Firstly, I’ve seen a couple of Dragon Age Origins mentions in the lists. I thought that was a 2009 game? If it really is elligible I might need to rethink my list.
Just gotta say, tough list to rank (but going through my total completed games over the decade, that list is surprisingly short, so it was pretty easy to wittle it down to 20, but after that it got tough). Anyway here goes:
Skyrim - Loved Morrowind and wasn’t quite as enamoured with Oblivion, but Skyrim really was amazing and its just soooo frustrating that its been 9 years and still no follow up on the horizon. Thats just nuts! WTF Bethesda?? (and no ESOnline DOESN’T measure up)
Portal 2 - absolute classic. Really surprised that it doesn’t show up on more lists. Played through the single & coop campaign and lots of mod levels. Just an awesome game!
Witcher 3 - Don’t think I really need to say anything about this.
Dishonored - Thief for a new generation. Unfortunately the series seems to have been buried with the Death of the Outsider. Sorry to see it go.
Assassins Creed Black Flag - For me the pinnacle of the series. Tried getting into Origins & Odysey but something just didn’t click, while AC2 & Brotherhood were great too, BF just managed to bring things into focus nicely and the open pirate world was soo much fun.
Grand Theft Auto 5 - Crazy that this game isn’t in the top 5, but its still a great one. I didn’t need 3 protagonists, but it was an interesting mechanic to tell different stories in one game. Like others have mentioned, Vice City is still my favourite, SA was fun and GTA4 dropped the ball. So 5 was a good return to form.
Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun - Excellent game that reminded me how much I love Commandos & Desperados. Rather niche game that doesn’t get enough respect. Hoping that their Desperados 3 sequel knocks it out of the park!
Divinity: Original Sin - Tough call between this one and the sequel. The second one had fun characters, but the innovation of the first one just fresh and raw, so that gets my vote. Also more fun and prettier than the Pillars games. Nice to see this genre so healthy, starting on Pathfinder now…
Red Dead Redemption - Though RDR2 is more polished, I feel there is TOO much stuff and verisimilitude in it and the game / story gets a bit lost in it.
XCOM2 - Great game that was soo much fun. Gotta admit though that I was a bit of a save scummer, because I got too attached to my favourite team members and couldn’t bare losing them.
10 just isn’t enough! So these really DESERVE to be in the list, but just don’t fit in:
Just Cause 2 (3 was a dud & I haven’t gotten into 4 yet, but I doubt it’ll get close to the glorious destruction fun of 2)
Far Cry 3 - As a series this would be higher up in the list, but the individual titles kinda merge into one game and sorta cancel each other out. I’m a sucker for this Ubi game loop.
Saints Row 3 - Crazy fun game where its still a nice balance between the GTA clone approach of the earlier titles and the off the wall mayhem that turned into later in the series.
Spiderman - Excellent game with an awesome swinging traversal mechanic. One of the few games where I was close to unlocking all the collectable side mission errands, just because I loved zipping all over town.
Return of the Obra Dinn - really innovative game and fun setting. Though I will confess to not really being a fan of the retro graphics, fun to imagine what it would have played like with “proper” graphics…
I played a fair amount of Witcher 1 and 2. Witcher 3 definitely seems to hit the sweet spot of accessibility, scope, open worldiness, graphics, etc. It feels like a next-level thing after its predecessors.
That said, I don’t think I like it quite as much as a lot of folks do. The indifferent combat is less trivial an issue to me than for some, and the strong writing is less important to me than for some.
Grand Theft Auto V - The best open world in a video game. I love driving around and listening to the radio. The size and complexity of the Los Angeles recreation is unmatched by anything else I’ve played.
Mass Effect 2 - People have said enough things about this one in the thread.
Red Dead Redemption 2 - Another outstanding achievement in open world design. Some people are tired of the linear missions but not me. RDR2 is a beautiful game and I am happy to let Rockstar show me how to enjoy it.
Mass Effect 3 - Not as good as Mass Effect 2 because it lacks the loyalty missions but the gameplay is a bit better than ME2 because of the increased customization options.
Nier Automata - I like many Platinum Games games but this one is clearly their best work. The story is interesting and unique. I love the look of the overgrown city. The mix of ranged and melee combat makes the gameplay great too.
Splatoon 2 - Accessible and simple multiplayer that can get intense if you play the ranked modes.
The Witcher 3 - Great story, world, and characters.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 - I spent so many hours listening to podcasts and music with this one. The graphics have started to wear on me but it’s still surprisingly satisfying to drive across Europe delivering stuff to IKEA.
Portal 2 - Although I remember parts of the game dragging, the puzzles are great and the story is much better than any of the games Portal inspired.
Red Dead Redemption - The sequel probably obsoleted this game for me but it was still great visiting Rockstar’s version of the wild west for the first time.
I liked and finished the first two and it still blows my mind how they went from the complete jank of 2 to the relatively tight 3. I can’t think of a single other game series that has made a leap as gargantuan as that.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Half of the nominees are @Brooski’s friends. This is a fraud!
I confess I am the worst kind of historical gaming dilettante, but just toying around and watching my Nazi Germany being handed its ass no matter what they try to come up with is a wonderful and surprisingly simple delight. I’ll call it historical accuracy and not me being inept at understanding the game.
I wished my setup when playing solo boardgames wasn’t that stressful on my back.
I typed "Braudel" and “Derrida” too, and then caught myself and erased them. I promptly washed my hands for the use of that profanity, and I apologize to everyone here for writing these types of words in public.
The New Era, that is, the standalone expansion to 51st State.
Dale of Merchants, a deckbuilding game designed by someone who appears to have overheard someone talking about deckbuilding games in a bar and otherwise knows nothing about them.
Disco Elysium, the best written game I’ve ever played.
Terraria, I could farm hellstone for hours.
Pax Porfiriana, a beautiful crazy mess of a game.
High Frontier, ditto.
Sol: Last Days Of A Star, a game like none other.
Arkham Horror: The Card Game, the apotheosis of cooperative LCGs.
@Arrendek Would it be possible to count the votes in two ways? Once assigning votes to games but once assigning them to series instead? So if you have a lookup table to say Withcher 3 and Wild Hunt are the same thing, could you use that to say Dark Souls 1, 2 and 3 are the same…? Then we’d get series of the decade for no extra work. For us :)
It would be possible but yes it would be more work for me. Also I’m not sure it would be representative, if we had a vote for best series of the decade I think you’d get people picking other things than what they are picking here, like if you tried to say “best board game of the decade” from this vote it would be different than if you held a separate vote for best board game.
For il2 great battles, or il2 battle of whatever, and the DCS modules your script will have to count them as single titles. Modern flight simulation titles are unlike other games.
You are correct, and it’s technically not eligible.
It looks like it received two votes by @Nesrie and @Scuzz, you guys may want to adjust that vote by editing your thread.
EDIT: I think it’s fine, since there was a bundle that was only available after 1/1/2010 it should qualify, in my opinion. Thanks @Rock8man for the details!
