The games I have never played by and large are… I don’t know how to describe this well without it coming across as unintentionally insulting… “classics”?
Like, until last year I had never played Crokinole. I still haven’t played Sequence or Five Crowns or Qwirkle… Rack-o… Twister… Karma… Sleeping Queens, Rat-a-tat Cat, Slamwich…
At work I usually describe the genre as “cottage games” because every year starting around May we have a steady stream of silver-haired folks who buy them 3-4 at a time. “Oh, we taught it to our friends and they all loved it so now I have to give them a copy for their cottage and we need a copy for our cottage…”
I’ve tried some of the games from the list (Rummikub I’ve played, despite my mother-in-law insisting it is better in the original German every time we played). The best I can say about them is that they’re totally mindless… like, you can take your turn, wander away from the table for 20 minutes, come back, and you’ll have missed nothing and be able to take your next turn without any negative repercussions.
I think there are… 13 games in the top 100 I haven’t played? And I have almost no self-directed interest in playing them (like, if somebody invited me to a game of Mombasa I wouldn’t say no, but I’m not going to seek that game out on my own). That sounds like a brag, but again, I don’t mean it that way. I started played tabletop games in '95 and I’ve been pretty consistent throughout my life from then until now. I’ve played a tonne of duds (including a few on the Top 100… it always stuns me that anyone likes Brass: Lancashire), and I don’t think I am a “better” gamer than anyone who has played exactly zero games from the list (I might not ask them for recommendations, but I don’t think that makes me a “real” gamer or any nonsense like that).
And it sure as heckfire doesn’t make me more likely to win!
I don’t have “Grail Games” any more (I had 2… Forbidden Stars which I have and love, and Game of Thrones which I spent way too much on tracking down about two weeks before 2nd edition released). I still pick up a few too many games every month (about… 3? Maybe 4?), and my collection sags with games I haven’t played in years but don’t want to get rid of because I really want to play them.
I dunno. I think I miss isn’t games that I “should” play (like… gosh… Return to the Dark Tower? Apparently it’s very good?), but people to play them with and the time to do so. I’ve never had enough time, and I don’t make friends easily (some serious self-worth issues going on there, it’s a thing I’m working on).
Anyway. Now I’m just procrastinating from doing my coarse work for this week (Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”, I think, which apparently has some “spicy language of its time” in it).
so is itself pretty old. But I think people are still adding to it. I‘d start looking from the end.