What are your favorite board games? Me and my friends love playing board games, but I get the feeling their tired of playing the same things. What do you guys usually play? My favorite board game of all time is HeroQuest. I never get tired of playing it. Also love Catan, Arkham Horror, Betrayal House on the Hill, Spyfall (great at parties)
I have very little experience with board games so I’m using this thread for ideas to try out. But I did play Betrayal and liked it so I’ll say that one is my favorite.
Monopoly and Monopoly Cheaters Edition, although I like the cheaters edition more.
Some of my favourites right now:
-Wingspan: 1-5 player game about birds from all over the world (with the European, Oceania and Asia expansions). Build up your board of birds and make future actions you take have more effects. There’s a solo mode and Asia expansion introduces a special 2 player and 6-7 player mode. As a birder myself, can’t recommend this game enough.
-Parks: Small but in depth 1-5 player game about exploring US national parks. You buy gear and set your hikers off on a trail that changes every round, to collect tokens and visit national parks. Games last up to an hour that feels like it flies by. Box design is the best I’ve seen, everything just fits together perfectly in a tiny box, making it much easier for travel.
-Terraforming Mars: Most complex game I own, for 1-5 players. Games can take 2-4 hours sometimes. You play as a corporation and compete with others to terraform mars the fastest. You raise the three global parameters (temperature, oxygen level and water) and increase your terraforming rating, all while managing your resources by playing various project cards. Has a challenging 1 player mode where you’re racing against the generation counter to terraform mars in under 14 generations. Expansions are a bit expensive but I can recommend Prelude and Hellas & Elysium, for extra cards that can be played at the start of game to kickstart your resource generation, and a double sided map you can use as a replacement for the base game board.
Other notable mentions are 7 Wonders, Tokaido, Mystic Vale and Ticket to Ride
Not sure if this counts as boardgame, but I’ve been enjoying Farkle a lot (a dice game) thanks to Kingdom Come Deliverance xD
I never really like this kind of stuff but Farkle is quite simple and fun!
Dune imperium is really fun - worker placement with some deckbuilding and bumping tracks (as the brothers murph says).
If you like campaign games you might enjoy something like Kingdom Death Monster - dark, boss battler/settlement builder. Definitely mature game though.
Marvel champions is a ton of fun but it can be very expensive if you want to keep buying more and more packs. Baiscally a deck bilding game similar to arkham horror LCG but for marvel and not a campaign unless you buy the campaign expansions.
I’m mostly into deck builders and I haven’t seen these mentioned before so I’ll drop two of my favourites Dune: Imperium and (TBOI:) Four Souls! Also an honorable mention to Dominion but I haven’t played that in a while.
I really like board games that don’t take that long to play. It’s a lot easier to rope your friends into a game that takes 30-40 minutes to play and is easy to learn rather than a game that takes 4+ hours.
Some that I’ve found
- Azul
- Sheriff of Nottingham
- Splendor
Azul is such a beautiful game too. That’s usually my intro for people new to board games.
We have a wider circle of friends who are boardgame enthusiasts, so we go through a rather lot of them. Some stick, some don’t. These we play regularly and have a lot of fun:
There are more that made an impression on me, I remember playing them a few times, but do not want to play them again (Do you know that feeling? :D ), eg. Eclipse (the galaxy-wide battle 4X preparation-takes-as-long-as-playing-and-playing-takes-a-whole-day strategy), Agricola, Mice and Mystics…
Brass Birmingham is a masterpiece. I absolutely love that game. It’s and absolutely heartbreak that my SO dislikes it.
Have you tried Lost Ruins of Arnak? It’s great!
There is a board game I played years ago at a comic shop, and I can never remember the name of it. I only played it once but it was super fun. Kind of like if Freelancer were a board game. You had a huge game board with a bunch of planets and you picked up missions. I dont remember what the win conditions were, but I remember I had a lot of fun with it.
That could have been:
• Xia, legends of a drift system
• Star Wars, outer rim
• Firefly
• Merchant of VenusThose are probably the most well-known games along that line 💁🏻♀️
Maybe it’s Xia or Merchant of Venus, those are activating something in my brain…
You had me at “Freelancer the board game”. I love that game, and what you’re describing sounds fun as hell
It was years ago, so my memory may be a bit foggy on it lol. I looked up the names someone else suggested and it was Xia: Legends of a Drift System. I remember it was a lot of fun, even if I was totally out of my depth the first time playing it
I vaguely remember totalbiscuit and the gang play some games that would fit the description. Maybe worth a shot digging through his old stuff
Yeah, I’ll have to go and check some of those out, thanks for the suggestion!
I realise this doesn’t really count (well, it does but you know), but chess. The rules are straightforward and it has infinite replayability. And you can play a game online any time you want in an instant.
Other boardgames I enjoy are Arkham Horror and Twilight Imperium, though I haven’t played either in a while.
Was into the tabletop simulator version of TI4 for a while. But even with automated set up and digital streamlining, the games are still 6-8 hours.
Love the game, but just don’t have time to play anymore.
Jeez, when you play a board game you really decided it’s an all day event. Both Arkham Horror and Twilight Imperium take forever every time I’ve played them
My single favourite board game is the Game of Thrones. No dice. No luck. Pure tactics and the occasional alliance.
I have apparently terrible luck so games that involve dice, especially d6’s do not interest me.
I have a huge shelf of shamepportunity (see what I did there? Now no one can correct me! 🤣) what I like vs what I get to play with my friends/SO vary greatly.
Some of my favorites
- Undaunted Normandy
- Trails (my SO and I play this one a lot at bars)
- Tak, a lovely abstract strategy game
- Spire’s End and Spire’s End Hildegard
- March of the Ants
- Cosmic Frog
I’m not sure what my favorite is. My family and friends and I love Pandemic, Catan, Ticket to Ride, Throw Throw Burrito, and the first Walking Dead board game, the name of which is escaping me currently.
Ticket to Ride is our go to.
For a game that’s not on your list, Unfathomable is one I’ve been playing a lot lately. It’s a hidden identity game where you’re on a ship and the ship’s crew and passengers are combating Lovecraftian horrors that keep climbing aboard from the depths while trying not to run out of food and fuel and sanity before you escape. You or one of your companions may turn out to be a cultist who is summoning the dark ones and attempting to sabotage the escape efforts.
I love the Betrayal games: Betrayal at House on the Hill (horror), Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate (fantasy), and Betrayal Legacy (legacy horror) for a campaign style version that is linked over multiple sessions.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with them, the players build out a map by exploring a building or city one tile at a time, collecting items and buffs along the way and triggering events. After a certain point a trigger is reached when the “haunt” stage begins. At that point, one player typically becomes a traitor with unique abilities or monsters to control and gets the traitor’s tome - a book explaining their abilities and win condition. The rest of the group gets a different book explaining what the group must do to survive and what interactions they can do to foil the traitor’s plan. There are a bunch of different haunt scenarios in the books and they are chosen based on the last tile revealed and card drawn, so you never know quite what you’ll be facing in the end.
