Such a cool video! I haven't seen such designer rankings often. Glad to see you both went with your taste, and not by general popularity. Look forward to more such content. Thanks! 🤩
Hi. Great list Kim. My favorite designers (their best games in parenthesis) are: Cole Wherle (John Company, Root, Pax Pamir, Arcs) Vlaada Chvátil (Through the Ages, Mage Knight, Dungeon Petz) Xavier Georges (Troyes, Carnegie, Carson City) Martin Wallace (Steam, Brass) Dávid Turczi (Tawantinsuyu, Anachrony, Imperium Horizons/Classics/Legends, Nucleum) Eric M. Lang (Cthulhu Death May Die, Blood Rage, Star Wars LCG, Chaos in the Old World) Carl Chudyk (Glory to Rome, Innovation) Uwe Rosenberg (Agricola, Le Havre, At the Gates of Loyang) Danielle Tascini/Simone Luciani (Tzolkin, Voyages of Marco Polo I and II, Teotihuacán, Grand Austria Hotel, etc) Stefan Feld (Trajan, Civolution, In the Year of the Dragon, Castles of Burgundy, Bora Bora, Macao, Notre Dame) And many more 😅
That's cheating! Your "favorites" can't ve every designer that ever lived! 🤣. Big fan of glory to rome and how crazy it gets sometimes. That's why we made the custom set and made a video out of it!
@ hehehe yeah that’s also true. But it shows how tastes and colours are very personal. Sometimes with reviews it can get a little lost even when reviewers like you keep saying this is our experience, you’all might like games we don’t! But great video! Thank you both!
Embarrassingly I've only played Hansa. I owned it for a long time but got rid of it because nobody seemed excited to play it anymore, which is a shame, because it's a great game. I've had Stroganov on my want to play list for awhile, but never had the opportunity.
Your designer tier list is a great idea.👍 even if it's personal, you've put them on my radar now. I've been playing games for years and never really bother to look at the designers 😮 I've been playing different styles of games from the same designer(s) and didn't even notice 😂 I also like the chemistry between you two and the positive energy that you bring in your videos. It's contagious 😅 thx
Thank you! It's funny because I was the same way with movie directors for awhile. Appreciate the kind words! For games, it just becomes another good way to decide if a game deserves your purchase.
Yes we can all debate on how “epic” the tiny epic games are. Yet, Have you guys tried Tiny Epic Vikings? TE Galaxies is a lot of fun in tiny boxes. Always get lots of fun around the tables!
Great list! My tier ranking is: S - Vlaada Chvatil, Cole Wehrle, Uwe Rosenberg, Phil Eklund (not included in your list at all) A - B - C - D - Lacerda E - everyone else on your list!
Rosenberg in C and Garfield not in S is a crime! Garfield's games: VTES, MTG, Bunny Kingdom, Mindbug, King of Tokyo, KeyForge, Netrunner/Anbroid Netrunner, The Hunger, etc. Note also that unlike French, his CCG/TCG games are SOLO designed. He is a boardgame genius
Should have played the meta better and put him at an S like my gut said, so he would be averaged out to an A. Ah well. As to Rosenberg, dude has more repeats in his designs than the good doctor and unlike the good doctor, ol' Rosey doesn't have 700 games to his name 🤣
Great Video, oddly enough enough 4 of my top 10 designers / designer groups where not mentioned in you video ..... sad. Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro /Paulo Soledade, Mac Gerdts, Phil Eklund, and Matt Eklund Honorable mention : Volko Ruhnke
Tabletop Turtle get's S tier for Catan: LotR. Really enjoyed Gloomhaven, but agree that if it's too long between play sessions then you just lose it. You'd need a dedicated playgroup to meet up weekly or something.
Bruno Cathala for ever and ever (one of your two common “S” tier)! Reiner Knizia really growing on me. Dis you skipped Paul Dennen designer of Clank and Dune Imperium?
@ hehehe well I guess there are some you can probably skip since many are reiterations or re-editions. There is a pretty cool full review by Actualol which is worth a view.
We did mention that we only picked the top 50 designers with the most games in the top 1000 on bgg. Certainly couldn't do everyone. We do own and enjoy Endless Winter. Hopefully we can get a hold of Nova Roma because I've only played it on Tabletop Simulator.
It's tough because aside from Kingdom Builder, I only know him from dominion. So I'd go B. Appreciate what he has done for the hobby, but I just don't play his games anymore.
Konieczka getting an S is ridiculous, since all of his new stuff (starting from Discoveries) is below D, haha. For me, the classic FFG is Kevin Wilson (and his recent TMNT and Kinfire systems are great).
WHAT? Bro, the man made Battlestar Galactica, Runewars, Rune Age, Mansions AND Rebellion by himself! Now, I'll admit his new stuff sucks. Discoveries is awful and 3000 Scoundrels looks uninteresting, but the new Mandalorian game could be good. Wilson's only big solo game is Descent and that's just a derivative of Doom, which he made with Peterson. But dude is still an A.
@@TabletopTurtle idk anything about Peterson. Like, he was the founder of the publishing company, but then what? Maybe he was like Simone Luciani - mostly a developer with a name on the box. Or maybe the other way around. Still, KW is a co-designer on the dungeon crawl system that set the course for over a decade in the genre and since leaving FFG made another 2 titles on his own in the same genre, that are unique and well-crafted. I highly recommend those. At least the smaller box series of Kinfire Delve. I'm not a fan of Konieczka's work personally, but there are some undeniable contributions, like the brilliant order systems from Starcraft/Forbidden Stars/Rebellion or implementing the hidden traitor mechanic in a bigger game. But his new titles confuse me. What inspires these designs? Boredom? Burnout? Midlife crisis? Or was he always a crazy-idea-generating machine, from which Peterson and the team took only the best?
I enjoyed the vid. My tastes are vastly different than yours, except I can totally relate to the Sears catalog analogy. That and my heart designer would be Vital Lacerda.
Kim and I have pretty different tastes too as I found out very well here! Vital is a good one, even if Evolution of Ideas kind of disappointed me. But it's sort of like your A+ kid getting a B on a test kind of disappointment.
Simone in Italian is pronounced Cee-Moh-Neh. Daniele is Dah-Nee-Eh-Leh (actually "nie" is a single sillable, but I'm not sure how to convey it without resorting to IPA symbols - in which case it would be "njɛ"). If you mute the last E, that's the French pronunciation, but both become female names in that case, to the chagrin of all Italian Simones and Danieles. :)
@@TabletopTurtle It's possible you just found the French ones - in fact you said them perfectly in French, but that would make them both ladies. :) Speaking of, I find disheartening that a list like this is still so much male-dominated. What's the most famous female designer, Elizabeth Hargrave? And then crickets? And it's not like we're talking of a medium that was born in the 1920s, modern board gaming is barely 30 years old.
@@TabletopTurtle The "establishment" needs to allow it, though. Women film director always existed, but only relatively recently filmmaking has stopped being a man's game. Maybe we should celebrate young designers more rather than the Knizias of them all? It might be an idea for a video, Idk.
Well over a decade? That's a huge understatement. Magic is from 1993, dude, it celebrated its first 20 years two years ago. :) Also, your description doesn't really fit how MTG is played anymore, you don't really buy and openly random boosters to build a deck in the wild, the vast majority of players play Limited (where you draft a deck from three boosters of a single expansion and play it once) or Commander (which is basically a different game that uses MTG cards) or Cube (which is a draft from a predetermined pool of cards). If you want to go back and take a peek, there's a strong online support with two different platforms fitting different styles of play.
Hey, that's well over a decade! 😜 No, I know lots of people don't play standard much these days. I always loved getting a box and drafting with friends and building a cool deck around the current set and of course I'm a huge fan of Commander. I can't remember the name of him, but my favorite was the one where he would take his own and other people's summons and throw them at the opponent. Too fun.
@@TabletopTurtle Nice to hear you're still a bit connected to the game. It's basically like smoking, you never really quit. (I kinda did stop playing, but it's part of my job to stay current with it, so it's still in my life). Standard is played a bit, especially on Arena. Modern and the eternal formats in paper are completely prohibitive, those decks would range from the price of a car to the price of a house. :) Also, MTG is now every IP at once, Lord of the Rings, Transformers, D&D, Warhammer, Marvel, there's everything in it, which is a bit iffy. The last set based on 1970s and 1980s horror movies was cool, though. One thing is, Garfield had the idea that changed card games forever (and influenced a lot of board games too), but the designers that came after (especially Mark Rosewater) have been more brilliant in making the game so durable. Garfield's MTG wouldn't have lasted more than 5 years.
Rob at D is wild, he is amazing Pandemic Legacy is an all timer. Issac Childres is also an all timer. Hard disagree with both of those opinions. Also having lack of cross over with the cohost on designers didnt help this.
Childres created a single game and then tinkered with it for new editions. I think it's amazing that someone was able to make BANK on Kickstarter with his passion project and the brilliance of the design shines through beautifully . . . but it's one game lol I'd like to see a game from him that isn't Gloomhaven related or a reimplantation of an older game. Kim and I have have different opinions on games. That's sort of part of the beauty of the channel. Our tier list is deeply scientific, objective, and inspired by the divine. It cannot be argued with.
Ah crap! Cause that's an error on my part when editing. Just a simple graphic error that slipped through the cracks. The other two boxes were supposed to be Last Will and Praga.
As a Mindclash fan boy I'm unhappy he couldn't make the cut due to the guidelines we set in place. But considering I'm a huge fan of Imperium, Voidfall, Days of Ire, he's an easy S. Although I wasn't the biggest Nucleum fan and the solo additions he makes to so many games are of no interest to me.
Paul has two games: Clank and Dune and then a bunch of permutations of those games. We mentioned at the start of the video what the requirements were to make the list and he didn't make the list; however, both Clank and Dune are in my top 100. So that should tell you where he would sit in the ranking.
![Noob To Max With DRAGON REWORK In Blox Fruits [FULL MOVIE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LnBMOinoOvA/mqdefault.jpg)
Such a cool video! I haven't seen such designer rankings often. Glad to see you both went with your taste, and not by general popularity.
Look forward to more such content. Thanks! 🤩
Thank you! Tier ranking is a lot of fun. Just need to come up with some new things to rank. Happy you enjoyed the video.
Wake up son, new Tabletop Turtle video just dropped.
Hide yo kids, hide yo wife, Tabletop Turtle climbing in your windows bringing videos!
Hi. Great list Kim. My favorite designers (their best games in parenthesis) are:
Cole Wherle (John Company, Root, Pax Pamir, Arcs)
Vlaada Chvátil (Through the Ages, Mage Knight, Dungeon Petz)
Xavier Georges (Troyes, Carnegie, Carson City)
Martin Wallace (Steam, Brass)
Dávid Turczi (Tawantinsuyu, Anachrony, Imperium Horizons/Classics/Legends, Nucleum)
Eric M. Lang (Cthulhu Death May Die, Blood Rage, Star Wars LCG, Chaos in the Old World)
Carl Chudyk (Glory to Rome, Innovation)
Uwe Rosenberg (Agricola, Le Havre, At the Gates of Loyang)
Danielle Tascini/Simone Luciani (Tzolkin, Voyages of Marco Polo I and II, Teotihuacán, Grand Austria Hotel, etc)
Stefan Feld (Trajan, Civolution, In the Year of the Dragon, Castles of Burgundy, Bora Bora, Macao, Notre Dame)
And many more 😅
That's cheating! Your "favorites" can't ve every designer that ever lived! 🤣. Big fan of glory to rome and how crazy it gets sometimes. That's why we made the custom set and made a video out of it!
Awesome video! Loved to hear both of your thoughts on each designer and how they have impacted you.
Thank you! Always good to try to convey how a game makes us feel and impact us over just a little overview of its basic mechanics in our opinion.
Thanks for a great video, love your tier-lists!
Thanks!
I love the rollercoaster of evaluations between the two of you. He is an A, he is a D! 😂
At least we agreed on a few of them!
@ hehehe yeah that’s also true. But it shows how tastes and colours are very personal. Sometimes with reviews it can get a little lost even when reviewers like you keep saying this is our experience, you’all might like games we don’t! But great video! Thank you both!
Looking forward to your Acrs review!
Fantastic video! I agree on Chvatil. What do you think about Andreas Steding? Hansa, Gugong and Stroganov are quality.
Embarrassingly I've only played Hansa. I owned it for a long time but got rid of it because nobody seemed excited to play it anymore, which is a shame, because it's a great game. I've had Stroganov on my want to play list for awhile, but never had the opportunity.
Your designer tier list is a great idea.👍 even if it's personal, you've put them on my radar now.
I've been playing games for years and never really bother to look at the designers 😮
I've been playing different styles of games from the same designer(s) and didn't even notice 😂
I also like the chemistry between you two and the positive energy that you bring in your videos. It's contagious 😅 thx
Thank you! It's funny because I was the same way with movie directors for awhile. Appreciate the kind words! For games, it just becomes another good way to decide if a game deserves your purchase.
Yes we can all debate on how “epic” the tiny epic games are. Yet, Have you guys tried Tiny Epic Vikings? TE Galaxies is a lot of fun in tiny boxes. Always get lots of fun around the tables!
No, we've never tried Vikings. We sort of just walked away from the series after a few iterations.
@ fair enough. They’re definitely not all gems (TE Quest or Kingdom are rather blend to say the least; but Galaxies & Vikings are pretty awesome).
Loved this video! You guys need more views! SJ MacDonald and Shem Phillips, Vital Lacerda, Simone Luciani, and Bruno Cathala always pique my interest
I think P&M are done with the current series. I wonder what the new trilogy will be.
Great list!
My tier ranking is:
S - Vlaada Chvatil, Cole Wehrle, Uwe Rosenberg, Phil Eklund (not included in your list at all)
A -
B -
C -
D - Lacerda
E - everyone else on your list!
Damn you're brutal! 😜😜
What a nice video idea, loved it 🎉
Thank you! Appreciate the view, the engagement, and the kind words!
Rosenberg in C and Garfield not in S is a crime!
Garfield's games: VTES, MTG, Bunny Kingdom, Mindbug, King of Tokyo, KeyForge, Netrunner/Anbroid Netrunner, The Hunger, etc. Note also that unlike French, his CCG/TCG games are SOLO designed. He is a boardgame genius
Should have played the meta better and put him at an S like my gut said, so he would be averaged out to an A. Ah well. As to Rosenberg, dude has more repeats in his designs than the good doctor and unlike the good doctor, ol' Rosey doesn't have 700 games to his name 🤣
Great Video,
oddly enough enough 4 of my top 10 designers / designer groups where not mentioned in you video ..... sad.
Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro /Paulo Soledade, Mac Gerdts, Phil Eklund, and Matt Eklund
Honorable mention : Volko Ruhnke
Yep, we clarified our choice in the top 50 at the start. But those are all great designers. Concordia is one of my favorite games of all time.
Tabletop Turtle get's S tier for Catan: LotR.
Really enjoyed Gloomhaven, but agree that if it's too long between play sessions then you just lose it. You'd need a dedicated playgroup to meet up weekly or something.
Bruno Cathala for ever and ever (one of your two common “S” tier)! Reiner Knizia really growing on me. Dis you skipped Paul Dennen designer of Clank and Dune Imperium?
Well you just have to get through Knizia's entire game list and then you can make your decision. It's only 700 games!
@ hehehe well I guess there are some you can probably skip since many are reiterations or re-editions. There is a pretty cool full review by Actualol which is worth a view.
I'm surprised Stan Kordonskiy didn't make the list. My favorite designer.
We did mention that we only picked the top 50 designers with the most games in the top 1000 on bgg. Certainly couldn't do everyone. We do own and enjoy Endless Winter. Hopefully we can get a hold of Nova Roma because I've only played it on Tabletop Simulator.
@@TabletopTurtleAh, makes sense. Thanks for the video!
No problem! Hope you like Minos!
You displayed the games of Matthias Cramer for Wolfgang Kramer by mistake. Wolfgang's my all-time favorite, so I noticed.
Crap, knew we would make a mistake like that at some point. Thanks for pointing it out.
@@TabletopTurtle No worries. Nice content. Enjoy the games. Try Renature: Valley if you haven't already.
Great video! What would you rank Donald X Vaccarino, famous for Dominion?
It's tough because aside from Kingdom Builder, I only know him from dominion. So I'd go B. Appreciate what he has done for the hobby, but I just don't play his games anymore.
S TIER tier list as always guys! 👏
Thank you very much! Happy you enjoyed it!
Konieczka getting an S is ridiculous, since all of his new stuff (starting from Discoveries) is below D, haha. For me, the classic FFG is Kevin Wilson (and his recent TMNT and Kinfire systems are great).
WHAT? Bro, the man made Battlestar Galactica, Runewars, Rune Age, Mansions AND Rebellion by himself! Now, I'll admit his new stuff sucks. Discoveries is awful and 3000 Scoundrels looks uninteresting, but the new Mandalorian game could be good. Wilson's only big solo game is Descent and that's just a derivative of Doom, which he made with Peterson. But dude is still an A.
@@TabletopTurtle idk anything about Peterson. Like, he was the founder of the publishing company, but then what? Maybe he was like Simone Luciani - mostly a developer with a name on the box. Or maybe the other way around. Still, KW is a co-designer on the dungeon crawl system that set the course for over a decade in the genre and since leaving FFG made another 2 titles on his own in the same genre, that are unique and well-crafted. I highly recommend those. At least the smaller box series of Kinfire Delve.
I'm not a fan of Konieczka's work personally, but there are some undeniable contributions, like the brilliant order systems from Starcraft/Forbidden Stars/Rebellion or implementing the hidden traitor mechanic in a bigger game. But his new titles confuse me. What inspires these designs? Boredom? Burnout? Midlife crisis? Or was he always a crazy-idea-generating machine, from which Peterson and the team took only the best?
Heart designer for me is Vital Lacerda. Without question.
One of our favorites, obviously. Hopefully you like Evolution of Ideas!
@TabletopTurtle haven't played that one but the five others I've played have been excellent.
Best board game content on RUclips!
What a wonderfully nice thing to say! Thank you very much! Happy it entertained you.
Reiner Knizia, Wolfgang Kramer and Paolo Mori are my top designers. You guys must not have played Dogs of War... Mori is an epic designer.
I've played dogs of war, but Kim hasn't. I gave it a 7 10 years ago lol but I can't remember it at all.
Sears catalogue and Consumers Distributing 😉
The Sears Catalogue excited us all . . .
I enjoyed the vid. My tastes are vastly different than yours, except I can totally relate to the Sears catalog analogy. That and my heart designer would be Vital Lacerda.
Kim and I have pretty different tastes too as I found out very well here! Vital is a good one, even if Evolution of Ideas kind of disappointed me. But it's sort of like your A+ kid getting a B on a test kind of disappointment.
Did Suchy work on Tzolk'in and Tiletum?
Nope. Did we say that or was that in a graphic? Our bad.
Simone in Italian is pronounced Cee-Moh-Neh. Daniele is Dah-Nee-Eh-Leh (actually "nie" is a single sillable, but I'm not sure how to convey it without resorting to IPA symbols - in which case it would be "njɛ"). If you mute the last E, that's the French pronunciation, but both become female names in that case, to the chagrin of all Italian Simones and Danieles. :)
Damn! We tried so hard and had multiple of those pronunciation sites up before every entry haha
@@TabletopTurtle It's possible you just found the French ones - in fact you said them perfectly in French, but that would make them both ladies. :)
Speaking of, I find disheartening that a list like this is still so much male-dominated. What's the most famous female designer, Elizabeth Hargrave? And then crickets?
And it's not like we're talking of a medium that was born in the 1920s, modern board gaming is barely 30 years old.
@@Kumagoro42 As the hobby grows, so to does the amount of people wanting to be designers. It will come.
@@TabletopTurtle The "establishment" needs to allow it, though. Women film director always existed, but only relatively recently filmmaking has stopped being a man's game.
Maybe we should celebrate young designers more rather than the Knizias of them all? It might be an idea for a video, Idk.
Ive watched 5 seconds, if cole wehrle is not in s+ ill unsub
edit: A??!???? you guys are a disgrace…
This is a fair reaction, Cole. See you at PAX!
Well over a decade? That's a huge understatement. Magic is from 1993, dude, it celebrated its first 20 years two years ago. :)
Also, your description doesn't really fit how MTG is played anymore, you don't really buy and openly random boosters to build a deck in the wild, the vast majority of players play Limited (where you draft a deck from three boosters of a single expansion and play it once) or Commander (which is basically a different game that uses MTG cards) or Cube (which is a draft from a predetermined pool of cards). If you want to go back and take a peek, there's a strong online support with two different platforms fitting different styles of play.
Hey, that's well over a decade! 😜 No, I know lots of people don't play standard much these days. I always loved getting a box and drafting with friends and building a cool deck around the current set and of course I'm a huge fan of Commander. I can't remember the name of him, but my favorite was the one where he would take his own and other people's summons and throw them at the opponent. Too fun.
@@TabletopTurtle Nice to hear you're still a bit connected to the game. It's basically like smoking, you never really quit. (I kinda did stop playing, but it's part of my job to stay current with it, so it's still in my life). Standard is played a bit, especially on Arena. Modern and the eternal formats in paper are completely prohibitive, those decks would range from the price of a car to the price of a house. :)
Also, MTG is now every IP at once, Lord of the Rings, Transformers, D&D, Warhammer, Marvel, there's everything in it, which is a bit iffy. The last set based on 1970s and 1980s horror movies was cool, though.
One thing is, Garfield had the idea that changed card games forever (and influenced a lot of board games too), but the designers that came after (especially Mark Rosewater) have been more brilliant in making the game so durable. Garfield's MTG wouldn't have lasted more than 5 years.
Rob at D is wild, he is amazing Pandemic Legacy is an all timer. Issac Childres is also an all timer. Hard disagree with both of those opinions. Also having lack of cross over with the cohost on designers didnt help this.
Childres created a single game and then tinkered with it for new editions. I think it's amazing that someone was able to make BANK on Kickstarter with his passion project and the brilliance of the design shines through beautifully . . . but it's one game lol I'd like to see a game from him that isn't Gloomhaven related or a reimplantation of an older game.
Kim and I have have different opinions on games. That's sort of part of the beauty of the channel. Our tier list is deeply scientific, objective, and inspired by the divine. It cannot be argued with.
Why was Tiletuem and Tzolkin next to Suchy???
Ah crap! Cause that's an error on my part when editing. Just a simple graphic error that slipped through the cracks. The other two boxes were supposed to be Last Will and Praga.
No turczi?
As a Mindclash fan boy I'm unhappy he couldn't make the cut due to the guidelines we set in place. But considering I'm a huge fan of Imperium, Voidfall, Days of Ire, he's an easy S. Although I wasn't the biggest Nucleum fan and the solo additions he makes to so many games are of no interest to me.
@TabletopTurtle hehe, well still was astonished that under those parameters he didn't make the top 50!
Maybe someday. :)
Some day?!
No Teuber?
Watch the beginning of the video.
What about Paul Dennen?
Paul has two games: Clank and Dune and then a bunch of permutations of those games. We mentioned at the start of the video what the requirements were to make the list and he didn't make the list; however, both Clank and Dune are in my top 100. So that should tell you where he would sit in the ranking.
@TabletopTurtle Paul has 3 games sir. Don't forget Wild Tiled West, but yeah 3 is still not a lot, so I can understand his ommission.
@@Bocaj6487 But those two games are damn near brilliant.
@@TabletopTurtle No doubt.