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

Reversi: The classic game of dominance.  Printed by Ravensburger in 1893, two players clash in a battle of wits as they flank each other’s territories, converting units to their side.

It’s a good game, but one who’s theme is left to abstraction.  In 1973, however, Satoshi Hasegawa brought this classic English game to Japan and re-branded it Othello.

Othello is a Shakespeare play about an African general in the Venetian army.  Despite his acumen as a military strategist, he fears his Italian wife, Desdemona, may not truly love him because he is not of her tribe.  His second in command, Iago, pretends to be Othello’s friend.  But jealousy drives Iago.  It is both his motivation, and his weapon. Through manipulation, he twists Othello over his fears and “[Puts] the Moor at least into a jealousy so strong that judgment cannot cure.” Othello, with deep-rooted doubts about his ability to be loved and a lack of faith in womankind, is convinced that Desdemona is unfaithful based on circumstantial evidence.  By play’s end, Othello kills Desdemona, then himself.  In Hasegawa’s redesign, black represents Othello, white Desdemona, and each actor’s interlocking moves fight to maintain control on a bed of jealousy, “The Green-ey’d monster that doth mock the meat it feeds on.”

Rage, envy, self-doubt, racism, suspicion, and inherent sexism.  Sounds like a family game.  Some families more than others.

Like the box says, Othello takes a minute to learn, and a lifetime to master.  But you don’t need to ‘master’ Othello.  The key strategy of the game becomes recognizable after a couple playthroughs.  If you place a piece against a wall, it can’t be flanked on one of its sides.  If you maneuver your piece to a corner square, it can never be flanked.  Once players understand where the most valuable spaces are, games revolve around setting your opponent so that they must place one square away from a wall, letting you drop in the prized position while converting troops in a fell swoop.

From this point on, Othello is more a mental exercise than a game.  Like many players, I have fond memories of learning Othello as a young adult, and could be convinced to play a game or two on occasion.  But if I was stuck on a desert island with 1d4 other castaways and only one board game, this isn’t the one I would take with me (I could play this in the sand with rocks and shells, so choosing this would be a doubly wasteful.)  Maybe this combination of appreciation and apathy is why Othello receives spot number 47 in Ranker’s list, making it this week’s Honorable Mention.

Unlike Othello, spots thirty to twenty-six are filled with games featuring excellent replay value.  They are limited more by the number of cards in the box than by the game’s central mechanics.  That’s okay.  Four of the five games are so popular, a wide array of expansion sets were published for them to keep your palms red from rolling dice.  You can purchase expansions for Number 30 on Ranker’s list, too.  Except one of the beauties of Number 30 is that the execution is so simple, purchasing expansions is unnecessary.  All you need is to invent a few new categories to play an original game of…

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Remember kids, inside the heads of your friends is a piñata full of streamers and candy.

Number 30: Scattergories
635 Positive Votes
432 Negative Votes

In the game of Scattergories, players are provided a pencil and a pad with twelve categories (such as Breakfast Foods or Capital Cities.)  A twenty-sided die is rolled, with a letter on each side (skipping the awkward letters Q, U, V, X, Y, and Z.)  Players race against a demonic, clacking three minute timer to jot words in their each category that begin with the random letter.  At round’s end, each original word is worth a point (words you wrote which other people also wrote are worth zero points.)  Alliteration is also valuable since, if your answer is acceptable, each word in your answer that begins with the chosen letter is worth an additional point (for example, if the category is ‘Presidents’, and you write ‘Woodrow Wilson’, you get two points.)  If the category is ‘Songs’ and you luck into the letter ‘D’, then ‘De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da’ by The Police will send your opponents into fits.

“I’ve got a great idea for a song, mates.  It’ll totally send someone’s futuristic word game into chaos!” -Mr. They Don’t Call Me ‘Sting’ For Nothing.

Herein lies the problem with Scattergories.  There are times when the scoring is… subjective.  Struggling to appease an uncaring timer-god, players tend to write goofy and inappropriate answers, then fall over themselves justifying their apocryphal choices because of course Eddie Money is a mammal.  If you ever saw him in concert, you would understand that instinctually.  Sometimes whether the word is valid or not results in a complicated game of semantics, yet players must decide on an answer.  Like this post on philosophyforums.com:  Irish2301 was given the category ‘Things that are Spherical’ and the letter ‘H’.  So he wrote ‘Hemispere’.  He was shot down.  He went to his forum pals for back up, but was shot down there, too.  A hemisphere is half a sphere, and therefore not ‘spherical’.  But spherical means “shaped like a sphere.”  Doesn’t half a sphere have a sphere-like shape?  These are the little arguments that are never forgotten, occasionally pop up, and ruin an otherwise pleasant game of disc golf, Greg.

While Scattergories was officially published in 1988, similar word-based parlor games have been with us far longer.  And as long as people played word games, they’ve assaulted their friends’ sensibilities with arguable answers.  James Thurber once wrote in the New Yorker how he was at a cocktail party with a brood of loud and drunk writers.  The hostess tried to reign her wild guests in with a word game: the person who could write a list with the most animals which included a double-o in its name would be declared winner.  It kept them quiet for a time, but eventually came time to score.  Baboon, raccoon, loon, goose, moose, mongoose, rooster, kangaroo, cuckoo, woodpecker, and whippoorwill were all accepted.  ‘Whooping crane’ and ‘hoot owl’ made the cut, but ‘moo cow’ led to a shouting match.  ‘Stool pigeon’ and ‘pool shark’ caused further arguments.  According to Thurber,

“The shouting about this died down, when micro-organism turned up on the paper of a stuffy textbook writer, who defended it on the ground that a double ‘o’ is a double ‘o’ whether hyphenated or not. Everybody turned on him, and somebody threw an ash tray.”

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Number 29: A Game of Thrones
932 Positive Votes
641 Negative Votes

I don’t get it.

The artwork in A Game of Thrones is beautiful.  The chits are well-made and plentiful.  The themes are obvious and guide game-play.  You’re one of the houses of H.R.R. Martin’s masterpiece, struggling to maintain alliances only to break them when most convenient.  Excellent.  I certainly understand why people are enchanted with this game.

“Oh. When you said we were going to roleplay out some Game of Thrones fantasies on the dining room table, I kind of had something else in mind. No, no. This is good too. Do you have a coat I can borrow? I’m getting kind of chilly…”

But I don’t get it.  Maybe it was my play group.  In the couple of games I played, nobody did anything.  The mechanics reward patience, with the first person to back stab likely to become first loser.  So everyone moved some resources, and operated minor engagements until the timer ran out.  Points were counted and someone was declared winner.

Maybe it’s me.  I never read the books, nor watched the show.  But I never saw Battlestar Galactica either, and I think that board game is excellent.  I’m also not big on games where the dominant strategy is to pick apart your weakest friend at the table.  I play games to enjoy the companionship of friends, not bully them.  But I play adversarial games like Cosmic Encounter and enjoy them despite my inclinations.

Game of Thrones, however, marches beyond the boundaries of usual Risk diplomacy.  The more research I do, the more I’m sure you can’t win unless you’re lying to someone.  You’re supposed to establish alliances, then walk with an arm around your ally’s shoulder, making it all the more difficult to pull away when you jam a knife in their side.  I know plenty of players who love doing that.  I’d rather eat a lime.  Just because you can peel and eat a lime like it’s an orange, doesn’t mean you should do it.  Now I need a glass of water.

The game looks like it should be fun, and I can certainly imagine people I would recommend it to.  I just never had any fun when playing it.

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Number 28: Dixit
931 Positive Votes
600 Negative Votes

It pays to be vague.  In Dixit, ‘the storyteller’ puts a card from their hand face down and says a word or a phrase that describes that card.

For example: “Wandering Heap”.

The other players then put a card from their hand into the pile.  Shuffle the pile, then reveal the cards.

Maybe this looks like a ‘wandering heap’?

Players try to interpret which of the cards was the storyteller’s card, lock in their votes, then reveal.  Choosing the right card nets you two points.  You also get a point for each person who chose your card.  Meanwhile, the storyteller gets two points if some players guessed their card.  But if no one guessed the storyteller’s card, or if everyone did, the storyteller gets nothing.  Play passes to the player on the right.

Considering the way we score in Dixit, the storyteller’s descriptions of their cards tend to be as obscure and dreamy as the art on the cards themselves.  Marie Cardouat provides us with a lush atmosphere of obscure symbolism, featuring boys trapped in snow globes and inside-out sentient handbags.

It’s fun to play and simple to explain.  The rules are also easy to abuse.  Instead of being vague, the storyteller could theoretically use inside jokes.  For example, whenever a friend of mine was going out for a smoke, we used to say that she was going ‘duck hunting’.  I’m sure the expression originally spawned from a joke, but mostly we said that to keep people out of the loop so she could smoke in peace.  If she was playing the game with me, and there was smoke in one of the cards in my hand, I would get an easy two points as storyteller.  Who else would guess ‘duck hunting’ would mean ‘a humanized version of Princess Luna‘?

But, at least in the few games I played, true in-jokes were rare.  More common was that two people with similar personalities and experiences ‘clicked’, while occasional players who weren’t attuned to the table’s sense of humor struggled to adapt.  But the same could be said of games like Apples to Apples and Cards Against Humanity.  Games like these aren’t about winning, anyway.  Most of the value comes from using the game as a medium to interact with people.  Scanning for relevant minor details and attempting to read other players’ humors will eventually lead to conversations about why people think they way the think.  For such a visual game, it sure does encourage people to talk.

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Number 27: Cranium
919 Positive Votes
1223 Negative Votes
Often Listed and High on Re-Ranks

Ouch!  Check out those negative votes!  For every three people who like Cranium, four people hate it.

I understand the rage, though.  When Cranium released in 1998, I immediately shoved a copy under my arm after skimming the back of the box.  It’s four games in one!  Tired of word games?  Let’s switch to charades?  Tired of that?  Try a humming challenge!  Or make snowmen out of clay!  Cranium was a party in a box for a generation of scatterbrained nerds who grew up watching MTV’s Remote Control and The Kids in the Hall sketches.  Other party games can be clever, but repetitive.  Cranium encourages you to feel smart, creative and outgoing.

Pictured Here: One third of all the games in your local Salvation Army, complete with rock-hard clay.

That’s great, assuming you are a little smart, a little creative, and a little outgoing.  What happens, though, if English is your second language and you suck at spelling?  What if you’re a tone-deaf lover of trivia?  What if you can only draw if the subject combines arrows and stick figures?  Then you’re in for a terrible night.  One in which people encourage you to have fun while forcing you to do the one embarrassing thing you can’t.  And it happens again, and again, right when you’re having a good time.

That’s why Cranium gets more hate than Scrabble, Pictionary, or Time’s Up.  If you can’t draw, you can say you don’t like Pictionary and ask to play a different game.  But Cranium?  You can’t do a little drawing?  What a wet blanket.  Where’s your sense of fun?  Besides, you’re good at the math parts…

The crazy thing is that if you’re the type of person who enjoys playing Cranium, you would probably enjoy playing almost any other game, therefore you shouldn’t play Cranium.  That is, unless everyone else is on board.  I know I’m down.

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Number 26: Arkham Horror
1229 Positive Votes
971 Negative Votes

In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.  His worshipers, of which there are many, seek to rouse him from his slumber so he may loose his maddening vengeance on life itself.  Foolishly resisting this alien god while grasping at the virtues of sanctity and reason are a clutch of adventurers who struggle to uncover ancient works, learn forbidden magics, and leap through portals to otherworldly realms where they must hold tight to their sanity before tumbling back into our reality and erecting an elder sign to seal off further passage.  Time is of the essence!  Cthulhu rises from his slumber, and when he wakes the world is forfeit!

Arkham Horror is the first mass-produced purely cooperative board game.  Its predecessor games Scotland Yard and Fury of Dracula are also cooperative in nature, but both require a game master who acts as Moriarty or Dracula, driving the action to which the players must respond.  In Arkham Horror evil corrupts the game itself, and the players must work together to strike back against the ever ratcheting delirium spread through the waking world by a depraved deity.  In a striking evolution of design, Arkham Horror is the first game introduced where all the players can lose, as the game itself wins.

And the game often wins.  Fully cooperative games must be difficult to be interesting.  If players win in their first couple of times through, then they consider the game ‘solved’ and lose interest in playing again.  Alternatively, losing early games of Arkham Horror is liberating, and fuels the future euphoria one feels when they finally beat the game.  In Lorenzo Wang’s article ‘The Pursuit of Games: Designing Happiness’, he explores the addictive power of losing.  Wang is more interested in video games, but the principal is the same.

“Big gory deaths in your typical FPS stimulate the nucleus accumbens, the part of our brain that gives us dopamine-powered orgasms, and it also happens to be activated by the anticipation of pleasure.”

Winning isn’t what makes us happiest when playing games; losing is.  The release of winning feels great, but it’s only satisfying if it is earned.  Meanwhile, each loss compiles the gratification one feels when they succeed.  Ultimately, winning isn’t necessary in order to achieve happiness.  As long as the players can visualize future success, that is enough to electrify a game.

So come.  Embrace the inky ecstasy of the Great Dreamer.  Beat back upon the inevitable tide of doom.  Your futile blows do nothing to stop the awakening of the High Priest of the Old Ones while the world descends into gibbering hysteria.  Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!