This will surprise absolutely nobody, but I am sometimes accused of being a big old bummer. A downer. A morose feel-bad baby. Nietzsche said that if you stare into the abyss it’ll gaze back, and I’ve found that to be true, but in locking eyes with the abyss I also find we come to an understanding. We’re poorer in spirit if we don’t lock eyes with the void now and again.

There were a number of void-locking titles this year. Today is a celebration of the best of them. Take my hand, abyss. It’ll be all right.

#6. Night Soil

Designed by Jon Moffat. Published by Grail Games

Poop! Night Soil begins with a joke, keeps on giving that joke, and then sneaks up on you with a point about the hidden work that keeps civilization chugging along while everybody sleeps. Set in a Tudor London that’s packed to the gills with human filth, players adopt the role of gong farmers and mudlarks, the dirty workers who muck out the gutters and cart it to the river. It’s grimy, greasy work, made all the grimier and greasier for Jesse Gillespie’s rancid card illustrations.

But what a game. Most human lives have gone overlooked, but not all of them have gone quite this overlooked. Which makes Night Soil not only a rollicking title about the dawn of sanitation, but also a work of social history that ought to be taught in science-starved classrooms. How do we keep civilization running? By carting the poop to the sea. Oh, and by the way: Poop!

Review: I Don’t Wanna Do Your Dirty Work

#5. Chicago ’68

Designed by Yoni Goldstein. Published by The Dietz Foundation.

If you have no right to protest, you have no rights. This truism is at the heart of Chicago ’68, a game that feels all too timely five decades and change after the events portrayed, when right-wing violence has been so normalized that masked thugs kidnap citizens and non-citizens alike in the streets without repercussion while every act of disagreement gets labeled the end of civilization by a complicit corporate media.

But that makes Chicago ’68 necessary. It’s a reminder that conscientious people have always struggled to craft a better world, have always marched uphill through teargas, have always founded awkward coalitions, have always, sometimes, suffered setbacks and loss. There’s more to say about the game — for instance, that it’s a good game — but for now, its potency as a reminder is enough.

Review: The Whole World Is Watching

#4. Fate of the Fellowship

Designed by Matt Leacock. Published by Z-Man Games.

The Lord of the Rings has long been the modern world’s parable of resilience, a detail that sometimes gets overlooked in our hurry to strip-mine it for monsters and elves and general aesthetic. That it still retains its power is a testament to Tolkien’s skill as a writer.

Fate of the Fellowship understands that legacy. It’s a game about hope: its loss, its tenuousness, the way it stands firm or crumbles in an instant. Every time I play it, there’s at least one moment where I’m not sure we’ll pull through. The wraiths have backed Frodo and Sam into a corner. The hordes are descending on a beleaguered haven. Gondor can’t get its poop in a group. But then, a miracle. Reinforcements. A lucky roll. The horde blundering along the wrong path. When that happens, those prickles run up my legs, just like they did all those years ago when I read the trilogy for the first time. I’m a kid all over again, learning that I can slay dragons.

Review: Legend Became Tabletop

#3. Corps of Discovery

Designed by Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim. Published by Off the Page Games.

Corps of Discovery is a strange game, in no small part thanks to the strangeness of its source material. One part critique of the American colonial project, another part distasteful male gaze for Sacajawea, the comic series is an unsettling portrayal that sometimes doesn’t know where its head is at. The board game adaptation lingers in that headspace. Are we here to kill monsters? Yes. But also, we’re here to bend this land to our will. To remake it in our image.

Okay, some of this stuff is basement-level subtext. I don’t think the game fires on all cylinders without first reading the material it’s adapting. But in its proper context it hits many of the right notes, providing plenty of grisly work for its alt-history Lewis and Clark expedition. It’s grimy in a way that most board games never manage, with a wilderness that feels appropriately hostile and enemies that would rather eat us than become us. Heart of Darkness, indeed.

Review: Manifest Sudoku

#2. Purple Haze

Designed by Bernard Grzybowski. Published by PHALANX.

There’s a mode Purple Haze excels at, one where the player is invited to do terrible things and have terrible things done to them, one which leaves a sick feeling in the stomach, but does so without moralizing or offering an easy escape. As a squad of U.S. Marines, your troops are a tough match for their opposition. They’re well equipped, well trained, and have the advantage of artillery. But they’re also expendable to the machine that has sent them here. That expendability, both of body and spirit, is never far from mind. As the injuries accumulate, as hidden hurts become all too real, as the inability to tell friend from foe becomes uncomfortably present.

Like the rest of the titles on this list, the result is an imperfect game that still has a lot to say about our imperfect natures. Call it synchronicity, because I’m not sure a perfect game would fit in this company. Whatever the reason, Purple Haze is one of the most gripping and personal portrayals of infantry warfare ever put to cardboard.

Review: Don’t Know If It’s Day or Night

#1. Onoda

Designed by Francisco Gradaille. Published by Salt & Pepper Games.

Board games don’t often truck in obscurity. In a media ecosystem where ambiguity is already an imperiled species, this simply isn’t the strongest medium for muddy waters. Under normal circumstances, anyway. Francisco Gradaille’s Onoda asks us to inhabit the shabby boots of Hiroo Onoda, the second-longest holdout of WWII. Along the way, Onoda commits regular war crimes, steals and bullies and kills, and steadfastly refuses to face the reality that his empire has been shattered and his cause is futile.

Is this denial? Insanity? A last-ditch attempt to avoid prosecution? Gradaille doesn’t offer an answer. Instead, he walks us through Onoda’s daily life and the passing decades. Unlike many of the titles on this list, the landscape is bright and cheerful rather than overcast. It’s you, the protagonist of this tale, who falls like a dark cloud to steal a radio or hold villagers at gunpoint. As an examination of a man who insists he embodies manliness while fleeing from his responsibilities, Onoda provides a clear-eyed portrayal of a real-world horror story.

Review: On Banditry

Whew! What a big bummer we were today. What were your annual bummers, dear reader? Share all the bummers below. Let us become bummers together, and in being bummed, dispel the bumminess.

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