Favorite games, chronologically

2018: now we are entering the territory of where I did my best of XxxX lists. Of course, I never really followed "things only released in this year" when I did them.
The answer is Root for 2018. Once you get over the familiarity needed, it's the obvious winner.

I don't engage with Reddit, so this is my own list.

2005 Arkham Horror 2nd
2006 Pirate King
2007 Cash ‘n Guns
2008 Android
2009 Space Hulk 3rd
2010 Space Hulk: Death Angel
2011 Blood Bowl Team Manager
2012 Spartacus
2013 Firefly: the Game
2014 Sons of Anarchy
2015 Camp Grizzly
2016 Saltlands
2017 Escape from 100 Million B.C.
2018 Warhammer Quest: Blackstone Fortress
2019 Marvel Champions

Shellhead wrote: I don't engage with Reddit, so this is my own list.

2005 Arkham Horror 2nd
2006 Pirate King
2007 Cash ‘n Guns
2008 Android
2009 Space Hulk 3rd
2010 Space Hulk: Death Angel
2011 Blood Bowl Team Manager
2012 Spartacus
2013 Firefly: the Game
2014 Sons of Anarchy
2015 Camp Grizzly
2016 Saltlands
2017 Escape from 100 Million B.C.
2018 Warhammer Quest: Blackstone Fortress
2019 Marvel Champions

Nice! Adding salt lands and Pirate King to my want list.

WadeMonnig wrote:

Shellhead wrote: I don't engage with Reddit, so this is my own list.

2005 Arkham Horror 2nd
2006 Pirate King
2007 Cash ‘n Guns
2008 Android
2009 Space Hulk 3rd
2010 Space Hulk: Death Angel
2011 Blood Bowl Team Manager
2012 Spartacus
2013 Firefly: the Game
2014 Sons of Anarchy
2015 Camp Grizzly
2016 Saltlands
2017 Escape from 100 Million B.C.
2018 Warhammer Quest: Blackstone Fortress
2019 Marvel Champions

Nice! Adding salt lands and Pirate King to my want list.

Shelly and I are possibly the only people at this site who like Pirate King. It is essentially pirate-themed Monopoly for 2 to 4 players, with a Risk-like combat system and wonderful components. I am especially fond of the small plastic pirate chests where players can put their jewels, er colored glass beads.

WadeMonnig wrote: Nice! Adding salt lands and Pirate King to my want list.

Seriously. I've seen a couple games on the various year lists that I'd either forgotten about or had never heard of and I'm like: "Wow. That's cool..." And I really, really don't need to be buying more games right now.

Shellhead wrote:

WadeMonnig wrote:

Shellhead wrote:
Shelly and I are possibly the only people at this site who like Pirate King. It is essentially pirate-themed Monopoly for 2 to 4 players, with a Risk-like combat system and wonderful components. I am especially fond of the small plastic pirate chests where players can put their jewels, er colored glass beads.

My wife was literally asking for a new pirate themed game over the weekend and, hey, the price at noble knight is less than 15 bucks. I'm more than willing to give that a shot.

The Pirate King components and the movement system successfully deliver the theme. The map is even a good representation of the Caribbean.

2018 was when some big European kickstarters and a lot of thematic games suddenly came to my attention, many of them I would have first played after 2018 - Nemesis, Lords of Hellas, Deep Madness, Western Legends and smaller ones like Shadowrun: Crossfire and Maximum Apocalypse ... a good year for immersion games for me !

2019:
I think this year is where we've really turned the corner in that, yes, there is so much more being produced, but the general quality of that production (at least for the first 10 pages on BGG...) has really ramped up, as well.

Contenders: The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine was a great innovation (co-op trick-taker) that has since been emulated repeatedly; Undaunted: Normandy is a really slick, adaptable system which got even better with later productions; Watergate is a flat out brilliant two-player, especially if you're Gen X like me; Dune is Dune, but it's a (really good) reprint; Unmatched is one of the best fighting games ever; Jaws is an excellent adaptation of the material like all of Prospero Hall's other efforts (RIP); Funkoverse is the other best fighting game ever; Tiny Epic Mechs is great if you understand what the game is, rather than what you assume it is; Gandhi: The Decolonization of British India, 1917-1947 may be my favorite COIN game; Tiny Epic Tactics is the best adaptation of games like League of Legends to the board game space that I've played.

I'd love to put Pax Pamir, 2nd Edition here because it may be my favorite game of all-time, but it's a reprint, so the winner has to be Cthulhu: Death May Die. I still slightly prefer 2016 bronze medalist The Others for theme, but I'm a Lovecraft fan and this game is still hugely fun.

Starting to get short on games played by 2019 (not a great new game player, I'm more of a catcher-upperer) but I have a few games I rated pretty highly - Tainted Grail, Cthulhu: Death May Die, Batman: Gotham City Chronicles (this one really shines with the LOS and Elevation app they produced for it and Conan), and one out of left field Dark Venture.
Tainted Grail as well as being an astounding narrative game (you nearly have to call it a novel with so many story arcs) has a great game laid over it, the mini deckbuilding and card mechanics raise this well above your standard adventure-crawler.

2020:

A bit of a mixed bag outside the winner because, again, I'm avoiding second editions/reprints no matter how good they are (see: Pax Pamir last year) and set releases (Funkoverse, Unmatched, etc.) with one exception.

Contenders: The King is Dead, 2nd Edition is a brilliant game, especially for three people which is unusual, but it's a reprint; Pan Am is the only train game I've ever liked (RIP Prospero Hall); Undaunted: North Africa is enough of a departure from Normandy (vehicles!) to make the list but still kind of a set release; Tiny Epic Dinosaurs took a while to grow on me but is an excellent worker placement addition; Cosmic Frog is included mostly for being one of the weirdest themes I've ever played and also a good game in its own right; Versailles 1919 is a high-interaction game about a little-covered moment in history; Mezo is a different kind of DoaM that also involves a Mesoamerican theme which is rare; Caesar: Rome vs Gaul is a great card-driven release that involves two of my favorite historical themes (Rome, Gaul.)

But the winner is easily Cat in the Box. It's the best trick-taker I've ever played and I've played a lot of them.

Yep, not many 2020 games in my played stats, this is where my entries start to tail off rapidly. I have Etherfields and that, for my ratings, stands out miles from the few other 2020 games I've played - I have Gloomhaven: JoTL, Pan Am, and Rallyman: GT in the next level, all decent games but none I'd squeeze into a top three for the year.

I don't think I have played any games that were published in 2020. So many board gamers are always anxious to play their last acquisitions, but I wasn't playing anything face to face until for the first 12 months of the pandemic. And the only guy that I played boardgames with in the 13th month showed up sick with Covid at one point. I didn't catch it from him, but did catch it in 2023, apparently at a large backyard cookout that resulted in 7 people catching Covid. Anyway, by the time I was playing board games with groups again, the Cult of the New was already onto 2021 games.

2021:

Safe to say that the vast majority of what I've really enjoyed in the past few years is not going to be the "hot" games on BGG and this year is emblematic of that.

Contenders: The Crew: Mission Deep Sea is a great advancement of Quest for Planet Nine; Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition is a great game and the best version yet but is also a reprint; Oath is a brilliant game which suffers from not being played often enough by any of my groups to keep a real campaign going; Unfathomable isn't as good as the original theme (even Lovecraft fan that I am) but is the better version, mechanically; Tiny Epic Dungeons is very difficult but always fun and a marked achievement at sticking a dungeon crawler into a TE box; Roll Camera!: The filmmaking board game has to meet a higher standard because I'm not overly fond of co-ops but this one is both fun and funny; Pax Viking stands out in the Pax series as being as much against the game (the draw) as against opponents; Commands & Colors: Samurai Battles is my favorite C&C game.

But the winner, without question, is Ankh: Gods of Egypt. It's always been neck-and-neck with Rising Sun for my favorite among Eric Lang's mythical trilogy with RS usually edging it out. But this is the only one of the three that can be played as a 2-player and it's just a very different approach to the usual DoaM formula, including the merge.

My pick for 2021 is Masters of the Night. Mechanically very sound vampire co-op game for 1 to 5 players. It scales perfectly for any of those headcounts, and offers plenty of meaningful decisions and good amount of replay value. The components are mostly in a retro Sin City color scheme of black, white, and splashes of red. The minis have nice sculpts. The box insert is perfect. The rules are very clean and easy to learn, thanks to the rulebook design by Universal Head of BGG fame.