Let's vote on the Qt3 Forum's Top 5 Board Games of the last 5 years!

Games
1

So you’ve already exercised your civic duty in placing your vote for your favorite digital games of 2016 but now it’s time to weigh in on your favorite analog games as well. I thought a Top 5 board games of 2016 would make a nice counterpoint to the Top 5 video games of 2016 but Tom brought up a good point that people likely experience far fewer board games in a given year than they do video games so we decided to go with a 5 year spread.

Credit to @triggercut for running the video games post as I’m pretty much stealing that format here. Go ahead and list your top 5 games from the last 5 years in order as this will be a weighted list. The top pick will get 5 points, the second pick will get 4 points, etc.

Commentary is welcome and encouraged: You can just list the games if you want but it’s more fun, not to mention interesting and informative, if you tell us a little bit about why you ranked the games as you did.

Also be sure to mention if you play the game primarily as a solo experience.

Pretty much anything counts: I’m not interested in esoteric debates about what is or is not a board game. If you’re using your hands to move physical components in any way shape or form, it’s a board game for the purposes of this list.

Unlike video games I don’t think you’re going to find a yearly release list for all possible games, but www.boardgamegeek.com is a pretty good resource (not that I have to tell you that) for figuring out when a game was released.

Finally, lets set a deadline of Sunday January 29th at 11:59 PST. Up until that time your list is not final but if you do happen to change your mind and update your list, please let me know so that I can update the spreadsheet accordingly.

I look forward to discovering some new favorites and determining Qt3’s Top 5 Board Games of the last 5 years!

2

My bet: Tom insisted it be for the last 5 years to make sure Mage Knight wasn’t eligible. Obvious conspiracy.

3

Did Betrayal at House on the Hill come out in the last 5 years? Because that’s the most fun boardgame I’ve played in the last 5 years, to be sure.

On christmas day I shrunk my family to the size of mice, and had my cat eat them all! Except my sister, who jumped off the balcony, abandoning her boyfriend and my mother to their gruesome fate.

4

2004, apparently, though there was an expansion last year.

5

Ah, I think maybe they had a re-release of it, which is when I got it.
It’s still awesome though.

6

Oh this is exciting, but holy moly is this going to be a hard list to come up with!

On a side note, why do I like doing these lists so much?

7

I’m going to have to figure out which of my games qualify. I have no idea when they released. I don’t follow the wave at all.

8

I guess we should just use the dates listed on Boardgame Geek, right?

Ooh, did five years cut Mage Knight out of the running? Well, it obviously won’t make any difference because no one would pick the Worst Game of All Time. That’s not what this list is! (True story: I just bought the Lost Legion add-on last week…)

-Tom

9

Ummm…5 years. Let me see, carry the 1, divide by 7…screw it, here are my top 5 boardgames that came out kinda recently.

  1. Lord of the Rings LCG
  2. Twilight Imperium 3
  3. Space Hulk
  4. Dead of Winter
  5. Forbidden Stars
10

Recently? Space Hulk? TI3? Hahaha!

I was feeling bad about one of the games that’s probably going to make my list, but now I have nothing to worry about!

11

So how many points can I put into Mage Knight here?

12

I believe the Mage Knight Corallery allows you to list each expansion separately, so that’s 1-5 right there.

13

According to my math, a 2005 third edition of a 1997 game doesn’t quite make the cut.

I dunno, @agapepilot, should this just be favorite boardgames of all time? That would make life easier for us List Police. It would also open up the list for people who feel that they haven’t played enough recent boardgames. Plus it would also sidestep the thorny problem of trying to make this a counterpart to the yearly videogame choices. We could just have an annual list of the best boardgames, like our own Qt3 version of BGG’s top 100. It’s your call.

-Tom

14

If you rate games on BGG, you can go to your “collection” and sort by ratings. All the games will have years next to them.

I went down that list and grabbed the highest rated 5 in the last five years. Then I sorted them by what I most want to play right now.

  1. Codex
    This game isn’t usually my type of game. It’s sort of like if Magic the Gathering was redesigned with deckbuilders in mind and built by an RTS nerd. I don’t play Magic nor that many deckbuilders and only play a few RTS games. But this particular combination is firing on all cylinders for me. The deckbuilding brings the deep counterplay interactions of Magic decks into the game itself (very cleverly simulating “scouting” in an RTS). The RTS elements brings the diverse array of ways to build up the tech tree and spend your ever growing economy. Every turn is full of difficult decisions and exponentially increasing tension. On top of feeling incredibly deep, it plays in about 45 minutes. Because of all this, despite coming out in September, it’s my most played game of the last 5 years as well.

  2. Kanban
    I really enjoy Vital Lacerda’s complex thematic Euros. Kanban masquerades as a game about car manufacturing, but is actually a game about the social dynamics of middle managers at a car factory. It has little office seats you collect to represent social capital. It has education certificates you can gather to make sure you get to speak first during meetings. It has an R&D department where blueprints increase in value the more time they’ve spent talking about them. And best of all, it has all of these absurd-feeling elements in a surprisingly elegant-but-complicated design that hinges on predicting all your opponents at least 3 turns into the future. I find myself bouncing between laughing, role-playing, and intense moments of thoughtful silence throughout each game. Let me warn that this is a long and intimidating game that’s very difficult to get to the table.

  3. Blood Rage
    What I love most about Blood Rage is how our group-think about it keeps changing every play. At first, it was an area control game with a few stupidly over-powered cards. Then it became a game with one or two stupidly over-powered card combos. Next it was a card drafting game with a little area control on the side, all about building card combos. After that it became a game about carefully countering whatever combos were hitting the table. Finally it became an area control game again with an interesting card draft on the side. I’ve liked it less at certain points in this process, but love where it’s at with my group now.

  4. Cry Havoc
    Cry Havoc is a highly asymmetric 4-player combat game. This is a game with few turns, few random elements, and little hidden information. Because of this I was initially apprehensive. I worried Cry Havoc would quickly become rote. What’s brought it so high on my list is how completely different each play of it has been for us. Minor differences early in the game compound to create really distinct mid games and end games. Even playing the same faction twice, I find myself dealing with very different challenges. My caution with Cry Havoc is it’s great when everyone’s doing well, but if one player is significantly behind, they will know it long before the game is over.

  5. La Granja
    A farming game with almost no unique mechanics, but a careful combination of those it uses. At the beginning of every turn, you’ll play a card from your hand for one of its four completely different benefits, most of which are permanent boosts to your farm. Next, you roll dice to find which actions are available this turn, and draft each dice until they’re all used. Finally, you combine all the goods you’ve harvested into as many market stalls as you can manage in an area-control game in the center of the board. Tying these disparate systems together is a large number of “anytime actions”. You’ll accrue a bunch of bonuses you can use during nearly any of these sections of the game. Playing La Granja well is all about realizing when the perfect combination of anytime actions mixed with what the game normally lets you do will produce crazy exponential growth, and then trying to ride that to the end game.

5. Trajan
This is a pretty standard Euro where your action-selection mechanic is a small mancala board. Each of the actions leads to a separate simple mini-game. All of these actions have times when they are strongest and weakest, and these variations are largely driven by other players. What makes Trajan satisfying at first is planning out the next 5 or 6 turns successfully. What makes it exciting long term is recognizing other’s plans when looking at their boards and being able to build your strategy around theirs.

EDIT: I did poorly at math. Trajan is 2011, one year off the mark, so I replaced it with La Granja above.

15

I have a copy of Cry Havoc that dates to 1985. Just so you know. :)

100% intact too. Wonder if that’s worth anything?

EDIT: looks like my 1980s Cry Havoc is different from the new hotness Cry Havoc.

16

Here are the five I came up with:

  1. Forbidden Stars - RTS in a box. The worst tragedy in board gaming is that this won’t get any expansions.
  2. Bora Bora - One of only two Feld games still on my shelf. Probably the deepest game there too
  3. Quartermaster General - Simple, fast, and fun – one of the best “game day” board games ever.
  4. Sekigahara - A perfect example of a modern wargame. Streamlined, yet still historical.
  5. Blood Rage - Brilliant combination of card-drafting and area control.

Edit: Apparently I really like area-control as a mechanic.

17

I am fine with making this a simple 5 favorite board games of all time. I’m far more interested in what people love to play than setting some arbitrary restriction on the list. So yeah, forget trying to figure when your game was released or re-released just pick your top 5. Free the games!

18

We had a Top 10 thread in 2015:

I would modify my top 5 from back then to incorporate Roll for the Galaxy and to bump up the Big Idea:

  1. Kingsburg
  2. 7 Wonders
  3. Roll for the Galaxy
  4. Sentinels of the Multiverse
  5. The Big Idea

Runners up: Pandemic, Catacombs, Notre Dame, Incan Gold, Cash n Guns, Roll Through the Ages, Manila, Tales of the Arabian Nights

19

Aaagh! I can’t keep up with these rule changes.

20

  1. Android Netrunner - I had an intense few months where I was utterly obsessed with this and bought everything. I had a friend who I was playing every lunchtime at work and it was fantastic. Then he left his job, my obsession dried up and I have £200 of cards sitting in a box doing nothing. Fun whilst it lasted and easily merits it’s place as the best game of the last 5 years, even if I never play it any more.

  2. Above and Below - oh boy I love this game. I generally am not a big fan of worker placement but something about this just clicks and puts me in a good place every time I play it. Delightful. Also I am 5-0. I am sure that did not sway my opinion.

  3. Old School Tactical - this is certainly the best tactical WW2 game I have played. Combat Commander is just nipping at it’s heels but this game is just a masterpiece. Easy to get into, great scenarios, and it has that feel of generating a story just like CC but I prefer the titular old school mechanics on offer here. Every game is a thrilling shootout. Brilliant stuff.

  4. Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island - depending on how our PanLeg campaign runs (and as we are not even half way I am reluctant to put it on this list despite it’s brilliance so far), it will be a close run thing to determine my favourite co-op of the past 5 years.

  5. Coup - The top 4 are pretty clear and after that I could have put any number of games. There’s a lot of things I’ve played once or twice and been smitten with but just never had a chance to play again. So instead I will opt for a game I have played many many times and gotten a huge number of laughs out of. I’m the Duke.

Close run things (either lacked enough plays or are just very good games rather than the pinnacle): X-Wing Miniatures, Quartermaster General, Pathfinder, Imperial Assault, Love Letter, Codenames, Escape, Colt Express, Fire in the Lake, Greenland, the Great War, Samurai Spirit, Celestia, Fuse, Neanderthal, 13 Days, Blood & Roses