Graeme's Top 100 Games of All Time: 80-71

Welcome back everyone to my top 100 games numbers 80 through 71. My number 80 game came out 9 years ago in 2016. It was actually my first all-in Kickstarter as the art and the theme just won me over. It's a game set in 1920s alternate history Eastern Europe and this game is Scythe. This game has a really good mix of thematic elements and of course euro mechanisms along with asymmetrical factions.

I really enjoy the process of action selection this one. Each round you have to move your action token to a different spot to take that action and each action is split into two. You can take the top action, bottom action or both. But what really does this for me is actually the combination of asymmetrical factions and the enhancements you can choose to do.

Do you upgrade your actions, deploy more mechs to get abilities, build buildings to which give you bonuses for certain actions or onetime bonuses through enlisting? These decisions are a lot of fun and can change based on the factions you're playing. And you kind of have to learn the factions and play them to figure out their strengths and weaknesses.

The race to get your stars out is kind of what's driving this game, and you do need to be doing some of kind of most of the options available to you. This game is all about balance and efficiencies with a good dose of theme, which slams it in my number 80 spot. Number 79 is Thunder Alley, a game all about stock car racing.

Now, I know nothing about stock cars, but I always like the idea of a racing game, and this one gives me the right amount of euroness with the feeling of racing, as I do find a lot of racing games come down to the luck of the die roll, which I do enjoy from time to time, but I do prefer to to have a little more input into whether I win or lose the race.

This game does abstract racing a fair bit through the use of cards, and that each lap of the race is actually several in real life. You get the option of drafting other cars, and you're all working your cars on the track to kind of help each other out as you are the manager of a team. There are yellow flags, accidents, and worsening track conditions, which are all things you have to deal with while your cars are on the track.

And you will have to pit from time to time. But do you wait for that yellow flag to dive into the pits, or do you push your car a little longer and hopefully not far too far behind? For me, this racing game offers me the perfect balance of euro mechanisms and card play combined with randomness of events.

It just kind of walks that line perfectly for me, and that's why it's my number 79 game. Number 78 is just as thematic and is all about racing. Kind of. Okay, not really. It's Pulsar 2849. This game's key mechanism is dice drafting. You draft a die and use it to perform various actions, flying ships around the galaxy, claiming and building pulsars, and advancing on technology tracks.

And there really two main reasons why this game is on my list. First is the tech trees. I'm a sucker for getting unique bonuses and in-game advantages. But using a die to get this means you're not going to be using it for the other action, which means there's a good balancing here between, you know, getting up on the tracks or getting the action you need.

And getting that tech at the right time can be very advantageous. The second main reason for this being on my list is the dice drafting. At the beginning of the round, you're going to roll a number of dice, and you're going to be putting them in order with a marker on the median die. Players take turns drafting dice.

If you take a dice whose value is above the marker, you move your worker piece to the right of that on the track. If you take it to the left, you move your piece to the left. Th this offers up a good decision. It means taking larger dice can give you a stronger action, but it might mean you're moving a fair number of spaces to the right.

And if you get to the end of the track, you're actually going to be losing points. So, this balancing of moving on the track versus the die you want to take is definitely a fun thing to do. And that is why it's my number 78 on my list. Number 77 brings it back to Earth and managing a vineyard. This game is Vidiculture, and here I'm saying the essential edition.

The game is a worker placement game, but what sets it apart is the seasonal actions. If you use all your workers in the early seasons, you're going to have no workers left for the rest of the year. Now, the game revolves around upgrading your vineyard and harvesting, bottling, and aging your wine. You want to be doing this to fulfill the contracts you have, which will require, you know, a variety of wines, which all take different ingredients.

Though, through the different seasons, you're going to be placing your workers to perform various actions to enhance their vineyard. You're going to be maybe building different structures in your vineyard to help with the different aspects you need. Which ones to get first is always kind of a fun challenge here.

And the card playing Vida Culture is also something I find very enjoyable. You balance the long-term wine order cards which are going to get you points and going to win the game with the summer visitor cards which gives you a powerful one-time effect, but you need to use them at the right time to get the maximum benefit.

There's also those winter visitor cards which can aid your vineyard. When you combine all these mechanisms and choices, you get a really solid game that's even further enhanced by the definitely the Tuskini expansion. This game sits for me right in the middle of an elegantly simple game but with a strategic depth and why it's my number 77 on my list.

Number 76 on my list is one from Garfield games and is my current favorite from this kind of range and this is Paladins of the West Kingdom. Takes place around 900 AD in West Frankia and the players are nobles trying to defend their city against enemies. The main mechanism of this game is actually worker placement but the hook for this one is that workers are in different color and do different things.

Another fun twist of that is that each player has their own player board which you're going to be taking your actions on, but there's a shared board that may be triggered from one of your actions. So, in many worker placement games, you have this turn angst about wanting to take a certain action. Here, you can only take an action because it's on your board, but the result may not be what you would hope for.

So, maybe I can try and send a monk out, but my faith level might mean I can only place it in the left section of the shared board. So, if someone beats me to it, I can't place it out. It's an interesting dynamic for planning. Some actions when taken might mean you get an extra worker and some action spots require, you know, workers of a certain color.

Getting that mix right is all part of the fun. There are also some cards which you can recruit with your strength or maybe do you use your faith to convert them to your side. It's one of these games where as you get more powerful and you get, you know, more resources, things cost a little more. So, it never feels like you can just do anything you want.

And there's always a good element of planning and watching the other players. There is a fair bit going on in this game, but it's not unmanageable. It ends up being a truly fun game. And my number 76, number 75 on my list is a little more obscure than my previous games on my list. This one's called Patch History.

The game is a civilization and citybuilding game, I guess, kind of. You're building up a tableau in front of you out of cards that are going to be auctioning off. These cards have famous people on them or places, and each game has three eras, which you're going to be building a bigger, larger grid each time.

The main key for this game is the whole patching mechanism. Each round there's going to be an auction to start off. When each player has one one tile, you're going to patch them into your tableau. Each card is made up of six squares. And when patching, you must cover at least one square on an existing tile or cover at least one square in the new tile with an existing tile.

This is going to alter your stats as you could be decreasing on one type of square and gaining others. And in each area, you're limited to the space of your tableau. What are you doing with all these resources you're collecting? Well, you can build trading routes with other players. And once these are established, you can actually send some of your diplomacy points to aid other players.

Or if you have enough strength, maybe you threaten them a little bit. And later on the game, you can also go to war with another player. This is of course a very euromchanism war where you're going to be using a chit to say either aggressive or alliance. And depending on what each player picks, that's going to decide the outcome.

Now, this is rarely a huge negative, even if they're losing players, unless you're kind of woefully unprepared for it. The game has a few things I'm usually not a big fan of. auctions and direct player conflict, but this game has enough euro mechanisms to keep it from feeling frustrating as you can see what is happening and could potentially happen early enough to kind of prepare for it.

And that patching mechanism is just so fun and engaging that patch history is my number 75 on my list. Number 74 is my second Uve Rosenberg game on this list, and this time it's Glass Roads. The players take on the role of glass makers in the Bavarian forest competing to build the most efficient production engine.

The basics of the game we've seen before. You need to be clearing off your own personal land to build a variety of buildings. Each building will have an ability or end of game scoring. And often the buildings when activated might depend on the forest, pawns, and pits you have in your playerboard. So clearing them off too quickly is probably not the best plan.

So that balance is fun. But the reason this is on my list is actually for two mechanisms. First is the production wheel. These wheels have rotating spokes that split the wheel into two sections. You have the big section where all your resources, raw resources, go. And as you collect them, you're going to move the resource markers around the wheel.

When the first space is completely empty, so you've moved each one more than one space, you rotate the spokes to consume the resources. But by turning the spokes, you're making more of the refined resources. This is a really clever way of resource management. You can never collect refined resources.

They're breaking glass. So managing your resources so you can produce them is a fun thing to do. The second reason why I enjoy this game so much is the card play. Each player has a set of identical 15 cards. Each round, you can select five to play during that round. When a player turns over a card, if any other player has that card face down, they reveal it.

And the players who play the card do one of the two abilities. But if no one else played that card, you get to do both abilities on that card. The second guessing of the other players is really what I enjoy about this game. Though there's a whole bunch of buildings you can build to do various actions and score points means that the game ends up being my number 74 on my list.

My 73rd game is the first Vil Lerta game and this one is called the gallerist. Each player takes on the role of a gallerist, spplaying their time between being an art dealer, gallery curator, and artist manager. You want to discover new artists, promote their work, and then sell their work for a profit.

This is a fairly intricate game with several moving parts. And for me, that's what I always enjoy in games. At its heart, it's a worker placement game, but with a few twists. First, as you have your main curator, but you also have assistance. These assistants can be kind of left behind to be kicked out by other players when they take that action.

These kickback actions are one of the reasons why I love this game. You want to be making sure you get some of these actions as they give you extra actions which allow you to maybe manipulate the visitors in your gallery. And managing visitors, making sure you have the right kind of visitors is kind of the key to this game.

Like a lot of the sort of games, this one kind of has rippling actions. That is, you often have to work backwards from what you want to do to work out the steps you need to make it happen. Then you see if there's a maybe a more efficient way to do it, and these kickback and executive actions are kind of a key to those plans.

Another aspect of lura games that I love so much is the multiple paths to victory. Often when the aim in game is coming, I look around the other players and think, "Ah, I should have done more than that." And they often tell me that they should have done more whatever path I was going on. And that is why it's my number 73 game.

Number 72 on my list is a card game all about drafting and engine building. This is It's a Wonderful World. The theme in this one is, well, to be fair, not exactly sure beyond being an empire looking to expand. The core gameplay is drafting cards and a little bit of engine building. When you draft cards, you're either going to be drafting them in hopes that you can build them with the resources or recycling them.

That is discarding them to get the resources printed on them. As you draft cards, you're going to be placing them aside and revealing them. So, watching what other players are drafting is kind of a must for this game. Then, once all players cards have been drafted, you then make the agonized decision on which ones you want to keep and try and build and which ones to scrap for resources.

You want to build them all, but there's never enough resources. So strategically drafting cards that either work for your engine or have resources you need is always an enjoyable decision point. You then run through your engine in a kind of a set production order. Every card that is complete and part of that production step will produce something during that step.

And as you produce them, you'll be able to distribute them to other under construction cards which maybe can complete them. So the balance between discarding cards or adding them to your under construction queue followed by that production phase is really what makes this game so fun for me. It's fast and the game ramps up in production and construction and getting that arc just right is the fun of this game and why it's my number 72 on my list.

And the last game in the section is actually another card game. And this one combines drafting and worker placement along with a strange theme. And this one is called Demon Worker. What sets this one apart is you only draft once during the game at the very beginning. These are the demons you want to be able to try and play during the game.

And each round you'll be assigning workers to different work areas. And this is kind of the worker placement piece. You get the benefit from the work area and the worker itself. There might be costs associated with going to the location and you have to pay additional resources if another worker is already there.

And one of the areas is way to get more workers out by playing a card from your hand and hopefully getting the points from them. The main reason why I find this one so intriguing is that initial draft. Once you've drafted, that's it. No more cards. You have to play the cards you have. And all the demons are good and well balanced.

Some of them are more powerful in-game but are worth little to no points at the end of the game, while others are weaker but worth more. And getting that balance right and your resource generation working is just a fun puzzle to work out. And each game you're going to have a different set of cards so that challenge starts all over again.

The game doesn't overstay its welcome, and I always feel like I've had a good but satisfying quick gaming experience at the end, which makes this my number 71 and the last game in this section. So that's it for these 10 games, number 80 through 71. A couple of card games and some more euros. The next 10, there's actually gonna be something that's going to be unique for my list and it's because it's the only one of its kind on my list.

But until next time, thanks for watching. [music] Hey everybody, thanks for watching this video. If you like [music] this review or whatever you just watched, wasn't it amazing? Uh, check out our channel, Dice Tower. We have all kinds of things. We review games, we do top 10s, we play games live. And it's all about board games, [music] but especially the people who play them.

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