BGG Top Games – 3101 – 3200

It’s been over a week since the last Boardgame Geek century post, but last week was pretty full and I didn’t want to oversaturate the market.

I didn’t want my readers to be overwhelmed with awesomness.

But we’re back now, looking at another century of BGG rankings, this one getting further and further into the depths.

We’re below 3100 feet games and counting!

Be careful if you need to come up for air.

This week, we have a bit of a bonanza of played games.

I didn’t say good games, but definitely played games.

And one crime against nature, meaning there’s no way the game should be this low.

My overall stats for this century are six games played and two of those owned (or previously owned).

The list I’m taking these from can be found here, but keep in mind that a lot of things can change if you’re looking at this a year from now.

Or even a week.

Two cases in point!

After doing the last post, I looked ahead to this century and was thrilled that I’d be able to talk about Doomlings (the great evolutionary card game that’s just hilarious) because it was in the 3100s.

Lo and behold, I check back before doing this post, and it’s all the way up to #3008!

Which would have been on the last post.

So just go read the review, because it’s a good one.

The second case in point is also from last time.

9 Lives was at 3100 last time and I predicted that it would fall into this week’s post, but I was going to write about it anyway.

Sure enough, it fell to #3101.

It won’t be on this week’s post. You can read about it on the last one.

I’m still getting good discussions with these posts, so let’s get started!

The first game that I’ve played, which is kind of fun and also very light, is Surfosaurus MAX (#3097, but was #3103 when I started this post, so I’m writing about it anyway).

This is a card game where players take turns playing 2-3 cards (depending on player count) and then the cards are examined and the strongest combination of cards will score.

Whoever contributed to that combination gets to score their card(s).

In a 2-4 player game, the best 4-card combination is scored, while in a 5-6 player game, the best 5-card combination scores.

The combinations go in this order: sequence of the same colour, set of four (or five) of the same numbers, same colour, just a regular sequence, regardless of colour, and then highest values (regardless of sequence).

The points for both full coconut (contributed directly to a combination) and half coconut (was truly tied with another player’s card in contributing to a combination) are in the top middle of the card.

After everybody’s been start player once, score your cards and determine the winner.

This is a very fast game. You will always have 7 cards in your hand since you draw as soon as you play a card, and you do not shuffle and deal out cards in between rounds.

You keep your hands!

I wasn’t too impressed with it at the time I played it, but I can see the attraction to some extent.

It’s nowhere near my top game (in fact it’s pretty far down, in the 600s!), but I’d try it again.

It might move up.

Then we have Excape (#3150), another Knizia classic dice game with some truly cool mechanics that I think I underrated at the time I played.

This is also known as Rapido, in case you’ve heard of that one.

It’s a push your luck dice game, but in this one you’re trying to reach the end of the movement track, by either rolling doubles or by staying on the “ranking chart” until your next turn, which enables you to move up.

You’re going to roll your two dice, one that has the numbers 1-2-3-4-7-X and the other has 1-2-3-5-6-X on it.

If you roll doubles, great! You move up on the steps and then roll again.

When you don’t roll doubles, you’re going to decide whether to reroll or to combine them into a 2-digit number (X=0) and decide where you want to place on the ranking chart (unless you roll an X, in which case you move back 1-2 spaces because you busted).

You can place wherever you want on the track. However, if you place on a lower tier and your dice have a higher value than the pair above it (yellow above is 53 while white is 52), you bump them off the track.

So you can place high if you want, but you are in danger of getting bumped, especially if your dice are low.

If it comes back to your turn and you’re still on the track, you move that space’s number of steps upwards and begin the rolling process again.

If you get to the 21st spot on the steps, you win!

This is another game that I rated pretty lowly at the time I played it, but for some reason it sounds much better now than I felt back then.

I’d like to try it again just to see if my mind has changed at all.

Maybe I was too critical back then.

Go Nuts for Donuts (#3170) is a fun little card game where you are secretly bidding to draft various pastry confections from a row.

But if you and another player choose the same one, nobody gets it!

You are trying to collect donuts and pastries in order to score points. It’s kind of like Sushi Go in that various donuts will score in different ways, or they may have another effect, like the Raspberry Toasted above.

The game ends when there are not enough cards to replenish the donut row.

Count up your points and whoever has the most is the winner!

This has delightful art and is a fun game overall. There are Sushi Go vibes except you’re not passing cards. You’re choosing them. I love the “if two or more people choose the same one, they all lose it” mechanic.

Makes things interesting!

Inconsequential, but it plays fast and I’ve played it a few times on Boardgame Arena, where it shines if you’re looking for a fast filler game.

The travesty in this century is a game that’s in my Top 50.

And it’s way down here!

Shipyard: 2nd Edition (#3179) is a wonderful game and it pains me to see it this low.

Especially because, being a 2023 game, it’s probably not going to move up much higher than this.

This is a game where players are constructing ships in their shipyards and then sending them out on test runs to impress investors and gain prestige.

The action mechanic in this one is amazing, as you can choose any action that you didn’t do last turn, or one that the other players have just done.

Essentially, any action that doesn’t already have a cube.

You’re collecting resources, ship parts, crew, and equipment for your ships, all placed onto your player board.

The trick is that if you attach a front and a back to a ship under construction, that ship must sail at the end of your turn.

So don’t do that until it’s all put together.

When you take a piece, you have to place it in one of the squares at the bottom of your shipyard.

So above, the end was placed, meaning that only one more inner ship piece can go there. When that piece is placed, it sails.

It’s glorious when you have completed a ship!

Then they set sail for the demonstration run, which means that you had better have purchased the right canal pieces.

Your ship moves along the canal (and can’t go backwards), meaning you need to chain these pieces, and choose a route that will give you the most prestige on each cruise.

The game is very intricate, I love the timing mechanism (choosing actions rotates a cog wheel and, after a certain number of rotations, the game will end), and I love the planning.

Even though I’m shit at planning!

I’m not sure why I love this game so much, but I do.

I did review it, and it’s linked on the name above if you want to go check it out.

Ok, with all of that done, let’s talk about some really cool-sounding games, including at least one I’ve played asynchronously and really love.

Circus Maximus (#3149) is a Roman chariot-racing game that I played way back when I was either in college or high school.

I forget!

It was well before I started tracking plays, so it has no “official” plays for me.

It was so cool because of course you were racing, but you could also do things to other players’ chariots as you passed them by.

Let’s blurb this one.

“Violent and bloody, Circus Maximus details the chariot races that occurred in ancient Rome. Eight teams race around the track three times to determine victory. Players prepare for the race by selecting the composition of their team of horses, their rider’s skills, and the type of chariot that will be driven. Once the race begins the players are free to do as they wish to hamper the other racers including whipping the rider, ramming chariots with scythed wheels, smashing into horses, and running over crashed opponents. A campaign game of multiple races, in which players have to manage their teams and can increase their income by betting on races, is also possible.”

I remember having so much fun with this one, though I don’t think I got the chance to play it too often.

Which is a shame.

I’d love to play this one again and see if it still holds the appeal it did before.

Then there’s The Shores of Tripoli (#3178), which is a Fort Circle wargame that is also on Rally the Troops, so I will have to play it one of these days.

I almost bought this a couple of times, but my days of 2-player games at work have waned with our group growing bigger, so I decided I probably wouldn’t get it played.

This game is about the first Barbary War, between the fledgling United States and the Barbary Pirates off the coast of North Africa.

Let’s blurb this one since I haven’t played it.

“From the end of the American Revolution, commercial vessels of the young United States republic were easy prey for the pirates of the Barbary coast. In 1801, newly inaugurated President Thomas Jefferson was eager to put an end to this threat and sent a “squadron of observation” to the Mediterranean. As the squadron arrived in Gibraltar, they learned that the bashaw of Tripoli had already declared WAR!

The Shores of Tripoli plays out this exciting episode of Early American military history. As the United States, one player will pressure Tripolitania to allow the free movement of American merchant vessels – or face the consequences. As the bashaw of Tripoli, the other player will continue the lucrative piracy of the fearsome corsairs while countering the American threat on land and sea.”

The cards look beautiful and the subject matter is really interesting.

I think (but I’m not sure?) that this is the game that put Fort Circle on the gaming map, and they’ve done some great work ever since.

I do want to try this on Rally the Troops one of these days (I know I keep saying that about different games, but one day!)

Speaking of playing games on Rally the Troops that I need to try out, how about a wonderful game that I have played on Rally the Troops (but asynchronously, so it doesn’t “count” as a play).

Vijayanagara (#3175) deserves to be much higher in the rankings, as it is fantastic.

It was the first game in the “Irregular Conflict Series”, which is COIN (Counter Insurgency) adjacent.

The game takes place in 14th Century India, with two smaller kingdoms (the Delhi Sultanate and the Bahmani Kingdom) facing off against the huge Vijayanagara empire, even as the empire is trying to hold back the Mongol hordes from their own incursions.

Like the COIN games, each turn there will be a card which will have an event and each faction will be listed at the top, in the order that they can take an action.

Of course, depending on what they did last turn, they may not be active this turn anyway.

A lot of times, I have trouble learning the rules to a more complex game when I’m just playing it online, asynchronously (with no teach).

For some reason, this game was intuitive enough that I got it and actually was able to win a game or two!

I really would love to own this and play it live and on the table, but I’m not sure my game group is up for it.

It’s still an awesome game, though.

Going back to nostalgia, how about a game from 1982?

Gunslinger (#3189) is a multiplayer game where individual players are gunslingers in the Old West, caught in the middle of a sudden gunfight and trying to survive and kill…or be killed.

I remember when this game came out, because I loved reading the After Action Report of the game in The General magazine (the magazine produced by Avalon Hill at the time) and it just sounded so cool!

But I was alone, not playing games with people at all, and so it was something I always dreamed about playing.

The system looks really intriguing, so let’s blurb it:

“Gunslinger is based on a quick and easy game system that recreates the split-second nature of gunplay. Each turn the players secretly play cards to define exactly what they will do during the next two seconds in the game. Then they step through these actions on the playing map, resolving each shot in the split-second when it takes place. Gunslinger resolves combat quickly and easily. The attacker draws a result card that shows exactly where the shot hits, which combines with his/her weapon to determine the damage inflicted. This recreates the critical differences between weapons: Winchesters, Shotguns, Buffalo rifles, Colt’s “Peacemaker”, Smith & Wesson’s breakopen guns and Remington’s Derringer are a few of the guns in the game.

Gunslinger includes eight two-sided boards (a total of sixteen map faces) portraying town and countryside terrain at a scale of six feet per hex. These boards can be assembled in varying ways to create a vast number of different maps that are used in the gunfights. The terrain includes gullies, hills, trees, watering troughs, wells, hitching posts and the interiors of buildings.”

There is usually a game at Bottoscon, so maybe I should join it this year?

Finally, let’s talk about something that sounds…really weird.

Carcssonne: Wheel of Fortune (#3194) doesn’t even include Pat Sajak!

But it is a kind of expansion, kind of replacement for the base game of Carcassone.

And it sounds really strange.

I’ve never heard of it before!

I’m not an expert or anything, but I’ve heard of a lot of expansions for this game, and this is not one of them.

Anyway, let’s blurb this one so you won’t think I’m lying.

Carcassonne: Das Schicksalsrad (English: Wheel of Fortune) is both a full replacement for the base game of Carcassonne and an expansion to the original base game. It includes 72 tiles, consisting of 63 tiles released in the original base game, 6 from Inns & Cathedrals, 1 from Traders & Builders and 2 from King & Scout. It also includes a special replacement start tile which depicts the Wheel of Fortune, a new mechanic unique to this edition of the game. The new start tile is the size of 16 tiles, arranged in a 4×4 square and is built using some of the tiles removed from the base game.

Nineteen tiles from the game have numbers printed on them allowing players to randomly spin the Wheel of Fate (between 1 and 3 spaces around the wheel). Otherwise, a player may choose to place a follower on the wheel if they decline placing a follower that turn. The results of the Wheel vary depending on which of the sixths of the wheel the pig lands on. Results vary from forcing all players to remove a follower from the board to rewarding the player who moves the pig with three bonus points. There are six outcomes in all.

Also, it’s standalone so you don’t need the base game, and all expansions are compatible with it (though if some of the tiles in it were previously released in an expansion, wouldn’t there be some duplicates then?).

I have to admit that I’m intrigued.

I’ve played the base game a ton on the app (but only once on the table), so seeing these kinds of differences is really interesting.

Has anybody played it?

Or how about any of these other games, since I’m near my 3000 word limit and shouldn’t add anymore games?

Is anybody as in love with Vijayanagara as I am? Besides two people I know who are?

Let me know in the comments.