BGG Top Games – 3401 – 3500

Another short turnaround time for this Boardgame Geek century of games post, because I have another Friday Night Shots post ready to go, so I didn’t want this to go out on Friday too.

You all are getting so lucky with these!

Or at least you haven’t taken me out to the corn field and put me out of my misery, anyway.

This week, we go even deeper into the Boardgame Geek game rankings to see what might be out there.

There are a bunch of mediocre games here, at least as far as the ones I’ve played go.

But there are still a lot of them!

There hasn’t been a week yet where I’ve only played one or two games.

I don’t know if that means I’ve played a bunch of games or if it means that I only play relatively highly-ranked games.

You be the judge!

Here’s the century that we’re talking about today.

Keep in mind if you’re coming back to look at this some day in the future (maybe some rock musician sent you after notifying people that they won’t be attending GenCon 2029?), the numbers will have changed.

That’s the nature of things!

Here are my numbers for this century: 8 games played and one of those owned.

With that short introduction done (yay, I have more words to talk about games!), let’s go!

The first one that I’ve played is Abracada…What? (#3413)

What a weird name for a game.

I wrote briefly about this game when I played it back in 2019, and I’m still not sure I understand it.

It’s a deduction game where you’re trying to cast spells to do…something to your opponents.

But you don’t know what spells you have (what?) so you have to deduce whether or not you’re even going to be able to cast the right spell by seeing what other players have and also doing a little guesswork.

It’s kind of like Hanabi in that everybody else can see your spells, but you can’t.

If you end up casting the wrong spell (because you deduced you had one and you actually had something else), you could cost yourself a life point and potentially knock yourself out.

I remember playing this game, but I don’t remember anything about it except what’s in the description.

I think we had some laughter while playing it, but it didn’t rank very highly for me.

Maybe another play would make it live again?

I remember Brendan teaching it, but I don’t remember who actually owned it (if anybody, since it was at a convention and it may have been a checked out game).

Next on the list is Patrician (#3427), a 2007 game that I don’t really have a lot of memory about either, even though it was only back in 2024 when it was played.

This game involves you building various towers in cities around the board.

Each city’s towers will have a specified height requirement before they are complete.

Each city will only have two towers in it, so you’d better be one of them!

Playing a card will allow you to add a level to one of the two towers in the city on the card.

You’re trying to have the most pieces in towers in each city, because when the maximum tower height is reached, the city will score and you want to have the most pieces.

You play pieces to the towers with area cards that will tell you where you can build.

You then take a card from that district.

Each tower has height requirements which will tell you when the towers are complete.

When a district is complete with two towers of the indicated height, then it will score.

This was an interesting game, actually.

I didn’t rate it very high on Boardgame Geek, so I’d like to try it again and see if it’s improved in my estimation or whether my memory of it is fonder than when I had just finished it.

The card play was kind of cool, with some cards allowing you to shift tower pieces around.

Overall it was kind of “meh,” but that could just be hindsight.

I’d play it again.

Splito (#3433) was actually a very cool card game, though I didn’t really pick it up very quickly.

It’s a clever little card game where you’re trying to help your neighbours to the left and right of you, because if you do that better than everybody else does, you win!

The conceit in this game is that each turn, you are playing a card either in between you and your left neighbour, or your right neighbour, and you will each collectively score the cards there.

Each turn, you’ll be working with those people to make sure the group of cards scores as highly as possible.

You have to help them do well in order for you to do well.

So you’re hoping that their other partner isn’t doing that well with them.

That’s because at the end of the game, you multiply one side’s score with the other side’s.

If you have 20 points on one side and only 5 points on the other, that’s only 100 points.

Your neighbour with the 20 points might also have 20 points with their other neighbour, meaning they get 400!

You score points with the contract cards that you play down, though you have to work with your partner to make sure that you don’t exceed what it’s asking for later.

Like above, the “exactly 2 cards with a value of 5” scoring card only works if you have two cards of that value down!

As the game goes on, you have fewer cards available so sometimes you might have to play one that will nullify one of the scoring cards.

I really enjoyed this one but I haven’t seen it again since I played it at OrcaCon 2024.

But I’d definitely play it again.

Then we get to a game that I didn’t care for at all.

Dandelions (#3473) is a dice-rolling area majority game about finding the best spots on the table for your dandelion seeds to sprout.

Each player rolls all of their dice simultaneously and then chooses one to spend to move their token around the board.

Where it lands is where you will place that die, knocking anybody else’s dice that have the same value onto an adjacent tile.

As you run low on dice, your choices become smaller and smaller, and you can only reroll them if you happen to land in one exact space.

So much for dice mitigation.

The game ends when all of the dice are placed on the tiles, where you then score each tile.

Each player will score the tile’s number of points (1,2,3,5,8) for each die they have there.

Then on each tile, whoever has the most dice there scores the total pip value of their dice on the tile.

With the only dice mitigation being the “one space out of a bunch that lets you reroll your dice,” it’s really hard to recommend this one.

I love random games, but this one is just too random.

Your choices diminish as you place dice, meaning that towards the end of the game, you might literally not be able to do anything that benefits you.

I didn’t hate the game, but it’s not one that I’ll ever suggest playing.

(also, on the New to Me games post where I talked about this, I said I was confident that I would never talk about this game again. Oops! Maybe I should have chosen different ones in this century)

7 Empires (#3463) was an intriguing near miss for me.

It’s intriguing because each player doesn’t control one of the seven empires.

Instead, you are exerting influence on each one, and whoever has the most influence on it actually does its actions.

Thus, at the beginning of each round, each player collects the monarch of all of the empires that they have the most influence with.

Then, in turn order, they will choose one (if they have more than one) and execute actions for that empire.

The really interesting thing is that each action actually has a cool-down time of 2 turns for that empire when you do it.

So if you use the place units action, nobody else can use it for that monarch for a little while.

You place that action’s wooden piece on the “I” space for that monarch.

At the end of the round, they’ll all shift, with the last one going back to the adjacent pad and opening up the first slot again.

So you not only have to time your actions accordingly, but you also have to make sure that you maintain control of the monarchs who are actually doing well.

That’s because some of the actions will score that empire points based on certain criteria.

New influence cards will come out and other players can obtain them, causing them to suddenly have more influence than you do.

At the end of the game, the empires are ranked by their points and then players will score based on their influence with them.

Get a lot of influence with the top one and each influence point is worth seven!

This was a cool game that just didn’t quite hit for me.

However, having only played it once, I’d definitely try it again to see if that would change.

Finally, let’s talk about World Championship Russian Roulette (#3493).

Just because this game is so weird.

It’s a century of weird games!

It’s a push your luck card game, with a little bit of bluffing, where you have a deck of six “Click” cards and one “Bang” card.

You are a team who has made it to the World Championship (the colour doesn’t matter as there are no asynchronous teams).

At the beginning of the round, you “pocket” one of your cards: either a Click or a Bang.

This means it’s removed from your deck temporarily.

Then each player shuffles the rest of their deck and bids on how many cards they will turn over without turning over the “Bang” card.

Pocketing your “Bang” card may sound obvious, but if anybody suspects that you’ve pocketed it and you did, then the judge shoots one of your team members and the accuser gets to draw 3 action cards.

If you did pocket a “Click” card, then the accuser has to take another “Bang” card for their deck and you get to draw an action card.

Action cards can be played whenever the card says it can be played.

Then, simultaneously, each player turns over their top card.

If it’s “Bang,” then they lose a team member and they’re out of the round.

If not, then you keep going, turning over cards until you’ve reached your bid.

You then get the amount of points you bid plus another point for surviving if you never draw your Bang.

The first team to 15 points wins!

The theme is really questionable, but this game could generate a lot of laughs if you don’t take it too seriously.

I played more games, but I do want some time to talk about games that sound interesting, so let’s move on to those.

The first one I’m thinking of as something I wouldn’t mind playing is B-17 Flying Fortress Leader (#3411).

I’m beginning to really love solo games (even though the only solo game I’ve played recently is Final Girl).

This is another in the Leader series of solo games from DVG Games.

A lot of people love these games (I know my friend Zilla Blitz does, at least some of them), so it would always be interesting to try them.

In this one, you’re in command of the Eighth Air Force stationed in England during World War II, and you’re facilitating the bombing campaign of the Germans, trying to reduce their ability to wage war.

Of course, the actual effect of strategic city bombing is debatable compared to the moral aspect of it all, but these games don’t deal with that part of things.

In this case, though, a large number of your missions will actually be trying to destroy the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) so it can’t contest the Normandy landings in June, 1944.

In fact, there are various campaigns in the game, and many of them are focused on that rather than “strategic” bombing.

One interesting aspect that isn’t usually in a game like this (though maybe it’s a general part of the Leader series?) is this:

“Various German Defense Commanders will try different tactics and technologies in an effort to stop your campaign. Each German commander will also have a varying range of Luftwaffe responses to your attack, from Poor to All Out.

To help mitigate the Luftwaffe threat, you can accomplish Secondary Mission objectives that can advance the Mediterranean and Russian fronts to force Germany to send more Luftwaffe Squadrons into those theaters. You can also purchase various technologies to increase the odds of a successful mission, like Drop Tanks, Jammers, and H2X Radar sets. An option to invest and field the P-80 Shooting Star jet fighter is included. Once the Allied Invasion has begun, many Secondary Missions will help advance the Allies to Berlin to end the war.”

These kinds of games would be really cool for me.

First Martians: Adventures on the Red Planet (#3429) has always intrigued me because (when I was buying games in the States for our mailbox in Blaine, Washington) it was always on the Miniature Market clearance list of games (or at least I think it was this one).

The prices were good, but while I bit on a few (regrettably in most cases, but not all), I never actually bit on this one.

This game is a cooperative game in the vein of Portal’s Robinson Crusoe, where players are cooperatively trying to survive on Mars.

It can be done as a campaign or just random scenarios.

But it’s always seemed kind of cool to me.

Not much more to it than that!

Exploding Kittens: NSFW Edition (#3442) I only mention because of the tag line: “Match kittens and avoid explosions. Now with poop jokes!”

Just what the world needs: more poop jokes.

At least it’s not lame sex jokes like Codenames: Undercover.

Then we get to a game that I list for nostalgia’s sake.

Storm Over Arnhem (#3471) is the first wargame I ever bought for myself (ok, yes, my parents bought it for me) back when I was a kid.

I loved this game and I really enjoyed the After Action Report game that was a 2-part article in The General (Avalon Hill’s magazine back when they were a wargaming entity).

It’s an area wargame rather than a hex and counter game, with the courageous British paratroopers grimly holding onto an ever-shrinking area at one end of the Arnhem bridge during Operation Market Garden (September 1944).

The British end up losing this one, with the remnants of the British forces eventually sneaking past the Germans and away.

But in the game, you can win by delaying the Germans from getting across the bridge, preventing them from reinforcing the German forces facing the other paratroop drops further down the Rhine river.

It was such an intense game, though I’m not sure how much of that was because I was basically a kid when I played it.

But I think it would still be an awesome game and I would love to try this one again.

Finally, let’s talk about Medici: the Card Game (#3498), just because it’s a card game version of the classic Knizia auction game that seems pretty awesome.

I’ve played that one a couple of times, though not in the last few years.

Watching various game plays on Heavy Cardboard makes me want to try it again.

The card game, though?

This is not an auction game like its inspiration.

Instead, you’re drawing cards.

You draw 1-3 cards and you must take the last card drawn (this is all cargo, like in the regular game).

You can, if you like, take any of the other cards you’ve drawn and add them to your ship.

Any cards that aren’t taken are available for others to take.

Once your ship is full, you’re out of the round and once everybody is, you score the commodities you’ve acquired.

It sounds fine, though I’ve heard it’s nowhere near as good as the regular game.

But I wouldn’t mind trying it!

We’re bumping up against my 3000 word limit so let’s stop there.

A number of other intriguing games might have made the cut otherwise.

What have you played in this century?

What do you want to play?

Anything to recommend?

Or to avoid?

Let me know in the comments.