New releases often get most of the attention here at the Opinionated Gamers, so today we’ll be shining the spotlight on older games that made it into our Top 100 lists.  Aside from the four games mentioned in Monday’s piece about our collective Top Games (i.e., Can’t Stop, Crokinole, Acquire, and Bridge), there were 70 different games from before 1990 that appeared among our all-time favorites.  Here are all of our older favorites that were included on multiple Top 100 lists submitted by OG members:

Favorites of Four

There were three games released before 1990 that made it onto the Top 100 list of four different OG members:

• Cosmic Encounter (1977)
• Hare & Tortoise (1973)
• Liar’s Dice / Perudo / Bluff (1800)

Alan How: Cosmic Encounter is my favourite game of all time. I have every version and played the 1977 original version more than 100 times. I love the player interaction so you ask for help, but the current situation makes you decide on which side or not; the variety of alien powers provide near infinite changes to the game and just when you think one power is overpowered it gets zapped. Nothing is certain and you can have shared victories (which feel just as great as solo ones). The game is quick to set up and play and what it makes my top game is because of the fun and laughter I’ve enjoyed since I first played it. The others are very good, but not in the same league for me.

Fraser McHarg: One of our treasured possessions is an Eon Cosmic Encounter set. Will never play with some of the expansions I admit, but overall a great and truly chaotic game.

Compile: Main 1

• Designer: Michael Yang
• Publisher: Greater Than Games
• Players: 2
• Age: 14+
• Time: 20-30 mins
• Played with review copy provided by Flat River Games

In the card game Compile, you are competing Artificial Intelligences trying to understand the world around you. Two players select three Protocols each to test. Concepts ranging from Darkness to Water are pitted against each other to reach ultimate understanding. Play cards into your Protocols’ command lines to breach the threshold and defeat your opponent to Compile. First to Compile all three Protocols grasps those concepts to win the game.

Control your opponent’s Protocols with card actions, Compile your own as fast as possible, and Compile your reality.

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We continue Top 100 Week here at the Opinionated Gamers today by sharing some of our all-time favorite games that missed the cut for yesterday’s aggregate list.  As mentioned yesterday, 19 different OG writers submitted their all-time Top 100 list, and we compiled the results to present 63 games yesterday that appeared on at least 5 or more of those lists.  We crowned Can’t Stop and Puerto Rico as the champions, each appearing on the favorites lists of over 60% of OG participants.  Today we will tell you about some of our Top 100 games that did not make the cut for yesterday’s write-up due to a lack of love among our fellow writers.  Here you will hear about personal favorites of each of us and why we just can’t get enough of these games!

Talia Rosen: My favorite games that missed the cut for yesterday’s lists are

• Longer high-conflict games like War of the Ring, Twilight Struggle, Nexus Ops, Root, and Dominant Species
• Classic German-style games like Stephensons Rocket, Lowenherz, and Caylus
• Children’s games like Igloo Pop and Survive
• Pattern recognition games like Geistesblitz, Uluru, and Jungle Speed

My personal Top 100 reflected my eclectic (some might say idiosyncratic or bizarre) taste for a wide variety of styles of games.  I have a penchant for longer, higher-conflict games that is not shared by most of my fellow OG writers.  I’ve long championed games like War of the Ring and Dominant Species with little success in these quarters.  I just adore two-vs-two partnership Nexus Ops and four-player free-for-all Root.  At the same time, I can’t get enough of old-school classic German-style games, particularly the sheer brilliance of Stephensons Rocket.  I also have a total soft spot for the ahead-of-its-time gameplay of Survive and the frenetic-nature of games like Geistesblitz and Uluru.  My desert island Top 100 is ultimately so different from yesterday’s picks, but variety is the spice of gaming joy, right?

Kronologic: Paris 1920

• Designers: Fabien Gridel, Yoann Levet
• Publisher: Super Meeple / Origames
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 20-30 minutes per case
• Played with review copy provided by Hachette USA
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3ABOMwO

Investigators, embark on an unprecedented voyage with Kronologic and play in an era of your choosing!

Unravel a series of unexplained affairs at the Paris Opera to reestablish the truth. Collect clues about the movements of the implicated characters by determining where they were at the time of the incident: on your turn, align a suspect’s card with a special perforated tile and get two pieces of information about their movements. The first piece is for your eyes only, but the second one must be shared with other players!

So do you think you have what it takes to be the first to solve the mystery?

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As the summer draws to a close, and as the annual deluge of new games at Essen Spiel draws near, the Opinionated Gamers decided to memorialize our current favorite games by each creating our own Top 100 board games of all-time list.  19 brave OG members stared down this daunting task and emerged with their own list of all-time greats.  We did not endeavor to rank these lists, but rather to each come up with 100 games that stand above the rest.

I found this task relatively easy because it mostly meant collecting a list of the games that I had rated a 9 or 10 on BoardGameGeek.  With just over 2,000 games rated, and having long aimed for a bell curve around 6, compiling the top 5% of all my games rated over the past two decades (i.e., 100 games out of around 2,000 rated) was pretty straightforward.  I was struck by how great the games on my list were and how much I enjoy them (and ultimately by how few of them appeared in other people’s lists).  I need to get back to playing many of my top 100 more often, finding a way to balance that with trying exciting new releases.

Based on the 19 different Top 100 lists that various members of the OG each independently created (specifically Adam, Alan, Craig, Fraser, James, Jim, Joe, John, Jonathan, Larry, Lorna, Mark, Matt, Nate, Patrick, RJ, Steph, Talia, and Taylor), we were able to compile an aggregate list of games that appeared on the most number of Top 100 lists. This endeavor was inspired by Mark Jackson’s fascinating Top 100 piece back in June.

Overall, there were an astounding 983 different games that appeared across our Top lists (out of a possible 1,900 if everyone’s list had been completely different).  The most popular games of all-time appeared on 12 of the 19 lists, and only 9 games appeared on over half of the Top lists.  Before we get to those ultimate 9 champions, let’s start with some games that appeared across a significant number of the Top 100 lists…