My Top 10 Board Games

I like board games a lot. I own over 100 board games, and I’ve played the majority of them within the last 3 years. I have a monthly meetup with my local friends to play board games, and we always have a lot of fun. Here’s my top 10 board games of all time:

10. Battle Line – This is a great little 2-player card game, where you play little 3-card poker hands at each of 9 locations, and if you win 5 of the locations (or 3 in a row) you win the game. It’s quick, but full of tension as your options for playing cards get fewer and fewer, and you have to decide between playing a sub-par hand at a location, or completely giving up a location to your opponent in exchange for not making your other location worse. It’s so fun!

9. Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan – Sekigahara is a block wargame about the Japanese military campaign that in real life allowed Tokugawa Ieyasu to gain control of the entire country. The battles in this campaign were marked by frequent shifts of loyalty between the lords of the various armies, and this is well represented in the game by the way that you play cards to use certain army blocks during a battle. If you don’t have a card that matches the symbol on that block, it just doesn’t help in the fight. That makes it very important how you play or conserve your cards, and it adds a lot of strategy to the game.

8. Star Wars: Rebellion – This is basically Star Wars (the original trilogy) in a box. It pits the Galactic Empire against the Rebel Alliance, in space with Star Destroyers fighting Rebel cruisers, on planets with stormtroopers and Imperial walkers clashing against Rebel soldiers, and on individual missions that you send out iconic heroes to accomplish, where Darth Vader might try to stop Han Solo from achieving his mission. It’s a fantastic game with a great narrative arc.

7. Terraforming Mars – Terraforming Mars has you play as one of several mega-corporations that are competing to gain the prestige of converting the planet Mars to a livable biosphere. You do this by raising the planet’s temperature, importing water to make oceans, and spreading greenery across the planet to raise the oxygen levels. Once these three levels are high enough, the game ends and the player with the most terraforming points wins. This game is obviously well-researched, and the cards you play in the game show the detail and planning that would have to go into such a huge project as terraforming a planet. The rules are also well-designed, and I have highly enjoyed every time I’ve played this game.

6. Vikings – This is a relatively simple game where you explore islands and send viking settlers to those islands for gold and glory. Despite the name, it’s not so much a viking game (where you’d expect lots of raiding and pillaging) as it is a Norse settler game. Despite the name that probably gives lots of people the wrong impression of what the game is like, I think Vikings is a lot of fun. In the middle of the board is a rotatable rondel, around which are viking-island tile pairs. The rondel shows the price you have to pay to buy that pair, and once you have bought the pair, you may place the island tile onto your board (matching land edges to land edges and ocean edges to ocean edges). After placing the island tile, you may either place the viking onto that tile (if it’s in the row matching the color of that viking), or keep the viking on the mainland to later transport to the island via boatman vikings. It’s a nice, fun Euro-style game, where you can mess up other players’ plans by buying what they want before they do, but you can’t mess with what other players already have on their boards. Highly recommended!

5. YINSH – Othello meets Connect Four. This is an abstract strategy game where each player has 5 rings of their color on the board. On their turn, a player slides one of the rings as far as they want in a straight line, jumping once over any intervening pieces, and leaving a disc of their color where the ring started. Any discs that the ring jumps over switch colors (like in Othello). Getting a line of 5 of your color gets you a point, and the first player to 3 points wins. This is my favorite abstract strategy game, and that’s saying a lot, since there are quite a few abstract strategy games I like. (Honorable mentions include: Santorini, Go, Azul, Sagrada, and The Duke.)

4. Yggdrasil – This is a cooperative game where the players are Norse gods trying to prevent Ragnarok. Specifically, they’re trying to prevent several evil beings – mischief god Loki, fire giant Surtr, dragon Nidhogg, etc. – from reaching Valhalla, which ends the game in a loss. If the gods can hold the evil beings back long enough, they win the game. There are a lot of things you can do on your turn with your three actions, and figuring out what the best things to do and how to cooperate with your teammates is a lot of fun, and the game is very thematic, with each action corresponding to one of the various realms of Norse mythology. It’s been out of print for a long time, but I hope to get a copy some day.

3. Hands in the Sea – Hands in the Sea is a game about the First Punic War between Rome and Carthage. The ultimate goal of this game is to get the most points, but there are a lot of ways to gain them. This is a game about a war, but that war was won not just by who had the best armies. You can raid enemy cities, you can send your fleet to pillage or to fight the enemy fleet, you can extend control to the cities and towns of the Mediterranean, and you can recruit troops, settlers, leaders, and others to help you in your plans. Learning the game from the rulebook is a little challenging, but once I learned how to play I found that I really enjoy this game!

2. Julius Caesar – This is a block wargame about the Roman Civil War between Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompeius (aka Pompey the Great). Victory goes to the player who controls the majority of the major cities of the entire Mediterranean Sea. You can see the blocks that the other player has, but you can’t see what units they are, or what strength those units are at, until you actually face them in combat. Turns are simple, and consist of recruiting units and moving armies around the map, fighting when two armies contact each other. The rulebook is well-written, and the game is easy to learn. I’ve heard it said that this is the easiest block wargame to learn, but also one of the best, and I have to agree, though I haven’t played a ton of this type of game.

1. Commands and Colors: Ancients – Commands & Color: Ancients is a hex-based war game where each player takes turns playing a card from their hand that will let them move and attack with one or more of their units. Different units have different movement rates, number of attack dice they roll, ranged capability, and so on. The game is scenario-based, replicating various historical battles, and the first player to reach the specified number of victory flags wins (generally by eliminating enemy units). This is my favorite board game. Some people (like my brother) don’t like it because of the randomness of the cards you draw, and the randomness of the dice rolling, but I say that it’s a feature of the game – dealing with the variability of battle and deciding how to overcome it to your advantage. This game hits my sweet spot of being complex enough to be interesting and realistic enough for my tastes, while being easy to learn and quick to play.

So there you have it, my current top 10 board games! Are there any board games that you particularly like?