Board Game Geek Top 100 Tier List

[@willreardon5116]

Really glad I found your channel guys. That was a great watch - nice and snappy, bit of banter and some great insights 😀

[@GatheringGames]

Thanks so much for watching 😊

[@stevenburton7725]

After picking up every expansion for Arkham I must admit it is one of the best games to play with friends. Each expansion has added to the overall narrative, and each different character has its own unique style that makes certain cards better, and others far worse. It makes for such a rich experience

[@lukerutten78]

QUACKS!!! My big thing with Quacks of Quedlinburg is that it's easy enough to learn that first time players can really enjoy it, but there's enough depth involved in min-maxing your choices that more invested players have enough to keep them engaged the entire time.

[@GatheringGames]

On paper, It seems like a game I'd love, but I've never really enjoyed it when playing. Maybe I need to give it another shot... Thanks so much for watching 😁

[@oschiott]

Thanks a lot for your thorough and great video! I know it’s all about taste, but my favorites among these right now are (in this order): 1) Through the Ages, 2) Mage Knight, and 3) War of the Ring. :D

[@oschiott]

To expand on this, I think the next ones up on my list are: 1) Scythe, 2) Spirit Island, 3) Gloomhaven/Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, 4) Nemesis, 5) Eclipse, 6) Too Many Bones and 7) Terraforming Mars. Dominion is my absolute favorite game, though, but it’s not in the top 100 on BGG.

[@GatheringGames]

That's a really good point! How isn't dominion in the top 100?? That game is awesome!

[@monoludico6166]

Placing War of the Ring in Leave it and SW Rebellion in Mind Blowing doesn't make any sense guys. Both games have around the same scope and are very similar in complexity, learning curve, playtime, number of players, etc. Through the Ages is mind blowing to me, same as Race for the Galaxy and Root. On the other hand, Azul, 7 Wonders, Wingspan, Scythe and Gloomhaven (both of them) are pretty overrated imo. Gaia Project, Terraforming Mars, Spirit Island, Twilight Struggle Feast for Odin and Tzolkin are all Mind Blowing games, but so are Dune Imperium, Brass Birmingham, Mage Knight and Le Havre, imo. Anyway, great video guys!

[@GatheringGames]

Hmm war of the Ring seems like a few notches up compared to rebellion. I didn't think rebellion was THAAAAT complex or long. Thanks for sharing your favs and for watching 😁

[@SigurdBraathen]

What about #5, Twilight Imperium? You can play it online nowadays, if finding time and/or people to play it with is too challenging. Give me a nod if you're interested! :) Might be worthy of a video, even!?

[@nickm9180]

Mage knight is so good and it doesn’t have to be solo

[@jtms1200]

easily my #1 of all time

[@Orinap]

Scythe is sooo good. Bought it when I had just got into university for game design and it blew my mind lmao

[@MadMark118]

Ever tried Inis? Drafting and Area Control CLASSIC. Guess you did get around to noticing it.

[@GatheringGames]

Yup, we mentioned it during the list once we got to it. Totally forgot when we mentioned Blood Rage. Inis is an excellent game. Love me some drafting :D

[@tym6217]

Gloomhaven imo has way too much admin and pieces to keep track of for a TT game, it really detracted from the experience for me. It became almost tedious. I got a decent amount of playtime out of its digital version though. Having most of the admin handled by the computer does a lot to streamline its experience for me. Unfortunately my campaign on the PC suffered from a glitch making one of the bosses on a main story mission unkillable and pretty much ruined my interest in ever retrying it. Such is the pitfalls of videogame adaptations unfortunately.

[@GatheringGames]

I actually think the digital adaptation was more enjoyable for me with the admin taken care of. It makes for a much more fluid combat system. Thanks so much for watching 😁

[@WaseemIlyas]

Loved this video. Eclipse, Dune Imperium and Brass Birmingham deserve to sit in the Mind Blown tier! They all require repeated plays to shine and an understanding of the strategies to appreciate just how tightly balanced they are.

[@sahdmasood1603]

Agreed, Dune blew my mind 🤯

[@VaultBoy13]

Eclipse 👎 - It was one of the most disappointing games I've played.

[@GatheringGames]

​@@VaultBoy13what was it for you that disappointed you?

[@WaseemIlyas]

@@VaultBoy13 How many plays do you have of Eclipse? Was it second edition? Which part of it fell flat for you?

[@enr1l]

Very true, you don't understand the dept of Dune Imperium in few plays.... it's a game where plans often don't go your way and you have to adjust on the fly, Dune it's not for ppl that decide what strategy to take at the beginning and they keep that till the end.

[@sarumon17]

Really thoughtful commentary. Never seen you guys before, but like this a lot.

[@jtms1200]

makes me so sad to see Mage Knight in the leave it tier... its literally one of the greatest board games ever created and I just absolutely adore it. Please give it a chance - it rewards patience!

[@Alkarion26]

I recently played war of the rings for the first time, and like you i also struggle a little bit with the rules but once you learned the game its an amazing game, i think you need to give it a try and be patience on learning the game, it is not the type of game where you read the rules once and you ready to go, the first 2 plays through expect to be referencing the rulebook

[@GatheringGames]

Fez here! Thanks so much for watching and commenting. I didn't actually play this one, but instead Sahd had. I think we should give this a shot, given how beloved the game is. Thanks so much for watching and commenting 😁

[@sharxboy]

Did you leave out Twilight Imperium because you have never played it? You talked about it for a bit, but didn't really cover it, I would just say that it is at #5 for a reason. If you get invited, you should try it. Then become kinda obsessed about things you shoulda/woulda/coulda done, and you're hooked.

[@whattox]

Just for comparison sake, have you played the new Dune: Imperium - Uprising? And you should try another game on bgg100: Robinson Crusoe, a highly thematic survival coop.

[@GatheringGames]

I played uprising once last week. It felt like there was a greater focus on combat due to how powerful the worms are. We have a written review on our blog by one of the team members Nick who LOVED it. I still need to play some more to make final judgement on it. I'm not sure why I never got around to playing Robinson Crusoe, it looks awesome! Thanks for the recommendation and for watching 😊

[@tonyclark67]

So good to see Tzolkin getting some love

[@Klemeron]

I love everything about what I've heard of terraforming Mars, but as a designer and visual artist I cannot push myself to own a product so awfully designed, in functionality and graphics. It's a shame. Ark Nova it is!

[@VeteranVandal]

I don't like Viticulture. To me the game is mechanically poor and somewhat unidimensional. The game is just too simple and isn't even better than most older or newer games of its type. A lot of problems of the game could be solved by not using it's ending condition and if it wasn't just a "collect cards" game. Star Wars Rebellion: super boring game and one of the most overrated games of all time. The mechanics are contrived, the conflict is somewhat interesting, but I think the game is a tad too tedious and unidimensional on what each faction does. This is a game for maniacs for miniatures. The essence of the game is very very bland, and the production phase is very badly designed on purpose... War of the Ring is ok. It's nothing earth shattering, it has interesting mechanics that are laughably underutilized and has bad stuff overutilized, it's somewhat simple, but very charming and fundamentally a solid game. The game has some oversights that are very surprising, like inability to adjust difficulty within the campaign, to cite 1 thing that was surprising as an oversight, there are other examples of such nature. The missions range from trivial to "wtf do we have to do" too much, and the difficulty of the missions vary too much within themselves. Generally speaking, average difficulty isn't hard enough. The game could use quite a few adjustments to be a good game. Terra Mystica, Gaia Project, Gloomhaven are just some of my favourite games of all time. They are incredible in basically everything they do.

[@GatheringGames]

Fez here! It sounds like we align pretty close in our tastes for board games. Thanks so much for watching 😁

[@oschiott]

There has to be a misunderstanding here. War of the Ring has no campaign, no missions, very clear goals for both sides and no difficulty settings. Are you sure you’re talking about the War of the Ring? Sounds more like The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game or The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth.

[@branboom3342]

Havent played WotR but hard agree on Viticulture and SW:R. Lords of Waterdeep is a way more fun worker placement that came out way before and people scoff at it and revere Viticulture.

[@Yukamagic17]

I start watching these kinda videos lately and its really cool to see that people has alot of different opinions in comparison to me. Scythe is probably my worst boardgame experience ever. TM was too boring and Root is so unbalanced that it destroys all the fun ideas the game has to me. P.S: Try Dune with expansions. It’s gonna be mind blowing. Base game is fine but the expansions are just brilliant and will change the experience completely. Especially if you’re competitive.

[@GatheringGames]

The expansions for Dune Imperium or the original Dune board game??

[@Yukamagic17]

@@GatheringGames Imperium. Never played original Dune bcz heard its kinda similar to Game of Thrones and our group decided to just stick to that.

[@GatheringGames]

@@Yukamagic17 Loved Rise of Ix, but still haven't tried the latest of them tbh. I will need to try that out soon!

[@benalexander5010]

I wish the graphic was bigger throughout the video tbh

[@t.yop9]

Terraforming Mars is the only game my playgroup decided wasn't worth a 3rd play. Both times we played it, it just became this boring solo engine building game where nobody paid attention to anyone else's board and everyone was reading through all the cards in their hand. Way too many cards, way too many options and a tedious slog for us. To be fair, my group consists of a couple of players who are fairly impatient and prefer fast paced games. It just goes to show everything is down to preference.

[@GatheringGames]

It certainly is! Terraforming Mars Ares expedition is a quicker paced version of the game and naturally has more player interaction. Maybe your group would prefer that?

[@siurocky]

Great list! only thing I didn't really agree on is sleeping gods. Loved the open world adventure but mechincally it just didn't make any sense to me and somewhat clunky gameplay. And if I wanted more narrative, I would just play AH:lcg.

[@GatheringGames]

I definitely see the argument for the gameplay, but the world was just soo gripping for me. Agreed on AH: LCG! That's one hell of a game. Thanks so much for watching 😁

[@cyy321]

Where is Agricola?

[@GatheringGames]

Neither of us had played it. I hear it's pretty great though. Have you played it??

[@longtimeninerfan1309]

Well done.

[@sockz7001]

Feel your pain for war of the ring, such a stressful session. The card game should take it's place defo a better game. Pandemic Legacy is number 1 for me what an amazing experience. Love the video guys ❤

[@mrjamesben7767]

Root is so difficult ?

[@GatheringGames]

Yes! It's a pretty complex game, especially given how asymmetrical the game plays.

[@mckeoncrawford9262]

Great entertaining watch.

[@GatheringGames]

Thanks so much for watching 😁

[@Kojimalosophy]

war of the ring in the lowest category! ? I literally just came to this comment section to say that either you are horrible at reading rule books -and therefore you played the wrongly - or your mind just works differently than everybody else's ..... oh but not in a good way edit: oh man! and then you placed Mage Knight also at the lowest!? boy .. that js literally unanimously chosen by the people as the no.1 solo game OF ALL TIME! are you trolling just for clicks?

[@jtms1200]

Maybe its the learning curve for Mage Knight that puts some people off? It really requires some serious effort to even learn to play, but boy oh boy does it reward those who put in the time and effort!

[@Kojimalosophy]

@@jtms1200 I agree with what you say about Mage Knight having a high learning curve, and how about the end the payout is tantamount to the effort required to learn the game, what ranking the game solo because of these would be equivalent to ranking violin as an instrument very low, because it has a high learning curve and few people can get into it, do yo see the correlation? and the same criteria would apply for War of the Ring, yes they require 4 to 6 hours of you like to learn them, but now you have an extremely robust and rich experience that very few other board games can rival, one that you can enjoy for rhe rest of your life, for an initial investment of around 5 hours. look at Voidfall, it is an absolute masterpieces of design , once you know that game there really is not need to play any Lacerda games or most other euros , it is the filllet mignon of euros, BUT! ... takes you 5 hours to learn it..... same as mage knight.

[@PerikleZ87]

I don't know why this video was recommended to me. I am a board game enthusiast, but I disagree on all the "Leave It" takes. I guess the algorithim is still learning..

[@roflattheworld]

For real - The Crew is an incredible game with great replayability and it shines even brighter (and significantly so!) in its sequel

[@Burianu767]

Why should the algorithm recommend only things you agree with? Hearing opposing opinions is interesting...

[@brawleyavalon]

it probably recommended this video to you because they’re also board game enthusiasts? what do you think the algorithm is doing for you? finding only things you exactly agree with in an hour long video? 😑

[@lukamagicc]

47:37 I randomly clicked on this video, then this time stamp. Keep in mind, these are REAL LIFE people that talk like this😭.