Dave’s Top 80 Board Games of All Time 10-1

hello this is Dave for the Wizards keepin Muncie Indiana and today I'm continuing counting down my top 80 board games of all time with this video we finally made it my top 10 favorite board games of all time and at number 10 this pursuit of happiness and pursuit of happiness is a worker placement game where if you've seen several of my other videos you'll know that I'm a big fan of worker placement games this one I really like the idea cuz your workers are units of time you've got like these old wooden hourglasses which represents your time and you're placing those in different spots on the board that trigger different actions well the thing I really like about is the theme the theme of it is each person is basically playing a character that is going through their life cycle so you start off as a teenager and then every turn is like a decade until your feeble old man or old woman and your goal is to live the happiest life as possible how you do that is by using your workers or your your your time to gather different possessions like you could get like an entertainment center or a board game collection or whatever it might be to make sure character happy or you can involve your character in different projects different activities to generate happiness fight character you also can develop romances relationships which take up your time take up some of your time as upkeep but they can also generate different happiness or you can get different jobs which theoretically can generate happiness but ideally those generate resources for you that allow you to be able to purchase those different possessions or to upkeep those relationships or to of participate in those activities and that's why I really like about it by the end of the game none of you played a strategy worker placement game but you've also generated a story for your character and that's why I like Pursuit of Happyness my number 9 favorite game is a worker placement game by you've a Rosenberg now you've a Rosenberg is that mentioned several times in this list because he's probably my favorite designer but this is kind of as I put this list together I kind of had a soul-searching moment because typically my top ten is dominated by eBay Rosenberg games because once again he's one of my favorite designers and now you may rosenberg still makes the most appearances in this top 80 list but a lot of his games have kind of dropped a little and actually most of them were in the previous video my 2211 so this is my highest ranked worker are my highest ranked you've a Rosenberg and so by a solo by men by soul-searching moment is because another as a designer might be taking his place as you'll see later in this top 10 video as another designer starting to dominate the top 10 but for this you've a Rosenberg game it is a 2 player only worker placement game where the interesting thing in it is in addition to being a typical worker placement game where you're placed in different workers on spots to generate actions and resources you play it's over the course of several years that you're playing as your farmers and the I guess farming the fields of our own but each turn alternates between you have a summer turn and a winter turn so in the summer turns you can only put fulfil particularly summer actions whereas in the winter turns you get to fulfill different actions and so you have to kind of plan those ahead each turn the other thing about fields of ro though it does have a feed your people mechanic to it it's really minor and very easy to feed your people so it's probably what also moves it to the top of the list because it is a well-designed as all the things I like but a you very rosenberg worker placement game but without that kind of annoying feature of people mechanic that kind of dominates some of his other titles my number 8 favorite game is by the designer as shim phillips so this is part of his north sea trilogy and that is Raiders of the North Sea Raiders of the North Sea also the worker placement game but it's nice twist is on your turn there are two different types of actions you can take you can place workers to go on go on raids because it's a biking themed game so you can kind of go raid neighboring or coastal villages and by rating you basically place a worker on that spot and raid that location for its resources or you can decide to stay home and that's where you got to get this kind of interesting positional battle of the worker placement game because in the home section of of the board it has this concept of place a worker for an action and then pick up a different worker that has been previously placed on the board because each turn each each turn you start with one worker and you can either go raiding which you place that worker on the spot pick up the resources and the worker that's at that rating spot or you place it on the home section which is you place the worker there and pick up another worker and trigger two actions that turn and now you have another worker to start your next term with I really like that positioning at the at the home area where you're trying to plan out maybe turns a head each each time based on where different workers are located because you're ideally if you want there's two actions you want to perform on the home board area one of those places has to be empty and one of them has to be occupied though they do both of them in the same turn and I think I'll just kind of neat mechanic and things you have to kind of think of when you're playing the game and that's why I like Raiders are the north scene my number 7th favorite board game is I pick up a deliverer game Empire Builder that Empire Builder is kind of one of those quintessential euro games where it has this design of the theme of you're running a train Empire your train bearings but I really don't care that much about trains but it's really about the mechanics of the game and this one has like some of the most elegant worker plate I mean pick up and deliver mechanics and what I mean by that is that as essentially the game is literally picking up things and delivering them what you do and your turn is where you start the game with so much money and you use that money to buy tracks or where you wait what you do is it's kind of a dry erase board and you draw these lines on the board connecting dots that kind of represent the tracks of your infrastructure of your rail Empire and you use those tracks to build a move your train across going to different cities picking up goods to take them to other cities to fulfill different contracts that you have now each contract has three different options on on that contract that you can fulfill but you can turn in to get money but you always have three different tickets as well and that's part of the fun of this game is that kind of puzzle of seeing those three tickets with three different destinations on them and trying to puzzle out well what's the motion most efficient way to fulfill all of those tickets meaning ideally you want to be picking up goods from a similar region so let's say you're picking up tobacco and Savannah Georgia and you're also picking up cotton and Atlanta Georgia or something like that and a bill to take them to a similar location across the board so maybe you can drop a cotton off in Santa Fe New Mexico and you're dropping off that tobacco in Phoenix Arizona so that would be an ideal kind of play because you're picking up the goods in the same area and taking them to a and dropping off in a different area of the same in the same region and you take that money that you earn to pay for more tracks to kind of build your infrastructure or you can also upgrade your train giving it more load capacity or also giving it more speed so you can make those deliveries faster and in the end there are smaller cities in there major cities whoever connects six of the major cities to your tracks and gets the 250 million dollars first is gonna win the game and that's what I like about Empire builders my number sixth favorite game is an action selection game poor Rico in Puerto Rico every turn it's your turn you're going to select a role or in action and then after doing so everybody else is going to kind of do that same action so that's part of the interesting strategy of this game that I really like is whoever picks an action gets a benefit for picking that action for example let's say you pick the Builder action would let you to build buildings in your kind of colony in Puerto Rico you get a discount of one money to any building that you purchase for picking that action but then everybody else gets to build a building in turn order and that's the thing I really think is neat about this game because a lot of games you kind of try to figure out and decide what is the best thing for me to do and then you do that action and Puerto Rico you've got to be careful because you've got to figure out what's the best thing for you to do that doesn't help somebody else out more just like for example if you were wanting to be the pick the Builder so the Builder is the action that benefits you most but it's really gonna benefit me to you pick that building action and then I'm like well gee thanks and then I will build now I could probably pick the Builder action on my turn if I wanted to as well but if you pick it for me that means on my turn I get to pick another action which is gonna benefit me and I really like that dynamic in the game and that's what I really like about Puerto Rico my number five favorite game is kind of by designer shim Phillips and now he did the Raider or the North Sea trilogy which I had explores of North Sea shipwrecks of the North Sea and Raiders of the North Sea which was previously in this well explores I believe was number 80 on my list and Raiders was earlier in this video but this is his new trilogy and that is the West Kingdom trilogy and my number 5 here is architects of the West Kingdom now architects of the West Kingdom is also a worker placement game and it kind of seems where his North Sea trilogy each game was a little different North Star Raiders was a worker placement explorers was a tile laying game and ship rights was a card drafting take that game it feels like his West Kingdom trilogy is all going to be worker placement because we found with with Raiders of North Sea that worker placement is really I guess his where he excels that and architects is no exception and architects of the West Kingdom Minh twerkers on the board but you don't have like a pick up phase where you have like an other worker placement games meaning everyone placed their workers at the other tourney pick your workers back up and architects you just taking swap interns back and forth of the other players or really is end of phase so you're just keep places you have a pool workers and you just keep placing them on the board and some locations a lot of the resource generation spots you're going to place a worker generates buying resources I could say if maybe it's stone or wood you're gonna generate as much stone or wood based on the number of workers you have there so the first time you place a worker you get one wood next time you place a worker now you have two workers there so you get two wood and so on so but then there's another mechanic in the game where you can't go arrest people I guess for gathering like they're out there in the woods picking would you like yeah there's something sketchy going on about them woodsmen where there's so many of them out there so you can actually send what are your workers to go out and arrest either your own workers to get them back in the pool or to rest rival workers which you can kind of sell to the prison for money the benefit of that is while getting the money that you're selling the the workers to the prison to but also it kind of keeps resetting your opponent cuz if you let them set out there too much that means every action they take there exponentially getting more resources so you don't want you let your opponents build up too many workers in one spot so you got to decide when you're gonna take that action to arrest of one of your opponent's workers and that's one of the neat things about the architects of the West Kingdom is just has a nice system of how the workers continue keeps cycling in and those decisions you have to make and that's what I like about architects of the West Kingdom my number fourth favorite game is another worker placement game and that is viticulture and viticulture what you're doing is each person kind of owns a wine company and you're placing different workers on the board to generate actions like you do in all work or placing the games but ultimately you're trying to plan different set up different vineyards plant different vines that are going you're gonna be able to harvest to produce different kind of wines you have to kind of store your wine and age your wine in each turn you've got like a different chart on the board where you're kind of sliding these tokens along to kind of represent that you're aging the wine by one number each turn because the older the wine the more valuable the wine so you're able to sell older wine for more victory points you also have to kind of expand your capacity either your storage facilities allow you to hold wine longer or different type of I guess vineyard technology they grow certain types of grapes and also to collect these different contracts that allow you to sell different wine for victory points the other neat mechanic is is that especially with the Tuscany expansion which is one of the best expansions of all time it adds a new board to viticulture which allows you to have different seasonal phases and sort of like fills evarro you've got different worker placement spots based on the season but in viticulture it's you know all four seasons and you start with a large group of workers at the beginning of death of the year and you got to decide which season you're gonna place them and so you may not place any workers in the spring for example you just pass so you have those workers available to place in future seasons so there's lots of different decisions to make and that's why I like about viticulture my number third favorite game is I'm kind of an area control game I guess and that is clans of Caledonia clans account Dhoni uses a very similar system to probably the more popular sci-fi game Terra Mystica which I liked okay butter biscuit actually doesn't make my top 80 games but here claims of the Caledonian is near the top and maybe maybe it's you know this is not a you Bay Rosenberg game but it kind of feels like a you've a Rosenberg game it uses even the same art style is a typical hubei Rosenberg game and maybe that's why I subconsciously appeals to me maybe I really do like farming but in plan to cut down each player plays by different gusts the ancient Scottish clan and based on that actual historical plan they've got different special abilities kind of based on the actual historical clan like one clan is able to sell their milk that they produce for more money another one is able to age their whisky better and their friend bill T sell it for more money and use of all those money to basically kind of expand your farms allowing you to place different farms and facilities on the board which kind of create generates your engine and where you use that engine for is to fulfill different export contracts because the way the game is kind of set up is designed at the kind of Scottie sherry at Caledonia it is known for certain kind of resources I guess cheese and milk and bread and and whiskey but it doesn't but so it's a you take those resources that you can generate and you export them to kind of bring in figuratively other resources like sugar cane and cotton and tobacco and though you don't use those resources they basically just represent victory points but then that's what I really like about clans at Caledonia my number two favorite game and here's the kind of theme for my top for my for my top ten possibly the new designer maybe as he designs more games maybe he will replace you've a Rosenberg for me and that is shim full of paladins of the West Kingdom now like architects before in the Raiders also in this video this is a worker placement game game as well but it's interesting twist to it is that you get different types of workers kind of like or Leone's which I mentioned in my last video where you take these different types of workers and you're placing them on worker placement spots to generate actions but they have to be certain configurations of those workers let's say you need a red worker which represents a knight or a black worker which represents like the clergy to do different actions and you kind of put those in different combinations to to generate do your different actions and you've got it kind of balance between your your faith because order to do certain actions you also have like a threshold that you need you need like your military you need your economic power and you need your spiritual power and you kind of have to keep those in a balance so you can't just keep doing one as strategy over and over you have to kind of find a balance between all those strategies but at the same time there are also lots of different options in a very point salad type of concept so you do have a lot of different choices you don't have to do the same strategy over and over but at the same time you can't make elect the particular strategy too much so it's very very thinkI I really like that concept of like trying to figure out which type of workers do you want to get how do you build this balance to where you're raising your faith up so you can you you can be at the threshold you need to go through the military action that you want to do that gives you a economic power that you can go do another action and I really like that about paladins of the West Kingdom now my number one favorite game of all time every time I've done this list this is the second time I've compiled a list of videos prior to that I just wrote articles compiling my my list the first time I believe I did a top 40 list I wrote on Facebook then I did a top 50 list that I wrote on Facebook then last time I did a video series of top 60 and now my top 80 games the same game just keeps rising to number one now what I'm gonna throw these games in journal hopefully you're able to learn something about these games something that appeals to you something you want to check out but these are just my opinions these are what I like about these games they may not be your favorite games but this is what I like about them and if you hear something about that they'll let you want to check them out even if it's a game that I don't like that much but it really appeals to you please do check it out but I want to kind of put that as saying this is my favorite game of all time but it may not be your favorite game now a little background is what I got into gaming what got me in the game initially was playing role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and then later I started playing the collectible card game Magic the Gathering and that's what kind of guy I used to play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons in high school but I really didn't get part of like gaming community and hanging out at the Wizards keep and then later become an employee of the Wizards keep until I started playing magic and which then ultimately allowed me to take over and become the owner of the wizard scheme and that is B with all that background that is partially other reasons why this game is my number one game and that is the Pathfinder adventure card game and the reason being is Pathfinder is basically another name for Dungeons and Dragons by a different company but they so it's kind of like the dungeons in drag card-game so it has a lot of those elements that really appeals to me of Dungeons & Dragons of the kind of concept of like leveling up your character going on in adventures it has a campaign mode to it so it kind of tells the story over campaign as you level up your your character or your adventure deck that you build in this game so it has that dungeon and Dragons appeal to me that I always have a fondness for but then it's also a card game that kind of tickles some of those urges I got from from magic the concept of customizing your deck which cards do you want to keep in your deck how can you try out new you know getting new cards and acquiring those new cards and be able to say well next time I play I can't wait to see how this card works or how these cards work together and that's another thing you're able to do in the Pathfinder card game because ultimately what you're doing it's a cooperative game so everybody's working together kind of an adventurer party each person build your own deck of cards and those card that what your configuration of those decks is based on the character clasher playing sir playing a wizard character you're gonna have more spell cards in your deck if you're a fighter character you're gonna have more weapon cards and more armor cards in your deck and then you play through a series of scenarios most of those scenarios you're searching for a certain villain or a bad guy in a series of location index those location decks are at each a deck of cards and you when you encounter or go to that location you counter the top card of that deck drawing that card and if it is some sort of monster or obstacle or trap you have to overcome you have to fight it using using dice and cards from your hand or it might be a new item that you can find a new spell a new weapon that you might be able to pick up and acquire and then ultimately each scenario has its own kind of rewards but in addition to that at the end of the scenario you have to reconfigure your deck back to its original size but you get to pick and choose which cards you keep so let's say you found a better spell you found a better weapon you can keep that car kind of jettisoned the weaker version so as the game goes on through the campaign your deck is going to get more and more powerful and more and more dynamic and that's what I like about Pathfinder the adventure card game well thank you for checking out this series of videos as always if you have any questions about any of these games or any games in general feel free to shoot me some Facebook comment on YouTube or stop in to the Wizards keep until then thank you for watching all these videos and good gaming

Channel: David Barnette

Views: 5,999

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Id: t92KyIBnq-8

Length: 21min 57sec (1317 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020