< back

  The Zen 10

Looking to build a small but well rounded game collection? Downsizing?  Planning a trip across the Pacific Ocean by plane?

addenda:

 

Stranded on a Desert Island with Four Friends

These are the ten twelve fifteen games I'd keep from my collection if I were required to pare it down for some unholy reason. This is a desert island exercise (granted one that maroons friends and acquaintances in addition to myself) to build an affordable game collection that emphasizes versatility, replayability, games for all occassions and tastes.

Note, these are not my top 15 games. My fave list constantly evolves so I maintain it over at  BoardGameGeek.com  where I'm this guy:

Also note, this is not a shopping list. It's a meditation on my game collection, an examination of the classic categories of board games, and a jumping off point for others curious about the wide range of games out there now. Hop on over to BGG to learn more about these games and others similar to them to see if they'd suit you. I've also linked to my short reviews where they exist.

That being said, as of September 2015, this collection could be purchased from Amazon.com for approximately US$467.

If that sounds like a lot, remember how many plays come out of each game box, and how much fun each play involves. If one play of a game is equivalent to a night at the movies for four people (2 hours of fun for approximately $48 sans popcorn), this collection will pay for itself (in entertainment value) before you get a chance to play each game once. If you typically go to the movies once a month and decide to game instead of keeping up with the blockbusters, this collection will pay for itself (in actual money) in less than a year.

This collection is not only affordable, it's also compact — an often overlooked but important quality for any collection. It includes only 5 full sized boxes (if you re-box Augustus), 4 medium boxes, and 6 small (some very small) boxes. It could conceivably be packed in a couple pieces of luggage so that you'd actually have these games with you when your plane crashes and strands you in some deserted place!

In 2014, the Dice Tower, a popular collective of game reviewers, surveyed over 2000 of their viewers about their favourite games for their People's Choice Top 20 Games of All Time episode. I'm glad to report that 8 of those games are in the Zen 10. Here's that list:

  1. Pandemic
  2. King of Tokyo
  3. Ticket to Ride
  4. Dominion - deck builder - the granddaddy of that genre
  5. Lords of Waterdeep - worker placement - medium weight
  6. 7 Wonders - card drafting - fun but with little player interaction
  7. Agricola
  8. Eldritch Horror - ameritrash, co-op
  9. Small World - area control - refreshingly light for this category
  10. Carcassonne
  11. Cosmic Encounter - negotiation
  12. Power Grid - economic
  13. Love Letter
  14. The Castles of Burgundy
  15. Android: Netrunner - living card game
  16. The Resistance
  17. Robinson Crusoe - co-op - difficult to beat
  18. Race for the Galaxy - engine builder - has a steep learning curve
  19. Descent 2 - dungeon crawler
  20. Caverna - worker placement - Agricola 2.0

Irreplaceable Games

Here’s a twist on making a desert island game collection: boxing up your irreplaceable games. It’s 2023. A new reality where we live is preparing for evacuation every summer. We live in a wildfire zone.

The effects of global warming (don’t get me started) are no longer debated, they’re predictable. Every summer, our province burns.

We live in the southeast of British Columbia, which has had dozens of fires in recent years but has been largely spared most burning. The centre and north of BC have experienced the most, and the largest, fires. The kind that cause whole cities to be evacuated for weeks at a time. The kind that destroy whole neighbourhoods and towns.

How long will our luck hold? No one knows. Lightning strikes and stray cigarette butts are erratic. While we keep our fingers crossed each summer, we prepare for a possible evacuation order.

Each spring we box up irreplaceable items so that they can quickly be loaded into our car (along with camping gear and cat carriers) in the event the worst happens and we must leave our home.

The totes contain important documents, old photos, hard drives of newer photos, some books and DVDs that would be impossible to find again, a few sentimental keepsakes. And one tote contains board games.

When you collect games, you become familiar with the vagaries of game publishing. This is a polite way of saying, shit goes out of print quick. Lots of games get re-published, but the wait between editions can be long and editions can vary in quality. One can get attached to a particular edition for sentimental reasons.

Many of the games in our collection are out of print (OOP) but our car is small, so only beloved and rare titles that have gone out of print qualify for evacuation. Here’s the list:

Full Sized Boxes...

Small Boxes...

Tiny...

Twenty-two games in one tote! A collection that could sustain play during a protracted exile. But it isn't a balanced collection. For some reason it skews towards bluffing games and area control. Interestingly, it includes six games (**) from my original desert island list.

Again, these are not the games that top our collection. It includes some of our faves, but many are missing. Where is The Quest for El Dorado? The Fox in the Forest? Cascadia, Istanbul, Concordia? Ra, or It’s a Wonderful World? Those games are evergreen, always in print. They’d be easy to buy again.

Would we replace all the games in our collection if they were lost? Interesting question. Let’s hope we never have to find out.