Welcome back to my Top 100 Board Games of All Time, 2024 Edition! If you missed my previous posts, then be sure to check out games 100-76 here and games 75-51 here.
50. Lost Cities
Another approachable 2-player game that deserves high praise is one of Reiner Knizia’s most famous designs, Lost Cities. Here’s a fun BoardGameGeek stat for you: more BGG users own Lost Cities than any other Knizia game (69,000) and second place is considerably less (Quest for El Dorado at 43,000 owners). To be fair, Lost Cities is not his best selling game, I believe that award goes to Whoowasit? which has a main audience outside of BoardGameGeek users. At any rate, Lost Cities is a smash hit of a game, and for good reason.
You and your opponent are embarking on risky expeditions by playing matching colored cards into ascending personal columns. If you start a column with a new color, then you must desperately claw your way out of negative 20 points by playing enough high value cards of that color into that column. The delicious agony of Lost Cities comes in deciding which cards to play, which colors to commit to, which cards to keep from your opponent, and when to pull the trigger on big plays.
49. Agricola
Agricola is one of few board games that somehow feels both comforting and brutal. Comforting within the process of building a cozy farmstead. Brutal in the desperate struggle for scarce resources amid threats of starvation. It remains a bona fide classic worker placement game nearly 20 years on from its first publication. The thing that still puts Agricola above the thousands of other worker placement games that have been published since is the meaningful variety of the cards and impactful tightness of the board.
48. Equinox
I love me a good betting game, and I maintain that Equinox is one of the best. Not only are you placing bets on which mythical creatures will avoid fading into oblivion, but you’re also pulling the strings of destiny to favor your prized bets. At its heart, Equinox is a hand management game. You’ll want to place big bets on the creatures you can help with your cards, and lie in wait to sabotage all others. It certainly helps to form alliances with other players via shared bets. Those who go it alone don’t often fare well.
Many folks have complained that the box and cards for this game are bigger than they need to be. I don’t disagree, but I suppose it hasn’t bothered me enough to affect my enjoyment of Equinox. I’m just happy to bask in some savage betting for a short while.
47. Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy
Eclipse is one of the most epic board games in my collection. It typically requires some kind of two-table arrangement, nearly four hours of playtime, and a few friends with big gaming appetites. While it can be played much faster with only 2 experienced players, this is usually a big event style of game for me.
The object is to explore the galaxy, expand your fleet, exploit the resources of the cosmos, and exterminate rival alien races. Usually, you’ll spend the first act building your economy, the second act customizing your ships, and the third act unleashing your strategy on your friends. It’s always fun to see how things shake out when two heavy fleets collide in epic battle.
46. The For One Series
I spent much of my earlier years in the hobby assuming that solo tabletop gaming just wasn’t for me. So many board games are designed for multiplayer interactions, and solo variants often try to replicate this with cumbersome systems and nauseating flowcharts that simply aren’t worth my time. A needy bot just isn’t as fun to play against as a dynamic human.
But solo gaming has come a long way in recent years, and there now seems to be something for everyone. Within this genre, I’ve found that I strongly prefer games that are designed from the ground up for the solo play experience. Usually they are far more clean and smooth — no needy bots anywhere in sight.
The For One Series (Galactix, Kniffel, Schwarze Rosen, Number Up) is not only slick, but it’s endlessly addicting and challenging too. I’ve had a blast going through each stage and replaying it until I earn the gold ranking. Galactix and Kniffel are jam packed with tough-as-nails dice chucking challenges, while Schwarze Rosen and Number Up offer calm yet satisfying tile placement and card placement decisions. Whenever I sit down to play one of these games, I often get sucked in far longer than planned as I attempt several levels multiple times.
45. Dogs of War
Dogs of War is a criminally out of print banger from designer Paolo Mori featuring legendary hats and multiplayer tug of war. Across three fields of battle (I.e., tug of war tracks), you must decide which house to support and hope that just enough players team up with you. This game dangles many carrots to nudge you in one direction or another. Sometimes you support a house simply because you want to claim the short term reward on their side. Other times you are heavily invested in a house’s success — the more they succeed the bigger you’ll score at the end of the game. Thanks to forum comments from Paolo in recent years, it seems that he is keen to republish this design eventually and likely give it an updated set of rules.
44. Decrypto
Many hobbyist gamers regard Decrypto as their favorite word deduction party game. That’s an impressive feat, considering this genre boasts many titans including Codenames, Just One, and more. While Decrypto isn’t the most intuitive party game for newcomers, it’s more than worth the trouble to learn. Here you are giving clues that relate to your hidden topics, and those clues must walk a fine line between too easy for your opponents to follow and too hard for your teammates to understand. As players work to guess their own codes and crack the rival team’s codes, Decrypto quickly sinks its hooks in. With each successive round, the difficulty ramps up as you try to give new clues that don’t relate too strongly to old ones until a team finally crumbles under the pressure or triumphs over their foes. What a delicious challenge, that Decrypto.
43. Lords of Vegas
At the time of writing this, I just played Lords of Vegas again last night. It has been over 2 human years since my previous play of Lords of Vegas, so I was glad to finally get it to the table again. I was curious to see if my feelings have changed over the past 23 board game years since the previous play (yes, that is how time works in the board game universe). It turns out, I still love this classic game.
This area control romp remains a winner at the table because it is streamlined and spicy. And there is risky gambling inherently baked into almost every action you can take. Do you build a new casino? Which color do you invest in? Do you sprawl outward and risk losing that space to another player later? Should you reorganize to try and increase your income or take over a casino? Should you gamble at a rival casino in hopes of a little extra cash? There’s quite a bit of swingy luck involved in determining the winner of Lords of Vegas, but that’s what makes this one such a blast.
42. Marabunta
Marabunta was the very first 2024 release I got to play this year, and all these months later it remains one of my favorites. You could technically call it a roll and write, you are indeed rolling dice and writing the results with a dry erase marker, but it feels nothing like other games in this genre. Rather, this is more appropriately a 2-player split and choose area majority game.
As competing ant colonies, you’ll be fighting to claim territory and cut each other off from further invasion. You’ll take turns rolling the dice, splitting up the rewards, and letting your opponent choose and execute an option first. The decisions are agonizing and the depth is a joy to uncover. Some people have rightly identified that this game could have been a bigger production that uses tiles instead of a smaller dry erase map, but I really dig the compact and clean production here. Marabunta and its innovative ideas offer a strong case for why Reiner continues to be one of the greatest 2-player game designers across the past 3 decades.
41. High Society
Speaking of 3 decades of killer titles from Reiner Knizia, High Society turns 30 next year, and it’s as good as ever. As the title implies, you’ll be blowing your piles of cash on extravagance to enhance your status. You’ll also use your money to avoid or bury scandals that threaten your reputation. But most important of all, you don’t want to come away as the poorest of your peers, otherwise you’ll be cast out and forgotten like the daily dross.
In High Society, players are bidding with their hand of money cards on one luxury after another, sometimes bleeding money to avoid a catastrophe. One brilliant wrinkle here is that your hand is made up of different values including 1, 2, 3, 10, 12, 20, and more. Once a money card is spent, it is gone forever, and you’ll quickly wish you could make change with your larger bills. Another key ingredient is that the game can wind down to its ending much faster than expected (suddenly changing people’s opinions about the low point cards). But Knizia’s trademark twist is found in the end game scoring, where the player who spent the most money is eliminated from victory. What a legendary card game.
40. Botswana / Wildlife Safari
It may not be as opulent or dramatic as High Society, but Botswana (aka Wildlife Safari) is another scorch mark from the hot streak that was 1990s Knizia. Although for me it has been more of a slow burn, growing brighter and hotter with more plays and a new edition.
My first experience with this design was through Eagle-Gryphon’s 2014 edition called Wildlife Safari. The gameplay is the same as always, but the problem is that this box is crammed with literal children’s toys (generic plastic animal figures seemingly pulled off the shelf of your local dollar store). It immediately puts you in the mindset that you are playing a children’s game. And while the game is compatible with children (the rules are incredibly simple), it’s great for adults as well. Sadly, I didn’t give this game the appreciation it deserved.
It wasn’t until I beheld the glorious 2022 printing of Botswana, from Japanese publisher New Games Order, that I finally saw the brilliance of this game. There’s something to be said for a great production that puts you in the right mindset. You’ll do nothing more than play a card to change an animal’s value and then take an animal token from the supply. It’s pure economic goodness driven by shared incentives, unfolding information, and charming animal illustrations. This is perfection wrapped in a small box.
39. Mandala
Knizia isn’t the only one who knows how to cook up a brilliantly simple card game. It warms my heart to see younger designers such as Trevor Benjamin and Brett J. Gilbert pick up and carry the torch further with titles like Mandala.
In Mandala, you’ll face off against one foe across the table with nothing but a large deck of only 6 card colors. You’ll use these cards to increase the value of a reward pot, gain more cards into your hand, bid for drafting order, block your opponent from playing certain colors, and dictate the values of your various earnings. Who knew that a mere 6 colors can be used in so many clever ways?
38. John Company: Second Edition
If you’re tired of dabbling on one end of the board game spectrum — quick and simple card games with surprising depth — then allow me to bestow upon you a bit of whiplash by taking you to the complete opposite end of the spectrum with the wildly complex John Company: Second Edition. What can one say about John Company the board game aside from, “Wow,” and, “Please sir, may I have some more?” One can say a lot, actually.
But for the sake of brevity, I’ll leave it at this: John Company is the most wacky, chaotic, gripping, and memorable historical game I have ever had the pleasure of playing. I could happily play this game once a week for years upon years and still not have my fill of its political negotiation antics. Even in an ever growing sea of thousands of board games, there is well and truly nothing like John Company.
37. A Feast For Odin
A Feast for Odin — The Magnum Opus of Uwe Rosenberg, famed German game designer worthy of Board Game Mount Rushmore. Somehow that mad genius managed to stitch together all his favorite things in the whole wide world: worker placement, worker feeding, bean farming, animal breeding, and polyominoes. This big, beautiful Frankenstein gives you a massive sandbox of possibilities to explore as you manage your viking village. In simple terms, you are acquiring and upgrading all kinds of polyominoes to fill your board and improve your economy. But it uses this system to explore all aspects of viking life including hunting, trade, crafting, exploring, pillaging, and more. It really is a feast of a board game. Odin would be proud.
36. Oath
Oath’s enormous fall from my #1 Game of All Time (ranked in 2022) could be interpreted as me souring on the experience. But that is not true it all. The answer is much more dull: I’m simply not able to play it as much as I used to…. and for this 2024 list, playable games are heavily favored. Tragically, I have only played this game once in nearly two years. I suppose that most of my favorite heavy games have all fallen into the same sad bucket (notice how Oath ended up scrunched together with John Company and A Feast for Odin). These games are so long and demanding that I simply don’t have the ability to support all of them on a regular basis. But I still love this experience to bits.
Oath masterfully weaves innovative mechanisms together with a sprawling world of characters, locations, civilizations, and secrets. It is a legacy-like game with no end — a game where the choices and events of one play spill consequences and scenarios over into the next. This infinite stream of ripple effects impacts the map, deck, roles, and objectives in fascinating ways. It’s a world that lives and evolves between plays — both at your table and in your brain.
35. Patterns
From the same design duo as Mandala, Patterns is a similarly genius design that gets a lot of mileage out of 6 colors of components. Only here, the components are tiles instead of cards and the way they are used is very different.
In a year of many bangers, Patterns turned out to be my favorite 2-player release of 2023. Here’s what I said about Patterns in my Top 15 Games of 2023 post: “Straight from the first play, this humble abstract strategy game knocked my socks off with its tight design and layered decisions. And proceeding through even more plays, Patterns continues to… as the kids say… slap. Perhaps that’s just the tile placement lover in me letting my true colors show through. But either way, I can’t think of any other completely abstract dueling game that gets me as excited as Patterns.”
34. Taj Mahal
As far as Reiner Knizia classics go, Taj Mahal is a bit of an acquired taste. It’s not as flashy as Quest for El Dorado or clear as Through the Desert. The board state and scoring opportunities build gradually, and the crescendo is less like a booming firework show and more like a gentle sunrise. I remember that I liked it but didn’t necessarily love it after my first play. The premise is admittedly a bit dry.
But like Knizia’s best games, this one only gets better with repeat plays. It’s a game of managing your hand and deciding how many cards to burn through in each of the 12 game-of-chicken auctions. It helps to pick and choose your battles — knowing when to retreat early and when to keep your foot on the pedal. When you pass out of an auction, if you have majority in one or more symbols, then you gain those rewards. But too often you’ll find yourself tying for majority with other players… hoping that the others back out so you can pass last and claim the rewards. It may not be his most popular classic design, but I believe that Taj Mahal is low-key one of his best.
33. Sky Team
While Patterns was my personal favorite 2-player release of 2023, there’s no denying the greater appeal and innovation of Sky Team. I suppose that is why Sky Team ended up ranked a bit higher than Patterns on this list. Either way, I love both games.
Sky Team has been a hit for my wife and I thanks to the quick cooperative challenges it presents. I’ve often found myself reluctant to return to great cooperative games after beating them — there’s just not as strong of a drive for me to retread the same ground. But Sky Team keeps things fresh and addicting by providing many unique setups, scenarios, and modules for us to take on. The process of casting your dice behind your screen and taking turns fitting them out onto the demanding shared board amid restricted communication makes for a great little challenge.
32. Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West
Ticket to Ride has been a key gateway game for many folks in the hobby since its initial release 20 years ago. Gateway or not, it remains a favorite family-weight game in the industry. Although I haven’t played it in years, I still keep a copy stored in the dark recesses of my closet for when my girls are old enough to try it.
So it was a treat to fire up the more complex legacy version of Ticket to Ride earlier this year with some friends and ride our own journey through its twists and turns. Legends of the West tweaks some of the core rules of Ticket to Ride and then layers on extra considerations and objectives to keep you adapting throughout its 12-game campaign. Most nights we played 2 sessions at a time and enjoyed the surprises introduced to the gameplay. While this is undoubtedly the most complex version of Ticket to Ride out there, it’s actually on the lighter end of the legacy genre spectrum. If you have a group of 3-5 players interested and able to embark on such a trip, I certainly recommend it!
31. Battle Line: Medieval / Schotten Totten
If you couldn’t tell yet, I love a quick 2-player game with simple rules and juicy decisions. Battle Line (aka Schotten Totten) is the epitome of this genre with two players facing off via poker-style formations across several fields of battle. As you take turns putting out a card, you’ll learn more about what type of formations your rival is gunning for and what cards are even left in the deck to work with. Understanding when to pull the trigger and complete a formation is a major part of the challenge here, and your hand of cards will feel vanishingly small as you pick up cards you don’t want to play yet. This game is still going strong with new printings a whopping 25 years on from its initial debut, and I expect we’ll see the same thing 25 years from now. It is that good.
30. Regicide
On the topic of doing a lot with very little, Regicide is perhaps one of the greatest games ever designed from the standard 52-card deck. This cooperative boss battler presents a difficult grind through the jacks then queens then kings. Communication is limited, and you’ll have to make the most of what is in your hand. But each suit (spades, diamonds, etc.) grants you a special ability to help you defend, heal, replenish hands, and deliver heavy blows. The bosses get harder along the way, but fortunately they join your deck as you defeat them. Keeping the group alive all the way to the finish line is the only way to win, and it’s always a blast to attempt a run.
29. The Mind
If you thought that a standard deck of cards was as minimalist as board games can get, think again. The Mind is considered by some to be less a game and more a social experiment. In this cooperative game, your group plays through a series of rounds where your hand increases by one card per round. The objective is to play the cards (ranging between 1 and 100) in ascending order without communicating. That’s it. But with the right group, what sounds rather pointless and befuddling can actually be a suspenseful hoot. It’s proof that sometimes the best gaming moments take place between the collective consciousness of the players rather than on a slab of cardboard.
28. Viking See-Saw
Is it weird to say that Viking See-Saw is my favorite stacking game? Probably. But what it lacks in size and grandeur, it more than makes up for in novelty and portability. Where other stacking games are one-dimensional and rote (either you successfully add to the tower or you blow it and make the pieces topple), Viking See-Saw layers further mysterious physics on top of a standard dexterity challenge. You’re not only worried about which pieces will reliably rest on top of the growing stack, but you’re also worried about how much weight you can add to the see-saw and where you can add it without causing it to tilt. Sometimes I think back and wonder if I regard this game too highly. Is such a trifle really that fun? But then I play it again and witness moments like this that wash my doubts away.
27. Orongo
Next to Municipium (which Bitewing Games already took under our wing — see SILOS), Orongo is arguably the most underrated hidden gem Knizia design in his entire ludography of 800 published titles. Here lies a 10-year-old game that virtually nobody outside of Knizia enthusiasts has heard of or played.
Orongo combines two of Knizia’s greatest strengths into one beautiful competition: interactive tile placement and tense auctions. Players stuff their fists with valuable shells and then simultaneously reveal their bids — all for turn order initiative and to claim more spaces on the board. By making connections between resource spaces and coastal spaces, you’ll advance your objective in this race to erect your Moai statues first. The problem is that you have to permanently remove shells from your supply and the economy with each statue you erect, thus driving Easter Island into further scarcity.
Valuable spaces are offered up piecemeal, and having your connections blocked by rivals is always a threat, so the pressure never lets up. But you’ll also want to bid zero at times just to claim the pot of shells created by the winner of each bid who discards their offering in this tight closed economy. Interestingly, only the highest bidder has to spend their shells, so it can be super nice to bid just under them and retain your money. It’s also nice to increase your bidding power, but it’s possible that other people bid zero with you in the same turn, and then you have to split the pot into hilariously meager earnings. Thanks to the mind games at play within this shrinking economy, I’ve never seen a simultaneous auction done better than Orongo.
26. So Clover
So Clover is just plain solid. What else is there to say? I suppose it is ranked so highly because it is so easy to get to the table and engaging to dive into. Where party games like Wavelength and Decrypto perhaps require more creative or careful players to really shine, So Clover is more effortless in its ability to entertain any group. I love how players simultaneously make their own clues and then cooperatively go through each player’s board to try and reassemble the right cards in the right places. There is never a dull moment with So Clover.
Now On Kickstarter: Three Epic Sci-fi Games from Reiner Knizia
Bitewing Games recently launched the biggest Reiner Knizia crowdfunding project ever with the Cosmic Silos Trilogy — SILOS, EGO, and ORBIT! It’s an Avengers-level event and board gaming celebration where we’ve recruited some of the biggest artists in the industry to help bring these huge games to life. But ambitious publications like this and in-depth posts such as my Top 100 Board Games of All Time are only made possible by the support of our Kickstarter backers. So please check out the Kickstarter project and support the games if they strike your fancy. We love creating and sharing so many amazing games — thanks for your support!
Stay tuned for games 25-1 of my Top 100 Board Games of All Time!
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.