My Top 10 Games — Then and Now

I have a slight obsession with ranking things. To some degree, I think most people do, which is why IMDB has their Top 250 movies list, YouTubers of all kinds make videos with tier lists, and why this site has a ranking system that pits every board game against every other board game. I love knowing where things of the same type stack up against one another, so today I'd like to take a look back at a top 10 list I did of my favorite board games in 2020 and how that list compares to my current top 10 board games (as of March 27, 2026).

For a Quick Look, here are my top 10 games from that original list...

10. Catan
9. Dixit
8. Kingdomino
7. Small World
6. Rook
5. Pandemic
4. Carcassonne
3. Ticket to Ride
2. Terraforming Mars
1. Viticulture Essential Edition

…and here is my current top 10:

10. Skymines
9. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring – Trick-Taking Game
8. Great Western Trail: Second Edition
7. Brass: Lancashire
6. Wonderland's War
5. Civolution
4. Luthier
3. Paladins of the West Kingdom
2. Blackout: Hong Kong
1. Quacks

While there is no overlap here, it should be noted that Ticket to Ride and Terraforming Mars are still in my top 20 (at #14 and #15 respectively). I think there are some obvious evolutions that can be seen here. My preferences still skew toward competitive games (though Sky Team and Just One, both cooperative games, are at #12 and #13, respectively), but there is still some co-op representation (and some trick-taking representation) from the LOTR: FOTR Trick-Taking Game. There are definitely more patterns to recognize in my current top ten compared to the one from 2020 (which, to be fair, I made less than a year into my board game journey).

1) A preference toward certain designers. Three of the games in my current top 10 were designed, or co-designed, by Alexander Pfister. Paladins of the West Kingdom is designed by Shem Phillips and S J Macdonald, whose games are elsewhere present in my top 100 games of all time.

2) A preference for particular mechanisms. There is a really strong sense of engine-building in almost all the games in my top ten. In games like Blackout: Hong Kong and Skymines, it's a matter of hand-improvement; in Wonderland's War and Quacks, there is bag-building at the center of the game. I love seeing a sense of progression throughout a game, where my final turns feel significantly more powerful that my opening turns.

3) A tendency toward heavier games. This is something that, on the whole, is actually starting to wane. I feel like I'm on a downward trajectory on my "board game bell curve," as I've started playing more and more light-to-medium games, particularly on BGA, but some of my absolute favorites are in large, heavy boxes (or at least feature some large, heavy playtimes and/or require some large, heavy brainpower). Designing and publishing Galactic Cruise probably contributed to this, as I do find myself playing games of a weight similar to what I'm currently working on. For instance, as our development focus has shifted to Manoomin and to Excursions (which are both more mid-weight titles), my plays of other mid-weight titles has gone up.

What do we do with this information? Not a darn thing, but it is interesting to see how tastes evolve over time.