This is Sarah’s AFTERMATH of her top ten list. I rated a lot of games, over 440+ stand alone games. There has been some movement between last year and this year, but more movement between when we here at OSG started reviewing games, March 2017, and now. Some games have moved up, some have moved down, but, overall, I still really love lots of games. Here is some of the info.

Between this year and last year these games moved down or fell out of my Top 10:

Barenpark moved down from 4 to 5

World’s Fair 1893 moved down from 5 to 7

Mystery of the Temples fell from 6 to 13

NMBR 9 fell from 9 to 16

These four dropped some because they haven’t been played quite as often but are still top tier games for me.

Glen More got replaced by Glen More II: Chronicles, because it is an expanded version of the original core game. Also, this is the version we have, and I’m not sure that we would need to find the original out of print version now.

Kingdomino fell from 5 in 2017, to 10 in 2019, to 43 this year. It isn’t any less of a good game, but it falls more in the gateway game area that we don’t necessarily play as much of anymore. Typically, if we are playing a gateway style game, it is either a party game that can accommodate 7+ players, a new to us game, or a review copy.

Between this year and last year, these games moved up or were new in my top ten

Aeon’s End moved up from 7 to 4, mostly because of the Legacy version and the Expedition (campaign) system that they have introduced. I love the storyline in this game and the story aspect takes it up a few notches for me.

Wingspan and Bosk were released last year and we had not played their full published versions until after we ranked our Top 10s of last year.

Chimera Station was a 2017 game that I had been interested in ever since I heard about it, and we got to borrow a copy from our good friend, Ken Grazier of GeekCraft, for a bit. It’s the only game on all of our Top 10 lists that isn’t owned by one of the OSG meeples.

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Here are my games 11-25:

11. Spirit Island

12. Dinosaur Island

13. Mystery of the Temples

14. Xia: Legends of a Drift System

15. Ex Libris

16. NMBR 9

17. Takenoko

18. Calico

19. Just One

20. Fury of Dracula (Third/Fourth Edition)

21. Animal Kingdoms

22. Gizmos

23. The Isle of Cats

24. Silver & Gold

25. Sprawlopolis

I think that my list speaks to the fact that, overall, I am an omnigamer. I want to try a large variety of games. When I averaged out the weights of my 25 favorite games on BGG (which I don’t necessarily agree with all the ratings of how complex a game is aka its weight), they averaged out to 2.3. The lightest game in my top 10 is Barenpark at 1.67; the lightest game in my top 25 is Just One  at 1.07. The heaviest game in my top 10 is Chimera Station at 3.15; the heaviest game in my top 25 is Spirit Island at 3.96.

For the most part, I want there to be some sort of theme. I don’t mind games where the theme is thin; but I prefer for there to be something. Sagrada could have been relatively themeless, but the designers and developers made it into a love letter to the unfinished Basilica Sagrada Familia, which was originally designed by architect Antoni Gaudi. Of my top 25 games, there are only three where I would say that there isn’t really much of a theme: NMBR 9, Just One, and Silver and Gold.

I love gameplay mechanisms that let me build something or protect something, in the case of Cooperative games. A large majority of my top games let me do that in some form or fashion. Whether its via tile placement, worker placement, dice drafting, deckbuilding, or engine building, I want to feel like I created something at the end of a game.

Hope you have enjoyed OSG’s Top 10 series.

Game On!

Sarah