BoardGameGeek is the largest and most comprehensive website dedicated to board and card games, with a database comprising nearly a hundred and fifty thousand games.  These games have a ranking based on ratings submitted by account holders.  While these rankings are obviously skewed by the characteristics of the contributors, the number one ranking game clearly has significance.  In the twenty-two years that the rankings have been in place, there have been just ten games to achieve the top rank, but as of today, there is an eleventh, with Brass: Birmingham taking the top spot from Gloomhaven.

– Image from boardgamegeek.com

Of these now eleven games, three held the top rank briefly, for a day or two only.  The first of these was The Game of Life, and it’s top rank was the result of a software bug when on 25^th February 2006, a User gave it a rating of sixty-five thousand five-hundred and thirty-five out of ten.  Just over a year later, as an April Fool, another User encouraged his friends to give Monkey Auto Races a rating of ten.  With just three hundred ratings, this game went from unranked to number one overnight, only to plummet back down the rankings just a day or so later.  Three years later, the site owner pulled his own April Fool stunt and set the ranking equal to the data base number, making Die Macher number one for a day.

The list of eight genuine Number One Games and the date they first achieved the top ranking are:

• Paths of Glory (August 2001)
• Tigris & Euphrates (February 2002)
• Puerto Rico (June 2002)
• Agricola (August 2008)
• Twilight Struggle (January 2011)
• Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (January 2016).
• Gloomhaven (December 2017)
• Brass: Birmingham (February 2023)

– Image by boardGOATS