Most Euro- or “German-style” games are designed to keep all players in the game and competing until the end, but in King of Tokyo, the winner is the last player still standing. The real hook is that you overlay the cards slightly on top of each other in any way that connects a branch, as long as you don’t let three cards touch or cover any key features, so there’s more freedom to playing-almost artsy-than there is in most games.ĭesigned by Richard Garfield, who’s best known as the designer of Magic: the Gathering, King of Tokyo lets players pretend to be monsters attacking the city of Tokyo … and each other, rolling dice and playing cards to try to knock other players out, which makes this game somewhat unusual in modern board gaming. This list only includes tabletop board games, not role-playing games, dexterity games, or anything else that I don’t think qualifies as a standalone board game title.Ī truly great, portable family game with a unique mechanic at its heart and artwork that looks like it came from a Miyazaki film, Kodama has players place cards to add branches to their own trees and then lets you score for any of the six features, like caterpillars or mushrooms, that appear on multiple, connected branch cards. There are also some popular titles from the time period that I didn’t like as much as the general gaming community did. It’s as comprehensive as I can make it, but there are still some highly regarded games from this decade I haven’t played ( Coimbra comes to mind), and I still have a queue at home of 2019 releases to play and review. This list was compiled by me, and only me, so you are reading the opinion of one person, although in my defense, I’ve played a lot of games in the last 10 (more like 15) years. If you haven’t played any of these games yourself, by now, you know someone who has.

Gen Con, the biggest annual convention for board gaming in the United States, sets new attendance records each year, while PAX expanded into tabletop conventions two years ago with the first PAX Unplugged. Now you can find a well-curated selection of Eurogames at Target and Barnes & Noble, while FLGSs and board game cafes keep popping up in more and more cities. Only Catan, then still called The Settlers of Catan, had any kind of audience outside of the hobby, and you couldn’t find any of these games outside of your Friendly Local Game Stores or online retailers. Has any area of culture changed as massively as board gaming has in the last ten years? In 2010, the hobby was too small to be a niche, and if you heard a reference to tabletop games in the mainstream media, it was probably mocking.

Best terraforming games for pc