Happy New Year, everybody!  The OG staff wishes you all a very happy, healthy, and prosperous 2025, with more of the things you love about life and less of the things you hate.  The former will hopefully include lots of great gaming, of course!

The new year is a time when many people put together lists of resolutions.  And while that kind of introspection may not be your thing, the concept shouldn’t be a foreign one, because many gamers love making lists of games.  Top 10 lists, Desert Island lists, lists of our favorite games by timeframe, designer, and genre—all sorts of things.  Coming up with lists of games seems to be a big part of most gamers’ DNA.

One popular choice for this is an Alphabet list.  What’s your favorite game whose title begins with the letter “A”?  What about “B”?  And so on, for each letter of the alphabet.  It can be an enjoyable exercise.

Just before Thanksgiving this year, I saw a post from Caroline Black on the Geek.  Caroline regularly posts a blog on BGG called The Dyslexic Gamer that I like to check out from time to time.  Her article that day was about a couple of games in her own alphabet list.  After reading that, I realized that the OG group had never put together an alphabet list and I thought it might be a fun thing to do.  I put my own list together, posted it to a shared spreadsheet, and asked the group if anyone else would like to come up with their own list.  The results were pretty impressive:  we wound up with contributions from 30 people!  With that much data to work from, it was obvious that an article needed to be written to summarize it all.  Dale asked me if I wanted to ring in the New Year with a 3 part piece, and I agreed.  So thank you, Caroline, for the inspiration!

Obviously, for a project like this, you need some rules (although given the highly independent nature of the OG crew, maybe guidelines would be a better term).  Here’s the structure for our alphabet list:

• Categories – Obviously, each of the 26 letters of the English alphabet is its own category. I added a 27^th one:  games whose title begins with a numeral.  Joe Huber suggested an additional category—games that begin with a punctuation mark (Jeff Allers’ “…aber bitte mit Sahne” is a good example of this).  However, very few of the participants listed anything here, so we decided not to include it.
   
• Lists – Everyone was free to list as many as 3 games in each category. I asked that they indicate the order of these games, starting with their most favorite.  People could list fewer than 3 games if they wished and that wasn’t uncommon for some of the tougher letters.  Some folks even skipped a category altogether.  That was fine; I just took whatever each individual was comfortable listing.
   
• Game Families – Early on, the question came up about which version of a game the person was listing. A few folks listed Brass and I asked them if they meant Brass: Lancashire or Brass: Birmingham.  Most people said, “Both!”.  Based on this, I decided the simplest and fairest thing was to include all the versions of a game in the same listing.  So the listing for Carcassonne includes all the Carc games, The Crew includes both Quest for Planet Nine and Mission Deep Sea, Endeavor includes the original, Age of Sail, and Deep Sea, and so on.  I didn’t want games to be penalized just because they had multiple versions and different voters had a slight preference for different ones.
   
  Deciding how to apply this was more of an art than a hard and fast rule and my choices could be criticized, but again, this is just meant to be a fun exercise, so I didn’t worry too much about it.  One of the exceptions I made was not to include the “card” or “dice” versions of popular games with the original, since they’re usually very different.  I also chose not to include the Pandemic Legacy games with the Pandemic ones (the three Pandemic Legacy games form their own family).  But in most cases, I grouped things together.
   
• Eligibility – Which games were eligible and in which category should they be listed? The first of these questions was easy:  I just accepted whatever the person put down!  That included public domain games, as well as a couple of titles which haven’t been published yet (but will be soon).  Again, it was intended to be fun, so I let folks do what they wanted.  The only rule was that each voter’s list in a category could only include one title from the same game family—no double dipping was allowed.
   
  Which category a game fell under was trickier.  Games often have different titles that they’re known by.  They might vary based on where in the world it was published (for example, it’s not unusual for the German and the English language versions of a game to have different names).  Sometimes, the name is changed when a new version of a game is released.  And what do you do with names that begin with “The” or “A”?  Do you suppress the leading article or include it?
   
  So, for example, consider the game that today is known as Catan.  It could fall into as many as four different letter categories:  C (for Catan); D (for its original German name, Die Siedler von Catan); S (for Settlers of Catan); and T (for The Settlers of Catan).  The problem is that most of us gamers compile lists of our game ratings and that we usually list the games with the title that we first knew it by.  There’s no right or wrong way to refer to a game and with so many different entries, there was no way I was going to be able to wade through all of them and make them all consistent.
   
  So once again, I just let people do what they wanted to do.  Did that mean that some games were represented in more than one category?  Absolutely!  Did I care?  Not really.  I don’t think we had a case of the same game being one of the most popular picks in multiple categories, but even if it had turned out that way, it would have been more of an interesting curiosity rather than anything worth losing sleep over.
   
• Points – With this much data, I obviously had to summarize it somehow in order to form any conclusions. So I did the obvious thing and assigned points to each voter’s first, second, and third pick.  There was no perfect way of doing this, so I just picked a method that was simple and performed the way I wanted it to.  I decided to give 5 points to each voter’s first pick, 3 points to their second place game, and 2 points to their third pick.  Basically, this behaved as follows:

2 seconds > 1 first
2 firsts > 3 seconds
3 thirds > 1 first > 2 thirds
1 first = 1 second + 1 third

That felt right.  Then, I just compiled all the picks the group gave to each game in each category, totaled up the points, and listed the games that had the most total points.  In case of a tie, I gave precedence to the game that had more picks.

Those are the rules I came up with for our little exercise.  The response was fantastic.  As I mentioned, 30 people provided lists.  All told, more than 1000 games were listed!  That did include some duplications, because of the same game having multiple names, but that’s still a huge number of titles.  Our participants cast over 2200 votes!  Really cool stuff.

In fact, there was so much information that we decided there was enough to make three articles out of it.  Today’s is mostly about explaining the process, but I’ll use the next two days to list the results for each category and make some comments about the games that were listed.

Just to give you a hint of what’s to come, here are the results for the first few categories.  For each one, I start by giving the total number of games that got mentions and the total number of votes cast in that category.  I then list the 5 games (and ties) that got the most votes in that category.  I also include all games that got at least 15 points and exclude any that got fewer than 10 points.  I provide each game’s year of initial publication, to show where the group is coming from.  (Spoiler:  as a whole, we liked a lot of older games!)  I put an asterisk next to the game that got the most first-place votes; that’s usually the game with the most total votes, but not always.  For each game listed, I give the point total and, in parentheses, the number of people that voted for it.  After that top group, I also mention all the additional games that made the lists of at least three of our voters and give the number of lists it appeared on.  Finally, I’ll make some comments about the category as a whole and some things that I found interesting.

Ready?  Let’s start with the Number category!

# – 38 games, 78 votes

1. 7 Wonders* (2010) – 52 (12)
2. 6 Nimmt! (1994) – 29 (8)
3. 500 (1904) – 18 (4)
4. 1960: The Making of the President (2007) – 17 (4)
5. 7 Wonders Duel (2015) – 16 (6)

Games with at least 3 votes:  1846 (4), 7^th Continent (3)

7 Wonders is the dominant game and wins easily, with 6 Nimmt! finishing as a solid second.  As you can see, I decided not to include 7 Wonders Duel in with its votes, nor did I include 7 Wonders: Architects, so that vote total is purely for the base game and its many expansions.  By the way, 500 is a trick-taking game that was probably the most popular one in the world in the years before Contract Bridge was invented; it’s considered the national card game of Australia and is also still widely played in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

You might have thought that this category would be dominated by 18xx games, but it didn’t turn out that way.  A total of eight 18xx titles were listed, led by Tom Lehmann’s 1846, so that’s still pretty impressive, but none of them made the top 5.  Actually, two people listed 2038 as their favorite # game and that’s usually considered to be an honorary 18xx game, so you can add one more to the list.

A – 47 games, 87 votes

1. Agricola* (2007) – 48 (11)
2. Ark Nova (2021) – 41 (9)
3. Age of Steam (2002) – 26 (7)
4. Acquire (1964) – 14 (4)
5. Ave Caesar (1989) – 13 (3)

Games with at least 3 votes:  Azul (4)

This was a two game race and Agricola emerged victorious over another game that features animals, Ark Nova.  Between them, the two games got half of all the first place votes that were cast.  Age of Steam also got strong support.

Only two games with a leading “A” got mentions:  A Gentle Rain and A Feast for Odin.  The latter wound up doing better in the F category.

B – 45 games, 84 votes

1. Brass* (2007) – 27 (6)
2. Bohnanza (1997) – 25 (8)
3. Beyond the Sun (2020) – 17 (4)
4. Big Boss (1994) – 13 (3)
5. Bridge (1925) – 13 (3)

Games with at least 3 votes:  Barrage (4), Bus (4), Bargain Hunter (3), Betrayal at House on the Hill (3)

Another two game race and this time, the Rosenberg game finished second, with the Wallace title coming in first.  Brass’ support came almost entirely from first-place votes, while the Bean Game got more votes, but of the secondary variety.  Many of the top games are older ones, for some reason, with Bohnanza, Big Boss, Bridge, Bus, Bargain Hunter, and Betrayal all originating from the 20^th century.

As another quirk, a number of the listed games have ties to sports, including Balloon Cup, Baseball Highlights 2045, Battleball, and BasketBoss.

C – 41 games, 87 votes

1. Carcassonne* (2000) – 31 (7)
2. Concordia (2013) – 27 (7)
3. Can’t Stop (1980) – 22 (7)
4. Cosmic Encounter (1977) – 22 (5)
5. The Crew (2019) – 20 (6)
6. Castles of Burgundy (2011) – 20 (5)
7. Castles of Mad King Ludwig (2014) – 15 (3)

Games with at least 3 votes:  Crokinole (5), Codenames (3), Civolution (3)

The games here are pretty tightly bunched.  Carc emerged on top, but no fewer than 6 games got at least 20 points, more than for any other category.  And 10 games made the lists of at least 3 voters.  That includes Civolution, which I think is the only Essen title to get that many votes.

I’m a little surprised that Castles of Burgundy didn’t do better.  Obviously, it got some support, but the Geek still shows it as a top 15 game and it seemed like the sort of design that would do well with the group.

One of the more surprising votes:  Chase, the old TSR abstract game from 1985 that uses dice as pieces, got a first place vote.  Definitely a blast from the past!

That should give you a taste of what’s to come.  Check us out tomorrow, when we pick up the results with the always enticing letter D!