What is the best Alexander Pfister game? Ranking 15 games from worst to best!
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- Опубликовано: 2 июл 2024
- Hello everyone!
Today, we are taking a look at all the Alexander Pfister games we have ever played, and we're ranking them from worst to best!
Pfister is a great designer, and we usually enjoy a lot of what he does, even though we haven't loved everything!
We hope you'll enjoy the video!
Thank you so much for watching :)
A huge thank you to James Wood from @ThatBoardGameShow for editing this video!
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Timestamps:
Intro: 00:00
15: 01:24
14: 02:16
13: 03:12
12: 03:48
11: 05:33
10: 06:45
9: 08:12
8: 09:28
7: 10:48
6: 12:36
5: 15:10
4: 16:26
3: 17:50
2: 20:15
1: 21:53
Conclusion: 23:07 
Игры
"Its #15 because we played it 8 years ago in an airport, and we were tired."
That is the essence of what make you guys a unique channel.
Brutal honesty with great proffessional opinions and reviews.
Keep it up :)
Fascinating video: GWT NZealand is the only GWT I haven’t played yet…so something to look forward to.
I do not want to play Boon Lake because of the box cover, but for a different reason. I’ve seen the big board…THERE’S NO LAKE!
I’d love for you two to go a Kramer & Keisling ranking- as a pair of designers AND as individuals.
You need to play "Oh my goods" it is such a clever little game and so satisfying when you can get your production to align! It's the game that always comes with us on holidays because it's a small box but a big game 😊
We have played it a few times, but it’s been years since we last played! We’ll make sure to play it as soon as we can :)
Definitely play with Longsdale Expansion. It introduces an event deck that acts as a timer which makes the game sooo soo so much better
I am totally with what Rhado says in his review of the Longsdale Expansion.
Fun, even if I couldn't disagree more! :) My ranking would have to be...
13. Great Western Trail (all 3)
12. Broom Service
11. Pirates of Maracaibo
10. Skymines (a big step up from Mombasa)
9. Port Royal
8. Royal Goods
7. Tybor the Builder
6. Expedition to Newdale
5. Boonlake
4. Isle of Skye
3. Blackout Hong Kong
2. CloudAge
1. Maracaibo
And like you, I haven't played Mines of Zavandor, Broom Service Card Game, Gier, Wurfel WG or Meins
I was pretty sure we didn’t align here, hehe!
Happy to see Blackout Hong Kong high on your list as well, it is one I really would love to play more!
Seems like we need to get Tybor the Builder played again soon as well!
Thank you so much for watching, and for sharing your list as well! So much fun to see different opinions 🤩
GWT on 13. 😭😭..but Maracaibo no 1.😍😍= good balance ;)
@@RafaKaczmarczyk yup, if maracaibo didn't exist, i'd maybe move GWT up a few steps on the rankings, but after playing maracaibo for the first time, i realized i'd never go back to GWT (and i did try both GWT sequels, but they didn't change things)
My wife and I have only played Boonlake from Pfister, but it’s one of our favourite games. I’m stoked to play Maracaibo and GWT and see how they fair!
Hope you’ll enjoy them as much as you do Boonlake! 😁
Tybor the Builder and Oh my Goods are both amazing games. Same ‘universe’, but quite different games. You should give them an opportunity.
Tybor is so overlooked and underrated.
Tybor should be in eveyones collection. Everyone can play it but it has lots going on. Mini-Expansion comes with three really useful modules that bump it up for me and make it adjustable to the individual player groups.
song was pretty good, man!
Excellent work here folks. Great topic and fantastic designer.
1) Maracaibo
2) Mombasa
3) Great Western Trail series
4) Blackout: Hong Kong
5) Isle of Skye
6) Boonlake
7) CloudAge
8) Port Royal
9) Tybor the Builder
10) Expedition to Newdale
11) Oh My Goods
12) The Mines of Zavandor
Still need to play Broom Service and Pirates of Maracaibo.
I agree about Blackout Hong Kong : IT IS underrated. The french version of Pirates of M will be in stores this summer 😀
I suddenly realized that I own almost all of his games and really like them. So I'm really a fan of his games, just like I'm a fan of your channel. Really enjoy it every time. And very beautifully sung!!!!
That is awesome! What would be your top 3? :) Glad you’re enjoying what we do! 😁
Thank you. Nice list. And ohhh, T-Games series. I'm really looking forward to it. :)
We just need to find time to play them all again! Hopefully after summer, before Spiel!
17:57 Yep! A certain trilogy is coming up...
I think we will be visiting New Zealand at the very end! 😉
Whoa... You guys must have a massive budget for such amazing CGI.
We are up there with Mr Beast for sure!
Did I just win a million dollars?!?
Thank you for your nice video. I would love to see a ranking video of all the Bruno Cathala games :) have a nice day.
This video is reminding me that I liked pretty much everything I've tried from Pfister. Note to self: get more Pfister games.
Glad to hear :D
Thanks for this video.
Great list! Thank you for sharing :D
I just saw you start the list with Tybor and i had to stop the video immediately to write this before I continue to watch the rest: Tybor the builder is a rock solid drafting game. I can’t think of any better drafting game that comes in such a small box with so much game in it. It is actually the best implementation of closed drafting I have encountered to far, which is due to the mutli-use-cards. It plays fast (it might be the fastest multi-use-card game in existence). I has some variability, optional story, scenario cards, basically everything one could wish for. It also has an excellent mini-expansion that adds another character card type, a wild building type and contract/goal cards to compete for, which all together makes it an even bigger small box card game. You definitely lack knowledge! Play it some more and make sure to play a full scenario at max. player count. Then redo this video! :-) Now I will continue watching.
I'm looking forward to play it again :D
Maracaibo for me is my favourite and I have most of the list except the card only games. It is super, super cool and has one of the very best expansions of all time in Uprising which is really a must buy.
We have uprising, but haven't played it yet (which is what happens to 99% of expansions :P )
For me top 5 are #5 oh my goods! #4 Broom Service, #3 skymines #2 Maracaibo #1 Blackout Hong Kong. That being said I haven't played pirates of Maracaibo yet
Thank you for sharing! Would you say Skymines is a big step up from Mombasa and that it is worth getting? :)
@@BoardGamingRamblings I haven't played Mombasa to be honest but sky mines is amazing
Pfister is one of my favorite designers. Unlike the above response, I feel Pfister games to be more digestible than say, a Lacerda game. I feel like his pinnacle was GWT.
Happy to hear you’re enjoying his designs! What is your top 3? :)
I am not sure. I know GWT is my top game. I need to play SkyMines. And I just got Port Royal which is a fun push your luck. St. Isle was fun, but it felt like an expansion to Carcassonne. I also have Maracaibo, but not enough plays to classify/rate it.
Fun to hear your thoughts about Pfister games, even though the ones I own got the lower half of the list xD ahahaha
Blackout is my most favourite game of his with a comfortable margin . I love its card play and the constrictions it brings. The game got a lot of flack from the dark board and ended up being forgotten by most. It is such an underrated game.
Cloudage is also quite high for me. The expectations for it kind of killed it. Everyone expected the next Maracaibo and missed what I think the game is: a solid and great (sometimes also lucky) card play game. I started (not finished yet) the campaign solo and enjoyed so much every play of it.
Port Royal is the gem I will never get ride of. It got amazing once I got the contracts expansion; it doesn't need more. Love it!
Tybor is an interesting drafting game. I am still figuring out how much I like it. Oh my goods has quite a lot of luck, but I love to play it.
From the games I don't own, GWT NZ is the highest for me. However, I still need to try Boonlake (which I really want to do it at some point) and Pirates
I recommend playing Oh my Goods with the Longsdale Expansion. It is a huge improvement on the game.
I highly recommend playing Tybor with full player count (4).
@@TH-wq2ge I have the expansion for OMG. I don't feel it made a big improvement to the game. I have been trying to beat the campaign solo, but I still find myself wanting to play just the base game a lot of times
I only own your #14 and #1... And I was about to start a solo game of your #1, but the fact that you talked about Newdale suddenly reminded me that I hadn't played it for ages and I suddenly had an urge to do so.
So basically your ranking persuaded me to play your second least favourite game on the list 🤣 (I do agree that GWT:NZ is better though)
Haha, that is awesome :P Hope you'll enjoy!
I did thanks :)
But I have now packed it away and got GWT:NZ out anyway haha
Great List! I still need to play Port Royal & Great Western Trail. You guys should do a top 10/15 list of Phil Walker- Harding games.
That is a good idea! I will see if we have played enough of his games!
Cool Video. Agree with the rest.
I think GWT is still his magnum opus. A lot of the other systems he refined in his later works started here. One of my favorite designers for sure!
I agree! I am always excited when there is a new game released! Hoping for something cool at Spiel this year!
It is not easy to rank the heavy games among the other ones. But I would rank like this:
12. Newdale
11. Monster Expedition
10. Port Royal
9. Tybor, the builder
8. CloudAge
7. BoonLake
6. Isle of Skye
5. Broom Service
4. GWT
3. GWT NZ
2. GWT Argentina
1. Maracaibo
Still haven't played The mines of Zavandor, Oh my goods, Skymines, Blackout Hongkong and Pirates of Marcaibo.
Nice video! I think top board games from Scandinavian designers would be cool. Maybe too broad, but maybe not. Thanks for the video
We will see what we can do! Great suggestion :D
Newdale is bad. Oh my Goods without the Longsdale Expansion feels like a unfinished design and broken. Definitely play with Longsdale Expansion before culling. Oh my Goods with Longsdale expansion is a super cool „big“ small box game.
5:42 I thought that was a joke... Broom Service isn't a Pfister game... But wow, you surprised me!
Rebel sheep say MOO!
You just can't escape cows, can you? =)
Broom Service is an incomparably better game than Port Royal. If you rank Port Royal, which is a fine game, that high, you really haven’t played neither Oh my Goods with Longsdale Expansion and Tybor. Most people who do not like Oh my Goods have played it only without the expansion. And they are right, it is not a very good game. But the expansion changes many aspects of the game and makes everything click together as it had not before. Even the difference strength of the production chains, which were anoying in the base game, now make sense and are even important.
All people who have played Oh my Goods with the expansion (Longsdale in particular) love the game and keep coming back to it or praise it as a great travel game with more substance.
Coming back to Port Royal, for me it is a 7. Oh my Goods is a solid 7.5 and Tybor is a 8.3, ranking in my top 20 for over two years, and now in my top 30.
Skymines (which I own but have not played yet) has another side of the board with a very different map and some added systems to go with it?
Awesome! Maybe we’ll have to check it out then, as I like the mechanisms of Mombasa a lot!
Interesting rankings. I agree with a lot, but would probably say Argentina > Base GWT > New Zealand.
To me, GWT is a game system that revolves around timing and which opportunities are worth the delay of taking them. Base GWT already did this very well, but also had some odd quirks that I wasn't fond of (disjointed train mechanic, only 3 basic strategies, focus on blocking/taking spots). Argentina took this great core, polished it and really focused on it. It's less tight money-wise, but FAR tighter grain- and timing-wise. You can easily get locked out of key deliveries if you're not careful.
New Zealand, for me, was a step in the wrong direction. There's a lot of just ... stuff ... in there that most other euros do better, and it distracts from what GWT is good at.
That all makes a lot of sense! I feel they all 3 give similar but different experiences, and will depend on my mood wich one I want to play any given day, hehe 😂
Thank you for sharing!
@@BoardGamingRamblings Oh yes, don't get me wrong - they're all games I'd gladly play anytime :)
Yep, I agree. That's also my reason to rate Argentina as the best version of GWT!
I think you underestimated the degree to which Blackout: Hong Kong is underrated. My favorites would probably be GWT:NZ, GWT:A, GWT:2E, B:HK, Mombasa, and then Boon Lake. CloudAge and Maracaibo were both big disappointments for me. Skymines was a nice attempt to clean up the theme of Mombasa, but sadly the graphic design is terrible. The cards are way too busy, and the colors dark and indistinguishable. I’m sticking with Mombasa, where I can easily see at a glance how many bananas my opponents have played clear across the table.
Sad to hear about those graphical things! Thank you for sharing your favorites 🤩
My top ones would be:
1 - GWT Series
2 - Maracaibo
3 - Boon Lake
4 - Blackout Hong Kong
5 - Skymines
Great list! :D
Like Rahdo, GWT is also the bottom for me. My top are Mombasa (haven't played Skymines), Boonlake and Maracaibo. I suspect that once I play my copy of Blackout it will be top also.
Awesome! So many good games to choose from, and so fun to see different opinions!
19:16 Modules??
I’ve played several Pfister games but only kept one: Blackout Hong Kong. I almost kept Boonlake, but Maracaibo was a miss for us, partially due to the theme. And I couldn’t cope with the creepy cover of Great Western Trail. I want to try GWT New Zealand though and Pirates of Maracaibo though.
Isle of Skye is great
It really is :D
You can’t cull Tybor.
For some reason I really dislike his designs - they seem to be way too complex and icon heavy, with too many moving parts and subsystems. To be honest my fav game of his is Broom Service and I'm not even sure how much of this game was made by him and how much by Mr Pelikan... I would pick a Splotter over heavy Pfister any day. More depth with less rules.
Thanks for sharing! There is a lot of games out there, so it makes sense that we all like different ones!
We are big fans of many Pfister games for sure, but we don’t love every single one!
Hope you enjoyed the video anyways! :)
Thanks for watching!
the video is quality, as always ;)
Happy to hear that! Means a lot 😁
his other games which are very simple are Oh My Goods, Port Royal, and Isle of Skye. All great games in their own right, and a totally different category from his “heavy” designs.
His heavy games are not intuitive or elegant. However I find that once you understand the depth a bit more they are very rewarding. It takes quite a few plays to get there though unless you see experienced players perform certain strategies.