by Firestone My game group tries to get together one Saturday a month for a full day of board gaming awesomeness. And every time we do we know this is a chance to play some of the longer games on our lists, or try something new, or whatever. So we all come up with lists of games that interest us, and people chime in if something sounds fun.

There's one game that is on my list every. single. month.

Struggle Of Empires.

The brilliant Martin Wallace designed this game, and though it's not better than his masterpiece, Age Of Steam, it's really, really, really good—an underrated gem.

It's a light conquest/war/area-control game where you're building up troops and buying improvement tiles to better your position. You always have more things to do than actions to do them, and that makes for a tense and angst-filled game. But the genius part of the game is the turn order/alliance system: You can pay gold and maneuver things so that you're allied with the person who's your biggest threat. They CAN'T attack you for that entire war (there are three wars in the game). It's so cool.

And no one in my game group likes it.

It's in my Top 10 games, and I can't get anyone in my group to play it! We've played it 2 or 3 times in the last 10 years it's been out. But the last time was nearly 6 years ago, and i REALLY WANT TO PLAY. But for some reason, they don't dig it. Every month it's on my list, and every month people ignore it. I put it there mostly as a joke now, because people expect it to be on the list.