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

Number 25 – Power Grid
1055 Positive Votes
671 Negative Votes

To win Power Grid, a player must consider and commission copious power plants, and tie their grid together in a way that is both efficient and monopolizing, all while ensuring a steady supply of the appropriate raw materials.  Wait, no!  Come back!  I swear, this is a fun game!

See! We’re having a great time! Just keep in mind that your odds of winning are directly related to the pension plan you choose, considering your income and expenses. But first, we need to watch five OSHA training videos!

Ever play a game where you lost somewhere at the half-way point, but were obligated to follow through for another hour?  Or maybe you were mentally done, quit playing, and threw the game to the person in third place?  That doesn’t happen in Power Grid.  At the end of each round, points are tallied and a new pecking order is established.  Then the player in last chooses which factories to invest in, and how much oil, coal, garbage, or uranium they need to buy to power those plants.  By the time the player in the lead begins their turn, all they can spend their money on are run-down, inefficient, power draining monsters, and the over-costed, leftover fuel to run them.  The come back mechanic is so strong, some players intentionally sabotage their network as a strategy to get first dibs on the latest technology in garbage incineration.  The slingshot mechanic provides tension throughout the game.  It’s not so overwhelming that a person in the lead will forfeit their position.  But it’s enough to keep every player relevant, even as the game folds to a close.

Image stolen from Ludi Berkely.

Power Grid isn’t super complex, but grasping the ins and outs can prove a challenge for amateur board game hobbyists.  It is, after all, a resource management game.  And resource management games are only fun if they are too difficult to initially grasp.  Otherwise, you wouldn’t need to play the game; you could instead declare what actions you would take if you were to play the game, then determine whether or not you would have won by thinking it over.  If thinking is a turn off, you can always play a resource acquisition game, like The Game of Life.  Some of us, however, want to make hard choices with meaningful impact.

You ever notice there’s only one important choice to make in Life? It happens at the very beginning, and the rest of your life hinges upon a decision you made before you fully grasped the game. Milton Bradley sure was one pessimistic dude.

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Number 24 – Ticket to Ride: Europe
1206 Positive Votes
514 Negative Votes
Low on Re-Ranks

All aboard!  With one part area control, and one part Rummy, conductors match trains by color and score points by fulfilling missions as they criss-cross the United States with…

Er…

Ticket to Ride: Europe?

Ticket to Ride is an incredibly popular game with over three million copies sold worldwide for an estimated $150 million dollars.  It spawned sixteen stand-alone games and expansion boards, ranging from ‘The Heart of Africa’ to ‘Halloween Freighter’ which includes ‘pumpkin trains’ and ‘spooky stations’.

Ticket to Ride: Europe is one of the stand alone expansions.  And it introduced some new quirks to the game with ferries, which cross water spaces, train stations, which allow you to take advantage of your opponent’s routes, and tunnels, which involve risky investments for connecting tracks that spin under mountains.  Cute. But how come we aren’t talking about the original game?

Because the original game is in this chart’s top ten.  Ticket to Ride is such a popular franchise that a follow-up stand-alone game with minor changes and a new map broke into the top forty, edging classics like Mancala and Mouse Trap out.

One of the most common words used to describe the Ticket to Ride series is ‘gateway’.  As in “Ticket to Ride is a gateway game.  It’s colorful and the rules are printed on a single sheet of paper.  I could play this game with first graders and their lunch ladies, and everyone would enjoy themselves.”  But there’s considerable complexity, too.  Understanding what your opponents are working toward, and outmaneuvering them (or staying out of their way) is key to winning this game.  Then there’s a fine level of risk assessment.  Can you drop a route between Madrid and Moskva before the game ends?  Doing so is worth a lot of points.  But accepting the mission and failing to deliver will likely lose you the game.”

We often talk about gateway games as if they exist only to lead to better, more complicated games.  But the Ticket to Ride express isn’t a one-way line to a secret station where the real games are.  It’s a gateway: an opening that provides passage in both directions, giving access to both more challenging games to new players, as well as granting experienced players access to more casual fare, and letting both groups share in their love of a good game.

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Number 23 – Small World
1109 Positive Votes
643 Negative Votes

In theory, Risk is a fun game.  There’s something attractive about poring over a map and plotting with rival rulers to capture dominion over the planet.  It’s a shame a game of Risk never plays out the way most of us selectively remember it.  Player turns last anywhere from a few seconds to the amount of time it takes to play a game of Risk.  The vast majority of that time will be spent watching your opponents whip their dice out, and comparing the size of their dice to the size of other players’ dice.  All players, but one, will attempt creative strategies establishing a base of operations which can move between two continents for a surprise continental bonus turn.  Your most boring of friends, however, will dump everything in Burma, swallow Australia, and demand the aborigines reproduce, forging a mighty army of boomerang hurlers.  The game ends when everyone attacks cousin Peter for forgetting to bring the salsa, and Peter flips the board in disgust.

Fun!

Small World takes all the fun parts of Risk (not much, really) and junks the rest.  In exchange, we’re treated to one of four boards, each designed to be uncomfortably small for the number of players in the game.  There is no Australia tucked away in a corner.  In fact, individual territories have different values depending on the needs of your armies who may prefer to bask in the swamp, or desire forests filled with crystals.

At the beginning of the game, monster races are randomly paired with powers, often resulting in unlikely combinations like Berserk Halflings, Flying Orcs and Spirit Skeletons.  Players bid on the army of their choice and claim regions on the board.  At the beginning of a player’s turn, they may either raid or decline their civilization, and bid for new monsters to play with.

With considerable complexity designed into the race/power system, Phillipe Keyaerts pulled one of the most aggravating mechanics out of the war game genre: rolling absurd piles of dice to resolve conflict.  In Small World, if a territory is home to five orcs, and their controller wants to attack a forest with three elves in it, then three orcs and three elves are removed from both sides, and an Orc marches into the new territory.   An element of chance is still a part of the game, but civilizations no longer crumble to a terrific streak of sixes.  Whether you conquer territories in Small World is a dependent upon your skill as a negotiator, and your ability to claim the resources you need.  Play smart, and you can convince opponents to ignore your base and let you reap the bountiful rewards of continued peace.

Right, right.  But which one of these squares is Australia?

Small World is a tight game.  Player who like to dwell over every minor decision can.  Players that like to Leeroy Jenkins the over-thinking fool can do that too.  It’s a fun game whether your group overthinks or underthinks.  You don’t find many games that are as casual as they are competitive.

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Number 22 – Go
1340 Positive Votes
1147 Negative Votes

Enough modern classics.  Let’s look at a real classic.  Go was invented some time before 500 BCE. It was once considered to be one of the four arts, or four main accomplishments of a scholar-gentleman, along with calligraphy, painting, and playing the guqin.

Go is a staple.  Not only in Chinese royal courts, but at the modern dining room tables.  This is due to the game’s vast variability baked into set of simple rules.  Two players, one black and one white, take turns placing stones on a 19 by 19 square grid.  If a player surrounds another player’s piece, the placing player removes that piece from the board and claims that ‘territory’.  If multiple pieces are surrounded, multiple pieces are removed.

Black sees an opening…

Places a piece…

…and claims the territory, removing three white pieces in the process. Images come from Learning Go.

Play continues until the board is divided into each player’s territory. Territory spaces are counted up, half a point is assigned to the person who went second, and the player who controls the most territory is declared winner.

This is a 13×13 grid. Its smaller that the traditional board for quicker games, or for quasi-amateurs like myself before moving to a larger, more complex board.

This is a screenshot from a recent game I played on my smartphone.  I’m black, claiming the central and top-right territory in this game while white hugs the edges.  This game is finished: I won by a margin of a half a point.  I know that might sound crazy to a person who never played Go before.  There’s so much open space.  All white needs to do is place a white stone in my ‘territory’ and white ‘wins the game’.  But trust me, white can’t win.  The only way white could win is if the computer continued to lay pieces and I made some cosmically stupid mistakes.

Since the computer could only win due to my incompetence, it conceded.  That’s a striking difference between Go and a number of other games I played.  I once participated in a Magic: the Gathering tournaments where, in one game, I established a four card combo allowing me to produce infinite mana, cast infinite counterspells, and gain control of all my opponent’s permanents every turn.  Still, my opponent requested I play the game out to its inevitable conclusion.  Prizes and player points were on the line, and my opponent wasn’t going to sacrifice either if I proved incapable of piloting my own deck.  I get that.  I probably would have done the same in his situation.

If I was to attend a Go tournament, however, and I refused to concede when I was staring defeat in the face, I would gravely insult my opponent.  It smacks of ungratefulness.  The winning opponent is either my superior, or an unequal guided by inspiration.  By losing to them, I was treated to a valuable lesson which will improve my game in the future.  By continuing to play, I show a refusal to acknowledge my better, and a considerable lack of grace.  At Sensei’s Library, there’s a very active discussion on the subject, but I like Snappy’s immediate response to the thread:

“The worst part about this style of play is that when you do fall asleep and your opponent does capture some huge group, they think it’s their skill that won the game and they don’t get any better.”

It’s worth thinking about.  And not just for Go, but for any game you play.  If your strategy involves your opponent making a mistake, then you aren’t playing your best game.  You may win, and you may do it often, but you will never succeed.

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Number 21 – Axis & Allies
1322 Positive Votes
886 Negative Votes

The most popular war game ever printed.  And I say that knowing Risk lies further up this list.  But Risk is about world conquest in general, with only a vague Napoleonic theme.  With no historicity backing the actions you take, Risk leans closer to an abstract strategy game than a true war game.  Axis & Allies bundles the deadliest conflict in history with an uncanny knack for the military strategy of the time, given the game’s relatively simple combat system.

I spent much of my teenage years in war room conferences with my Russian and English counterparts, devising strategies to check the advance of Germany and Japan.  The United States is a purchasing powerhouse, but mobilizing troops across either ocean takes time.  The Russians can crank out soldiers, assaulting the German front.  But if the U.S. spends too much time building a singular unstoppable army and doesn’t contribute enough to the immediate war effort, Japan will make quick work of China and threaten the Russian underbelly in the East.  The United Kingdom’s influence is felt around the globe, and is capable of great mobility, but spread thin.  Excellent tactics, timely responses with appropriate weapons, and a margin of luck can turn the tide for the Axis nations as they alienate Allied forces while marching troops into London and Moscow.

As a nerdy highschooler of the early Nineties, I loved this game.  When we weren’t marathon running Megaman 4, or convincing my friend we could turn his parents’ basement into a comic book store, summers were spent building up and tearing down the forces of the world.   Granted, I didn’t have much to compare to A&A.  But I owned a copy of Gettysburg, which was components poor by way of comparison.  And Samurai Swords was interesting, but never grabbed me in the same way.  It was difficult to relate to a map of feudal Japanese territories.  World War II, however, was both familiar and malleable.  With Axis & Allies, I could talk with people who never played, and they would follow along and sometimes provide advice.  If I’m England, should I build a factory in South Africa?  Or in India?  India is closer to the action, so I can move my troops immediately into China.  But India is also vulnerable to a combined ground and naval assault from Japan.  With a factory in South Africa, my troops are better protected, and I can build a navy with the versatility to move into the Atlantic or Indian Ocean.  But by the time a proper Navy is complete, I might put too many resources in too far away a location.  If I’m Japan, should I island hop to America? Crush China? Or launch a naval expedition around the Cape of Good Hope to connect with German forces in the North Sea and launch a kamikaze blitzkrieg on London?

Ironically, as much as I loved this familiarity with the source material, what I wanted most from A&A was a different map.  After cutting up the globe so many times, I ran out of strategies to employ and found myself settling into routine.  If only I could keep the mechanics of the game I loved, but was challenged with new terrain to overcome.  There weren’t many options for me to choose from, then.  In high school, good board games were purchased from Child World, and information about unofficial expansions took a long time to filter through local Bulletin Board Systems.  Now, as an adult living in the age of information and on-line shopping, I could pick up 17 expansions, 19 new editions, spin-off games, or new editions of spin-off games, three ‘official’ unofficial expansions, and a collectible miniatures line with four expansions unto itself.

Somehow, when I wasn’t paying attention, the source material went from pauperish to overwhelming.  Now it feels silly to pick the game up because I know I will never experience everything this franchise offers.  But, I’m resolved to buy a new copy none the less.  If only to convince old friends I haven’t seen in years to come over and try to capture the magic in this game once again.