BGG Top Games – 2401-2500

Since I wanted to get another post done this week and it’s going to take way too long to do anything else I wanted to do, it’s time for the weekly look at the Boardgame Geek rankings, century by century!

Last week was really bad, but this week actually has some really cool stuff, so this one will be much more interesting.

Things aren’t actually too thin at this point, which is interesting since we’re hitting 2500 here.

The dregs gotta start happening soon, right?

I do love these posts because they do spark discussion about some games that aren’t written about very often.

Of course, last week’s didn’t, but last week kinda sucked, right?

This week is much different!

In fact, it even includes one of my Top 50 games, which is a crime against humanity because it shouldn’t be down this low.

(I kid, I kid…it’s actually just a crime against nature).

For this century, I have played 9 games and own (or previously owned) 2.

This week’s list is showing here, but of course keep in mind that things shift and, if you are coming here many months in the future (or the past, maybe you’re a time traveler?), this list could be very different from what I’m mentioning below.

I am going to be leaving some games I’ve played out of this because otherwise it would be a monstrously long post (as opposed to just annoyingly long), but we’ll also cover some games I wouldn’t mind playing.

There are also a couple of first editions where the 2nd edition is now really popular, as well as a few wargames, and some games that reimplement stuff I’ve played but I haven’t actually played those.

So a wide variety!

Let’s get started.

Let’s get to the main attraction in this century for me, and I can’t believe it’s this far down.

Maybe I’m just weird.

Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria (#2416) is my #48 game played and I stand by that.

It is a wonderful game with a bit of a runaway leader problem that the second expansion actually kind of fixes.

I love the dice drafting mechanism in this game, where the die you draft is one of your troops for fulfilling a battle plan, and the strength of it is inversely related to what benefit you will get from it.

Are you wanting to buy a Champion?

If you draft a 6 die, you will get a really powerful troop for your battle, but you won’t get any discount on that Champion.

Alternatively, drafting a weak 1 die will be a low-power troop but a 5 gold discount on hiring a Champion.

The runaway leader problem comes into play because if you fall behind in using your drafted troops to fulfill your battle plans, it’s almost impossible to catch up in the base game.

The expansion does add alternative ways to get points that don’t rely on battle plans, making it a bit more of a fight if you decide not to concentrate on those.

Still, I really love this game, it plays 5 very well, and doesn’t take that long overall. It’s still 90 minutes or so, depending on how well players know it, but I love it to death.

A travesty that it’s down in the 2400s.

Cutthroat Caverns (#2434), however, is a game that I have played once and really don’t need to play again, though it’s been long enough that I could be persuaded.

I played it 10 years ago, back in 2016, and don’t really have a lot of memories of it, other than I wasn’t a huge fan.

I don’t even have any pictures of it!

It’s the ultimate in semi-cooperative games, in that you have to cooperate to deal with 9 encounters (9 rounds).

Encounters can be monsters, or maybe insidious traps to waylay the unobservant.

However, the only person who gets points for the monster kill is the one who deals the death blow.

So you don’t want to bring it down to 5 hit points and then let your neighbour kill it.

But if you don’t do something, it’s going to attack and kill at least one of you. If anybody dies, you all lose!

Yes, there can only be a winner if all players survive all 9 encounters.

It’s a “whoever gets the most prestige wins the game” competition, but I played it before I was really recording my plays so I don’t even have scores for our game.

I just have who won.

Not my favourite game, but I’d be up for another go if somebody wanted to do it.

Then I’d probably be good for another 10 years.

Wits & Wagers: It’s Vegas, Baby (#2442) is a fun party game and I do like the betting aspect of the game.

It’s a trivia game, but it’s trivia you will never know.

This is like the classic Wits & Wagers, but with some Vegas additions, like betting a spread to be safer but earn fewer chips.

But the trivia questions are just as good and the gameplay is the same otherwise.

Do you know how many accidents are caused each year in Alaska by Moose? (Actual question).

Since nobody will know the answer, you give an answer that you think is as close as possible, and then everybody bets on who is closest.

Even if you don’t know trivia well at all, if you know who does know, and they know you know that they know…wait, I’m confused.

No, if you know who is good at trivia, even if that’s not you, then you can still win big.

That’s it.

It’s a party game that has lots of laughs and it’s definitely one I will play if it comes out.

Then we have Jorvik (#2465), which is an interesting game but that after our one play of it, nobody else really cared for it, so I traded it away.

This is a reskin of the apparent classic (“apparent” because I had never heard of it before I heard of Jorvik) Feld game The Speicherstadt (#1217, so I skipped over it when I did that century!).

It includes both the “base” game reimplementation as well as rules that were incorporated by the expansion.

I played this in 2017, and I remember buying it because I was so hyped after seeing the review of it (probably The Dice Tower).

The mechanisms looked really cool!

Yet when playing it, I didn’t even take a picture of it.

Granted, I was hit or miss in taking pictures back then. That “New to Me Games” post back in May 2017 didn’t even have any pictures.

What the hell was I thinking?

Anyway, I remember really enjoying it.

You’re bidding on cards with a really interesting worker placement bidding mechanic.

You can place a bid to take a card, but then other players can bid too (and you can even place a later bid if you want to).

Once bids are done, each card is evaluated and the first bidder can buy it.

But the cost of the card is how many bids there are in total on it.

So if there are 5 bids, then it will cost 5 gold!

You can pass, but then the next bidder can take it for 4. If they pass, the next bidder (which could have been you) can take it for 3. And so on.

I don’t remember the details of what the cards do or anything, or what you are ultimately trying to accomplish, but I do know that I’d love to play this game again if somebody had it.

I just don’t want to own it, because nobody in my game group liked it.

Oh well.

Custom Heroes (#2473) is a card-building, climbing card game that had some really cool aspects to it.

Looking back at my First Impressions post (wow, was I doing First Impressions posts back then?), I realize from my description of it that it was my first foray into card games like Scout, where you are trying to form different combinations of cards to lay out on the table to beat somebody else’s combination, and that you are trying to play all of your cards first.

Who knew?

Given that, I think I would love to play it again, because I think the concept was a bit alien to me at the time, back in 2017.

I love how you can be improving your cards (a John D. Clair staple, of course) so that they better reflect what you want to be doing.

You’re not dealt new cards at all.

Instead, your 10 starter cards will just be improved like crazy until they are totally different than what everybody else has.

But you’re still playing sets of cards and then somebody else has to try to beat them.

Another thing that sounds great is that the winner of the round just gets one improvement but does get points.

Everybody else gets a number of improvements based on where they placed in the round.

So if you lose, you get better!

(I don’t remember what those yellow pentagon chits are for)

If somebody hits 10 VP, then if they win a future round, they win!

If they don’t, you keep going until the end of the sixth round.

Then the player(s) who have 10+ points face off against whoever won round 6 in a final battle.

I remember (and my post confirms it) that this game took a long time, a lot longer than a card game really should.

Not sure why, so I’d love to try it again and see what happens.

Finally, I have to talk about Codenames: Deep Undercover (#2475), mainly because of how much I dislike this game.

Not because I hate Codenames, though I’m not a huge fan.

I really hate “adult” games that are basically versions of a game that just add sexual content to it in order to make it “adult.”

I played this at Bottoscon 2023 and was going back to read my reactions to it, and they were actually pretty mild!

Maybe I’ve become more of a prude since then, but if you’re going to make an adult game, make an adult game!

I’d go for that! (ok, not a prude, then)

Don’t just add dirty words or dirty concepts to an all-ages game and say “we’re done.”

Anyway, pretty much everybody reading this blog knows how Codenames works, so I won’t go into detail about that.

Just replace “regular” words with words like “bang” or “pervert” and you’ll know everything you need to know.

Let’s move on to stuff that I would like (or would definitely not like) to play.

But before I do that, a couple of interesting honorable mentions.

Scrabble (#2410) makes itself known!

The classic word game (first published in 1948) shows up on the BGG list way down here.

Will it ever move up?

Doubtful.

Also, a couple of first editions of games where the second edition is very well known (at least by me).

Archaeology: the Card Game (#2403) is not a game I’ve played, but Archaeology: the New Expedition (#1195) is a really fun one!

Funnily enough, this game also reimplements Archaeology (#13,490), so I guess this is kind of a 2nd edition and New Expedition is the third?

I’m so confused.

The second one is Pax Pamir (#2415), which we already know the 2nd edition is just so good!

Of course, the 2nd edition of this classic game is much higher than this (#51), but its roots are in this game, so it must have some great stuff in here.

That, and I know some people (I don’t know how many, but definitely some!) prefer the first edition to the second.

This is, of course, a representation of the Great Game in Afghanistan in the 1800s, where Russian, British and Afghan governments vie for power. Each player is a local Afghan tribe who is trying to play off the factions against each other, joining one and trying to help them achieve dominance.

The BGG entry for the first edition doesn’t really go into any gameplay details, so I have no idea what’s changed.

Anybody want to leave a comment and clarify?

Let’s get into games I would like to play, and I’ll start with a game that I’ve actually played the app version of enough to review it.

Lotus (#2438) is a card game where you are forming a garden based on flower cards that you play.

It’s a beautiful game in app form and I can only imagine that the art on the cards makes this game vibrant on the table as well.

I haven’t even played the app in quite a while, but I should probably rectify that.

I’d love to play it on the table once to see if it gives the same peace and serenity that the app does.

Let’s keep with the Zen feeling by bringing in Bob Ross: Art of Chill (#2435), a game that I laughed at when I first saw it announced in 2017 (good lord, has it been that long?) but maybe it’s as chill as Lotus?

Bob Ross is (or was, I guess) an artist who had a show on PBS in the United States and he was known for his super-dreamy voice and just zen-like manner.

Even if you never saw his show, he’s become a meme so much in the last 10+ years that many people around the world have heard of him.

I know nothing about how this game actually works, so let’s blurb it a bit.

“In the game, each player starts with three art supplies cards, with each card showing one of seven paints and one of four tools. (Some cards are jokers that serve as any color, but no tool.) Take one of the large double-sided painting cards, place it on the easel, and place Bob on the first space on the painting track.

On a turn, the active player rolls the die and either draws an art supplies card, plays a paint to their palette, receives an extra action for the turn (four total), or both draws a “Chill” card and advances Bob on the painting track. Chill cards give all players a bonus, set up conditions that could give players extra points, and more.

The player then takes three actions. Actions include drawing an art supplies cards, discarding two matching cards to claim the matching technique card (which is worth 2 points and 1 bonus point when used), sweep the art supplies card row, place a paint on their palette, wash half their palette, or complete a section of a painting. To take this latter action, the player needs to have all of the paint needed for one of the painting’s three sections on their palette with no unneeded colors mixed in! The player scores points equal to the number of paints used, bonus points if they’re the first or second to paint this, and additional points if they’ve painted this feature before Bob (i.e., did you paint this before the Bob figure reaches this space on the painting track.“

Seems pretty chill.

I could use some Zen, and I’d like to see if the game is at least playable, even if I ended up hating it (and thus getting unchill).

Another game I’d really love to try, just to see how it is different from the original, is Ethnos: 2nd Edition (#2461).

This is a 2025 game, so is it on its way up?

Or is it stagnating?

The original is at #335 and is an amazing game, partially because it plays 6 players with ease and in a timely manner.

The original game was also reimplemented by Archeos Society (#2564), which I guess we will get to next week!

In other words, it was not a great success.

It had its defenders, but most people love the area control of the original rather than moving up tracks.

This one appears to bring back the area control but with better (and less cliched) artwork?

I do like it.

There are also some supposedly updated rules to streamline things, so I’d love to play it to see how it feels compared to the original.

I want to end it there because this post is getting super-long, but I can’t go without mentioning the remarkable (at least in my online plays of it) Votes For Women (#2476), which I really need to play on the table because I have played it on Rally the Troops and it is an amazing game, but one that I just can’t really figure out how to play well.

Probably due to the online-only nature of my plays.

It’s a 1-2 player game, so I would probably never get it to the table if I bought it.

But I want to play it live, just to see what I can do with it.

It’s an important topic, a game by a female designer, and from what I can tell, it’s amazing.

Give it a try on Rally the Troops if you don’t believe me!

We’ve now reached 2500 games on BGG, and we’re still going strong.

Next week doesn’t look too bad, with some wonderful nostalgia for me and at least 7 games played.

So I’ll have something to talk about!

What do you think of the games in this century?

Let me know in the comments.