by: Michael Barnes

In terms of churning out consistently good to great new titles, 2011 was one of the strongest years in hobby gaming’s recent history. It seems like there was always something new, exciting, interesting, or innovative hitting shelves and tables and for my part I found it hard to keep up. To keep up with coverage, I shifted Cracked LCD to almost exclusively reviews for the better part of the year, sidelining editorial features and delaying the final two installments of my Barnes’ Best series of decade-best lists. But I still ran out of time to cover Dungeon Run, Panic Station, Olympos, Ascending Empires and Metal Gear Solid Risk. I’ve barely even played A Few Acres of Snow and I have yet to try Risk: Legacy, Sekigahara, Space Empires, the Evo reprint, or the Runewars expansion.

Nonetheless, I played lots of great games over the past year including a few that I’d rank among the very best the hobby has to offer. I also played the worst game I’ve played in at least a decade, Richard Berg’s embarrassing Godzilla: Kaiju World Wars. But that was an outlier in a year that saw top notch titles such as AEG’s Nightfall, Small Box Games’ Omen: A Reign of War, the surprisingly good FFG rendition of Gears of War, and the Summoner Wars Master Set. And let’s not forget The Horned Rat, an absolutely awesome add-on to 2009 Game of the Year Chaos in the Old World or the absolutely fantastic IOS edition of Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer.

But it all comes down to this— a shortlist of games that are the best of the best and a single title to be named your Cracked LCD/Gameshark.com Game of the Year. Without further ado, I give you the cream of the 2011 crop.

5. Blood Bowl Team Manager

Originally announced as a deckbuilding game, Fantasy Flight’s take on Games Workshop’s classic fantasy football game turned out to be a great sports game with only very minor traits of that popular and often overstretched mechanic. The game is easy to play, exciting, and rife with drama while also capturing just about every aspect of what has made Blood Bowl a perennial gamer favorite for decades. But more than that, it expanded the scope of Blood Bowl with the titular Team Manager concept simulating season play in concurrent abstract matches, player drafting, coaching, and other very high level gameplay ideas. It looks great, offers plenty of replay value with six teams out of the box, and offers lots of potential for a great expansion. I loved this game much more than I expected to, and having been out of the miniatures scene for some time I’m glad to have a way to enjoy Blood Bowl again without having to resort to that ghastly Xbox 360 game.

4. Yomi

Yomi is a brilliant two player game that uses some very simple (and sometimes traditional) cardplay mechanics to simulate a fighting video game complete with its own roster of original characters, each with special moves, strengths, and weaknesses. Designed by a bona fide Street Fighter developer (and self-professed “balance expert”), the game managed to turn a rock-paper-scissors mechanic into a thrilling psychological game of attack, counterattack, timing, and bluff. The rules were literally a page long and many dismissed it as a guessing game, but players that learned its subtleties and hidden intricacies discovered a game that has plenty of depth to offer skilled players. I stand by my assertion that it’s one of the best card games since Magic: The Gathering; when I played it earlier this year, I thought for sure it was lock for Game of the Year. But at that point, I had no idea what other designers and publishers had in store for us.