Top 50 Games Played of All Time – 2026 Edition (#10-1)

Now we’ve gone and done it.

We’ve now reached the Top 10 games of all time, played by me at least.

It’s been an incredible 5 weeks (ok, 6, but last week’s Friday post was important) of new games, oldies dropping in the rankings, a few bumping up as well.

I’ve really enjoyed doing this, mainly because I love sharing a love of boardgames with all of my readers.

In this day and age, we need all of the joy we can get because we are in the middle of dark times.

Unlike last week, the Top 10 is mainly games that have been on my list before (with a couple of exceptions) and one big mover that at least a couple of people on the Pixelated Cardboard Discord should not be surprised about.

Before we get to that, I did want to mention one honourable mention, just because it’s a cool game.

Sanctuary (the streamlined Ark Nova that’s more than that) just barely missed the Top 50, coming in at 52.

This is a cool tile-laying game with some of the symbology and altered mechanics of Ark Nova, but in a lot less time.

However, it is more than that. I think it’s a neat tile-laying game just by itself.

I’ve had another play of it since I wrote that first impressions post (still not enough for a review) and everything I said in it still stands.

This is a fun one!

For the final time, I’ll give the usual caveats at the beginning of this post before we get started (and maybe we won’t hit 5000 words this time?)

I’ve played less than 600 games, so there will be many great games that I haven’t seen yet.

So you Food Chain Magnate fans will just have to go run your restaurants without me.

I had more than enough of them when I was working through college.

Also, many of these ratings (only one in my Top 10, though) were given after just one play.

So things can change!

Though given which game here meets that criteria, I doubt it will.

With all of that, let’s begin!

10) Wayfarers of the South Tigris (2022 – Garphill Games)

Designers: S J MacDonald, Shem Phillips

Artist: Mihajlo Dimitrievski

Players: 1-4

2024 Rank: 7

We start this final decade with another Garphill trilogy game.

Of course we do.

Wayfarers of the South Tigris dipped a bit, but it’s still solidly in my Top 10 because it’s such a great dice placement game about exploring the Middle East, both on land, sea, and even the sky!

I love the dice placement and dice-alteration mechanics where you can place improvements in your caravan to make the dice numbers do more for you.

Or you can even use those to modify the dice!

You can gain land or sea cards to give you dice placement spots to do more powerful actions, or you can gain sky cards to showcase how you’ve scanned the heavens for anomalies (sorry, that’s SETI) cool stuff.

Thus, your player area can get quite large. This is definitely a table hog, because you also need room for the Journal board and all of the cards that go along it.

The journaling is the timer of the game, which works quite well.

It all comes together in a brilliant package: the cards, the tableau, and the dice-rolling and placement.

And the expansion adds a lot to it as well!

Though it’s not necessary.

This one will probably forever be in my Top 50.

9) Lisboa (2017 – Eagle-Gryphon Games)

Designer: Vital Lacerda

Artist: Ian O’Toole

Players: 1-4

2024 Rank – Not Played

I first saw Lisboa played on the Heavy Cardboard channel shortly after it came out in 2017. I know that Edward was still in Colorado at the time and I also remember he moved to Boston before COVID.

Anyway, that’s how long I’ve been interested in this game, but circumstances just worked against me playing it.

The few times it came out to our game day, I was always doing something else, either one of my new games that I really wanted to get plays in for a review, or something like that.

Last year, at Bottoscon in November, I finally got a chance to play it.

And obviously I fell in love with it.

This is a game where the theme is the rebuilding of Lisbon, Portugal, after a combined catastrophe (earthquake, tsunami and fires) that ended up devastating the city.

Architects and engineers who will help rebuild have been gathered together and the players are members of the nobility who want to steer construction more toward their own goals (though the city will still be reconstructed!)

The game has everything from you clearing away rubble to then use for other purposes (either construction, or maybe just selling it on a foreign market), to building (what can be built on each street has already been established by royal decree), maybe even interacting with the church!

I love the mechanisms in this one because, as with most Lacerda games, the actions are simple.

In this game, you play a card to your display (on top so that the top of the card is displayed, or at the bottom so that the bottom of the card is displayed), or maybe you’ll be removing a card.

This card will give you actions, or the ability to interact with one of the three royal figures (ministers or even the King).

Interacting with the royals to get actions is also fun, because others can follow that action if they have the right influence.

As with all other Lacerdas, this is quite an intricate game and I was really able to absorb how the actions went together.

Unlike most of my Lacerda plays, I actually felt like I knew (at least a bit) what I was doing and I didn’t do too badly!

I’d love to play it again to cement it in my head, but that one play was enough to jump it into my Top 10.

8) Grand Austria Hotel (2015 – Lookout Games)

Designers: Virginio Gigli, Simone Luciani

Artist: Klemens Franz

Players: 2-4

2024 Rank: 33

This was the big surprise in this entire Top 50, but not as much as you would think if you saw my asynchronous online plays.

I have an ongoing asynchronous game of this going on with two Pixelated Cardboard Discord friends, and it’s just cemented how good I think this game is!

It jumped all the way into the Top 10 from Number 33, which is kind of amazing.

I haven’t played this game on the table since 2024, but many plays on Yucata have made up for that.

I still suck at it (though I do have a fair share of wins in our ongoing series), but it just entrances me so much.

This is a game where you are hotel owners bringing in guests, feeding them, and finding rooms to trap house them in.

(You don’t ever see them leave, so they could be trapped!)

You’re gaining food, bringing in guests, and opening rooms for them.

It uses a really cool dice-drafting mechanism that I really love.

The dice are rolled each round, and then in a turn order much like Sagrada, players draft a die to take that die’s action (I could be 1st and 6th, 2nd and 5th, or 3rd and 4th).

The action can be either getting different types of food (1 or 2), opening rooms (3, and it costs money depending on what floor you’re opening them on), and so forth.

There’s also the Emperor, who will come and judge you at the end of Round 3, 5 and 7.

If you haven’t moved up his track, you will get penalized!

If you have, you will get rewarded.

And if you have somewhat but not a whole lot, then nothing will happen.

Sometimes that’s all you can ask for.

I love how you can also play employees (some guests will let you do that for free, even!) that will aid you either during the game or with endgame scoring.

This is just such an amazing game.

Tight actions, kind of luck-dependent but everybody is stuck with the same luck (just like Lorenzo el Magnifico, which shares at least one designer), but the better players will win.

I really need to get this to the table again so I can play it live. Whenever I play it asynchronously, I just want to take my next turn!

Granted, we have had some days where turns come fast and furious, and those are always fun.

Anyway, this is a great game, and a worthy addition to my Top 10.

7) Scholars of the South Tigris (2023 – Garphill Games)

Designers: S J MacDonald, Shem Phillips

Artist: Mihajlo Dimitrievski

Players: 1-4

2024 Rank: 6

Scholars of the South Tigris is another Garphill trilogy game that just has so many intricate decisions and mechanisms that’s it’s been in my Top 10 since its debut.

Much like Wayfarers of the South Tigris, it is a dice placement/use game where you will be rolling your dice and doing actions with them.

In this case, though, you have actions cards that you place to do a certain action, and you choose which dice to use to activate them.

Some dice will have colours, which will make that action have a colour, and you can use workers to change either the colour of the die or the value (using a same-colour worker will make the value a 6, while using a different colour will change the colour of the die to that worker’s colour).

(the number of red squiggly lines saying I’ve misspelled “colour,” even though I’m Canadian, tells me I used “colour” way too much in that last paragraph)

Anyway, there’s great track movement in that you have six scientific tracks you are going up (one for each colour, and there’s that red squiggly line again!), to get instant bonuses or income.

Track movement is always cool.

But you’re also hiring translators to then translate scrolls from some other language to Arabic.

There are a couple of different ways to win, and we have explored them!

One friend only translates one scroll, the one to meet his goal to get another action card.

Otherwise, he concentrates on the tracks.

There is so much going on in this game, and yet once you know what you’re doing, it all flows really well.

It’s at least a couple of hours, though you can play it faster if everybody knows the game.

But it’s well worth it.

Another great dice game from Garphill Games.

6) The Prodigals Club (2015 – Czech Games Edition)

Designer: Vladimír Suchý

Artist: Tomáš Kučerovský

Players: 2-5

2024 Rank: 4

Another Suchý game!

It’s funny how many of those there are on this list.

Prodigals Club has been on my Top games played list almost since the beginning, though it was further down until I finally got to play it more often.

Now it’s firmly set in my Top 10, though it’s fallen a couple here.

This is a game where you are trying to destroy your reputation in society, politics, and finance, and you want to do it faster and better than your friends in the club (i.e. your opponents).

It’s a sequel of sorts to Last Will, and apparently you can even incorporate that game into the Finance portion of this one, though I’ve never tried it (nor do I really want to).

You can play two modules or all three and essentially you are trying to destroy everything as much as you can.

I love the worker placement system where every round, places are seeded with cards that you will then be able to play in the Action phase, but some of which (the ones with a brown border) you will be able to play to your board to have ongoing actions/effects.

The scoring is very much like some Knizia classics, in that you are trying to lower your score in everything, but your final score is the highest of the three (or two if you’re only playing two modules).

Thus, you can’t concentrate on just one thing because you will lose.

The game is sped up by the Action phase being simultaneous, at least when everybody knows the game.

You’re playing cards and losing as much as you can!

This is a game where it almost seems overwhelming because you’re wondering how are you going to tank everything to get a super low score.

But then (most of the time, at least), you find yourself able to do so in order to have a score at most in the low to mid teens.

You might not be as successful so you have a score in the 20s and 30s, which is not good.

The mechanics of this game just grab me so hard.

I love every minute of it, and it’s become a convention staple for me and my friends.

5) Viscounts of the West Kingdom (2020 – Garphill Games)

Designers: S J MacDonald, Shem Phillips

Artist: Mihajlo Dimitrievski

Players: 1-4

2024 Rank: 5

Viscounts of the West Kingdom holds steady at #5 as my favourite Garphill game, mainly due to the deck-building mechanics and how all of the actions work so that you can concentrate on one or two things and come out on top if you do them well.

The deckbuilding is neat because you can hire townsfolk (or whatever they’re called in this one) and add them to your discard pile, which of course is standard.

But on your turn, you will move the three cards on your player board. The rightmost one will fall off (and if it has a “fall off” effect, you will do it then). You then shift the other two and play one card from your hand.

The symbols on the cards will help you do actions, either market (get stuff), build buildings, write manuscripts, or put your people into the castle (this one I’m not sure what it actually represents?)

You can win by concentrating on one or more of those aspects, even more so with the expansions (which help the building strategy, which was a little weak in the base game)

It also includes the virtue/corruption mechanics from the other West Kingdom games, but this time really uses them by essentially making them the timer of the game.

(The black and white tokens move as you gain virtue or corruption, and when they meet, you will get your deeds/debts)

The timer is when the Deeds or Debts deck runs out, and the corruption/virtue track will end up giving players a lot of one or the other (or maybe a little of both?).

Also, you can gain deeds and debts other ways, which will also contribute to the timer.

I also love the modular board, where you have your Viscount figure moving around the board to do actions depending on where they end up.

Everything just goes together really well in this one, which is why it’s the top Garphill game on my list.

4) 1960: The Making of a President (2007 – GMT Games)

Designers: Christian Leonhard, Jason Matthews

Artists: Josh Cappel, Donal Hegarty, Christian Leonhard, Rodger B. MacGowan, Jason Matthews

Players: 2

2024 Rank: 2

Now that we’re in the Top 4, there’s not a lot of movement, other than some new interloper coming in and knocking this game down to #4.

Yeah, right?

This game still stands really high, even though it’s been a very long time since I’ve played it.

I just can’t get long 2-player games to the table right now.

I’m waiting for retirement.

Anyway, this is a game about the 1960 US Presidential election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

And it is amazing.

Based on the Twilight Struggle system of card play, each round will have a certain number of cards played, with each player taking turns.

The twist in this one, which I find delicious and much more preferable to its predecessors, is that while most cards are either Kennedy’s or Nixon’s, you can still sometimes play them safely.

In the original games, if you played an opponent’s event, it automatically happened, which was usually bad for you.

However, in this one, it doesn’t automatically happen.

The other player has to spend a Momentum token to do so, and they may not have that many!

So it also becomes a cat and mouse game.

If you have a hand full of your opponent’s events, can you draw them out to play their one Momentum token on a card that doesn’t hurt you that much, to then let you play another card that would hurt you a lot?

It is essentially an area control game, but in this case it’s “votes” instead of “influence” that you are placing cubes in a state for.

The final election is tense because there will be some final cube draws in some states, which can turn the election!

As Nixon, I lost California on a final election cube draw.

It’s just such an amazing game and I wish I could play it more often.

Hopefully I will get it played at Bottoscon Winter in a month!

3) Combat Commander: Europe (2006 – GMT Games)

Designer: Chad Jensen

Artists: Lee Brimmicombe-Wood, Chad Jensen, Rodger B. MacGowan, Leland Myrick, Mark Simonitch

Players: 2

2024 Rank: 3

I’ve been playing this game monthly since 2021, including some extras as well.

Of course it’s going to be high in my rankings!

Combat Commander is a wonderful tactical WWII wargame where the dice are the cards, but you’re also playing cards for orders, and maybe even actions!

With battle packs and expansions and the like, there are tons of scenarios, but there’s also a Random Scenario Generator process that you can partake in if you just want to set up your own ahistorical ones.

I’ve never done that, but I’ve heard it’s fun.

The game can be pure chaos sometimes, with a random sniper suddenly killing your only leader from out of the blue, or maybe a Breeze event that blows away all of that wonderful smoke that’s letting you advance across the open.

The “dice rolls” (drawing a new card) are a fun way to do things, and card counters can keep an eye on what might be coming out.

If both “12” Time triggers either have gone by or been played or whatever, then you know you’re good for a while!

The game is just pure fun.

I used to think Combat Commander Pacific was better, but for some reason the randomness of Europe just appeals to me more now.

I would marry this game if I was a game and not a human being.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

If you’re a tactical wargamer, you have to try this one!

2) Civolution (2024 – Pegasus Spiele)

Designer: Stefan Feld

Artist: Dennis Lohausen

Players: 1-4

2024 Rank: Not Played

I first played Civolution in December 2024, and even though I sucked really hard at it, the game just grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go.

You are essentially alien beings of some kind running a simulation on how to form a civilization, having it spread across the map (kind of randomly generated) and adding trait cards to it to create your own unique form of people (or aliens, or whatever you want to call them).

This has to be one of Feld’s most intricate designs, but even with all of the stuff going on, it’s still kind of a point salad game.

There are so many different paths to victory in this game that it almost breaks your brain.

You are playing cards to your console, which will maybe give you an ability, or maybe an action that you can do, or maybe just straight up resources.

It uses dice in a kind of dice placement way, but you have to use two dice of the appropriate values to do 1 of 22 (!) different actions.

It’s almost enough to make you sit back and dither for hours on end, but you have to make a move!

Not to mention that every one of those actions can be upgraded to be better, but you’ll only get so many upgrades in a game so you have to decide what path to victory you want to pursue.

You can’t do everything!

It even has tracks!

I love tracks.

It’s been a few months since I’ve played this, so I really want to play it again.

After four plays, it jumps ahead of almost every game I’ve played to be near (but not on) the top of the list.

The only game to beat it is…

1) Ark Nova (2021 – Capstone Games)

Designer: Mathias Wigge

Artists: Steffen Bieker, Loïc Billiau, Dennis Lohausen

Players: 1-4

2024 Rank: 1

For the second time in a row, Ark Nova tops my list of best games played of all time.

I’ve even managed to get two plays of it in already this year, and it’s only February!

There’s just something about this game that makes me love it, and the wonderful Dire Wolf Digital app certainly helps keep it front and center in my brain.

Yet, I am really bad at it.

Players are building their own zoos, constructing enclosures to house the animals they play, doing sponsorships that will benefit them in some way, doing conservation projects and partnering with universities and zoos all over the world.

You are trying to maximize your public appeal with conservation points that you get for supporting projects (and sometimes just playing certain animals).

The two are on tracks that move toward each other like runaway trains in those weird math problems you did in high school (I don’t want to calculate how fast each train is going. They’re running right at each other! Oh the humanity!)

The game is essentially a race, and while I know that in my head, I can’t get my playing brain to internalize that at all.

I find myself trying to build up to the perfect play, and then end up falling behind everyone else.

But I will have a beautiful zoo at the end of it, with lots of cool animals.

The Marine Worlds expansion makes an already great game even better. While the base game is fun on its own and I wouldn’t say you need the expansion, I will never play without it if it’s available.

It adds upgraded action cards, two new enclosure types (well, one but in two sizes), and the “wave” mechanic which will help clear a stagnant card row (the only real downside of the base game, though even that doesn’t happen that often).

In fact, the Action card system really makes this game shine, where you have five action cards that will be moving as you play them.

They will have strengths 1-5, and when you do an action, that card will move back to the first space and you’ll have to build up its strength again.

I just love everything about this game!

Yeah, it can be long sometimes, especially at 4 players, but if everybody knows what they’re doing, it’s not that long of a game.

Definitely not a lunch time game, though.

Will this be #1 for a sixth year in a row in 2028?

Only time will tell, but I’d say it has a good shot.

So there you have it.

My Top 10 games played of all time.

Any surprises?

Anything I left out?

What’s in your top 10?

Let me know in the comments.

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