Top 10 Board Games of 2022

0:00 foreign how's it going everyone I am Dylan this is all you can board and it's finally time for me to take a look at my top 10 games of 2022 it took a little bit longer to do this video than I did last year for 2021 and that's just because there was a bunch of games that I was pretty sure were going to land on this list or even potentially in the top five uh that I wanted to play before I did this list obviously this is one of those lists where you kind of just have to like cut it off at some point because there's no way to play every single game from 2022 but I just there was a few that I needed to play before I felt good about doing this list so I will preface this by saying that even though I'm pretty confident that I've played all the games that had a chance of at least cracking the top five there's probably a game or two out there that if I played it from 2022 could maybe slot in in like the 6 to 10 range or you know like barely made the cut if I played it enough times obviously these lists are a little bit fluid that way and we can always do like check-ins later on and see how things have evolved but as of right now I feel pretty confident about this and there were for a while I thought it was good there was going to be lots of room for surprises to kind of end up in in the you know the top five and I still think there will be a couple but um there was also I realized as I got closer there were a lot of games uh to that could have even been number one I think I I waffled between a few and I waffled between a bunch of ones that were gonna end up in the top five and barely miss it as well so uh yeah there was a there was a lot of a lot of competition here so as always we're gonna go through this from ten to one before I jump in I'm gonna give a couple uh little honorable mentions that uh

1:30 that didn't make the list uh this might be I guess a little bit of a spoiler because this means you're not going to see them later on the list so if you really want to go in completely blind just skip the section uh but I just didn't want to do this at the end so the the couple that I want to mention that it barely didn't make the list first one is uh hot lead which is a really small uh little little box game that I'm not going to get into all the the the ins and outs of how it plays and why I think it's great but it is it was at one of the bigger surprises from 2022 it barely missed a crack in this list which says a lot so that's hot lead uh also Guild of merchant Explorer explorers awesome game I only played it once if I play it more and it continues to land the way I did the first time I could see it kind of just cracking the top 10 but again I think it would be in like 10 or 9 spot I don't know that it would go much higher we also have Terra Nova again this is another one where I've never played Terra mystica and I've only played Terra Nova once so I feel like it's just my lack of uh you know having played in that playground to be able to rank this higher but again I don't know that this wouldn't get um to the top five but this is one that I played enough and to continue to to you know land for me and it wasn't then overshadowed at some point by Terra mystica maybe it slots in it like you know it's somewhere between 10 and 6 but uh as of right now just missing as well so those are the ones I wanted to uh just kind of touch on as honorable mentions no more no more waiting no more song Let's jump right into number 10. number 10 is a game I actually don't have here Carlo owns this game and that is heat pedal to the metal so this there's been a lot of talk about this game um honestly the reason it potentially only comes in at 10 uh is just because

3:02 of limited placement at one time but I also don't know that it will get that much higher If It Moves like it's one of those things that maybe it could slot in at nine maybe at eight but I don't know they would move much higher I'm already not like racing games I think have the potential to be great and I'm always open to being surprised and playing more and and you know falling in love with them but it's never going to be a genre that I gravitate towards or that I necessarily you know go out and seek out or that is going to be something that shoots it up my list because it's a genre I resonate with that being said he'd surprise me for the fact that you know even though it's a straight up race game the way that you're managing your your hand of cards and having to decide what you want to use and when for you know when your car is coming around to getting close to a turn and you look at what your what the the threshold is that you have to be beneath on that turn with the cards you're playing to be able to clear the turn successfully having to plan ahead for turns that are coming up and uh you know if you get an ideal card in your hand if you know is going to help you on a really tricky turn sometimes having to keep that card in your hand for multiple turns and just kind of leave it there until you get there or do you use it and hope you get something back that will help you there's there's often I I'm not going to obviously get into all the rules and everything about heat that there's there's uh you know how to plays I think Rodney even didn't know how to play that you could check out if you want to learn all the rules but I will just say that it is uh for for a game that is basically a a basically a race game like that's all you're doing is you're racing around the board whoever completes x amount of lapse first wins uh there's a lot of nuance and a lot of strategy in having to decide when to use your cards

4:32 and uh you know how you're clearing out the I forget the names of everything in this game but they uh the heat the extra heat or whatever it is when your engine's heating up having to clear those out of your deck or or taken more into your into your deck if you think you can handle it there's just a lot of cool strategizing and uh and I had a lot of fun the first time I played it so it does barely crack in here at number 10. you should check it out if you're if you're interested in race games especially and you're looking for something a little bit new it is a pretty cool one number nine a game that uh you're gonna see the box I'm gonna put on screen here you're gonna be like oh my God there's a gigantic hole in your box and you'd be right there's a gigantic hole in my box but that's okay don't worry every all the components are fine uh this is a game that I uh was actually I was either number one or number two I think on Carlos most anticipated games of 2022 um and it was up there for me as well and I can't remember what either of our numbers are I always forget to look these things up before I start filming uh but that is a game called dice Realms uh so again ignore the big hole everything's fine um dice Realms is a really interesting case this is a really tough one to rank really tough I've now played this I think like five or six times it might even be more at this point because I've played multiple times in in one sitting as well but essentially what this is is you have dice that all have customizable die faces that are plastic and they kind of pop off and you are sticking them on you get you start with these two dice that have these really generic basic die faces every game you're gonna have certain um new die faces in the game if you've played Dominion this is basically

6:03 Dominion with dice in a lot of ways not entirely but in a lot of ways so in the in Dominion you could have different cards featured in that game that you were going to buy from the market so every game felt a little bit different based on what's in the market and you're having to adapt saying okay is this going to be a game that's focused more on this or this depending on what's available dice Realms is very very similar and identical to that to that uh you know philosophy in that you are going to pull car out of these kind of like you know cards out of this uh out of this bag to determine which die faces are present in that game aside from the basic ones that are always present and that's going to kind of dictate how you strategize that game what is gr is grain going to be something you have to really watch for because it's going to be you know really valuable in this game or is great not gonna be valuable at all based on the die faces that are available um you know is the winter die going to be extra horrible because you pulled something out of the bag that changes the faces of the winter dye and the winter die should specify something that is rolled for both players and it can be good or bad things usually bad things that happen every round so your game is very is modified a lot by just that setup and knowing what's in the game and at that point turns fly by I mean like they're they're almost entirely simult uh simultaneous you're essentially just rolling your two dice or more if you acquired more dice every round and you're just getting what is on the die phase it could be upgrades to be able to upgrade those die faces it could be grain that you're gonna be using for a few different reasons it could be straight points uh you know it could be gold that you're going to be using to buy different things or buy re-rolls and buy or buy more dice so depending what your strategy is you can't go for everything effectively so you kind of

7:34 have to pick certain lanes and diversify when it makes sense and while playing to the strategy of whatever die faces have been presented that game so the reason I say this is really difficult for me it was difficult to ring and I think it's going to be a game that kind of fluctuates as I go forward here is I've had really good games of dice Realms and I've actually had really bad games of dice Realms this is one of those games where sometimes with the die faces that uh your air in that game you just you just have a really poor setup and you have a poor game and that can be mitigated just by being aware of what makes a game good or bad but that takes multiple plays because then at that point you could say okay I know these go bad together I'm going to flip these out or you have your preferred setups you see let's just use these die faces but that takes multiple plays to get there so for someone who's just getting to dice ROMs you're not going to have that Knowledge from the get-go you're kind of at the mercy of either using the setup examples and suggestions that are in the book or randomizing it which is it seems to be that's like you know in some ways what is expected uh for you to do because it's in the setup it has a bag that you can pull tiles from I think the game wants you to get to that point but you have to be able to identify when you just pulled a bad matchup that's not going to be fun and in my case I still am not there even after multiple multiple plays and so sometimes the setups I just find less interesting whether that's because it's there's no attack uh faces that have come up so there's no not enough player interaction or too much player interaction or too much focus on something like grain Which is less interesting than you know some of the other die faces they could become available I would just say that your the variability here can mean that if you only play this a couple times for

9:04 instance there's a chance that you could have two subpar plays and leave thinking yeah dice ROMs is kind of a lackluster game but then I've had other games of dice Realms that I'm like that was a game that played in 30 to 45 minutes it felt great even though whether I won or a lost it felt like I was in and I had a strategy and it was you know it was flowing well there's just there we'll have a lot more disabled bass ROMs this will likely be covered in a whether it's a full Standalone review or on an auto plant skip or somewhere where we can get into a lot of these thoughts because I have way more I want to talk about right now but it would take up the whole video uh but needless to say is just there's a lot of layers to nice Realms and I'm happy that it slots in on this top ten it's just one of those ones out of any other game on this list might fluctuate the most uh out of anything it could drop off it could go up and all of a sudden be number six number five um and and I don't have I don't know how many plays it's gonna take for me to kind of know for sure or if it's ever going to stop moving around I think that in many ways dice drums is just going to kind of be that kind of experience but I and and I would say if you if you're interested or if any of this sounds uh you know appealing to you to go check it out it is unfortunately a really expensive game it's not something you can just say yeah it's 30 bucks I'll just go I'll just go buy and check it out I think it's like a hundred dollars so I think you kind of have to know if it's something you want to get or not or be able to like get your hand in a copy to play or know someone to be able to play it but if you can try dice drums give it a shot but hopefully give it multiple shots because otherwise it might just not land for you on that first one or two plays depending on what your setup is that's dice Realms number nine all right coming in at number eight is a Reiner kinesia game uh surprise surprise uh and it is a little one

10:35 called longboard uh I recently covered this in an OnePlus skip it and it does slot in my number eight game of 2022. uh this was another I don't want to say big surprise because I've never I would never be surprised that I can eat the game resonates with me but because of the theme and because it didn't get like a whole lot of Buzz or wasn't talked about like other you know large Canadian games could be or even a game like Siege of roondar from kaniza that isn't on my list but got more buzzed than longboard did I didn't know that it was gonna it was gonna land this way from here I was gonna feel this strongly about it but I think we're a longboard shines is it's a really quick playing game that has a lot of variability not only on on which cards uh are coming up obviously from the deck but also on the player count that really affects the experience you have as well as the goals that your are the achievements that you're trying to get the end game point scoring goals uh which obviously shake it up every single time so all that variability means that you're gonna get a lot of mileage out of longboard before you feel like you know you're tiring of it or anything like that and it just has that that kinesia type design that you know it's it's not super comparable to Lost Cities but in some ways it is that I use that comparison because Lost Cities feels tight in terms of like you there's so many things you want to do in your turn sometimes or don't want to do on your turn sometimes but you have to do something and trying to figure out along where what you're going to do and how you're going to strategize to get with the the you know the surfboard cards you want at the right time to be able to add them to your uh to your the long boards that you're building but not keep them in your supply too long unless a player

12:05 then is going to come in and steal it from you and add it to their supply instead so that whole stealing uh surfboard cards from other players on the board is what makes longboard great and the surprising thing to me almost out of anything is that it worked that well with it too because I figured at two you know having only one person to steal from would be far less interesting than having two people or three people to steal from it and while that still might be true it doesn't detract from the experience all that much I actually really really like longboard it too and I still think it's this interesting design of how I only having to manage one other person and what you're going to steal from them what they're gonna steal from you but then still having to think okay how long am I willing to risk leaving a card out here that they might steal before I play it on my area but if I play it now in my area I might be playing a number five on top of a number two and then all of a sudden the three and the four are going to come up and I can't play them anymore because I it has to be an ascending order and I block myself so knowing when to pull the trigger on certain things and when to you know let it lie and hope you're okay is very lost cities ask with the way that you have to kind of like manage when you're adding ascending numbers in that game as well so that's where the similarity is but yeah longboard is a great game I really really like it I should definitely check it out if you if you haven't or if you like other kinesia designs if you like Lost Cities if you like these like simple playing card games that have a lot of variability longboard is a really really good one it's my number eight from 2022.

13:23 okay number seven another game that I have talked about uh a few times at least and it is a really really good one one that probably could climb from this spot and I would not be surprised and that is Evergreen so Evergreen I'm not gonna spend tons of time talking about because I have talked about I have covered it in an owner played Skip but you can uh click that either if I remember to put it above or you could just search on our Channel and you'll you'll find it there uh Evergreen is sort of a spiritual successor to photosynthesis which is game I really really love and what's funny is recently I played photosynthesis again just on board game reading it had been a while since I played it and I remember thinking I think when I covered this and when I've been talking about on the Channel that I was saying things like I think I will like Evergreen more but I will also like have room for both my collection because they play very differently they focus on not very differently but differently enough and they focus on different things with photosynthesis all being on a shared board never each being on individual boards and how they manage player interaction and after playing photosynthesis again I am am almost certain I like Evergreen more than photosynthesis now I still like photosynthesis a lot but Evergreen just feels better when I when I play it and um and and that's for a lot of reasons I won't get into all them here but in general it's because I like the player attraction everyone does with the cards I find that that's more interesting than having the shared board in photosynthesis it's different but having my own player board that no one else is is you know affecting I get to craft it the way I want feel satisfying without having to worry too much about what's

14:54 coming in but what I'm adding to it which Powers I'm upgrading in Evergreen is all still uh you know centered around the fact that there is these cards that are is this player interaction element of who's going to pick what cards and which cards going to be left that gets added to the main area then dictates what every single area of our player board is worth the main player board is divided into like six different biomes or five different biomes and those biomes are just going to score a certain amount of uh points for the largest trees I believe based on this like Market or whatever you want to call it that is being affected by the players in the game and that is whichever card does not get drafted gets added to that that area I'm trying to forget in the name of um and the amount of icons that are on each of the biomes in that area dictates what everyone's gonna score for in that bio so if I know that like Carlo is playing really hard into the ice biome I can add cards that are going to lower the power of the ice area or not add cards at all to make sure that he scores less points than me in whatever by other biome that I'm going for which kind of has a biblios feel to it if you play biblios you'll kind of know that that's what you're doing with the dice and affecting them this one you're not so much decreasing the value as much as you're increasing but there are ways to decrease it as well but I just find that way more interesting than having that shared board in photosynthesis on top of the fact that the production value is amazing and Evergreen It Feels So satisfying to to play with all the pieces the bonus piece you get with the bushes and the rivers are really interesting and knowing how hard to go into those and where to place them is really important uh managing the sun in just the four positions instead of

16:26 instead of multiple um other like the sun rotates multiple times the photosynthesis in Evergreen you just have four rounds it's going to be in each spot one so you kind of have to plan way more conclusively on how you're gonna really take advantage of where the sun is it's just the whole combination of everything Evergreen is just a really really solid game this is easily one like I said that could climb on this list there there's I don't know it would never I don't think ever be number one on on this list but there's a lot of games that I could see it going ahead of just by having me having more plays but I'm really really impressed with it I love Evergreen definitely one of my favorites of 2022 and that's why it's number seven all right number six uh another game you've heard me talk about a lot of I've definitely featured it on my uh top 50 games of all time it was on there as a debut uh that is a two-player game called Caesar sees Rome in 20 minutes I'm not gonna yell it out this time because they do that all the time and I think that joke's run thin and I don't want to hurt my throat um so Caesar sees Roman 20 minutes uh is a really quick 20 minute plane uh two-player game that has you placing little tokens on the shared board that are on the borders of different provinces or territories or whatever they're called um every single territory will have a certain number of spots around it to place these tokens and you have to place on the border of territory so one side of your token is going to face one territory and one's going to space the other and each token has two sides to it with a different number on each side you're basically designating a power to either territory so you might have a token that says it's a one and a five for instance I don't even know if that's

17:56 a token in the game I can't remember but if I position it so that this territory gets a one and that territory gets a five I'm putting way more strength in one territory than I am in the other and when you combine all the borders of the territory once all tokens are placed Whoever has the most power in that territory is going to win that territory be able to place one of their player tokens into it and you're basically trying to get rid of all your player tokens first to win the game so you want to win territories to do that but if you win adjacent territories you get to place extra tokens out so it becomes this race of who can place all their tokens first and you're really finding ways to kind of double up on placing tokens there's also bonus powers that lets you place additional tokens as well or do some other cool things so it's really simple it's really quick plane but the strategy like it's I we've said it before but every time we play we wanted to end up doing a best of three because of how quick it plays and because it just feels very satisfying to to have that much strategy packed into a little game and just be able to say okay best of three best of five best of seven whatever and not feel like it's taking a whole bunch of time but you're having fun the entire time and there's different powers in different places there's an expansion in the box that adds additional Powers you can use as well so there's just so much to love about Caesar this is one of those two player games that's going to stay in my collection for if not forever for a very long time until something replaces it because I can always guarantee that this will be one I will be happy to play and know I can kind of fit in in almost any situation because of how quick it plays as long as I'm only playing with two so it makes me want to play Blitzkrieg even more uh and and there I believe there's a third one that as soon as I was talking about this someone in our

19:26 Discord sent me a link to the third one that's coming out which now I'm completely forgetting the the name of hustling two of the air I think or something like that anyways uh I do want to continue to play games not only by Paulo Mori but also just uh in this line because of how satisfying this game was so if you're into two player games if you can get over if you're not into the war theme neither am I like that's the thing that I had to overcome that's why it took me I never did play Blitzkrieg and it took me a bit to sort of you know just go in on Caesars because the theme isn't something that necessarily speaks to me but I think beyond that it's just a great game and I can kind of look past the theme so the only downside I will say to this game is I think the solo mode Is Not Great uh but it's honestly not a game I I don't pick this up to play the solo mode and so I'm just putting it out there in case you see the solo mode and you're like oh I'll get it because I like solo games there's better solar games there's not many better two-player games maybe I'll award it that way but yeah great two player game my number six of 2022. all right my number five of 2022 the first one in the top five uh I'm not gonna put on the table because it is a gigantic box and I honestly didn't want to pick it up I can just put the the image here for you uh not that I didn't want to pick it up but I I have to like put games on the table to be able to be in reach without being on camera and I just it's a whole thing uh my number five game of 2022 is oh sworn into the deep wood now if you've watched some of our anticipated games of videos of the past or just games where I've been talking about or videos where I've been talking about games I'm excited about you've heard me talk about this before this is a lot large campaign game sort of in the vein of like a gloomhaven but with a much stronger

20:58 focus on just boss battles like big memorable encounters with a single boss or with the boss and then their minions or whatever the case may be with us still having a town element that just plays out very differently so I was really excited about this game I'm a big campaign game fan as it is so this was on my radar I backed it on Kickstarter way back it finally came in I have only played a couple sessions of this but this is one of those games that if I wait to play even half the campaign to give you my thoughts or to rank it it won't even happen this year probably because we have I've limited time I have multiple games that I'm doing regular sessions of uh it's just gonna take me some time so I'm ranking it based on what I've played now I feel pretty confident about where I'm placing it um I could I could see this dropping or even jumping depending on what I encounter later on in the campaign and this is one of those things where for a few games on this list you're gonna see us cover them or see me cover them again later on in the year whether in full reviews or unable to skip its or other types of feature videos where I can get into more of my thoughts and I can then tell you how they've evolved since this video but oh sworn is here because it does what it sets out to do very very well I wasn't sure getting into host foreign whether it was gonna you know live up to some of the expectations I think it really did um you get this town phase or city phase at the start of the game that is carried out as sort of like um almost one of the like almost one of those point-and-click adventure games from the computer but done in board game form which I find is really interesting so you have this smaller board the top of your main board that is or sort of a timer and every time you you go and explore a place in the city you're gonna

22:29 place a token from your map onto this timer and that's sort of like the time elapsing the day you have a limited amount of time to explore different locations and you're exploring locations based on what's happening in the story so if the story says you know there's been this murder and you don't know who caused it or people are having this dream and you don't know what the cause of the dreams are you will take hints and clues someone might say you know they reported seeing someone wearing all black or something like that and you go and explore uh the Town Square and you and you read the in the journal and it says uh someone in the Town Square mentions having seen someone wearing black in the alley then you go to the alley like it's not that straightforward it's not always just like you're full in this the step I'm just using this as an example but you're having to take different Clues sometimes multiple Clues a deal with red herrings to be able to as efficiently as possible find you know the solve the mystery figure out what you want to figure out and that's all in service of basically getting Intel on the boss that you're about to fight and after you've done everything successfully in the city or unsuccessfully you're gonna go into the boss encounter either with information ahead of time where you've seen potentially what you're fighting what their special abilities are and you can plan your deck for it or if you did poorly you might go in blind and you have to just kind of deal with with the surprise of what this boss could do and then the boss encounters where the game shines um so much of this game is revolved around the items you're collecting for your character so like in terms of armor in terms of weapons in terms of items you're bringing with you different things like that and you get a lot of those from the bosses you defeat as well as from you know buying them in town

23:59 things like that and so when you beat a boss you sometimes get items off the boss like what like a horn from that boss or a tail or things like that that have flavor as uh from that boss and then our weapons or armor and stuff that you can use so you feel like you're using you know the The Spoils of the battle that are from that boss itself which is a really really special thing that it does really well and your character is being customized a lot as you go because of that as well you're gonna unlock new abilities things like that so all the things you can expect from a campaign Adventure game and the boss encounters themselves it's not just you know take down the HP of the boss they have different sections they have their their front and they're in their rear and the flank and their arms and different things and so if you're fighting about cost that uses its jaw to attack you want to potentially take out its jaw first so that its attack does less damage and it makes it a little bit easier to take all the other limbs because you have to take out every single area of the boss to win the encounter so that is really cool it it plays really well lots of strategy you really have to think and with your teammates and kind of figure out how you're all going to act to be able to take down this boss and you know every time we've taken down a boss it's felt like it was very close even on one of the last one we played it felt like oh actually we're destroying this and then all of a sudden I realized that the boss is almost meant to feel like you're doing really really well and then at the very end it gets really difficult so at least that's what it was for us but all things uh all that to say Osborne is a really really solid campaign game the reason that I'm saying it could fluctuate and go kind of up or down the list is if the if they continue to find

25:30 ways to innovate on this and add more you know wrenches into it and and in both the city phase and the boss phase over the course of the 20 plus scenarios that are in the Box I can see this even going up climbing maybe even into like top three maybe even into top one who knows um because I I really am enjoying this I just kind of wonder how long that variety will last whereas the flip side if I after you know 15 sessions it's like yeah we've done this before we gotta take all the limbs okay it attacks with its left hand so we're gonna take that out first and it feels like a little bit you know we're just kind of following that same formula I can see it kind of dropping and or settling into this spot whatever the case may be there's just a lot to love in those storms it's gonna take a lot more before I'm ready to cover it as a full review and talk about it in full but I will say that even right now it's really wowing me and it's number five on my top 10 of 2022.

26:17 number four okay this one I don't know that it'll be a full surprise to everyone because I know a lot of people have been talking about this game and they really like it um but it's a surprise for me that it's ahead of uh you know specifically osworks it's such a small box compared to osor in a gigantic one uh and even Caesar because this is also a two-player only game and I had Cesar pretty I have my top 50 of all time and I'm ranking this above Caesar so that game is one that is a two-player version a dual version of a game that had been released before and that is Splendor duel so this is the newest game that I've played on this list and it left a huge impression in the couple games that I played of it so Splendor is a game I already really like I've talked about it a lot um and I've talked about games that do things like Splendor like project L and most recently Point City there's a lot that Splendor does that other games bore from or that splendor's bored from other games as well um that is just that engine that simple engine building idea of the more gems you collect the easier it is to afford things and it ramps up and whoever can hit that 12 points wins Splendor duel is a two-player version of that in the same way that seven wonders duel is a dual version of Seven Wonders where it takes the DNA and the essence but it changes it and makes it into a you know a foundation that is best at two and Splendor dual does that so well it does it very similarly to how Seven Wonders duel does it and I think that that's why it's resonating with me so much the biggest comparison I can make is that seven wonders duel has the multiple win conditions where you can have the Science Victory the military Victory the points Victory and it never feels you're like you're completely out of it because if someone's doing really well in one you can gravitate towards

27:49 the other and kind of you know put the pressure on in a different way Splendor duel does the same thing in this one you can get 20 points to win instead of 12 like the original splendor or you can get 10 points in a single color so you can go just hard into one color and get 10 points there you win the game or you can get I think it's 10 crowns and 10 and crowns are like a new thing that can appear on the cards that you're buying so they can have one or two crowns on them if you get enough of those crabs you get 10 you can win the game having all those Avenues to win means that in the games that I played I I changed the way the win condition I was going for both times in the middle and that felt so satisfying to do that and React to what your opponent's doing to be able to win the game I love that in Seven Wonders duel I love it in splendor duel it it hits that same note in that exact same way that's so satisfying uh the other cool thing is that normally in the original Splendor you just had gems in piles and you were just buying from them and Splendor dual you have a board in the middle that is has 25 slots and you always have to buy uh three uh it can be less than three but the tiles that you buy the gems that you buy have to be adjacent to each other in a line either and sorry it always has to be a line it can't be like I'm doing an L shape or whatever so it can be diagonal horizontal over vertical but you have to buy gems depending like depending on how your board looks you're not always going to be able to get the most efficient buying of gems that that you would like to like whereas in splendor you could be like yeah I need two blue so I'll just buy two blue because they're available this one you could have only two blue gems left on the board but they're in two corners and there's no way to get it in one turn so you have to kind of adjust and say am I going to try to get this over two turns if I get one is my

29:20 opponent gonna see what I'm doing and take the other one should I get a gold gem instead like that decision making and the fact that you can easily jump in and try to block your opponent as well makes that push and pull of a duel game like like split a duel so satisfying um I think there's so many things there's every time someone collects uh three crowns or six crowns there's these bonus tiles uh bonus cards you can get that uh you know give you extra points and extra abilities there are abilities on cards now so uh abilities trigger as soon as you buy the card and some of them can just be get another turn straight up take another Gem of from the board one is like the card is wild and can be added to any single um current color that you have have uh in your in your sort of Supply that you're building up but that same essence of just buying cards that make things cheaper or free to be able to buy more expensive and better cards is still there it's just they've improved everything around it they've taken what I loved so much about Splendor and made a strong case for this being the definitive way to scratch that itch is what I would say like you might want to play with three or four people and that and in that regard you're going to still go to splendor but I cannot see a situation where I want to play Splendor with two and I will not just play Splendor duel Instead This is a two this is better in every way they've improved on everything that I loved about Splendor for a two-player game and it might even just become that I would rather just play Splendor as Splendor dual now and if I have three or four people I'll just play something else instead because this is just such a great version of the game now I need to play it more if I can definitively say

30:51 that it's just that this has left us such an impression from that first play I'm just the things I love about seven wonders duel and Splendor makes together into a package this one like I said with a few of the games on this list could fluctuate but I don't think this will go down I I say that it could fluctuate by the fact that I think this could go up this could be a game that if it continues to hit the same way that seven wonders duel has hit for me over multiple plays this could be a top 10 game for me over time like in terms of my top of all time work but even without that I think that it's going to be one of those games that's in the top 30 or whatever for for a long time just uh because of the fact that it it is just such a solid two-player game and I love having those in my collection because I play two player games a lot and I like the ones that I can come back to and it feels differently like I can just go for victory in a completely different way Splendor duel has that solid game I'm glad that there was so much Buzz around it and it convinced me to get uh get it and check it out for myself because often times in the board game industry when they come up with a new version of a popular game like lost City's role in right or or Splendor duel to Splendor or whatever I never know if it's going to be one of those cases of yes they've improved it or they're trying to cash in on on the name and all the different Azul versions whatever so I for some reason with this one I just thought yeah okay two player Splendor like it's Splendor already plays good at two like do we really need this and then hearing all the buzz uh I decided to check it out and I'm so glad it's a phenomenal game I'm gonna be playing this for a long time number four of 2022 Splendor duel okay number three a game that this could

32:24 have been number one or two uh I'll pull it out before I even talk about it anymore it's a game that I am super impressed by and that is melee Fiore so this is a writer Konichi game it's my top writer konitza game of 2022. I wanted this so badly that I went and bought the French version and I use the PDF to read the English instructions when I need to because it was the only way I could find it to be able to get it sooner uh Emilia Fiore is an interesting case and I'm going to tell you why before I tell you like the reasons I like it and that's because as a four player game this is one of the best games I've played in 2022 Bar None it could be as a four player game alone it has every right to be number one on this list based on the the experience I had I thought it was such a phenomenal game at four it everyone was impressed when he played it and it felt so satisfying to play me and Carla were both Blown Away as a two-player game it was really subpar for me and that's because everything that milia Fiore does best is kind of lost at two in some ways so what how this game plays is you basically have a bunch of different areas on the board and you everyone has their 30 or 27 colored Diamond tiles almost in the same way in Kingdom Builder you'll have you'll start with your like 30 wooden tokens they're gonna be placing but in this one you're placing based on the card that you draft so everyone's gonna you're gonna have five cards and you're gonna look at them pick one draft it to your left everyone's gonna reveal the card that they played and you're going to play a diamond to the area that is on the color of the car that you played and so you're gonna be playing to different areas no one knows what what has been

33:56 chosen where you're gonna play until they've been revealed and every area scores differently one might be you have to keep building adjacent to that one one might be that you're you know kind of building a pyramid and you're scoring for everything underneath when you play something another one there's these boats that you're moving across this like C track and depending where it lands you're scoring points or getting bonuses so everyone scores a little bit differently you're going to go for it at different points but you can never really let someone run away with one area if you notice that someone has gone to one area uncontested three times in a row they're gonna start really multiplying and building up their points in some cases some cases buy a lot so and you could have them get like you know Five Points then ten points then another 15 points just by not contesting them so someone ends up having to contest with them but if multiple people do it then you end up with this kind of battle for territory and stuff so having to jump around and place things in different territories and having multiple people blocking you know you're blocking people is really really satisfying and there's multiple ways to score multiple ways to win multiple ways to be successful or to fail it's just so interesting every time and it turns fly by so quickly there's no there's no real downtime but you have enough time to sort of plan out what you're gonna do before it gets back to the drafting is interesting because you can kind of see what you're passing to other players and you might be able to guess what they're going to play next turn and prepare for it even though you don't know what you're being passed every territory as a way to trigger a bonus as well every territory has a whoever completes a certain thing on that territory first will get 20 points second gets 15 third gets 10 fourth gets five and every territory it's a

35:27 different thing you have to complete one might be first one to get all four symbols one might be the first one to place everything in a line horizontally whatever I can't get into them all week because without seeing the board it's hard to understand but essentially you're just you're you're it's a race on every area there's bonuses on every area there's ways to score in every area it's just a such a satisfying game at four with that much interaction that much fighting going on at two you lose a lot of that player interaction and when me and Carla plated it too in some cases some territory some areas went like pretty much unused or just like ignore because we were doing other things so Carla ran away with one area and there was no one else stopping besides me obviously so it was harder for me to combat that I just found it way less interesting but so I would say this is here as a three and a four player game because you need that additional player interaction if you're only gonna play this game as two player game this would not have been in my top 10 as a two-player game straight up I don't even know where I would rank I just did not overly care for it too much as a two-player game as a four player game this is going to be one of my games that I get like I recommend if we have four people on the table almost more than most of the games in my collection based on how much fun that was and a three it'll still shine as well but those two player counts this is a phenomenal game some one that I think a lot of people can get your hands on it uh should check out should play s quickly uh and pretty simply as well but there's just so much nuance and strategy and it's just so satisfying to play as well so as a three and four player game milia Fiore is my number three of 2022.

36:56 okay uh I waffled a lot on one and two here um it took me a lot of deliberating to to land on this uh number two I'm not gonna put on the table because it's very large it's a campaign game it's a sequel to what used to be my number one game of all time that is Frost Haven so Frost Haven is number two uh this is one that again kind of like old sworn for me to have exp to be able to like fully give my thoughts on Frost Haven it's gonna take me a long time probably because there's well because I'm gonna be playing this game for probably a year or two and then I say that because glue Maven took me two years to finish with us with us meeting regularly like once a month or twice a month we're doing the same thing for frost Haven so it's gonna take a while before I can really say definitively here's what my entire overall experience was but as someone who's played two years of gloomhaven and the expansion to aluminum forgotten circles and three uh uh sessions now of frost Haven I feel confident placing it placing it on this list and placement number two it almost was number one because it's it's Landing for me the same way gloomhaven did uh there's just one game I had to rank a little bit higher uh as of right now anyways but again this is one that could be number one and it could all of a sudden you know uh take over my number one of all time like gloomhaven used to used to have and now belongs to if you spoiler alert now belongs to a feast for Odin um just because of how good it is and how much it advances everything that I loved about gloomhaven you know for me there's so much Nostalgia tied to Gloom Heaven because it was also about meeting with the same people over and over again

38:28 and getting together and laughing on the table and then you know carrying out the story together and all that Frost even has all that it plays into the same Nostalgia so it had all that going for it that right off the bat the foundation the frost even had to even make it onto this list was almost was definitely higher than every other game here it was almost it was a guarantee it was going to be on the less unless it completely you know just dropped the ball in in something about the design that's not the case so it takes everything I loved about Gloom Haven that's you know that decision of having your hand of cards and having to pick two in terms of the initiative that you're picking but also the top ability and the bottom ability of one cards and how you're going to play your class effectively each scenario as well as overall the build that you're building for all the unlockables there's 17 classes you only start with six so you're unlocking like 11 classes as you go there's secrets that you don't even know you're going to be unlocking because they're in envelopes this one has a completely expanded City phase which is now called an outpost phase where you're actually building up the Outpost of frosting so now you're not only unlocking classes you're unlocking buildings to be able to do things like brewing potions to take into battle to to crafting items and weapons and armor to be able to improve your character and a bunch of more things that I can't get into because it'd be spoilers or I have it unlocked so I don't even know what they are yet but you're building those buildings you're upgrading them to get better effects of the buildings your Outpost is coming up under attack in The Outpost phases sometimes and you're having to defend Frost Haven and you can fortify the walls and you can fortify your your town deck which is like the attack modifier decks from gluehaven in this

39:58 game except it's what's for frostings outposts in and of itself there's just so much more in Frost Haven but they've also improved in the things that you know in some ways we're lacking about gloomhaven they I I will say that so far as much as um you know we're playing it with the the narration the audio narration for the story and I'm already feeling a little bit better about it than that I did in gloomhaven Gloom if it didn't shine as a story game it shined as a campaign game um I I think frosting will probably be the same thing nothing about the story so far has really blown me away but we're early and that could change but that's again not the reason I'm coming to frost Haven I'm not coming for an epic story I'm coming for an epic campaign experience that's evolving as we go I'm playing with some great people that are we're going to be playing over the course of a you know months and months which is really really exciting and has me pumped just to continue to get to the table the classes the certain classes seem Leaps and Bounds more interesting than the glue Maven classes that the starting classes I should say and I'm really enjoy I'm playing the blink blade I'm really really enjoying my time with that class and seeing what everyone else is doing with theirs all in all it's just everything I loved about gloomhaven and what made it one of my top games of all times and it's improved for me so it's going to take me many more plays to be able to like definitely say here's my review here's my comparison here's how these games you know are here's here's what I think about it in the long term is it better than Google like over the entire course of the campaign it's going to take me a while to be able to get there but as of right now it is definitely my number two game of 2022 because I am in love with it I can't wait to play it more and it could

41:29 be number one at some point if it can overtake my number one game of 2022 which I have you might know what this is because I mentioned it uh in quite a few videos already and it was pretty high up as a debut game on my top 50 of all time I love this game it even beats Frost Haven right now right now right now and that is libertalia wins of galecrest I knew this was probably going to be number one or if not number one it was going to be number two because of you know how I felt how I feel about and those feelings aren't changing um this is such a chaotically fun game that's the best way I can describe it is is chaotically fun um essentially what you're doing is everyone is going to start with six cards and those six cards cards are going to be the same for every single player we're all going to have the same characters in our hand to start so you kind of know what it's possible that your opponents might be playing but you don't know when they're going to play which card and the hands evolve as you go and eventually they'll start to diversify you're all going to play a card uh to the top of the board or in front of you and then reveal them and you're going to arrange them at the top of the board in initiative order and then going from left to right abilities are going to trigger and then going from right to left abilities are going to trigger and when you go from right to left you're also taking tokens off the board and those tokens are sometimes desirable sometimes they're negative so you have to kind of pick initiative characters based on not only their ability and when you want them to trigger but also on which tokens they're open to grab or not grab having to manage all that while also thinking about what your opponents have in their hands what they might be thinking but they might be playing what character

43:00 abilities are now in play in each person's uh ship or on the board and how that's going to change things or what you're trying to you know stop someone from doing there's just so much chaos and I've played this when I when I got this I remember thinking or especially after the first one I played I played it at three players and I thought okay that that was tons of fun at three more than I thought it was going to be as a three-player game but four is probably Gonna Be The Sweet Spot maybe five we've we I mean I played it at three again I think I played a three or three times now but as I would played it as a six player game the full max player count and it was amazing with six like I don't even know what player count I love this the most at because at six it's way more chaotic you're you're having to do I guess less strategizing in some ways because you can't plan for every every case every scenario because of so many people in play but there is still planning you can do and having that the the game changed so much based on all the characters the six characters every round that are being played this is just one of the most the games that I've had the most fun with in a long time obviously you know at the essence of board games we're playing to to have fun I think that that's probably almost Universal uh I'm sure there's some cases where you're not playing to have fun but in general I would say that's the when we come to board games we get other things out of them I get lots of different things out of board games I get something different of frost Haven for instance because I'm also on the table with a bunch of people on a regular basis so there's that bonding there's that you're seeing people it feels like coming home and all that kind of stuff with libertalia all it comes down to is it's just pure fun for me yes I'm sure

44:32 that if I dug into it or someone else you know I read uh something where it digs into it they would be unbalanced in this way because of these cards or this would be making harder to strategize so you can't really like always play for the best strategy to be able to say I did this to win sometimes it's going to be luck whatever the case may be but at the end of the day I just have fun playing libertalia unlike a lot of other Productions unlike but more than other games that I play sometimes um and it's consistent it's every single session that I played at libertalia I've left saying I want to play that again as soon as I possibly can and I don't care what player count maybe besides one or two uh I played with that two three four five six or sorry three four five six get it to the table let's play it again because I just love it it's just a phenomenal game and it's one that I think it's not going to land the way it's lighting for me for everybody but I think you need to give it a shot try it out and see how it lands for you and just go in with the expectation you just just want to have some fun with a board game you just want to have a great experience where you're laughing and where you leave saying that was a riot and I thought that every single time I played libertalia and I think that this game is going to be a Mainstay in my not only my collection but on my top list of all time and just one that I always gravitate towards in the same way that I talk about you know other games you hear us talk about all the time like like Agricola for Carlo and feast Frozen for me and Carcassonne for Carlo and key flower like I just think this will end up being a Mainstay because of how much fun I have with it it's my number one game of 2022 and I think it really really deserves that spot that's it those are all my games uh my top 10 games of 2022. again there are

46:04 several games I have not played several several games I've not played from 2022 it's possible that some of those ones after I play them could be ones that slot in here I'd be surprised if they slot it in from one to five because I played the ones that I really thought had a chance of being in the top five I think but as always no one does one of these lists and and it has it not be fluid there's no way you can do a top 20 game of whatever year either on January 1st or July or whatever and still have it be definitive things are going to change as you play certain games more than others or as you discover that you know your interest is waning in this one or increasing another one so this is a flu list this is how I feel right now later on in the year I'm not going to do like a re-top 10 or whatever but when we get to our top 50s and we as we start to rank games in other categories like whether it's two-player games or three player games or party games or whatever you'll start to see some of these games you know go ahead of each other in different ways I'm sure and there'll be adjustments but as of right now I feel confident about this and I don't think any of these games is going to move all that much that there's going to be any drastic shifts so let me know in the comments which of these surprise you the most which ones you agree with which ones would be in your top 10 of 2022 in fact just give me your top 20 top 10 games of 2022 in the comments I'd love to hear what everyone else is playing what else uh you know is resonating with you I love all these games I can't always put all the more and see where they land for me over the years the months the years to come so thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time