When you hear the name Wil Wheaton, different images might flash in your mind: the bookish teen Gordie, who goes out to find a dead body with his friends in Stand by Me; the gifted yet kind of snobbish cadet Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation; and most recently, the proponent of all things geek. Like Chris Hardwick and Patton Oswalt, Wheaton has risen up the celebrity food chain in recent years by tapping into the nerd demo. In the latest chapter of his career he's found success as the creator and host of the popular Internet show Tabletop (which just launched its third season), in which Wheaton plays popular board games with a group of celebrities, geeks, and game designers.

Sitting in a midtown Manhattan bar with Wheaton last week—where he was doing press as the new pitchman for Newcastle Brown Ale—we asked for his top five tabletop games of all time. Taking a deep breath, he gave us an ached look like we suddenly asked him to decide between Star Trek or Star Wars. "I can't rank these and I'll tell you why," he said, positioning himself in his chair like he's discussing a pressing bureaucratic issue. "When I sit down to play a game like Love Letter, I'm expecting a different experience than when I sit down to play Lords of Waterdeep. And when I play Cards Against Humanity I want a different experience than when I play Apples to Apples. We play different games for different reasons."

So with that bombardment of nerd etiquette, we settled on five games he's obsessed with playing right now. If you're familiar with Settlers of Catan and other settlement-oriented games—or if you're at all like Wheaton—these will probably appeal to you.



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A variant of the deduction game, The Resistance: Avalon is similar in that the five to 10 players are split between two groups—in this case Arthurian Knights and the evil Mordred and his minions—but the big twist is there's an additional role in the character of Merlin, who is told at the beginning who the evil players are. If the evil players lose the game they have a final chance at victory by correctly guessing who Merlin is. "It's one of the greatest deduction bluffing defector games I've ever played," Wheaton says. "Everyone has a little piece of information that no one else is in possession of and you have to misdirect and try to frame people. It's really, really fun."

If you dig pandas, then this is the game for you. From game designer Antoine Bauza (7 Wonders, Ghost Stories), Takenoko can have up to four players who are the Japanese Emperor's loyal court members entrusted with caring for a giant panda bear that was given to the Emperor as a peace offering from the Chinese Emperor. Each player has a land plot in the Imperial garden, and whoever grows and sustains the best bamboo for the panda wins. Wheaton prefers it as a two-player game. "With four players there's a tremendous amount of entropy in the game. Two players, the game becomes like chess and there's a lot of strategy involved."

Set in the Marvel universe, players shuffle a number of hero decks made up of all your favorite good guys—Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk—to go up against a mastermind villain (Loki, Magneto, etc.). Over the course of the game the players collect cards that build powers and fighting abilities as they go up against the villain who will wreak havoc by doing everything from kidnapping innocent bystanders to doing "master strikes." The player with the most points wins, but if the villain accomplishes a certain number of escapes or imposes enough wounds to the heroes, all the players lose. "Legendary is the best deck building game I've ever played," Wheaton says. "And I'm astonished by that. I could not believe that a licensed game was as good as it is, but it's phenomenal."

Set in Waterdeep, a city in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons, Lords of Waterdeep involves playing powerful secret lords of the city attempting to be the main ruler. You accomplish this by collecting the most treasure and resources through deploying adventures to complete quests. But here's the kicker: You only have eight rounds. "It plays in about an hour and it's a gateway to Agricola, which I think is the greatest worker replacement game of all time," Wheaton says. "So if you want to introduce people to worker replacement games, I would use Lords of Waterdeep."

(Featured on season three of Tabletop with Yuri Lowenthal, Tara Platt, and Paul Scheer.)

The name of the game explains it all. In this construction game up to four players create a grand kingdom. The player with the most gold wins through meeting the parameters of the three cards that were drawn at the beginning of the game. "I love this because it's different every time you play it," Wheaton explains. "You flip these different tiles over the board and it's never going to be the same, the conditions are never the same. I want a game that has a ton of replay value. I like Betrayal at House on the Hill, but eventually you're going to run through all the scenarios. Same with Dead of Winter. With this one it's never going to be the same."

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