Top 100 Board Games : 60 - 51

[Music] welcome to allies or enemies i'm jess and i am shawn and this is part five of our top 100 favorite board games of all time series that sounds awfully bombastic but this time we are counting down from number 60 to number 51. if you've been watching and following along thank you so much and you might notice a difference for this one we just got a brand new camera on the weekend and so this is the first time we're trying it out with video yeah if you uh if you watched our meadow review that's our first try at the photo side of things so let us know if you noticed any difference in that even and please also it'd be great if uh if you have any feedback on do you like this camera better do you like how it was before i really hope you like this camera better because it cost us some money um so please do do let us know though and uh yeah let's let's get rolling with this one so i think i was first last time if i remember yep so it's over to me to start things off this time my number 60 is honey buzz honey buzz i love the theme of for this one you are a bee that is collecting honey to fulfill the forest creatures orders for it and everything about this game is gorgeous the honey is kind of soft and squishy yeah i really i love that it's like it's not just squishy but it's like tacky squishy yeah it has a really good feel to it and then the the cards that you're using to fulfill the forest creatures orders all of those look gorgeous your your workers are actual little honeybees that you put out so it is a work replacement game and in this game you put your bees out and you collect your honeycomb tile and each of those honeycomb tiles have an action on it and you build out your beehive once you have a completed hexagon then you're able to do all the actions that are there so it's a light medium game but because you have to decide what patterns you might want and which actions you might want to complete when there is a little bit more to it than you might think yeah it's um i i miss this on my list this is one when uh like you saying it right now i thought oh man i just forgot to add this game it's fairly reason for us but honestly it's not even that we've had it for a few months so i've got no excuse um this is a great game it should be on my list i really like it every it looks nice and it's just it feels nice yeah and that's my number 60.

um my number 60 this is another newish just really nice kind of shiny and new game this is tidal blades and tidal blades honestly the look almost turned me off of it at first because it's so pretty and i saw like the kickstarter had a lot of plastic and a lot of kind of things to it a lot of bells and whistles and i thought is there going to be a lot of substance under that style and we we did buy it we bought the retail version though which is a little bit more cardboardy it's still real flashy it's not quite as flashy it looks great it does it it looks super nice um and the good news is it's also actually really fun game and it's a it's a kind of a dice collector slash dice chucker when you collect up your dice you can actually level them up yeah so you can get them stronger and stronger and stronger which ups your odds all the time and it's it's not quite it's kind of a work replacement game but you've got one worker you've got your dude and they move around and then they kind of leave a little thing where they've been and so you do these trials which just use your dice and you fight these monsters which spend your dice and then you're also trying to upgrade your dice and you're also trying to impress this judge and there's there's a lot of things going on here but i i love the theme and i love kind of just the ocean style of it all and it's not a game i would usually think i like but i really like it yeah the look of this is great and then it also has another element you didn't mention of skills that you're also have an opportunity to up so deciding which skills you use which might be different depending on who your starting person is also changes the game a little bit yeah there's a lot going on but it also isn't that complicated it's almost it's kind of as you can see a little bit hard to describe but uh but well worth trying out and it feels weird to say but don't be turned off by it being too pretty um because it just is pretty and also it's fun and that was my number 60.

my number 59 is paladins of the west kingdom so this is part of the west kingdom series and this is the second one in the series in my opinion i think this would be the heaviest of the three yeah and so for this one uh you have paladins that you are and each of your paladins give you a unique ability that you can use for that round so you pick your paladin for the round and you get different workers and then you use those different workers so different colors lets you put your it on your individual boards in different ways to do actions and a lot of people may describe this as multiplayer solitaire which i think is very accurate i mean once we have our cards out and we've grabbed our workers it's very much just looking down and seeing what you can do but it has a really nice puzzle element of trying to extend your turn of how much can you do because if you are able to maybe build a fortress that might give you an additional worker that you can then use and so i love i'm i'm totally okay with multiple player solitaire and i think this one does it really well yeah i i like mo people say multiplayer saw the terrible games like it's a knock and i'm like no that that sounds great to me i'm not it i i like it when especially when i'm really building something and i'm doing a puzzle like this um that other people aren't gonna mess up my puzzle like i like that but there is still like a little bit of interaction just in like the places that you're going and the things that you're doing can get in the way of other folks um but really you get to do your own thing and this game is hard enough it's tricky enough and thank you enough i don't i don't need someone messing around with it yeah and that's my 59 my number 59 is maracaibo and this is designed by alexander fister he's one of our favorite designers and it is a rondelle game so if you know great western trail like if you don't know this one but you know great western trail it's got a similar-ish you're moving along a path and the different places that you stop are going to have different actions for you and in this one you're a boat and so you're moving you're moving your boat around and you've got different actions and it's and then you're collecting of cards that are crew members slash kind of agents it's also a campaign game although i will note that the campaign is the worst written campaign of any campaign i have ever played but the campaign does work interestingly in that it changes uh like it changes the board all the time there's there's a lot going on here but it's it's a really cool game and i understand um fister is actually re-theming it and is going to re-release it because the mechanics are great the theme definitely not for everybody the mechanics are fantastic though um so it's going to be really cool to see what happens with the new theme yeah i really enjoy this one of everything that you said and there's another element that fister uses from some of his other games too of the cards being multi-purpose so you have to decide if you want to keep your card and then spend it to give it you that ability or you want to also spend your cards for an icon it has on it to kind of free up your board so there is a lot but after that first read through we actually didn't have to look at the rules too much yeah it really isn't it's complex but only once yeah and then you're kind of like all right cool i get this and it's fun and really mechanically sound an interesting game uh and that is my 59.

my 58 is a very light game this is draftasaurus uh so in this game you are doing drafting dinosaurs you're reaching your hand into this bag and you're pulling out these fantastic meeple dinosaurs and you're putting them on your board when i first got this i was a little bit let down i thought it might be a little bit more maybe along the lines of dinosaur island but once i once i kind of re-thought about it and thought of it more as a roland rite it almost has that feel to it of of instead of checking a box you actually get to put an amazing physical dinosaur on it it was fantastic it's it's dinosaurs which i love and it's takes like 15 minutes to play yeah if if that i don't know why you thought it was a dinosaur it's called draft asaurus i don't know why um yeah i i love this from the very first because i absolutely love dinosaurs and we got the two expansions too which um i think both add something to it but i think the pleisiosaurs are like a little bit better than uh than the pterodactyls yeah but yeah i i i can just play this over and over and over and you're totally right with the roland right it feels like a rolling right in which you are neither rolling nor writing yeah yeah that's about the level that it is and that's my 58.

my number 58 this is hashem phillips game uh and you just had one on your list and we're we're fans of both of his series and this one is explorers of the north sea so explorers in the north sea part of the first trilogy the north sea trilogy obviously and i i actually like this one i know this is a bit of a controversial opinion but i actually like this one more than i like raiders of the north see because i i just i love exploring islands and i said this when you had this on your list that wind waker's my favorite zelda game and this makes me think of that a little bit just taking out your boat exploring the different islands um leaving your dudes in different places so that they can you know build their buildings and stuff and picking up the animals and bringing them back and we've got the expansion as well which adds like a whole other level to this because you don't have to come all the way back as much so you can keep going out and out and your whole map is even bigger uh and i i just i love how this looks i'm such a fan of tile placement because i like building out and this one does really well you end up with a really cool thing at the end of communal one because you're both exploring the same islands in the same area and you're right the expansion really did raise this up in in my thoughts as well and the communal yeah it makes it you're competing for those islands too you can get throat yeah but it's great and that's my number 58.

my number 57 is a lot heavier than my previous game this is on mars so this is a vitella sorta game it's right over here yeah it has a great look to it it takes place on mars and you're trying to make mars habitable and there's lots of things that you need to do and you have slightly different goals that you might be trying to accomplish each turn i love the theme and there's a lot of science to it it makes it a bit complex but i really like to build the greenhouses for example you need to spend water because that makes sense so usually you think you have to just spend the element that you need more of but you need water to grow the plants you need oxygen to make the the domes that the people live in so everything's connected in that way and it has the additional element of you can only go in in either on the surface of mars or you take the shuttle to do the stuff at the space station and so you've got to decide when the shuttle is leaving whether you're going to take it and and go do actions on the other side or if you're going to stay but you could be staying for a while depending on when that shuttle is coming back yeah there's there's a lot of planning it's it is cool like like you say that it's i think it is kind of based in the thinking what would the steps be if you were terraforming mars so it's a little less silly than terraforming mars is because of the science it is it's it's real thing it's real heavy it is it is really heavy so some games i kind of feel like i didn't get anywhere but then some days it clicks and the times that it clicks it's really worthwhile so i love the theme of this i love the look of that uh and so my number 57 was on mars my number 57 is merv and it's funny that yours was a vital loser game because merv feels like it's almost it's it's like a vitality light and it's it's a beautiful game it's uh from osprey games we generally like the game also by ian o'toole for the art like on mars it is yeah yeah which explains why it's beautiful yeah oh his his artwork's always great um and it's based on this this ancient city of merv and you're doing all of these different you've got a mosque track and you've got camels and you've got trading um and you've got yes you've got all of these different segments that you're kind of moving between but it's got this really cool mechanic of the central board where you're putting down buildings in the middle of the board which kind of influence what actions you can take but also how strong those actions are and what cubes you get and they can also like give other players resources depending on where they place their things which is really it's this kind of like cool other layer to it that that i really enjoy and look it just looks great and for two player it's an additional layer because you can activate any building in that row or column and it doesn't even have to be your own but for two player you have a dummy player that you place and so the placement of where that goes might totally change because your opponent might purposely put it and block you whereas normally they wouldn't do that because they would just go where they had the most buildings and not worry too much about what you were doing yeah and it affects your because your term priority decides who gets to place the dummy or who gets to choose either his row or his column which it it's actually it's i i kind of really like the two i don't know of another game that uses a dummy player in that way and it it's really an interesting kind of extra little bit of strategy that is my number 57 [Music] my 56 i'm going back to a lighter game is quilt express so colt express is your it takes place in the wild wild west and you have these characters and your bandits on a train and you're trying to get as most treasure as you can the fantastic mechanic for this is you have your hand of cards and everyone plays their cards down sometimes they're visible sometimes they're not and then at the end of the round you then you then go through and do the actions so it can be really really tricky to remember even where you are let alone where all of your opponents are and we have a really fun way of playing this two player where we're each playing three characters and it gets to be a whole mess where we're our one of our characters is punching another one of our characters and it's just it's super fun this is this is our first match yours is as well yeah yeah this is our first out of uh how many have we gone through now i don't want to do math but this is our first one that matches my 56 also cult express um and i i love it it's just it's mayhem especially because um like you're saying we house rule this because and we never house rule games but we didn't love the two-player way you're supposed to mix the two decks in this in this way that i don't know didn't really work for us so and then and then we thought okay we're gonna use like two characters each at first but we'll make everyone fight everyone but we totally didn't we totally cheated and tried not to shoot our own people so we're like all right forget that now we're just gonna be where teams of three grew up to teams of three and we're just teams and then we add all the treasures together i think you said that at the end um but yeah it's because it is that that programming of putting out the cards and because it's you know you got six characters and so and sometimes they go like boo boo boo boom and sometimes they go down the line and then they loop back um we can never remember what anyone's doing so it's always a surprise in the number of times we punch a jewel out of our friend's hand or end up on the roof on the first turn and totally forget that and so it's the rest of the detergents wasted for that character especially because when you do three characters it's like what was i doing with that guy oh uh i don't know and then you yeah you run right into the marshall and it's it's crazy and we actually because we got it during lockdown we haven't played it with multiplayer as i imagine it's amazing with multiple players but even with two if you just play just play just play them like separate characters and as a team trust me it's so much fun that was also my 56.

my number 55 is is a wonderful world this has a great look to it it's a relatively simple card game but i would say probably more light medium weight not lightweight because there there is a little bit more to it you start off with card drafting so you pass your cards and try and decide which ones you want to keep and which ones you want to discard and then from those ones you are building an engine to produce cubes to get more cards for this one it's only four rounds so it's really difficult to decide the long-term plan of like right now i'm not producing any blue but this one's gonna be worth a lot of points so i'm just gonna put this out now and hope i can get it later yeah we love i love the the dystopian theme because um i'm just a huge fan of anything dystopian dystopian y a we read a lot of that uh and and there is a little bit of asymmetry because you've got your starting card that is going to give you it just changes your starting resources and it changes one of your point scoring goals and it doesn't look like a lot but it really does make a pretty big difference too yes this is one we've been playing a lot yeah and we've got the expansions for it as well so that got us to play even more so um and so that was my number 55.

my number 55 is hive and hive is it's it's these little bakelite tiles and so you can play it anywhere because there's no board and each tile has a different insect on it and each insect moves in a slightly different way so you've got spiders that can move like three spaces around the outside kind of turning and creepily you've got ants that can move to anywhere you've got your queen bee that can only move one so it's very chest like in that way but it's just in this like abstract kind of free form it's it's like jazz chess with insects and i just i just love everything about it this has a great theme i love the insects it is not on my list nope uh and that is because when i had played it sean was quite experienced he'd already been playing it for years and it just took me a while to figure it out so i had to get through a lot of games of of losing and now i'm getting closer to the stage of being able to win maybe 15 of the time so i think once that percentage wind goes up a bit i think i will like this game more the last this is what she would always say about it i think you win kind of half the times of the last few times that we've played oh maybe i'm just factoring in all those previous losses no no you're better at this than you think please play it with me more uh but really hive is it's just fantastic so that is my number 55.

my number 54 is unmatched and this is another one i'm kind of grouping a lot of games into one my my favorite of them is cobble and fog so that's the newest one that we have and in this one we we always play just the two of us there are some ways that you can play with three but it's a one versus one so you have heroes from from fiction and from movies so in caldwell and fog you've got invisible man and sherlock holmes and dracula and so these these great characters and they're your hero and some of them will come with a sidekick or some of them will come with minions and you use your cards to battle it out and try and get down to zero and so this is a combat game that i i really like because of the asymmetry between the characters and how they play and it's different than something like villainous where the only thing you're trying to do with unmatched is fight the other person it's not like you have this other goal and someone keeps getting in your way right well they get in your way of you because you want to beat them but i i i like this one because it's it's based on the same system as epic uh star wars epic duels and me and my friends that loved star wars epic duels and i was so glad when when they brought back that system especially with a couple of fog yeah agreed that's my favorite too but also the jurassic park ones and so many of the characters that are in it and it's just a really fun um like one versus one just a head-to-head uh card battle and yeah we've had some pretty epic tournaments of mixing and matching so that was my number 54.

my number 54 and the second dinosaur one on the list which makes this a great list is dinosaur island and i i like anything that is dinosaurs if it's got dinosaurs i'm almost certainly going to enjoy it um and that was the case with dinosaur island although i will say that okay so when i bought dinosaur island this is one of those ones that i saw the kickstarter and i thought should i and then i didn't and then later i bought the base and the expansion really close together and the expansion didn't come with the blue dinosaurs i thought it would come with and that really usually i don't have that like oh i miss this thing and i'm sad about it but i really wanted those blue dinosaurs and so it took me a little bit to get past that oh but now i i do really like it i've moved past the blue dinosaur situation um and i'm fine with just using the pink ones whatever but it really is a cool worker placement and you're building your park it's very jurassic park you're building your park and people get eaten and you're researching dinosaurs and you're adding them to your pens and it moves quicker than you'd think really we find we play the long game now because that seems to be about the right yeah the short game is very very short it is yeah but it's uh i've i've really learned to love this game yeah i'm surprised this one's not on my list i think this is like the other one for you where somehow i just missed it because i do love that science element of collecting the dna and spending that for dinosaurs and the expansion we don't necessarily use all the modules and we certainly don't use them all at once but it's been really fun to kind of introduce a module and play with that one and then play with a different one another time yeah the executive's the best and it comes with a little kind of like like dr hammond um richard attenborough yeah meeple meeple as well um so that is my number 54.

my number 53 is red rising this was announced a few months before the game release and that it was based on the ip of red rising which is a book series i hadn't heard of it before neither had sean so we picked up the trilogy and before the game arrived i read through the first three books got the next two and read through them so already it was this experience that i was invested in and the game itself i really like how it plays it doesn't really take place in the world you're not playing out the game series but it uses characters from the game and throughout the game you're putting the the cards down to get certain effects and then collecting them up and hoping to gather a set that combo really well together and having read the books those combinations are great because you understand why a certain character might want to be paired with someone or why they wouldn't yeah it's pretty simple just like play a card take a card which i guess is also in fantasy realms a lot of people compare the two games and it's pretty openly i think based on that but we haven't played fantasy realms but i think it really helps that we read the books i only read the first three because the first one's terrific and then i don't know they drop a little and by the time i got to four i was like probably good but it really helps to to know those characters i think that makes a big difference and there's another one that didn't end up on my list and i'm kind of like this really should be on my list yeah having played a lot we're really familiar with the card so it only takes us about 20 minutes as well so i really like that about this being able to be a relatively quick game that was my number 53.

uh my number 53 is marvel united in marvel united super light game you can play this with kids it comes with a lot of little plastic dudes and i didn't do this kickstarter which i think is kind of a theme this is like games i missed in kickstarter and got later but i didn't use the kickstarter and then when they announced the x-men one i'm a crazy x-men fan so i was like fully on board there and very excited to get a multiple man that's my all-time fave for any x-men nerds out there but i was really into that so then i kind of went back and picked up a few of the the sets from the first one and it was really a surprise it's it's a light but it's it's fun it's just like you play a card and your card does other punches or moves or does like a heroic effect it just has like three symbols plus sometimes they've got like a special thing that maybe they do but super simple but it's totally different for the different villains that you play and there's some really cool ones especially sinister six really fun to play against yeah and the villains i think make the biggest difference because the hero cards do play a little differently but some of the villains are so different and so that gets us playing it again and again and it's a co-op so i love that it's the two of us against the bad guy yeah the the heroes honestly are pretty interchangeable but if if i can have like the 70 x-men or whatever are coming up give me more x-men i'm i'm excited uh so that was my 53.

my 52 is calico so this is a tile placement game and in it you are building a quilt but it's a bit challenging you have your own gold tiles so you want to make sure the pattern matches them and the colors match them and then cats of course there's three cats that come out every time and they have their own preferences cats can be very picky and there's different buttons that you put out so it's a really fun puzzle because you only have a few tiles to pick from that you can maybe use the next turn and you have to try and maybe give up one goal to complete the other one and every time i do this i think i think my score can be better next time yeah it is um it is impossible to get all of the goal type tiles i it's possible i guess but it is incredibly unlikely because you have to get all the patterns and all the colors just right and draft just right not have anyone steal what you want so you kind of have to it's kind of like cat quilt triage where you're just kind of doing the immediate thing you need to do um but it's it is great and the cats kind of have their own like personality they have little stories about them in the book and uh which which is a nice nice little touch yeah and it looks really nice that's my number 52.

my number 52 is a little bit of a heavier game it's brass birmingham and um we do live in the uk so we got used to saying birmingham instead of birmingham but uh brat brass birmingham is at first i was like i don't think i'm gonna like this because it just it looks dry i don't love the art but there's a reason for the art because it's all um like industrial revolution so it's like it's real dark and just kind of gloomy it's just it's very gloomy the look of this game but but it is it is a really interesting game where you're putting down well you're putting down your first your boats and then your trains to connect up the little towns to connect up the resources and kind of help to build the railway and i guess as you've told me that there is some kind of historical accuracy within it too which i know is a selling point yeah i really like the history of that and how the railways really transform this country and it's amazing to have a game that captures that but the mechanics of it are really interesting as well particularly the interaction because there's certain things like if you build school stuff and then the next person who uses cool has to go for the closer one so even if i'm building it i might have to use sean's cool but then he might be happy that i am because it might flip his tile which might be what he's looking for yeah you're kind of you're building these little almost warehouses i guess that do that do different things uh so and you do want to flip them because that's how you score points later in the game yeah and it's really tight resources too which isn't something i always love but does work well in this but that is number 52.

my number 51 is imperial settlers empires of the north and this one has a really cute look to it which can be a bit deceptive i think because there's actually a lot going on with this one first of all each of the decks that you play with play incredibly differently so that's already a selling point i love the asymmetry of that and you're using your cards and you've got to gather resources to put your cards out and there's a little bit of work replacement aspect because you get these discs that you can put out and you can use your ships to go sailing and other workers to activate actions but because of each of the decks playing so differently it's very easy to to play one get a sense of it want to play again to try and master it and then move on to another one and keep trying and switching them out and see how they play against other ones as well yeah no when you talk about the asymmetry people talk about like decks playing differently this is almost like you're playing different games sometimes some of these decks like some of them are you're just gathering resource and some some of them are you're just sailing and uh we got the japanese islands expansion and i was using one that's just about trading resources which just did not like you were taking the things that you wanted give me things i didn't want very fair training no all the time best for everybody but yeah so there can really be some interaction in this game as well and i think you're right the cuteness is uh definitely hiding a real sinister under underbelly to this one yeah and the expansions have definitely made us play this a lot more too they're great that's my number 51.

uh my number 51 is uh it's a roll and write one of my favorite rolling rights it is silver and gold and silver and gold one of the most really inventive roland rights that there is and again it's not actually rolling right it's a flipping right but it's really creative because it's just it's a deck of cards and you're writing right on the cards and so each one of the cards represents an island and you've got two islands at a time and then there's a bunch in the middle and each turn you flip over a card and that's got a polyamino shape and use that shape to fill in a bit of one of your islands and sometimes you you there are ways to combo that and there are ways to score bonus points um but again it's it is that collecting islands and like i talked about with explorers i just i love that as a theme and it's it's just it's fun to write on the cards and it's one of these like why didn't anyone think of this this seems of course this is a good idea to have a rolling right that's card based i don't even know if anyone else has done it again yet but it's it's a great idea and does it ever play well it plays really well it's not surprising because it's phil walker harding so again a designer who's really great at making very accessible games yeah yeah just just simple smart ideas and uh and like like i said this is one of my absolute favorite rolling rights if you haven't played it pick it up and that was my 51.

and that is it that brings us to the halfway point that is just about the end of the 50s we're going to be kicking off the next one with number 50 and then we've got the top half of the list thank you so much for watching and following along as usual please like subscribe leave a comment and hopefully we'll see for the next one [Music]