BGG Top Games – 4801 – 4900

Even closer to 5000 on the Boardgame Geek ranking system, the pickings of played games are getting slim!

Not so slim that it would keep me from doing another in this series of posts, because it’s so goddamned fun to talk about games, both ones I know and ones I don’t!

And it seems to be fairly popular, at least among the folk who matter.

Before we go into that one, though, let’s look at our two experiments.

Last week I said that I would give The Game Makers one more week to wow me because its rocketing up the charts had slowed considerably.

This week, it seems to slowed down even more, so this may be the last week I look at this one.

When last week’s post went out, it was sitting pretty at #2855.

As of writing this last Friday, it’s now at #2824.

Not much movement!

Of course, at the time of this posting, it’s at #2773, so it’s still moving up a little bit! Still less than a hundred, but it’s on its last legs for this experiment.

The other experiment is Wingspan Pocket and it may be the last week for that one too.

Last week it was at #1545 and as of writing this on Friday, it’s at #1515.

Still moving, but really crawling now.

Will it make its way, slowly but surely, into the top 1000?

Well, it’s at #1453 now, so maybe one more week to see if it still continues to slow?

The list that for this century can be found here.

Just don’t think that game you’re looking for is going to be here if you’re coming six months from now.

It’s probably long out of print.

This week continues last week’s drought of games played, with the exact same number!

Yes, I’ve played two of the games in this century and don’t own any of them.

That means more about interesting games instead of this dreck, right?

(I shouldn’t say that. One of the games is actually quite good).

Introduction’s word count almost used up, so let’s get started!

The first game I have played, I have only played online. So it shouldn’t count, right?

But it does! Because I played it live, even using voice chat, with my good friends Michal and Clio (Boardgames Chronicle and Clio’s Board Games) on the Rally the Troops platform.

With the big time difference, we were able to get the game in on a weekday morning for me, weekday evening for them.

Land and Freedom: the Spanish Revolution and Civil War (#4862) is a 1-3 player game where each player is a faction in the resistance to the fascist alliance that has rebelled against the Spanish republic.

Players are either the Anarchists, Communists, or Monarchists, all with different goals but all united in trying to fight off the fascists trying to take over the country.

It’s essentially a semi-cooperative game, because only one player can win but it’s very possible for everybody to lose if all the factional infighting allows the fascists to overcome everything.

The fascists are controlled by a deck of cards and you know what’s coming at the end of the round, so you can play your cards and do your actions to hopefully forestall that.

Each fascist card will move one or more of the four areas closer to a fascist victory.

In classic card-driven game fashion, you can play a card from your deck for either the action points or the event, but each faction has their own deck.

Action points can be used to move up the various tracks or to add Republican forces to the conflict areas.

This was a fun game, and it’s a real tight one where you have to make sure the fascists don’t win while also getting ahead in your own things.

I’d love to play it again one day.

The other game that I’ve played wasn’t nearly as fun, though I did enjoy my play of it. Mainly because it was a game I played at OrcaCon with people I didn’t know.

This was the convention where I don’t really know anybody, so I’m flying by the seat of my pants!

Horizons (#4887) is a 4X game in an hour, allowing you to explore new worlds, expand your empire, gather resources, all of that good stuff.

It calls itself “4X”, but there’s really not much extermination in there. It’s all fairly peaceful for the most part.

There are a number of star systems out on the table with planets orbiting the stars.

You are attempting to colonize or place resource-gathering equipment on them in order to establish control.

It’s an action selection game where you get two actions on your turn (two of the same ones can be done twice if you want): exploring (adding a planet to a star system, so obviously the picture above is after all the planets have come out), adapting (becoming able to inhabit a certain type of world), build a structure on a world, harvest resources from your collectors on planets, or conspire (draw 2 Mission cards or 1 Mission and 1 Ally).

The Allies give you neat special abilities that you can use twice in the game before they go away.

The player boards are kind of cool too.

I don’t remember much about this game, so I’m not sure why I rated it a 6.5.

Control of systems gives you points, and the game ends immediately when somebody places their last colony.

I’d love to play it again to see if that rating holds up or not. In my New to Me post for that month, I mention how it didn’t really grab me, but we played the basic side of the player boards, so no asymmetric powers.

Maybe it gets better with those?

I don’t know.

I doubt I will ever see this one again, but I’m glad I played it once.

At least because it gave me something to talk about!

Now on to the good stuff (though one of those two was good!)

One of the games that got me into gaming as a kid (before my long hiatus from 1992-2012) was my brother’s copy of Third Reich.

Lo and behold, Advanced Third Reich (#4858) is on this list!

This one came out in 1992, so I wasn’t playing long wargames at this point. This was never on my radar, though I was still collecting Advanced Squad Leader stuff (without playing, sadly), so I think I had heard this was happening?

This was a “rewrite” of the original game, but no idea exactly what they did.

In fact, the main part of the blurb on the BGG page is to say that this was eventually redone by GMT Games in 2003 as A World at War!

So I don’t have much on it, except that it’s a large-scale game about the overall World War II conflict in Europe and North Africa, having all of the major nations in it.

Since I don’t know what was changed, I can’t really comment much else on it, though.

I do love how the time of play ranges from 3 hours to 20 hours!

Let’s move on…

Another game that caught my eye is Blitz Bowl: Ultimate Edition (#4860).

I really enjoyed Blood Bowl (a game about true fantasy football where you can win by basically killing or injuring most of your opponent’s team if you can’t score a touchdown) back in the day, but I’ve never actually seen this quicker and meaner edition out in the wild yet.

In fact, the only reason I’ve even heard of this is because of an old post from the Players’ Aid, way back in 2018 (so it was a review of the original, not this Ultimate Edition).

It looked intriguing!

(Grant looks so young…)

The Blitz version of the game has six players a side instead of the normal eleven(I think? It’s definitely more than six). It has streamlined rules from the original and two teams (Humans and Skaven) and the game plays in less than an hour.

Mayhem, blood, and shorter?

Sign me up!

It looks pretty cool and I’d definitely give this one a go if I could.

One thing I really love, but don’t get to do much of, is trivia.

I loved playing Trivial Pursuit with my family, though it got to the point where we didn’t play it often anymore (I wasn’t *that* good, but I was good enough that I guess they didn’t find it fun).

America (#4894) is a trivia game where you don’t necessarily have to know that much!

All you need in this one is a rough idea.

Which US state gets the most snow each year?

Who knows?

But you could try to follow somebody who does seem to know what they’re doing, betting on them.

Or if everybody is clueless, bet against all of them!

Also, guessing close to the right answer does get you some points as well.

Categories are pop culture, food, products, games, sports, and United States history, and there are almost 1000 questions covering almost 300 topics.

The trivia cards are double-sided and you have three options for each one, as shown above.

Of course, this being a 2016 game, the questions are probably fairly dated (though not as bad as Trivial Pursuit!) and 1000 questions can make the supply run low eventually.

I vaguely remember playing this before I started tracking game plays, but I could be wrong.

It looks like a fun one!

From party game fun to all-out war, how about The Lamps are Going Out: World War I (#4877)?

This is a game about World War I in its entirety (though it seems to be limited to Europe and the Middle East, and a little of Eastern Africa) with two-four players. One side is Germany and then the Central Allies (Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Bulgaria) with the other side being the Western Allies (France, Great Britain, Italy and Belgium) and the Eastern Allies/US (United States, Russia, Serbia and Romania).

Player turns start with an Event Card phase, then Movement (up to two units can be moved, which seems not optimal!), then Combat (with cards played to support the combat) and finally Production, where you spend your precious resources to refit units, get new technologies, or maybe even lend points to your teammate.

Let’s do a short blurb from Compass Games.

“Players must make critical decisions each turn as to how to spend their scarce resources. Production Points are required to Refit spent units, build new units, construct trenches, conduct research, etc. The combat system is very simple, but yields tremendous excitement and that “just one more attack should do it” feeling. Event cards allow for all sorts of historical situations, conditions, leaders, political events and so on. Everything that would be important in a WWI simulation is considered in this game.”

I first heard about this, once again, in a Players’ Aid video!

This one’s from January 2022.

All in all, if you have 3-4 hours, this looks pretty great.

That’s your Saturday set!

I was (and still am, though I haven’t played it in ages) a big fan of Castle Panic.

If I had kids, I certainly wouldn’t mind playing My First Castle Panic (#4849) with them!

This fully cooperative game has vicious cute monsters advancing toward your castle, out to destroy it bring you muffins.

Ok, they’re still out to destroy the castle.

But they’re so cute!

The concept is similar to its parent game, but there’s only one road that the monsters are travelling down, and only one wall they’re trying to breach.

Let’s blurb this one:

“In the game, monsters follow a single path toward a single, large, eye-catching castle, which is protected by one wall. Each step toward the castle is identified by a color and a shape. Players hold cards in their hands with cute defenders who also have a color and shape. When a card is played that matches the location of the monster, that monster is captured and thrown in the dungeon. Tension builds as more monsters are placed and move along the path toward the castle. If the castle is destroyed, the players lose; if it still stands when all the monsters are in the dungeon, the players win.”

Very streamlined, very kid-friendly.

You’re not even killing the monsters. You’re only capturing them.

It also appears to not be a table hog!

That’s a bonus.

How about a game that looks nice but the description on BGG looks really frickin’ intimidating?

Legends of Void (#4834) fills that space very well.

This game has your hand management, your area control, your engine-building.

It looks amazing on the table, with lots of cool stuff.

All that cool-looking stuff on the table.

Lots of plastic, lots of cubes.

It’s another one of those semi-cooperative games, where all players can lose, but one player is going to be the best defender against the Void and the Seraphs it casts.

You’re using some of the nine different resources to help fight against the Seraphs that are emerging, gaining Lumen when you damage them. Lumen is basically the points that determine the winner.

In a rare thing for a semi-cooperative game, even if the players don’t succeed in defending, somebody still wins.

It’s just that the world has been destroyed, so all of your fans are dead.

Yay?

It sounds interesting, intense, and long at 1.5 – 3.0 hours.

But it could be fun.

Finally, one that is in a bit of a time warp, though I think I know what happened.

City of Gears (#4845) is a game that I know I was thinking of backing when Grey Fox Games put it out there, but it’s a 2012 game.

I wasn’t buying games in 2012.

I think they came out with a new reprint or second edition that doesn’t have a new BGG entry, or a more “deluxe” one that wasn’t actually a big box and garnered its own entry.

(Ah yes, this must have been a picture from the Kickstarter in 2018)

I was definitely intrigued by it, but at the time I was being a lot more financially responsible and thus I decided to pass.

It’s yet another engine-building, area control, and worker placement game and it looked very attractive.

Let’s blurb this one:

“Each turn, you roll a number of production dice and activate City Tiles, then you move your automaton workers and perform a variety of actions (such as drawing and placing gears to reactivate areas of the city, sabotaging opponents, and activating unique steam powers) as determined by your resources. Along the way, you will develop your Factory with special powers which set it apart and provide you with powerful bonuses.

As the city is revealed and its abilities are discovered, players must concoct plans to accrue prestige and hinder opponents so that once Opening Day arrives, they will emerge victorious! Do you have what it takes to set the City of Gears in motion?”

It also looks pretty good on the table.

There you have it. Another century of Boardgame Geek games in the “complete” bin.

Any games on this list I missed that you think are awesome? Or should stay away from?

Let me know in the comments.