BGG Top Games – 3501-3600

No time warps this time, hopefully.

There wasn’t last week, anyway.

Yes, doing these centuries (that’s 100 games for those who have been wondering) of Boardgame Geek game rankings have been really interesting and fun to do.

But writing them ahead as I do, I sometimes run into the problem of one of the games I’m talking about suddenly not being in the century by the time it posts.

So far so good on last week’s, though.

And hopefully this week as well.

I’ll keep writing these as long as you’ll have me and as long as I’ve actually played some of the games in the century.

This week’s list is here, though keep in mind, as usual, that things may have changed by the time you’re reading this.

In case you’ve been in a coma for a year and are just catching up on my blog.

You have a lot to read!

This week is a bit of a lean week, with me only having played 5 games and own (or previously owned) 2 of them.

Still, doesn’t mean there aren’t some interesting games down here, including my previously-owned one!

But yeah, not so much.

Getting close to the introduction word limit, so let’s just get started.

(Remember that you can click on a picture to blow it up)

My first played game is a fun little card game that I have played a bunch of times and I always enjoy it.

Cover Your Assets (#3518) is a game of set collecting and thievery.

Never have I seen a take-that game played with such laughter and so few hard feelings in it.

You’re collecting pairs of assets, but your top pair can always be stolen by another player who has at least one set of assets out.

They just need to play the matching card, but you can defend with a matching card!

Gold and Silver are wild so can also be played to steal or defend (or just be part of a pair you place down).

Suddenly those top asset groups can be hugely valuable because all of the attacking and defending cards get added to it, so you want to make sure you cover them as soon as possible.

Fun game, always good for a laugh. Nowhere near a Top 50 game, but it’s something I’m always willing to play.

Poor Scott (we’ll see if he’s reading this one…)

Another fun lunch time game that, unfortunately, I haven’t gotten to the table in a while (though I did play a game on Boardgame Arena last year) is Dog Lover (#3516)

This game is the sequel to the excellent (and rated #1190) Cat Lady.

It’s still a card collecting game where cards are placed in a 3×3 grid, but unlike its predecessor, you’re not taking a row or a column.

Instead, you’re taking cards in the design of one of the tricks your dog has learned.

Thus, you can vary how your cards are collected and may be able to get one or more cards that you really wanted without taking the other useless for you cards, like in Cat Lady.

It still has some of the same features of the original, like you’re collecting dogs to get you points, but you have to also collect the food to feed them at the end of the game.

There are still toys and other set collection type things.

The cool thing about this one are the traits that you can assign to your dogs for extra points.

They get you points and usually allow you to tuck other cards to get more points.

These make the game stand out and I do actually like it more as a “gamer’s game” (though both are not that difficult to teach to even non-gamers).

I really should bring this to work so we can play it at lunch.

Also played, but only once (though it is available on Boardgame Arena!) is Spellbook (#3527).

This is a Phil Walker-Harding game that I played back in 2023 and I don’t remember too much about it.

It’s a game about learning spells and collecting magical essences to both learn them as well as feed your familiar who really loves that stuff.

Turns are split into three phases: Morning, Midday, and Evening, and you take an action in each one.

You are trying to learn the same spells as everybody else, but you can decide what level of the spell to learn based on the Materia you have.

Learning the upper level is easy, but if you want a more in-depth version of it, it will take a longer study.

Some of the spells will give you Morning or Midday actions that you can take instead of the standard actions for that phase.

Morning actions are to take two Materia (I think there are two missing letters, there, Phil!) from the bag, or you can take one from the market.

Midday, you can either feed one of your Materia to your familiar or take a spell action if you have one.

Evening is when you learn a spell, if you have enough resources.

There is little mitigation in this random Materia draw, though you can discard three Materia with the same symbol (not colour as I had thought at the beginning of my game) to get a Wild one.

Once somebody’s Familiar is full, the game will end, or if somebody manages to actually learn all seven spells.

This was a fine game, not my favourite, but it was easy to learn (except the Wild thing) and I wouldn’t mind playing it again.

The same cannot be said for 18Lilliput (#3532)!

This game is definitely not for me.

It’s basically a simpler 18xx game, seemingly put out there to get people’s feet wet who may not be sure if they are interested in a train game like other 18xx games.

Assuming that’s the case, this just reinforced my lack of desire to play any of them.

I don’t normally do this for games I’ve played in these centuries. I usually actually tell you about them.

But I have to point to my New to Me: January 2019 post where I do try (operative word is “try”) to explain how the game works, but then the awesome Jonas leaves a comment and does a lot better job than I could.

He never came back to “like” my reply to him, so I don’t know if he saw it or not. I hope he realized how much his comment meant to me.

Anyway, long story short, 18xx light, which will mean you either love it or hate it (or maybe just find it too simple if you’re an 18xx grognard).

Let’s save some word count for games I can actually describe intelligently (Editor: “well actually…”)

Stop it! (Editor: “ok, I’ll stop…for now”)

Finally in games that I’ve played, there’s Ecosystem: Coral Reef (#3585).

This is another quick filler card game (there are a lot of them in this century) and it’s…fine.

I wouldn’t mind playing it another time or two so I can review it.

This is a card drafting game where you are drafting and playing cards into your 5×4 (4×5?) ecosystem grid, with each type of card scoring in different ways.

Some cards will score based on what’s next to them, or in their row or column.

Some will score based on how deep they are in your grid.

Whales will actually flip cards, but that can be good because they’re worth a lot of points!

Just make sure you’re flipping cards that aren’t helping you score anyway, as that would be a bummer.

The cards are cool and the artwork is nice.

It plays 6 very quickly, which is also nice.

Since there are enough cards for 6 players, games with smaller amounts can suffer from the fact that not all of the cards are coming out.

Kind of like low-player count Sagrada before the new rules had you actually take certain dice out.

Without taking certain types of cards, you might find yourself with very few whales, or sharks, or eels, or whatever.

Just a thought.

Not bad, will definitely play it when it’s on offer, but not something that makes me enthusiastic.

Before I move on to games that sound interesting, I wanted to say that I previously owned Bayonets & Tomahawks (#3536) because I loved my couple of Rally the Troops plays of it (or was it VASSAL?) with Michal from The Boardgame Chronicle.

But after buying it, and before I even unwrapped it, I knew that I would never get it to the table so I sent it on to somebody who will get some use out of it.

This is a game about the British struggle with France in the French & Indian War, with colonial armies and Native American tribes helping out both sides.

You can play 1-year scenarios or the entire war, and it has some interesting card play and point-to-point movement that I’m not used to (the wargames I used to play were all hex and counter ones).

Let’s blurb it so you can really get the gist of how it plays:

“Bayonets & Tomahawks is card-driven. But unlike most card assisted wargames player don’t manage a hand of cards. Each player starts the year with one undisclosed reserve Action card picked randomly. At the beginning of each Action round, both players draw a new card. They must then choose one of their 2 cards to play for the current round. The other card becomes their reserve for the next round. At each action round, the French player also gets a random Indians action card.

The Action points (AP) on the cards in play determine how many stacks of pieces a player can activate during the current round. In addition the cards trigger events and determine initiative for the next Action round. Movement is point to point. Pieces can also move via sea zones.

Each side has particular assets he must make the most of in order to achieve victory. The British have overwhelming numbers, the French are more adept at wilderness fighting with the help of their numerous Indian allies. To win, a player must control enough enemy key spaces to reach the scenario’s Invasion victory points requirement by game end. In one-year scenarios, pieces removed permanently from play yield Invasion VP as well. The French player can also win if he succeeds in enough raids during the current year to reach the scenario’s Raid victory points requirement.”

Now let’s move on to some games that sound interesting.

Trick Shot: 2nd Edition (#3557), I actually played a demo of it back at SHUX 2022, a couple of years before it came out.

It was a fun game!

It’s kind of a push your luck dice with added player skills as you are trying to put the puck in the net.

It looked really interesting, but sadly I don’t remember much about it and the BGG page doesn’t say much either!

I do recall enjoying it, though I knew I wouldn’t be buying it.

I probably wouldn’t get it played, since it is a 2-player game.

(keep in mind too that these two photos are from the demo, 2 years before it came out. It might have changed some)

Now let’s talk about some possibly cool games that I would love to play, or just want to talk about.

None!

Ha, I kid, I kid…

Let’s get nostalgic a little bit, like I did last week with Storm Over Arnhem.

Panzerblitz (#3578) is a wargame from Avalon Hill that came out in 1970.

1970!!

It’s all about armored warfare on the Eastern Front in World War II at a tactical level.

It used isomorphic boards that could be put together in different configurations (much like Squad Leader) and enabled you to simulate many different tank battles in the Soviet Union.

I didn’t play a bunch of this when I was a kid, but I played some.

This is more noteworthy for me because they used the same system (updated for more modern warfare) in the Arab-Israeli Wars (currently #6217) game that my brother had and that we played many great scenarios from.

Yeah, the art wasn’t the greatest. It was 1970!

I enjoyed this (and its successor) a bunch.

There do seem to a bunch of older games that nobody’s heard of in this century, but let’s go with Cleopatra and the Society of Architects: Deluxe Edition (#3604, so it dropped out of this century before I could post it! I don’t care, I’ve already written this).

This one I’ve heard mentioned a lot, at least the original game.

The original of this is a Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc classic auction/tile placement game that I have no idea about.

I’ve never played either one!

There’s a three-dimensional palace that you’re helping build and you’re trying to become the richest architect in this ancient kingdom.

Let’s blurb this one:

“Players, however, will be tempted to trade in materials of dubious origins in order to build faster. While these corrupt practices might allow an architect to stay a step ahead of the rest, they come with a high price: the cursed corruption amulets honoring Sobek, the crocodile-god. When Cleopatra finally reaches her new palace at the end of the game, she punishes the most corrupted architects (i.e., the ones with the most amulets), depriving them of riches or giving them as a sacrifice to her crocodile! The wealthiest architect from among those still alive wins.

This new edition of Cleopatra and the Society of Architects has a new graphic design by Miguel Coimbra, a free-standing 3D palace, and rulebook updated by the designers for simplicity and fluidity…”

And then it goes on to list the changes.

The game (or at least its original) is well-regarded, so I’d love to play it sometime.

However, I have heard horror stories about Mojito’s production quality, including this one.

So maybe that’s why people are ignoring it.

Finally, I want to mention something of note because I have no idea whether it’s destined to stay down this deep in the rankings or whether this is just a stepping stone and it will be much higher (maybe even before this posts).

Gloomhaven: 2nd Edition (#3488 though it was #3508 when I did this post and in the upper 3500s when I started writing it, maybe disproving most of what I write below?) is way far down, considering that the original game is in the Top 10.

Is this just because it came out last year and it’s going to keep rising steadily (even fast enough that it will cause another time warp in this post)?

Or are so many people done with the first one that the second one isn’t catching on quite as fast?

This is a “revised and elevated version of the core game” (what the hell does “elevated” mean here?), so maybe there aren’t a lot of changes for those who have already played the original?

“The world, story, and challenging gameplay are all still the same, but there is a plethora of additional content to explore. Even for those who have played Gloomhaven before, this edition brings new material to the table, with rebalanced and redesigned mercenary classes, items, and scenarios, as well as brand new artwork, newly written narrative and events, updated miniatures, a new faction-based reputation system, and more.”

Is that enough to bring enough new players in to move it up in the rankings?

I honestly don’t know.

Yes, yes, I know.

BoardgameGeek rankings are not a sign of how good or bad a game is.

But it is interesting how low this one is, even though it’s less than a year after it came out.

Is it going to keep moving up?

I guess we’ll see!

(spoiler: yes, it is! At least for now)

Honestly, there is not a lot that excites me in this century.

A friend of mine has Steam Up: A Feast of Dim Sum (#3510 and probably going to move up into last week’s list before this posts, and yes it did, now at #3497), but I know nothing about it so can’t really comment.

Overall, this is the most bland of the centuries I’ve done in a while, but let’s get ready for next week!

It has to get better, right?

Spoiler alert: it does (though not by a huge amount).

Anything in this century excite you?

What do you think of the games I mentioned?

Did I miss anything?

Let me know in the comments.