The 30 Best Games of 2023 (This time for sure!)

hey everybody today on R runs through I'm going to tell you about the best games of 2023 and it's going to be my final countdown and what do I mean by that well every year as a uh Christmas present for all the folks who watch the channel I put up a preliminary list of the best games uh that I had played that year and I always promise that by the middle of the next year I will have played all the games I need to play and so I will do an update and that's what I'm doing right now it was actually on Christmas Day 2023 that I did a walking tour of the Town Square of San Osio in Baja Mexico and told everybody the 30 best games of the year at that point and it was a great time I'm afraid I'm not out and about right now you're just going to have to make do with a bunch of pretty box covers in the background instead of a really neat background there but um we are now what is it it's August I'm a little late normally I like to get this done by June or July uh but uh it's finally time to update and give you my final list um and I've got 10 more games to talk about I talked about 30 right there you're seeing me as I as I walk around and 10 of the games I talked about have been pushed out by 10 different ones and so this is going to be a countdown and I'm really only going to focus on the new stuff that's on the list and uh I'll just kind of skip over the ones that I already talked about when I did this video whatever it was you know seven and a half months ago so um that's what we're going to here to do today folks and by the way if you want to see this original video and hear about 20 or actually 30 other games uh that I will go into depth on well there's going to be a link for my original one down in the show notes or you hit the ey in the top right corner screen or at the end of this video there'll be a big button on screen you can press so you can go watch more does that all sound good okay if so I think we are ready to go let's see y I've got uh my list queued up so let's get going with my new number 30 best game of the year and this is brand new I have not talked about this uh back in December number 30 on my final countdown list is IIA or a or AI ye I have no idea how I pronounce this game the publisher grock games did not bother to um put a pronunciation and even um Portuguese speakers I've watched some Portuguese uh channels as I this is a Brazilian published and they uh game they don't know how to pronounce it either everybody's guessing so I'll just spell it AI Yee with accents over the A and the E anyway uh regardless of how you say it this game is phenomenal I really liked it a lot as did my wife Jen let's see if I right now I'm just G I'm putting all that stuff up there you can pause and see the stats of it here's some more stuff about it including the uh description what I just want to say is it is a very sharp very pretty fast playing montala game and I love montala games um if you're looking at this right now I know some people are listening to this rather than watching um right there at the bottom this is my Mona it's a row of stacks of cards that have different powers on them and on my turn I'm going to grab all the chips below one of these columns and start dropping them off going clock or there is no clockwise because it's not round but dropping off to the right right if I picked up these two yellows and dropped one and then dropped the second one the second one would be where I stopped dropping and I would activate this middle column which has three special powers on it and then you would do the same thing and you know it's just standard montala stuff but what really makes this game Stand Out aside from the really awesome presentation is your monola is incredibly Dynamic you can collapse different columns into each other so you have fewer columns and they are bigger and more powerful over time you spread them out by adding new columns that are smaller and weaker like in this picture the one on the far right is probably a brand new one that's been added because it would only do a single action so you need to collapse it into other ones but the tricky thing is you can get more cards that have more powers and add the your manala but to pay for those cards you've got to give up the chips that let you activate your montala so this is a game full of really tricky and puzzly compromises as you try to figure out how best to balance everything going on and then on top of that like I said it's a stunning looking game really really sharp with a lot of variety a lot of different cards Jen and I both liked it a lot and here's hoping folks that at some point some um bigger worldwide publisher gets the memo and contacts Gro games because everybody if you like mallas or if you just like nice puzzly beautiful um Euros you'll want to check out my number 30 best game of 2023 a yeah I don't know how to say it anyway okay so that was number 30 um now I've got four that I talked about in the previous video so we're just going to skip over hey there was a how rulers of the Yucatan you can watch my previous video you'll hear me talk about it there's Forbidden Jungle there's printing press and there's House of cats uh that was number 29 28 27 and 26 now time for a new one number 25 on the list is Delta um from oh and this breaks my heart I didn't even think about this as I was putting it on the list but it's from game Brewer and sadly just a few weeks ago game Brewer closed down and went out of business so Delta um their best designed to date in my experience having played a bunch of their games uh is also one of their last ones very very sadly so if you see a chance to pick this game up folks grab it because it won't be around very long and it is absolutely phenomenal what is it about well you know I actually have done a full run through of this game maybe I shouldn't show images maybe I should just go to the videos and find my video of it there I am here I am let's see go on ahead and start up there there we go okay so uh this is a worker placement game although it's also a um deck builder of sorts because you have a deck of cards and on your turn you've got a handful you're going to pick one of the cards in your hand and play it to one of the different worker placement slots below the main board and where you place that card is a very very important decision because first of all each of these cards they're multiuse cards they do different things they have different strengths and weaknesses and depending on which section of the board you are going to place that card the card will literally do different things because they're multi-talented individuals that you're either deploying into your laboratory or into the field to do studies or whatever it might be um so the worker placement is very interesting because you're doing deck building getting more and more cards over the course of the game and trying to figure out how best to deploy them but where the game really comes alive is after a round is done and the cards have all been played and they've all been activated and you've resolved Things based on choices you've made um those cards are going to not just go into a discard pile but go into one of several discard piles and other cards that have been waiting in a queue to come back to you will come back at that point and so long-term hand management of multiple discard piles you can see them down there at the bottom of the screen is a huge part of this game that really elevates it to the next level um Delta is absolutely phenomenal Jen and I fell in love with it when we first played it in Prototype form which is why I'm showing you here and I couldn't I was pretty confident it would rate pretty highly for me but at the time I'd only played a prototype and I had not played the final version since Jen and I got back from Mexico I did get a chance to play the final version and um I I mean you know if if we no longer have game Brewer which again is heartbreaking because they've put out so many amazing games over the years but if this was the last one of the last things we got from them it's not the last there's a few more out there well they went out on an incredible high note because Delta is phenomenal it's the 25th best game of 2023 okay then we go on to number 24 another one that I had not um talked about in the original it is Zango the first Empire and now one thing I should say and I mentioned this in my previous 2023 video is when I'm making these best ofs I always leave expansions off the board and I always leave like 2.0 hey look we brought a game back from 10 years ago and made it really pretty isn't that awesome I always tend to leave those off because I'm always trying to try to show new stuff so you might be saying well why is Zango which is a remake a re-implementation uh Zango the first Empire is a remake of a of a previous game another one from a sadly now defunct out of business company what's your game why did I bring this one on the list because this is more than just a facelift um Zang First Empire and you can check out my run through there's a link for it down the show notes there's a link for everything down in the show notes uh let me go on ahead and find my video for it too although wait a minute before I do that I'll just go on ahead and if you want to read more about the stats and you know the uh the different mechanisms and whatnot or the description there it all is you can pause but now let me go find my video of it there we are um right oh shoot I have not done a full run through of it because of course I had already done done a run through of the original um Zango oh my goodness that's embarrassing wellway I'll just leave myself talking about it there um so Zango is a uh another um you know heavy heavy super crunchy Euro and the Crux of it is about building the Great Wall of China and every turn you're going to play a card that determines your initiative but the high low you know what there's a link for this video I'm over here talking about I I don't want to take all day on this I mean when I did this back in December this took me over an hour I'm going to be trying to get through this pretty quick this is sang glow the main I you know all the core gameplay is there but in-game scoring or objective scoring has radically changed radically um you know come up with a new system that is significantly better uh all about building the Terracotta Army plus there is a whole new um you know side mechanism about going on this Epic ship journey and recruiting new people in addition to the the regional Governors and the generals and whatnot now you also recruit Alchemists who help you with this journey so I mean I would say the game has changed a good 30% this is a much bigger um you know reinvention of the game than what you normally see U you know on these kinds of games and um that must be people making their own boy I wish I'd made a video of this now because all there is on board game week is pictures of people putting their dog pictures on it the game does not have dog cards although got to admit that would be pretty cool um all right uh anyway though um you know what's it uh um Zango was always a phenomenal game back when Jen and I played it gosh seven eight years ago back when we were still living in Malta it was a little bit too heavy for us and while the core mechanisms of the game are still here overall it plays so much more smoothly come on board game beak are you even gonna put this video up no you're just these are all terrible pictures where are the pictures that make the game look good no offense to whoever took those pictures where are the ones from the publisher why is this so difficult all right um wow there just aren't very many I guess that's why I only showed one picture when I did the video of it I'll just go back to that here's the picture of it in um situ as you are you know building up more strength there's kind of an engine building thing going on where you get better and better certain actions you want to keep doing them you've got area majority stuff you've got engine building stuff you've got initiative stuff and with the new changes to the game um which again I talked about in the video that you that you can follow the links down the show notes uh it is so great um it's the original one we did not keep it was a bit too crunchy Jen found it a bit too frustrating now it just plays like Silk it's so smooth and we really enjoy it a lot so much so that I think it was a big enough change it's a it's a different game um it is not just more of the same and it is phenomenal it is number 24 for us of the year zangu the first Empire then we've got 23 apiary I already talked about that in the earlier video but then we've got a new one 22 Comet uh and now this is a smaller game um from Peter Prince you know an old school uh board game designer you responsible for some real Classics like thieves and whatnot and he made a big comeback with comet in 2023 and sadly nobody seemed to notice even though Jen and I really dug this game in a big big way uh it is you know said in prehistoric times well before human Humanity was around and it imagines a situation where the asteroid is going to strike it's going to W you know do huge damage wipe out tons of species and what we're trying to do is get as many species as possible to Safety in the cave so they'll be able to survive the aftermath and we do this by playing um multi-use cards that say how far we can move and also what special actions we can do and once we've actually gotten a given animal species to safety we take the card for them and add that to our overall abilities uh that we can do so over the course of the game um things just start speeding up as we save more animals and um things just go faster and faster because we have more and more cool special powers um so uh that's all really nice the other thing that's really interesting about too is it's kind of a game of checkers because one of the big things you're trying to do is if you need to move into a space where another animal is that either you or somebody else is trying to direct to safety you get to Hopscotch over them and in fact if you can set things up so you have several enemies you can Hopscotch over a huge line of them so what you're always trying to do is set up a really great fast track for yourself but if you see some other player moving some of their animals into your neighborhood you've got to break that group up um so that hopefully you got some use out of it but your opponents won't it's really clever uh there's a lot of variety with all the cool different special powers and every time you play the animal cards are going to come out in an unpredictable way so you're never sure you know what powers you're going to be earning and it's just fast it's fun there are very few I mean this is effectively a race game we're trying to race all these animals to safety and there are very few race games that Jen and I tend to keep but it's the fact that once you rescue these animals that you um build up these powers and if you rescue more the powers start to compound and get more and more powerful and you can save more and more I you know it's that perfect um you know approach to game design where as the game goes on things speed up and Rush closer and closer to the big finale and um yeah I I I think it's it really should have gotten a lot more attention than it did I might be the only person who put it on a top games of the year list I'll have to go check the reviewer medalist and see if anybody else caught on to just how fantastic number 22 of the year was Comet then we'll go on to another new one 21 is mind space um from publisher all play I do not know the designer but I'm telling you right now folks this is a fantastic roll and right one of my favorite role and rights I have played in a long time um it's uh basically about bling uh polyomino out to represent filling our brain with different memories and emotions so that's a subject matter I already love yeah it's strictly speaking it's an abstract Tetris tile laying game where we're actually using different colored penss to you know uh you know color in the different shapes to fill in all the different regions of the brain and uh you're racing in different ways to score the different areas or get areas that have certain colors in them each of the different colors which again represents a different memory or emotion has different ways of scoring or different special powers it gives you or different ways of interacting with other sections so it's a really compelling game but um it's not the actual the writing that makes this so interesting like I said this is a it's not a roll and right it's a random and WR you know there's some random element that tells you what it is you can write the randomness is shown right here in this picture from the innocent and it does a pretty good job of giving you an idea basically you've got a row of different shapes right and and these are the different shapes that you might want to um color in to you know again do the tile laying stuff that we're trying to do this is a better picture actually from uh munium board game thank you um so uh you know you I I might want to make that tea because that's going to fit perfectly with the space I have or you know just a little smaller te from original Tetris size or the really long one or whatever basically you've got this row of all the different shapes you could put in at the beginning of a round you roll all the colored Dice and then um if in this particular picture if you rolled a one it would go here because this is in the one spot in this case you rolled a an orange and a green three so they both B they both went on this one and the five went here and the sixes went over there into the dump file basically um and so you're going to pick one of those dice so you are rolling the rolling is telling you which um which shape you can um drop into the brain and what color it's going to be and therefore what special power you're going to activate or what type of scoring methodology you're going to use and this is awesome now that's just awesome in and of itself you might say oh that's fine oh there's just these shapes and you roll and you do that but there's another cool thing about it as well after everybody's Chosen One the rightmost um shape that was your last chance to do it um it was in the number five slot it goes into the dump pile it's gone all the other ones in a conveyor belt kind of way Shuffle over to the right and then a new shape comes out and then you roll the dice and that creates this conveyor belt I I I'm the more I think about this the more I'm confident conveyor belts are my favorite board game mechanism period because they give you so much cool fun and tension as you are desperate to do a given thing but you're waiting for it to be in the right place at the right time but time is running out it's about to disappear should you use it with the wrong color or should you oh well I mean it's not the right shape in color but this other shape is okay for this color how am I going to do that it's absolutely brilliant it's so much fun it's very very fast very quick every time you set up and play to go back to the thir picture you're going to get a different collection of special powers that are going to affect this particular game and so every game's going to play very differently too uh I don't think it got a lot of attention and that's a real shame because like I said this is one of the best role and rights I have ever played and it was one of the best games of 2023 it's number 21 mindspace now let's go on to a few that we already talked about last time uh number 20 is Sky team number 19 is Humanity number 18 far away number 17 point City number 16 Raa or Raha another one that they won't bother explaining how to pronounce this one's getting expansion coming very soon folks I'm very excited about that um and then number 15 come on Board Game Geek Wild Child West again I talked about all those in the previous video now let's move on to another new one number 14 on the list Vienna from publisher Queen games and um this is the second time that I have broken my long um strongly uh stuck to rule of not revisiting 2.0's and putting them on these list because I want them to be about new stuff Vienna from designer Stephen Feld my favorite designer of all time is a remake of a game he put out many many years ago called lla and lla was always you know is never the biggest most popular of uh feld's designs it's actually one of his more lightweight Gateway ones it always had a soft spot in my heart and I've always enjoyed it well anyway um publisher Queen games has republished it given it a new setting now it's no longer on a little island where you are um studying wild um you know native species to the island and you know on a scientific thing now we're in um Cold War era Vienna and we're basically spies moving around trying to collect intelligence rather than study wild animals and um it's the same core gameplay of really brilliant multiuse I'm pretty sure I did a run through for this tonight there it is right there so let me go and put my video up of multiuse cards where uh every turn you are going to take your hand of cards you're going to take one card and um put them in each of three different slots so one card is going to tell you where oh I I every time I think I should have myself of what they do but each of the each of the C if I could just show a picture of a card why am I not showing a picture of a card show the cards why are you not showing the cards am there we go there's a picture of a card okay so um fine so one card is going to tell you uh it used to be I forget U it used to be research materials now it is bribery materials that you use to get into the local embassies and whatnot one is going to tell you a bribery material you're going to get one is going to increase the value of the different types of intelligence and one is going to going to give you a special power uh or in this CA you know this case a special scoring ability or whatever it might be so you have a a handful of cards and you're going to have to pick one to be hey what do I harvest what do I increase the value of and what special power am I going to do and you've got to figure out of these three cards although you can upgrade and have more cards to play how am I going to lay these out and every turn this is an incredibly agonizing decision I'm trying to figure out which ones go into Which slot and then once everybody chooses we ac them all we send our agents out into the field not to study the animals but instead to retrieve um you know you know secret intelligence and score points and it's brilliant and now here's the interesting thing about this um this game can be played with rules that are almost the exact same thing as the original Lisa and if that was all that was in the box I would not have included it it wouldn't have just been oh cool a new theme and all that I I'll put it back on the list but there is now an Advan adved mode of play and this advanced mode of play really really ratchets up the depth and complexity and takes this from being a little familyfriendly Gateway or maybe Gateway Plus game into something more in the realm of you know like uh Stephen feld's Merlin or something like that a much richer more complex game because now you've got um income uh that you're trying to maintain so you can invest into upgrades into your spy agency or pay the salaries of your spies um and and a bunch of other things not just a few little changes but significant changes that radically overhaul the game and um if you play with the advanced mode well first of all I could never go back to the family mode but I think people who think oh yeah I already played Lisa oh you they put in a couple little extra things no big deal I kind of know what to expect but like um what was it number 24 these changes so radically upgrade the game you just can't call it oh it's the same old thing the experience you get is now hugely different and hugely improved and you know stepen Feld is still my favorite designer and this has now knock um you know laa is now no longer on my list of greatest Feld games of all time but Vienna has taken its place and it's jumped up quite a bit into my top 10 favorite felds now which Lisa did not hold that state so it's such a huge jump it's absolutely fantastic and uh it's number 14 of the year Vienna okay now I got a couple more um things we talked about last time number 13 is nalia number 12 is Barcelona okay and my apologies to Barcelona I know you were in my top 10 before but you've gotten kicked out very unceremoniously um and so nalia was I think in my top 10 when I did this earlier so there went my um number uh you know 10 and nine but I've got a new one to talk about although it's at number 11 on the list it is arboria um from the same designer Danny Garcia as my new number 12 Barcelona Barcelona used to be in the top 10 now it's number 12 arboria comes in at number 11 and it just cements Danny Garcia as a design wunderkin superstar that everybody should be watching let me go find my video of it again it should be in here someplace there it is um and this is a worker placement game of sorts we are vying to become the New Forest spirit and um we are sending what are they sages or pilgrims or something I forget the exact term we're sending our little helpers out into the world to do different actions to harvest resources and fulfill objectives and all the kind of Euro stuff you want to do the interesting thing is when we put one of our little helpers out into the world they kind of go on this surfboard for lack of a better turn um and multiple play multiple workers my workers and your workers can go on all the different spots of these surfboards and um after everybody's done with their work rep placement for the round these little surfboards are going to slide along it's kind of like we're going for a ride like we're all sharing an Uber or a lift or something or a taxi and um as these things slide along our workers can jump off whenever we feel like and then activate a series a chain of actions depending on where they got off and the interesting thing is the more workers there are on on these vehicles that we ride on basically the faster they go if I'm just there by myself it might take several rounds before this slow moving thing will get into the position where I needed to go so I can jump off and then activate all the different things I want to activate but if you jump on hey maybe you're jumping on because you know I'm already there and that'll make both of us go faster this is a lot of fun it's um another Twist on time um manipulation games like going all the way back to zul in the mind calendar where time the passage of time is an incredibly important mechanism or you know component to the gameplay that you are trying to manipulate just like sheep and lumber and stone in a different game here the number one resource we concern ourselves with is time and the passage of time so we can make our workers more powerful and it's fantastic it's gorgeous bright and colorful and Jen and I really liked it a lot it didn't quite make the top 10 of the year but it's still absolutely fantastic um number 11 arboria now folks we're getting into the 10 best the top 10 games of the year uh starting with number 10 hey it's rebuilding Seattle this was already on the list before so I've already talked about it uh number nine it was also on the list our chaos Society more people should be talking about this game it's fantastic these are all fantastic this is the 10 best of the Year we're talking about now um number eight is evacuation from Vladimir sui number number seven is the White Castle this made a lot of people's uh list for a lot of people was the game of the year I thought it was fantastic too but it only came in at number six or I'm sorry number seven now in number six we've got a new one that I did not talk about last time it is Globe trotting and um man uh this is another Rolland right uh so 2023 was a good year for roll and Wright fans but what's interesting about this is um we are trying to plan our travel let me uh first all let me give you all the info about it you can pause and read that if you want but then we're going to go to the video and there's my video of it we're not drawing on whiteboards or pieces of paper or anything we're drawing on actual Globes trying to um you know plot out three different trips around the world that we're trying to plan one for summer one for Autumn one for um was it winter or spring no one for spring and um we're doing this every round oh man you know what hold on a second I'm gonna the cool factor of this game is off the chart I just need to show you hold on all right here it is um it actually comes in oops this cool little it's like a it's like a suitcase right with all the stickers from you've been to it's got a little carrying case and all that so everything about this game uh fun factor is fantastic but let me if you open it up what do you get you got the rules you got I'm not I didn't actually intend to do an unboxing when I started out today but I'm getting kind of carried away so you take the little um frame that one of these Globes sits in right everybody gets their own Globe just get the rest of the frames out of the way oh we got to put this thing on here so game does have a little bit some assembly required to get it going but it's not too bad right so I've got this um holder for my globe and now to make all these player Globes fit they all get taken apart and I I just figured I'd mention this because I've seen some people complain that these Globes are impossible to put together and it's incredibly frustrating they think oh I can never use the cool box because once I put them together I never want to take them apart because it's hard to put together I don't get that myself to me they go together really easy you just got to get them all lined up on both sides and you have to kind of just reach all the way around to make sure the one you know fits into the other because there's like a male and a female half and boom they just snap together just so incredibly easy and then B I've got this cool thing where oh um we're going to start our trip in Chicago where's a pen and um what you're doing every round is you are drafting a new location saying that you know say that you know this is where um you know our our our our vacation starts and I've chosen oh the next space will be in um you know because I drafted it it'll be oh way far away over here in Bora Bora right so now what I take I've got the this first to second I've got to it's hard for me to do it but I can't see but but let's see if I can you right so if I put them both here like this so that they're lined up on this um Globe standy right I'm try to rotate around so you can see it I can't see what I'm doing now but basically you just draw like this and you have just um shown the first leg of your trip and you just keep doing this trying to plot three different trips throughout the northern and southern hemisphere all over the world trying to complete a bunch of different objectives um that are going to be set up every single time and it's wonderful Jen and I both love this to Pieces we have played it with other people anytime anybody sees this the toy factor is just off the chart and don't believe people when they say these are incredibly hard to put together I I I don't know maybe I'm lucky to be fair I have really big hands but I found all you got to do is just kind of get them lined up based on the thing on the top and then you just got to make sure that um they you know the one um the the the one hemisphere tucks into the other and then boom it just snaps into place easy peasy these things take less than 10 seconds to put together the frame takes longer so I'm just throwing that out there as a public service message because some channels have said these are impossible to put together but no they're not they're incredibly easy um if I'm ever in your neck of the woods and you have a copy of this invite me to your home and I'll show you how easy they are put together but all of that aside what really makes this stand out honestly is not how cool this is what's really really interesting is this is a very simple light family-friendly Gateway roll and right which it should be because of the fun factor and you know the really um universally appealing theme but what happens is every time you set up to play you can have the game just suggests have only have a few objectives right but the rules also say have as many objectives as you want and if you really want to have one of the crunchiest heaviest most challenging role and rights you've ever played turn on like five or six objectives that you're trying to do with every single draft of every single place you're going to go um around the world trying to basically fulfill all of these different objectives at the same time knowing okay these two don't work well but this one does work and so trying to balance all that really elevates the crunch factor of the game quite a bit and that's when it really comes alive and that's what puts it at number six of the best games of 2023 Globe trotting um okay and now I this out way bye-bye going to clean you up later um where was I that was number six oh number five already talked about it earlier cigar Artisans number four even fall number three we have another new one oh man folks life of Amazonia is phenomenal it is the greatest bag building game of all time um and that's saying something there's a lot of really popular ones I'm including oron when I talk about this there's all the details um I didn't do a video of it but Shay did for the channel so let me go on ahead and see if I can find his video but you know what the problem with his video is he had a prototype and the the game did actually change quite a bit so let me just go on ahead and um let's see are these all pictures of the Prototype too well here's the back of the box that's always a good thing to show um the uh the toy factor of this game is fantastic one not not for nothing you've got these really really cool progress tracks you're working on um as you're trying to develop your own stretch of the Amazon rainforest to be the ideal habitat for all kinds of Flora and FAA to score lots of points and it's on three different levels with these waterfalls didn't have to be that's just a really cool touch also whenever you've spent the chips that you pull out of the bag like or Leon they go into a discard boat which again is just fun and when it's uh when the bag is empty you just pour them out of the boat back into the bag really nice um stuff but then the pieces look at those um uh leopards and those Maca and those orangutangs I forget what all the different animals are but they're really fun looking and the little quas i3d trees although there was a deluxe edition of the game too where you don't have to do the cardboard cutout trees but actual proper tree meeples and whatnot um so the game has incredible production value one of the best produced games of the Year by far hands down but none of that is what makes it cool or makes it special what really makes it stand out is um basically you've got to forget I think three different types of resources money and water and um I beway different things that allow you to do different stuff you've got a big mix of them at the beginning of the game and you reach in you pull out stuff whatever you pull out that kind of becomes a puzzle of right how best to use this combination of resources this isn't like you know most pool building games where oh yeah uh you you you you you get some stuff they let you do some things sure but then oh you buy something and it's the stuff you buy that determines what you could do here the actual stuff you have the combination of water versus food versus whatever I might have gotten versus money uh determines how I can actually spend those resources in concert although if I want to in any given time I can combine any two resources to become a third one it's wasteful but you will find yourself doing it a lot in this game because it really rewards clever uses of stuff but as you lay out more and more tiles and make a bigger bigger habitat with more trees and more animals and more um you know uh uh you know flora and fauna the game gets bigger and more complex and more compelling but the real Secret Sauce of this game let me see if they show it in any pictures uh they're not really showing it very well they're mostly just showing off how cool the game is I mean look how cool it is uh you know this yeah here's the deluxe stuff with the uh cool little um water lily things and the tree meeples that have stencl on stuff not stickers but just pre-made stuff but are you ever going to show anywhere in any picture nope because nobody cares about the cards even though the cards are everything all right I will go to Shay's video then uh to visually show uh video where are you shay there you are lado logo right there try to make it about the game not about me um anyway though so here's Shay uh playing solo every time you set up there's always going to be the same set of creatures that you're trying to make the ideal habitat for but they're always going to be set up with a different group of ways to score in this regard this is very very um familiar I mean it's impossible not to draw comparisons between this and Cascadia which of course won the Spiel TOS a few years ago and deservedly so for me this game obliterates Cascadia because it takes all the great things about Cascadia and then ratches it up to like an 11 in terms of depth and complexity with the bag building as opposed to the simple tile drafting that you do in the original game instead of just four is it four animals or is it five animals I think it's five animals in Cascadia here you've got um um what is it eight animals plus as part of setup each player gets their own special unique animal so you've got nine different animals that you're trying to make work together with other ones so that they can score well and have ideal circumstances I just love the big deep gameplay here um the really satisfying and compelling tiling and then putting stuff on top of those tiles depending on how we've expanded and I won't deny that it's also absolutely gorgeous with an amaz amazing production value this game is in my I think it's in my top 30 games of all time now if I recall correctly I could be right I'd have to go back and look but it's absolutely fantastic I came to it way late way late but I'm really glad I did because it's the third best game of 2023 okay then uh the number two best game was my previous number one of the year Earth and no surpr there it's everybody's I mean heck it just won the dice tower award um last week for game of the year it won the golden geek award for game of the year so many people put it as their best game of the year and I originally did too and I talked about why if you go check out the original um video uh you know where I where I did the countdown but uh there's a new one it has been supplanted by a game that is just sitting outside my top 10 I think it's my number 11th highest ranked game in the world world the best game of 2023 is Daybreak um from Matt Leo and Matteo manip um this just won the uh kennerspiel if I recall correctly and deservedly so um because it's absolutely phenomenal this is a game about um you know players working together cooperatively to overcome the challenges inherent uh that our species and our world faces because of climate change but um it is nothing but wall to--all optimism and an Ode to the power and resiliency of Science and cooperation and I love it for that I love the story this game tells not only in terms of his gameplay but also in terms of one of the coolest things and mark my words this could potentially be a big thing you see moving forward in games every card in this game has a QR code so while you're playing you can scan the cards and the main reason to do it is to learn more about let's see I should bring my video up shouldn't I yes I should uh here we go nope that's not me that's somebody else because there's no rotto logo there is there no there's not um there we go there's the r runs today on Boop here we go um so every one of the cards you've got represents a different real world project that um communities societies can take on whether they're Technology based or government based or culturally based these are all things that can help um you know address the problems we all face uh together as a species and um what you're trying to do is you're trying to play them into one of five columns and um you either play them uh to the top of a stack of cards in a column so that becomes the new project that that card can do or instead you tuck it under existing columns so that they will instead supplement other projects that are in the Forefront and so in that way you start building engines and then also every round you can also discard these cards instead of using them to build up your engine you can discard them uh to represent the resources you need to run your engine um like I just I tucked one under to make that other thing better or maybe I'm going to you know replace things and this constantly amorph sizing changing engine that you're building up but then converting into other engines because different problems come up it's Absolut the game playay is Rock Solid but I didn't mention um like right there in the bottom right corner of that card you can see there's a little QR code if you'd like you can scan that and read up tell me about Net Zero buildings and it'll go go to a web page devoted to this card it'll tell you what are Net Zero buildings how can they happen how can you Lobby your politicians to actually um push this agenda what types of breakthroughs are being made what can you do in your own local community to make them more of a reality this game like I said inspires us to do more in the real world but that's not all the reason I think this Innovative Innovative is because you can also scan those QR codes if I don't understand how this power works and in instead of digging it up and trying to figure out oh where is it in the rule book you can scan the QR code go to the page and it'll tell you everything you need to know about these cards from a gameplay point of view as well and that is a fantastic brilliant and Incredibly Innovative way to make games more approachable instead of just having to work your way through a Byzantine rule book with a lot of different pages and appendices and still can't find and having to go on Board Game Geek and ask questions and people aren't sure no that you can just scan and the Beautiful Thing is because this is taking you to a web page uh if it turns out that the developers realize oh you know we need to explain this better because we haven't um explained this to people how it works um we can update the web pages so the game can become better and better over time at um helping us play the game this is a really big deal um now none of this is what may I mean what puts this at the number one and my number 11 highest ranked game of all time is the game play combined with the incredible optimistic and aspirational story it tells but I got a shout from the rooftops how phenomenal this is as a technological breakthrough for Games 2 and I hope to see more Publishers take this idea on we are used to thinking oh uh our phone all we can do with it is look at a PDF that that is just a recreation of a um you know of a hard copy rule book that is not using our phones to the best uh ability that we can phones can take us to web pages which have hyperlinks which have have cont contextual popouts all that kind of stuff this is what I want to see I want to see board games easier for everybody to use everybody has a phone in their pocket if I have a question about the game I just want to scan the game and say what is this and then my phone tells me instead of me having to put the game on hold for 10 minutes while I try to find it in some dark corner of a rule book that's amazing and so I have to do my cap for that too but again that's not what it's it's the game playay and um and the theme that makes this so great that makes it the best game of the year by far and one of the greatest board games of all time as far as I'm concerned Matt leok Matteo manip publisher CMYK you're all amazing and uh I love it I love Daybreak and um phew I think I think that's it folks although wait I do have one more thing I'm going to give you a bonus because you stuck all the way here to the end uh I've got three more games to talk about folks because just like I talked about you know when I did this back at Christmas and I had not played all the games there are still about 50 or so games from 2023 that I would really like to play I really wish I could um but you know I I just couldn't keep pushing this off I had to do it now I have spent a lot of time researching all of those games and looking at Rule books and watching other people's videos so most of them I just want to play CU they look like fun that I know they're not going to push into my top 30 but there's three that I don't even think might that I think will that would actually um punch their way into the top 30 that I just did so I can't say for sure because I haven't played them but I'm just going to give them a quick shout out and and shake my fist at the publisher for all of these I've been trying to get review copies for months so that I could cover them so they can maybe make it onto the list they didn't but I'll just mention them right now because I'm just trying to let you know what's the best of 2023 which by the way not for nothing is now the best year in board game history for my tastes if you go to top.

r.com I've got all the best games of every single year sorted by year and at the bottom of that page there is a ranking of every year 2019 used to be the greatest year in board game history now it's 2023 and some of those games I just talked about are why but there are three more that I wish I could have played for you I wish I could have shown you what are they they are Tesseract oops shoot got to bring the back up Tesseract uh which looks like an amazing uh Cooperative kind of abstrac sort of game to be fair where we are trying to dismantle this big stack of colorful dice it seems so cool it looks like so much fun I've watched several videos of it and I am so jealous that I never got a chance to play it I I'm very confident it would have made into the top three I would say the same thing for Nova Roma the latest design from Stan cardonsky I have to admit I kind of ignored this one because 25th Century games one of the Publishers they're usually really good about sending me review copies of stuff and they never sent me one of these so I just kind of assumed oh this is Stan doing a game like ruic a game with a lot of warfare it kind of looked like it from the outset and I figured ah they probably figured I won't like it but then just recently I did a video um for Stan's latest game Minos look for this folks my video will be going up very soon it's amazing uh probably going to be my top 10 of the year and I mentioned in my final thoughts that hey I've played eight of of the 10 games that Stan has uh done so far and the only ones I haven't played are roric because I don't want to play it and Nova Roman I figured ah it's probably more like Ruck and a few people pointed out to me no it's not R you would love this game why have you not played it and then I went and I looked into it and I'm asking 25th Century games or for that matter half a kingom games why have I not played this Stan talk to them I want to cover this game for you it looks phenomenal this looks like designer Stan cardon's trun you know one of Stephan feld's greatest designs of all time so maybe this is his greatest I don't know I suspect it's going to be phenomenal I love the action selection mechanism it uses uh and I love the like six different mini games all going on simultaneously I love that kind of stuff plus art from the mo I got to give this game a go but I did not get a chance to so I'm just mentioning in passing and then the other honorable mention goes to ancient knowledge man I have talked about this one several times uh the publisher yellow said they were going to send me a copy and then they never did and I've just been sitting here waiting maybe I mean I know an expansion is coming so I figured I'll just wait for the expansion now but this looks like a fast playing little card um driven engine building civilization game that just seems phenomenal this made a lot of people's top 10 with good reason it seems so sharp and I am so sad I did not get a chance so I could play it for you so I could tell you folks definitively where it shows up in my um top 30 of the year I suspect it would but I can neither confirm nor deny so I'll just mention it in passing uh ancient knowledge and uh that's it folks I am dunsville I got to take these things apart see they just cut they're so easy to come together cut apart but anyway and uh get back to work and that's it I have made good on my promise that's those are the best of the best from the greatest year of all of board gaming but if you're not done you'd like to see a little bit more boom there it is right there folks you know what to do click that big thing and you can watch me talk about 30 more uh in my original in case you hadn't seen it or if you want to hear from the rest of the gang on the channel there's also the link to the RNR best of the Year video that we did too which is one of my favorite videos we have ever done for the channel so click away folks CU we are dunsville bye-bye