Board Game Top 100 (2024) Part 18 (62-61)

 Another short one. Still writing from the car. 

#62 Three Sisters

Three Sisters is a combo-rific roll and write game where players plant beans and corn and pumpkins. You also can gather tools to gain certain advantages and raise bees for honey and harvest fruit trees and berries. Combos abound here and it's all about taking every opportunity to trigger those to score the most points. 

#61 Tricky Tides

This is a trick taking game where winning the trick allows you to move your ship first which is important because you are racing around these islands to gather and deliver goods. Higher cards will win you a trick but lower cards let you move around these sea monsters to help yourself or hinder your opponent. This creates a great push and pull where sometimes you'll want to win tricks and sometimes you won't. The cards and components are beautiful. I love trick taking, and I love Tricky Tides. 

Board Game Top 100 (2024) Part 17 (64-63)

#64 Flamme Rouge

Flamme Rouge is about a bicycle race. Players have 2 cyclists to move around a track. Cards determine how fast you can go, but you have to pace yourself because the cyclist in the lead gains fatigue. Fatigue goes into your deck and will hinder you with low value cards towards the end of the race. This is actually really thematic. You also have rules for drafting in the wake of cyclists in front of you and for going up and down hills. The mechanisms are simple, but complete making for an awesome racing game, and my 64th favorite game of all time. 

 

#63 Marvel United 

Players take the roles of their favorite characters from Marvel Comics and work together to defeat some of Marvel's most famous villains. I've written about Marvel United many times in the past. So, I'm not going to go into the game again here. (Plus, we are on our way west to visit family and friends for a vacation and I'm writing this post on my phone while riding in the car.) Suffice to say, that I love this game and I probably have any character that you can think of. Marvel United is my 63rd favorite game of all time. 

Board Game Top 100 (2024) Part 16 (66-65)

#66 Maglev Metro

Maglev Metro is a crunchy little route building pick up and deliver game. Players build routes in their color by placing these really cool transparent hexes with the colored routes printed on them. Because of the transparency, tiles can be stacked, and colored routes can run parallel or cross. This is exceptionally neat and the board quickly begins to look like one of those colored bus route maps.

Routes are meant to get you places to deliver passengers. Maglev Metro has a futuristic theme and your "buses" are monorail trains, and the bus drivers are robots. You have little silver, gold, and bronze robots that you can move on your player board to put to work. The robots drive the trains, build the rails, and make the trains run faster and better. 

As you pick up passengers you add them to your board. This unlocks more abilities and scoring opportunities. Different types of passengers unlock different areas of your board. Passengers might include commuting workers who need to go to the business district, or shoppers who want to go to the commercial areas, for example. These are represented by different colored passenger meeples. Picking up the right passengers and getting them where they need puts them on your player board, and doing this efficiently and in the most beneficial order is a big part of the game's puzzle.

Maglev Metro is a crunchy pick up and deliver game with cool pieces and cool mechanics. The puzzle of this game tickles my brain in all the right ways, and I love the theme and the aesthetics of the game. All of this and more makes Maglev Metro my 66th favorite game of all time.

#65 Hero Realms

Hero Realms is a two-player, head-to-head, card-battle game. It's a deck building game. Players start with ten cards. These cards represent coins for buying more cards, and weapons that can damage the other player. Players have 20 Life, and the first player to be depleted of all 20 of their Life loses the contest. 

Coins are used to purchase cards from a central market. These cards go into your discard pile and are soon shuffled back into your deck to give you new and better options. Cards available for purchase include powerful allies who stay on the board and do damage to your opponent every turn, unless your opponent does something to take them out. There are also more powerful attacks, special defensive characters, called guards, that your player must target before they are able to do more damage to you, and ways to boost your spending power. There are even explosive gems that give you spending power, but that you can "blow up" to damage your opponent when you don't need them anymore. 

On top of all of this, the cards that you buy from the market all belong to a specific faction and playing cards of the same faction together will give you additional benefits. So, there is incentive to build your deck with a faction based focus. All of this is wrapped inside a fairly generic fantasy theme, but that's cool. I like fairly generic fantasy themes. Hero Realms is an awesome, quick and engaging, deck building battler and it is my 65th favorite game of all time.

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Board Game Top 100 (2024) Part 15 (68-67)

#68 The Crew: The Quest for Planet 9

The Crew is a trick taking cooperative card game. Trick taking is a style of card game where cards are put to the center of the table. The lead card establishes the suit of cards to be played and then the other players must play cards of that suit if they can. The highest card takes the "trick" gathering all cards. This is repeated until all cards are played and the player (or team of players) with the most tricks is the winner. Classic trick taking card games include: Bridge, Euchre, Spades, and Hearts.

The Crew is a game like that, only cooperative. It accomplishes this by setting very specific goals for the hand. Players may be assigned specific cards like the 7 of spades or the 3 of hearts, and then must win the tricks that contain the cards assigned to them. And just like in the competitive games, table talk is forbidden. Players can't discuss the cards in their hands, they must "read the table" and watch what has been played to try to figure out how to achieve their goals.

The Crew is challenging and fun. It's my 68th favorite game of all time.

#67 Knarr

Knarr is another card game, but this one isn't trick taking, it's card drafting and set collection, and it contains some board elements. Players have a hand of cards, and there is a central board with colored slots matching all of the colors of the various suits of cards. (I think there are 8 if I remember correctly.) The board is randomly seeded with cards, one in each of these slots. 

On a player's turn they play down a card and gain a resource benefit that is shown on the card. Then the player draws the card out of the colored slot matching the color of the card that they just played, and that empty slot is refilled by a different random card. This mechanism creates an interesting push and pull. 

Cards you place in front of you are grouped by colored suit and each time you play a card from your hand that matches other cards of the same suit, you collect all the benefits from every card in that set. When you play a card you have to balance the immediate benefit that you get from playing the card against which card you are going to be able to add to your hand based on the slot the card you are about to play will allow you to draw from. 

All of this is only one aspect of the game. The lion's share of the points that you will need to score in order to win the game come from exploration cards. You get these by cashing in sets of cards that you have collected. So, you may have a great little engine going in front of you, but you have to cash it in to take a different card to try to get you some points. These exploration cards can also be activated to create yet another engine for gaining resources or victory points. 

Knarr is a really interesting and tight little game of resource management, set collection, and engine building that's played mostly with cards. It's small and portable and it packs a lot of punch. It's my 67th favorite game of all time.

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Board Game Top 100 (2024) Part 14 (70-69)

#70 Can't Stop

Can't Stop is a classic push your luck dice game. This one never fails to entertain. Players roll 4 dice and then divide these into 2 pairs. You have 3 ghost pawns. Once you choose a pair of numbers, then you place a ghost pawn onto the track on the board that matches that number. 

Once all three ghost pawns have been placed, then you must manage to create a pair that matches one of the three tracks that a ghost pawn is currently on, or you will bust immediately ending your turn. If you don't bust and instead end your turn voluntarily, you swap the ghost pawns on the track with pawns of your player color, saving your progress. On your next turn, when you place a ghost pawn on a track where a pawn of your color already resides, you get to place your pawn on the next space higher up on the track, starting from there. 

Players are racing up the tracks. Tracks vary in length based on the probability of rolling particular numbers. The two and twelve tracks are the shortest, and the seven track is the longest. The first player to reach the top of three tracks wins the game. Can't Stop is great fun! 

Do you keep going and hope to make the numbers you want? Common numbers like the seven are easy to roll, right? Or do you try for the extreme numbers knowing that you only need to succeed at these a few times to reach the top? Can't Stop is my 70th favorite game of all time.

#69 Dice Forge

In Dice Forge players roll dice and gain resources to place workers around a central board to buy tiles. But these tiles aren't ordinary tiles. "Oh, no." These tiles are dice faces that are affixed to custom dice that you create yourself. That's right, in Dice Forge players are actually making (forging) dice. 

Some of the dice faces give you gems or gold to buy more tiles. There are dark gems and light gems that you can use to buy cards to gain special benefits or gold that you can use to buy new tiles for your dice. Some tiles give you victory points which you need to win the game, but you can't focus solely on these because you need the resources to improve your dice or you will fall behind and lose the game. 

Dice Forge is a really clever game with big chonky dice that you modify yourself … and the dice really work. Julie and I love dice games, and speaking for myself, Dice Forge is my 69th favorite game of all time.

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