The Qt3 Top 10 Games of the Decade Voting Thread

Games
209

Hey, imma vote!

  1. Dien Bien Phu: The Final Gamble — (Kim Kanger, 2014). This game is story, without the tiny BioWare dialogue boxes. Instead, each move is your dialogue box. How hard will you push? What types of supplies will you drop? The 2nd edition smooths out some of the balance issues. It’s something no other wargame has done as well, narrowly beating out Kanger’s own Ici, c’est la France about the war in Algeria. But you need to play it to believe it.

  2. Empire of the Sun – (Mark Herman, 2005/2015). This is a cheat, because the first edition of the game actually came out in 2005. You can disqualify it if you want. But a game that solves the “Pacific War problem” deserves a lot of credit, and the 2nd edition that came out in 2015 smoothed out some rough edges that may have affected how the game was received in 2005. There are still naysayers, though. “Cavemen can’t destroy battleships!” Oh yes they can.

  3. Enemy Action: Ardennes — (John Butterfield, 2015). JB has designed a ton of outstanding board games, but EA:A does something that no designer has ever done: it plays equally well as a solo game from either the German or Allied sides, and as a two-player game. Like everything else on this list, “I dunno how they do it!”

  4. Tonkin — (Kim Kanger, 2012) This list is about singular games - games that do things no other game does, and in almost incomprehensible (to me) ways. The French Indochina War has no discernible tempo, other than not having a tempo. Sometimes it was hot. Sometimes it was cold. There were long periods of inactivity. Sort of like trying to simulate the Hapsburg-Ottoman conflict over 300 years. How does Kim do it, then? I dunno. Play it and see. I got more insight into that conflict by playing this than I got out of reading ten books. I won’t say which books, though. Not Calvin & Hobbes.

  5. Churchill — (Mark Herman, 2014). This gets some pushback from the groggiest grognards, and I understand that, but I am still awed by the way in which Mark conceptualized this three-way struggle for power and incorporated it into a global representation of the war. Yes, the victory conditions are inscrutable. Mark has a problem with victory conditions, it seems (cf Fire in the Lake). That’s ok. The radical construction of this “wargame” is enough to get it on the list. Oh, it plays well, too. Despite the naysayers.

  6. The Dark Valley — (Ted Raicer, 2013). I’ve been playing Eastern Front games for a long time. In high school, I thought The Russian Campaign was the perfect simulation of the campaign. Then I started reading more, and found out that just like Andalusia wasn’t some kind of multicultural paradise, the 1941 was much more than a series of German errors. Sadly, the specific things that you need to represent to make this work in a game (the stretched German logistics and furious Russian counterattacks) are very hard to do mechanically. Ted Raicer (designer of Stalin’s War, Barbarossa to Berlin, Hitler Turns East, and the PC/iOS Drive on Moscow) brings chit-pull to the rescue. It’s a LONG game. But for those who invest, they will get a return 10x that of the S&P 500. In LOVE.

  7. Holland ‘44 — (Mark Simonitch, 2017). This is really a proxy for all the Simonitch ‘4x games, from France ‘40 on. Simonitch takes a pretty vanilla base and layers on lots of historically accurate chrome depending on the situation. It always feels right. Holland ‘44 has been criticized as being somewhat “scripted,” but whattrya gonna do with a historical drop zone game? Make it “free drop?” Blasphemy!

  8. U.S. Civil War — (Mark Simonitch, 2015). I’m not a big Civil War guy, which incidentally was a problem when I lived in North Carolina and everyone wanted to play GBACW. I thought Eric Lee Smith’s The Civil War was the final word on ACW strategic games (sorry, We the People) but then Mark Simonitch took everything Civil Warry about ELS’s game from 1983 and takes all the 1980s out of it while preserving the guts of the war. This is now my go-to game on the subject. Gotta get a Big Board map for it.

  9. No Retreat: The Russian Front — (Carl Paradis, 2011). Ok. I don’t think I could really have appreciated what this game does if I had played in 30 years ago. I would have dismissed it as a cheap simplification. Now I appreciate it as solving a difficult problem: how do you play the whole 1941-45 period without needing a ping-pong table? Or without leaving it for the cats or kids to tear up? I’ve played this front-to-back, opposed, in 10-12 hours. That’s face-to-face. VASSAL is longer because VASSAL. The way the Soviet army morphs into a juggernaut through the “upgrade” system while preserving a small countermix is inspired. Best non-historical East Front game there is.

  10. The Barbarossa Campaign— (Gary Graber, 2010) This gem appeared at the very beginning of the decade, went out of print, and has never been reprinted. That’s a shame, because it’s a remarkable “little” game. Graber has done some other solo games that I frankly consider middling, but East Front virtuoso Carl Paradis (see above) got his hands on this and, well, you get one of the ten best games of the decade. I love how mechanically wacko this game is, yet how naturally it flows. Draw little chits, move guys in a deterministic fashion, place your bets, pay your debts. Lesson #213 in why I could never be a game designer, as I could not have conceived of this chit-pull system that makes the whole thing work. Watch your breakthroughs break through. Watch the line twist and turn. Watch the front get pushed back. It’s truly magical. I’ve tried to get Alan Emrich to reprint this now that VPG has given up on it, but he is too busy with Frank Chadwick’s Europa II (The Deckbuilding Version) to do much else. I thought of funding a reprint myself, but I don’t have any background in game production. Am I supposed to call up China? What is the phone number for the Barbarossa game factory?

That’s ten.

Looking at the list, it looks like the mid-‘10s, from 2013-2015, produced half the games on this list. Nothing from 2018 or 2019. Oh, where have all the good games gone??

Not really. But I haven’t had a chance to really play some of the bigger recent games, like Thunder in the East. Is it better than The Dark Valley? I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure. Cards make me angry.

Note that there aren’t any COIN games on this list. The COIN era started in 2012, and proliferated through … well, it’s still proliferating. COIN for everything! I’m pretty much off this boat, although it did produce some excellent games. None that can displace the ten on this list, though. In my opinion. And in the opinion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Only Son of the Father, Our Savior, Amen.