by: Michael Barnes

To ring in 2011, this edition of Cracked LCD is going to be the start of a new mini-series that I’m calling Barnes’ Best, a ten-best list of my favorite games from every decade of the hobby. I started this piece as a best-of-the-decade number since we’re over ten years deep into the new millennium and I thought it was time to take stock, but I decided to just go right on ahead and issue my proclamation on what is best in gaming for the past hundred years. These aren’t the most influential, important, or significant games by any means- just my favorites, and the ones I’d slate as the top games of their time.

To kick off Barnes’ Best, I wanted to take a quick tour of the pre-1970s gaming landscape. Before the seventies, hobby gaming didn’t really exist and the games that we’d classify as hobby concerns were really just exceptionally good family or mainstream games. There are great games from this prehistoric era, so this first list covers the first six decades of the 20th century. Even though I love Go and Backgammon just fine, there are no traditional or folk games listed as I wanted to focus on designed, commercially published titles. With that in mind, these games are Barnes’ Best for 1900-1970.

1. Acquire (1962)

Acquire is one of my favorite games ever published and of the pre-1970s games, it’s definitely my top pick. This Sid Sackson masterpiece is abstract and seems closer to a jumped-up Bingo game at first glance, yet it somehow captures a thematic sense of giant corporations competing against each other to expand while smaller, independent businesses get consumed in the process. It’s one of the best investment games because it’s one of the most direct—a simple majorities system determines who gets the best payouts when mergers occur. We brought this almost half-century old game out at one of our recent game nights and had a complete blast with it. Sackson did a lot of other great games in the 1960s, but this remains his best design. It’s a shame that the amazing 1999 publication- with plastic tiles, board and buildings- has been replaced by a much flimsier all-cardboard issue.

2. Nuclear War (1965)

When I first bought this game in 1990, I was amazed that my friends and I were playing a game that was twenty five years old. In 2011, I’m amazed that we still love it. Nuclear War is a Cold War relic, a game about atomic annihilation with a wink and a grin where millions of people (represented by population cards) get wiped out in the blink of an eye and everyone can lose the game on the very first turn. The mechanics are surprisingly innovative given its historical context with cardplay managed by a queue requiring players to strategically plan on what cards they’re going to put into sequence. If you want to shoot that 50 megaton warhead, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got an appropriate rocket in line ahead of it. Later expansions turned this game into an even more insane offering, and as recently as 2005 it’s been kept current with a “Weapons of Mass Destruction” expansion.

3. Astron (1954)

I covet very few games. I have a great collection that includes almost every game that I care to own. But I don’t have Astron, and this is definitely a case of “they don’t make ‘em like that anymore”. It’s a world-wide rocket race game, with the map of the world printed on a scroll between two rollers in a cardboard housing. There’s a piece of plastic film over the map so that when you turn the rollers to advance it, the cool metal rockets stay in place while “flying” to the next space. The game features some pretty ahead-of-its-time card play activation mechanics that control not only the rate at which the map scrolls but also how the rockets move. There are hazards all over the place, and part of the fun is steering your opponents right into danger. There’s nothing else like it, and it’s one of my favorite games of all time, easily.