Honestly I've never really gotten around in any year to properly organizing and thinking out what I might consider my personal games of the year, but this year after a friend shared his GB blog post about his GOTY, I thought, what the hell. I got some time on my hands, it sounds like fun, and I probably maybe have ten games I enjoyed this year? Maybe? Hopefully?

Now to clarify that latter statement has nothing to do with the state of the industry: 2015 was a pretty damn solid year for games. It's also personally been a busy and exceedingly rough year, and I haven't had as much time to spend on games -- but honestly, that just makes the games I did manage to experience this year all the more important to me. This is a personal list, not an objective list, of games that I've loved and valued my time with in 2015, and that so happens to include a couple of board games. Bite me, I like board games, and I don't really feel a need to seperate them from video games all too much.

MY BOARD/VIDEO GAMES OF THE YEAR

( in an order that is roughly approximating how much I like them, but probably not entirely exact )

10. Evolve

Whoa, whoa. What the fuck is this? Evolve? That bloated DLC-filled piece of crap? On a GOTY list? Yes. yes, it is, and every single criticism everyone has about the game is completely true. It launched with more editions than a Ubisoft title, which is a pretty impressive feat, had stirred up a decent amount of hype over the period of its promo cycle but managed to slaughter all of it as it rolled out the release plans, and it quite happily stabbed its small playerbase in the gut with DLC schemes. On PS4, I even had an absurd problem where I was unable to share DLC across different accounts on my console, which because of how I bought and played most of my games, meant I didn't get the DLC I paid for until me and a few others sat in the same Turtle Rock forum thread about it and kept hammering on about the issue, and even then I only got it literally seven months later. Because of all these problems the playerbase is completely dwindling, and for such a multiplayer focused title, this is a death sentence -- especially on the comparatively sparse servers in my region compared to the states, I have a real hard time even finding a game.

And yet, I've spent over 90 hours on it.

Hunter/hunted asymmetric games are a great weakness of mine, and I've a great love for hidden movement board games like Fury of Dracula -- this felt like the video game incarnation of the concept. I participated in the beta on PC, and even though I had to play it at 800x600 in order to get even a passable framerate, I still had a ton of fun with it. There were some technical issues on release on PS4, but I loved everything about the gameplay. I loved everything about being a monster and feeling the sweat drip down your forehead when you're crouching behind a rock and all four hunters leap and bound past following the tracks you hoped would mislead them, everything about the moment when you successfully drive the monster into a map chokepoint where your trapper was waiting with a dome, about the moment when you jumped in as a fragile magic to use your close-range heal in a selfless attempt to save your assault -- and because you knew you could depend on your support, right behind you, shielding you as the monster tried to set its sights on you. To me Evolve is a very sad example of a great game bogged down by literally everything other than the game, and I will make no appeals to any reader as to why they should ignore any of the very real complaints. I still loved my time with it, though, enough that I feel it deserves a place here -- every now and then I still hop on, hoping to find a game, and I enjoy the one or two matches I occasionally find.

9. Destiny: The Taken King

Okay, okay, hear me out. Destiny, on its release, still would've probably found a place in my yearly GOTY, even though I was perfectly aware that it was an exceedingly flawed product -- if you'd asked me then, I'd have told you it probably wasn't that great of a game, maybe after some hand-wringing about how great it felt to play. Like many others I did find the release of this latest DLC a welcome breath of fresh air that revitialized a tired system, that smoothed over many of the game's more jarring flaws and brought to us the wonderful King's Fall raid. None of that is why it's here on my list.

One of the most important things I feel a game can do -- and this extends to my love of board games -- is provide me with ways to enjoy my friends' company. Destiny was always a fun social experience for me on day one, when I brought in one of my oldest and best friends and we could spend hours every day together running the same missions over and over, and even more so when I managed to find a few like-minded gamers on little-known niche interest video game site giant bomb dot com to actually try that raid content I'd heard so much about. A few of us left, a few of us stayed, a few of us showed up, we had this little group of gamers that became a little group of friends. The Taken King brought us back for more horrible misadventures together, and what this game has done to allow me to make some new friends and to enjoy my time with them earns it its place here a lot more than tight shooting mechanics and an improved quest screen.

Though, I mean. The vault space was a really good thing to add.

8. Assassin's Creed: Syndicate

I'm one of the few souls out there who will still happily profess to loving the Assassin's Creed games. I'm kind of an oddball when it comes to that, though -- I appreciated but didn't much care for 4, greatly enjoyed 3, and for how much time I spend running around for collectibles my overall playtime still pales in comparison to how much time I've spent on any of the games' competitive multiplayer ( 80+ hours on Revelation MP alone ). I did kind find 5 overwhelmingly terrible, though, and without even a multiplayer remaining to let me spend time on, I probably only spent about 4 hours in total in Unity, but Syndicate won me back when I thought the series finally lost me for good.

It's honestly a little hard for me to put in words just what I liked so much about Syndicate, and maybe that's a good thing, with how much rambling I've already done on this list. It feels a little bit like Syndicate returning to the promise of what Assassin's Creed was supposed to be, about sneaking and planning and assassinating instead of becoming another open world fest with some occasional stabbing. I felt like an Assassin again, in a way that I hadn't quite felt since not even really Brotherhood, but the first damn game, and while I'm not entirely impressed with the game's story, I stayed interested enough to see it through. Ziplining around a beautifully realized London while listening to podcasts has taken up many of my evenings, and here's hoping that Syndicate is a sign of a return to form for the series rather than a sort of last dying gasp.

7. Infinifactory

I really like making things. I'm terrible at it in real life, it's not like I've ever had any kind of access to tools or whatnot, but I have a fascination with systems and mechanics, with making something work. Games that can emulate this feeling have always been the kind that could capture my attention more than anything else, and I tended to find that in odd places: it used to be the map editors of old RTS games like Warcraft and Age of Empires 2, and it eventually found a home in the extremely prolific Minecraft modding community in the form of tech-based modpacks like Feed the Beast. One of the most perfect puzzle games I've ever played scratched this itch like nothing else, a game I described to my bewildered friends as a combination of Lego Mindstorm robotics and high school chemistry with a vaguely Lovecraftian storyline. That game was Spacechem, and until Infinifactory came along, I thought nothing could ever best it.

It's appropriate that my obsession with Spacechem in some ways came directly from my obsession with Minecraft, as the game was originally explicitly coded as a clone of Infiniminer, by Zachary Barth -- who then went on to make Spacechem, and now, Infinifactory. This is a puzzle game about making a machine, about assembling a factory, about being given tools and mechanics and then being artfully taught how one can use and manipulate them to solve increasingly complex tasks. Infinifactory manages to repeat the miracle that made Spacechem work: it features some of the most incredibly challenging puzzles I've ever encountered in a game, and yet always feels fair. It is a little frustrating, but it's a good kind of frustrating, and there is a real art to how Barth continually manages to to really make you understand what you're working with over the course of the game's carefully designed levels, always encouraging and forcing you to think in new creative ways. There's never a set solutiion, and how you approach each level has an incredible amount of room for player expression -- though you are making a machine, and the game is quite happy to encourage you to return to your barely functioning monstrosity and hammer it into something efficient, elegant, and absolutely mesmerizing to watch work.

If Portal made you feel clever on solving a puzzle, Infinifactory makes you feel like a damned prodigy, wrapped up in a surprisingly clever and funny little story and well-realized world. I've not yet beat it, because goddamn this thing is hard, but I'll keep hammering at it while enjoying every minute of my repeated failure. It is not for everyone, but if you're anything like me, this thing will be impossible to put down.

6. Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

Yelling at my friends is one of my favorite past times, and is something I tend to associate more with board games than video games. Not that a game of Dota can't have you yelling at your friends, god knows it can, but there's something different about experiencing the same thing together in the same place while doing that said yelling. I've mentioned before that this year has been a hard year for me, and part of that is tied up in this being a year when most of my dear friends in real life have gone their seperate ways, when we're splitting up across the globe, and while we still keep up and talk often, I miss having them here in person to yell at.

I first played Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes over skype with a good friend in Hong Kong. Now, I've played board games over the internet before, it's something that happens often, whether it be talking-heavy games like Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective and Spyfall or something that required the aid of a program like Battlestar Galactica. It's always been fun, not quite the same, but a suitable analog -- and there's something about Keep Talking's approach with one person staring at a bomb and another flipping through a manual yelling panicked instructions that makes it feel incredibly immediate and real. That first play session was supposed to be an hour, but after much laughter and countless explosions, stretched onto almost three. I've since played over and over again, online and off, and I have to say we're all pretty damn good at it now, but the genius of the model is that the game still somehow manages to remain fun despite apparent mastery of the challenge -- and that a new manual will give us all something new to fail at and enjoy. I've not been paying close attention, but here's hoping there'll be one soon, as this is a gem of a game and I'd love to relive the joy and frustrartion of that initial learning experience.

5. Prison Architect

This is cheating, maybe, because I've had this game since early access, but Prison Architect finally released this year and I couldn't have been more pleased. I've a great nostalgia for the 90s tycoon game, a genre that seems to have all but died out these days, living on in some indie games and the upcoming probable disaster of a sequel for Rollercoaster Tycoon. I've said before that I love making things, and tycoon games were all about that, making a system, watching it work. Prison Architect first caught my eye because it reminded me of Theme Hospital, the 1997 Bullfrog ( may they rest in peace ) title that I still find myself humming the music to in the waiting room of the doctor's office, and boy, does it live up to expectation.

You create and manage a prison, run it, manage everything about it from the quality and quantity of the meals to security patrols to daily schedules to prisoner intake. You control everything, and yet simultaneously nothing -- workmen and prisoners can never be directly controlled, and the prisoners may be the commodity you're shuffling around ( lets just say that the game may not directly tackle difficult issues but doesn't shy away from presenting them in ways that can be considered thought-provoking ), but you also need to find a way to appease them, or controlling them will be impossible and they'll take over your prison block by block and you have to send in the riot police and hope you can wash the blood off the walls. Or maybe instead of appeasaing them and providing them with some amount of quality of life, you take the opposite approach, choosing instead to fill the halls with armed guards ready to shoot on sight and keeping the prisoners in line with fear and suppression instead. Or maybe you're like me and you let your prison rot away because they just patched and added dogs, and you spent all your time trying to make a cute little doghouse in the prison with little dog pathways the dogs could use to get around to the yard. Either way, the possibilities are endless.

The game has continued to update since then on a slightly slacker schedule, but they've certainly not let up on the quality, introducing more and more meaningful features like the most recent update of women's prisons and shared dormitories as an alternative to individual cells. If you haven't yet checked it out and have any love for this sort of game, you're missing out.

4. Invisible Inc.

I love stealth games. I'm pretty bad at stealth games, though, and maybe part of my initial draw to Klei's latest was that a turn-based stealth game would mean I could probably be less bad at it. I'm pleased to report that I am decent at it, but only after many many many many many failures, and that's fine, because damn do I love this game.

Invisible Inc. also features on Austin's list this year, and I'd encourage you to read what he has to say, he puts it better than I ever could, but it is an incredibly designed piece of work.. Every decision is a tough decision, there's never just one right or wrong choice, and the game is very sneaky about giving you ample opportunity to be greedy while being very willing to punish you for pushing it too far. It's smart and sharp, unafraid to challenge you, doing it all with style -- one of my favorite features? When you're down to your last agent, when you're trying desperately to get them out just so you can have some small hope of scraping yourself back into form, when you fail and misstep and it's clear that you've lost, the agent gains an additional action: an option to spend their last turn delivering a pithy one-liner.

3. Skull ( and Roses )

It's one of them dirty board games, one of two on my list, neither of them released in 2015 ( though good god there are plenty of 2015 board games I wish I could get my filthy mitts on ), but I only got around to playing them this year for various reasons. Skull and Roses, or Skull, is a game that giving a release date to feels kind of odd, because while there is a commercial release version, much like Mafia and Werewolf it's a much older game that's always just been played by people sitting around.

Skull's often played as a pub game, with coasters, let alone cards, and it's incredibly simple: each player has four cards, consisting of three roses, and a skull. Every player secretly choose a card to play face down on the table, and then players take turns to either play a card, or make a bid. A bid consists of a challenge: I bet I can open X number of cards on the table without opening a skull. Bidding then goes round the table, with players either passing and leaving the round ( but leaving their cards in play ) or choosing to raise the bid, until everyone's passed and someone has to make good on their promise and open up those cards -- with one catch. That player must begin by opening all the cards they have personally played in front of them. Losing a bid means you lose a card, leaving you less information for further rounds, winning a bid gains you a point. Two points wins the game.

That's literally the whole game, and the simplicity is why it's incredible. It's an old game, and I'm honestly ashamed to say that as a long-time board gamer I'd simply never bothered to look it up and teach it to myself until now, because I brought it to my friends one night and that's all we played for the next few sessions we met up to game. I've always expressed disappointment in poker: we want it to be about Casino Royale and hard bluffing and tells, but while that's part of the game, it's more about math and probability. Skull is the game we all secretly wanted, all about hard bluffs, about smiling at your friend when he asks you what you've played, about playing every card while loudly announcing "I've just played a skull, I'm warning you!" -- and let me tell you, the first time someone decides to take on a bid to open every card on the table you'll be on your feet with nervous energy with every card he flips, roaring with laughter when he flips a skull, or with laughter and applause if he manages to pull it off.

Skull is great. Get some damn cards or some things lying around the house that will double as cards, and play it. You won't regret it.

2. Undertale

I can understand that people are probably tired of hearing about Undertale. I can understand that the fandom puts a lot of people off, and I profess to being a little immune to that, because I've always been a fandom person and I've been in that culture for long enough that I shrug off all of the louder more obnoxious parts of it with relative ease. I can understand rolling your eyes when you first hear about it, an apparently heartwarming RPG, with a sense of humor, how unique! And you don't have to kill everything? Ugh, a moral choice system. How novel.

But there really is something to Undertale, and I would appeal to everyone to please, please give it a shot. It does a lot more with it's concept than any other game ever has and pulls it all off with a sincerity and earnestness that should be treasured in today's overwhelming cynicism. It uses the medium to talk about ideas intelligently and in-depth, and there's so much it does that only a game can do -- not only that, only a PC game could ever really do. To share too much would genuinely be ruining it, but rest assured Undertale has a lot more under its sleeve than anime jokes and the choice to spare rather than kill your opponents, and it ends up creating a wonderful story that its impossible not to be engaged in, with characters that you will fall in love with.

Undertale is one of those games that I'm still thinking about after I put it down, and I don't just mean because I'm still humming along to the incredible soundtrack. If you're willing to engage with it, it has the potential to deeply affect you, and it really did for me.

1. Archipelago

Look, a board game!

Archipelago is a year or two old, and it came to me almost 7 months after I first ordered it. It arrived after I was already convinced it was lost to the mysterious mail maelstrom, or perhaps just trapped forever in the limbo of Canadian airspace. I was drawn to it mostly because it was gorgeous, hand-painted tiles depicting a beautiful archipelago, a nice amount of wooden pieces, meeples, ships. The gameplay, however, is what has me completely hooked.

This is a beast of a game, and giving any more than a brief overview would be an overwhelming block of text, but I think the best way I can describe it is if you took Settlers of Catan and zoomed in a bunch while realistically accounting for the effect of colonization on the local population and economy. 2-5 players play as colonists, and the game doesn't shy away from presenting you with your intent to exploit the fuck out of the island and everything it can offer you. You explore the archipelago, creating it tile by tile as you go, gaining resources and trading them for profit -- but what makes the game unique is that it's a semi co-op game. Everyone wants to win, and victory is individual -- you have to be selfish, but not too selfish, because at any time the island might be lost to a rebellion and everyone loses. Unless, of course, someone happened to secretly be the seperatist the whole time.

There's a lot more that's unique and clever about the game, from hidden but global victory conditions to a nefarious method of determining player order, but this game like no other preys on the dynamics between you and your friends. I love the traditionally friendship-destroying games, Diplomacy is one of my all-time favorites, and while this game isn't that inherently cutthroat and nasty, the game thrives off that semi-cooperative tension, and players will find themselves doing things that give them unquestionable benefit while handing off the responsibility for the unsemely consequences to the rest, or sneaking into each other's territories to claim their resources for their own. I said this was a beast of a game, and it isn't easy, but for all of it's mechanics -- everything that could carry a game by itself, from worker placement to secret auctions to hidden victory conditions to domestic and international market dynamics -- it somehow manages to make everything intuitive and elegant. Well, almost everything, the rules for engaging workers are a little fiddly, but, still. Almost.

It's not a perfect game, by any means -- among other things, it makes some questionable art choices when portraying the native population. However in an industry that's flooded with eurogames that typically celebrate colonization, it's a little refreshing to have a game portray colonization in it's entirety, nastiness and warts and all. We're the villains here, the game knows it, and it's going to let us be as nasty to each other and to the game as we want. I've played this game plenty of times by now, and a few times even without a seperatist amongst us we found ourselves losing to the rebellion before ever making it to the end of the game simply out of greed and selfishness, and that's kind of wonderful.

That's it, my top 10 videoboardgames of 2015. I'm not entirely happy with this list and I probably have some runners up I should be listing, but you know what, I've rambled on for long enough. This has been a fun llittle exercise, and you out there who's read it, I hope you get something out of it somehow. Me, I've got Undertale songs in my head and a hankering to play Skull. So nothing new, I suppose.