support for someone U newcomers can have another can equally do well on this game and it's a fantastic negotiation Style game with with fun powers all right we're number four now let's check it out number four can you figure out what the game is based off of that component or even just add icon hopefully you do I imagine you do because it is another very very very popular game um and despite having it tied to an IP it is still a very good game and that is Dune Imperium I love this game um there's a lot to look at here but I promise you it's really not that complicated compared to some of the other games I've already shown you in this list and even previous lists uh this game uh tries to marry worker placement and deck building but this is way more of um of a worker placement game that than it is a deck building game in my opinion um and the reason for that is because when you play a card the tags on the left here determine what action spaces you can send workers to if I had per performed worm Riders then I can only go to a blue space or a triangle space A blue circle space and there that's these spaces here these are the triangles and these are the the blue circles or couple triangles up here too that's it like I play those cards so I have access to these these locations I put an agent out and I do the thing that's there so it's worker placement in the same vein as like Lords of Water Deep almost this does feel it does have some similarities to Lords of Water Deep because there are intrigued cards that you can play and keep secret but for the most part you're going to get re resources um the resources are very limited there's only two types mainly there I guess there's three types but mainly you're dealing with um spice and Solari the the orange and the white um but then some of these other cars like seek allies let you go and and visit the other um factions in the game not player factions but just other races in the game so like this card will let me interact with only these spaces over here which will let me you know get more troops and put them into battle or discard a card to draw cards or get more intrigued cards or get more of these red cards which U it's like a it's like a future card where um if you draw that card you have access to any space basically on the board but you have to get rid of it you can't keep that card so it's an investment piece and the reason you would interact with these places these spaces is because oh wait it's also a race game you're you're trying to be the U you're trying to have the most points but the end of the game is triggered as soon as someone hits 10 points and when you are interacting with these other races as soon as you go up the track twice just twice you get a victory point and and then if you can interact with them again two more times and you're the first person to sort of cross into this orange threshold then you get this uh faction chip showing that your alliance your alliance is is is good with them and that's also worth a victory Point uh but this Victory Point can get stolen um but if you're the first player that actually max out the track you've locked it in you got that Victory Point here so every one of these tracks has the potential of 10 point or 2 4 6 eight points no one's ever going to get eight points from the track but it's possible but you're going to get the majority of your points here uh and then the majority of your points through combat so every round finishes there's going to be a combat card displayed that tells you you know what are the rewards for first second and third in this particular battle first place gets two points and a control marker uh Second Place gets this a card and three spice and so on uh the way and combat is also really fun in this game uh because you have uh troops in your Garrison but they can only enter the combat when you go to a place that has these these little x's on them so you know the basic cards let me go here and then by going there and doing whatever the action says I can do then I get to also move troops from my Garrison into the conflict and um eventually we'll play cards and and and maybe get some boosts to that and it's kind of where that that feel of of U wordss of Water Deep comes in because it's like hey I'm playing this card and look at that I get five more I get five more power um it's got typical deck builder type of elements there's some because uh these this icon over here uh represents your ability to buy new cards from a market so it's got like a Clank vibe to it in some ways there too it's a hodgepodge of stuff um and the theme does kind of play nicely I do like that they used um like you can tell that that the characters match the way that they look in the movie but they're not frames from the movie it's like an art filter put over them or whatever like I appreciate that so it still feels like a game especially if you never watch the movies um man there's so much going on in this game I'm sorry even though there's so much going on in this game like it's still not that inaccessible it's not it's really not a a very very very complex game compared to some others um but if you if you like Clank if you like V culture if you like Lords of Water Deep like this might be a good step up to go have some fun and that is Dune Imperium uh my number four favorite game at the moment and now we're in top three territory top three this is my number three favorite game uh sorry for like the fuzzy icon it's not that fantastic uh but I love forx games sty 4X style games this one is like the Beast of them all in my opinion not like overly complex from like a perspective of Forex that will take you forever like this is not Twilight Imperium I don't ever see myself enjoying that game so that's like the ultimate side of the spectrum this is leaning towards that side of the spectrum and that is Heroes of land air and sea what makes this game special is that it still kind of plays out like a Euro game and I um I like that a lot so it involves a good amount of resource management it kind of invokes that feeling of of exploiting the lands and exploring in combination with each other to do better and cooler things so this is the main board for a four player game each player starts on their own continent with their own structures has really awesome components it does take a little bit of work to put them together um and I did use Drops of superlu so that they do Stay Together uh but there are a lot of constructs in this game so you've got a three tiered Tower you each player has um three of these oh maybe these are called towers and this is like their Capital City whatever you get three of these to per faction every faction has a flying construct and a and a and a and a boat construct which holds miniatures is in there as well and then then that's how you can Traverse across the waters um you're trying to control certain terrains and if you draw resources from them based on the terrain type you can get you move up your certain tracks for those types of of resources um there are a bunch of exploration tiles out there that you can explore both water and on land uh there's also I have all the expansions so there's an expansion that does include like a bird race so there's a floating island as well um and you're doing all of this so that you can upgrade your units you can upgrade your castle like the better that you upgrade your Capital like this is the basic for everyone right now but if you upgrade your Capital City suddenly um all of your uh in this case it would be like the paladins um they all get an upgrade as well uh you can and and it represents building like a a cathedral a Tavern a seaoc the air Spire like you're building these things and you're also unlocking even more fun abilities for all of your that are on the board uh you're trying and and so even though this is a 4X Style game uh the winner doesn't automatically get assumed by the person who achieves that X first so forx stands for explore exterminate exploit and um expand got that one wrong so for example exploring is going around the is going around and picking up these exploration tokens so you don't win the game just by finishing by by by having all the exploration tokens be be picked up uh expanding you can get all of your units out and built and onto the board uh you don't immediately win the game just because you did that or exploiting is where you're trying to use the resources to build up your capitals again you don't instantly win so there is still victory points to tie to this game so obviously doing those things well is good for you but you're managing or even um exterminate uh you can it's really really really hard to do which I appreciate but you can um go to anyone uh factions capital and have combat with it and if you can destroy it completely that player is eliminated from the game and it does end the game but it doesn't guarantee that you're going to win it does guarantee that that person's out of the game so if you see someone running up the track like this Brown player is uh you might want to kick down their front door and if you if you do that you can technically eliminate them from winning the game and still lose because another player has got different ways of getting victory points so that's really cool and entertaining and the last part I want to mention is in combat uh everyone has the same hand of cards although there's a variant that's being shipped from kickstarters right now but the main game is everyone has the same deck of cards and in combat you play a card um you do you can't just play any card you want some of these cards do have costs on them so you've got to pay for example if I want to play this too I have to pay four of my of my resources of this green track so I have to have the resources um a retreat card um costs to Brad but it will let you move all of your units to a capital city and you lose two points like you can do certain things to mitigate winning or losing combat um or or uh just to come to the loss I mean there's so many things that you can do just in the interplay between players of here there's spells and upgrades like there's so much going on here um but the experience is again memorable um I don't love this game at high player accounts but I do think it plays good at three which is really odd for a game like this usually you'd want to play two or four but even at three um it's pretty cool because there's a there's a like it's easy to get to this even if you're across from here so anyways I'm not going to talk about that anymore here's the land a z is my favorite 4X style of board game that and and I think strictly because oh I didn't talk about this but even strictly because you you've got all the resource management and and and buildings and upgrades and spot and spots of here but it also even has the the follow mechanic which oh man there's so much goodness here I'm not going to talk about that anymore I'm going to move on for my number two game but Heroes land see is an amazing amazing design here we go number two time y'all do you recognize this piece that's my number two game uses this funky little dude dude um and that is here Raiders of the Raiders of the North Sea now I have a caveat this is my number two game because of the expansions however I think that the base game is perfectly great in its own right but for me I love playing with all the extra elements they add to this game but when I play with my my oldest daughter for example we pretty much only play base game and we still have a great time so in this game uh it this it's got a little bit of deck building in there and it's got a little bit of work replacement in there as well there's another one of those hybrids but man this what makes this game so fun and unique is on your turn you always have one worker of a certain color black gray or white and on your turn you have to play that and you and so there are certain places here that are like you can only place a gray and a white you can place a gray and white otherwise you can play the black ones anywhere so on your turn you have to place it first take the action of the location and then you have to pull a worker off the board and so let's imagine I I went to the barracks which lets me add one I can pay the cost of a of a card in my hand and add it to my crew but then I have to pull one of these other workers off the board and then take the action there so maybe I pull from the town hall and I and I play a card for my hand for its ability or I go to the gate house and I draw two cards so like you always always Place do an action pull do an action or you pillage you try going out there and pillage the pills the areas there's different cost and requirements like if you want to do the harbor you have to have three um um uh what do they call these there um supplies oh I can't think of the name I'm blinking out oh I can't think of the name you have these three resources and you need to have a crew size of at least two if you do that you take the worker that you had which is most likely going to be a black one and it stays here at this location you get all of the resources that are here and then you pick up your gray worker and then you use that so the game sort of decays the the black units and you're going to get more of these gray and white units in in into the game which so there's a nice ramp up there uh you get victory points for what you pillage later in the game some of these other locations not only do the costs go up but you have these two dice that you roll which may give you extra points as well so you can't see it here on this picture but there are there's two rewards here if your total strength is at least one value you get this one but if it can exceed this one you get more points and this particular one will let you roll one dice so you can do that to help boost you up there's all of these really interesting combos that you can pull with the cards like if you add them to a crew you pay one less provision that's what they're called provisions when raiding outposts but if you just play them and get rid of them you can use it to gain a provision in silver so like there's so many things you can do in this game um but I really enjoy it and the expansions they do add layers uh to this onion like other yls that you can get and defeat there's other um things that you can do with the resources there's um ways of of temporarily boosting your strength by getting your by drinking some Mead uh there's there's uh tracks that you can go up so as you earn as you uh add armor and strength to your units you gain victory points as your units die and go to Valla you're getting victory points and in as you remember the Fallen the Fallen your Fallen units man this game is so cool and it's one of my favorites and barely ever ever will ever say no to a playing game of Raiders of of the North Sea all right time for the number one game my favorite game right now I love this game and hopefully you can recognize it from this component do you my favorite game my number one favorite game out of all 100 that I've talked about every other game I've played since the pursuit of happiness now I want to remind yourselves like I mean you should see it like my game is a complete array of different styles of game and some are designed better than others um I'm never going to say that this is the best designed game but man is this game fun and again this tells a story and leaves you with an impression and a memory every time you play it this is the Euro game of life this is a game that I can play with my kids and we can all do well and have a good time so it's accessible to a lot of people and man is this really going to leave you inspired to change maybe change something in your life when you're done playing it um you're you know in in in this game you start off as a teen and you progress through adulthood until eventually old age uh there's a stress track that's over here and if you take every time you start around you take on certain amounts of stress but if you take on too much stress during your old age you die so technically speaking you can be eliminated in this round when players can still have two more rounds after that although it's not rare but it's definitely uncommon to get this far so most people tend to die in this in this round here um and that's okay so sometimes like again going back to the name of the game The Pursuit of Happiness the name of this game is long-term happiness that is what the victory track represents your victory points come in the form of long-term happiness sure you can earn some short-term happiness right but the most and and if you have a pretty low stress life you're going to be getting you're going to be able to do more in your turn um but you know doing things like working overtime uh will give you a little bit extra extra money I believe and but it'll cause you some more stress getting a temporary job can give you some money um learning you know studying can get you some knowledge and these are the resources that you use in the game to spend for the things that you do uh you can get a job you can even get into a relationship and these all and this is so clever this is so clever your workers are in the shape of an hourglass and so when you're deciding what action to take you're literally spending time I know it's kind of hokey whatever but I'm spending time to develop my relationship right for example or I'm spending time to go and study how much time do I have left to spend during this time of my age and um and and you can do things like um going out and participating in in activities or getting items you can go ahead and uh work in projects uh you can get a job you can get in a relationship with folks and all these things requires uh time energy and resources anyways by the time it's done uh you should have a pretty fun story to tell and uh Pursuit of Happiness is my favorite game I love this game so much I do have not all but some of the expansions I don't recommend them especially in your first time playing but if you do want to add wrinkles to the strategy uh they're out there for you you can get uh your kid you can get child traits uh which kind of act like AB abilities you can get things like uh Community projects and stuff anyways it's it's a lot of fun I would well obviously I would highly recommend it it's my number one favorite game and that's it that's my top 100 The Pursuit of Happiness I'll just run through them all over I'm not going to run through them one by one but you can see the top 10 here uh Pursuit of Happiness is reigning Supreme Over Raiders of the North Sea Heroes of landarc Dune Imperium Cosmic Encounter life of the Amazonia distilled V culture Arc Nova and Horizons really enjoy really enjoyed putting this all together for yall and like I said before I really hope my goal with this series of videos isn't to just talk about things that I love but hopefully talk about something that you haven't heard of or something you've forgotten about and get you inspired to go try those things out and play them for yourselves and hopefully find some new favorites for yourself so with that we're going to conclude my series of the top 100 thanks for going along with the journey with me and um if you've got anything you want to let me know please I'm I'd love to hear it anyways thanks so much for watching and I'll catch you sometime in the future bye

Channel: Informal_Geek

Views: 3,688

Keywords: Geek32, Board Games, Top 100

Id: HLnySdyAR4Q

Length: 49min 21sec (2961 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 04 2024