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)
My partner and I love playing Wingspan. A game about bird may not sound great but it’s full of strategy without being too hard to pick up. It’s competitive, but just total points at the end, you can’t screw each other up during play.
You can definitely screw people over via “hate drafting.” My group usually plays casually but sometimes we’ll agree beforehand to tryhard and then this happens somewhat often.
I came here to say Wingspan. I have gotten my friends and family to play it, and everyone likes it.
My second favorite game might be Scythe, another one of their games. They just make good stuff.
Ooh, we picked up the digital version of Scythe because it was a few dollars during a Steam sale, we’ve only played one game so far, but it almost immediately jumped onto our list of games we’re planning on buying.
Nice! It’s super good in real life. It feels like there’s so many things at the start since there are so many ways to win. But I really think the game is pretty smooth after a couple of turns. Every time I play it I have a good time — even if I lose.
I ended up buying the expansion that tells a story as you go. But unfortunately my friends and I haven’t had a good time to really play through it.
Wingspan is my favorite! I want to try the Asia expansion sometime soon, I really liked the Oceania one.
My current favs are Wingspan, Dune Imperium, and Deep Rock Galactic (both a great video game and board game!).
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!
Might be a slightly separate category, but I still think of it as a board game. I really like Call of Cthulhu. Tabletop RPG systems in general are typically good fun as long as you have a good group of people to share the time with, but mechanically I think CoC is particularly good. It is simple to learn and the mechanics really assist in the tense storytelling.
Tabletop rpgs are my passion. I devote a lot of time to it, and getting together with my friends to play is my favorite thing in the world. Currently dming Pathfinder Kingmaker.
I so agree with you! Been playing RPGs for decades now …!
I just started reading the pathfinder 2e core book. It’s really interesting compared against 5e. I’d like to convince my group to give it a try, but I’m running Deathwatch right now, then there’s 2 or 3 other campaigns lined up before the DM hat will get back around to me, so it might be a minute before I get around to actually playing it.
I had a chance to play a CoC one shot recently, it was really good!
Yeah, Call of Cthulu was my favorite out of most of the tabletop games. You need a good Storyteller, which I was lucky to have once.
I really love Spirit Island because i find the setting really nice. You are Spirits and need to destroy the invaders to your island. Another great part is that its a coop game and you can chose many different spirits with each different playstyle.
Ticket to Ride is our go to.
Not so much a traditional “board” game, but I’ve been a lifelong enjoyer of Munchkin! It’s a whimsical dnd-esque card game with (almost literally) hundreds of different themed versions, from Space to the Wild West to Cthulhu even.
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
It’s a card game rather than a board game (but still within the tabletop sphere so I think it still fits): I absolutely love Sentinels of the Multiverse. It’s by the same people who made Spirit Island, which I believe is more well-known. It’s a cooperative game where you play as superheroes working together to take down a villain. Aside from the game itself being a lot of fun, there’s a bunch of hidden story and lore within the card art, and the creators even have a podcast where they create stories and characters within the game’s world.
I love Sentinels of the Multiverse. Every player picks a different superhero with its own unique deck and powers, the villain is a separate deck, and there is an environment that adds a bit of chaos and having so many individual components you can swap out makes for a very high replayability. I love cooperative games, too, and this being cooperative is nice if you want to include someone who is less experienced in games because nobody is going to be out to exploit them. I’ve never been much of a superheroes fan, but the game plays so well. That’s one that has gotten played over and over in my house for many years at this point. It’s also available on Steam if you want to play with someone remotely, but I do prefer playing the physical version when possible.
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.
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.
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!
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
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 💁🏻♀️
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.
Me and friends play the early version of Betrayal at House on the Hill a lot (i think they released an updated version recently) and I also have Baldurs Gate since im a big fan of DnD and the Forgotten Realms setting and the Baldurs Gates games. However, we dont really play the Baldurs Gate version anymore, since it doesnt feel very balanced. The Warlock character, with the ability to attack with Sanity AND at range right from the start is always really OP and has won them the game multiple times. We’ve also had the traitor lose really fast AND really quickly.
The Warlock is pretty strong, I can understand that being frustrating at times. My group doesn’t take the game too seriously so it hasn’t been a problem for us having it be a bit unbalanced, but with people who are more strategy focused I can understand preferring the other games. I didn’t know there was an updated version of House in the Hill, I will have to read up on that!
Oh yeah we’re all Pathfinder players lol. Every board game and ttrpg becomes a puzzle that we have to solve with the resources available. So when the game isnt exactly balanced, its not as fun for us.
I really like Lords of Waterdeep and Xenoshyft:Onslaught.
I run a board game store so my list will be rather lengthy.
But short answer is Gaia Project… Until Age of Innovation drops
Hive is a modern, fun take on chess with a dynamic board. Its super fun and unlike chess its not figured out and people just don’t bother to throw a “book” at it. Every board game convention I try to find someone wirh Hive and it’d awesome!
