Top 10 Board Games of 2025

0:00 All right, it's time for the best games of the year. Mikey,

0:04 there's no other point making other any other list than this one.

0:06 That's right.

0:07 This is the best games of the year. We're talking about them now.

0:15 What's up everybody? My name is Nick. We are the Brothers Murf and that's right, we're talking about our top 10 games that were released in 2025. Couple different caveats. One, we have not played every single game that came out the year. So, if it's not on the list, it's either because we didn't like it enough to be on the list. Or maybe we haven't even played it. That's very true. It was a good year for games. I'm excited for the inevitable couple comments saying that, "No, you're wrong. This year sucked for games." No, it didn't. It was a good year for games.

0:38 Every year is a good game.

0:38 It was a good year for games. Yeah, it was a good year for games. Now, we are going to do a combined list. And very often people ask us why we do combined lists. That is because we have very similar tastes in games. And this year, we actually experimented where we actually made two individual lists, gave them to Yeah. with no consulting game to Jimmy and we have had seven of the same games on there. So there's just no point us doing two different list. But we use a point ranking system to create our list. But what we want to do is talk about our individual list because there's some things you haven't you've played that I haven't and vice versa.

1:11 Different taste. So on Patreon, we're going to go through our top games of the year as they appear on our individual list.

1:18 Our top 20 actually.

1:19 Yeah. And give a little bit more. So, if you want to take a deeper dive with us on our individual tastes and things we experienced this year, go ahead and become a patron. Or if you're already a patron, go and check that video out. Um, and in the meantime, we're going to talk about our agreed upon top 10 games of 2025.

1:39 Hey everybody. Just want to ask Hey everybody. Hey everybody. Usually at this point we do some kind of silly little sketch or something like that. Ask people to subscribe. But we thought today we'll do just kind of like a a normal earnestish one where we ask you please subscribe if you enjoy what we do. If you're new here, make sure to click that subscribe button. It really do does truly truly help a lot. It's why we all ask y'all to do it. And so if you like what we do, if you ever like what we're doing, if you like this video, please hit that subscribe button. It would really really mean a lot. We're trying to end the year strong um with a uh good amount of subscribers on this video. So please hit that subscribe button and thank you so much for watching our stuff. Um, and here's to a great year of games.

2:22 Number 10, we actually played very very recently.

2:24 Sure did.

2:24 And this is kind of our is it our favorite? Yeah, I would say it's our favorite kind of small box game of the year. And this is going to be Flip Tunes.

2:31 Flip Tunes. Yeah. There's usually a game of this weight that makes it

2:34 makes it onto our list. It's a game that is, you know, uh, very playable, playable with lots of different types of people. Flip tunes for us this year is that one. This is a game uh where you are trying to cast uh you know a TV show and you are with all these different animals which are the different characters you can put into your show and they're all going to provide a certain amount of fame. Uh and what's going to happen is everyone's going to shuffle up their deck of cards and then flip over six cards in a 3x two grid activating any abilities of those animals as they come out. And then they're going to generate a certain amount of fame which you will then use to hire better animals than your starting cards or dismiss uh cards that you don't want to keep anymore. And you're all in this is all in service of creating a very synergistic uh pull of cards which of course is random. So you're hoping to give yourself good odds at pulling a very valuable kind of tableau in front of you.

3:25 Exactly. And so after you're done buying that, you're going to take all the cards in your grid and the new cards you got and your previous deck and then shuffle everything up. So every single round you're shuffling your whole thing and you're flipping out six, sometimes more depending on the cards you have cards and generating fame. So again, as Mikey said, you're trying to get like synergistic stuff. There's like the lion which will is always giving you three fames, but it'll give you plus four fame if every other card adjacent to it is a lower rank than them because everything has kind of a rank in it. So you're trying to again be like, "Oh, I have a lion. I want to make sure I have low ranked cards so I'm always getting max value out of this lion if it even comes out." Because if you have more than six cards in your deck, it might not come out. There's things that allow you to stack on top of other cards so you can get more cards into your grid. It's really great. Um, eventually once someone hits 30 fame in a in a single round, you will finish out that round and then everyone will shove up their decks and do one last flip. And the whoever has the most fame in that flip flip

4:19 wins the game. So, it's not necessarily whoever triggered the end of the game. Yeah. It's whoever has in that. So, I will say there's some luck in this game, but it's a small light game that you can teach to kind of anyone and play quickly. I love this game. This is the perfect kind of game to play like late in the evening with maybe some people who aren't into like super heavy games. You can play with family and stuff. It's got great art. I just love it.

4:40 Yeah, I agree. I think there's just like a a high fun value. It does what it's meant to do. It's quick, so you don't feel burned by the luck. And you will build up a decent tableau by the end of it. You might not be a winning one, but you're not going to be where you started.

4:54 You're not going to end with like two fame like No. Yeah. So, like that's kind of cool. Like I feel like there's a general progression and uh Yeah. It's just kind of one of those games you can play anytime with anyone.

5:05 Let me go by number of

5:07 Yeah, it's number one. Got to be right.

5:09 Yeah.

5:10 Yep. It's your number one play game of the year.

5:11 My number one played game of the year. This is Zenith and I played it 80 times as a result as the the time of this recording.

5:18 80 times. the power of BGA and

5:20 I'm in two games of it right now and two lined up. I love this game.

5:23 I also love Zenith a lot. Uh Mikey likes it slightly more than I do, but we both really really enjoy it. I also don't play BJ or else I'd probably play it a lot more, but I actually just played it the other day cuz I showed it to Jimmy. Um and yeah, Zenith is a great two. Well, you can play in teams, but mostly it's two-player one uh tugofwar game.

5:40 Yeah, you are trying to basically get control uh the influence over these planets. So, you're going to be doing this by playing cards on your turn, and you can play them in one of three ways. One is to influence the planets and pull them in your direction. If you pull it off of your end of the You're selling that, too. I'm really feeling the weight of that

5:58 of your uh of your opponent over there.

6:01 Hire me, Hollywood.

6:02 Do it. Just like Flip Tunes. Uh if you pull a planet off on your side of the building of your player of your side of the board, the table, uh you get to collect that planet and you can win one of three ways. If you have three of the same color planet, four different color planets or five planets of any type in any combination will win you the game.

6:19 So, you can play cards uh down, they will always pull, they're always from one of the five planet types. So, they'll go in a column uh and then make future cards you play of that color cheaper. Uh and there's all sorts of effects that can happen. They give you more money, get the special resources, zeniththeium, which you can use to go up these kind of tech tracks to trigger a bunch of effects. There's the reason I like this game is there's just so many fun little effects and little combos you can pull off. And so every game is slightly different in how you try to go about uh you know tugging these planets in your direction. There's certain ones that allow you to pull two of them that are adjacent to each other and on and on and on. You can also again play cards for their suit. There's animals, robots, and humans to go up these tech tracks. And what's cool about that is there's five levels to each one with an escalating cost. But if I'm, you know, on the first level, I do whatever its effect is. If I come back to that track and I go to the second level, I do the new effect and I do the first level again and then if I do the third on and on. So it has this kind of cascading it gets really powerful

7:15 effects and stuff becomes very powerful. So yeah, that's the reason I like this game is there's so many cards. You're always going to build a sort of different method for trying to win the game. I like that there's three different win conditions. So if you have two of the orange planet, I'm like, "Okay, well I got to pay attention to that. I can't let you get that, you know, because that would be an instant instant game over." There's a lot of fun stuff like that to kind of create a fun heads up experience.

7:39 Yeah, it's really really good. And again, like Mike said, it's it's all about the card play and the the bevy of abilities. And there's a really good play area that kind of shows you all the different ones. Like you said, there's ones where it's like, oh, you get money. One, you get zenithium, which is how you bump up those tech tracks. There's ones that just allow you to draw more cards and put them into your tableau,

7:55 transfer cards from your opponent's side.

7:57 You can like make them discard cards or you can take cards from them and put them over here. And so it's like and it's just this constant tugofwar and like that. Oh, Mike's gonna get that teal. Screw it. I'll let him have it. I need to be working on this. Like, oh no, Mike now has two teals. I need to make sure he does not get this third one. And Mike's going for that, but he's kind of bluffing because he's actually trying to get four different ones over here. It's [snorts] really, really fun. There's tons and tons of cards. It's got really great um art. It's kind of like simple art, but very colorful and kind of striking. The little pieces are the Rewood pieces that like uh CGE uses and so because you can license that from CGE. So, it's got like really nice components and stuff. components but more eco-friendly.

8:34 Yeah, it's just it's just really really good. If you like kind of tugofwar games but want one like simpler and easier than you know like a big one like Watergate or something like that. Um Zenith is uh very very good. And Jeff, if you're watching, you're wrong.

8:48 You know what? Thunderworks has had a good year for games not in their normal universe.

8:53 Yeah, they their normal universe is like the roleplayer universe.

8:55 Role player lockup, those kind of things. This is going to be Citizens of the Spark, which is another Thunder War games. Flip Tunes, if you didn't know, was also Thunderworks Games, which is also games that are not set in their universe. But two bangers.

9:06 Yeah. So, this one is uh

9:08 No one's talking about this one. Is it just me?

9:10 No. I I mean, we don't we don't

9:13 Maybe other content creators or people out there are talking about I feel like I hear

9:16 I feel like no one

9:16 know people talk about it and this game is so good.

9:19 Yeah, maybe we're wrong, but we haven't heard many people I've never read it. Uh so, Citizen of the Spark is a game uh where you're going to have a number of different animals. It's like an animal world. uh a number of different animal types that are all going to have a certain effect and you're going to kind of create this this big draw deck of certain animal types and that will change from game to game.

9:39 Uh and you are going to be then putting out uh kind of a grid of cards in the middle that are going to be different kind of depot for you to draft cards from. Yeah.

9:49 Uh and on your turn, you're going to pick one of the depots. You're going to collect all those cards. There might be like little sparks on them which are points and stuff. if you'll collect any of those and then you're going to uh put them out in your tableau in front of you and then choose a card type to activate. Exactly.

10:04 Uh go ahead from there. But yeah, so so basically you put on your tableau and then you can choose, you don't have to, you can choose one of these kind of cards to activate because you'll stack them all together. So if you have like the farmers, you'll stack all your farmers together, um your scouts together, all that kind of stuff. And you'll be like, "Okay, I'm gonna activate my farmers." And then basically every single card is for the most part going to do something when you activate. There's a couple that don't activate. Uh they're kind of just defensive cards, but most of them activate. And almost all of them, if not all of them, are basically the activation they have is going to be stronger depending on how many cards you have in copies of that.

10:37 Usually up to three. So basically once you have three like farmers in there, you're going to get more spark, which is points in the game uh than if you had only one or two in there when you activate them. So, I would activate my farmer, which will give you a certain amount of spark depending on how many of these like little kind of leaf symbols you have because they're farmers in the rest of your tableau. Yeah, exactly.

10:59 And the cool thing is is then going around the table, anyone else who has a farmer can then activate their farmer as well. And then after everyone has activated who wants to, if you activate, you then have to lose one of those cards. So, you're get you're trying to get like three strength to get the max, but then you will have to lose one of those cards. There are these kind of orange cards which are mean cards which are going to be doing stuff to other people. There are like purple defensive cards or some cards that have like endgame scoring, but most of them you're going to be activating in the game to gain yourself spark and stuff like that. But the thing is is you play with a certain amount of these characters depending on the player count, but it's usually around eight to 10 of them. And there's like 10 cards of each in each kind of like animal type.

11:40 But the thing is is there's like 35 cards in the deck. There's like some promos. I think it goes up to like 33 or 35. And you can just there's in the back of the rub book, there's suggested ways to play like, hey, you want a really interactive like mean game, choose these 10. Oh, you want like a not really interactive at all game, choose these. You want like a simple game, choose this. D or there's a randomizer card for every single animal in the game. You can just shuffle it up, grab a way to probably play.

12:05 It's really fun. The thing about this game recently, and this is kind of what pushed it up even higher for me um recently is I've played this game a couple times, but I've only ever played the suggested starter one because we were always like showing new people, playing a new game. So, we're like, "Oh, let's just start with the new one." So, I did that recently. We were playing with our budd buddies Charlie and Keith and we played the kind of starter game

12:26 and then after that we wanted to play again. So, it was just like I was like, you know what? Let's just randomize it. So, I did. I just grabbed like 10 random cards and the game was wildly different.

12:34 Yeah, that's cool.

12:35 Wild. There's like an executioner card that like when you play it, you like kill other people's cards and stuff. It was just like wild. And so the thing is there's so much variety in this game because the makeup of cards and how they kind of work off each other and synergize off each other is going to really really change up the game. And the fact that there's like 30 and you only ever play with like eight to 10 to 12 depending on the player count.

12:54 It's so the art's really really good. I don't know. I just can't speak highly enough about this game. I love it so much and like I just feel like no one's talking about I feel like it went completely under the It was at a Kickstarter and it's Kickstarter funded, so like it did fine. But I don't know. It just feel I feel like this is such a good game that's like pretty easy to get into. Yeah. Has so much variety.

13:12 Cool art. Like kind of almost

13:14 I don't know. I just feel like it's going under the radar. Maybe I'm wrong, but it just feels like that was for me.

13:17 Shouldn't be, but I like it.

13:21 Was this our most anticipated game ever? You think

13:24 it was up there, man? It was really up there. This is going to be Lord of the Rings Fate Fate of the Fellowship, a pandemic system game.

13:31 Yeah, it goes to show it's been a really good year considering this is as low as it is. Uh, and some of this might be there's always a little bit of recency bias and stuff that man, Fate of the Fellowship is so g dang good, it's really fun. So, this is a game that's based on Pandemic, so it has it's a cooperative game and you are the free people. So, we're going to be playing as two characters um and moving around and using their abilities and stuff. and we're in Middle Earth uh and trying to complete certain missions along the way to destroying the one ring.

14:03 Um and of course Sauron, which is the game itself, is going to be uh you know, mustering troops, moving on these sort of um printed pathways,

14:13 uh trying to interfere, take over. There's Naz Ghoul searching for Frodo in the ring. They do.

14:17 Um and you're trying to to complete your goals before you run you fall to despair. You before you run out of hope.

14:23 Run out of hope. It's it's a bummer when that happens.

14:25 Yeah. Um, so for us, uh, pandemic was our gateway into this hobby.

14:30 Yeah. Oh, Lord of the Rings shirt as well.

14:32 I'm wearing Yeah. Lord of the Rings. You see, I'm wearing green, which is like, uh, the Elvin cloak, so we're both

14:36 basically the exact same thing. Yeah.

14:37 Uh, so Pandemic was the game that got us into the hobby. That kind of cooperative epic save the world experience was really cool. We grew up and are still big Lord of the Rings nerds. So this is like a perfect marriage coming together. You're like, "Oh, we're going to save Middle Earth." Like, yeah, that's a great goal.

14:53 Yeah. Uh, it's our two favorite things, board games and Lord of the Rings.

14:56 Yeah. So, we've uh really enjoyed uh uh this one. I feel like the pandemic system of games has like really evolved in cool ways over the years with the different versions they've done. And one thing that's cool about this version versus original Pandemic where you're collecting cards to be able to turn in, you know, more of a set collection thing. Turn in five of the same color to cure a disease. Here, the cards that you're getting are going to be used throughout the game for their icons.

15:21 They're just like tools.

15:22 They're kind of tools.

15:23 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

15:23 Sometimes you want to save certain, you know, some of them up, uh, you know, the the search, the kind of sneak symbols in particular to get Froto where he's going safely.

15:31 But like these are tools you're going to be playing. So it feels more active in that way where I'm playing these cards. It's not just the event cards that are being played that way. There are also those.

15:39 Um,

15:39 well, it's just really variable because like you always have to destroy the one ring, but you have a certain amount of missions you have to do. One of which is always destroy the ring, but the other three,

15:49 there's like 30 of them in the game. And it's cool especially if you know like the books and stuff like that. There's like one where like Aragorn has to go to the stone of Eric to get um to get like the undead army and so that when they go to Pelagri or stuff like that. So it's like that's one that's like so in that situation you have to play with Aragorn and Aragorn has to go over here to do this thing. You're like oh that makes sense. It's cool. And those massively change up how you're playing the game. It changes up who maybe you want to play with.

16:13 And then of course you have to destroy the ring. Yeah. Uh, and there's also a ton of characters, um, as there are in the books and stuff, but you won't be playing with all of them in any one game. So, it feels very, uh, like a lot of variety in a very familiar world.

16:25 Uh, and the kind of cooperative experience from Pandemic that we know and love.

16:29 It's so good. Oh my god,

16:30 it's really, really fun. I really like it. Well done production. There's like a cool

16:35 um, uh, dice tower.

16:39 Barador searches in Barador and stuff. There's these cool Naz minis on stand. They're flying around. Um, it's it's really really fun.

16:47 Really really fun.

16:48 I was happy because I was like when it got announced I was like out of my mind excited.

16:52 Well, because you didn't get a chance to play. We have we I just need to play it. But like you're talking about the pandemic system games have been really interesting lately. But it's like the World of Warcraft one was cool, but like the Star Wars Clone Wars one is really fun and then now this one's incredible. So I'm like I'm really interested to see like

17:07 cuz it was always kind of like PC Iberia which is still very pandemic. It's like now they're getting more. It's still kind of the B same base.

17:14 They're playing around with it.

17:15 They're playing around with it and it's been really fun to see what they do. And so I hope Matt Leen and uh Zman continues this trend because it's been really good. But Fellowship is just unreasonably good.

17:26 So here's the thing. At the end of the year, we always spend a couple weeks, it's been the last couple weeks, basically trying to play as many 2025 or 2024, whatever games we possibly can because sometimes there's a game that we're like, I think I'm going to like this one. And we're like, we need to see if it's going to be on the list. and Covenant. It was that one for us.

17:43 Yeah, we both uh got a chance to play this uh in the last couple months.

17:48 Um and so much fun.

17:50 Yeah, this was one that was also like highly anticipated cuz they

17:54 released a cover for Covenant a while back. Remember showing up in the hotness. It looked cool and stuff and then we didn't really hear anything about it and then it showed up on the hotness again but had new art.

18:04 Yeah, I think people didn't really like the cover

18:06 and like and I think D'Ve had kind of reworked some of that stuff. Uh, and now the game is out and so we were able to try it. Um, and it's super duper fun. This is a game where you are uh different dwarven clans and you are

18:18 uh digging out a mountain uh to gain resources like myithril and iron and stuff like that. There are as you're kind of exploring this mountain, you might be revealing monsters. You probably will be revealing monsters. Yeah.

18:31 Uh so you can go and fight monsters. You can build buildings out onto the map for various scoring purposes. Uh, and then there's also some kind of additional types of scorings and stuff you can unlock through kind of forge abilities and give yourself flexibility of actions. Now, this game,

18:48 uh, which we've seen a trend of recently, we'll talk about this, this trend again later this list.

18:54 Yeah.

18:54 Um, of a thing where it's like you only have a certain amount of turns. Like in this game, you're going to have 12 turns.

18:58 Yep.

18:58 You have these dwarves that are all level one to begin. They're pretty weak. Uh, but you're gonna have the ability to upgrade them to level two, three, and four, which are going to give you basically more action points to use when you take an action.

19:09 And then there's also all sorts of like little things you can do to modify to, you know, rev up the engine of what you're building to get more out of each of those individual actions you take. So, it's like I'm only getting 12 turns,

19:26 but I'm getting more than 12 turns of stuff done because of the way that you kind of build your engine. And that's something that I think you and I have really

19:34 enjoyed in the last couple years.

19:36 Squeeze out as much as you possibly can.

19:38 It's a really fun thing to try to do. And this game gives you like a million little things you can do to create like a really kind of juicy fun engine to then kind of maximize your game.

19:49 Yeah, it's really good. And it it I've played this game a couple times now and like both uh the times that I've played it I've played very different games and the people I was playing against were always playing very different games than what I was playing. Yeah.

20:00 And it was always really competitive. So it's like you can just go in a bunch of different ways because because you only have 12 turns and because there is that kind of chaining together and comboing actions but there's a limit to that. So you can't really do everything. So you kind of have to choose like I want to the main thing you want to do is I try and strengthen your dwarfs because that allows you to do more and more and more. But on your actions, which are like tools, one's like a pickaxe. That's like the dig action. You can put inlays on them, which is like jewels that you're putting on it because dwarves like to bling out their stuff. And that inlay might allow you to immediately kill an enemy when you do that action. Even if it's not the fighting action, it's like, oh, I just get to kill an orc when I do this. Okay, cool. So, that means maybe I want to start getting some more fighting stuff going on. It's like there's so many different ways you can mess with this system to just play it out in a different way. It's got like really really great components, really great art. I love dwarves. Mike loves dwarves.

20:51 We just love them as like just like a fantasy race.

20:54 Yeah.

20:54 And it's just it's cool. I love the upgrading of your actions, choosing what new actions you want to forge for yourself to give you more of that flexibility. How can you squeeze as much as you possibly can? There's like three tracks in the game that you're trying to bump up. But again, you're not really going to be able to do all of them a ton most likely. So, it's like it's just that efficiency puzzle of like how do I get as much as humanly possible out of these 12 turns. There's like goals that will happen at the end of every era, which is every four turns. You can go for those and stuff. It's just it's really really really good. Yeah, there's just a ton of stuff to do and uh I can't wait to like keep trying different combinations of like actions and engine builds and stuff and I feel like there's a lot to explore. I dig that mountain.

21:40 Ting ting ting. So, this one's kind of interesting because again over on our Patreon, you'll have our kind of true list where I put stuff where Mike puts stuff because we actually kind of put this, it was in our both of our top 10, but it was kind of on opposite ends. So, right now it's in the middle and this is Galactic Cruise.

21:56 Galactic Cruise number five. Yeah, right there in the middle. Uh really fun game fans of

22:02 uh Lasera games and stuff and things like Combine EV and stuff. And Galactic Cruise is a game

22:07 very much inspired by

22:08 very much inspired by uh those games and even has Eno2 art. So really uh even has the look of a sort of

22:16 uh this is a game where you are working for a company that puts on these uh these galactic cruises out into space to visit, you know, planets far away and stuff like that. and you are uh taking actions to basically prepare, build these ships, uh advertise to guests and get them on their cruise to be able to kind of generate points and

22:35 uh and become, you know, I guess head of the company or at least middle management, reach

22:40 at least middle management.

22:41 Um and so uh this is a game where, you know, it's a big kind of resource management game. uh getting stuff prepped, trying to maximize uh your resources and your action economy to uh to again kind of go for certain goals and stuff. There's a lot of things you can do to score points in this game, in-game, at the end of the game.

23:02 There's so much

23:02 the types of ship segments you build. Um each ship that you have will have a kind of scoring condition that will trigger every time it launches and it'll be for a whole wide range of different things uh that you might be doing in the game. you want to try to like build the ships that are going to be, you know, closer aligned with the stuff you've been doing. Uh there's company goals that you're trying to race for. Uh you are um

23:28 gosh, you're you're kind of

23:30 going out to different planets and sort of upgrading the value of those planets, which unlocks special powers for you,

23:35 game breaking rules, and on and on and on. This is one that we uh really enjoy because it's a generous

23:41 Yes.

23:41 game. Uh, it's a game that, you know, it's a big old Euro game. No doubt about it. Um, but I feel like there's certain, you know, things that are a little easier to acquire than, uh, than other games of its kind of weight level might sometimes be. I feel like it's a little easier to get resources sometimes or to, you know, uh, get get [clears throat] ads together and and and do these things that you need to kind of fuel the actions you take. Uh, and I appreciate that because there's plenty to think about.

24:13 Definitely don't.

24:13 It's got a little bit of everything. [clears throat] It's got, you know, worker placement. There's like worker bumping where you can bump people out. That's a good thing. For me, it's like

24:20 there's resource management. There's you're getting these ship part. There's so much stuff you can do. And how you choose to do that is again kind of up to you. And how you want to do it. You can have one big ship that you just kind of launch over and over and over again. You have a bunch of bunch of ships try and do that. Though I will say if you get a ship and you don't launch it, you will lose points for that which is not good. So, you can't just acquire ships for no reason. It's It's very very good. It's really really fun. We recently played uh we've done a playthrough for it and we recently did um got to play with a couple of the expansions which I really really enjoyed.

24:51 Really like the expansions.

24:51 Kind of jump start you a little bit, just change stuff up a little bit. I really enjoyed the expansions.

24:56 Um I'm curious what the next expansion is bringing as well with the achievements where you're kind of unlocking stuff as you go. Yeah, this game is great. If you like big crazy euros, this is a big crazy euro. Uh, great art, great production, and just an all round banger.

25:11 Don't tell me theme doesn't matter.

25:13 Oh, baby.

25:13 If you're one of those theme doesn't matter people, you're wrong.

25:16 You're wrong. It does.

25:16 I would have bought this game off of cover alone.

25:19 Absolutely. A name. It's called Moon Colony Blood Bath and it lives up to its name.

25:23 It's called Moon Colony Bloodbath. Try and think of a crazier name. You can't.

25:27 It's amazing. It's got like a sentient KitchenAid on the cover. How good.

25:31 It's so good. This is such a good game in a very kind of campy

25:36 uh retro sci-fi world uh where we live on the moon

25:41 uh and we're building buildings and stuff and thriving at least to start the game and we have a ton of population and you are trying to maintain your population as best you can for as long as you can as the game continually finds ways to kick you in the nards and make life

26:00 just kill you kill and your people,

26:02 kill you and your people.

26:03 Um, so basically uh various things are going to start coming up that are going to start wiping out your population.

26:10 Um, there's going to be uh robots that come out that are maybe going to do something cool for you, but they're definitely always going to kill some amount of people.

26:18 Yeah.

26:19 Uh, you have different events that are causing accidents to happen and on and on and on. And the things that I really like about this game is you're going through this. There's a central deck of like events and different things happening and you're going to flip over a card and then everyone is for the most part going to be affected by whatever is on that card.

26:39 Uh, and there's four points in that deck of cards where you're going to be able to take an action. It's all kind of simultaneous play. And this is going to allow you to gain some resources, build a new building cards and stuff which is going to be essential, you know, get some money and stuff. But what's really cool is a lot of the building cards you build are going to have bonus actions that happen when you take a certain action type. So the mining action to get money, for example, it's always going to give you four money. That's great. But if I have three buildings that have the mine action, I'll get to trigger all of those as well when I do the mining, you know, its associated action. So there's a great sense of engine building

27:14 in this game. And you can get an engine up and running pretty quick and easy, which is going to be essential because that engine's going to get torn all to hell.

27:20 It sure as hell is. Uh it's going to get ripped apart. Um you have no every you're you're always like I feel like I'm going to be fine.

27:28 You're not going to be fine.

27:29 You are not going to be fine.

27:30 You're not going to be fine.

27:31 Uh but that's like kind of the fun of it is that

27:34 you're going to be losing this engine. Uh you know, but each building you build has a population value. So you're also it's more people that live there. So the more buildings you can build, the more people you have and you want to have people because if you ever lose all your people, you're out.

27:48 Um it's just really fun. like the theme carries so much and it's a fun

27:53 it's a fun engine

27:54 uh engine building game as well

27:56 and it's why it's why theme and art and all those things matter because it's like the theme of this one is so silly that even though your stuff's getting ripped apart you just can't help but start laughing because of how it's like oh this robot does this thing also it kills seven people because of because it's just a rogue robot and all the robots are rogue and like all the art is very like pulpy like

28:15 you know and so when all this horrible stuff happen everyone's just like

28:19 it's just very very funny. But I think the main take away the art, take away the theme of it. The reason why I feel like this game works where at least for me and for Mike as well, a game like Empire's End really did not work. It was one of my least favorite games I ever played. I love you John Declar so much. But just absolutely dislike that game so much. And the reason is is because the first half of the game, a couple bad things are happening. Couple bad things are happening, but you're able to do stuff. You're able to get your engine up going. Yeah. You're able to get your engine going and work it for a little while. You're like, "Oh, it's working. It's working. It's working." And around halfway through the game, actually, not even maybe like 3/4 of the way through the game, it just starts tanking hard. But you've had time to play with that engine. You've had time to build that engine where I feel like a lot of other games where it's like, "Oh, this is a game where bad stuff is happening to you constantly. They just start out kicking you in the teeth." And this one honestly doesn't. It starts off with a little jab here and there, but for the most part, you're able to build your engine, you're able to work your engine, you're able to do stuff, and then you start getting kicked to the teeth. But at that point, it's just fine cuz you're like, well, you knew it was going to happen. And at least I got to build this engine. And that part of the game is very, very interesting. Whereas I feel like other games, it's just like, here's your empire. Oh, by the way, it's just burning to the ground right now. And it's like

29:41 it feels inevitable and there's like not really any way to

29:44 Yeah. And you have a lot of agency in this one where it's like, "Oh, you ran out of population tokens. That means you now have to discard a building, which again has population, but you get to choose what you discard." And not to mention, a lot of the cards give you something when they get discarded.

29:57 You already have a really cool ability that happens when they get blown up. So you're like, "Well, that's sucks."

30:00 You're like, "Whatever." And so you pay with that card and any excess population comes back as tokens. And so it's just like,

30:06 I don't know. It just feels so much better than a lot of these other kind of games where you're just getting kicked right in the stomach over and over and over again. It's just fun and campy and I absolutely adore this game.

30:17 Yeah. The other thing, the last thing we'll say about this one that I think really helps with this is that it's almost entirely entirely simultaneous play. Yes. So the time of game is like 45 minutes, maybe an hour. Yeah.

30:29 So it doesn't go on and on and on and on and you lose all your people. You get to enjoy 45 minutes of like

30:36 peace and prosperity, 15 minutes of chaos, death, and doom and then you're out. And it's very that that kind of the cadence of that is really uh really fun and dynamic each time and everyone yeah I can't help but kind of giggle like how horrible things are going at the end and like

30:52 you know once one person gets wiped out the game ends. Whoever has the most population wins but it's always like I have five and I won you know and it's like that's awesome. It's just it's just a great fantastic execution of theme and mechanisms and uh that really makes the whole thing go.

31:11 Now we're going to talk about the other game that Mike kind of alluded to with like the whole point is in this game you have 11 turns and you're just trying to do as much you possibly can. This is going to be speak easy.

31:19 Speak easy. A vital seral unlike Galactic Cruise which is a fake [clears throat] and a phony. Uh this is a game where we are in the roaring 20s uh deep in the prohibition era. Played

31:31 this game the other night.

31:32 Uh we did. And uh of course we're not letting the prohibition era get us down. We're out here running hooch hooch. Uh buying liquor, selling it around to our different uh speak easyies, nightclubs, and casinos out avoiding the cops, avoiding rival mobsters trying to push their way into the city uh as we kind of try to dominate Manhattan. So uh this is a game. Yeah, you have 11 turns. which is a worker placement aspect of the game. You're going to go uh over to one of the locations on the board. Uh take, you know, the various actions. There usually be two or three things you do on a turn. Uh and you're going to through that uh build buildings out onto the board, protect those buildings with your family members, maybe uh buy rum and deliver uh you know, whiskey and you know, whatever various forms of alcohol to your different locations, sell that for uh money, which are your points in the game. You're both spending and gaining money, and you hopefully gain more than you spend.

32:30 Uh you're not going to do very well. Uh you could rob uh rob the boat boats that are going around the island. Uh on and on and on all bunch of stuff with really cool like kind of card play

32:41 as well as you sort of just try again to extract as many things as you can out of ultimately 11

32:48 Yeah. 11 turns.

32:49 Uh big turns, but 11 turns.

32:51 Yeah. Because there's kind of like four there's a lot of stuff you can do in the game. There's basically four main actions that kind of run the whole system. That's going to be

32:59 making hooch, making alcohol.

33:01 Yep. delivering that alcohol, moving it around the board with your trucks to your various buildings, selling that alcohol for money, and then protecting those buildings because if there's a police officer in that district with your buildings, and your building isn't protected by a family member, that building doesn't exist. You can't sell hooch, you can't produce hooch, it won't score you any money at the end of the game. It doesn't exist. So, those are kind of the four main actions. There are four different colors of cards, and each one of those cards, like the green card is the movement card. Whenever you play a green card, you'll always get to do the movement action. So you can do like say the movement action through the cards, but you can also do it in a bunch of other different ways. One of the main one of the spots on the worker placement part of the board also allows you to do a movement or it allows you to play a green card which will allow you to do a movement. There are these city tokens you can get and those city tokens uh you can go to a different spot to use those city tokens and those might allow you to play a green card or do the movement action. You can get these helper cards and that might allow you to do a movement action. So there's these kind of main actions along with other things like building and a bunch and like rum running and stealing from the boats, all these kind of things. But those four main actions and kind of everything else even

34:10 you can do in all of these different ways. And so how you decide to do that and how you try to maximize your efficiency puzzle

34:19 is really up to you and is also going to change from game to game to game because from game to game, you know, the mobsters are always going to be coming into town. The police are going to be showing up in these different districts, but which districts they show up when is going to be different every single game.

34:34 Yeah. Which area is going to start off as hot spots where it's safe to kind of build, they're going to be wildly

34:38 it's going to be wildly different. And every single time I played this game, I've played very, very differently. And again, the opponents have also played very, very differently. Mike and I played the other night and like I built my stills, which is where you make your alcohol. And I was like churning out alcohol in there. I had a lot of movement. I was moving around to my various buildings selling it. Mike never once built his stills. Mike never once made a lick alcohol. He just kept buying it from boats or stealing it from boats and Mike ended up winning.

35:03 Did a mix of both. So, it's one of those things like you can do the play this game in totally different ways and just and that efficiency. You're going to have a couple turns that are just like bonkers big and fun.

35:13 Awesome.

35:13 And then just I mean in terms of theme and art integration, it's maybe the best like of all time.

35:20 For our money, you know, the best in the game uh in terms of artists for board games. Uh, and this is his best work.

35:27 This is his best work. Yeah, I agree. I think it's so cool. It's so jazzy, so

35:32 uh, in the 20 mobstery, like all those kind of motifs and things you expect from that era in the movies we've seen and stuff like that. It just feels just really vibrant. The art is so awesome. And the production, of course,

35:45 uh, Eagle Griffin doesn't mess around. Uh, is awesome. And it's, uh,

35:50 just really, really fun to do. So, yeah, this is, um,

35:53 honestly up there. People have have asked already uh with Speak Easy like where's it rank in the alltime laseros and stuff and I probably put it number one right now above all the others. So that's how much we enjoy it and it's number three on our list.

36:06 This game for at least for me was my number one game of the year for most of the year. And the fact that it's still sitting here at number two is really really good. This is going to be Unstoppable which is a solo game actually.

36:16 Solo or two player?

36:17 Can't play two player. It's technically in the solo series but I actually think it's better as a two-player game.

36:22 I know. I haven't played a two-player. solo and stuff and it's awesome. This is from John Declair and he uses uh his kind of uh card crafting system where you're going to have these sleeved cards and you're going to be uh adding upgrades and things to them. But what's really fun about this one is that every card you uh start the game with and gain on one side is going to have, you know, your kind of hero card, you know, whatever thing you're using to attack the baddies and stuff. the backside of every card is going to be those baddies that you have to fight. So, that kind of is cool in a couple ways. Number one, uh it's kind of a deck building game, but you're not getting like I get five cards per turn and then I discard those and get five new cards. Every round you're going to have a certain amount of bad guys out in front of you. Yep.

37:08 And you're going to use the cards in your hand to fight those bad guys. Anytime you defeat somebody, you collect that card and flip it over into your hand. And now it's one of your good cards. And that's how you actually get cards into your hand. you'll get one new card per round,

37:22 but you need to actually do those to get your card draws. And so it just creates a really interesting kind of rhythm with,

37:27 okay, what am I going to use and and how am I going to do this to be able to get as many of these cards in my hand to kind of keep keep playing

37:35 um uh as you go. And then you can also upgrade and kind of modify cards to make them stronger. But it comes at a cost.

37:43 It does come at a cost because on the other side is enemies. And when you upgrade your cards, it gives you like more attack or allows you to get more money,

37:51 get more actions or money or whatever. Almost always, I think always, but maybe there's a couple that don't. It is also going to upgrade the enemy on the other side. So, it kind of solves the problem that a lot of these kind of card crafting games have where you'll have like one or two cards or a couple cards that are just so so good and the rest of your deck is kind of like eh. And this solves that because as you make these really cool cards, you are then going to make the other side of the card significantly worse. And so there's this this it's kind of this selfbalancing system because you will eventually reform your deck and it's coming back as an enemy. And so it's one of those things where it's like it really really balances out well. And one thing that's cool about the game is there's no hidden information. So, like when you buy one of these upgrades, you you know what the enemy is going to get. It will tell you on there what the enem is going to get.

38:45 So, it's not like it's a big surprise. So, you're like, "Okay, this is good for me, but oh man, that means that means the enemy on the other side this is getting two extra damage.

38:54 I think that's worth it. I'm going to go ahead and do it." When the enemies are out in your battlefield, you can see like your card is a little bit bigger than the enemy cards. And the reason is is because [clears throat] at the very top of the card, there's a little tab that tells you what's on the other side of the card. So you know what card that is that that's yours and you can even at one point just look up and look at it. There's no like you you don't don't get to know. You just have to kill the enemy and hope it's a good card. Sometimes you're like, "Oh no, I need to focus on this enemy

39:20 cuz I need to get this card cuz then I can play this card and kill two more things which will give me these cards." So it's like it's a good solo game in the sense where it's like you can really plan things out. You have almost completely perfect information about what you're doing. So you're really trying to do it well. You're going up against a boss every single um game. You're basically trying to get through to that boss, defeat the boss. There's a couple of them in the game. There's like four different like starting heroes. There's a whole bunch of different cards.

39:48 It's just fascinating. I'm in

39:51 infinitely fascinated by this game. Agreed.

39:53 It's a great solo game, but it's also a really good two-player game because the two-player game is basically 99% the solo game with one difference. And the difference is is Mike and I are each playing our game. Normally I'm fighting my stuff, he's fighting her stuff. We can't really interact. But the main difference is is that you can attack stuff in the other person's area because one thing that can happen this game sometimes is just you get a bad draw, which happens in any card game, right? You get a bad draw and you can just get walloped pretty quickly. So in two players, it's nice because you have a little bit of a safety net because the other person like, "Oh, do you have extra attack? Can you please kill this thing cuz it's going to hit me for a ton right now." And then when Mike kills that thing, I still get my own card. It's not like you're taking cards from each other. So it just gives you a little bit of cooperation, a little bit of a fail safe that I think makes it work a little bit better. But ultimately, Unstoppable is one of those games I'm like, expand the ever loving hell out of it. Please give me every single card, John D, you can think of.

40:51 Give me every single boss, every single hero. I will buy every single one of it. I

40:55 just bought the expansion recently. Haven't had a chance to try, but very excited to.

40:58 It's a new standalone set that you can com that'll be cross compatible, everything I think coming out next year. So yeah, I hope that they just

41:04 oh my god give us so good more and more and more.

41:06 Yeah, if you like solo games, give it a shot.

41:10 Number one time, baby.

41:11 That's it, baby. What is it, Mikey?

41:13 This one is uh for my money far and away my favorite Chip Theory game. This is Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era.

41:22 Betrayal of the Second Era.

41:23 Uh this is uh the based on the Elder Scrolls video game series. The whole universe. Yeah. and and uh it's a cooperative uh game where you are going to be going around to the different regions of uh

41:35 Tamriel. There we go. Tamreel and stuff. You might be in Skyrim or or Mororrow and stuff in different areas. Uh and you're going to be kind of

41:45 how do you describe like completing quests or you're going on quest? You're on a guild quest. you're you're going to be interacting with different guilds in the game that are going to have different

41:55 um kind of give you different directions to go in on your journey. This really is kind of a game where like you as a party are going to kind of figure out how you are navigating the world, what kinds of things you're doing. A lot of times you're going to be fighting stuff because it is a most chip theory uh dice rolling uh good time of a game. Uh, but you're going to have different guilds and stuff are going to give you different focuses and stuff as you kind of go through three acts in a journey ending in a climactic big boss battle uh, and stuff. And so it's an interesting thing where it's a campaign game in a way, but it's it's limited in scope. Yeah.

42:30 Because you're going to play this three these, you know, three sessions. Uh, we've done these big long streams where you play it all in one, but probably you'll play like over a weekend or a couple weeks, a couple of game nights and stuff because each session is two, three hours. Um, but once you're done with that, then everything's completely resettable and there's all these different regions. Whatever guild you're in in whatever region is going to massively change the directions you go. So, you can kind of just keep playing over and over and over because you're going to have a very different path each time. And the way you build out your characters as well,

43:00 uh, is is going to be something that you kind of continually do throughout the game. Uh, and that'll gain you new types of dice to roll, different types of abilities. So much stuff.

43:09 Uh, different races and things and, um, it's just really about that kind of experience of like building through this journey.

43:16 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's it's it's

43:19 unreal. So, I mean, you can we have actually played an entirety of a session of this game twice on this channel. We've done it. So, if you want to watch like an eight hour stream of us playing this game, it's very, very fun. Uh, I've actually played this game like

43:33 six different times this year. I mean, it's it's really been a lot,

43:36 which is no small feat considering how

43:38 considering how big the game is. Yeah. It's it's so much fun. It's just And like Mikey said, like you're building out your character kind of like you do in Skyrim or Oblivion or whatever. It's like, oh, you're choosing a red guard, but you can then

43:50 make any you can anything you want. Yeah, you can be a destruction person. You could be like two-handed weapons. And it's the same here where it's like you're getting these skill dice like bow or two-handed or heavy armor or destruction or illusion or whatever. and you're getting these dice and you're kind of investing your XP into those things, getting more and more of dice. So, it's completely up to you how you build your character and you end up building completely different characters where you're really, really good at these kinds of things, but not good at these things. So, hopefully someone else can kind of compliment you. You can be sneaky. You can do all different kind of stuff. Every single guild quest is different. And on top of that, the guild quests are kind of like, hey, by this day, because you're playing days, by this day, you need to be at this point to do this fight.

44:36 But in between there, you can kind of do whatever you want.

44:39 Yeah. You can go to different towns. You can go and

44:41 go do fights, try to upgrade stuff, do whatever. It's up to you. So, it's very generous in the sense where it's like it's kind of like sandboxy with like way points where it's like you have these points you kind of need to get to, but other than you can kind of do whatever you want. can build however you want. You can go wherever you want. You can buy whatever you want. All this different kind of stuff. It's just so good. And like you get so awesome by the end of it when you're in like the third session and all your skills are just like maxed out and you're just rolling all these freaking dice and stuff.

45:12 It's like I honestly don't know if I've ever had more fun playing a board game than I do in like the third sesh of an Elder Scrolls campaign. It's just I'm having so much fun with this character that I've built, with all this stuff that I can do, the choices that you make. This is kind of like Mike's I I like Too many Bones more than Mike does, but like you've kind of hit the nail on the head with what it is. Like this is kind of what I wanted Too Many Bones to be.

45:40 Yeah.

45:41 Whereas in one of the main things is it's like you have this cooldown track where at the beginning of every round of a fight, um you're going to get a certain amount of dice back equal to your cooldown amount. And so when you roll your dice and you do your cool stuff, they go into your cooldown track. They're not gone, which is different than most Too Many Bones dice, usually in Too many Bones, when you do a roll, those dice are then gone. And so it can feel really bad when you whiff a big roll in Too Many Bones. And that's just part of the game. It says on the rulebook, like it's part of the game, you're going to lose sometimes.

46:09 In this case though, they go to your cooldown tracks. You get to get them back. And so it just feels better where sometimes you just miss and feels less punishing.

46:17 Yeah. And it's just choosing what to roll when and do these things. It's just infinitely playable. I want to get every single thing ever released for this game.

46:25 Same.

46:26 It's just

46:26 We've had a chance to try some of the expansion content. It's awesome.

46:29 And it's just it's incredible. I like I said, I don't know if I've ever had more fun playing a board game than this game. It's like it's not my favorite game of all time. I can probably say that. But it's like

46:38 it's going to be up there. I feel like

46:39 it's going to be really high up there, honestly, because it's just

46:42 it's I'm I'm having so much fun when I'm playing it.

46:46 Yeah, I totally agree. And that's our list, everybody. So, the way we kind of came up with this was we each made a ranking of 20 games, which we'll talk about over on Patreon,

46:56 and then whatever was 20th got, you know, a couple points. Whatever our number one got a whole bunch more points, and from that, we sort of balanced out

47:03 uh and made this list uh of games. Uh but if you want to see, you know, us talk about some games that obviously didn't appear on this list or just figure out like where one of us sees one game versus the other one, over on Patreon, we'll talk about our top 20 games of the year. We both uh think this was a very good year for it always. Uh we're very lucky uh to be in this era of gaming. I think right when we kind of got in was when it like really hit the start taking off. Yeah.

47:27 This is our eighth top 10 of the year of the year. Man,

47:30 we're getting close to We usually do like a five years back kind of list. We're almost about to do 10. So quick.

47:36 If you've been here for a while, uh or if you're new, thank you for being here. Thank you for watching our channel. We really appreciate it. We love our jobs. We love what we get to do. Uh it's so fun to kind of do these end of the year lists where we're like, "Oh, we're through another year of of gaming and and this wonderful wonderful life and job that we get to live." So, thank you so much. If you're new here, please consider subscribing uh and check out the Patreon and stuff. Love you to death. I think that's going to be it.

47:55 That's it. Everyone take take a look at the games you played this year. Put your picks for the best in the year in the comments below. Uh and we'll see you all real soon. Bye.