Guest Post: Dave’s Top 10 Games of 2022

Dave is a member of our local gaming club. Whereas my focus in the past couple of years has shifted back toward miniatures, his is firmly on board games, so I was keen to see what a more current and up-to-date, board game-focused top 10 might look like. Dave was happy to oblige…

I was pleased when Stuart asked me to pull together a list of my favourite board games of 2022 mainly because it gave me an opportunity to have a proper think about it. A chance to reminisce and properly consider what got me excited in the hobby over the past 12 months. When I started to pull the list together, there were some games that surprised me, some not so much.

Before we delve in, I will give some criteria for what was allowed to make the final 10:

1. I need to have played it physically in the calendar year of 2022 (this might seem obvious but given the shambles that is my Shelf of Shame, it seems I need to spell this out to myself).
2. It doesn’t need to have been released in 2022.
3. It doesn’t even need to be new to me in 2022 but I did weigh very heavily to games that were. 
4. I decided to stick purely to board games simply because literally the only other thing I could add from the gaming sphere would be the wonderful DnD campaign I am playing at the moment (which would comfortably be top 5 in this list but it felt a little tokenistic and I liked the purity of keeping it to board games only).

10 – Above and Below

Above and Below wasn’t Ryan Lauket’s first game but it certainly feels like the one that put him firmly on the map, paving the way for the other two games in this trilogy, Near and Far, and Now or Never, as well as the massively popular Behemoth Sleeping Gods. 

There’s a cohesiveness to Above and Below that you can feel when you play it. Lauket does all the art throughout the game as well as designing the ruleset himself. But what worked for my wife and me with Above and Below was the huge choose-your-own-adventure style book that comes along with it, small vignettes which you encounter throughout each game which hint at a larger world and again, all written by Lauket. 

You’ll encounter a strange race underground and be forced to pick whether to help them or not, the answer seeming obvious but with unforeseen consequences, a robot will come to your aid and you add him to the fledgling village you are trying to establish, a pirate ship attacks and you must decide how important the defence of the village is if it means incapacitating many of your workers in the process…

It’s a charming and vibrant playground of ideas and one I highly recommend.

9 – Flamme Rouge

Ever since I was a boy, I have been a cycling aficionado. While most of my friends would get excited about the next upcoming football tournament, my sporting year revolved around the Tour de France, as far as I was (and still am) concerned, the most impressive athletic feat a person can complete year after year.

Flamme Rouge is ostensibly a card game but rather than being a deck-builder, it turns things on its head – your starting deck representing the full health of your respective riders as they pass over the start line, slowly whittling away, losing cards from the deck, as they surge up hills, face the wind at the front of the Peloton or move for the heroic breakaway victory. By the end of a race, your deck may be only two or three cards deep, barely enough to make a final burst for the finish line.

There is something wonderfully organic in the way Flamme Rouge feels as a game – I have yet to play another board game that comes as close to feeling like the actual thing it is trying to represent. Riders move in a pack, exhaustion eats away at you, trying to maintain the gap to the rider in front to minimise your efforts, it all just feels very right and correct and it manages it all in this deceptively simple ruleset. And yet every decision feels important and impactful. 

8 – Canvas

I will freely admit to still being deep in the ‘collecting’ phase of my board gaming hobby. But as room on the Kallax (and the bank balance) ever diminishes, I find myself looking for games that fulfil one of two criteria – either obvious holes in my collection, whether that be a particular type of game or modern classics everyone should own, or games that are unique, offering an experience not replicated elsewhere in board gaming.

Canvas was definitely a purchase intended to tick the second in this list and does so with aplomb. In Canvas, players attempt to fulfil a semi-randomised scoring criteria determined at the start of each game by creating five works of art consisting of three transparent cards each with their own artistic ‘aspects’ that when layered upon one another, create something akin to a genuine painting. 

On top of that, each of these cards contains a part of a title in such a manner that each finished three-card masterpiece will have its own name which is required to be read out when presenting the finished work to the other players on completion.

Canvas isn’t a deep game, it certainly isn’t the best designed game on this list from a rules or gameplay standpoint by a long measure but it is infinitely charming, a wonderful thing to experience with a group of players. 

7 – The Initiative

Another game that makes it to this list more because of the experience than perhaps the core gameplay itself is The Initiative, a board game about teenage angst and codebreaking spies. The core loop of The Initiative is this simple little board where players use cards to move around and uncover tiles to unlock codes and ciphers to solve clues. 

But that’s not what The Initiative is. I’m going to be very careful to avoid spoilers here but it becomes clear a few games into the campaign that each of these small self-contained games you play are actually part of something deeper, more insidious and not readily apparent when first jumping in. It’s all very meta. And it works because there are a ridiculous number of ‘what the actual?!’ moments in there.

My wife and I played this with my daughter who is 10 and each time we finished a game and cracked some new code and something in this box did something absolutely wild, something that changed her perspective of what board games can do, what board games can be, my heart sang! The Initiative is one of those games that will reframe how you look at the hobby as a whole but in the absolute best possible way.

6 – Splendor

The classics are the classics for a reason. There are certain games that have pushed board gaming into the mainstream over the past 10, 15 years – Ticket To Ride, Carcassonne, Pandemic, Azul, to name but a few – and Splendor is undoubtedly on that list. And it’s only very recently that I picked up my copy. Since then, it has fast become a staple in our household board gaming diet.

In Splendor, players compete for a limited market of resources in order to purchase more extravagant gems with the goal of attracting the attention of nobles. These gems and nobles grant victory points and so begins a simple race to be the first to 15.

There is something fundamental to Splendor I appreciate. I can see that it has been iterated upon by games such as Machi Koro and the Century series and while those are aesthetically much more well-rounded than the, frankly, quite dry Splendor, the latter just feels more polished to actually play to me. 

5 – MicroMacro

If Canvas was a game I included here because of the experience, MicroMacro makes the list also under the same criteria. Essentially a detective spin on Where’s Wally?, in MicroMacro, players pore over a giant (and I do mean huge) detailed black and white map of a city and using clue cards, follow individuals as they move around it, buying groceries, taking the subway, killing councillors…

Honestly, MicroMacro is barely a game but as a family experience it shines. Both my 10 year old and 4 year old daughter took part in playing this, each tightly gripping wee plastic magnifying glasses as they hunted for a car with a particular stripe or a specific fishing tackle shop, engrossed in the adventure and story. It’s a game that’s fundamentally inclusive because the barrier to entry is so low both in terms of rules overhead and actual cost that I automatically bought the second and third editions of the game as soon as they launched. 

4 – Destinies

I keep wondering whether my wife would ever try RPGing with me at some point and I am pretty confident the answer is ‘no’ but what seems to be becoming more and more prevalent in the hobby are board games that allow a DM-less, ‘RPGesque’ experience without the required rulesets, books (and perhaps even the role playing itself which I know can be intimidating for a lot of people).

Destinies was a real surprise to me in being the first game I played with deep app integration. I was a little nervous about this, fearing it might somehow take away from the ‘board game’ experience. But my fears were unfounded.

Ostensibly a light ‘RPG campaign in a box’, Destinies is a wonderful box of miniatures and map tiles with a very simple ruleset which in conjunction with the mandatory aforementioned app, allows players to explore a world rapidly approaching the end of days. The skills stats are executed in a smooth and simple way while players can interact with people and sites of interest on the map with items they have found in their journey via QR codes on their respective cards. It’s all very slick, well-written, fun and surprisingly cheap given the quality and number of included minis. 

3 – Tussie Mussie

Elizabeth Hargrave is best known for designing the genre-defining Wingspan, a game we own and love. But one of her earlier designs was the superlative Tussie Mussie, a two player game published by Button Shy, known for their cheap wee 18 card wallet titles. 

While Wingspan revelled in the avian world, Tussie Mussie instead considered the Victorian fashion of giving small posies of flowers to someone and the meaning of those posies from the flowers they contain. Like another game still to come in this top 10, Tussie Mussie shines because the gameplay is whip smart, easy to learn but unfolding with time and experience, it’s super easy to pop in a pocket and carry along and requires almost zero setup and tear down so can be played anywhere on a whim when 10 minutes desperately require a swift and certain death. Aesthetically pleasing and tactically satisfying, Tussie Mussie is bite-sized gaming heaven.

2 – Jaipur

In terms of number of plays, if perhaps not hours played, Jaipur is the game my wife and I have gotten to the table more than any other in 2022. We take it on holiday, we take it out to the pub, we take it for coffee, we squeeze the odd game in after breakfast – it is omnipresent in our gaming vocabulary.

Jaipur is such a simple wee game and yet every time I sit down to play, I feel I have unlocked some new layer of strategy that wasn’t obvious before. It is balanced to a knife edge (I have no idea what the overall win record for the year is between my partner and I but I would be willing to bet it is very close to 50/50). It’s easy to set up, easy to pack away and you can fire through a set of three games in a half hour which zooms by in a blink.

1 – Clank! Legacy

Making this list was difficult. But the first game I added to the list was Clank! Legacy in the #1 slot. No game in 2022 gave me more joy, left me more ripe with anticipation after every play with my wife and our friends than the phenomenal Clank! Legacy.

Clank! as a base system is just so delicious and Clank! Legacy builds on that with depth and humour and shocks and surprises that have been wonderful to experience. It’s not perfect – the game’s humour comes from poking fun at the oft-ignored administrative aspects of adventuring and sometimes leans just a little too heavily into the theme (I never want to see another board game sticker sheet again), but every time I put this box away, I am counting down the days until the next session.

We are just over halfway through the campaign and I am dreading the void this will leave in my gaming calendar once we have completed it. 

Honorable mentions: Flamecraft, Lost Ruins of Arnak, Clank! Catacombs, Quacks of Quedlinberg, Blitzkreig