Best Games I played in 2020

This is not necessarily games that CAME OUT in 2020, but that is when I played them.

Might as well start with board games, since my list is so incredibly short. Cosmic Frog, the end.

As for video games, here are some that stood out:

Control - the best game I played this year. It's a third person action game involving telekinesis. I have yet to beat it, but I expect that I will. For me, if I actually finish a game, it usually means that I really like it, or it's really short. Control is not short. The environments in this game are fantastical and real world at the same time; it really seems like you are in some giant evolving office building where real people work.

GTFO - this one has caveats; you need 4 people on microphones who will actually work together, or you will not get far in this sci-fi FPS. Environments are super dark, monsters are super deadly. Ammo is super limited. My favorite part is going up to computer consoles and literally typing in commands to find things in the world.

Borderlands 3 DLC: Bounty of Blood - BL3 is a fun enough game that should have been much better; the DLC has largely been pretty average... but Bounty of Blood is better than the base game and a real joy to play.

For me, it's Lucky Numbers. It's a two-dimensional version of Rack-O that I discovered on Board Game Arena. Very simple but has subtleties that reveal themselves with multiple plays, particularly during the end-game. The luck element is high but most of the decisions you'll make are how to mitigate against this. Very addictive.

I prefer it as a two-player game.

Didn't play that many 'new to me' games in 2020, it was a start-stop-start-stop year, and COVID killed off all my KSers arriving (the first one finally arrived Christmas Eve) - the two best of the few are:

Shadowrun Crossfire: Prime Runner Edition - clever and fun deck-builder, needs a proper campaign (slowly organising one) and maybe a closer affiliation of role to character but still great as it is.

Fortune and Glory: The Cliffhanger Game - annoyed I didn't find this one when it first came out, price probably played a lot in that, again clever and fun with good options to add in and can be co-op or competitive with no difference in fun.

This year Marvel Champions was seeing heavy play on my table followed up with Hellboy and Pax Pamir.

Bloodborne was the video game I played the crap out of. The Chalice Dungeons are a game into itself. I can't think of another game that is so packed with content.

Truth be told I miss the hell out of playing games, watching movies or hanging out face to face with my buddies. I look forward to when we can finally do that and safely.

Video game was probably Crusader Kings III, they finally made a more legible Crusader Kings.

Board game is tough. I want to say Oath, it has been tremendous and has gotten stronger as the play has gotten tighter, played maybe 30 times.

But the reality is that it's the new Spirit Island expansion. Impeccable design, perfect ramp up in complecity and mechanics for a second expansion for experienced player. We hit 70 plays this year and I don't see any sign we'll stop, still a ton to explore.

Board games online: Oath and John Company with TWBG friends; Camp Grizzly, The Crew, and Rallyman with local friends. Great times with great people and great games, all of which were new to me this year.

Board games at home: I’m not as enamoured with Jagged Earth as Gary Sax, however the good bits are still better than almost any other game I’ve played and Spirit Island remains my all-time #1.

I was impressed with the innovative design of Micro Macro which we’ve been playing over Christmas, although it’s a one-and-done game there is more content, and a lot more fun, than any escape room game I’ve tried. Also very impressed with Everything Lost, a map-drawing post-apocalyptic survival game that I still haven’t written up in any detail. New Year resolution to get some more plays in and do exactly that.

Video game: I don’t play these a great deal and the only game that’s really stuck on me is Space Haven.

Irrelevant GOTY pick: take any of the above that you fancy, they are all good

Dr. Mabuse wrote: This year Marvel Champions was seeing heavy play on my table followed up with Hellboy and Pax Pamir.

Is Hellboy as good as someone else has said and I should make a few bids on eBay ?

southernman wrote:

Dr. Mabuse wrote: This year Marvel Champions was seeing heavy play on my table followed up with Hellboy and Pax Pamir.

Is Hellboy as good as someone else has said and I should make a few bids on eBay?

It fills the solo, miniature, RPG-lite adventure game I don't have on my shelf and I love the comic book. I don't think it adds anything new to the dungeoncrawl genre of game and one scenario, in particular, does not work. No raves from me but I do enjoy it.

Dr. Mabuse wrote: This year Marvel Champions was seeing heavy play on my table followed up with Hellboy and Pax Pamir.

Bloodborne was the video game I played the crap out of. The Chalice Dungeons are a game into itself. I can't think of another game that is so packed with content.

Truth be told I miss the hell out of playing games, watching movies or hanging out face to face with my buddies. I look forward to when we can finally do that and safely.

Was that Pamir 2e Dr?

And do you vassal?

Boardgames: I dropped almost exactly half wrt recorded plays this year vs last year. Killing my weekly game meetup had really put the kibosh on my gaming and social life. But hey, 2020.

The Crew (40 plays), Marvel Champions (39 plays), and Aeons End (35 plays) were the big ones for me this year. The Crew saw a ton of play at the beginning of the year before lockdown hit. MC and AE are my two favorite solo games, so it makes sense that I played them a lot.

Re video games: it's just Mario Maker 2. Everything else had been incidental, more or less. I'm up to 805 hours.

mc wrote:

Dr. Mabuse wrote: This year Marvel Champions was seeing heavy play on my table followed up with Hellboy and Pax Pamir.

Bloodborne was the video game I played the crap out of. The Chalice Dungeons are a game into itself. I can't think of another game that is so packed with content.

Truth be told I miss the hell out of playing games, watching movies or hanging out face to face with my buddies. I look forward to when we can finally do that and safely.

Was that Pamir 2e Dr?

And do you vassal?

It is indeed 2e. I've been playing on Tabletop Simulator. Do you have that? If not I'd try it on VASSAL.

Fair warning, being a grocery store worker and watching sheer stupidity happen in front of my eyes day in and day, along with being a new dad, this year changed me on fundamental and minor levels. My tastes in games was significantly different this year. The peaceful, puzzle-like nature of Euro games were a tremendous comfort this year and I opened myself up to alot of games I would never have even tried a year ago. That's not to say I went full Euro, but you're going to see more than a few on this list.

In no particular order...

Dune: Imperium
Pan Am
Cosmic Frog
Wingspan
Unmatched (any set, this game has fired all other skirmish games)
Watergate
Concordia (for real, a fucking masterpiece)
Castles of Burgundy
Trajan
Gold West
Near and Far
Empires of the Void II
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion
Pulsar 2849 (which I had played before, but I fell hard in love with Underwater Cities last year and revisited this to find I really enjoy it)
Terra Mystica (another one I revisited and made peace with)
Fallout

If I had to pick a best, I'd go with either Dune or Pan Am.

Worst game I played this year was Godzilla: Tokyo Clash.

Go ahead and laugh it up on Terra Mystica and the Feld games, but they were like therapy to me this year. I played a TON of RPGs on Discord this year, so my narrative gaming was already more than accounted for. RPGs do it better, don't mind my board gaming time to be about something else.

I struggled with video games this year, which was entirely anxiety related. I did finally beat Breath of the Wild, the white whale in my Switch collection and I will admit that I eventually came to love it.

Since mid-March, I have only been playing solitaire board games. I tried online role-playing last February and didn't like it, and assumed that I wouldn't like online board gaming for similar reasons. I did play Vampire/Jyhad with the weekly group at maybe every other week in January and February, and the monthly hipster group met in January but skipped February due to weather. And I hosted boardgames maybe three times.

Of those games, these are the best:

Vampire/Jyhad: An enduring classic that has been in and out of print for over 26 years now.

Blackstone Fortress: A very tactical sci-fi dungeon crawler set in the Warhammer 40K universe.

Camp Grizzly: The most popular game in my collection with my gaming friends. Even light gamers pick it up quickly and enjoy the game.

Honorable mention: Magic Realm and Dark Venture. I spent a significant amount of time in 2020 teaching myself to play Magic Realm, though I have only played a couple of times so far. The dense, complex rules pay off with a strong sense of narrative and very meaningful choices. Dark Venture is a similar game, though with a post-apocalyptic setting, wild creativity, and a simple set of rules that generally replace Magic Realm's meaningful choices with random dice-chucking.

Biking and jigsaw puzzles were huge in this house as well. Both super helpful in getting by.