Super thrilled and thankful to see Shapers of Gaia on this list! It’s not for everyone, as all games are, but I really appreciate it when players explore the game beyond the first play to uncover all the complexities and nuances it brings to the table (pun intended). Thanks Rahdo and Jen! 😊
This is, in my opinion, your best yearly top 10 ever because it matches mine so well. Super glad to see Rise, Marrakesh, Guild and Planet Unknown on this list! Marrakesh is the best game I played in 2023 so far.
a board game convention in a poor place? F'in brilliant! i expect that this is going to inspire a lot of uganda people (ugundans?) to design games themselves. so many ways in which this will yield positive results! it is extremely hard to impress someone as cynical is i am, but i am impressed. this truly was a stroke of genius.
There wil be more copies at Essen this year. Let's see where it goes from there :) For fun, my personal top 5 (no particular order): Revive First Rat Federation Marrakesh Dune Imperium Expansions (this might be a cheat, but they very much changed the game for me
I bought Isle of Cats and Revive after watching your runthroughs last year and I really enjoy both of them. Isle of Cats is great for a lighter short game and Revive is a great engine builder.
Forum Trajanum and Merlin were good. Some overlooked Bonfire for the theme but it’s one of his best designs of the decade. Hopefully he can retire and just design games soon!
Picked up Shapers of Gaia based on your initial video - looking forward to getting to the table for a 3P game soon. Just put together a nice insert for Revive and going to get a solo play soon. Thanks for all the great info!
Mosaic is brilliant fun! It uses tableau and engine building in a race for area control. It's progressive, not destructive. You should take a bit of a closer look Richard if only to adjust your pre-conceptions. Also, I'd highly recommend you check out Heat for at least one play for a single specific design element: the automa cars are ridiculously easy to run so every player count can be the full compliment of cars. 2 players is a blast! And that's not even high on the list of what's truly great about it.
oh i looked at it quite a bit. they originally contacted me to cover it when it was crowdfunding, and i read the rules and talked to the pubs, and in the end decided it wasn't for us (which is why shea did a fantastic job with his runthrough). afterwards i watched his runthrough and confirmed i made the right choice for me and jen. but it's still a great design, and omg so gorgeous! :) and yeah, heat is fantastic, especially the automated players, but i'd rather race in cubitos or el dorado... i can't state how much of a turn off the race cars are for us :(
I greatly appreciate the push for humans to be better humans. We can certainly use more of that! Come Together is one I'd like to try. Looks quite interesting. Woodcraft fell sort of flat for me but I do think I need to try it again sometime.
@@rahdo Earth is your #1? I thought you had a few issues with it. If I recall, you found it too forgiving to complete one's objectives or something like that. At a glance, it looked a bit dry and by the numbers. Should I give it a closer look? Btw, playing Space Explorers (2017) as we 'speak'. Great game.
i sometimes have that criticism for games, but earth wasn't one of 'em, so that must have been a different game i covered! i wouldn't say there's anything revolutionary about earth, except maybe that it's such a crunchy euro that plays in a fraction of the time that games like it usually take because of all the simultaneous play :) i just got the new space explorers expansion and can't wait to try it out!
sabika would potentially be in my top 10 if it weren't for the very difficult to read font wayfarers could have made it if not for the influence token stuff weather machine might have made it if i played at 3+ instead of exclusively 2 so i think those are 3 great choices! :)
@@rahdo Thanks! Yeah, the text on the cards for Sabika is thematic but it is tiny. It might be the best solo game in my collection, though, because of the simple, yet competitive, AI. I thought the influence in Wayfarers was a little wonky at first. But I just view it as a third resource that can be used on upgrades or for bonus abilities. And then towards the end of the game I see how I can manipulate the area majority aspect to earn endgame points. I've only played solo. And Weather Machine is actually 1-4 players. I've only played it solo but I think it's outstanding. Super challenging and proportionally rewarding when you win.
I still haven’t tried Isle of Cats e+d because I just love the bast game so much with all the tiles etc. should really try it but for me I doubt it would top Cartographers as my favorite pencil and paper game.
Was the cube tower in Marrakesh essential the same as the original deluxe print run?? I haven’t played the deluxe yet but I did test the tower and it did seem to work mostly.
unfortunately i don't have my original copy of marrakesh so i can't compare the orig tower i had and the new one, nor can i compare the size of the keshis. i assume everything is the same and there must have been some weird anomoly with my original copy, but i can't say for sure. with this new tower, we find 1 or 2 keshis getting stuck at least half the time. one one round it was holding 5 keshis that slowly came out. my original copy never had any keshis at all. considering how 'grabby' it is now, i'm still inclined to think that something changed because iirc most folks saying that their tower did work last year tended to report things only getting stuck intermittently. another interesting twist, this new version has an extra 'shelf' you can install into the tower to make it even more "grabby" if you want.
There are still a lot of people who like cut-throat games, take that, etc. Just that You and Jen don’t like them does not mean they are bad and not needed for boardgame hobby space. 😊
well strictly speaking, nothing is _needed_ in the boardgame hobby space. we've got more games than we can experience in a lifetime readily available to us right now. but in that context, considering the overwhelming majority of those experiences are ones where we beat each other over the head with virtual clubs in various ways, i think pursuing new and different is a bit more "needed" than continuing the status quo we've had for centuries :)
Carnegie was my Game of the Year in 2022. I did pick up Come Together at Essen last year, but I still haven't got it to the table. Heat is a decent game, but a very poor simulation of racing. The designer's Flamme Rouge is a better game, and mirrors road cycling to a reasonable degree
I haven't played a lot of 2022 releases but Heat and Turing Machine are big hits for me. Heat has been a huge hit with almost everyone. And I despise car racing. Nothing more boring and useless in the world. The theme does nothing for me. But oh my, what a fun game. Equally good with new inexperienced gamers as for veteran gamers. There is so much stuff in that box that you can modify the experience for who you play with. And it works really well at 2p with the 4 bots.
I haven't play either merchants cove or free radicals budding games like these where everybody is playing a different minigame, how can somebody's victory be fair and legitimately derived from that person's superior strategy or hugher intelligence? I feel as though there will be the one mini game or the one favtion/character that has a clear advantage to win.
these games all have a central "clearing house" where you convert resources into points, which is dyanmically updating as the game goes on. your minigame produces those resources, so the games are all designed so that comparable level play will produce a comparable amount of resources, that can then be funneled into the central points conversion engine, and the thing that determines the winner is who best navigates that central space that everyone has access to. this is similar to root and other asymmetrical warfare games where each player generates military force in unique ways, and it's how you deploy those forces on the central battlefield that wins or loses the game. and all of the factions are designed to produce a comparable amount of force assuming comparable skill level :)
You should give Mosaic a chance. There is no real combat in the game (I think a coming optional expansion adds this but I don't think the game needs it) and it is very much more about building things up albeit in an abstracted way.
sorry i meant to say "direct conflict" which definitely does exist with players being able to destroy each other's military units to mess with their plans. needing armor to protect from bows/composite bows, spears, the general, calvary, formations, horsemanship and iron technology is more than enough conflict for us :)
they're fundraising for a 2nd printing plus expansion now: gamefound.com/projects/adams-apple-games/planet-unknown-supermoon-expansion-and-deluxe-edition-reprint :)
I disagree that Arc Nova came in 2021. A few people got to play it in 2021, but all the rest of the world got it in april or may 2022. If only 1 person played it in a year, inmediatly BGG declare that is a game of that year.
the first print run of the game was widely available in europe in december of 2021, both german and english versions, so thousands of gamers got their hands on it. that's good enough for bgg, and it's good enough for me. if you think those gamers "don't count" because they live somewhere other than you i guess(?), well then we'll have to agree to disagree :)
Yep, we were playing Ark Nova in Brussels before Xmas. Can't say I like the game (too much multi-player solitaire), though I would admit the artwork is wonderful.
UK didn’t get that print in 2021. Not even talking about Polish, Spanish or French editions that came half a year later. Also, reviewers review what games they could actually buy and play in 2022, not some hypothetical dates from across the globe 😉
ohhhh in UK, ok that explains it. In US, I tried to get it. I pre-ordered but was not available until april/may 2022. I didn't knew it was available in Europe. Thanks for the info.
![Noob To Max With DRAGON REWORK In Blox Fruits [FULL MOVIE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LnBMOinoOvA/mqdefault.jpg)
Love the comparison in the end
Super thrilled and thankful to see Shapers of Gaia on this list! It’s not for everyone, as all games are, but I really appreciate it when players explore the game beyond the first play to uncover all the complexities and nuances it brings to the table (pun intended). Thanks Rahdo and Jen! 😊
Thanks for sharing the Metalist. That was awesome!
This is, in my opinion, your best yearly top 10 ever because it matches mine so well. Super glad to see Rise, Marrakesh, Guild and Planet Unknown on this list! Marrakesh is the best game I played in 2023 so far.
a board game convention in a poor place?
F'in brilliant!
i expect that this is going to inspire a lot of uganda people (ugundans?) to design
games themselves.
so many ways in which this will yield positive results!
it is extremely hard to impress someone as cynical is i am, but i am impressed.
this truly was a stroke of genius.
Amazed to see Come Together still on the list. It means so much to me as a first time designer 😊
Congratulations! I hope it gets a wider print run soon!
There wil be more copies at Essen this year. Let's see where it goes from there :)
For fun, my personal top 5 (no particular order):
Revive
First Rat
Federation
Marrakesh
Dune Imperium Expansions (this might be a cheat, but they very much changed the game for me
that's totally a cheat, but i'll allow it! :)
I really enjoyed playing Come Together. Great game.
I bought Isle of Cats and Revive after watching your runthroughs last year and I really enjoy both of them. Isle of Cats is great for a lighter short game and Revive is a great engine builder.
I love that Marrakesh got another chance. Feld is back in form, baby! 🤩
Forum Trajanum and Merlin were good. Some overlooked Bonfire for the theme but it’s one of his best designs of the decade. Hopefully he can retire and just design games soon!
Picked up Shapers of Gaia based on your initial video - looking forward to getting to the table for a 3P game soon. Just put together a nice insert for Revive and going to get a solo play soon. Thanks for all the great info!
My family loved Oathsworn.
Mosaic is brilliant fun! It uses tableau and engine building in a race for area control. It's progressive, not destructive. You should take a bit of a closer look Richard if only to adjust your pre-conceptions. Also, I'd highly recommend you check out Heat for at least one play for a single specific design element: the automa cars are ridiculously easy to run so every player count can be the full compliment of cars. 2 players is a blast! And that's not even high on the list of what's truly great about it.
oh i looked at it quite a bit. they originally contacted me to cover it when it was crowdfunding, and i read the rules and talked to the pubs, and in the end decided it wasn't for us (which is why shea did a fantastic job with his runthrough). afterwards i watched his runthrough and confirmed i made the right choice for me and jen.
but it's still a great design, and omg so gorgeous! :)
and yeah, heat is fantastic, especially the automated players, but i'd rather race in cubitos or el dorado... i can't state how much of a turn off the race cars are for us :(
I greatly appreciate the push for humans to be better humans. We can certainly use more of that! Come Together is one I'd like to try. Looks quite interesting. Woodcraft fell sort of flat for me but I do think I need to try it again sometime.
Looking forward to the expansion for Revive
Iv not played Heat yet but Planet Unknown is definitely my number one too
Glad to see Marrakesh on the list after your initial reaction last year! Plus, looking forward to your coverage of Barcelona.
that should be up next week... it's great! :)
My #1 for 2022: Catherine The Cities Of Tsarina. #2 Rise. Good year for Capstone Games. Front Runner for 2023: Archeos Society
archeos is currently my #3 for 2023 (sagrada artisans at 2 and earth at 1) :)
@@rahdo Earth is your #1? I thought you had a few issues with it. If I recall, you found it too forgiving to complete one's objectives or something like that. At a glance, it looked a bit dry and by the numbers. Should I give it a closer look? Btw, playing Space Explorers (2017) as we 'speak'. Great game.
i sometimes have that criticism for games, but earth wasn't one of 'em, so that must have been a different game i covered! i wouldn't say there's anything revolutionary about earth, except maybe that it's such a crunchy euro that plays in a fraction of the time that games like it usually take because of all the simultaneous play :)
i just got the new space explorers expansion and can't wait to try it out!
@@rahdo that's very possible on my part. I definitely look forward to your thoughts on the expansion for Space Explorers.
My top 3 for 2022:
1. Sabika
2. Wayfarers of the South Tigris
3. Weather Machine
Honourable mention to Planet Unknown.
sabika would potentially be in my top 10 if it weren't for the very difficult to read font
wayfarers could have made it if not for the influence token stuff
weather machine might have made it if i played at 3+ instead of exclusively 2
so i think those are 3 great choices! :)
@@rahdo Thanks! Yeah, the text on the cards for Sabika is thematic but it is tiny. It might be the best solo game in my collection, though, because of the simple, yet competitive, AI. I thought the influence in Wayfarers was a little wonky at first. But I just view it as a third resource that can be used on upgrades or for bonus abilities. And then towards the end of the game I see how I can manipulate the area majority aspect to earn endgame points. I've only played solo. And Weather Machine is actually 1-4 players. I've only played it solo but I think it's outstanding. Super challenging and proportionally rewarding when you win.
I still haven’t tried Isle of Cats e+d because I just love the bast game so much with all the tiles etc. should really try it but for me I doubt it would top Cartographers as my favorite pencil and paper game.
Was the cube tower in Marrakesh essential the same as the original deluxe print run?? I haven’t played the deluxe yet but I did test the tower and it did seem to work mostly.
unfortunately i don't have my original copy of marrakesh so i can't compare the orig tower i had and the new one, nor can i compare the size of the keshis. i assume everything is the same and there must have been some weird anomoly with my original copy, but i can't say for sure.
with this new tower, we find 1 or 2 keshis getting stuck at least half the time. one one round it was holding 5 keshis that slowly came out. my original copy never had any keshis at all.
considering how 'grabby' it is now, i'm still inclined to think that something changed because iirc most folks saying that their tower did work last year tended to report things only getting stuck intermittently.
another interesting twist, this new version has an extra 'shelf' you can install into the tower to make it even more "grabby" if you want.
My favorites from what I played were:
Revive
Wonderland’s War
Heat
Ready Set Bet
Tiletum
Dark Tower
Clank Catacombs
a lot of people would agree with that list! :)
There are still a lot of people who like cut-throat games, take that, etc. Just that You and Jen don’t like them does not mean they are bad and not needed for boardgame hobby space. 😊
well strictly speaking, nothing is _needed_ in the boardgame hobby space. we've got more games than we can experience in a lifetime readily available to us right now. but in that context, considering the overwhelming majority of those experiences are ones where we beat each other over the head with virtual clubs in various ways, i think pursuing new and different is a bit more "needed" than continuing the status quo we've had for centuries :)
@@rahdo well in that sense, yeah, I can agree, thanks for explaining
Carnegie was my Game of the Year in 2022. I did pick up Come Together at Essen last year, but I still haven't got it to the table.
Heat is a decent game, but a very poor simulation of racing. The designer's Flamme Rouge is a better game, and mirrors road cycling to a reasonable degree
Sounds like you need to play Come Together ;)
I haven't played a lot of 2022 releases but Heat and Turing Machine are big hits for me. Heat has been a huge hit with almost everyone. And I despise car racing. Nothing more boring and useless in the world. The theme does nothing for me. But oh my, what a fun game. Equally good with new inexperienced gamers as for veteran gamers. There is so much stuff in that box that you can modify the experience for who you play with. And it works really well at 2p with the 4 bots.
I haven't play either merchants cove or free radicals budding games like these where everybody is playing a different minigame, how can somebody's victory be fair and legitimately derived from that person's superior strategy or hugher intelligence? I feel as though there will be the one mini game or the one favtion/character that has a clear advantage to win.
these games all have a central "clearing house" where you convert resources into points, which is dyanmically updating as the game goes on. your minigame produces those resources, so the games are all designed so that comparable level play will produce a comparable amount of resources, that can then be funneled into the central points conversion engine, and the thing that determines the winner is who best navigates that central space that everyone has access to.
this is similar to root and other asymmetrical warfare games where each player generates military force in unique ways, and it's how you deploy those forces on the central battlefield that wins or loses the game. and all of the factions are designed to produce a comparable amount of force assuming comparable skill level :)
Wow I worked on a top 10 of the year!? 🎉🎉🎉 (Rise!!)
You should give Mosaic a chance. There is no real combat in the game (I think a coming optional expansion adds this but I don't think the game needs it) and it is very much more about building things up albeit in an abstracted way.
yup, i almost gave it a go, but in the end, any direct combat it too much for us, and shea ended up doing a great job of filming it for the channel :)
@@rahdo There's not really any combat
sorry i meant to say "direct conflict" which definitely does exist with players being able to destroy each other's military units to mess with their plans. needing armor to protect from bows/composite bows, spears, the general, calvary, formations, horsemanship and iron technology is more than enough conflict for us :)
@@rahdo fair enough, but after playing the game I was actually disappointed in the lack of conflict 😂
oh i can totally see that! :)
Would love to get Planet Unknown - but its almost impossible to find...
they're fundraising for a 2nd printing plus expansion now: gamefound.com/projects/adams-apple-games/planet-unknown-supermoon-expansion-and-deluxe-edition-reprint :)
Yup! I’m backing this “second wave”, not sure on the expansion yet though.
I disagree that Arc Nova came in 2021. A few people got to play it in 2021, but all the rest of the world got it in april or may 2022. If only 1 person played it in a year, inmediatly BGG declare that is a game of that year.
the first print run of the game was widely available in europe in december of 2021, both german and english versions, so thousands of gamers got their hands on it. that's good enough for bgg, and it's good enough for me. if you think those gamers "don't count" because they live somewhere other than you i guess(?), well then we'll have to agree to disagree :)
Yep, we were playing Ark Nova in Brussels before Xmas. Can't say I like the game (too much multi-player solitaire), though I would admit the artwork is wonderful.
UK didn’t get that print in 2021. Not even talking about Polish, Spanish or French editions that came half a year later. Also, reviewers review what games they could actually buy and play in 2022, not some hypothetical dates from across the globe 😉
Looks like the German publisher did send a few hundred copies worldwide in late December 2021, plus the game was available in Germany for Xmas.
ohhhh in UK, ok that explains it. In US, I tried to get it. I pre-ordered but was not available until april/may 2022. I didn't knew it was available in Europe. Thanks for the info.
You can't play all the games!? Shame... Lol 😂😅