Top 100 Board Games of All Time, 2024 Edition — Games 100-76

It’s now been over 2 years since I last shared my Top 50 Games of All Time. And 2 human years equates to roughly 15 board game hobbyist years, so that means my list is very outdated! Just to give some perspective, since sharing my last Top Games of All Time list, I’ve added over 150 more games and removed over 50 games from my collection. I’ve had roughly 1000 more plays of board and card games in that time as well. 1000 plays will change a gamer, no doubt.

First, Some Context

While my list is dramatically different (and larger) from a couple years ago, my core preferences, tastes, and biases are largely the same. Here is some context that has shaped my love of board gaming:

• I’m a shameless Reiner Knizia fan.  Reiner’s design style fits my tastes perfectly. I love games that are easy to get to the table yet surprisingly deep and full of dynamic interactions — that’s exactly how Knizia has been designing games for decades now. This is what led us at Bitewing Games to work with him on many publishing projects. But the fact that we work so well with Reiner Knizia has led me to play and research literally hundreds of his designs at this point. And an inevitable side effect of playing so many of Knizia’s best creations is that my Top 100 list is absolutely infected with Knizia games. You and I will have to come to terms with that, somehow. If it makes you feel any better, there are over 5 times as many Knizia games that I have played that did not make my Top 100 list compared to the ones that did. There are plenty of his designs that I don’t like (you can check out my Tier list to see how I rank them all).
• I almost always prefer high player interaction over low.  In my opinion, the most interesting aspect of any game is typically how it pits the players against each other — their wits and their personalities.  Additionally, potent player interaction is the number one thing that keeps a game coming back to my table for many more plays, as this keeps a game from feeling stagnant.
• I gravitate to clean and pretty games. The more fiddly, messy, demanding, or ugly a game is — in its setup, teardown, upkeep, rules, components, or iconography — the less likely I am to enjoy it. Perhaps that’s true for everyone, but I feel that this element especially influences whether I like a game or even give it a shot in the first place. And it seems that the more games I play, the less patience I have for exhausting and needy board game experiences. 
• I’m including our own publications among my Top 100, but I’m also not…  Here is my thought process: If this was a smaller list focused on highlighting the best games in a specific category (Like Top 10 Games of 2024, for example) then I wouldn’t feel comfortable cramming our own games onto it and crowding out others. And a Top 100 Games list feels similar, but different. The pool is much larger, and at the end of the day this list is a compilation of the games that I love getting to the table the most. And the truth is that any game we decide to publish is one that we love playing and that we want to share with others. To me, that’s what Top 100 lists are all about. As a compromise, I’ve created a separate section outside of my Top 100 (featured in the final post) that discusses how I rank our own publications among my all-time favorite games. So you can completely ignore that section and anything I mention from Bitewing Games, or you can simply take it at face value as a game I love to play and want to share with others.
• I own and love way more games than these 100.  There are over 300 games in my collection, and any game that hangs around on my shelf is one that I enjoy playing and hope to get back to the table soon. These 300+ already survived the gauntlet of my careful initial research, cold-blooded acquisition filtering, and critical analysis playthroughs that thousands of other games have not. And this Top 100 list only gets more crowded and competitive every year, so there are plenty of games I love that didn’t make the cut. But just because you don’t see a specific game among my Top 100 does not at all mean that I dislike that game.

So, with all that out of the way, we’re now ready to dive into my Top 100 Board Games of All Time — 2024 Edition!

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100. Courtisans

Sometimes it’s nice to just gather around the table for a quick communal bashing. As a 20-30 minute game, Courtisans delivers with funny and cutthroat moments. Each turn your hand of three cards must be split up: Play one to yourself, one to another player, and one to the table to influence the end-game value of a suit. In addition to manipulating the incentives of the group, there are plenty of opportunities to nail each other either out of petty revenge or cunning calculation.

99. Patchwork

Patchwork is a widely recommended 2-player game, and for good reason! It combines the satisfaction of polyomino puzzling with smart economic considerations including time management and a button economy. There is a reason why this one has been endlessly in print for 10 straight years. Patchwork is great for couples and/or casual play.

98. 7 Wonders Duel

Based on the big box hit, 7 Wonders, 7 Wonders Duel has the honor of being the second highest rated 2-player-only game on BoardGameGeek. Does that mean it is the second best 2-player-only game ever created? That’s for you to decide. All I know is that it is mega popular and mega fun. Players take turns drafting cards from a pyramid display as they build their civilization and wonders. It allows you to gun for 3 possible victory objectives and pressure your rival in their weakest categories.

Fair Warning: It’s very possible that this game will soon be replaced for me by the upcoming The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth which promises to be an evolved spin-off of 7 Wonders Duel.

97. For Sale

For Sale is a fantastic filler game of bidding on a wide spectrum of abodes and then flipping those houses for profit. In phase one, you are spending money to assemble the best hand of house cards. In phase two, you are bidding with that hand to claim the best payouts. The objective is to become the richest player at game end, but you’ll have to outwit your fellow players to earn the victory. The smartest move is not always to win every auction. Sometimes you are better off taking the loss in an auction and passing early to conserve your resources for more important bids later on. Nothing feels worse than wasting your best card on an auction that everyone else played low for.  Conversely, eking out the best money card of a round with a measly house makes you feel like a mastermind.  And that roller coaster of emotions is the magic of For Sale.

96. The Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation

If you love the idea of Stratego, but perhaps not the execution, then this one is absolutely for you. Reiner Knizia offers his take on Stratego’s experience with a game that is also inspired by the Lord of the Rings trilogy. One player is trying to sneak Frodo all the way to Mordor without him getting captured, and the other player is trying to reclaim the ring or basically take over Middle Earth before the fellowship stops them. Devious bluffing and brutal conflicts abound in this highly revered classic from the Good Doctor Knizia that sadly hasn’t seen a new edition in many years. Fortunately, publisher Ghost Galaxy recently announced an “Ultimate Edition” to be launched soon, so hopefully that version lives up to the legend.

95. Skyrise

Perhaps this new release will only be a fleeting title on my list… time will tell… but so far Skyrise has proven to be a unique and engaging auction game at our table. In Skyrise, the bidding takes on a spatial element as players snake their proposed buildings across the board in increasingly higher bids — eventually one person wins and their winning bid turns into a permanent building at that site. As the city spaces begin to fill with buildings, decisions become more critical and auctions become more spicy. 

94. Race for the Galaxy

Race for the Galaxy is a popular engine/tableau builder much like Terraforming Mars and Wingspan… except it is older, and faster, and tighter. So while it may not be a pretty as Wingspan or as sprawling as Terraforming Mars, Race for the Galaxy is far and away the reigning champion at my table. One trademark of this design comes at the start of each round, when players secretly and simultaneously select roles or phases that will activate for everyone. Those who can correctly predict their opponents’ intentions will certainly have a leg up in the competition.

93. Love Letter

Love Letter is a classic filler game of holding one card in your hand and hoping you survive the gauntlet of each round. On your turn, you’ll draw a second card into your hand and choose one of them to play. The objective is to be the last person standing or to have the highest card when the round ends, as that person will get to deliver their love letter to the princess. 

Love Letter works so well because there are a mere 16 cards in the entire deck, and only half that many card types. Newcomers quickly learn what their opponents may be holding in their hand, and the game of cat and mouse ensues. As more cards are played and revealed, the options narrow and the round reaches a crescendo. By deducing what card may be in your surviving opponents’ hands, you’ll take calculated risks to come out on top.

92. Codenames

Codenames is the smash hit party game that every publisher wishes they had made. This stone-cold classic pits two teams against each other as their spymasters give out clues to help their teammates guess the correct word cards. Even nearly 10 years after its release, Codenames never fails to be a hit with virtually any group. Few things are more satisfying than watching your team weave together four or five correct cards from a single clue. If you haven’t played this yet, then do yourself a favor and try Codenames today.

91. Pipeline

Pipeline is a brutally satisfying economic game that sees players starting out with meager actions and eventually buliding up a well-oiled engine over time. It also combines an interesting personal spatial puzzle with a sharply interactive turn order emphasis. Despite being one of the heavier games on my list, it still manages to play in under two hours with a fairly streamlined ruleset. Much of the complexity stems from the strategic planning.

90. Modern Art

While Modern Art isn’t my favorite auction game from Reiner Knizia (and he’s got a lot of them), it is still an absolute hoot to play. Players take turns auctioning off paintings across multiple different types of auctions, creating an energetic atmosphere with a hint of role playing that rivals any party game. This amusement is supported by a clever system of valuations and payouts. And it is still so satisfying to smack the gavel on the table and declare “Sold!” before greedily raking in the cash.

89. Great Western Trail: Second Edition

Cows, cowboys, and wild west rondels. What more could you want in a board game? Great Western Trail remains a favorite Alexander Pfister game for myself and many others thanks to its wide range of strategic possibilities. It’s so successful that it’s received a second edition plus two spinoffs. I haven’t tried the whole line, but I hear that vanilla GWT is the most streamlined and tight, so I’m happy with that. Like Pipeline, this meaty Eurogame offers tons of depth to sink your teeth into.

88. Chinatown

I don’t believe Chinatown has gotten any worse over the years. But admittedly it’s taken a tumble on my Top 100 list merely because I now usually opt for our own Zoo Vadis over Chinatown when selecting a negotiation game (I’m biased, but I also like the wider player count, shorter play time, and more creative negotiations that come from Zoo Vadis). Regardless, Chinatown is a great title if you want to wheel and deal with your friends or family. I love the thrill of dealing out cards (lots) each round and discovering that you hold the perfect lot, either for yourself or for another player, and then maximizing that golden opportunity. How much is this lot worth to you? Let’s find out… I haven’t tried the new version of Chinatown — Waterfall Park — because all the changes make me slightly leery and depressed.

87. Radlands

Radlands (and a few other great titles like Blue Moon Legends) might be the closest I ever get to the Dueling / Collectable Card Game scene. I have a fear of such rabbit holes, much like one would have a fear of heights. But Radlands lets me enjoy the heights from a comfortable and safe distance by offering a complete and streamlined dueling game contained entirely in one box. It doesn’t take long at all to feel familiar with the deck and strategic possibilities here. I love how the game offers a huge variety of powerful characters and abilities, but the design never blindsides you. Any time a player drops a new threat into the battlefield, their opponent has at least one turn to brace for impact. It never hurts when a game like this is gorgeous as well.

86. Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition

I enjoy a good trick taker. Who doesn’t? Apparently all of us enjoy a good trick taker, if the recent flood of new releases in this genre is any indicator. Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition squeezes into my Top 100 list by being a unique and tense trick taker. All of your cards are suitless, formless, moldable… Once you play a card into a trick, you must declare its suit and claim the open space matching its number and delared suit. If you don’t feel like following suit, you can simply declare that your hand is now out of that suit. Easy, right? WRONG. It’s all fun and games until somebody backs their hand into a cat-astrophic paradox.

85. Carcassonne: The Castle (aka Zamek)

Carcassonne provides a great 2-player experience on its own, but like Pandemic it has seen many spin-offs due to its popularity. One of those spin-off games is a 2-player-only version designed by the one and only Reiner Knizia that introduces some fantastic features to the Carcassonne system. Players are confined to adding tiles within a wall, and the wall itself functions as a score track with bonus corners that encourage you to stop on them exactly. Subtle changes like these make you think all the harder about where you want to place tiles and when you want to score them. It’s easily my favorite way to play Carcassonne. Unfortunately, this one is very difficult to obtain (unless you track down a used copy or order Zamek from Poland).

84. Blue Lagoon

After years of resistance, I’ve finally split up the dynamic duo of Blue Lagoon and Through the Desert. I’ve finally come to accept the fact that I would rather play Through the Desert between the two. But Blue Lagoon is still a mighty fine family-weight game in its own right (and different enough to be worthy of its own place on my list). The standout feature of this design is found in the two-phase system of setting up huts in round 1 and spreading out from those huts (and going after the leader) in round 2. I’ve never had a bad play of this game, even when I’ve been trounced by my opponents, and that’s the mark of a great strategy game.

83. Iki

It’s very possible that Iki is simply the Eurogame flavor of the year for me — lucky enough to be present in my mind when I’m updating this goliath list of my favorite games. But as it stands, Iki is one of the countless modern Eurogames that I’m most keen to revisit. As I shared in my first impressions post earlier this year: “Somehow Iki manages to provide an experience that is more than the sum of its familiar parts. It’s the kind of comfort food Eurogaming that every new title dreams to achieve.”

82. Caesar!: Seize Rome in 20 Minutes!

While I can’t commend Caesar for its production quality and presentation, it manages to overcome those weaknesses by being a fantastic 2-player filler game from Paolo Mori. You’ll pick a tile hidden behind your screen and place it out onto a border of the map, exerting your influence on the two regions along that border. The player who closes off a region with the last tile gets a juicy bonus, but the player who has the most influence in a closed region takes a step closer to winning the game. It’s so good that it makes me ache with hunger to collaborate with Paolo Mori on a publishing project.

81. Blitzkrieg!: World War Two in 20 Minutes

Paolo didn’t just do it once, he did it twice. Twice he has put out a banger of a 20-minute two player game. Blitzkrieg differs from Caesar by replacing the region control with tug of war tracks. It’s a 2-player tug-of-war game across multiple theaters of combat. Yet there’s still that same tension of deciding which tile to put out and whether to gun for a short-term bonus or a long-term victory. In many ways, this is a 2-player version of Mori’s Dogs of War (which may or may not be found later on this list…).

80. Caylus 1303

I probably don’t give publisher Space Cowboys enough credit, because I’m just now realizing that they have multiple titles on my Top 100 Board Games list. Caylus 1303 is the first of those titles earning its place as one of my favorite worker placement games. Across several rounds, players contribute to a growing line of buildings (worker placement spaces) that extend up to the castle. Meanwhile you’ll have to deal with the ruthless provost who is out to spoil the fun of the newest (and often most lucrative) buildings and your fellow competitors who delight in claiming your desired spaces first. It’s tight. It’s interactive. It’s brutal. It’s Caylus.

79. Mysterium

It’s not long or complicated, but Mysterium feels a bit like an event game in how it brings up to 7 people together in a social and collaborative way. One player acts as the ghost who divies out vision cards to help each player guess their own suspect, location, and murder weapon. Because it is a cooperative game, players discuss the clues together and try to hash out what exactly the ghost is communicating to them. On top of that, players are still allowed to disagree by betting for or against each other’s official guesses. All of this culminates in a climactic vote where the players must solve the murder… or quit their psychic escapades and go back to their day jobs, I suppose.

78. DroPolter

I suppose I have a thing for ghostly games. But rather than solve their murder case, in DroPolter you are trying to satisfy their random whims. Players must each clench a fist of wacky objects and then a card is revealed — telling them exactly what a ghost wants to see. The first person to drop the displayed objects (and only those objects) earns a bell. First person to five bells wins. The only problem is that those tiny jingling bells get added to your fist of stuff, and if you accidentally drop a bell then it is gone forever. What a delightfully strange game, that DroPolter.

77. Galactic Renaissance

This sibling design to Inis turned out to be far more polarizing than I ever would have guessed. Perhaps that’s the danger to marketing a game as the follow up to a widely beloved legend. With enough similarities in their DNA, some people might decide to torch one and exalt the other.

But while Galactic Renaissance is from the same team who made Inis, and it likewise features area control driven by card effects, it still feels like a very different beast to me. Rather than drafting a few cards and jockeying for one of three victory conditions, players are cycling through their decks and racing to score 30 points first. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed exploring the strategic depth and tactical possibilities in this sci-fi epic.

76. Lacuna

Publisher CMYK Games has a knack for finding refreshingly unique games and sharing them with the world. Lacuna by Mark Gerrits is one such design that features a production as elegant as its gameplay. Lacuna comes packaged in a large cylinder that functions like a salt shaker. You’ll sprinkle the wooden flower tokens out onto a large mat to setup the game and then take turns positioning your pawns between matching flowers to claim them.

This simple flower collection game only takes ten or fifteen minutes to play, but you’ll think carefully about where to position your pawns. After all the pawns are out, the remaining flowers are claimed by the nearest pawn, and then the winner is the player with the most flower majorities. As I stated in my first impressions post: “The simplicity and speed of Lacuna, combined with the unique abstract challenge and a perfect production, make this one of the most fresh 2-player games in years. Lacuna has a breezy timelessness to it that many 2-player titles can only dream of providing. It’s not the most tense or riveting game among my collection of duelers, but it doesn’t want or need to be.”

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Launching soon: Secret Epic Big Box Knizia Project

This month, Bitewing Games is launching the most epic Reiner Knizia Kickstarter Project ever. But ambitious publications like that and in-depth posts such as this are only made possible by the support of our Kickstarter backers. Be sure to follow the pre-launch page so you don’t miss the grand reveal, then you can support the game if it strikes your fancy. We love creating and sharing so many amazing games — thanks for your support!

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Continue on to games 75-51 of my Top 100 Board Games of All Time!

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Article written by Nick Murray. Outside of practicing dentistry part-time, Nick has devoted his remaining work-time to collaborating with the world’s best designers, illustrators, and creators in producing classy board games that bite, including the critically acclaimed titles Trailblazers by Ryan Courtney and Zoo Vadis by Reiner Knizia. He hopes you’ll join Bitewing Games in their quest to create and share classy board games with a bite.

Disclaimer: When Bitewing Games finds a designer or artist or publisher that we like, we sometimes try to collaborate with these creators on our own publishing projects. We work with these folks because we like their work, and it is natural and predictable that we will continue to praise and enjoy their work. Any opinions shared are subject to biases including business relationships, personal acquaintances, gaming preferences, and more. That said, our intent is to help grow the hobby, share our gaming experiences, and find folks with similar tastes. Please take any and all of our opinions with a hearty grain of salt as you partake in this tabletop hobby feast.