Board Games, Card Games, Miniature, Geek, Hobbygaming

After winning gaming’s biggest prize, the Spiel des Jahres, in 2022, Cascadia’s mix of intriguing strategy and simple gameplay has earned it a spot in the all-time hall of fame. Each turn, you pick from a random pairing of terrain hex and animal token, then add both to your growing wilderness. The Quacks of Quedlinburg is one of board-game enthusiast and Cartamundi tabletop games ambassador Sean Amdisen-Cooke’s “all-time favorite games” to play. “It’s a push-your-luck-style game where players draw blindly from their ingredient bags,” he says. Some ingredients will help you gain points and coins which you then spend on more resources. “But if you draw too many of the wrong ingredients, your pot will explode and you’ll have to make the hard choice between getting only victory points or coins,” which will put you behind your opponent, he explains.

Stockpile resources to score end-of-round points, and you’re even more likely to steal the win. Each player gets a clipboard, several wipe-clean drawing cards, a marker pen, and a prompt card. This prompt provides the object, person, action, or abstract concept that they have to draw (often ordinary, but occasionally NSFW, too). A rash of travel-themed games such as Wanderlust and Parks have popped up in recent years—perhaps driven by the pent-up frustrations of the pandemic years. Japan-themed games have also been popular, perhaps because the aesthetics of traditional Japanese culture fit well with the high-quality design of modern games.

Maybe Uncle Kevin gets too heated when he starts falling behind in points. While plenty of games have you go up against other players, there are a whole lot of incredible cooperative board games around now to choose from. And if you have a hard time getting people together, you can even find plenty of solo board games that don’t require anyone but yourself to have a good time.

Star Wars: Outer Rim (about $75 at the time of publication)

The Wizarding World from the Harry Potter books and films comes to the tabletop in style with Hogwarts Battle, a cooperative, easy-to-understand deck builder. Those who practice the Dark Arts are attempting to control some of the most famous locations from the series, including Diagon Alley, the Forbidden Forest, and the Chamber of Secrets. Players must work together to defeat these villains over the course of seven games.

Players must stack wooden telegraph poles on top of each other, simulating dense Japanese towns, with placement in different zones of the board determined by a dice throw. What makes it tricky is that the poles’ wires can’t touch, so the board becomes a tangled mess of stretched wire and underhanging connections. But what makes it extra tricky is that every so often they also must hang off a wire a comically heavy cat that can topple the entire setup if they’re not careful.

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This guide may be the absolute cream of the board game crop, but there’s a wide tabletop world out there, and we’re on a mission to profile the top-tier choices of every genre, scale, and type. Combat is made less random by a eurogame-inspired deck of cards that modify your chances of dealing damage. Completing Merlin’s Beard a dungeon is a careful dance of maintaining your dwindling hand size and hit points until the objective is complete. If you like social deduction games with more meat on their bones, we can’t recommend Blood on the Clocktower enough, based on our extensive experience (that’s Wargamer and Network N staff playing in the picture above). You lose some of the majesty of the real deal game, of course – miniatures are swapped for teeny colored cubes; many rules are slimmed down; and the story writing isn’t as inspired as the original.

Hidden roles and secret agendas take center stage on an old-fashioned steamship surrounded by Lovecraftian Deep Ones in Unfathomable, which borrows many of its mechanics from the classic Battlestar Galactica board game. When it’s your turn, you can move about the ship and perform the action on the location you pick. If you visit the captain’s quarters, you might be able to send another player to the on-board prison. Human players need to defeat strange monsters and protect the civilian population on board in order to win.

If you’re looking for a more entry-level strategy game, Ticket to Ride is an adventure-style game in which players attempt to cross the country and connect cities by building train routes. It is easy to pick up “but also offers a level of strategy and tactics just deep enough for competitive gamers to return to time and again,” says Ian Ross, who runs the popular Instagram page Board Games As Art. It’s played around the world in every country, and teaches kids advanced strategy and planning skills. Backgammon similarly teaches strategy, but focuses more on how best to use the rolls of the dice you’re given. Go, is an ancient game of strategy that gets more and more complex the better you get.

By marrying the sensibilities of Dungeons & Dragons with the mechanics of modern board games, Lords of Waterdeep made a smash hit to last down the ages. Players take the roles of power brokers in the Forgotten Realms’ biggest city, hiring adventurers to defeat perils threatening Waterdeep while building new facilities in the town. It’s these additions that take this unusually thematic worker placement game to the next level, with the new buildings entering play ensuring that new strategies are required each time. Throw in a modicum of minor “take that” cards to spice things up and you’ve got a brilliant game with very wide appeal. It’s hard to believe that the epic narrative of Tolkien’s magnum ops could be re-imagined as a multi-layered wargame and still retain that sense of storytelling wonder, yet that’s exactly what this superb asymmetric title achieves. Throw in an action-dice system that prevents scripted approaches to play and great narrative beats from each player’s deck of cards, and you’ve got a game that will satisfy fans of Tolkien, strategy games and war games in one package.

Should you fail, you’ll have to face off against this demon one last time. It feels very like Francis Ford Coppola’s 2024 Megalopolis, but unlike the Coppola film, this isn’t a giant mess. It’s a tightly designed Euro-style game that mixes auction mechanics and board control; players seek to outbid each other for key areas without exhausting their long-term resources. Kelp is a cleverly themed two-player game where each role is very different. One player takes on the role of the octopus, and the other the shark, and each is effectively playing by their own rules. “It uses such unique asymmetrical mechanics, with a unique hunt-and-chase theme,” says Ian Curtiss, a strategy consultant and board game designer.

Gorgeous art and components, combined with its surprisingly laid-back mechanics, make this a perfect game for thoughtful, quiet nights in. When you manage to pull off a combo and get all your eggs in a row, the strategy is immensely rewarding. And even if you missed out on drafting a crucial card, it’s hard to feel stressed when gathering food and discovering new birds. First released in 1995, designed by beloved German designer, the late Klaus Teuber, this medieval-themed game about settling a desert island has survived and thrived for decades because, at its heart, it’s just reliably good fun for so many people. Lord of the Rings-themed games are quite common, but this one ranks among the best. As fond as I am of War of the Ring, it’s a giant box and takes a full day to play; this one is a nicely compact box, and players can easily knock out a game in less than an hour.

You might be too tired from your day job as a waiter or massage therapist to have the energy to make it to that gig—or you might be struck by inspiration in the middle of a shift. The octopus’ position on the board is concealed, playing cards to bluff about their location, and sneaking around the board trying to grab its food. The shark, meanwhile, uses deduction, dice-based abilities and persistence to try to track the octopus down. The board is a beautiful depiction of an underwater landscape, with two finely crafted miniatures for each of the players, though the theme might be a bit bloody for sensitive children.