Every couple of years (or so) I blog through my top 50 or top 100 games over on my personal blog, akapastorguy. This time around, I decided to share that list with our ever-so-wonderful Opinionated Gamers readership… along with some random thoughts that I had about the list.

Method to the Madness

Here’s how I come up with the final list:

1. Download my BoardGameGeek collection. (There are 4227 games that I have played/owned/rated, so it’s a pretty substantial list.)
2. Clean the spreadsheet to remove expansions and any game rated below 6. (As of today, that’s 1722 games.)
3. Go through and clean off games that obviously won’t end up in my top 100. (Example: much as I love Wits & Wagers or Win, Place & Show, neither of them is going to be in my top 100 games… and that leaves me with about 500 games to work with.)
4. Randomize the list of games and begin comparing them in 1v1 playoffs. (The question I ask myself – which game would I choose to play, given the right number of players and the correct amount of time?)
5. The losers of the first round are faced off against each other… and the losers of the second round do the same.
6. Losers of the third round are removed from contention.
7. This process (which is long and a bit tedious) continues until I’m down to approximately 100 games, each of which have won multiple 1v1 playoffs to get here. Now, as a group is dumped, I order them to fit into the top 100.
8. Once I’m down to the top 25, I order them myself, leaving the 1v1 process behind.

Tastes Change

Out of curiosity, I compared my current 2022 list with my top 50 list from 2020 as well my top 100 lists from 2014 and 2012. (No, I’m not sure what happened in 2016 & 2018. Evidently I was playing a lot of games rather than writing about them.)

Over the past decade, I’ve had 192 games on my top 100/top 50 lists… but only 18 of them appear in each of the four lists:

• Africa
• Agricola
• Anno 1701: Das Brettspiel
• Ascending Empires
• Catan
• Claustrophobia
• DungeonQuest
• Favor of the Pharaoh/To Court the King
• Heroscape
• Im Reich der Wüstensöhne
• Memoir 44
• Mystery Rummy: Al Capone and the Chicago Underworld
• Pandemic/Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 & 2
• Race for the Galaxy
• Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit
• StreetSoccer
• Thebes
• Ticket to Ride
• Zooloretto

Note: three other games would be on that list if not for something wrong with my sorting system that caused five “should be in the top 100” games to go missing from the final list. We’ll talk about that more in a minute.

And 22 games have appeared on three of the four lists… Obviously, some of the change is due to new and exciting games that have appeared since 2012… but it’s also an issue of my tastes changing. (And the change in who I game with on a regular basis – my boys are getting older and the pandemic definitely changed what games got to the table.)

All in the Family

Four families of games showed up on the lists… in other words, while they aren’t the same game, they are definitely related.

• Daytona 500 gave way to Downforce
• Pandemic gave way to Pandemic Legacy
• The City gave way to Jump Drive
• To Court the King gave way to Favor of the Pharaoh

BGG and Me

Only 8 of the games on my top 100 list are currently in the BGG Top 100 list… and there’s even a single on my list that isn’t ranked (Wolfgang Riedesser’s Route 66).

And 41 of the games on my list don’t appear in the BGG top 1000 rankings.

Mistakes Were Made

In the process of moving lists from one spreadsheet page to another, the following five games were lost and did not end up being considered for inclusion – which is maddening, as all five of them would likely have ended upon the top 100 list.

• 7 Wonders
• Fast Food Franchise
• Nemo’s War
• Sentinels of the Multiverse
• Terraforming Mars

I haven’t chosen to boot other games out to fit them in… instead, I think it’s wiser just to recognize my error.

Mark’s Top 100 Games List for 2022

Here it is… the list you’ve been waiting for – which includes the direct links to my blog posts about each of these games.

1. Memoir 44
2. Race for the Galaxy
3. Clash of Cultures
4. Heroscape
5. Armageddon
6. Dungeon Alliance
7. Catan
8. Unmatched: Battle of Legends
9. Im Reich der Wüstensöhne
10. Pandemic Legacy: Seasons 1 & 2
11. Zooloretto / Aquaretto
12. Anno 1701: Das Brettspiel
13. Ticket to Ride
14. Lost Ruins of Arnak
15. DungeonQuest
16. The Quacks of Quedlinburg
17. Marvel Champions: The Card Game
18. Imperium Classics/Legends
19. Africa
20. Xia: Legends of a Drift System
21. Res Arcana
22. Dune: Imperium
23. Undaunted: Normandy/North Africa
24. Favor of the Pharaoh
25. StreetSoccer
26. Mystery Rummy: Al Capone and the Chicago Underworld
27. Ascending Empires
28. Monopoly: Tropical Tycoon DVD Game
29. Minigolf Designer
30. Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit
31. Dungeon Lords
32. Quantum
33. Wildlands
34. Eminent Domain
35. Jump Drive
36. Trails of Tucana
37. Tales of the Arabian Nights
38. New Frontiers
39. It’s a Wonderful World
40. Era: Medieval Age
41. Thebes
42. Can’t Stop
43. Core Worlds
44. The Princes of Florence
45. Baseball Highlights 2045
46. Innovation
47. The Taverns of Tiefenthal
48. Risk Legacy
49. Showmanager
50. Claustrophobia
51. For What Remains
52. Bärenpark
53. Ra
54. CloudAge
55. Cartographers
56. Clank!
57. Tobago
58. Septikon: Uranium Mining
59. O Zoo le Mio
60. Nexus Ops
61. Keltis: Der Weg der Steine Mitbringspiel
62. Lord of the Rings
63. Impact: Battle of Elements / Strike
64. Roll Player
65. My City
66. The Downfall of Pompeii
67. Tanz der Hornochsen!
68. Downforce
69. Die Schlacht der Dinosaurier
70. Vom Kap bis Kairo
71. Suburbia
72. Trains
73. Starship Catan
74. Galaxy Trucker
75. Giro Galoppo
76. Gingerbread House
77. Around the World in 80 Days
78. Rhino Hero: Super Battle
79. Diamant
80. The Dragon & Flagon
81. Zahltag
82. Traumfabrik/Hollywood Blockbuster/Dream Factory
83. Fireball Island: The Curse of Vul-Kar
84. Wurfel Bohnanza
85. The Quest for El Dorado
86. Survive: Space Attack!
87. Bohnanza
88. Arctic Scavengers
89. Anno 1503
90. Mississippi Queen
91. Agricola
92. Canyon
93. Route 66
94. Flamme Rouge
95. Kauchuk/Rule the Realm
96. Entdecker
97. Dice Town
98. Marrakech
99. The Rivals for Catan
100. Columbus

Full Disclosure: I received review copies of Flamme Rouge, Survive: Space Attack, The Dragon & Flagon, Septikon: Uranium Mining, Lost Ruins of Arnak, Unmatched: Buffy, some Heroscape expansions, and some Memoir ’44 expansions.