The ranking
One of my top 5 favorite things in the world:
is asking Valerie (the Mrs.) to rank her favorite boardgames. The reader should know that Valerie's life before meeting me was bleak and dissapointing (her words!) not only because I bring sunshine into her life, but mostly because she did not play a single boardgame before meeting me (Monopoly doesn't count!).
Contact Valerie to verifyScoring
I should probably explain a bit more about the scoring here...
There are 5 scoring categories: Wow factor, Storyline, Replayability, Luck factor and Rulebook.
The biggest chunk of the points goes to "Wow factor", where we crammed everything that we found super compelling and memorable about a particular boardgame. For example, how we still say "Meet me in Delhi" when we talk about arranging a meeting place with my sister (because of that one time in Pandemic when she spent all her moves walking through Asia, because we said we would meet her in Delhi to swap a card, only to forget about it later and leave her stranded there with no purpose. Fun times).
The rest of the categories are pretty self-explanatory. We defined Luck factor as "Enough random chance to make everything a bit more unpredictable and exciting, but not so much that a roll of dice can ruin your entire game".
We would both sell a horse for a good story, so that category also carries a lot of weight.
A good rulebook can make for a very enjoyable start, but you shouldn't need to Google longer than you play. And some games should be endlessly replayable (not all games!) because they are more fun every time.