A number of games were left off this list because it felt too early to judge whether they’d managed to live up to their lofty expectations, but it doesn’t feel too soon to say Gaia Project achieved everything it was supposed to.

As the successor to Terra Mystica, reactions were initially a little mixed on whether Gaia Project improved on the formula. But in the year or so since Gaia Project hit the market, a consensus has emerged that it generally surpasses its progenitor in most ways. (Gaia Project also sits comfortably in the top games lists of several Cardboard Reality contributors—as Nick put it in the Slack channel recently, “Gaia Project has to be the best received game on the podcast amongst everyone.”)

Most notably, it took Gaia Project only about a year to surpass its precursor in the BGG rankings, which is no small feat, as Terra Mystica cracked the top 10 long ago. Gaia currently sits as the eighth-highest-ranked game of all time; Terra Mystica has dropped to the 10th spot, and it will be interesting to see how much further it drops as its successor continues to reach new tables.

After the first two games on this list, this one may seem like a bit of a surprise. After all, it sits much lower in the BGG rankings (hovering in the bottom half of the 400s) than Gloomhaven or Gaia Project, and is also a significantly lighter game, with a 45-minute playtime.

Though it may not have the universal acclaim of the BGG userbase, Kingdom Builder represents other significant achievements. In 2009, designer Donald X. Vaccarino captured lightning in a bottle with Dominion, the game that basically invented deckbuilding as a genre and won him the prestigious Spiel Des Jahres. But that wasn’t all—Dominion was also a commercial blockbuster, spawning more than a dozen expansions and earning a place on shelves next to Catan as a perennial, easy-to-learn crowd pleaser.

So how exactly do you follow that? The pressure must have been immense for Vaccarino to deliver another success. And somehow, Kingdom Builder, one of his first post-Dominion titles, came about as close as any game could have. The simple area-control title published by Queen Games won Vaccarino his second Spiel Des Jahres, just two years after his first, and spawned its own batch of expansions.

Another 2011 Vaccarino release didn’t fare so well, though—more on that later.