Ryan's Top 10 Favourite Board Games - Honourable Mentions

0:00 hi it's Ryan from knights around a table you know I've never done a top-10 list of my favorite games of all time ever and that's not going to change but I've been invited by another host of another channel to come on to his or her channel to do exactly that there are gonna be three of us talking about our favorite games and this is all part of something very exciting that I've had in the works now for a couple of months and I've been teasing it to the folks I hang out with on the discord channel saying something huge is coming and I think when this video releases probably Monday then that cat's gonna be out of the bag and everybody will know and I'm really excited for everybody you know it's an announcement that is going to change the way this channel operates a little bit it's gonna make things more fun and more exciting to watch and it's just good news all around it's gonna be great I can't wait to let you know now like I say I've been teasing this secret in the discord channel for a couple of months now and if you've never popped into the discord channel I invite you to it was originally built for the people who support me on on patreon to come and hang out with me but you don't have to be a patreon supporter of mine to jump in and hang out and talk but if you are a patreon backer I've got a couple of special channels where I'll make announcements and I'll talk to you about secret behind-the-scenes stuff so you get a like a little view into that world except for this big secret that I've been teasing that's that's kind of still under wraps but I think by Monday now if that video is available right now I'll put a little link up at the top if you're watching this on YouTube where you see that link you can click it and go watch that video now if it's not

1:31 available you won't see anything there but I'm gonna blast it out to everybody on YouTube who's subscribing so that you'll know when that video is ready please do go watch it I think it's gonna be a lot of fun and join us on discord I say this from the bottom of my heart the people who I'm hanging out with on this discord server are some of the nicest most wonderful folks I know and I genuinely look forward to getting up every day and being able to talk with them on those chat channels it's it's a it's a great place to be in a burgeoning little community I hope you'll join us there now what are we doing in this video well I put together my top 10 list of games that I'm going to talk about in the other video on the other channel and I felt bad because there were a few games that I really enjoy that didn't quite make the cut so I thought that I could do a video of five or so honorable mention games that I think are excellent in their own right but they all just kind of slightly missed the mark and don't quite make it into the top ten so I haven't put them in any particular order but since people like numbers and their orders I'll just throw them in sort of randomly in an order of five so number five of the games that didn't quite make it into my top ten favorite games of all time list or Leon I love or Leon or Liana's fantastic game and I picked it up after a whole Vision Quest of trying to get a game that was a deck builder that didn't use cards like Dominion did because I don't like shuffling so I went through quarters and that didn't work in with your Kings Forge and that wasn't very good at all and it finally found these bag builder games altiplano and/or Leon and/or Leon was the more highly recommended one so that's the one that I

3:02 picked up and I ended up really really liking it now why didn't it make my top ten it's because of the theme really early on takes place in French town in the Middle Ages where people are dying of the plague and the coolest thing that you can do in life is the old part of a cathedral kind of thing is like I don't know if I really want to spend a whole lot of time there it's like the coolest thing you can do is travel to the next town over and buy some cheese I don't know I just you know it didn't do a whole lot for me theme wise mechanically I think it's a really clever and interesting game and there's lots of really cool stuff going on and it quite liked it so part of the issue with board games with me is convincing other people to play them with me if you get a theme like the one I normally Hall and it's illustrated by someone like Clemens Franz where maybe it looks tiny bit garbage it's just that much harder to rope people in or convince people that they're gonna have a really good time with it so I mean it's excellent it's an excellent game I even we've talked to you about the trade and intrigue expansion and the invasion expansion and I've played some modules from both of those I've had a really good time with it I really really liked it but it's a game that I play with my friend Michael Todd who also likes games and recognizes good game mechanics and an excellently constructed game and can maybe past some of the thematic shortcomings or the amateurish illustration that's right I said amateurish poor Clemons frunze I'm gonna meet him face to face

4:33 someday and I'm gonna find out he's very good at boxing number four scythe now side is an interesting one because scythe is one of these games where you ever really like a movie but then other people are like ah you like that movie that movie's crap for this and this and that reason my enjoyment of scythe is diminished by the number of people who don't like scythe and have been vociferous about how much they don't like sigh which kind of stinks and again I'll make another movie comparison I think that it got a bit of a bum rap in certain circles because like a movie that has a trailer that doesn't really advertise it in the correct way or tell you what the movie actually is I think that's what happened with size I think people were expecting more of a war game and when it wasn't that they got mad and they're like oh the combat stinks well it's it's not supposed to be great because it's not really combat game it's a year old game where you're it's it's like a curricula where you can shoot each other occasionally or threaten to so it's not the best game that I've ever played but it's a very competent very capable game and it's worth I think me spending time on the biggest knock against it for me is being Canadian I live in a country where we have about two days of summer and we guard them zealously so I don't really enjoy the prospect of sitting down at a table where all the artwork is a bleak desolate wintery landscape that's cold and snowy and it's been it's communism and there's big gross dirty metal machines all a bit kind of depressing

6:05 really I like generally like warmer happier themes this is why I don't go for stuff like power grid and why despite people saying that brass Lancashire is an excellent game I just can't get past the dark look of it but like sighs people say brass Lancashire's is beautiful in its own right like it's beautiful in its ugliness I get that the paintings are gorgeous in the game the game is inspired by and based around entirely the painters work mr. werewolves work and I appreciate the aesthetic value of it just he didn't quite point get there now despite that I have been amassing all of the bits of size so I've been buying the the metal coins and the extra cards and the the expansions and I might even spring for that this is ridiculous and I feel dumb admitting it but they've got a gigantic empty box you can put all your size stuff in and I think the Box cost like 3040 bucks or something ridiculous so I'm borderline about to buy that and I feel like a fool for doing it but I do like high production values and I do like over produce things and I do like improve game components - all of that stuff I mean it's right up my alley with side and I do think the games is enjoyable number 3 on my list of games that didn't quite make my top 10 list is soakin smoking again an excellent excellent game it's gorgeous I mean I have almost no qualms with the presentation of it those gears that turn other gears and the rondelle mechanic that is a mate all of his amazing it's amazing it's great it's loved loved to play the game the reason why it just

7:36 kind of slips off my top 10 list is because it's weird to say it's almost too good of a game does that make sense it's almost to mechanically excellent at the expense of fun does that make any sense like it's like you're playing in a clock almost literally inside a clock this could be redeemed clock and you'd be okay and you have to be so meticulous in your planning and you have to be running multiple threads it's like you're in a computer and you gotta think like a computer to play the game well and it's all very stressful I find and it's just a little bit too tight so there are other games that are like this like Lorenzo el magnífico is another one where I recognize that it's a good game but the game enos of it and they just that the tightness of everything makes it a little less like it could be more generous and it could be more loose and a little bit more freewheeling and fun and I'd enjoyed a little bit more it's still an excellent game I really liked it I picked up the expansion which I talked to you about a few videos ago great game yeah I didn't quite get there for me number two is the voyages of Marco Polo now the voice of Marco Polo has a mechanic that I absolutely adore it's a dice worker placement game that's where your workers are dice you roll the dice you get different pips on them and the spaces depending on what the pips are on your die you've put them on the spaces and you get to do different things it's cool I really like that mechanic a lot and I like a lot of games with that

9:08 mechanic and in fact the number two game I believe on my list is a dice worker placement game I wonder if you can guess which game that is I think I've only mentioned it once in one other video but you'll see if you go watch the other video I'm succinctly pinned down the reason why I really really like the voyages of Marco Polo but it didn't make it into my top ten list again it kind of comes down to theme I like a theme that's really resonant and I can immerse myself in it and it's a place that I'd want to be and that time period the time period of Marco Polo in the hurricane hundreds because I study history I know it well I don't know if I want to be there so much I mean I've listened to the hardcore history podcast about the Mongols and they're not cool people to hang out with if you're not one of them you're gonna die but I think the biggest issue that I have with the voyages Marco Polo is that the mechanic and the theme just kind of missed each other like this because Marco Polo was an explorer and you are moving your pawns around a big map in the voyages of Marco Polo but it is so darn difficult to do that voyage is one of the most challenging and expensive things to do in the game which is bizarre for a game that's ostensibly themed voyaging right and it's called the voyages of Marco Polo you'd think it would be a little bit easier to move around that map so I think you know it

10:38 was an interesting choice of theme and I don't know if I would have picked it if it was so difficult to move around maybe I would have picked a time period or a situation I was still working with a map where the difficulty of movement was reflected maybe Hannibal going over the Alps with his elephants or ever whatever happened was the elephants was it candy I can't even remember so just I think because of it's a great game don't get me wrong I picked up the expansion never played it but I'm excited too and I haven't played the sequel but I heard that it makes improvements on the on the base game but it keeps that theme I presume that moving around is just as hard in the sequel as it is in the base game I don't know why I presume that I don't know I just said that I have no evidence to base that on but just because of that weird disconnect with a game that's called voyages about voyaging where voyaging is one of the most challenging things I've never done and had any game they didn't quite make my top 10 list and the number of one game that didn't quite make it on my top 10 list of games is the castles of Burgundy again all five of these games are fantastic games I enjoy them very very much they're not quite there and the reason why the castles of Burgundy isn't quite there is again down to theme if you couldn't tell I'm a big theme guy and there are certain themes I gravitate towards and when the theme meshes with the mechanic boy I'm in paradise if I don't want to be in the setting that the game presents doing the things that the game lets me do I'm at my happiest now do I want to be a 1400 estate owner in bologna france

12:11 building Marketplace on my leg none of that stuff is stuff that appeals to me and it looks very very washed out and drab just like the voyages of Marco Polo though it is like a dice worker placement game you're rolling dice and depending on the numbers you get you get certain things from different depots and you get to put those on your hand that part's cool mechanically it's an excellent game we had this game on our 10 by 10 list for this year which would quickly abandon but when we did play it a couple of times my family all really enjoyed and we recognize it as a mechanically excellent game that was fun to play horrible to look at and you know a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there I think one of the people who watches this stuff on YouTube commented on it and called it aggressively boring I think that's a good that's a good way to put it I don't know why all these euro game themes have to be so off-putting ly bland and they all seem to have to do with farm animals too like you got to collect all the pigs and you score the pigs like this game has that and key flower the farmers has that and car has that you got to kind of wonder like why are the board game designers so fixated on farm animals but I digress great game mediocre theme they tried to fix that I think in the 20th anniversary edition just by taking the saturation slider and cranking that right up yeah brighter Browns I don't know that quite did it again despite my criticism it's a fun game I enjoy the game and what's really nice about the council's burgundy is if you're on a budget it's one of the

13:42 least expensive me degrade games out there so if you haven't picked it up yet definitely add it to your list if you want to click my Amazon affiliate link then I will get fractions of pennies so that's it that's my list of games that are great but not great enough to make it into my top ten thank you for watching as usual I'd like to know which games are on your list that didn't quite squeak into your top ten and more importantly what are the reasons why you would keep a game out of your top ten an excellent game but didn't quite make it but what are your reasons it looks like my reason is mostly theme the theme didn't gel for me it's it's not in there what's the hill that you're gonna die on let me know in the comments below and we can chat about it or if you want to pop into that discord server I'd love to see you there too for those of you who have been helping me out on patreon to make this channel all that it could be thank you again so much and you know what we're almost there this big exciting announcement boy it's gonna blow the doors off if you would like to help blow future doors off then definitely consider hopping over to patreon and helping me out thank you so much for watching this one and I'll catch you in the next one did you just watch that whole thing oh hey there 100% this video click the badge to subscribe and then click the bell to get notifications when I've got new stuff