The 10 Best (Video, Board, and Mobile) Games I Played This Year

10. Mini Metro

I don’t follow video game composers — except one. Disasterpeace first got my attention with Fez, of “Indie Game: The Movie” fame. Fez doesn’t have much going on: You can jump, you can shift your perspective, and you need to collect stuff. That’s pretty much it.

Disasterpeace’s soundtrack elevated what could’ve been a bright, simple— likely forgettable — pixel-art game into something that feels like a melancholic love letter to gaming. Give it a listen even if you haven’t played the game. His soundtrack for Hyper Light Drifter, another fantastic game, is also one of my favorites.

When I saw that Disasterpeace did the soundtrack to this little $5 game, Mini Metro, I knew I had to give it a try. I was hooked from the first play. The game moves at an odd pace. The game is in real-time, yet it’s peppered with moments where you just sit watching your little mess of a plan work (or, once the ridership grows, not work). Meanwhile, Disasterpeace’s programmatic soundtrack responds and adapts to your situation, creating an audio-visual-mechanical loop that is oh so satisfying.

9. Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds

Part of me hates this game. I haven’t played it all that much — only 10 hours according to my Steam account — and most firefights result in my death.

Yet there’s no denying that PUBG has some special about it. It’s a rush. Your first couple games in PUBG teach you some valuable lessons: don’t get in a gun fight unless you have to; don’t underestimate the circle; and never, ever, ever feel safe. I can still remember the first time I saw another person. I ducked behind a rock and my heart pounded as I lined up a shot from what seemed like 100m. I missed every shot as he turned my way and dropped me immediately. It was frustrating, but it felt more emotionally “real” than any shooter I’d ever played.

This is one of those games that I’ll likely never get into, but it’s impossible not to respect the kind of emergent storytelling and tension the finely-tuned design creates.

8. Puerto Rico

I got really into board games this year. Puerto Rico is one of the classics, and for good reason. It has a great pace: Everyone starts slow, formulating initial strategies and grabbing a few buildings to build up their production. Then suddenly the tension ratchets up once everyone has an economy in place and the competition for buildings gets fierce. Then, the race to rack up points and finish the game (while not helping the other players) ratchets up the tension even more.

The action selection mechanic this game pioneered is also genius. The “action/privilege” creates elegant player interaction that’s less about screwing people over and more about helping them as little as possible.

7. Hive Pocket

The first few times I played this game I was underwhelmed. I loved the idea of a board that changes as you move pieces, as well as the asymmetrical piece powers, but our first few plays of it seemed like a race to surround the queen bee rather than a back-and-forth duel.

Then, my friend discovered a new layer: Attaching pieces to other pieces so they can’t move. Since you can never break the hive (e.g., the board), this means that you can effectively tie up the other player’s powerful pieces and play defense. The game broke wide open and everything clicked into place. We continued to play the game obsessively as the meta kept evolving. I love when a game has layers of strategy that slowly reveal themselves, and Hive is a great example.

6. Super Mario Odyssey

Platforming is not a great genre for me. I’ve also never been a huge Mario person. I played Mario 64 and Sunshine and Galaxy, but I’m not sure I ever beat them.

Nothing changed with Odyssey. It’s great fun, it’s gorgeous, and it’s hard to find faults in the design. Yet something keeps me from falling in love with it. That said, I am one level away from beating it, and here it is at #6 on my list. That it broke through my normal bias against platformers says a lot.

5. Alto’s Adventure

Ah, Alto’s Adventure. This is my subway game. I’ve played it every day on my commute home for months now thanks to its ease of play (one-handed!) and addicting gameplay loop. A fantastic little game that’s been polished to perfection.

4. Castles of Burgundy

This was my first “serious” board game, and it remains one of my favorites. Castles of Burgundy is not a sexy looking game: it’s too small, the color is washed out, the components are so-so, and it’s basically themeless. The design more than makes it up for it.

The mechanics themselves are relatively simple, but full of interesting decisions and creative play. You and the other players add tiles to your personal boards; different combinations give you points and/or allow you to break rules and get even more points. Everyone pulls from the same tile pool, making for fierce competition and delicious moments of blocking. The twist is that everything you do is determined by two die rolls: You can only do certain things based on what you roll, and you have limited ways to change what you roll. So while you may have a strategy in mind, sometimes you have to adapt because you didn’t get the numbers you needed; luckily the points are so easy to come by here that there are always plenty of options (though some are decidedly better than others).

Once you understand the rules to this game it starts to feel like popcorn. You roll, you get stuff, you combo moves together and get tons of points, and then you do it again and again.

3. Power Grid

Power Grid, so far, is the best board game I’ve played. It’s long, it’s complicated, and it’s full of math. But don’t let that scare you. It’s full of big moments, backstabs, and tension — it’s impossible not to find yourself peering anxiously at the board, your eyes flittering this way and that as you try to find a hole to exploit, obsessively counting your money to make sure you can do what you need to do.

Every mechanic of the game interacts with the others brilliantly. You’re constantly having to balance investing for the future while having enough money to actually run you’ve built and get more money. Every decision has a waterfall effect: You could invest in a new, sexy nuclear power plant, but will you create a dearth of uranium that’ll leave you hamstrung later in the game? Can you afford to power your current plants if someone drives up the price in the auction? Will the cost of the plant make it impossible to build enough cities to make your investment worthwhile? While you’re making these calculations, so is everyone else; you can practically see the steam coming out of people’s ears when you play this game.

Power Grid is an excellent example of what board games are capable of, and I can’t see myself ever getting tired of it.

2. Rimworld

No game this year, save maybe number one on this list, blew me away like Rimworld. For those that don’t know Rimworld, imagine a city-builder crossed with The Sims crossed with some crazy — and truly innovative — programmatic storytelling. The basic idea is you build up a little colony of men and women on a hostile rimworld, growing and harvesting food, building an efficient base, and protecting yourself against a never-ending onslaught of threats.

What’s amazing is that everything is programatticly generated: From your colonists’ personalities and names, to the events that affect them, to little things like the descriptions of the art they make. There are even different “AI storytellers” you can select that create different kinds of experiences depending on the mood you’re in.

The game intrigued me so much that I bought a book the designer wrote on game design. In it, he writes about how he views games as “engines of experience” — that what separates games from other media is that games are a system for an audience to create their own experiences. He believes deeply in giving players a toolkit and letting them play with it, and that the best games are simple and elegant enough to allow players to do things the designers never have even thought of.

Rimworld feels like an evolution of what’s possible in gaming. More people should play it.

1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Breath of the Wild is the greatest video game I’ve ever played. I won’t repeat what’s already been said a thousand times over. Yes, it’s a perfect evolution for the series. Yes, it fixes what’s a lot of what’s been broken with open world games. Yes, playing a fully-fledged 3D Zelda on the go is awesome.

More than anything, playing Breath of the Wild reminded me why I love games. I’ll never forget the first time I decided to just explore, heading off in a random direction and not knowing at all what I’d find. I ended up playing for hours, organically interacting with whatever caught my fancy as every roll of the hill and top of a mountain revealed something fantastic and new. A few hours in, I almost ran into a massive flying dragon and just had to shake my head at what Nintendo had accomplished. Few games nowadays can create those moments of wonder you had as a kid playing games. Breath of the Wild did that for me over, and over, and over — and it still hasn’t stopped.