Geek Top 10 Games Through Time

Posted on July 23, 2015 by huzonfirst

I’m sure many of you have seen the Geeklists of JonMichael Rasmus, who regularly lists the games in the Geek’s top 100 and analyzes their trends.  About a week ago, he released a Geeklist in which he listed all the games that have been in the top 10 since he started tracking them 10 years ago.  Here’s the link:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/193639/who-replaced-who-top-ten

I love this kind of stuff.  More than anything, if you aren’t already convinced that the Geek has a severe bias against older games, this should do it.  Here’s some of the things I observed.

  • The initial top 10 game in JonMichael’s first chart (back in May of 2005) are the following:
    • Puerto Rico
    • Tigris & Euphrates
    • The Princes of Florence
    • El Grande
    • Power Grid
    • War of the Ring
    • Europe Engulfed
    • Wallenstein
    • Die Macher
    • Paths of Glory
  • Of those games, only Puerto Rico is still in the top 10 (although Power Grid fell out only a couple a months ago).
  • Only two of these games are still in the top 25 and two of them have fallen out of the top 100 entirely. Here’s the position these great games currently hold:
    • Puerto Rico – 5
    • Tigris & Euphrates – 33
    • The Princes of Florence – 61
    • El Grande – 26
    • Power Grid – 11
    • War of the Ring – 34
    • Europe Engulfed – 480
    • Wallenstein – 181
    • Die Macher – 94
    • Paths of Glory – 44
  • Just as an aside, later in 2005, Go briefly made the top 10. It’s hard to imagine a traditional game doing that well these days.  Go is currently ranked 65th.
  • Here are some other top 10 games that have fallen precipitously in the rankings, together with the year that were last in the top 10, and their current ranking:
    • Ra (2007) – 95
    • BattleLore (2008) – 148
    • Shogun (2008) – 76
    • Space Hulk, 3rd edition (2009) – 118
  • All told, 34 games have resided in the Geek’s top 10 over the past 10 years. (Technically, the total is 35, because the Anniversary Edition of Puerto Rico made the list late in 2012, but then it was decided that such deluxe editions would not be ranked, so I’m not including it, as it wouldn’t meet the standards of today.)

Thanks to JonMichael for putting this very interesting list together and summarizing the Geek’s trends over the last decade.

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