Is your shelf of shame ever growing? With thousands of new board games being released every year, it’s harder than ever to figure out which games to buy, which to play, and which to avoid. There’s simply too many games! Overwhelmed with choices, many of you may have turned to popular board game reviewers such as No Pun Included and their comedic stylings or Tom Vasel and his motley crew at The Dice Tower. But reviews have limitations and only help so much with the decision process. They don’t rank games, compare them to other potential candidates, or account for bias à la cult of the new. It’s no wonder that “top board game lists” have risen in popularity over the years among reviewers and content creators. They are helpful and simultaneously entertaining.

Although I love a top game list as much as the next gamer, I understand that they only represent an individual’s personal game tastes. I wanted to see what they may look like in aggregate. So, I compiled the lists from 39 of my favorite board game reviewers and updated things for 2020—greatly improving the methodology, fixing some data issues, and combining them to see which games topped the charts.

For comparison, see 2019’s list of best board games of all time.

Which games do reviewers think are the best? Let’s explore the board game rankings…

Note: The following buttons allow you to filter the list by favorite board game reviewers, media networks, player counts, complexity, and game length.

Notes about Data, Methodology, and Changes from the Previous List

The aggregated lists contained a total of 945 unique board games and 2145 total rankings from reviewers.

The ranking methodology is more mathematically sound than what was used to compile the previous list. The 2019 list was relatively simplistic in nature. Games were sorted first based upon frequency, and then based on average rankings. There were more limitations to the 2019 data as well. For instance, several of the lists were unranked (Shut Up & Sit Down for instance), and some were inferences based on ratings on BoardGameGeek (e.g. JonGetsGames).

The new list uses a slight modification to Borda count, a technique that’s used for voting where candidates are ranked by preference in lists. It’s a method leveraged for election in Slovenia as well as to determine the Major League Baseball’s MVP.

Anyone who did not provide a ranked list could not be included using this method, so Matt and Quinn’s list on Shut Up & Sit Down, What Eric’s Playing?, a portion of the current Heavy Cardboard lists, and JonGetsGames were unfortunately removed from the aggregation.

The oldest list on the previous version went back 3 years back. We kept to this in the current version. The oldest list included in the top board games aggregation was from 2018 (most from late in the year). This excluded some reviewers who had not recently updated their lists like the previously included Man vs. Meeple and Suzanne Sheldon who I would have liked to include.

The 2019 list incorrectly assumed that there wasn’t an official list for Rahdo Runs Through. After publishing, I was quickly corrected by both Richard Ham himself (as well as numerous fans). The new list uses the top 100 board games from his official rankings (pulled early February 2020).

There were occasions in which either games on people’s lists included expansions or referenced an older edition of a game. It was necessary to make a judgement as to whether these should canonicalize to the the base game or current editions. Sometimes, it was obvious. For example, Jess Davis had both Pax Pamir 1e and 2e and explained her reason for specifying the two editions. Thus, those counted as two separate entries. Other times, it was less obvious and a gut decision was made—usually in favor of the current edition and the base game sans-expansion.

Sources

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