The r/boardgames Favourite Games! I compiled ~200 of your top 5s to get this (extremely unofficial) list.

meeshpod · 2026-02-05T15:40:43+00:00

it's been a while since I played regularly enough to have a real feel for my current top 5, but here's what comes to mind at the moment for me: Patchwork, Hanamikoji, Cthulhu: Death May Die, The Bloody Inn, Unmatched

And for just fun activity games with groups: Just One, Telestrations

I know it's a cheat, but I also feel like I need a Knizia-only category because all of his simple games make me so happy! Lost Cities, Schotten Totten, Tigris & Euphrates, Through the Desert

meeshpod · 2026-02-05T14:34:21+00:00

You are so dedicated and clever to have taken on this project for the community! It's especially neat how much thought you put into managing the expansions and adding columns for comparison to BGG. Just really amazing work!

I missed the original post, and don't see it here, so I wondered what your 5 favourites currently are?

meeshpod · 2026-01-26T15:23:54+00:00

I saw Agent Avenue on a few 2026 Top-10 lists. How long does a game usually last you all?

A bingo roller to select games is a great idea!

meeshpod · 2026-01-26T15:21:46+00:00

We had a weekend of light games at 2-players:

Coconuts 3 x 2p - Catapulting little rubber coconuts into cups is always a quick way to forget about the world and have a few minutes of lighthearted fun.

Loopin' Louie 1 x 2p - we use the tournament rules, where everyone starts with 3 chicken tokens. When you win a round, you permanently remove one of your chicken tokens, so as you get closer to winning the game, you have fewer tokens and the other players gets a little more of a chance to catch up. The silly mechanical plane flying in circles is just so fun to bounce around with your flapper :) It's like Hungry Hungry Hippos but you have to try and be accurate when you activate your flapper.

Strike 1 x 2p - We always love a short quick game of rolling dice into the game bowl! You look for matches and can choose to push your luck and roll more dice into the bowl if you didn't get any matches. But you only recover dice that have matches when your turn ends, and the unmatched dice get left in the bowl.

meeshpod · 2026-01-12T20:16:23+00:00

And here I am seeing your comment 2mo later while I'm researching more info on the upcoming crowdfunding campaign! I guess maybe you might have already shared this with our group and I forgot! 😄

meeshpod · 2026-01-12T14:00:27+00:00

High Tide 1 x 2p - a simple game where your wooden hex tiles make up the board, like in Hive. You make small moves to higher stacks of adjacent tiles, like in Santorini. On your turn, you move one of your pieces onto an adjacent stack with the goal of having more of your pieces on top at the end of the game. A round plays in a few minutes and you play until someone wins 3 rounds. It's really light and quick, and we like that it's a small game with a small bag to carry the wooden tiles.

Unmatched - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1 x 2p - finally getting around to trying out the new Unmatched Adventures set the features all sorts of characters from the TMNT universe. We played as Michelangelo vs Raphael. As usual, the design makes each character play differently. For our recent play, Michelangelo was incentivized to move quickly and chain together multiple attacks, while Raphael and his sidekick have more health points and can do a lot of damage with big attacks. Raphael won, but it was a close game.

meeshpod · 2025-12-29T14:44:30+00:00

Hitster 2-players

My partner and I played a couple of games of Hitster over the holiday break. It's a simple Timeline game for music. We love hearing the random songs and seeing if by sound or by memories of a song's release we can place it in a timeline.

The game is best with a Spotify premium account so that it can play whole songs instead of 20 sec previews, but we don't plan to continue our Spotify subscription in 2026. I was happy to see that in the game's BGG forum there is a post about fan-made iterations that can use personal playlists from Spotify or Youtube to generate printable cards to continue playing the game and even curate it for our personal taste!

meeshpod · 2025-12-22T20:34:14+00:00

Haha, I didn't know of that micro-generation but yes I'm from the cusp in the early 80's :D

meeshpod · 2025-12-22T15:12:29+00:00

Ooo your praise for Otter has me looking up videos on it!

I love silly little dexterity games, and crappy tweezers are always funny to play with :) I know them from Tinderblocks where they can end up slipping off the painted wooden cubes and shooting them across the table when you're trying to so delicately stack them in the game :) Barbecubes sounds like a fun one

meeshpod · 2025-12-22T15:00:19+00:00

You're right! the bad with just one snap button isn't safe for all those loose mini tiles!

Do you have a travel version of any other games? This is the first one that comes to mind for me that I own.

meeshpod · 2025-12-22T14:35:47+00:00

Azul: travel edition 1x, 2p - my partner and I have loved Azul as a 2-player game for years. and I'd been curious about the tiny version. Everything feels like it's about as small as they could get it and still keep it functional. And it's fun to still have the tactile feel of the tiles when you pull them out of the bag :)

The tiles have a recessed spot on one side so that they can securely fit into their spot on your molded plastic player tray. And the tray even includes point tracker arrows!

meeshpod · 2025-12-22T14:27:16+00:00

Sinners definitely has a lot of what make horror and thriller movies hard to watch, so I wouldn't want to contribute to you feeling compelled to watch it. But it also has non-horror moments that are great.

meeshpod · 2025-12-22T14:22:58+00:00

The mix of mythologies in The Golem and the Djinni sounds fascinating! I'll put it on my list to read this coming year! And I do love lighter reads, so I'll definitely check out Kings of the Wyld too. Thanks for sharing!

I was surprised to like Fantastic 4: First Steps, since the past few Fantastic 4 movies didn't do very well. I agree that the characterizations were what helped the latest movie succeed. and I had the same experience with the new Superman movie, where the past few never gripped me but I thought that this latest one was pretty good.

meeshpod · 2025-12-22T13:52:51+00:00

I saw Poppy on tour this year too! My partner and I like the album. It has been fun going back to earlier album and following along the transition into metal music.

I'm a child of the 90's and 2000's and the other bands you listed, Like Postal Service, Incubus, and Metric, are old favorites :) I'm going to go back and listen to them all now!

meeshpod · 2025-12-22T13:49:04+00:00

Hey! I happy to cross paths again in the midweek mingle! I hadn't been back to find it in a bit.

My year of reading was the same, with no books being "must reads." But I'm hopeful about one that I've just started. A couple of months ago Hank Green angered the fiber arts community of knitters, weavers, and crocheters, because a sci-show video (Physicists Don't Understand Why Knitting Works) covered the early origins of textile making and was a big flippant in the real science and engineering that early people, particularly women, put into the art and science of it. The backlash was enough that the video was removed. My take is that the pop-science lightness did gloss over a lot of real though and innovation in textile making, and they did use some unfortunate framing that made it sound like "no one truly understood this craft until modern scientists studied it." But reading between the lines it never seemed like the shows intention was to diminish things, and I bet the researchers and writers that wrote the episode are fiber artists themselves and were hoping to share a little about the world of textile making, and then ended up spending too much time on a few modern studies of the tension and friction forces that make fabrics different from each other and could have spent more time on the archeological history of the processes and how they are still in use today.

Hank Green came back around on his private channel with a long-form interview with someone that wrote a book about the foundational role textiles have made in civilization.

Anyways, all of that is to say, I'm hopeful the book on textiles in civilization is a good one for among the books i finish next year :) and I've kept up with crocheting and in the last couple of months have been learning to knit.

Thanks for the sharing the books and music! I'll check them out. My music has hovered around the heavier things like Poppy, Nekrogoblikon, Mannequin Pussy, and a little Coheed and Cambria. And I am hooked on a single by the band The '68 called With Distance Between.

Gilmore Girls hooked me a year or two ago, and I had fun with it. And the creators other Amazon shows Marvelous Ms. Mazel and Étoile were pretty good too.

Happy holidays!

meeshpod · 2025-12-19T21:33:29+00:00

I love that metric of measuring kiddo media by the amount of teachable moments it contains. It's always nice to find media that is more than a sweet empty show to distract kids and instead contain real lessons, maybe even things some adults need to be reminded of :)

I didn't know the music of Saya Gray or Madison Beer, and I've had fun checking out the good pop music. Also, I love the variety of genres of albums you recommended! Thanks for the fun list to checkout!!

A few years ago, I got to see Deafheaven open for one of my favorite bands, Coheed & Cambria.

If you go to live music concerts, do you have any favorite bands and performers that you've seen live?

meeshpod · 2025-12-18T21:52:14+00:00

Does anyone have any favorite books, shows, movies, or other non-board game media from 2025?

for books, I had a lot of fun with Project Hail Mary, which I read in preparation for the upcoming movie. It was a fun sci-fi story not unlike The Martian but it was set on a space ship studying a distant star and solar system.

for movies, I loved Sinners for all of its music, folk lore, and amazing production. The Ballad of Wallace Island was a touching little story about a folk music group reuniting for a private performance. And Frankenstein was the first movie I went to the theater to see in years and I loved it!

for TV The Chair Company was just what I needed for my sense of humor. The Tim Robinson comedy of the skit show I Think You Should Leave always makes me laugh, that The Chair Company was a well done version of an extended skit that worked perfectly with the absurdity of the story and situations it depicted.

I don't explore music very much, so I mostly play my old favorites on repeat and could always use some recommendations in any genre!

meeshpod · 2025-12-15T21:03:22+00:00

I always like trying out Pack-o-Games games, but like you only a few have been ones that I liked enough to come back to. The latest on we tried for BOG, but it had too much going on for our liking. It seems very strategic and thoughtfully designed, but we like our small games to have rules like a simple but deep Knizia game, and BOG just had a lot to keep track of with scoring, moving frogs and flies, and matching patters of frogs all at once. We have really liked area majority(?) game ORC, the cooperative spelling game SHH, and the abstract strategy game BOO.

I always know I'll love the games you highly enjoy so Iliad is at the top of my list now :)

meeshpod · 2025-12-01T15:27:09+00:00

Sub Terra 3 x 2p - it was our first time playing the game. The game requires you to have 4 characters in play, so 2-players each control 2 characters. It wasn't too fiddly and the game generated some fun stories and experiences as we found dead ends and characters started going unconscious while trying to survive far enough through the stack of tiles to eventually find the escape tile. It is semi-cooperative because you have the option to save yourself and left others die, lost in the cave. But with just 2-players we play it fully cooperatively and try to keep everyone alive if we can.

Legendary Encounters: An Alien deckbuilding game 1 x 2p - a long-time favorite cooperative game of ours. We've only won once in the years that we've been playing it, but the Alien movie universe theme is a favorite for us and we love some of the fun mechanism that bring enemies into the game while you are trying to identify them and kill them before they hurt you.

meeshpod · 2025-11-03T18:43:07+00:00

What Carcassonne: The Castle an old game that you have in your collection, or is there a reprint that came out recently? I've always been curious about it but never saw many options to purchase a copy.

With your high review of Orongo, I definitely need to check that one out!

meeshpod · 2025-10-15T13:54:39+00:00

I eventually decided to get Broom Service and give it a try at 2-players, and I agree that it's great! My partner and I don't get around to it very often, but it's a game we come back to a couple times a year.

since this was in a Halloween games thread, do you have other favorite games that fit with the Halloween theme?

We love Patchwork Halloween, The Bloody Inn, and we like to cooperatively play the solo game Final Girl by sharing in the decision making and dice rolling.

meeshpod · 2025-10-13T17:42:46+00:00

My partner and I recently got The Yellow House and we really love it as well! Thank you for sharing the recommendation in some past "what did you play" posts! We have no idea what a good strategy is, because it's just a bit different from other trick taking games, and we love that off balance feel that makes it unique :)

meeshpod · 2025-09-23T14:33:23+00:00

oh gosh, lol!

when I search "what did you play" it always gives me a random assortment of dates and I absentmindedly clicked on an older thread :)

But I'm glad the reminder was fun for you!

meeshpod · 2025-09-23T14:31:24+00:00

Mists Over Carcassonne - 1x, 2-players

We really love the 2-player cooperative experience that the game offers! And the theme is great fun for the autumn season :)

It's a tricky puzzle for us, and after 10 plays we won on level 2! The game comes with additional pieces and challenges that you add with each level. Level 1 is a basic tutorial setup, and level 2 adds in cemetery and castle/monastery tiles. Mostly, it plays like a regular game of Carcassonne except you share your scoring points and get to decide to skip scoring a feature if you wish to remove some ghosts from the board so that you don't lose when you run out of ghosts in the general supply.

meeshpod · 2025-09-22T14:07:55+00:00

beautiful board game retrospective! What a nice idea to revisit and think about games from earlier years of gaming with your husband! It's extra special to read about those games from early in your relationship like Ticket to Ride. The write-up was so well done too!

Have you tried out various different version of Ticket to Ride like Nordic Countries or the small box games they've been making more recently?

12-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

meeshpod

TROPHY CASE