Our Top 50 Board Games of All Time - (#1-10)

hi everyone my name is monique and i'm naveed from before you play and welcome to the final video in our top 50 board games of all time which is also known as our top 10 games of all time that is true currently stands yes and also happy new year to everybody out there because uh we are now in 2022 so um hope you're having a wonderful holiday season so far so we've done four other videos like this leading up to this one so this is the big final uh wrap up i guess if you want to call it that home stretch the home stretch uh we do share a collection so there may be a lot of crossovers here so we'll talk about those when we get there and as per usual we are going to have one final giveaway that is paired with this video thank you so much to all the publishers who we partnered with in the other four videos uh thus far and uh as usual stay tuned until the very end of the video to hear what this giveaway is and without further ado here are our top 10 board games of all time starting with number 10 naveen who does go first okay i'll go first make sense uh so number 10 for me this is a game that i've talked about on the channel before but we have not actually played it on the channel it's designed by three different designers back in 2014 uh gil de ore uh nuno bizzaro sentero and paulo soledad and it's published by stronghold games it's a game called panamax ah nice yes panamax okay so this game essentially what you're doing is you are trying to fulfill different contracts of uh cargo by moving literally um cargo on these card ships or these token ships across the panama canal from one side from the east all the way to the west it gets very interesting because in the canal you can get passive movement but from your opponents because there's kind of a blockade or a a bottleneck in the canal so you can kind of camp in the canal and then have other people passively move you through so you're not wasting actions just trying to get your cargo across it's a fantastic game there's an economic aspect of it because there is also a stock market where you are investing in not only your own company right but you can also invest in other players companies if you see that they're doing something really really well right uh and ultimately it's the person who's run the best business uh wins the game yeah i was gonna say it's truly an economic game right it is most money most planned yep so this is a very interesting uh dice selection action selection kind of component to it where all the diets are just laid out in the middle of the board and depending on which dice you select is what action you get to take and how strongly you get to do so i suppose that's exactly it and this is a game that was also on a previous list it's one of the the games i believe that you're never getting rid of that's right yeah that's exactly it so uh that was in a previous video i mentioned this is one of my 10 games that i would not want to get rid of i think it's out of print so i do and if you apologize see it and you like those kind of games i would highly recommend panamax so that is my number 10 that is panamax nice great choice all right moving on to my number 10 this is a spoiler so anybody who is going to be following along with the continuation of our uber rosenberg series this is an uber rosenberg game um and uh if you prefer not to be spoiled on what our final lineup is going to be then feel free to skip ahead right now but uh but yes my number 10 is designed by ubi rosenberg and published by lookout games in 2013. this is a game that i mentioned previously but i don't think i've ever spoken about before maybe not yeah and it is called kaverna the cave farmers oh my gosh this is large as well you got to kind of hold it together or else all the oh hold it and talk about it fall out so this is a game if you've never played cabrena before this is kind of like the follow-up to agricola this is the other farming game it's the one that people will ask the question which one do you prefer vikla or caverna and clearly as it stands right now i prefer caverna and so that's why this is a spoiler but this is kind of the more sandboxy version of agricola you can do a lot more it encourages you to do to find more combos it's just a larger kind of scale game and not as restrictive it definitely scratches that kind of a euro itch for me it introduces the adventuring you know you can go with your people and adventure and then like you'll have like a menu of items to choose from it's just a lot more feel good in that sense but also still has the the restriction in some ways that agricola initially um kind of implemented yeah agricola is pretty uh punishing or you you have to worry about getting punished this one is a little bit more sandbox exactly so yeah uh i i've only played this one i think twice so i don't have too much experience with it but i'm looking forward to our plays of it yeah leading up to our uber rosenberg series i will say one of the first time ever one of the first times i've ever played cover now was with the expansion the forgotten folk expansion and honestly i'm a fan of asymmetry and so i i feel like i would probably never play it without that as long as everybody around the table agrees yeah because the forgotten folk expansion is really interesting it gives everybody kind of an asymmetric uh player faction i suppose and each faction has a benefit as well as a hindrance and i thought that that was really interesting and it's very thematic to what your your faction or kind of character is yeah i've the two plays i've had of it we did not play with the uh forgotten folk expansion so i am very unfamiliar with it but i am intrigued by it because of course we do like asymmetry it kind of like leads you yeah in a direction right so anyway that is my number ten this is kaverna the cave farmers okay my number nine this is our first crossover for this list so we're gonna do something a little bit different the next time it shows up on monique's list or vice versa then we'll talk about it then makes sense make sense so that way it's a little bit closer to number one exactly yeah a little bit easier okay so all right so hunting it off to you mysterious all right thank you well then my number nine is a crossover from a previous video so i will talk about it now and this is a game that was designed by rob davio and matt licock and published by z-man games in 2015. it is none other than pandemic legacy season one specifically season one this well yes yes cause this is the only one uh if you know us uh we've only played to completion yeah season two we're still stuck in somewhere in august right it remains that way we are legacy games slackers yes so um anyway if you did not catch the previous videos or if you're not even familiar with this game this is a legacy style game based off of the pandemic uh base series which is a game where you're saving the world from these four diseases you're trying to cure them it's fully cooperative it's a good time a very popular base game that they turned into a legacy style game that that changes over the course of 12 months in the game each game scenario is one month and so what's cool about this one is if you fail it uh then you get a little bit of help to redo the same month again and if you fail it again then you just kind of move on to the next one and all of the pandemic legacy seasons seasons one two and zero all kind of follow that same format i think we think about zero we have not seen that one yet unknown but either way you're doing things like ripping up cards you're opening envelopes it's very exciting because you do a thing and then you get to discover something and it's going to change the way you play the game and even if you're really really used to the pandemic um base game it's it's really really refreshing to play something like that the game plays out kind of like a tv show like yeah you're playing through a season of a tv show like uh i get i used to watch the show 24 and it really feels like that kind of like you're going from one episode to the next episode yeah and like what's gonna happen now especially if you get really into it yeah but this is definitely in my top ten um i would say more just the entire idea of it this is my favorite legacy style game so far and i'm always on the lookout for more and more legacy games i can kind of add to my legacy game entourage i guess if you have a favorite legacy game that's not pandemic pandemic legacy please let me know because i really really enjoy that kind of discovery aspect to it but yeah this is my number nine favorite game of all time this is pandemic legacy season one okay my number eight is an exact crossover with monique i think this is our last exact crossover where my eight is her eighth i think so we can talk about this together uh this one came out back in 2017 designed by two different designers jen's drogon mueller and helge ulstertog and it's now published by capstone games our copy is from z-man games and it is gaia project woo-hoo mystica game oh my gosh uh so this one is if you're familiar with either this or terra mystica they kind of follow a very similar um design styles and essentially what you're doing is it's kind of a kind of not a space opera but essentially what you're trying to do is it's a tech tree game where you're trying to expand your exact uh alien race onto different planets in the surrounding galaxy and you're trying to outwit your opponents yeah it's interesting this is a 2.0 version of terra messico which is another game that they're both sort of a heavier heavier games definitely i know when we were getting into the hobby time mescal was like the one of the heaviest games we went to a convention and and we heard a guy say like i want to play tara miska but only with people who know how to play terror and at the time we're like man that's kind of rude but uh i understand why it is a long teach and if you just want to get into a game and not go through 45 minutes of teach yes it makes sense it makes sense and so this is the 2.0 of that yes because if you're familiar with terra messick at the base there is kind of like a a track that's just kind of going up the track it's not really a pre-strike or something it's not super functional and so i i think that they replace that with this sort of tech tree of options that uh dictate how strongly you can perform certain actions yes yeah because those tech trees they basically correspond to the different types of actions um and so as you move up them uh you can do those things better and so everybody starts with the asymmetric faction so we talked about asymmetry which is cool because it kind of gives you a leg up on one track so you're like do i want to keep going that direction right should i go that direction or maybe i should kind of diversify but i think the main purpose of this game is everybody has their own sort of mat with buildings on it and you're trying to build these buildings onto the main board and so in this game the theme is space so you're building out your buildings onto planets you're trying to terraform them so that you're able to reach them and create a federation yeah and create federation and stuff like that it's a very similar concept terry mississippi you're building up buildings as well um the main difference is that tech tree that we're mentioning and so it to me it's interesting because it's almost like they replaced one aspect of terra mystica with that tech tree and when you play gaia project the tech tree is quite a large part of the game it almost kind of shifts the focus into who can make the tech tree work together with your strategy in putting out those buildings right because it's still a euro game at the end of the day there are different things that will score during every round and then there's obviously end game scoring and it is excellent yeah yeah so good we've covered this game on our channel before before this game came out i really really wanted to explore terra mystica yes and all of its expansions and all that until this one was released and then now we're very much on board with gaia project yeah aesthetically i like terra mystica better i agree and also the neighboring bonus i think is a little more interesting in terra mystica uh but this one for me the tech tree and what's going on there uh supersedes terroristic for me it just makes it way more strategic in in our opinion although we do know that there are people who are on both sides of that argument there's some people who really prefer terramisica and uh i can totally see that it's a better theme right yeah yeah i would say so anyway that is our exact crossover the last one of this entire series but yes number eight guy project all right then back to you again for number seven number seven okay so this is one that uh monique talked about in a previous video uh this one i knew was probably gonna be in my top 10 when i set out to do this for sure i didn't know where it was going to sit until we did the ranking engine this one came out back in 2011 uh published by aaliyah and ravensberger and designed by stephen feld and it is my one of my favorite euro games of all time of course it is the castles of burgundy oh yeah uh this was a one that i did not get to try until like uh a little bit further into my gaming uh experience i think it was like i was already three years maybe into the hobby yeah and then i finally got a chance to play this i think you had recommended like oh you still haven't played it yeah i don't know why all the rage cast is a very good yeah it was all the rage i guess but um yeah essentially what you're doing in this game is it the theme is kind of uh pasted on here but you're trying to build out your territory your uh your estate estates with tiles with tiles such as different castles you're trying to put out different farms with different types of animals or the same type of animal if you know castles burgundy yeah you're trying to do shipping and basically score the most amount of points this is a true point salad game yeah this one's interesting because uh to me it's almost like you're constantly trying to one-up your opponent right yeah the entire game there's a shipping where whenever you ship you get to move forward with your your ship and you uh change this you're trying to complete areas earlier the earlier the better because it scores you more points you're trying to complete certain colored areas before your opponents so it is just a lot of one-upping each other in various ways but it's really fun yeah this one plays well at all player counts too i like it at two three and four i think three might be the sweet spot for me um but i have no problem playing it at any player count this is the game that i knew absolutely knew it was going to end up on his top 10 let's say your top 10 list because of how much naveen loves this game and this is also one that i oh man this is going to be so hard to kick off your list yeah i think this will probably be there for a long time yeah a lot of things in the top 50 are pretty fluid you know even even right now between now and the time that we formulated the the entire list things probably have changed in order but this one is going to stay for a while this is also another reason why we both have kind of a hard time making these lists because there's so many of these older titles that are so good and they really stand the test of time and yeah this is one that i'm willing to pretty much always play i i've never gotten to a point where i'm sick of it i could play it four times within a weekend and be fine totally fine with it so that is my number seven of all time that is stefan felds the castles of burgundy nice all right moving on to my number seven so my number seven is naveen's number that was my nine so now we get that i got it now we're gonna talk about it this is a game that was um designed by r eric roos and published by greater than games in 2017 this is a new to us game in just in the past year yeah this is like our one year anniversary we've covered it on the channel and it is called spirit island my all-time favorite cooperative game of all time okay all the time all the time yes so this is my number nine of all time this is your number seven it gets pretty close yeah but they're both definitely uh for us it's a top ten game oh yeah absolutely yeah this is a fantastic game really fantastic game this is a fully cooperative game if you've never played it before where you are playing as spirits and you're trying to help the natives of an island uh protect the island from invaders essentially and the thing about it is you're not playing as a natives you're playing as spirits and so because of that we kind of embody different elements or different uh parts of nature and that is and that's the asymmetry to this game you have a deck of cards and they're all thematically intertwined with what your spirit can do you have like a starting hand of cards but over the course of the game you can kind of acquire other cards that are just from a grab bag so you can kind of custom and tailor what kind of spirit you're going to become over the course of the game you can you can be the fire spirit you can be the ocean spirit and all of those kind of uh dictate your playing style and what you're able to do in the round and uh the game is also extremely difficult yeah it's it's one of those where you're you might lose a lot the first time you play but there's also various modes of play that you can put in to your game once you start getting better at it and you want to do more and more challenges and so we have not yet played everything that comes in the base game but it's something that we're looking forward to exploring for the upcoming year and maybe even diving into some of the expansions yeah that's definitely something that uh we've heard and seen in some of the comments from our last couple of videos of spirit island like oh you gotta try out uh these different expansions because uh i'm totally willing to because what's in this base game so far from what we've played i absolutely love and if everybody's oh if you love that you're really gonna love this other stuff i i think it's a no-brainer at this point just mind blown yeah so this is a fantastic game um i think this is going to stay for a very very long time i think so oh yeah it's going to be hard to top a game like this so that is my number seven and my number nine spirit island okay moving on my number six this is a game that is going to show up later on in monique's list so we will reserve the right to talk about it at that point all right fasten it back to me yep okay so then my number six is a crossover from a previous video that naveen had chosen and it's a game that was designed by richard amman and victor peter published by mind clash games in 2015. this is another game that we need to give a disclaimer for we've been sponsored to do a playthrough of it on our channel and we still have another one yet to do and it's called tricarion so far again this is the box that we showed in the previous video where naveen had chosen it so this is a collector's edition um it does come in a different box if you just get the base game but this game has been on my list for uh since the first time i played it this is this was we knew this was going to be on your oh yeah 100 just like i knew castle burgundy was going to be on naveen's list naveen probably knew that this is going to be on mine in addition to the laserdos and all that because i really really really love this game from the moment that i was introduced to it in fact first of all if you're not familiar with it this is a game where you're playing as competing magicians you're performers and you're just trying to be the best magician in all of megoria but it is quite heavy it's a very long very involved mentally involved game where you are trying to learn tricks you're gathering um trick components from the store you're hiring assistants hiring assistants all so that you can perform these tricks in the theater and it's played over like seven rounds but it's really intense and my favorite part of the game is the action selection mechanism you know everybody has a hand of cards that are identical to start the game and all of the cards that you have correspond to the different locations on the board and so at the start of each round you're going to simultaneously select secretly uh with all the actions every single location you're going to and you're going to put them in front of all of the assistants and just employees who you've hired over the course of the game because they're going to be your worker placement people and then once everybody's ready you simultaneously reveal all of your cards so that you know exactly where everybody is going because there are only a certain number of work replacement spots yes per location and not all the spots are treated equally because some of them give you more action the first spot is sweeter which has like a an inherent base like a value of three the next spot is like an inherent base value of one and some of your workers also come with a boosted uh kind of action point so right you start looking around the table and you're like oh man you're going to the dark alley i really want to go to the dark house because on your turn you only get to go to one location you're going to put out your workers one at a time and so this dictates the order that you put your workers out in anyway that's my favorite part of the game because that is the most like meta that's the most i've got to get into one of my opponents right yeah like i really need that component right now or i need to get that trick before this person does so i'm going to make sure they go there first it's very very interesting such a fantastic game but again this is a game that we were sponsored to do a playthrough of uh in the past and you will be seeing another playthrough of it in the future uh coming up hopefully this this upcoming month and so this is my number six to carry on legends of illusion okay so we are at the halfway mark this is my number five game of all time this is a crossover from my previous video uh monique talked about this one uh this is technically the second edition of this game it came out in 2018 designed by vitala serta and published by stronghold games and it is none other than co2 second chance so i've never played the first one so uh yeah i don't know anything about the first chance but i've definitely played this one several times there are two different modes of play in this game there is a semi-cooperative competitive game and the fully cooperative experience so for me it's number five because of that fully cooperative experience yeah essentially what's happening in this game is pollution is rising uh co2 levels are rising and so uh the world is in crisis and we are different industrialists or uh different scientists that are trying to combat it by bringing the co2 levels down and so in the cooperative experience you are trying to share knowledge with your teammates but there is a hidden agenda that everybody has and everybody must achieve that hidden agenda meaning you're not allowed to talk about it ahead of time in the game and so sometimes people are going to want to do things and you're like ah let's actually do this thing first if you don't mind it's really hard uh but you really don't want to you know if you want to be fair to the game and fair to yourself um you don't want to like really like emphasize what exactly it is that you're gunning for uh but it's a fantastic game it's a very very vital sort of like uh where you're getting executive actions and you get to do a bunch of cool stuff you're just trying to go up different tracks knowledge and essentially um combat this problem it's hard it's all this game is probably harder than spirit island and it's interesting this is this is probably your favorite game of all time it's not it's not a pure cooperative game but yes the cooperative experience absolutely yes the cooperative the fully cooperative part of it is is higher on your list than spirit island so i really enjoy this game as well um as a cooperative game it is very very strategic uh very hard but also less strategic at the same time like i feel like you could lose the game just because the game was out to get you yeah sometimes uh there's pollution tiles that come out and from anywhere from i think 20 20 up to 40 um parts per million and so if you just start pulling those those big ones it just becomes that much harder yeah but i know that naveen really loves this game because whenever we play it cooperative he gets really into it it gets really intense yes but i guess that's just your passion for saving the the planet right i'm a humanitarian there you go yeah and that is my number five of all time c02 second chance all right moving on to my number five so this is the home home stretch this is like 50 games of all time and we're down to our top five five which by the way uh for me at least i don't know if you feel the same way for me my top five is constantly in flux yeah so this is where it stands right now um if i were to be completely honest my top five is more like all the games tied for number one because i love all five of these games so much if you've been following along on our channel um you know that i'm a big patella soda fan so here they all come so my number five is designed by vitala serta published by eagle griffin games in 2020 it was really hard to figure out where to put this one but it is on mars so this is um this is my number five game of all time it is also one that i said is tied for truly number one because i love this game it is fantastic so much so much so but the reason why it is number five and if you're not familiar with it you know we've this is a crossover and davina had mentioned this uh way earlier in his list earlier it was it was a few videos ago couple videos but uh you're basically set in in space you know you're on mars we're trying to colonize mars make it habitable for for human life i suppose and you are going back and forth between the space station and the surface of mars to bring resources to bring all these things that you need in order to build out a colony on mars and it sounds really you know nice and dandy but it is extremely difficult and that is why it is my number five because there's such a barrier to playing it to introducing it to other people i would say that all out of all of patella's orders games is probably the one that has the largest this one or lisboa for some reason but for just overhead in my head the rules overhead is quite large on mars we played it very recently uh we did it for a the the expansion that was on kickstarter for the cooperative experience and i quite enjoyed that version of it but i think it's probably in my top 10 for the competitive experience not that i don't like working together what has been officially published so far yes it's just that a lot of the components in the game are specifically uh created for the competitive experience yeah my favorite part of this game which i think i mentioned in the previous video was uh over time as you're building up on mars your dependency on back going back to that space station uh is a lot less but sometimes you can get you can get stuck up there and you're taking inopportune uh turns there so you really have to time when are you going to go back and forth at the right time and this this takes a lot of forward planning in this game and your favorite part is the life cycle of everything i i go back and forth about what what is my favorite part specifically i just really like how all the elements connect and that's that is why i like batala started games in the first place because it's his design style is very much so where he designs all these components that you need in order to form one larger thing i suppose and that that is really involved in this game with the life cycle of resources which means you really need to pay attention to which resources specifically you're getting in order to do what you want to do what buildings you're building out yeah you have to really pay strong attention when you play this game and so that is my number five game of all time this is on mars okay my number four this is another crossover that will appear later on in this list oh my gosh and so uh we will talk about it when it shows up we didn't even do the last one yet we know not you we're in debt we're in board game day yeah i'm in debt uh my number four is another crossover from something that naveen has chosen uh in a previous video and this is another patella sort of game so this is again going in line with i don't quite know how to order these these top five but for now this is my number four it was published by eagle griffin games this version of it was published a lot more recently but i think the version that we played initially was published in 2014 and it is a game called kanban or aka kanban evie in the newest iteration of it which i think this come out last year this is very recent this is very weird it's not last year the year before but uh this is the souped-up version of kanban um standard i think it was called kanban the automotive revolution back then yes then there was like driver's edition yes then there was driver's edition and then kanban evie and so we get a lot of questions about kanban about where it's where it it stays in our ranking um because of the new edition the kanban ev if you're not familiar with the game and and didn't catch our previous video where naveen talked about it this is a game where you are working in automotive factory you're trying to gain parts you're doing um getting blueprints you're getting blueprints you're getting the parts you're doing testing on on cars you're having meetings where you're going to be uh pitching your pet project to score a bunch of points and it's another one of those vitality games where everything intertwines you need to have the blueprints in order to make the car in order to do this and test it out on the racetrack yes it is quite involved this is this is the first video sort of game we've ever played the original and now they came out with this new version that i believe i don't know if it was kickstarter only but i know that our version has uh like a mini expansion to it but other than that it really just had some rules changes that you could easily implement into your original game and everything else was very a superficial aesthetic design the layout of the of the board in the original the 2014 or whatever that came out was was a little bit uh um disjointed and it's it's a little bit hard on the eyes so when you know when you first walk by the table if you see it laid out you're kind of like what is going on there yeah this one they try to clean it up a little bit but there is a lot going on in there there's a lot going on on the board so there's only so much you can do aesthetically for that i think that you know tool as you know wonderful as you know tool is it did a great job doing that um with this version of it yeah but it was still a culture shock kind of going from the original version to this yeah because everything got kind of skewed so i'm so used to playing our old version of it our older version of it yeah i'm so used to like i need to go to oh wait that's not where it is that's yeah brain was so used to looking at the other map but that was no longer busy yes and then moving to this one everything became busy again that's right because my brain has to undo some things but yeah yeah fantastic game um i wha what is your favorite part of this game is it sandra oh my gosh i really really like how turn order works in terms of where which department you want to go to the way that it works you're going to go to a department and you take all of your actions contained in that one department each round and every round you have to move to a different department but the turn order is dependent on the from left to right from left to right yeah top to bottom in this version yeah that often determines who gets to choose where to go next and so that becomes like a meta game of like oh i know nobody needs to go to this it's like naveen is in the blueprint area yeah so he's blocking the really good spot there do i want to go there now and take a less efficient spot because he's in the he's in the spot that's a little bit better right and you can see when the next meeting is going to come up or when the next end of week scoring is going to happen and so you can kind of guess where certain players are going to need to go next inside i know this is really mean but you can kind of block them out of those spots i think that that part is really interesting that's probably my favorite part and this is actually the game that fluctuates as being my favorite game of all time so it does feel kind of weird talking about it at number four but like i said all these top five are such a tie and to answer your question to to any of you who are wondering about where this specific game falls in line now that it's the eevee version in my head they're the same game yeah so i i till this day i will still talk about kanban the automotive revolution as well as this version of it as being the same game if the original game goes up in my list so will this and so right now it is my number four game of all time that is kanban automotive revolution slash kanban ev okay my number three i've done it again it's another crossover with monique we wanted to be as honest as possible with these lists we have to be efficient too yeah and now we live in the same household we have the same game so they're gonna they're gonna fluctuate but we both really enjoy these games and it's kind of similar to what you were saying earlier with like the top five is like a rolodex where it's just it could be here it could be there okay uh when we ran these lists and we really looked at it though my number three is somewhere else on monique's list so we'll talk about it then so what we'll do is you can talk about my number three because now this is going to call back to well you can skip that sure yes um my number three is your number six all right this is a game that is designed by juve rosenberg so another spoiler alert this one is so high on our list um but if you are if you really don't want this to be spoiled then feel free to skip ahead to our number two but for now this is a game designed by uber rosenberg published by z-man games in 2016. and it is none other than the big box beast for odin so good this is a viking themed game where you can kind of do a little bit of everything uh there is a huge enormous menu of actions that you can take such as going uh well spearfish like now that you're thinking about it well like you can go fishing you can get goods go to the market go hunting go hunting you can uh raid and pillage you can make jewelry so there's a ton of different things that you can do in this game it is a ultimately it's a work replacement but kind of an action selection game just based off of kind of the the different sections of the uh menu board that you can take actions because they're kind of grouped into different types of actions i think it's truly a workplace it's truly a worker because that is how you're selecting your actions you're putting your worker out and then you have the ability to block other people because this menu that navy is referring to can only house one one person per spot but that is probably the part of the game that turns off people the most and that is that huge selection of spots that you can go to because you play other work replacement games that have like eight spots and this has i don't even know what the number is i think like someone somewhere like around 40 plus yeah and when we get to this game um in our series which is going to be in a couple months from now uh we're gonna we're gonna kind of show how to read the board but it's not as daunting as as it may seem because yes the worker placement spots are grouped according to category like if you want to go to the market you go to this area specific area of the menu and the true thing truly the thing that you're doing in this game is you are trying to gather various sizes of polyamino tiles to place onto your main board as well as on these separate island boards that you may or may not get throughout the game which you should do you should probably get those islands yes but you're doing this in a way that can gain you the most amount of points and points are very hard to try to figure out where to get in this game because you start the game off with negative points because your entire board is just a bunch of negative points they're going to score you negative points unless you can cover them up with these tiles yeah this is one of those games you start off with only a certain amount of workers but as the game goes on you start to gain more workers meaning you can take more action so at first you're like i have this huge task how the heck am i going to get anything done yeah obviously if you've played the game enough you that that fear of when you first like all right we're going to get started goes away now that you know how to score points but the first two or three times you play the game you might be like this is way too overwhelming for me how the heck am i how am i going to get out of the negative just to score some points there's a short game and a long game although if we can do it we try to play games every time and this is one of my favorite games to introduce to new players because a lot of times i feel like new players can get overwhelmed by it like we're mentioning and i really want to try to you know help people through the experience and kind of like why we enjoy playing it it's weird it's like heavy but not heavy at the same time like because it's all just kind of laid out for you it's just the decision points is what makes it heavier yeah it's not heavy yeah it's not heavy rule set well yeah once you understand the iconography it makes sense like oh this converts into these get those things and yeah now what do you do with those things that's where the the decision points and kind of the heaviness will come from right uh there is an expansion oh yes the norwegian expansion norwegian expansion uh it's fantastic it is uh something that kind of changes the main board the main menu items for us it's kind of a fix-it it's got to be out of all the games in our collection i think the expansion to this one is the most mandatory for us we will try to play a feast for odin every single time with the norwegian expansion yeah and it doesn't add any more overhead it just it's kind of the same a couple more things but they really improved upon the base game without expansion yeah some of the decision points are now more balanced um like it's like okay now i can maybe go with this this uh farming strategy or this animal strategy versus like previously you would try to do something else kind of all the time and so now it's a little bit more of a balanced experience yeah with this norwegians expansion yeah and i will say uh the thing that i'm looking forward to the most about our uber rosenberg series even though it's kind of slow is i want to see if there's another game that can kind of usurp this on our list because we've been told by several people who have played pretty much all of we've rosenberg games that there are some other ones that are coming up that are also fantastic so that is what i'm looking forward to maybe um in a year so we can give an update as to where this this is on our list compared to the rest of the list but this is my number three and my number six game of all time a feast for odin okay down to the last two now this is a game that is a crossover but from a previous list that monique talked about so uh this one is the oldest on this particular list today uh the original came out in 2004 and it's designed by rudiger dorn published by z-man games and this game is goa new expedition so this is probably one of the first heavier games in my gaming experience that i've ever played i think so uh the theme is very loose uh you are portuguese merchants or portuguese traders in the goa region of india or spice traders exactly uh you're trying to build out plantations to grow different crops so you can essentially essentially what you're trying to do is move down on these tech trees um yeah the game is split up each round is split up into two halves there's an auction phase at the very beginning and then the second half of a round uh there is a kind of multiplayer solitaire action space my favorite part is the duality between the auctions phase and what you can kind of get out and eek out of that options phase and then move into your multiplayer solitaire space action phase favorite part though ultimately is definitely the auction four player game of this is my favorite player account somebody has asked in uh in a comment i think somewhere how does it play out too it plays okay at two but because it's an auction and there's competition for uh different tiles and money uh yeah i for me i would rather play something else at two and three and this is absolutely fantastic at four it plays in roughly 90 minutes so it's a good it's a good amount of time so yeah this is a game that's going to be in our collection for a very long time i think that was this is uh high up there when i said uh he's not leaving our collection and this is a game that you love to run at a local convention yeah pretty much at every local convention i try to run this game uh because every time i introduce it to people they they really enjoy it and so um you know it it gave me that much joy when it was run and taught to me that i'm hoping to kind of pay it forward yeah exactly and i really enjoyed playing it too so that is my number two of all time that is goa a new expedition all right moving on to my number two this is a game that was naveen's number four right that you had to skip that's right and uh uh i do love this game so much we've covered it on our channel before and this is one of those that we've been promising to return back to it but haven't had the chance it is a game designed by jamie stegmeier and published by stone meyer games in 2016 and it is called scythe although this is a legendary box this is not the box that the original game comes in and it's empty yeah yeah oh my gosh you've revealed well you you carried it in pretty strongly i guess it feels empty oh my god it's because we've mentioned in a previous video that we have not ported it into this box yet and uh embarrassingly still hasn't happened yet we will do it soon but uh if you're not familiar with cybe um this is a game about moving around this board the theme is is something like we are competing uh it's like an alternate uh post-world war one or world war ii yeah in europe in europe right and we're basically trying to we're going to war each other competing over resources yes you can sometimes find yourself in war but you're doing several things you have this board um that has four different sections and those dictate the actions that you can take it's truly action selection in that sense because you're moving your pawn to the different sections of your board to take that action similar to like villainous if you're familiar with moving your your pawn uh kind of from one space to one another right but the thing that's interesting is there's a top and a bottom row action you start with the top row action and then additionally you can do the bottom row action if you're able to do both if you meet the question but sometimes you can't and it's just a big efficiency game where you're trying to be able to take as many actions as possible by doing both of those bottom and top row actions right yeah because like in most games you know the more actions you can take the better you're going to get better you're going to do and it's going to be stuff like moving around the board you're going to be growing resources according to the different hexes that you control and the different building types you put out you're gaining popularity there are so many different things that you can do um in an effort to earn these stars and you're going to gain stars for like reaching the highest uh plot on the popularity track or or maxing out on your power or winning a combat winning a combat gets you a star and essentially the game ends when somebody has reached six stars i believe it's a hard limit uh it's a it's a hard end uh the second somebody gains their six star at the game ends now that does not guarantee that that person is gonna win the game they might have just triggered the end game because there is a point system uh for for scoring in this yeah yeah this is it's a whole thing and you know what for a very very long time i did not fully grasp the fact that money equals points if you feel like you're not doing very well in this game or maybe you're not very good at it um maybe focus on that part because that was what really got me to click with this every time i would spend money to take actions i was spending points or like there are certain player boards or certain parts of your player board that will gain you three coins every time and you really want to hit that that action when you can so just know money equals points it's not like a fraction conversion at the end of the game my favorite game of this is when we played a full complement of seven players and for some people who maybe this game takes a long time to play that probably sounds like a nightmare but it was so much fun because every single corner of the board was occupied by somebody you can't hide and just kind of that the the drama or the politics that happens around the table is really fun as well yeah this is a this is a fantastic game uh we have played the legacy version of this which is the rise of fenris um we played through an entire campaign of that uh that is it was fantastic because it's so highly rated on our uh on our top 10 list each that it just forced us to play i think it's eight eight campaign games of the of the yeah the entire thing with the same group yeah and we played it with five people and you know the base game of sight is five people you have to get the invaders from afar to get to the sixth and seventh so we played with the base five i believe and yeah it was a really really good experience so yeah if you like scythe but you haven't kind of pulled the trigger on that particular experience i highly recommend it yeah the rise of fenris and with that uh that campaign we were playing multiple games back to back another testament as to why this game is so high on my list is this is the longest game that i'm willing to play several games of in the same setting yeah and be just as excited about the next game as i was about there's something about like coming in second or third in this game where you're like do it again do it again remember no you won by four oh man okay not this time yeah and so that is my number four game of all time and my number two side all right we are here at our number one game of all time we finally made it it's been a long uh long beautiful road right this is beautiful yeah so these are all great games um again we talked about that the top five being a kind of a revolving door uh this one is someone that we've never covered on the channel surprisingly and it's my number one of all time back in 2007 it was originally designed by martin wallace and now published by roxley uh this is brass lancashire specifically i like brass lancashire over birmingham monique covered uh birmingham in a previous video last slight crossover slight crossover for me i personally like this one better but they are very very similar and they're very very similar in the same system now i know we did read some comments uh in the last video when we talked about birmingham that the photos were of lancashire and good for you you guys are very good you're right detectives out there so we provided photos of both essentially what you are you are different industrialists during the 1800s you are going to be building out canals during the first half of the game to try to connect to different cities so you can build different uh industrial businesses or industries like coal uh ironworks different things like that at the halfway point of the game all the canals are going to be stripped off because now there's new technology for how you're going to ship goods through the uh the countryside of england and so now you're gonna start to build uh railways to try to do the same exact thing in the second half of the game it's very very interesting what you're doing here there's a hand management aspect where the cards have multi kind of kind of multi-use uh you can build in different industries or you can build directly into certain cities that you may be cut off from uh so managing your money as well as getting your income up and also putting out the right buildings in the most strategic place it's hard it's very hard to do uh it is a very competitive game i think it personally plays best at three and four uh you can now i think back when brass was first made it was a three and four player only game right now you can play it with two uh we have played a couple times with two and the sweetest experience though for me is at three and four yeah so this is a re-implementation i believe this is the original this is based off of the original this is based off the original birmingham was kind of like a fan made fran drain rated and quite sure what the history of birmingham was all i know it is it came when they did they re the new versions these this beautiful versions of this game this is a new version of it it is a much older title i definitely knew that this is a game that naveen likes way more than i do i knew it was gonna be in the top five specifically where it was gonna fall after doing the ranking yeah i was like finding myself just like brass class yeah so sometimes when people will gather to play this i'll sit out and just say you know you play without me because of all the math that is required it's constant math need to math or else you're going to lose but uh but yeah naveen is like loves this game through it through i'm not very good at it i i don't win very often but um if this is kind of like how we said inside like i'll just i just want to play it yeah i just want to get into it and uh and see if i can get better than the last time scores uh typically get better over time for me i have one just a couple times and yeah it's just a game that i constantly want to come back to because there's just so much going on in it uh that is my number one game of all time uh i am very curious to know if anybody uh predicted this to be the one but it is it is my number one game of all time that is brass lancashire all right and finally my number one game of all time um some people may have already guessed it because this is a game that has not appeared yeah on my list yet this is my number three by the way this is my number three this is the last of all the absolute crossovers so this is a game that was designed by patala sterda published by eagle griffin games in 2017 and it's called liz it is known not a surprise but but a a truth this is a truth in the house that we do love lisboa um this is a game that we've covered on our channel we talk about it a lot it is a very different style of game for battalion but fantastic so so elegant in its design you know you you if you're not familiar with the game you have a deck of cards you have a hand of cards you on your turn you play a card and you just do a bunch of stuff you decide where you want to play it and then perform actions of course that is the most uh simple you know there's two two halves of the game and then at the end of the game whatever has the most points wins that's how you play that's it it's the most simple version of it but uh it is also known as one of the telescope's more complicated designs because of the everything else that happens after you play that card yes this is a very thematic game uh this is centered around the uh for a heavy game for a heavy game this is centered around kind of the destruction of uh lisbon in portugal uh back in i can't remember the year 17 1700s there was a series of floods fires and earthquakes that occurred and it kind of devastated the city and it's essentially after that event happened after that traumatic event happened how did they rebuild uh lisboa to what it is now today and so it is a beautifully designed game uh the artwork is i think is personally fantastic i love the way it looks uh on the table uh the board is really really big and um it is such a fun experience yeah every single time we play it going back to the art by the way if you like look really closely to the board and just the the box even you'll see like little cracks it has it has kind of like that marble look to it it's so beautiful yeah it's just such a different looking game you know from other games and this is a really good game to play at too this is the one that plays excellent they will play at two players sometimes but also a game that kind of fluctuates in my top five you know my true number one is a tie between liz boa and kanban on mars is kind of like the second and then above them is a tie between those two yeah and so today it was this boa tomorrow might be fun but it's been lizboa for for a while for me as my number one vitale game of all time um another game that i really love teaching to new players because of that difficulty and that barrier of what do i do and uh it's another one of those that it's it seems more complicated than it really is yeah right yeah this game is uh it's very elegant like you said um the the timing and the pacing of the game is very good uh i for me i i feel like if you play with people who are well versed in the game it can go pretty quickly um oh yeah you know you play a card you take the actions and you move on there's a point in the game where the deck of cards gets kind of changed out and uh then you get kind of the same actions but just a little bit sweeter and so the timing of the game yeah it gets a little bit nerve-wracking sometimes you're like man i think i can do a little bit more and then a stack runs out and you're like ah the game ends and so uh i always feel like i'm i'm one or two turns away and i think for me that's a sign of a really really good design you don't want to feel like oh i've done everything and now i'm just waiting for this clock to run out this thing that we've talked about so much in the past and so we'll leave it at that this is my number one and my number three of all time that is lisboa and there you have it that is the end of our top 50 board games of all time now we haven't forgotten about the giveaway and in the past our giveaway has had to do with uh one of our number one games from the list but uh since we've already given away a copy of liz bella uh we are partnering today with stone meyer games so thank you so much to to jamie and everybody over at stonemart games for uh sponsoring the giveaway for this video all the details are in the description but basically we are giving away any three scythe related products from the stonemeyer games web store and that includes the base game of scythe yes that includes the base game or expansions whatever you're missing or whatever you're interested in um in getting thank you again to to sun meyer games and to everybody who has been just following along on our journey so far anybody who's participated in the giveaways as well we've been uh enjoying reading your responses although i think we might have doubled up on some questions now now that i think about it yeah yeah um so so i have not been uh responding to a lot of comments right now it is during the holidays but i am absolutely reading all the comments that i really really enjoying reading through everybody's lists so please continue to let us know what your ten to one is because uh it's really exciting and it's also a fantastic resource for anybody who's just found these videos maybe they're just new to the hobby and they just want resources as to what games are out there that i should be investigating those lists in the comments are really really helpful so again thank you so much for following on our journey we really appreciate everybody who supported us so far all the details in the giveaway are in the description below we hope you all have a wonderful new year and we will be back with our regularly scheduled playthroughs very soon thanks again thank you as much [Music] you

Channel: Before You Play

Views: 103,305

Keywords: top 50 board games, top 100 board games, best board games, top board games, great board games, board game reviews, board game rules, Top 10 board games, board games, tabletop games, tabletop, new board games, board game playthrough, board game thoughts, board game gameplay, board game review, euro games, top 50, games, the castles of burgundy, lisboa, kanban board game, on mars board game, brass board game, goa board game, a feast for odin, spirit island, trickerion, pandemic

Id: IeljLh9Orxs

Length: 49min 37sec (2977 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 05 2022