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.
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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. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
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.