Board Game Lovers Will Want To Hear About These Favorites

There are so many great games out there, whether from classics like Trouble, Scrabble, Bonkers, or Pay Day, to newer games like Ticket to Ride, Cascadia, Settlers of Catan, or Scythe. You may have a hard time picking a favorite, or if you have a large collection, picking one to get to the table. This week on Table Talk (WJON's bi-weekly show about board games), Gaming Expert, William Pankratz from Game by James, and I took our turn at picking our time 5 favorite games from our collection.  They are not necessarily the top games of all time because there are so many great games, but games that if someone asks us to play, we would pretty much say yes.

William started us off with his #5, and it was a game we have spoken about often on the show. His #5 was the relatively new game "Bomb Busters."  He says it is a fantastic co-op game with tons of replayability.

We traded off back and forth, so up next was my #5 game Clank. I included all versions of the game here in the original, Clank in Space, Clank Catacombs, and Clank Legacy. It is a great deck-building game with a push-your-luck board element, and always fun to play.

William's #3 is a game with all kinds of different-shaped tiles as you build the Castle of Mad King Ludwig. He says fitting the different shapes together is a big part of the fun:

"There's small circles, large circles, big octagons, big squares, long hallways, L-Shaped rooms, so it is truly a weird puzzle of where can you place this in your castle, will it give a bonus because it's next to because you have a buttery next to a dining room or do you have a hallway going downstairs to a pit that will give you bonuses and things like that."

You are making your own board, but you still get a sense of interaction with other players because of the bidding for the tiles.

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It was a lot of fun to see how our lists compared. We talked about some honorable mention games, too. We both had the deck-builder Trains as one, just missed both of our top 5. You can tune into great game conversations with William and me and special guests every other Saturday at about 8:10 a.m. after the news and weather on Table Talk.  Check out our full top 5 lists below:

WILLIAMS's TOP 5 FAVORITE GAMES:
#5 - Bombbusters
#4 - Ultimate Railroads (also known as Russian Railroads)
#3 - Castles of Mad King Ludwig
#2 - Spirit Island
#1 - Arkham Horror, the Card Game

PAUL's TOP 5 FAVORITE GAMES:
#5 - Clank (all versions of the game)
#4 - Wonderland's War
#3 - Meadow
#2 - Seasons
#1 - Dominion

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