Dude! Take Your Turn!
A Gaming Life
Where are the Best Games Played in 2018?
As promised in my “Taking a hiatus” post right before Christmas, I was planning on doing a Top 10 games played in 2018 as well as a list of top games played of all time.
I wasn’t sure how many “Top games of all time” I was going to include in my post, and I’ve since decided to make it a nice Top 25. Out of 295 games played, I think 25 is a good round number.
A funny thing happened after I ranked all of my games, however (thanks so much to Pubmeeple for having a game ranking engine that works great!).
After looking at my list, I realized that the Top 10 Games played in 2018 were also the Top 10 Games played of all time (spoiler!!!).
Why post a duplicate list?
So, over the next week or two, I will be posting the Top 25. Once I’ve posted 10-1, I will link to it here. Those are also the best games played in 2018.
(Edit: Here is #10-6 in the Top 10!)
(Edit: Here is #5-1 in the Top 10!)
However, since I don’t want to have a nothing post where I go “ha! Made you click!” (clickbait is not in my vocabulary), how about I instead tell you the best new to me game played in 2018 and the worst?
Best:
Easily the best new to me game played in 2018 is Architects of the West Kingdom, designed by Shem Phillips and S.J. Macdonald with art by The Mico.
First played in November 2018, I’ve already played it twice and am trying to get it to the table again.
This game is simply fabulous.
I love the variation on worker placement where the more meeples you have in a spot, the more resources (or actions) you get. However, if you start getting too greedy, somebody’s going to go to the Town Centre and arrest your workers. You won’t be getting 5 clay anymore!
There are a variety of different strategies you can do, perhaps guided by the character you’re playing (you can play as characters with asymmetric abilities). Maybe your character works better with the Black Market?
You can work on building the Cathedral, or work on your own buildings, or just try to get a shit-ton of Marble.
Whatever floats your boat (Editor – Marble doesn’t float). Maybe you can win?
A full description of the game can be found on the New to Me – November 2018 entry, with a lot more pictures.
This game is damned fun, and is easily the best new to me game I played last year.
Spoiler: it’s somewhere in my Top 25 of all time.
Now how about we go to a game that is nowhere near my Top 25?
Worst:
When I say “worst,” I don’t mean “this game isn’t for me” (my #295, Factory Fun, is definitely in the “not for me”category rather than “bad”).
This one is definitely bad.
Lucky Loop is a game of doing aerial stunts in a bi-plane, using cards to decide what the difficulty level of your trick is going to be and dice to see how well you perform it.
This was first (and last) played in March 2018.
Designed by Karsten Hartwig and Wolfgang Panning with art by Christof Tisch (and published by Queen Games), this game has a very confusing rulebook that doesn’t even clearly tell you whether you have to perform a trick every turn.
The scoring system is almost byzantine, and we ended up just not really caring.
There may be a fun game hidden underneath the atrocious rulebook, but we couldn’t find it. It just bored us to tears.
The art’s nice, but the game? Ugh.
This is #293 on my game ranking of 295 games. (FYI: Knit Wit is #294)
So there you go. Best and worst new to me games played in 2018.
Keep an eye out for the Top 10 games played in 2018.
Coming soon.
Dude! Take Your Turn! 
Oh wow. How long did it take you to go through 295 games on the ranking engine?
LikeLiked by 1 person
About 2050 comparisons, probably about 2 hours LOL
LikeLiked by 1 person
Pingback: Top 25 Games Played of All Time (5-1) – Dude! Take Your Turn!