Top 10 Board Games of 2021

0:06 welcome to allies or enemies i am sean and i am jess and today we are going to be sharing our top 10 games that have been published in 2021 and it's important this is not we're not saying that this is like objectively the top 10 games of the year this isn't like like board games scientists haven't got together scientists with all their stats yeah and like done the math on this this is just this is our favorite games of 2021 the ones we had the most fun playing um and this is also this is a combined list yeah so what we did is we both separately ranked them all and then we gave an average score to put it in our top 10 list but hopefully we'll be able to show you my score and sean's score at the same time so you can see our small differences that we may have had there are some big differences too and we should actually start with some honorable mentions because most of our top 10 stayed in the within like the combined top 10 but we had a few that didn't uh and a big one for me that was actually number five on my list and not even on jess's list at all is uh seven wonders architects and part of the reason that that was just on my list is uh we don't own it so i've just been playing it a ton on board game arena and if you haven't played it super fun it's just like a far quicker easier version of seven wonders and it's it's very fast it works really well at like three or four players and you can play a game in like 15 minutes

1:37 and there's just a lot to it with a nice simple system so hopefully we will get it at some point then i can win just over it's great i've played it only a couple times which is why i didn't put it on because i wanted to make sure all the games that we've had on our list we've played at least a few times and that's the only reason probably why it's not on my list i think everything else we've played like five times minimum yeah exactly and for mine my number 10 so it was the last one on my list but it squeaked out of that for yours is explorers which is just a really fun roll and right designed by phil walker harding and you cross off boxes for different terrains to try and collect keys and explore temples and it's so interchangeable with all the different combinations that you can make yeah it's a it's a great game i think it was 11 on my list like it just didn't make it but there's there are three strong phil walker hardings this year and one of them did make the list and maybe that's what kind of bumped it out um i won't tell you which one we'll just tell you when we get to it so should we jump right into it then yeah i guess let's and we're gonna be um kind of jumping back and forth but it's gonna be kind of the person who liked that game a little bit more is gonna is gonna start off and i think the first one was i had this one a little bit higher but our combined number 10 is welcome to the moon and welcome to this is a game that we loved we've played that so many times by now yeah it's our favorite wool and white is the original welcome to yeah it's

3:08 fantastic and then they made welcome to new las vegas and that they tried to throw a bit too much into that it didn't quite work for us and then this one i think really nailed how you do a sequel so it's got kind of a campaign to it um and it is do i have it i do have a straight great i have the box this is going to drive me crazy because i need the front and the back to line up and it doesn't right now and i don't know how that happened but um this is so it is a uh well i fixed this it's a campaign um game and it's got eight different games in it and it's really cool because they all have kind of the same general premise but they all play a little bit different but it's nice because none of them have so much like new las vegas do but they all just add like a little wrench each time to make it interesting yeah it was really surprising actually i think i had pretty low expectations for it and it really did blow us away and it does that same card system for welcome to if you're not familiar with it so three cards get flipped you pick a number and you pick an action for it so it does that but for each of the eight maps it's all a little bit different and it's not like learning a new game completely each time because the differences are so small it's amazing that they threw it all into this box they didn't like save any for future expansions they kind of just gave it all to us which is great they could have done half as much and i would have been happy like they could have done four of the eights um and i would have been thrilled with it but doing eight of them it's like guys it's like you're giving us too much

4:39 but we appreciate it and that is our number 10. so our number nine is oh yeah it's a big boy yeah sleeping gods uh so sleeping gods is by ryan lockett who does the art and the story and the mechanics of the game and we're we're really big fans we really like near near and far um and for this one it is a cooperative game campaign this is really is more like a choose your own adventure and so you are thrown into this world and it has some amazing world building and you follow clues as you go through the map which is all in the book so you can choose to go any direction you want and then as you're following the clues you you stumble across things that you weren't expecting and it's it's just delightful i love world building i love that kind of like d d type of feeling it has to it in terms of like encountering new things and then having to fight some stuff and it's gorgeous it looks so nice and i think this was higher well i know this was higher on your list than my list and it's really just because um i just i'm not that big in this sort of game like when i play video games i just play stuff that is going to take me 20 minutes or less uh and for board games well it's a bit more than that more like an hour but anything that's like a huge like an expensive rpg that's just never really grabbed my interest so like this is one of those ones where like board game scientists

6:10 would say this is excellent it's clearly an excellent made game i'm just not quite the audience for it yeah i could play it continuously for a week i think but i really like it when we get it out and play it so that's our number nine so our number eight over here is this one so this is lama land uh so it's by one of our favorite designers phil walker harding it is basically a combination of gingerbread house and baron park if you played either of his two other games um we love baron two of his like eight billion other games he has a lot of games it's not just two other games yes uh so it's tile placement you have all these polyamino shapes that you put on and then as you cover tiles that gives you certain resources and you trade in those resources for for llamas and i love that it uses llama meeples i i love animal meatballs and getting to put it out and anything that you're building throughout and left with something at the end is a huge plus for me it's one of the coolest things that you're left with at the end and i didn't even notice on the back it actually says designer of baron park and gingerbread house which i didn't notice before we had said because it really it's got that gingerbread house feel of building up and it's got the barren park feel of when you put things on the tiles then you get other things based on what you put it on um and i i still do like baron park a little bit more but i put this probably above gingerbread house um kind of in the middle of the tube but this one

7:40 definitely it's got that 3dness like you're saying and you're left with the coolest i think the thing you're left with at the end is the coolest of the three it's something you kind of want to take a photo of your llama land every time after you're done playing yeah absolutely i think it's a bit heavier than the other two as well which is nice to have that in the mix so kind of gingerbread house is lightest than baron park and then this one yeah it's not like heavy heavy it's just yeah it may be a tiny bit heavier yeah and so that was our number eight oh our number seven is this guy uh rise of korra or i even i have the boss here korra rise of an empire uh i think right is that the second avatar is it called rise of korra and it's called the legends of legend of korra this is nothing to do with that korra no um totally separate korra this is it's really it's a you're going up different tracks and it feels a little bit like um like a rolling right in what you're neither rolling nor writing to me a little bit because you are kind of comboing and you're slowly moving like the different tracks oh yeah you are rolling so you're just not writing yeah you roll a couple dice each time and then those dice pit values let you know what actions that you can do yeah which is maybe the trickiest part of the game um and i think i was worried about that at first because i'm notoriously a terrible roller but there's so there's so many ways to mitigate it that it's you barely notice it honestly and it is a pretty

9:10 it's a pretty simple system like it's fairly bare bones to what you're doing and you're just you're making a selection of two out of five six two six actions and then you're using those to build your empire to build your military um which can get you little like tokens that then help you build more cards and then the cards get you other bonuses so you're kind of comboing different things and just trying to trying to get points in different ways yeah it's asymmetric too so are your different is it greek empire yeah yeah yeah different greek empires so each of them have different strengths so we love asymmetry and that was a huge plus for it and it is one that does seem pretty simple on the surface but i feel like our score's been getting better and better the more we play it as we figure it out yeah and it's a cool theme too like the theme isn't definitely isn't intrinsic to it it could be anything but i like the theme i like that it's different ancient greek cities so i'm interested in that sort of thing so uh yes i was i was already kind of drawn to it and it looks great they did a really good job with production it looks wonderful yeah really nice i'd love i like anything with two with the double layer boards yeah and they do them well here so that is our number seven this is our number six is meadow yes um and so it's gorgeous it uses all of these cards that go out and then you have tokens that you put out to determine whether how far in on the

10:41 columns or rows that you can take those cards and you're building your tableau and you're building it out based on the the features of those cards and so you start with your forest floor and then to your first floor you might add trees or berries and it actually is kind of like scientifically accurate in that sense and then because the animals will only go on top of kind of other things that they might eat so you're looking to to what cards to build out and then how to get the cards that you need that can go on top to try and really get kind of all the levels of the ecosystem in play to maximize your points and it's got the great system of each turn you put out a little token on the side of the board and then that says which card you're taking so you can kind of block off cards and there's like a little extra strategy between that and the campfire board and the cards that you're putting down there's kind of a few levels of strategy and then the art is just beautiful like the cards look amazing yeah and it's one of those ones that you are again left with something pretty awesome at the end so i love that tableau building element to it so that was number six our number five is red rising and so this is designed by jamie stegmeier and alexander schmidt and when we got this game i never heard of the book that it's based on um and i think one of the reasons why i love this game so much is because i really love the book so it introduced me to that whole world uh the first book is is

12:12 fantastic and then the the game itself uses the characters from the book so i i love having my hand of cards and seeing who likes to be matched up with each other and try to maximize it in terms of how the game is played you've got cards out that are um just in different columns and then you always have to put a card down to do an action and then pick a card up into your hand then you're hoping to find the right combinations of cards left in your hand to get the most amount of points yeah it's kind of an interesting because you want you have to play cards but then the cards in your hand score you the points at the end so you want the perfect seven to score you the most points but you also need to be able to play those sometimes to get things so it's this whole um just kind of figuring out it's not quite risk reward but you're figuring out the best way to use each card they're all kind of used for two different things which which is interesting and yeah in the books um i love the first one i'm not going to say a lot about the other ones but the first book is terrific the first three are pretty good and the fourth one just pretend it's a trilogy first three are terrific and it is it's it's a beautiful game it looks great i do think if we would have played it without the books we'd be like yeah it's pretty good but i think with the books and would that tie into the theme yeah it really bumps it up that other level yeah but it it we we have fun playing it and it plays in for us with two players it plays in under 30 minutes so it's a nice kind of like quick game where you can just try and maximize your your hand

13:43 that if it doesn't go your way one game you can easily just like reset and play again yep and yeah and i heard everything fall down when we pick this up so i'm gonna put it carefully you have to store it upside down when it's on its side that's one of the trickies with the there we go and that brings us to number four and number four is a pretty big boy number four is merchants cove and merchants cove i i love asymmetry asymmetry is like the number one thing that sells me on pretty much any game and this is maybe the most asymmetrical game um that i've ever played it's like the four characters that come in the box you've got a dice manipulation one that's some kind of like a potion explosiony like a marble resource thing you've got one where you're like you've got two characters and you've got kind of total control where you're moving you can only move them so far around the board so that one is a it's a lot more kind of thinky worker placementy kind of like puzzle one and then you've got one that's a lot more random that's kind of the total opposite end of that spectrum where you're spinning a spinner and where a pirate captain yeah yeah as a pirate captain it's all got this great theme of kind of a piratey thing and everyone's kind of tied into that and they're just trying to sell their goods um and then the expansion ones as well we've there's a rolling right one we've got two more coming we just got this the week before christmas and we've

15:13 already played it oodle sometimes because i i cannot get enough of this game i l i love the look i love the the style i love the asymmetry everything about this this is this is like the shiniest game on our shelf for me right now it was funny because you loved it from the first time that we played it um and i've liked it more and more each time i played and i think part of that is because the factions do play so differently and so the first couple i played with are actually probably now looking back maybe my my least favorite two and so it's more fun if what you're doing on your board is is is enjoyable obviously as well because that's such a big part and then there's the whole communal board with the goods that you're selling to everybody um but i think what recently really brought this up in my opinion too is is that expansion and getting the oracle who's really great and i am really looking forward to playing it with the two new ones that are coming yeah you can tell because i started playing with the alchemist and the chronomancer yeah i think and i was like this this might be my favorite game i love this game and then i played with the other two and i was like oh it kind of fell a bit for me and it went up a bit for you based on those characters yeah but the asymmetry is like i just i love that there's the ranger characters yeah that everyone is playing completely different mechanics yeah that's pretty cool but still work the same game like there's still something because there's still the yeah the um people coming to buy your goods that you're doing share and there's enough shared it's it's just it's so clever so that is our number

16:45 four so here we go uh number three is dinosaur world it takes up a lot of table space it's not only a big boy in terms of the box but this is i think the game that takes up the most amount of tables for two players that we have i don't we've got a big table here uh and i don't think we could play this with four players yeah i don't know how we would but the game itself is is is really great um if you're familiar with dianosaur island it takes a lot of those very similar mechanics in terms of the the dna that you're collecting to make your dinosaurs but instead of just putting some dinosaurs out on a little board you're doing much more than that they've gone they've gone bigger they made it a world yeah it feels like um like to me like dinosaur island is like one of those kind of crappy zoos in like the 80s where all of the animals it's just animals and they're just all sandwiched together and dinosaur world is one of those big like conservation like san diego zoos where you're driving through habitats uh and whatnot or even like even like disney world because you can have way way more than just dinosaurs for it i the extra kind of level that it added to it was taking your your attractions that you're putting it out and then the final phase now is you have your your jeeple so your jeep meeple that you have to drive through and visit the attractions and then the more often that you pass through an attraction that you've driven by on previous turns the more bored the

18:16 people are so the less kind of excitement levels you get which is an interesting mechanic jaded people yeah you've got dinosaurs you've got like paddocks filled with dinosaurs and they're like yeah we've seen them yeah i just had like a t-rex jet skiing yeah and apparently they even get bored of that i don't even i don't know what to get bored about that there are a lot of fun in the like in the other because there's the dinosaur ones but you kind of have like maybe one dinosaur to every two or three of the other areas as well that have like roller coasters and just a bunch of like fun silly things and a bunch of sciency things too which is kind of fun yeah it's it's really great i love theme parks i i also love the science element it's a lot heavier i would say than dinosaur island yeah it ups it yeah there's sometimes like just picking what people you want you really have to think ahead um but i like that it's still at a good level for me in terms of how heavy it is and it's it's a great fun game to play yeah yeah i know it's it's excellent so that brings us to number two all right number two is cascadia uh so cascadia is another tile placement game and this one you are building out your different terrains it takes place i believe in the pacific yeah pacific northwest which is from both from where we're from well not quite where i'm from oh the calgary doesn't count as normal no calgary's a little uh calgary is its own it's like prairies oh okay well you're from the rocky mountains you're like two hours

19:46 away we can drive to the pacific northwest easily in the pacific northwest so it reminds me of home and uh it just it's it's pretty simple you just pick a tile and an animal each turn you put it on you put your animal on an icon that matches it and then each of the different animals have different scoring conditions and there is a selection of them so you can have different ones for each game that you're playing so you want to maybe have a group of bears and a run of salmon and it's i love that that quick kind of play to each taking a turn you can get a little bit stuck sometimes but there's only so many things that you can do um and then you're trying to group similar territories it looks great it plays fun yeah i really really like cascadia yeah the look is great the look reminds me of parks the gameplay doesn't remind me anything of parks but it's got that same parks had this like this wood that i love this like soft beautiful wood and this has the same sort of wood but with these um with the with the pictures on them i don't know if it's just stickers or if it's like heat transfer or whatever but it just it looks so beautiful and beth sobel did the art and we always love beth sobel's art she's one of our favorite designers in any game or illustrators yeah in any game and yeah the play of it's so fast and there are definitely some like you know a little thinkier decisions in it but not too much and i think even for people with ap they're gonna go pretty quick

21:16 with it yeah this is one that i could play again and again and even if i lose i still have an enjoyable experience and again you're left with something really cool at the end even if you lose you still win so that's number two one left and our number one is hadrian's wall and hey we we love rolling rights we uh we actually did a thing over the last couple days where we played every rolling right we have which is like 24 rolling rights and it took us like a full day and a bit to play through them and this is this is our number one rolling right this is our number one game for 2021 because it takes rolling right it's interesting because rolling right has always been i've thought of as like that real quick thing doesn't take up a lot of space you can take to like the camper i always think of it with camping and you can play it really fast hadrian's wall is not that hadrian's wall is like using roland right to replace what would have had to be an enormously expensive giantly produced thing it's like taking this big idea and using paper and pencil to make that feasible which is a really cool interesting way to use that mechanic yeah this was actually our both of our number one so it wasn't number one by by combination we we both picked it as the best of the year and it is very kind of multiplayer solitaire because there is no player interaction but we love it and so

22:48 the turn starts and you each collect your workers and then and then that's it you're silent as you are exchanging exchanging your workers to to coloring your boxes and coloring those boxes get you more workers and you're almost trying to extend your turn for as long as possible yeah it really is though like if you want interaction this is not your game because it really is you get your things your head goes down and you're just you're just working on your own paper there's no sharing there's no looking at the other person and there's no reason to i think there's one there's like one action that you can take where you have to give the other person and we never we never do it yeah so it just does not come up but just like like it's it's just so like combo rific like just the combos and the trying to figure out your engine and you go down these pads that you weren't sure you were going to go because every turn you get two cards and one of them is one of your end game goals and one of them is extra resources i think that's one of the interesting things about it is we played this a number of times and there's still some paths that i have yet to even try and so i usually kind of stick with what i'm comfortable with but because of that scoring system it does force you and i'm really looking forward to playing this more and actually seeing what like the gladiators are about i haven't given them a proper go yet and what scouting's about what what some sheets that i have been left untouched thus far are yeah no it it really is i highly recommend and especially if you

24:19 want something that you know you're all doing at the same time and it's it's really simple to explain but it definitely it's the heaviest rolling right that i've played i think it's the heaviest rolling right out there that i know of yeah and it's easy to learn but there's oh boy there's a lot there's a lot of decisions in here a lot of paths to take and so our our top game for 2021 that we've played so far is hadrian's wall and uh yeah thank you so much for checking this out and it is important we said that we played so far and i think we're probably gonna do a thing next year where we'll look back um and see this year so we actually we're gonna do a video coming up soon looking back at 2020 and we didn't do a top 10 for 2020 but we feel like now that we've played everything for a full year we've really we really know those games yeah and so i think we'll look back and it'll be interesting to see how much is still in there based on any new ones that we've played yeah or do some of the ones that just missed sneak their way up um arc nova and boone lake that we're super excited to finally try i think and there's always some that kind of that we didn't even know about yeah like 2020 beyond the sun we got way later and that we were just like how did we not know about this this knocked our socks off yeah so really looking forward to trying those out for sure but i think that brings us close to the end so please like subscribe all of that really helps us out and hopefully we'll see you

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