BGG - One Game Per Page - My top games from the top 600

This is a post I made over on Board Game Geek in an attempt to use their blog function. It was less user friendly than Blogger. I was inspired by another blog post to pick my favourite game from each page (one page being 100 games) in the top game rankings. I was surprised at how many I had actually played, but a little sad that some of my favourite games weren't in the top 600. It was meant to be the top 10 pages but I had none from pages 7-9 and stopped looking.

Page 1
Games Played:
6 Terraforming Mars
17 Castles of Burgundy
45 Agricola
62 Star Wars Imperial Assault
71 Eclipse
84 Seven Wonders
93 Battlestar Galactica The Game
100 Dominion Intigue

I am actually quite surprised by how many games in the top 100 I have played. Aside from Dominion and Terraforming Mars I have only played the others once. Also, many of them were played between 5 and 10 years ago.

Terraforming Mars is perhaps my all time favourite game right now. Everything about it is fun, but for me the concept of terraforming Mars as a game just gets me interested. It is like a game version of the Red Planet books.

Page 2
114 Dominion
116 Codenames
119 Pandemic Iberia
159 War of the Ring
160 Chaos in the Old World
168 Memoir 44
170 Cosmic Encounter

I guess Dominion is my favourite from this group. Memoir 44 is a superb game, and I am glad to have it, but it doesn't see much use as it is only two player. With Dominion I like the imagined kingdom in my head. I like the deck building element, which hopefully allows you to create an engine to score points. This is what I love about Terraforming Mars also - playing those cards to build a VP machine on the table. The theme of Dominion is part of what I love, even though some say it is paper thin. If the cards were to represent stocks or military units, or zombie things I don't think I would be as interested. I love my little kingdom and the ...dominion... I have over it.

Page 3
202 Carcassonne
210 Ticket to Ride
230 Taverns of Tiefenthal
263 Dixit: Odyssey
286 Telestrations

It probably has to be Carcassonne from this list. I have played it a lot, picked up the Big Box at GenCon 2012, and recently played it with my children, although I don't play many games with them. I like the tile laying aspect, and that you build a little world on the table. I have never actually played with all of the expansions I own.

Page 4
310 Survive: Escape from Atlantis!
316 Small World
337 Dixit
339 Mysterium
341 Takenoko

I found it odd that so many games, that I love, are on page 4. Small World is likely my favourite here, but Dixit and Mysterium are family favourites. They are games that my wife will actually play with me. In fact, I am going to go with Dixit as my top here, because I have had many a great time laughing about the images and our interpretations of them with many family and friends.

Page 5
401 Love Letter
417 Mice and Mystics
466 Forbidden Desert
467 Colt Express
471 Citadels
490 Catan

The bottom three on this list are the games I most remember. Catan was one of the first games to broaden my mind from Risk and Monopoly. Colt Express was a laugh whenever I played it. Citadels is a useful small game, that is filler with two people, but can last a good hour plus with more. I love the card laying, and small scale empire building with it. Citadels is my top game.

Page 6
510 Time's Up Title Recall
520 Alhambra
527 Sentinals of the Multiverse

Time's Up Title Recall has to be my favourite here. I love the game, many family memories, and the other two I barely remember. I think I liked Alhambra, but I honestly couldn't tell you a single thing about Sentinals. Time's Up is just a lovely, standard family party game that if I owned would be out every Christmas.

Beyond page 6 I moved three more pages and there were no games I remembered having played. As such I am calling it here. A little sad that my old favourites Star Wars Miniatures (WotC) and Marvel Dice Masters haven't made it.

Well, that is that. I hope you like it, and I will see what happens. Game night on Friday... maybe a new favourite emerges.

Discover: Lands Unknown

Today I saw a Reddit thread talking about the trailer from this new game by FFG. Discover: Unknown Lands. The idea is that no game box is the same so your copy will contain different cards from mine.  This mechanic seems interesting, but I am more interested in the premise: you wake up in a random wilderness and have to figure out why you are there and how to get home.

I will be following this closely.

Image from FFG website.

Link to website.

Castle of Burgundy

Today my brother in law came over to play games. We have painted miniatures together on occasion, really got into Marvel Dice Masters together, and are now occasional boardgame buddies. He is 15. 

He got Castles of Burgundy for Christmas back in 2015 and never played it. My board gaming time has been replaced mostly by either work, playing with my daughters, spending time with my wife or painting/terrain building, then the occasional dabble of PC gaming (I am updating Starcraft 2 with about 4 years worth of patches right now).

Now I am not exactly well versed in the board game jargon these days, but I believe it is a "Euro-game". The idea is you earn victory points by building the best estate (I assume in Burgundy). You can add fields, buildings, river trade, and "knowledge" upgrades. The theme is quite cool, and different from my normal Sci Fi tipple, but I absolutely love the aspect of building an estate. I genuinely think that is my favourite type of board game. Build an estate/empire/space station/nation.

It took about 2 hours to play, but we were learning as we went. Next time we will get the game done in under an hour. I won't do a review as such, but playing today has rekindled my desire to game more with real people. I need to put more feelers out there to try and get a monthly get together organised, even if it has to be at my house. I am sick of playing solo, even though it allows me to play some pretty cool narrative based stuff.