Merchants & Marauders lets you live the life of an influential merchant or a dreaded pirate in the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy. Seek your fortune through trade, rumor hunting, missions, and of course, plundering.…
101 Best Board Games showcases classic family and popular board games.
Merchants & Marauders lets you live the life of an influential merchant or a dreaded pirate in the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy. Seek your fortune through trade, rumor hunting, missions, and of course, plundering.…
Twisted Fish takes the old favorite “Go Fish” and casts it into the 21st century. The game offers guaranteed laugh-out-loud fun for the entire family and features outrageously humorous fishy characters, as well as tantalizingly unpredictable Zinger…
Survival Camp is a dice and card game based on survival of the fittest. A zombie outbreak has occurred in your town and you must grab what you can and run. You’ll never be able to come back. It’s time to build your survival camp. …
The Hysterical Game of Clues and Collaboration. Rollick! is a new hit party game that’s a fast and furious team competition. With Rollick!, the entire team works together to act out clue words for one person to guess. It’s a hysterical,…
Climb aboard your trusty steed and lift off for the race of your life! The players race their dragons on a course in a deep and winding canyon. You have some magic to use to aid your cause, or hinder your opponents, but the real test is your skill…
Each player oversees the building of his city-state. Temple, theater and oracle, a harbor with ships, vineyard with vintner, and many more must find space on the islands. Players must move fast to get the best land for themselves while blocking their…
It is Rome and they do not have enough drinking water. Master builders oversee their workers as they build the necessary aquaducts to bring the people the water they need. The winner will be they player who best manages his workers to build the longest…
During the 15th and 16th centuries, the great royal houses of Europe sent explorers and conquerors all over the world, hoping to discover and secure new areas of influence and sources of wealth. Without the right naval vessels, these voyages would…
Nightfall is the all-new deckbuilding game from Alderac Entertainment Group. Designed by David Gregg and releasing in early 2011, Nightfall puts players in control of minions of the night, fighting one another for control of an Earth shrouded in eternal…
A Game of Bribery, Bluffing, Betrayal, and Banishment. Intrigue - a secret scheme... To achieve or force a result by manipulation, scheming, or underhanded means. Can you suppress your integrity and honor? Will only the money in your coffers have…
In the dark of a moonless night, a lonely militiaman shuffles along a deserted alley. The sound of a small stone striking the pavers brings him about just in time to see a black-clad figure vanish around the corner. “Stop! Thief!” Kornak hollers.…
Epic Railroad Building in North America! View the new Empire Builder® Pronto (Computer Game) below this product page! Discover a modern North American classic. Celebrate one of our most vital and enduring passions: railroads. Use your…
The Cylons were created to make life easier on the Twelve Colonies. And then the day came when the Cylons decided to kill their masters. After a long and bloody struggle, an armistice was declared and the Cylons left for another world to call…
In the 20th Century, every region strives to develop. Some become financial leaders, others become centers of learning. Science and commerce propel nations into the future – but what kind of future? Growth produces waste, and advances come with…
Across the land, courageous heroes delve into shadowed dungeons, journey to lost cities, and explore forgotten ruins. In the darkest corners of the world, these heroes confront deadly and terrifying monsters. For those few who survive, the rewards…
Designed by Kevin Wilson, Civilization: The Board Game is inspired by the legendary video game series created by Sid Meier. Players are tasked with guiding an entire civilization throughout the ages, taking ownership of your people’s technology,…
Prospector, captain, mayor, trader, settler, craftsman, or builder?Which roles will you play in the new world? Will you own the most prosperous plantations? Will you build the most valuable buildings? You have but one goal: achieve the greatest prosperity…
You are a monarch, like your parents before you, a ruler of a small pleasant kingdom of rivers and evergreens. Unlike your parents, however, you have hopes and dreams! You want a bigger and more pleasant kingdom, with more rivers and a wider variety…
"You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun." -Al Capone Throughout the 1920's and 1930's, rival gangsters compete in a life or death struggle for control of the gleaming city on the shores of…
Storms of Steel! makes you a witness to the greatest tank battle in history! After their stinging defeat at Stalingrad, the Germans mass their best forces for an all-out attack against the growing Soviet bulge at Kursk. The Soviets’ network of master…
Conflict of Heroes merges the elegance of streamlined Eurogame rules with deep strategic wargames. The series was designed to create a tense and highly interactive game play experience. You must manage multiple command resources to move, attack, and…
Money! Money makes the world go round. Money also makes factories, fleets and armies that around that world and bash each other to bits, at least that’s according to Imperial 2030! But is it really all about war? Just because it looks like Risk and even smells like Risk, that doesn’t mean you should
Thrower: The table is a wreck of cards, tokens and wads of cash. One player has collapsed on the sofa, eyes closed, exhausted. Another feverishly sorts their deck, cards held close to face, unable to understand what went wrong. Someone else has walked out, professing a desire for space and calm.
I’m wondering where the last two hours went and how I didn’t notice we now have an audience of a new visitor and a cat. I realise, suddenly, that on this cool spring evening I’m bathed in sweat. This is the aftermath of Millennium Blades.
We’ve spent the time pretending to be players of a fictional collectible card game in an anime universe. Millennium Blades is, then, a game about playing games. This sounds like a recipe for a design that disappears up its own backside. Instead, this game is interesting, intense and ingenious. Stuffed with self-referential satire, it sits, winking at its players from the comfort of its oversize box. If you can unpick all the parodies from a card called “I’ll Form the Head” from the “Obari as Hell” card set, you’re a higher voltage gamer than me.
Cynthia: It is a little known fact I accompanied Paul Dean during his fearless investigations into the horrific Mythos Tales affair earlier this spring. I witnessed some of those same horrors, unearthed dark revelations couched in official documents, grappled with non-euclidean maps, and ventured alongside him into spaces where our accustomed rules of time and space seemed to break down.
None of that prepared me for the bizarre investigations that I commenced upon my return to Minneapolis –– investigations that continue as I write. Therefore, while I still retain enough of my mind to write, I find it imperative to tell you all this:
There is no Lovecraftian mystery game as engrosssing, as well-crafted, or as much sheer fun as Pelgrane’s roleplaying game, Trail of Cthulhu.
Paul: Gawd, I love BGG. It’s one of my favourite gaming places on the internet and this has been a fascinating journey.
Quinns: It’s an astonishingly rigorous database. As if IMDB was combined with a… an educated mosh pit, but with a set of scales in the corner that told you how much every actor weighed.
As we close out this feature, I’m simply left wanting to play more board games. Which is surely the best possible result.
Quinns: Matt, we have to abort this feature! Reddit’s disapproval is reaching critical levels.
Matt: That’s not the Reddit alarm, that’s my egg timer. I’m making everybody lunchtime eggs to keep up our strength.
Quinns: Wow! I could kiss you.
Matt: Don’t kiss on me, daddy-oats, kiss on these great games.
Paul: Matt it’s nearly Friday, how are we only now poking our way into the top 40? Why did we take on this challenge?
Matt: Trains.
Quinns: He’s a goner, Paul. There’s nothing we can do for him now. PRESS FORWARD.
Quinns: As we continue our marathon-like jog through Board Game Geek’s top 100 games ever, today I can reveal that we’re out of the weeds. We’ve played every single board game in the 60-41 slot!
Which isn’t to say that we always enjoyed ourselves…
Paul: Our exhaustive look at the games jostling their way about BoardGameGeek’s Top 100 continues! Today, we have everything from international illness to urban development to mischievous academics. Oh, and opinions. Always with the sassy opinions. ONWARD.
Board Game Geek is a titan of the board game scene, one of the most comprehensive and consulted sites the hobby has, as well as a place to which we owe a huge debt of inspiration. It’s also home to the absolute Board Game Geekiest among us, namely those with a monthly allowance for small zip-lock baggies. While we undoubtedly fall into that category ourselves, we appreciate that not everyone does and it’s inevitable that our opinions will diverge now and then.
Just what do we make of those most esteemed of titles that are forever locked in an eternal battle for a place in BGG’s Top 100 rankings? This week, we’ll be giving an extensive, nay, exhaustive breakdown of that list, telling you what we’ve covered, what we thought and even admitting what we’ve missed out on. So come with us as we count down the games in a whole week’s worth of analysis and adventure!
A mobile game makes an infectiously good transition to tabletop, a card game richly rewards smart selection and a domino-strategy mashup is a quickfire winner
There’s a faintly luddite spirit to the board game renaissance of recent years, perhaps a reaction to the heavy demands screens now make on our time. Yet there isn’t such a great divide between games built of cardboard and those spun from code. They explore similar themes and their designers frequently learn from one another.
In 2007, a simple web game, Pandemic, challenged players with spreading an infection across the world. Around the same time, an unrelated board game of the same name tasked its players with preventing the spread of disease and quickly assumed cult status. Soon after, a mobile game called Plague Inc reversed the goal again, making global epidemic a mainstay of many commutes, while happily crediting the original Pandemic web game as an inspiration. Now Plague Inc has been reimagined as a board game that looks much like a homage to the board game, completing a considerable circle over 10 years.
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