![]() This press-your-luck mechanism transforms simple worker placement into a very different kind of game entirely, one with a lot more interactivity, and one with a lot more risk vs reward evaluation. They’ll end up getting rewards for their efforts, and you’ll need to waste a turn busting them out of prison. They can place a worker to arrest all of your workers in a single location and send them to jail. Clump up your workers too much, and they’ll be a tempting target for your opponent. That’s a lot of lumber! Such power is not without it’s downsides though. ![]() As an example, placing your fourth dude on the lumber mill will get you four pieces of lumber. More to the point, you can go to the lumber mill, and not only are you not prevented from doing so, but the strength of the action is based on how many dudes you’ve got there. In Architects, anyone can go to the lumber mill, even if someone’s there. As an example, you might go to the lumber mill, take one piece of wood, and then noone else can go to the lumbermill until a game mechanic makes you move or remove your worker. In most worker placement games, when you place a worker, you take an action and no one else can go there. The thread that connects Shem’s games is to reinvent the worker placement mechanic in interesting and creative ways. We’ve already seen one already ( Paladins of the West Kingdom). His breakout hit, Raiders of the North Sea (an excellent title that fell off the list this year), put him on the map and since then he’s released about a game a year. It’s weird to not think of Shem Phillips as an up-and-coming design talent. Only two new games in the top that I’ve never listed before, although as we will see, one of them is a variant of my former #1 game of all time… The top of the list isn’t as fluid as the rest, though. ![]() Roughly 30% of the list is new blood, which is very high, but frankly the list had gotten somewhat stagnant in recent years, and so a shakeup was in order. Like many gamers, I had quite a backlog coming out of the pandemic, so this year I put special emphasis on playing lots of new games and evaluating them, and it shows in the results. Fuck you, game #11, you didn’t cut the mustard. All those other games I’ve listed before? They’re all crap. So here we go: the definitive list of top ten board games in the world, as of right this moment.
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