 I want to be very clear about what this panel is about. These are not the best 40 games. This is not a top 40 list of the best 40 tabletop games. More importantly, these are not the most important tabletop games. Payless is arguably the first worker placement game ever. Maybe. It is important. There's arguably one other game called, like, BUS, I think. Oh, I know BUS. You played it, though. That might be worker placement. This is an important game. It's set up a genre. It doesn't mean it's a game you need to play as a game designer. It's part of the history, but a game doesn't make this list just because it's the first of something or just because there's some interesting history behind it. These are not our favorite 40 games. I enjoy what that is on that slide. I have all the initial D-Manga I'm trying to get rid of it, or at least all that was printed by Tokyo Pop in the US. If anyone wants it, come talk to me. But we're not some fanboys. We could do a panel of, hey, here's a 40 anime that we like, and those panels suck. We don't even like all the games we're going to talk about. And you're not us, so the 40 things that we like are not going to be the 40 things that you like. What's the point in coming to find out what the things we like are? Yeah. Oh, watch me stroke my ego. Is that where your ego is? Oh, yeah. These are not in any particular order. I don't care who wins the fight between Puerto Rico and Batman. In fact, I literally randomized the order. We have definitely missed a lot of genres and a lot of games. And we don't care that we miss them. If you've ever been at a convention where someone asks a question, you'll notice that most people don't ask a question of, hey, I want to know a thing. They ask a question where they say you forgot to mention our routine. Yeah, I got an hour, bro. One hour. And I've already used most of it on this nonsense. This is going to change. We're doing this again at PAX East. Because it's a cookie cutter panel. It's really easy to do. Just change up the list of games and do it again. No problem. Oh, we got another free badge to go to the convention. Yeah. It was no effort. And you didn't even need to come here. If you go to Board Game Geek, you could figure this out yourself. That's right. So I don't know why you're here. But if you're here, the important part of this is that a lot of people only play a very narrow set of kinds of games. And if you become not just a gamer, but a player of game, someone who plays games, irrespective of what kinds of games they are, you'll find that you get better at all games, including that narrow area you really care about. Right. So we're talking about someone who's going to take their game brain to level 2 or level 3, right? I should make this the expanding brain meme instead of an obscure sci-fi novel. Yeah. The novel is called Player of Games. That's the joke. That's all I had. But seriously, the moral of that novel is that someone who is good at games, games in general, all kinds of games, is good at life. Like you, Mia. Let's get right into it. Tigris and Euphrates. This is actually my favorite tabletop game. It is also my favorite tabletop game. It is notable because most tabletop games do not actually survive serious play for very long. If you take any tabletop game and you and a group of people try to be good at it, after six or seven plays, you will probably break it. You will probably play it perfectly. You will probably be bored with it. You'll figure out the cheap strategies. Right. A lot of games, especially these days, are a lot of floof around the same exact thing. So it might take a while if a game has a lot of complexities to it, but you eventually figure out, oh, this game is actually rock, paper, scissors in disguise. This game is actually flip a coin in disguise. This is a vote who wins game. And it starts to look a lot like all the other games that are just like it. But T&E, there is no game that is like this. So this game has probably survived easily 100 plays among a group of very serious gamers. And it still holds up. I still don't have very significantly powerful strategies in it. It's one of the deep, complex, abstract, German-style games that epitomizes that genre of take a bunch of cubes and do stuff with them. Cubes and tiles on a board. Yeah, there is a great app for this game. I don't know if it's on Android, because I don't have a crappy Android phone, but it's on my phone and iPad. It might be on Android. I don't know. But this game will survive your play no matter how long you play it. Frank Herbert's Doom, this board game? Good luck getting this game. Most people pirate it by just making their own. There's also, you can print your own. This game was put out in the 70s, and it hasn't been put out since. I bought one on eBay a long time ago. But there is actually a newer game. I think it's called Rex, which is the exact same game with a little bit of fixing, you know, the polishing and a different theme because they didn't have the license to use Doom again. But it's almost the exact same game. Now the reason you should play this old Doom game, and our rule for things being on this list is that they have to instruct or teach two interesting things. So even a good game, if it doesn't do two things that some other game in this list didn't do, we're not gonna talk about it. Doom is a highly evolved, better version of diplomacy. It'll give you the same experience without five hours leading to a five player draw. Yeah, we played it over the weekend. It took a while to teach, but then we played it like an hour or two. And I won, so. But two, a lot of board games have a really good theme, and then there's the game. I have never, ever seen a board game where the theme so closely ties itself to the game mechanics. Right, it's like you can tell whoever made this game wasn't actually thinking too much about game design. They were literally just translating the things in the book into game mechanics and somehow it actually turned out to be great. Like the kinds of things that happened in Doom, the novel, happened in this game reliably even if none of the players have ever read Doom, the novel. The most miraculous thing about this game is that it had the six factions to choose from. If you know about Doom, it's like Bene Gesserit, Emperor. Arconan. Arconan, yeah, he loves Arconan. It's not like the Guild. And when you see the powers that they have, right, you read, you like, someone hands you one of the races and you read it and you're like, these powers are unfair. I'm gonna win this game. No, everyone has a completely different and completely ridiculously unfair superpower. And it's evident even if you don't know the rules, I'll tell you the Arconan's powers. Everybody gets one traitor. Don't even worry about the mechanics. Among the generals, all the other people have. Arconan get four. Everybody can buy these treachery cards. Arconan gets three ones all the time. Everyone can only hold four treachery cards. Arconan get eight. The Guild, right? Oh, if you wanna put dudes onto the planet, you have to do Arrakis to fight. You have to pay Spice to the Bank. But if the Guild is playing the game, you give your Spice to the Guild. That's like if one of the players in Monopoly is the Bank. Oh, you wanna buy that Mediterranean? All right. So if you want a purely political, alliance-driven, complicated game that is not bad like Diplomacy, play this game. Mafia, Werewolf, this game, there's a million social deduction games. If you've never played one, you should play at least one. And Mafia is probably the best one to play. If you like Mafia, you'll like Resistance and Secret Hitler and all those other games. All of these games, most of them, are pretty much the exact same game, just crook slightly so, right? This is the purest form, however. You'll know this game, you'll see a bunch of kids sitting in a circle, and they're like tapping on the table and being real annoying, and then someone yells at someone. Now the thing is a lot of people play Mafia Werewolf. They don't play it the original way, right? I wanna play the original way, but no one wants to do that with me. The problem with social deduction games, meaning if you've never played Mafia, the idea is that some of the players are Mafia, and every night they wake up secretly and kill somebody. And then during the day, everybody wakes up and tries to lynch someone in the Mafia based solely on arguing with each other. Meaning when we play with our friends, they kill me, then they kill Scott, then they play the game. So the original rules, the rule that I wanna incorporate from the olden days is that when the Mafia wake up at night, they don't just pick somebody and kill them. They each Mafia member wakes up individually and must point, right? And then if the Mafia are not unanimous in their decision, no, they don't kill anyone at night. And this means- Meaning winking a nod during the day. Scott looked at- During the day, while everyone is awake, the Mafia have to look at each other and have some sort of signal to figure out as they all vote the same way at night, which means the civilians during the day can look at the Mafia and say, I saw a rim winking at Scott Johnson. And of course, the Mafia says, I saw Scott winking at other Scott, right? I feel like they would still kill us first. Sure, but the point is you look at people and you in your, at least regardless of what people say, you can use your own eyes to look at other people and try to, you know, who do you think is signaling? But these kinds of games have a low barrier to entry so you can play them with unlimited numbers of people at conventions, even when people might be intoxicated. And you don't even need equipment, except human bodies. A deck of cards, and- Are we going too slow that we're gonna finish all these games? No, because I have way more than 40 and I'm not worried. Some of you don't need to say a lot about it. We're just gonna stop when we hit time. All right, code names. You've probably seen a million people play in this game. If you haven't played it, that's your key. If you see a ton of people playing a game at a convention and you haven't played it, it's worth at least figuring out what the deal is. It might be bad like Munchkin, but at least then you'll know. Now, the thing about this game is it's all about communication, right? And you play it on teams of two versus two usually. So what you can do is you're gonna play with someone you know really well and then use your inside jokes to gain an advantage, because like you just like you, you gotta, you know, so I can bond with this person and then play with a complete stranger in another game and see how good your actual communication skills are. Yup. The game is also notable because you can effectively play it with an unlimited number of people greater than four. Battle Tech, old as Battle Tech. If you have never played this, this game is kind of bad. It's got a lot of problems. It's super fiddly. You literally have to sit there rolling D6 over and over and over again. 2D6, 2D6. While someone else, I'll literally be like four and Scott's like right center torso. There's a lot of lookup tables, right? You roll, it's like 11. What does that mean? I don't even know what the hell is even going on. So what's really fun about Battle Tech is that like, you know, you sort of make this giant robot and you put all the equipment in different places on the robot and you take damage to different places, right? And then crazy things happen. Sometimes you do all this work to customize this robot. You go into battle, one shot to the head. Boom, it explodes in the end. Pete still has the character sheet from that one game. So the interesting things about Battle Tech is that if you've never played one of those hex base like have squad leader, troop type stuff going around on a board, it's an experience to have with a bunch of friends. Like that's a part of gaming that's not super common. But even more importantly, Battle Tech's poor design, fiddliness, lookup tables, it means that most people playing aren't 100% sure what will happen based on what they do. That randomness leads to sort of emergent storytelling by a game mechanics alone. Even if you're not role playing, the story starts to emerge because crazy things happen and you're trying to mitigate the chaos. It's more like real war than like a war game. Also Scott is obsessed with small lasers and that never works out. Well, the game gives you so many options of like things you can do. Like, okay, I'll just dislodge my arm because it's gonna explode or I'll jump and land on someone's head. All I'm gonna say, I'll just punch the other robot. If you ever play in this game and one of your friends just keeps shooting their PPC into the ground and you don't know why, don't go anywhere near them. All right, it's like this torch bearer. So if you never played the old Dungeons and Dragons like Dungeons and Dragons. Right, BECMI Dungeons and Dragons, the one that's a red book. It's like you've seen those T-shirts with like red and it says Dungeons and Dragons is a square picture of a dragon in it and a guy with a shield and the fire's coming out, right? That one, you know what you know what I'm talking about. I hope so, I hope so. If you don't, that's a problem. But Dungeons and Dragons is very different today. It was not really about role-playing back then. It was mostly about going your murder hobos and you go into a dungeon, get as much loot as possible and get the hell out. Right, if you look at those old D&D books, how much XP do you get for like killing a monster? Not much, right? A monster was an encounter. The idea was to get around it by any means possible. Fighting isn't really that great. You got one XP per gold. It was all about gold. If you get gold out of the dungeon, that's where the XP's come from. Torch Bearer is a modern reimagining, a streamlined modern indie RPG that evokes all the feelings of old D&D with a modern system that is very easy to learn and very brutal. Yeah, the book is only EA big. This is amazing RPG to play with like four people or so, but the other interesting thing it does is it incorporates this resource cycle, this grind of you do stuff and then you've got to sleep or you're gonna start getting sick and you might die. And the things that tend to take you out are like disease or rats ate the food. If you're gonna play a tabletop RPG that's about going into dungeons and getting loot, you should be playing this one. Zendo, Zendo just got re-released by the new Zendo. It used to be hard to get Zendo. You had to buy these pieces. They ain't cheap. It averages over a dollar a piece. The company is what, Looney Labs? Looney Labs. So the company called Looney Labs and they make these a whole set of different games that you can play with these pyramids and the pyramids come in different shapes and colors, right? And you can buy Ice Dice and what are the other ones? Ice Dice was the highest ratio of pyramids per dollar. Right. But basically it's like you would just get these pyramids and there's an incredible number of games you could play with the pyramids. Sort of like a deck of playing cards. Just so many games you can play with it. And Zendo is the only one of those games that I found that's worth playing. Zendo is a sort of competitive but really cooperative game where one player's the master and they make some shapes and they say one of them has the boot of nature, one of them does not. And on your turn, you make shapes and the master tells you if they have the boot of nature or not, you win if you can say what the rule is that gives one of these contraptions the boot of nature and the master cannot refute you. If you can explain why those ones on the left have blue dots and the ones on the right have white dots, then you win. So you're sort of working together but you're working against the master to figure out what their puzzle is but the master doesn't care. They can't win the game. They're gonna lose it eventually, right? You're competing against the other players like who can figure this out first but also working with them to figure out that evil master's rule. The game has an effectively infinite scale of difficulty based on how smart your group of friends are. The game can take an unlimited number of players. The game provides a spectacle. If you set this up on a table, people walk over and ask what the hell's going on and because the barrier to entry is zero, you can say, do you wanna play? People can walk in and out of this game as it's going on like set. I used to bring it to conventions and we do just that. Right, so you can play with the rules for this game. You could do something so simple as like, you know, exhibit the boot of nature if you have no yellows or you could go as difficult as like, ah, it exhibits the boot of nature if you have a prime number of pips on the pyramids. Are there two red X or three blue pyramids larger than the smallest size? Don't play like that. Unless you're playing with geniuses, then play like that. Has anyone even heard of this game? Oh my God. Oh my God. Fast food franchise is everything that you wanted Monopoly to be, but is it? It is Monopoly, you literally roll the dice, go around the board, land on a thing and buy or not buy, but there's also this thing going on in the middle of the board that's crazy. This is an abstracted map of the United States of America. The fact that this is an abstracted map of the United States of America is amazing. Right, but the point is, you get the exact same thing as Monopoly, only more fun and it takes way less time. We're talking like 30 to 45 minutes. So if you wanna experience Monopoly without spending four hours of your magfest, find a copy of this game, play it, there is no other game like it on Earth. There might be, but this is the good one. Also, chicken surprise. Ice cream screen. Spot it, you might see us playing spot it. We just played spot it. Spot it is a game that you can play with an unlimited number of people, you buy this tin and it has cards in it, the cards have a bunch of symbols on them, you literally just hold them out and you try to match the symbol with someone else's card. It's basically a deck of circular cards and each one has a ton of symbols on it and there's always, no matter which two cards you pick, there will be exactly one symbol that matches between the two cards and there's a few different ways to just play games involving who can match them the fastest or the best. It looks like a children's game, it feels like a children's game. It is a children's game. But then you play it and you feel like a stupid child. It says right here for players ages seven to adult and it's not lying, right? This game is crazy hard, it is also hyper social. This is a game that I have watched people, particularly our friend Chase. Chase is wandering around this convention with this game. In his pocket. If you see him, he will play this game with you. We once played this game with an entire panel room. This game is like the best way I've ever seen to meet new friends at a convention. Right, and the best part is this is regular spotted. If you buy the UK version, it's called double. And if this comes in a lot of different themes, you can buy like NFL spotted or hipster spotted or whichever. I got Halloween spotted personally. It's got bats and graves on it. You can also, the best one which I'm gonna get is Beach Spot, oh, Spotted Splash. Oh yeah, the water bottle. Spotted Splash comes in a net and has plastic cards so you can bring it to the beach. Jungle speed, this is the only board game we've ever played where someone broke their finger playing it. It was adding magfest that this happened. Right, so there's a bunch of crazy evil cards in a deck and the cards are, you know, got all kinds of crazy shapes, but you'll see that it's like, there's one card of each shape of each color. So every card is unique. And the idea is that when cards, when their shapes match, even if their colors are, you know, different, right? It's really like a thing that messes with your perception. Like, is there a match or not? Oh, right? If there is a match, you got to grab that wooden totem faster than the other player. And that's when you break your finger. This, this is a board game. This is also a sport. Puerto Rico. I played this today also. We played this today. So we spent a summer back when we were first starting to like learn all this game theory nonsense. We played Puerto Rico, three player, over and over and over again, five or six times a day for an entire summer until we solved three player Puerto Rico. Three player Puerto Rico is a fundamentally different game from four player Puerto Rico, which is a fundamentally different game from five player Puerto Rico. We put this up here because if you want a traditional machine building Euro game, I think this is the best and most perfectly designed one that has ever been made. Right. In terms of elegant game design, minimum rules, maximum depth. Right. This game has absolutely no luck in it whatsoever, except for who goes first and which, uh, what plantations show up in the random plantations. Three player Puerto Rico, whoever goes last will win if you all play optimally. Anyway, the point is if people don't know this, if you went to the board game geek list of like best games, Puerto Rico was number one for a long, long, long time. And it would still be number one if board game geek didn't get flooded by people who don't know any better. People who like, uh, Twilight Struggle. Yeah. Twilight Struggle is not on this list. Yeah. Twilight Struggle is awful. Hanabi. Oh, people know Hanabi. Oh, there was a time when no one knew Hanabi. Right. So most of the co-op games people play, like the crappy ones, like Shadows Over Camelot or Pandemic or whatever else out there, right? All those co-op games are actually solitaire games. It's just what they, imagine playing Klondike solitaire, like Microsoft solitaire, but your friend is sitting next to you helping you. That's pandemic, right? Hanabi is actually a co-op game, right? You cannot play it by yourself. You literally need to have each person work independently, but also cooperatively towards the same goal because you don't know what cards are in your hand. The main thing, the interesting thing this game does is that it makes the exchange of information itself a mechanic of the game. You can't just talk like you can in these other co-op games. You play your hands facing the other players. You can't see your own hand. You play cards blindly out of your own hand. You spend a resource to tell someone else something specific about their hands. You gotta remember the, because they can't tell you again. They can't remind you what they said. They say it once and that's it. You gotta remember, okay, this card is that. This card is that. Okay, I have two green cards and these are them, which means these aren't green and I have two twos and those are these two cards, which means this is a green non-two, okay? This is one of the only two games I can think of that have information exchange as a fundamental mechanic, yet are otherwise a normal tabletop game. The other one is Rest Publica by Raynor Canizia. Vinci, how many of you played Small World? Do you know that Small World is actually a redesign of a game called Vinci by the same guy? Vinci's out of print. Vinci is in every way superior to Small World. Yeah, so Small World, it's like when you play Vinci, first of all, the Vinci rule book had like some misprints and the production quality of it had some problems like it's a little chits and stuff, right? It had those kinds of issues and in Small World, they polished it up and made it more modern, put a better theme on it, but the thing is in making it more modern, they took away the insanity that is Vinci and so I ended up liking Small World less even though I saw that it was technically a better design. Vinci's gameplay is in a much wider space than Small World. Small World actually, whether you realize it or not, it's rules heavily constrain the possibilities in the game. You don't have that many tactical options and if you play the game enough, you're not making many decisions. Your decisions are always straightforward. So there's two main differences between Vinci and Small World. In Small World, the game ends after a certain number of turns, period. In Vinci, the game ends when someone gets enough points. That's a huge difference because now there's a whole bunch of strategy in Vinci surrounding controlling when the game ends. Like don't score too many points, don't want the game to end or oh my God, I'll push myself just over the line. Oh, and then someone passed me. Or I'm going last. I think I can eke out and get one point ahead. Yep. The other main difference is that in Small World, when you're building your race or whatever, there's like the pieces on the right and the pieces on the left and you get one of each, right? So it'll be like, oh, angry skeletons or something like that. I don't even remember. This game is just two things. In Vinci. It's skeletons and skeletons. In Vinci, it's just a bag of squares and you get two. You can get barbarians, barbarians. And you just get tons and tons of guys. It could be anything. And that insanity is actually tons of fun because you never know what you're gonna do. But the game also has a lot more input for your decision-making skills and risk-taking. The point is that just because you've redesigned a game to be more elegant, more streamlined and have better rules doesn't mean it'll actually be more fun. Wizard. Wizard is a traditional trick-taking card game. It's called Oh Hell if you grew up in the Midwest. All right, do people know what a trick-taking game is? Bridge, hearts, Euker, wists. Does anyone not know what we're talking about? Whoa, all right. You know more than packs. Good job. If you don't know what a trick-taking game is, go play Microsoft Hearts. Yep, trick-taking games, card games, P-Nuckle, Euker, Crivage, all these different games. A lot of gamers really overlook them. But if you go back and play Hearts, you'll realize that it is one hell of a vicious game. Wizard is the best trick-taking game to try to get people at a convention like Magfest to play with you. And the best you can play it with two, three, four, five, or six people, because the 60-card deck, it divides evenly, no matter what. Here's the deal, the interesting things about it. You bid how many tricks you are going to take. You only get points if you take the number you bid. You have to be exactly right. So if it's the first hand of the game, you play one trick, you're bidding one or zero. Are you gonna take that trick or not? The second hand, you got two tricks. You're gonna take zero, one or two. The game escalates, play a hand of one, how many do you bid? Now play a hand of two, how many do you bid? Scott already bid two, I have a wizard, should I just bid? What's gonna happen? If he plays his wizard first, I might lose my wizard. The other interesting thing is that trick-taking games like Wist and Hearts, they'll have Trump and all these other things, but you can card count and that adds a very heavy skill and memory dimension to the game. You can do that to inform decisions in this game, but because you play hand of one, hand of two, hand of three, and because there are wizards in the deck. Wizards are magic cards, if you play them, they automatically take the trick no matter what and you can even play them off suit. It prevents pure card counting and it makes the game much more about risk-taking. Right, and we can't neglect to mention that, you know, you can play- This is fantastic art. You can play wizard with any old deck of cards as long as you get four jokers and four something else to be the extra cards you get. Four bicycle rules cards? Yeah, the four bicycle rules cards, sure. But if you get this deck of wizard cards, the art is simultaneously not great, but also hilarious and also amazing. I should have put the gnar's up here. You should have put the Scott Johnson. Oh, the game is a German game, so Z, those are wizards because the word is Zauberer. But yeah, we have a friend, Scott Johnson, who looks exactly like one of these cards. Yeah, the blue card number two looks like a man. It's like this guy, he looks like he's in just some under armor going for a jog. That's our friend, Scott Johnson. Bonanza. So people love when they play games to trade stuff with other people. But Settlers all trades a three sheet for a one. Right, that's the fun part of Settlers, trading, right? But the fact is most games, trading is usually a strategically bad idea even when it's legal, right? But in Bonanza, you are forced to trade, right? Every turn you got these two bean fields and every turn you take these two beans. You either gotta plant them or trade them. You got no choice. And if they don't match the beans you got, you wanna trade those beans away big time. So it gives everyone this huge incentive to get rid of things in trading. And now other people who want them, right? If you might draw high demand cards, you might draw low demand cards and have to trade something away cheaply or give it away or do something with it, right? So you get all the fun of trading without that bad feeling that trading is not a good idea to actually do even though it's allowed. So if you wanna play that kind of trading game, the two interesting things that this game instructs are that one, when you draw your hand initially, it's in order. You cannot change the order of your hand. Things come into the back of your hand, they come out the front of your hand. That is a weird mechanic that is not common. How often do you play a game and you're just like, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle? Can't do that in bonanza. You gotta keep that hand the same way. Why in the film does the same thing? That's also a weird game. Yeah, it's similar, yeah. But so we call that bonanza hand. But two, like it's got that, it's rare to find a game. Like we looked at this game, we got the rules explained to us and we thought it looked kinda dumb, we weren't into it. And then our friend was like, I say, I need that cocoa bean. What will you give me? I need that cocoa bean. I will do anything. There's only three cocoa bean in the deck. It's an ultra rare cocoa bean. Don't play this game boring. Play this game loud. Glory to Rome. It's hard to find this game for reasons I don't wanna get into, but if you see this box by it, it's rare and expensive and hard to get and super out of frame. You might see the same game called Glory to Rome in a really ugly box with awful art and you can't understand what's going on. It is the same game, just really, really graphically unappealing. Glory to Rome will introduce you to the games of Carl Chudick. If you like Glory to Rome, you will like every Carl Chudick game except Impulse. And if you don't like Glory to Rome, you can stay clear of games like Innovation. Glory to Rome has mechanics that I have never seen in any other game ever. Multiple of them. And it combines into a game that is hard to describe, difficult to be good at and intensely engaging and only takes about 40 minutes to play. I don't even wanna get into the details if we don't have time, but if you see this game, play it. The main thing about his games, the games where cards do four different things. You have a hand of cards and each card means four different things. One thing per edge of the card and you can use cards in different ways so I don't wanna use it for this or don't use it for that. But the other thing about this game is that combos can occur. Like you have cards that do things like, draw a card every time you have a client action. Get four client actions for everything you have. If they combo in a weird way, the rules are very clear. That just happens. Oh, I get 40 actions now. It even does, this game does so many unique things. You know a lot of games like Power Grid especially, the game like the thing happens that triggers the end of the game. You have to do a bunch of fiddly bullshit that no one really understands and look in the rule book and like go around one more time and then who's the starting player and all that nonsense. This game, everything that ends the game is immediate fuck you. Someone builds the last building, game's over, score immediately. There's a building you can build. If someone builds it, the game is immediately over. If you can build it right at the early part of the game, it itself is worth enough points to win the game. Camel Up. You ever see, you know, you go to like see, watch a movie and there's a horse track in the movie and there's always that guy with a whole bunch of money in his fist. Just going like, come on. You don't need to eat food tonight. Right, and then when they lose, like, ah, nuts. Throw the money on the ground. If you want to role play being that guy, you can play Camel Up. The two novel things this does, it is a gambling game. You're just betting on what Camels will come in first place in this race, but like that's it. That's it. It's a dumb game that is pretty random and even though we keep talking about all these serious high skill games, dumb random games can also be fun and super enjoyable. And the best part is you roll the dice, go in that pyramid and then you shake up the pyramid and go push the button and one dice comes out and has a number and the color of the dice tells you which Camel moves and the number tells you how far the Camel moves. But the other thing, you see the Camels are stacking up right here. Uneducated people think that this game is called Camel Cup. They're incorrect. It is actually called Camel Up because you notice the Camels stack on each other. If a Camel lands on another Camel and then the Camel under moods, he brings his friend with him. This game is so much fun. Hands of the Arabian Knights. Full disclosure, I did not enjoy this game and I never want to play it again. I don't want to see this game ever again. However, I feel like everyone in this room should play this game once. There is nothing else like it. So what this is, if you like Choose Your Own Adventure book, this is Choose Your Own Adventure weekend. This, in an era before like computer games, this is just a board game, role-playing game where you do stuff and it tells you a procedurally generated story. This literally comes with a book and then someone who goes in, you land on something or I forget the exact goal. And you look in the book and it tells you something. You look in the book like, oh, it's encounter number 100. And someone's like, all right, there's a genie and he says this and this and this. You answer the genie's questions and then the person goes through and says, okay, you chose that? Well, this happens. How much money do you have? You all, you can do this. But it's abstract and it'll be things like you encounter an angry woman in the desert and she's yelling at you and she's demanding something. How do you respond? And it's not like, say what you do, you have two options. Respond with piety, respond with aggression. And see what happens. It's weird and I don't know if you'll like it but you gotta see what the deal is with this game. I've never seen another game that is like this game and that's a reason enough to play this game one time just to see what the deal is. Eclipse, this is probably the upper limit of how much complexity you can put into a tabletop forex game without it being unplayable or that guy takes eight hours on his turn and you never finish it. And the reason it's notable, I mean, it's a forex game. You build ships on planets. It's the same game as Master of Orion but if you look at Master of Orion, you need a computer to play that. There's so many numbers and ships and all sorts of craziness going on. You couldn't possibly play Master of Orion on the table but what they did is just simplify everything to the point at which it's the exact same game that you took out all the extra complicated meaningless nonsense, brooded down. So it's like, okay, now you got three kinds of ships, big, medium, and small. The neat thing about this game, if you actually play it, look at the physical pieces and how statistics and actions and things are tracked in the game physically. This game could not be this complex but for the shockingly clever design of how the cubes physically interact. The game cleverly lets you overload information that could not otherwise be done in a board game. I've never seen a game do with this elegant thing. There are a lot of bidding games but I'm on array, it's not the best one but it's probably the most fun one. You bid on one thing then you bid on another thing that's different. You do this blind bid where you decide how much money to give to the gods and depending on the collective bidding, like what we all gave to the gods, it might be a good or bad year for the crops but you can also steal from the temple. The other interesting thing about this game, the thing that really makes it fun is that it's that of the Nile River, like ancient Egypt. You play the entire game, then the flood happens, you wash away all the people, you leave the pyramids on the board, you play the whole game again. It's almost, it's like a legacy game in a way except it only takes two play sessions and you play them back to back immediately, right? It's like, you play it, all the pyramids are on the board, you erase the whole game except the pyramids and your money and victory points and then play again and then whoever wins that is the winner. Elkfest, that is the entirety of the pieces in Elkfest. Elkfest teaches you that games can be extremely simple and still be games. If any of you played the game in the Expo Hall that's a spring and a line and if you don't know what I'm talking about when you see it, you'll go, oh, that's the game we were talking about. This game is literally, you've got two moose, they're called Elk, don't, there's a whole story about why this game is called Elkfest, don't, I don't even wanna get into it. But these- Moosefest is a little weird. Yeah, Moosefest is weird. You're trying to get your moose onto the other guy's pad and on your turn, you flick these- Stepping stones. And then you move your moose from one to one. If a stepping stone is close enough to where your moose is, you can sort of move them a little bit. If you knock your moose over, your turn's over and you gotta back up. It's literally just a dexterity game. You race across a board toward each other. At some point you cross paths. I usually just carry this game in my pocket anywhere I go at a convention because we can just bust it out anywhere. We could play it on this table. We could play it on the floor. If you're really hard on this table, it's a terrible- Yeah. You gotta get that moose moving pretty nice. You could just set it up on opposite sides of Megfest and just slowly play it toward the other guy. Also, again, sports, physical game, dexterity games. There's a lot of games that involve flicking. Catacombs. Good one. Catacombs. It's a good one. Exit the game. Anyone do an escape room ever? I don't know about you, but I hate escape rooms. They're really stupid. However. I could solve the puzzle by myself. I don't need these stupid friends here, right? I don't need to be. If you wanted an escape room, give me a real escape room. Hair, Houdini, shit, right? Only no tricks. Scott, there was one of those in New York and the people who ran it got arrested. I know, that's what I wanted to do it, but then they closed it. Exit the game. It's a series of escape rooms that are board games. There's no app involved for anything. You've got all these cards and all these rules and these artifacts, like pieces of paper and like clues and things. These are just escape rooms that you can play on a table at a convention. Way cheaper than going to a real, real escape room. They work really well. They're really good. If you like escape rooms, they're just like physical escape rooms. It's a little tiny box. You buy it. It's a one shot. You play this game and then you can't really play it again because you tore it up or whatever you did with it. It is shocking how well and how elegantly these physical pieces make the same things that happen in a physical escape room happen on a table at a convention. There's another series that's not the exit series. It's not disposable. You can replay it. Of course, the same person can't replay it. That would involve us spitting on a piece of paper hoping that text would appear. Yeah, but it didn't. The other series has like an app involved. It works a little differently. But that's why. The exit ones are the disposable ones. I actually like the exit ones better. The app is why that one didn't make the list and this one did. Also, and part of the reason I said this one specifically, the Pharaoh's Tomb, is that the game is the series. The Pharaoh's Tomb is probably the best one to play to see if you like these games. Lost Cities. This might be the best two player game that exists, period. Two player games are intensely hard to design. The only kind of game harder to design than a two player game is a three player game. Lost Cities is a risk taking game. You do not want to take actions. Every time your turn comes around, you wish it wasn't your turn. You never want to play a card. Well, you want to wait and see for the other person to play a card. Yeah. And that's it. Play this game. It's a two player game. It's super cheap. And I don't need to explain the rules to you because. So I started playing magic when beta came out. And when Fallen Empires came out after the dark, I thought magic was done and boring. And I quit. And I thought this game was dead. I looked up recently because it was the anniversary of magic or something. They published a list of all the sets and what years they came out. I played 82% of magic. I played magic from 1993 to 1994. That was it. And yeah, that felt like an eternity because I was a kid. But Magic the Gathering, it was the first one of these really. I mean, there was a lot of spell fire. There was Jihad. There was all those other. There was Lord of the Rings one that I really want to play. Netrunner. We said we wouldn't put something on the list. Because it was the first or because it was notable. But the fact that magic has not only survived to this day, recognizable to someone like me who stopped playing it in middle school when Fallen Empires came out. If you don't know how old I am on that. It's like, even if you don't get into magic, even if you never burn any money, you can get free decks of magic cards for $0 and just learn to play the simplest, most basic game of magic. It's something you should know, even if you're not into it. If you do play that free game of magic and start to think, oh, maybe I should get into this. Oh, I see why this is so popular. I hope you're rich. When I was in middle school, I saved up my allowance. I spent like $140 in like $19.92. I could have been buying video games. But every time I went to the mall, I just bought packs of magic cards. All that got me was every wall that had ever been released in any magic sounds that I bought. I got a lot of planes. But magic is a juggernaut that will never die. And juggernaut is still my favorite artifact. Fury of Dracula is one of the rare hide and seek games. Now, the original hide and seek game is called Scotland Yard. It's in the library. You can go play it. It's literally just a hide and seek game. But Fury of Dracula is a better hide and seek game but also has this other crap tied to it that's not good. The combat in this game is bad. But it only happens at the end. Everything else is good. The deal is it's asymmetric. One person is Dracula. Everyone else is vampire hunters. And Dracula moves secretly by laying cards down from his own deck. Face down. And everyone else is like moving around trying to find Dracula's trail. It's super fun. But the normal part about it is that it's so asymmetric and it handles this well. If Dracula makes a mistake, there's rules to handle that. If Dracula straight up cheats, that's totally OK. Dracula can cheat and get away with it. And that's totally OK. But there's also rules to handle it. This game has a lot of really fascinating mechanics bound together. And it's not a perfect game. In fact, it's deeply flawed in many ways. But there are not other games like it. I can think of one other game I have ever seen that catches errors and players cheating and corrects them in the rules other than that game. It's this and Puerto Rico, which is also on the list. So the deal was, I guess, a few years ago, I'm going on Board Game Geek and I see the list of games. And Game Six is like Android Netrunner. I'm like, what the hell is that? I never heard of that. Well, how did it come up to number six from me not hearing about it ever in my whole life? So I bought this box. And I thought it was just some two-player game. But actually, no. See, when I was a kid playing magic in 93, 94, whatever that was, I said, man, if only they would just sell me four of every card instead of making me buy random cards, wouldn't that be great? Yeah. Well, apparently someone did do this and I just didn't hear about it until it was way later. So Netrunner was a game designed by Richard Garfield back in the magic days that was collectible. It died because everyone played magic instead. And more recently, it got re-released, but now it's not so collectible. The way it works is every few months or so they come with a pack of cards. It costs 15 bucks and there's three copies of every card in the one pack. So everyone who's into Netrunner has every single card. If you play against an evil deck, you have that deck too. You just gotta put it together. You have all the cards. No one can win with money. You can only win by being smart, clever, or lucky. Right, it's not cheap. You still gotta buy hundreds of dollars worth of cards, but you're getting every single Netrunner card there is. And for that amount of money and magic, you'll get the one deck that you're going to play with. So, mm, also it's a way better game for smart people. If you're not into complex, difficult games, you'll be upset. It's also interesting in that it is asymmetric. One of you plays the hacker and one of you plays the corporation who doesn't want to get hacked. And you got a tournament, you got to bring two decks because you got to play both sides. Donations and Dragons has existed for a long time and continues to exist. I don't particularly, well, I enjoyed second edition the most of Adventures and Dragons. I'll admit that. But it was deeply flawed in fundamental ways that kind of made it a bad role-playing game. Case in point, you had weapon proficiencies and anything else, anything that wasn't killing was called non-weapon proficiencies. D&D is just, it is not the best RPG. By some definitions, it's barely even an RPG if you play some other interesting RPGs. But Donations and Dragons is notable in that it is instantly recognizable and playable by anyone who has ever played D&D throughout its entire history of D&D. I mean, that go disappeared, rules changes. I haven't played D&D since like Third Ed. But I'm confident I could sit down to a D&D of like 10th edition and just play it. And also, it is the game that most people first experience playing an RPG with. Knowing the deal with the RPG that most people in the world who have ever played a RPG have played gives you a basis to understand all the, arguably, much better, more streamlined RPGs that are more focused on specific kinds of storytelling. So D&D is bad. You shouldn't make it your game and have a big campaign event. You could play something else, but you got to have no D&D so you know what you're talking about when someone yells at you and you're saying how bad D&D is. If you want to know about all those other games and why we're so down on D&D, because remember, I love D&D. I played D&D. I do. I played more D&D than any other RPG to this day. That's only because of the realities of this awful world. Yep. Don't leave college ever. But we did a lecture at PAX Australia called Beyond Dungeons and Dragons, which is just an hour of us going through the mechanics of role-playing games and like how the rules inform the storytelling. And then at the end, we do the same kind of panel. We list all the weird RPGs that'll teach you interesting things about role-playing. It's on YouTube. If you grab one of these, you can just watch it. The Blackbird is an RPG that starts in media, it's free to play. You can just download it, download this PDFs and play. You can download them now, print them at the business center and play this game tonight. Somewhere in the Game Master, everyone picks a character. The characters are already written. You read your sheet. It tells you your character's deal. The story starts the same way every time. Everything is already set up. You just start playing. What do you do? This is Firefly crossed with Star Wars. The other novel thing about it is that it sets up this world and there's all these proper nouns, but it doesn't give you any context for them. The primary way you drive the story forward in the game is there's a mechanic that boils down to, hey, this is like that thing we did that time, where you and another character get a bonus if you tell the story of something that happened in your past relevant to the current situation. You start in a world you know nothing about in the middle of a crisis. You play the story forward while simultaneously writing the backstory. It is amazing to see this happen. This is, I put this on this list because if you've only played D&D, this will show you there's another way. So I do not like poker. I think poker is kind of a shitty, not that fun game. Pendante, you know in poker, like if you really play poker, it's not like Maverick, it's not like every hand is this crazy drama. You fold 98% of the time if you're smart, but Pendante makes every single hand of poker that hand at the end of the movie Maverick. And even if you have a really bad time playing this game, the mechanics of it are bad, you're losing at the game, all the cards have pandas on them. It's great. And the other great thing is that there's no way to get a flush in this game, but you can get a flush. So you can go flush and that's awesome too. The other fascinating thing about this game, it's for, like you play it with poker chips, but not for real money, but say you're crazy. You could play for real money. At the back of the rule book it says, hey, do you want to play this for money? Here's the playing for money rules. Do not do. Do not do. You don't want to put your money in the hands of a panda. America is a trivia game about the United States and it is amazing even if you hate trivia games, which I hate trivia games. All right, the main problem with trivia games, bust out an old trivial pursuit from before you were born and it's like, oh, what celebrity in this movie you've never seen? And it's like, I don't know. It's not fun, right? It's like you can't even guess at what it could possibly be, right? And it's like you either know it or you don't. America, the way this works is they come out, it comes out with something. It'll say like M&M's. Like, all right, guess the year M&M's were first sold. Guess how many M&M's are on average in a bag and guess what was the first thing. What state is the largest M&M factory in? Yeah, and it's like, so you take turns putting things, there's two lines and a map of the United States and you put out things making guesses of the three things. It's like you might put your shit on a state or you might put it on a range of years or you might put it on a number. Right, and you get points, if you can even get points for being close if you're not exact, you don't get points for being way off though, so. Yeah. But it's like anyone, even if you don't know you don't have any information in your brain, you can start to make guesses and learn things. A bunch of German game playing like hyper, we complain about everything and we hate Americana games and we hate like boring regular old board games. We somehow find this game to be amazing. I kind of want to play this right now. I wish we had it. I hope Chris and Anthony have brought it. We'll see. So, it's train games. Most of you have probably never played what I would consider a train game. Train games. Ticket to Ride is not a train game. Nope, Ticket to Ride is a set building game that happens to have a board it doesn't really need. Railroad Tycoon is a train game but it's sort of a baby train game. You play out tracks and you move cubes from here to there. This is a real train game. You should play one train game in your life. If you're gonna play one to see what the hell is wrong with these people, full disclosure, I like this game a lot. This is the one to play. Most people play these games are train nerds who care about train history. So a lot of the things that happen in this game are accurate to train history and they're just gonna go right over your head. Don't have to worry about them though because the game is so perfectly playable without knowing what happened in 1846 in the Midwest. This is the one to play but the interesting things it does is you are a person in the game. You buy stock in companies and run those companies. You'll probably only have one. You might have more than one. Your money is separate from the company's money. Company buys a train. You buy stock in the company. You pay the company the money. Scott buys stock in my company. Scott pays my company money. Scott buys too much stock. Now Scott owns my company. And the other novel thing this game does is that you know most machine-building games you do stuff and then you crank the machine and then you do stuff and you crank the machine. And you don't feel like you get to crank the machine that much? This game, it's do stuff, crank, crank. Do stuff, crank, crank. Your machine feels like you get to use it a lot. The only other game I've ever seen do that is Oh My Goods. At the end of the game, there's the big things you can build at the end that people rarely build. And even if you build it, you get to use it maybe once, then the game's over. When Oh My Goods ends, you get to crank your machine a bunch before you actually score. It's like, all right, the game ended. Everyone do your turn one more time so we can use the fun stuff we just bought on the last turn. Yeah, build that glass. So Dominion, not only was it the first deck-builder, it is to this day the best deck-builder. Every other deck-builder I've ever played is fundamentally flawed in really, really obvious ways. And this game is to this day, it holds up, the expansions are good, the game is great. If you've never played a deck-builder, play Dominion. If you've played all their deck-builders and you don't like them, play Dominion, and you might find that you don't hate deck-builders, you hate all those other games. If you don't know what deck-builders are, we talked about magic, where you build your deck at home with cards you spent a lot of money on, then you show up at the game store and lose. In Dominion, everybody sits at a table with this one box of cards that you only had to buy once for everybody, you get the same 10 cards as everyone else gets, you draw your hand, you play your entire hand, then you draw a new hand, then you play your entire hand, and once you run into the cards, you shuffle the deck, and while you're playing, you're buying cards from the table and putting them into your deck, and your deck gets bigger as you play. It's like the real-life experience of Magic the Gathering, but contained into a single board game. You're buying cards to make decks to play this game. Instead of buying cards from the game store, you're just buying them from the table with other cards that were started in your hand. Yep, so the game really is who among your group, because there's so many cards that the combination of cards you're drafting from is different every time you play. There's more combinations that humans could ever play, ever. The game is really who among your friends figures out the best path to victory quickest from this set of cards. It doesn't matter which one. Find some game at a game store, it's probably on sale, that has cardboard shits with a bunch of bullshit on them. It's called like Someone's Last Stand. I think there's like Paths of Glory is one that's really popular, there's Advanced Squad Leader. We've got the one that's the Battle of the Marn. Yeah, there's gonna be one of these games, they all, whatever, right? There's some time in history, some battle that they simulate or whatever, just pick one. The reason you wanna play one of these games once is because you go to any gaming con, there's at least one group of Beardos playing these games, and it's good to know what those Beardos are up to. Twilight Struggle almost counts as one of these. Almost. These games are very close to the origins we would call modern board gaming, as in the Creechfields, the German board games that the Prussian army played to train its officers. These games are close to games that people use to literally plan actual wars. And the other thing is that they are not games that are designed to be played well to win as a board game, nor are they designed to be fair. They are designed to be simulatory of the actual experience of war. They are often not fair. They're often horribly overbalanced. Crazy random things will happen. Because often war was unbalanced. Yeah, like read the history of real warfare, and it's crazy. Oh, the very wealthy country with many tanks attacked the tiny country that was very sad, because they didn't even... What happened next? Roundabout.mp3. Play one of these. You probably won't like it, but then you'll know. And if you like it, I got news for you. There are people who will do anything to play these games with you. Risk is a shitty game. Shogun, which was then renamed Samurai Swords, which was then renamed Iguusa, is the best possible realization of a game that feels like risk. You got a board. It's the map of Japan in the ancient times, right? You got all your friends to throw their Samurais on it, and then you fight, all right? But the best part of this game is that every turn before the fighting happens, there's this sort of auction, where you take your money and you bid on things. You can bid on who goes first. You can bid to hire Ronan temporarily so that when your friend attacks you, suddenly a bunch of Ronan jump out. You can bid to buy more castles to defend your places, right? You can bid to choose where in the turn order you go, whoever bid the first picks if they go first or last. And the most fun part of the game is that whoever gives the most money to the ninja hires the ninja, it's a fucking ninja. Oh yeah. The other interesting thing about the game is instead of having like just armies everywhere, you've got regular armies, they can't do that much, and they have a few big armies, and that's actually the game, these big armies fighting. So this is risk with good mechanics that ends quickly, gives all the feelings of quickly, quickly relative to risk. And it is a game that actually has a lot of skill input. The fighting is interesting and you have to make decisions during the fighting. Need I mention, when you play this game, you'll finally get to roll your D-12s. All right. We have a lot of D-12 rolling. We have five minutes left, so we're gonna power through the rest of these. X-Gun the board game is a co-op game. The only way to fix co-op games, other than having an information economy, is to have time pressure. Make something force you to do things quickly. Yeah, you're playing solitary with your friend, it's boring, oh, but you only have five minutes to do it. Oh crap, right? That's what X-Gun is, it's an app. This is the game that, you know, one of the first games that had an app that went with it. Yep. Between two cities is a game where you're building cities with tiles, you know, typical board game stuff. You build on your left and your right and you collaborate with the players on your left and right. Your score at the end is of the two cities touching you the lowest of them. The more you think about that, the more you realize how vicious that kind of game can be. There's no other game like this. Every turn you get two tiles. It's like which one goes in the left, which one goes on the right. Oh Scott, I got a plan. Oh hey, I got a plan. I gotta keep Scott down. Oh, don't give that tile to him over there. Give it to me. What is this? No, what is this? Find your business, find your business. I don't like pandemic. I don't even really like pandemic legacy, but if you're gonna play one of those kinds of games, this is the best one. So far. Also, it is probably the best. It's all relatively new deal. It's the best legacy game. It's the best pandemic game. It's the best BSE co-op game. And it's arguably an RPG. It's a role-playing game. In fact, I encourage you if you play it to treat it like a role-playing game. Deep Sea Adventure takes maybe four minutes to play. You're a bunch of jerks. Sharing a cheap submarine that leaks air constantly. And when you use any air you use, someone else ain't using. You're all sharing the same air. You go down picking up treasure and the deeper you go, the bigger treasure there is, but at some point you say, fuck it, and you turn around, start heading back up. If you don't make it back to the sub before it runs out of air, you don't get to keep any of your treasure because you've died. This is a pure risk-taking game. It's super simple. It's super quick. We play it like 20 times at any given convention. It fits in my pocket. Holy shit, Captain Soto. If you haven't played this, it's a four versus four game where you're each on submarines. It's sort of like battleship, but more real-time. You're trying to blow up the other team. What hell, a board game is four on four out there. Four on board, real-time. No moderator, no game master. It moderates itself. You give orders, like move north, move east, move north, move west, fire torpedo in that direction, and then the other team tells you if they hit. There's no game like it, play it, it's amazing. Factory Fun is actually super out of print, so I feel bad about telling you to play it. The notable things about it are it's a pipe and goop puzzle game, which that's a genre as far as I'm concerned, and it's effectively solitaire. No matter how many players you have, the game is the same. If a player walks away from the game, it totally doesn't matter. New player can come in and take over their spot. The only interactive part of this game is that every turn, new factory pieces show up and you basically go one, two, three, and try to grab all the pieces. If you touched it, you have to play it. That's the fun part. If it turns out that it really ruins your factory, that sucks. Access Nalyze is a really shitty game. Corner Master General gives you all the feelings of Access Nalyze, but it's actually a good game. It's not random, other than your deck of cards. Combat is you kill one guy. You can only have one guy in a space. It's like this hyper-elegant version of Access Nalyze. It is great fun. We play it every year at PAX East. It's also three on three, which is great. Three on three. It's equally, it's balanced, it's fun, and never play Access Nalyze. We're out of time, go to the end. We have three more seconds. Every player is playing a completely different game with completely different rules, and yet somehow it all works. One person's the goblins. One person's the adventurer. One person is the cave itself. One person's the dragon. There is nothing else like this. It's so weird. And this is the last one. This is a lark. No table, right? So the deal is, a lot of people have never played larks either because it's usually creepy people dressed up like vampires hitting on you in real life. Little too real, I know. Or people hitting each other on the head with sticks. Yup, that's the other kind. This is the kind of lark that people mostly play in Europe and Scandinavia. But this one was designed in America by a guy named Luke Crane, who also designed Burning Wheel and Torchbearer. Inheritance is a one-off, you buy this bag and you can play the lark of inheritance with a group of your friends. One person moderates it like the Game Master. The rules are very simple, they're very elegant. Playing this game was literally one of the peak gaming experiences I've ever had in my life. If you've never played a real lark, try this one. And then don't play any others. If you don't like this one, you will hate larks forever. If you like this one, you're a lark for now. And we are out of time. And we are out of time. The panel's here at some point. If you have questions, grab one of these flyers. There are videos of our other panels and if you email us, we do answer our questions. Also, if you wanna see us tonight at 8.30 p.m. in Mages 1, writing rules for tabletop games, it's us and Luke Petersburg. That's what he's talking about.