The 40 Most Popular Board Games, According to Ranker – Part One

Let me show you one of the best games I ever played:

Love Letter is a brilliant.  Each player represents a suitor, desperate to place their letter in the hands of the princess, but must dodge the intrigue of a royal court.  On your turn you draw a card, then choose and play one of the two courtesans or royalty in your hand, all while hoping to eliminate other players through clever deduction as to what card must be left in their hand.  The game costs $12 retail (though you can currently buy it for $5 new on Amazon), and the sixteen cards and little wooden victory cubes fit in a small felt pouch which can be taken anywhere that you have a pocket (so maybe not while sprinting in a one hundred meter dash in a nudist colony, but pretty much everywhere else.)  The game is easy to pick up, explain, and play.  It is a quintessential great game.

It also doesn’t make the cut on this list.  Love Letter ranks in at #62.  And that’s because this is not a list of the best board games ever.

Oh, sure, this list is pulled from Ranker.com’s poll The Best Board Games of All Time.  But the list is created via a cross-section of society, on the most visited voting website on the Internet.  While an individual voter may up-vote the games they think are best, the end result is a compromise between what people like, and what they know.  Love Letter is well-liked.  But only 300 people voted on it.  Compare this to the top game on the list which weighs in at 7,635 votes, and it becomes obvious that Love Letter winning the top spot stood less of a chance happening than the prospect of Burger King and Dairy Queen eloping to form a single corpulent kingdom.

The wedding was magical. The reception dinner, however, left much to be desired.

Unlike in my According to Gatherer series (where I evaluate the way players vote on the best and worst cards in Magic: the Gathering.) Ranker doesn’t average the votes.  Positive votes are worth a point.  Negative votes reduce the positive votes by a fractional amount.  And then (to add to this madness) items added by users in their personal ‘re-lists’ are given extra special weight.  How much weight?  I don’t know.  According to Ranker:

Giving away our algorithm’s “Secret Sauce” opens Ranker up for gaming or manipulation, and nobody wants that. We’re all about transparency, but we’re going to keep some of the details a secret to protect the integrity of the system.

I’m not fond of that answer, but it’s all we have to go on.  Oh, and one more thing.

I’m sure if it was allowed, that Magic: the Gathering would be in the top forty somewhere.  But the rules state that this list is of board games only—ones in which pieces move around a flat surface (Love Letter must have slipped through the cracks due to its relative obscurity.  Magic was probably banned.)  That eliminates Poker, Hearts, Pokémon, Uno, and

Image by Joseph Horne

Dungeons & Dragons.  Limiting Dungeons & Dragons to a board awkwardly forces the game to be judged by the Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Adventure Board Game, Dungeon & the Castle Ravenloft board game.  The Adventure Board Game comes in at #101, while the other two trail close behind.   Not how I would do it, but I didn’t make the rules.

Enough jibber jabber.  Let’s see some games!

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Number 40 – Candy Land
615 Positive Votes
898 Negative Votes
Often Listed and High on Re-Ranks

I couldn’t ask for a better game to drop in the 40 slot.  Candy Land feasts on lists of this kind, gobbling up the syrupy, nostalgia-drenched positive votes served by this questionable ranking system.  King Candy and Court’s success, however, is gunked up by all the ire in the icing.  With approximately 57% of the audience voting against it, this tart is a hard candy sell.  The fact that this sugary game coats the bottom of our list is a testament to how many sweet tooth suckers love Candy Land despite its jawbreaking flaws.

The quest to rule said confectionery kingdom is guided by the sticky hand of fate.  In the classic version of the game, players are penalized for getting mired in the Molasses Swamp and skipping their turn until they draw a certain color.  They rocket forward the map with unreasonably lucky draws, and victory is stolen from players primping to join the court at Candy Castle only to find a missive shoved in their hands with the dire news that they must return to the Plumply the Troll at the Gingerbread Plum Tree near the beginning of the game, who evidently only wanted to say ‘Hi’ because his full basket is a clear indicator he already finished picking his damn plums.

Son of a B-! If you do this to me one more time, I will cut you Plumpy, and burn your tree to the ground!

Your average two-player game lasts around 50 turns.  If you enact the house rule where winning requires you to land on King Candy’s space exactly (a rule which is insisted upon by everyone who is not in the lead), then 10% of those games will last 126 turns.  126 turns filled with repetitive game play, occasionally broken by unwarranted leaps ahead and soul-crushing setbacks.  If I wanted an emotional roller coaster, I’d instead quit my job and enter a new career, only accepting interviews from women that remind me of cartoon heroines I liked as a kid.

Please, Ms. O’Neil, give me a chance!  I know I can be the best news reporter you ever seen, if only I didn’t need to care for my dying mother who disagrees with all of my political ideologies!

Despite its egregious flaws, however, remains the spirit of an earnest tutor.  For many children, this is the first game they will fully grasp, and can play with others.  The fact Candy Land requires no skill isn’t a liability, it makes the game ideal for toddlers.  Meanwhile, these tykes are learning skills we take for granted.  The rules of the game, so basic as to bore us to tears, are complicated enough to keep them engaged.  Children learn how to follow directions, how to abide by rules, how to interact with others when given a goal, how great it feels to win, and, most importantly, how to lose gracefully.  Even picking up the pieces and putting the box away is a learning experience.  Cleaning after oneself never seems important until it leads to the destruction of something you love.

I’m not saying you need to love Candy Land.  It’s an abysmal game.  But I’m willing to give it the respect it deserves.  King Candy’s rule has enraptured kids since 1949.  And as long as there are board games, some variation is likely to keep the rug rats mellow and interacting while Mom/Dad/Rosie the Robot cooks dinner.

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Number 39: Forbidden Island
497 Positive Votes
339 Negative Votes
Low on Re-Ranks

A mysterious island emerges from the sea.  You and your friends must work together to retrieve four sacred treasures and escape the island before it submerges once again.

Forbidden Island is most people’s first experience with cooperative board games.  Can I make that assumption?  I’m going to make that assumption.  Because whenever I hear someone explain Forbidden Island to someone who never played before, they tend to focus on the idea of working together to achieve a goal as if it is both radical and mind-bending.  Scotland Yard and Arkham Horror are kicking around with multiple reprints since the 80s.  And Lord of the Rings reinvigorated the genre at the the turn of the century.  But none of those games came packaged in a shiny tin with striking artwork and stellar components for $17.99 in Barnes & Nobles, ready for the holiday season of 2010.

Those families who snagged a copy as a quickie present discovered an excellent surprise.  Forbidden Island didn’t only look beautiful, but played beautiful as well.  Matt Leacock took every good lesson from his hit game, Pandemic, and consolidated it into a portable twenty minute game.  Players took on distinct roles, a modular map, and were challenged to agree on a best plan of attack—a plan which must change as the board inevitably slipped beneath the waves, altering the landscape every turn.

Image from Wired Magazine.

Over the years, I’ve heard a few gripes with Forbidden Island, claiming Pandemic, with its larger map, heightened complexity, and relatable theme is the better game.  Maybe.  But I would bet that between its more convenient set up time and family friendly appeal, that Forbidden Island was the game more often played.   Should convenience be a deciding factor when determining which game is best?  Maybe we can re-ask ourselves that question when we discover Pandemic further down this list…

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Number 38: Operation
724 Positive Votes
943 Negative Votes
Often Listed, High on Re-Ranks

The Operation commercials always make the game out to be a farcical romp.

Leering over this horror show of a body, however, is as tense and nerve wracking as using your amateur skills to perform a real life appendectomy with thousands of dollars on the line.  Maybe more so.  No amount of fake money is worth the continuous stress of never knowing when the buzzing beehive in your patient’s nose would finally unleash.

Of all the crazy maneuvers in which your skills as a fake surgeon is requested, I’m most perplexed by the rubber band, which you must remove, turn around, then replace in the opposite direction all while touching nothing, ever.  What kind of operation involves removing something, flipping it, and putting it back in?  “Well, it’s not good Sam.  It turns out your heart is upside down.  I’m afraid we need to operate.  Now I’m not going to lie to you.  This won’t be easy.  I need to open up your chest, remove your heart with a pair of tweezers, spin it around, then put it back inside without grazing any other part of your body.  If my tweezers so much as touch anything, then your nose will explode.  Needless to say if that happens, I won’t collect my standard fee of $200.”

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Number 37: Trouble
783 Positive Votes
653 Negative Votes

Spot thirty-seven goes to the Pop-O-Matic™.  At least, that’s the narrative I wish to tell myself.  I find it hard to believe anyone would choose to up-vote Trouble over Parcheesi, the precursor to the entire family of cross and circle games.  At least with Parcheesi, you field options.  Advance two pegs, one for each die?  Or add the dice together and zoom ahead?  Is it more important to move to grace, attempt to block a player’s advance, or take advantage of the five you rolled to move a piece out of the nest.  The only decision you make in Trouble is, “What should I do after pressing the Pop-O-Matic™?”  The correct answer is to put the game back in the box and drop it off at the nearest Salvation Army.

But the Pop-O-Matic™ itself?  That’s awesome.  It takes the most repetitive feature of many games and gives it punch.  I could pop a Pop-O-Matic™ for minutes on end for no discernible purpose, lost in a tactile response loop.  Why more games didn’t slam a bubble in the center of their board is beyond me.  Okay, technically, seventeen other games did.  But with names like ‘Headache’ and ‘Frustration’… it’s as if Hasbro was warning you how painful these railroading games play.  At least one bright-minded fellow figured out that Settlers of Cataan is made that much better when the desert square is replaced with a Pop-O-Matic™.  And another hero built a successful Kickstarter campaign around Pop-O-Matic™ d20s for Dungeons and Dragons, and the Dwarf Paladins who want some ker-smack in their hammer smashes.  Smashing the board isn’t for every game.  But if you’re a publisher who wants to add some oompf to your six-sided cube, a popper will do.

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Number 36: Chutes and Ladders
716 Positive Votes
1181 Negative Votes
Often listed and High on Re-Ranks

Chutes and Ladders is based on the classic Indian game of Snakes and Ladders.  You know what other game came from India?  Parcheesi!  Which kitten do I need to save from a tree to climb a ladder and put Parcheesi further up a list?  Wait a second.  Chutes and Ladders encourages pre-schoolers to bake cakes, mow the lawn and climb trees to save kittens?  Without adult supervision?

Why are we giving dunce hats to kids who show an interest in graphic novels?  And why are slides such a terrible penalty?  I thought slides were supposed to be fun.  Madness!

If you’re perceptive, you noticed something about the rankings which makes zero sense.  Chutes and Ladders has fewer positive votes than Trouble.  It also retains almost double Trouble’s negative votes count.  Yet, it’s rated one spot higher.  What the?

Members of Ranker.com who disagree with a list’s make-up (or just for funsies) can create a personal list of the same category.  Items that are mentioned in that users ‘re-rank’ are given more weight than a normal vote.  While I’m not a fan of letting personal busywork effect the master list, I can appreciate the underlying logic.  Games re-ranked are games people care about.  Numerous users took the time to find the Chutes and Ladders entry and add it to their personal list.  Fewer users bothered to re-list Trouble.  Effectively, they admitted to liking Trouble when prompted, but not loving it.

This will continue to cause problems as we sally further up the list.  A number of non-Hasbro games broke into the top forty based on their excellent design, but lost points on individual lists.  This problem already arose with Forbidden Island, which scored a high percentage of positive votes, but suffered from poor re-ranks.  If I’m to guess, I would say that those who are voting for traditional Hasbro games are really voting from among fifty or so choice games, while those who are voting for more current independent game publishers are choosing from among thousands of titles.  Since the Indie crowd features a wider knowledge base, they’re more likely to choose lesser known games in their personal re-ranks.  They may mutually agree that Forbidden Island is a great game, but they’re less likely to include it in their personal top ten.  If you think Chutes and Ladders is a good game, however, your knowledge base is probably more restrictive.  A C&L fan who creates their own list is likely to include C&L again.  And even if it only ranks #10 in their personal top ten, that re-rank still scores big points.

It’s a shame to set great games aside because the audience that supports them is overcome with options.  But serious gamers should take this as a reminder to rejoice in the variety we’re constantly exposed.  We find it a challenge to decide which of our games should be number one.  That’s great!  Trouble and Chutes and Ladders can own spots 37 and 36.   Feel free to keep arguing over the top slots; we’ll be in the next room playing games.