A brief history of the top-ranked game on BoardGameGeek

Why does a game hit #1, and what can we learn from the games that have been there?

Someday, I’d like to be able to tell you what makes a game great. I want to understand fully what aspects of a game take it from good to the upper echelon gaming. I’d like to understand, too, why communities decide games are great, and how individuals work within those communities. None of that will be answered here today, but I think we can start to think about some of this as we look through the top game on BoardGameGeek since it started tracking user ratings.

The history is a long one as far the internet is concerned. Ratings started appearing in 2001, and the best games often had hundreds of ratings. (Today, the best games have tens of thousands of ratings.) For nearly 25 years, the site has cataloged gamers’ favorites, and it gives us a window into how the most enthusiastic gamers have thought about the hobby.

An excellent resource as I’ve researched all this is a great Geeklist on BoardGameGeek, and you’d do well to check it out. It adds some interesting color, and it includes a few games that made it to the top for more humorous reasons, too: BGG Number Ones history - Definitive (ongoing) list with dates.

Brass: Birmingham (Feb. 2023–present)

Brass: Birmingham has been the number-one rated game on BoardGameGeek for over two years, and it would be a bit of a surprise to see it taken down now. Its presence at the top of the list can tell us a lot about the state of board games, and it can tell us a lot about the website’s most passionate rating audience.

For those who’ve yet to dip their toes in to the Brass duology (the other being Brass: Lancashire, which predated Birmingham by 11 years), they’re reasonably heavy games — and while the playtime listed sits caps at two hours, I think you can reasonably assume that it’ll take longer. You’ll also not see people raving about the theme all that often, though the 19th century industrial revolution in Britain is a bit more exciting than trading in the mediterranean. The art is good, but it’s not colorful or exciting. This is a dark, dingy game, and not because your child got the pieces with dirty hands. It’s the game working its theme, and it certainly does that quite a lot.

What does it tell us about the audience of BoardGameGeek? Let’s enumerate some key facets:

• Games being broadly accessible to new players is not a strong priority when rating a game. Ratings are a deeply personal thing, and being able to introduce the game at a game night without preparation just isn’t playing into those ratings.

• Those rating the game — enthusiasts, generally, are those taking the time to place ratings. While there are many flavors of enthusiast using the site, this is a particularly strong audience: There are over 50,000 ratings of the game on the site. While the general wisdom is that there are many more people who own and enjoy games than rate them on BGG, I wonder if games of this sort can go a bit outside that thinking.

• The game is extremely well-regarded among enthusiasts. While it hasn’t had crossover success the same way Wingspan, Carcassonne, or Catan have, that’s never been the aim.

• There is a bit of a human nature effect at play that can help keep games like this in the top spot: When those just starting their board game journey come to BGG, they see the top game, decide they want to play the top game, and love the top game. It’s not something you can really fight while keeping an open community, so I think we should just aim to understand it. I wouldn’t attempted to dissuade anybody from playing the game, but I also don’t think I’d actively give it as a recommendation. A point of discussion, though? Absolutely.

None of this means you’ll enjoy Brass: Birmingham — we’ve not talked about the game at all, really. I’m just making statements about the game from an outside perspective, which I think is more interesting here, anyway.

Designed by Gavan Brown, Matt Tolman and Martin Wallace; illustrated by Gavan Brown, Lina Cossette, David Forest, Gui Landgraf, Damien Mammoliti and Matt Tolman; and published by Roxley Games.

Gloomhaven (Dec. 2017–Feb. 2023)

I’ll confess something here: I’ve never played Gloomhaven. The opportunity just never emerged, and while it has a lot for me to love: It’s cooperative and a campaign game. It sat at the top of the BGG rankings for over five years, and I just never got around to playing it. Maybe it’s that the theme didn’t resonate with me — I’ve got nothing against fantasy, but it’s not my go-to. And of course there’s a price component now, too: It’s a $250 game, and that’s a pretty penny to drop on a game, even when it’s worth it.

Designed by Isaac Childres; illustrated by Alexandr Elichev, Josh T. McDowell and Alvaro Nebot; and published by Cephalofair Games.

Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (Jan. 2016–Dec. 2017)

Now here’s a game I can recommend. Matt Leacock’s innovative cooperative game Pandemic helped usher in new eras of cooperative gaming, and Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 introduced a slew of gamers to the ‘legacy’ game — roughly, a campaign game wherein your actions have lasting consequences, typically leaving the board in an irrecoverable state when you’re done. Its reign at the top was only two years, but it’s sat comfortably at second overall basically since, occasionally trading places with Gloomhaven in third place.

Why has this had such longevity, I wonder? The game is exhausted when you complete the campaign, and there were two very successful sequels. Is it simply that its high rating has become almost unassailable? Will it take sustained growth in the hobby for it to drop back down the ranks, as so many great games have done before it?

Twilight Struggle (Jan. 2011–Dec. 2015)

This sat at the top of the BGG top 100 for such a long time when I started getting deep into board games. I also knew intuitively there was no way I’d play it. Wargaming has never particularly been my thing, and while I’m certain I’d actually enjoy this a lot if I ever played it, it’s just not ever been a priority. I know I should theoretically above saying that a game is ugly, but this game, like most war games, is ugly. And it’s too bad.

Anyway, this held the top for essentially five years. Remarkable, really.

Designed by Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews, published by GMT Games.

Photo by Matt Montgomery

Agricola (Aug. 2008–Feb. 2010)

I love Agricola. It’s not a game I’m introducing to new players, but if any of my friends ever want to play Agricola, there’s no way I’m saying no. Incidentally, one of my worst gaming experiences was also playing Agricola — though that had nothing to do with the game and more to do with the absolute awkwardness of playing with a friend’s now ex-husband and his brother, and how neither of them said a word as they silently played all of their turns. That’s neither here nor there, really.

This is the game that introduced me to worker placement. It’s the game I thought was so novel and innovative when I first started diving deep into games. It was the big game I wanted to play. Today, we might see Agricola as too restrictive, too punishing. Uwe Rosenberg’s worker placement games since have built on this framework, but none of them feel like Agricola.

It’s such an influential game that it set the ground work for a career for Uwe Rosenberg. He’d designed some good and great card games before this — Bohnanza is a classic, and Bargain Hunter is an interesting spin on trick-taking — but this is the game that pushed him into Le Havre (2008) and Caverna (2013). Would we have a classic two-player game like Patchwork (2014) if not for Agricola? It’s hard to imagine.

Designed by Uwe Rosenberg, illustrated by Klemens Franz, and originally published by Lookout Games.

Puerto Rico (2003–Aug. 2008, March 2010–Dec. 2010)

The first undisputed champion of BoardGameGeek, Puerto Rico has had an enduring impact on games. It’s a purely colonialist game, too, and that’s rendered it somewhat controversial over the last six or so years — and I do think we should consider how games represent their themes (the problematic representation of enslaved people.) None of that changes the gameplay of Puerto Rico, but it ought to change the way we think about the game and talk about the game. I won’t get into all that here, but there are some good threads on BoardGameGeek that talk through the issues and are full of robust debate. I don’t think there’s one simple answer to any of this.

The remaining question tangential to the facts of the game remain: Why did Puerto Rico live at the top of the rankings for such an extended period? It’s a question I’ve been thinking through. Clearly there’s a lot to enjoy about the game play, especially in that it rewards deeper thinking while keeping the game relatively easy to teach and play. My plays of Puerto Rico never left me feeling lost in any particular way. Is it so simple? What makes one game of that sort better than another? Is it our social systems that move games — are we always just buying into the hype of a game when we consider it the best?

What keeps games “the best” — and does it say more about the other games being published during this time? And does any of it relate to the world economy in the 2000s? I’ve come away with far more questions than answers, I’m afraid.

Designed by Andreas Seyfarth, illustrated by Franz Vohwinkel, and originally published by alea.

Tigris & Euphrates (2002–2003)

A classic Reiner Knizia tile placement game, Tigris & Euphrates held the top spot for roughly two years. It feels like a game from a bygone era, which is on one hand true, but on the other hand, Reiner Knizia tile placement games are still generally successful. I think I’ve only played this one once, and it would have been before I started tracking my plays on BGG, so I don’t think I can speak too much about it.

Interestingly, Tigris & Euphrates has fallen below another Knizia game on this list: The Quest for El Dorado, a medium-light deck building game. Neither are in the top 100 on the site, which is fascinating. Knizia games in the early 2000s were quintessential modern board games — if you were into games, you knew Knizia, and you appreciated his designs. That’s still the case today, but he’s nowhere near that top spot. I don’t know quite what to make of it.

Of course, an interesting wrinkle here is that often these games had to be imported from Germany, as evidenced by the game’s title on the site being its German one, Euphrat & Tigris, when it appeared on the list 2002. That tells us something, too: These were gamers who would go out of their way to find these hot games and play them. Further, in February 2002, the game had a meager 242 ratings on the site, and by June 2003, it had 642 ratings. (And they were running PHP 3, which is a funny relic.) Today, Brass: Birmingham has over 50,000.

Designed by Reiner Knizia, illustrated by Doris Matthäus and originally published by Hans im Glück.

Paths of Glory (2001–2002)

This is another very boring-looking wargame, and that it was the site’s first top game tells you so much about the state of board gaming in America in 2001. Wargaming really was the order of the day, and war games weren’t pretty. If you browse the top 100 today, you’re hit with a wide array of vibrant colors and rich themes.

Designed by Ted Raicer and published by GMT Games.