In this article we round up the 17 best board games available to humanity, together with vital statistics (time to play, number of players, our difficulty rating) and a link to buy. For the best bargains, read our roundup of the best board game deals. And if you’re on your lonesome, take a look at our guide to the best solo board games. We’ve also taken a look at the pros and cons of playing free online board games.
Expansions
Where relevant we’ve included our picks of the best expansion packs for each board game. Expansions are cheaper than full games and make great presents for loved ones obsessed with one game in particular. However, we don’t recommend that you buy an expansion until you’re sure you (or they) love the base game, have played it a lot and are reaching the limits of what it has to offer. A good expansion takes a great game and adds more depth, but no good game needs an expansion to ‘complete’ it; some expansions, in fact, will take a streamlined game and bog it down with extra rules. If the options below are out of your budget, here are some excellent budget board and card games.
The best board games
You start with five planets, 20 little spaceships and a weird alien power. The aim of the game is to get your spaceships, by persuasion or violence, on to five foreign planets. You’re dealt an initial hand of eight cards. Some of these will be Attacks with a number: secretly play a card, add the size of your army, and higher number wins the fight. But you also have Negotiates: if you both play these, you’ll be able to come up with a deal that’s favourable to both of you – unless one of you is lying and plays an Attack instead, and therefore wins automatically. The game comes down to a lovely blend of bluffing and hand management. You want to throw away bad cards when you know you can’t win, but if the other guy thinks you’re doing that, he might try to get away with a weaker card – in which case maybe you can win. And that’s before we even get to Reinforcements, and alliances, and the alien who wins if all his ships are destroyed… Best expansions: There are currently six expansions for Cosmic Encounter: in order of release, Incursion, Conflict, Alliance, Storm, Dominion and Eons. Cosmic with six players is really special, and for that reason we do recommend that you get one of the first three expansions, each of which provide an extra player colour as well as new alien types. Incursion is probably best because its reward deck balances the game nicely. • 3-5 players (more can be added via expansions) | Ages 12 and up | Takes 60-120 mins | Difficulty: Medium to hard There are multiple ways to die: you can run out of time; you can run out of disease counter cubes; you can trigger too many outbreaks. But there is only one way to win, and that’s to find a cure for all four diseases. You’re a team, so everyone wins, or nobody does; but either way it always seems to come down to the wire. One less enjoyable aspect of co-operative games is the way that sometimes an experienced player will take over the show and boss everyone around. Make sure that doesn’t happen! Your turn is just as important as everybody else’s – particularly because of those vital special powers – and while discussion and friendly advice are encouraged, only you can decide on what your character will do. Keep that in mind and you’ll have a blast. Best expansions: There’s three: On The Brink (which most notably adds the Bio Terrorist villain role), In The Lab and State Of Emergency. We’ve not played any of these so cannot comment further other than to note that for full enjoyment Lab requires Brink as well as the base game. There are also separate variant games such as the simpler dice game Pandemic: The Cure, and the expansive Pandemic Legacy, which is designed to be re-played, with the outcome of each game affecting the next. • 2-4 players | Ages 8 and up | Takes 45 mins | Difficulty: Medium For such a simple game, Carcassonne has a surprising depth to it: it’s all about knowing what tiles are left, and the probability of drawing what you need. There’s also a fair element of sussing out what your opponents are trying to do and how to prevent it, although Carcassonne is on the whole a pretty chilled game. Highly recommended. (There’s an iOS version that’s brilliant too, and although it’s expensive by App Store standards it’s still a cheaper way of seeing if this is the game for you.) Best expansions: Traders & Builders is the one to go for, in our opinion. The builder piece allows you to take double turns if you place it astutely, and the trading goods – which are awarded to people who complete cities, even if they don’t have any meeple there – encourage an interesting degree of semi-cooperation. Inns & Cathedrals is mostly quite good although we find the cathedral piece itself rather brutal; it can completely screw over someone’s city if placed at an opportune moment. The third expansion, Princess & Dragon, is a bit mad. Both the princess and dragon can dump meeple out of features, which places far greater importance on getting into a feature, scoring the points and getting out again. • 2-5 players | Ages 8 and up | Takes 30-45 mins | Difficulty: Easy No matter, because this evocative tile-laying number has more to offer than a mental massage. Tiles are dished out randomly on ‘factories’ in the centre, and you take it in turns to grab all of one colour from one factory, or from the discards, and organise them in lines on your board. Complete a line and you’ll earn some points; get stuck with too many leftovers and you’ll be penalised. It looks delightful and there is an immense tactile satisfaction from constructing neat coloured patterns and amassing points (something which accelerates, also satisfyingly, on later turns). But we also love the gentle but genuine strategic choices in the game, whether you want to finish lines as quickly as possible or focus more carefully on completing lines in the right places. And in either case you always need to take the human element into account. Best expansions: None are currently available. There is a variant, however, called Stained Glass of Sintra, which doesn’t require the original game and looks equally lovely. 2-4 players | Ages 8+ | Takes 30-45 minutes | Difficulty: Easy You’re buying stations, buying fuel (oil, coal, rubbish, nuclear or renewables) and building towns; the more towns you can power with the plants and fuel you’ve got, the more money you make. And next turn that cash goes back into buying more powerful plants, more fuel and more buildings. Power Grid has some really smart mechanisms, including a supply-and-demand system that makes prices go up if a resource is popular and some gentle rubber-banding that gives whoever’s losing first pick of the new plants and best pricing on the fuel. A key part of the game is knowing when to make your move and go for the victory, because taking the lead too soon is generally punished. Fun fact: I have played this game more than a dozen times and never won. Yet I still keep playing it. This is generally a good sign. Also, the original name of the game is Funkenschlag. Best expansions: We don’t feel this is a game that particularly calls for expansions, although your mileage may vary. The standard game comes with two maps: Germany and the US. Expansions will add additional countries to your options, and some have distinctly different flavours that affect the way games play out. Italy makes expansion more difficult, Benelux is good for beginners, France is nuclear-friendly and so on. Boardgamegeek has a great forum posting on the expansions. • 2-6 players | Ages 12 and up | Takes 120 mins | Difficulty: Hard Here’s what you get: 21 cards; a handful of counters; the rulebook; and a little red bag to store it all in. But from these ingredients an exceptionally compelling game has been cooked up – one which can be grasped by drunks in 10 minutes, but keeps revealing new depths and subtleties for months after. The aim of the game is to end the session with the highest surviving card (the highest of all is the princess, whom everyone is trying to woo) but there are numerous sneaky ways to knock out your opponents before it gets to that point. Brilliant stuff. Note that this is the 2019 update, which added five extra cards and expanded the player maximum to 6; the older one only comes with 16 cards and supports a maximum of 4. Check which you’re buying. Love Letter is also a staple of our best card games chart – take a look if you like the sound of it and want to try something similar. Best expansions: No expansions, but there are some alternative versions which you could buy instead. There’s Love Letter Premium, which adds a bunch of new cards (such as the Assassin, who has a value of 0 but knocks people out if they target you with the Guard). And there are loads of reskins of the game with nice new artwork, such as Lovecraft Letter. • 2-6 players | Ages 10 and up | Takes 20 mins | Difficulty: Easy It’s Yahtzee with monsters, essentially: you each control an oversized creature from a monster movie (King Kong, Godzilla, Robbie the Robot, a non-branded alien thing) and take it in turns to roll a fat handful of dice, marked with various monstery symbols instead of numbers, and attempt to cause mayhem. Roll a lot of claws and you can smash the heck out of the other monsters; roll hearts and you heal yourself; roll a bunch of lightning bolts and you accumulate the game’s currency – sort of monster power – and get to upgrade yourself by buying cards. It’s fast, it’s simple, and it’s surprisingly tense when the last couple of monsters get down to the last dregs of their health bars. After some deliberation we are recommending King of New York, but for a casual crowd the older, simpler and also excellent King of Tokyo may be a better pick. That one is really just about the dice and cards; New York adds more focus on moving around the city, and lets you smash up buildings and fight the army too. Best expansions: Keeping it simple is best here. If you just want more monster cards, however, consider buying the version of the game you didn’t get already – New York monsters can be used in Tokyo and vice versa. There are expansions for each game called Power Up, which add unique upgrades for each monster; but these incentivise people rolling for hearts and therefore make games longer and (in some players’ opinion) less exciting. • 2-6 players | Ages 10 and up | Takes 40 mins | Difficulty: Easy to medium (King of Tokyo would qualify as easy) You begin the game by drawing a few route cards – these are essentially your missions for the game. Each of these will name two (probably intimidatingly distant) cities that you need to connect, and a point value, based on its difficulty, that you’ll get for completing the mission. So you then spend the game trying desperately to connect Edinburgh to London, and London to Paris, and Paris to Brussels, and so on until you’ve got an uninterrupted railway line stretching across the continent. While the other players, trying to build their own overlapping routes, inevitably snatch the sections of track you most wanted and force you into an annoying detour through Rome. Incidentally, we are recommending Ticket To Ride Europe (which is a complete game in its own right, please note, rather than an add-on expansion) rather than plain Ticket To Ride; TTRE features a slightly updated and improved rule set. But if Europe isn’t available, or you just fancy a change, the original game is pretty fantastic too, as is the iOS port. Best expansions: Since this is a game that is both simple and long-lasting in appeal, it’s a prime candidate for expanding – adding just a touch more variety and complexity when you’re ready for it. Consider the 1912 expansion, which adds new destination tickets and map variations, plus warehouse and depot pieces. • 2-5 players | Ages 8 and up | Takes 30-60 mins | Difficulty: Easy The sun supplies a neat internal game clock (at the end of its third revolution you stop playing) and an ever-changing landscape – that prime real estate on the east side won’t look so appealing when everything is facing the other way. The most valuable area of all, in terms of points, is the centre, but this is obviously the hardest area from which to soak up the rays; it’s all about risk and reward. Photosynthesis is simple to pick up but it has more depth than you might expect: you can try to avoid other players entirely, abandoning the big-scoring regions, or focus on growing a small number of plants as tall as possible to block out the light for others. And the final kicker is that trees only score points when they die, which is slightly melancholy. Best expansions: None are currently available. There has been talk of releasing one that would make the board bigger, but we would resist this idea: tightness of space is the whole point. 2-4 players | Ages 10 and up | Takes 30-60 minutes | Difficulty: Easy to medium This horror-themed game sees each player step into the shoes of one of 12 characters exploring a sinister mansion. Room tiles are drawn at random to fill out the map across three floors, and range from the expected (dining room) to the more sinister (furnace, underground lake, pentagram chamber). As you enter each room you draw either an event, item, or omen card, each of which triggers some horrific scenario that usually requires a dice roll to determine if the effects are good or bad for you. The group of you work together to explore the house and evade traps at first, but each time someone draws an omen card it triggers a ‘haunt roll’, and the more omen cards are in play, the more likely this is to trigger the haunt: one of a series of twists to the story, drawn straight from classic horror books and films. These range from the angry undead to science experiments gone wrong, but almost all have one thing in common: one of the group is a traitor. They’re given separate rules and win conditions, and the game shifts gears to be one vs. many, with each side trying to both figure out what the other’s goal is and how to stop them. It’s great fun, and the niche horror references are always entertaining to try and spot, but the sheer level of randomness in house layout, cards, and haunts means that the end-game can occasionally be hopelessly unbalanced. That’s the price you pay for the otherwise welcome unpredictability. Best expansions: Right now there’s only one expansion for Betrayal: Widow’s Walk. This adds a selection of new cards and room tiles, including a new roof floor, but the main addition is 50 new haunts, written by a selection of writers with serious nerd cred. It’s an expansion that’s more about adding new content than it is about shifting the core game mechanics, so we wouldn’t recommend it unless you’ve already worked through most of the 50 haunts in the base game. There’s also Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate, a spin on the original set in the fantasy world of Dungeons & Dragons, which also boasts a few welcome quality of life improvements. This is a full separate game, though, rather than an add-on for the original. • 3-6 players | Ages 12 and up | Takes 60-120 mins | Difficulty: Medium On your turn you can either pick up some coloured jewel tokens, or spend them on the cards in the centre of the table – cards which represent jewel mines, and which will give you a discount on future purchases. In this way your spending power gradually increases and the more expensive cards (which give victory points as well as the discount) come within your reach. Get enough mines and you’ll earn ‘noble patronage’ cards and even more points. Resist the temptation to spend too long building your card-buying engine, which is satisfying but doesn’t yield points for a while. First to 15 points wins, and you’ll find that things accelerate rather thrillingly when someone gets close. • 2-4 players | Ages 10 and up | Takes 30 mins | Difficulty: Easy The game all takes place on a flying boat assembled from pre-cut cardboard. At the beginning of each round the players put their pieces inside, to indicate that they are on board. But as the vessel floats across a series of islands, the crew encounter increasingly dangerous hazards (selected randomly via dice) which must be defeated with cards by the captain (one of the players, who take turns). At each roll of the dice, the non-captain passengers must decide if they want to bail out at the current island, collecting a reward, or stay on board and potentially get a bigger reward on a later island – but risk failing the encounter, crashing, and getting no reward at all. It’s all about pushing your luck, and hand-management by proxy. Has the captain got the cards to beat two pirates and a lightning storm? And do you want to stick around for another island, knowing that it’ll be your turn next to be captain? Best expansions: A Little Help is fun, although it doesn’t change the game a huge amount. It adds a few extra power-ups, different rules for the various player characters, and the ability for non-captains to occasionally help with hazards. • 2-6 players | Ages 8 and up | Takes 30 mins | Difficulty: Easy On each turn you get to do two actions out of a possible five: expand the garden, dig an irrigation canal, move the gardener (who will grow bamboo wherever you put him), move the panda (who will eat bamboo wherever you put him) or choose a new mission. The missions are accomplished by performing the four other actions in particular ways, and earn you points. We’re not convinced there’s a huge amount of tactical depth here, nor has there been much fierceness of competition in the games we’ve played. But the corollary is that it’s incredibly friendly, as well as beautiful to look at. The components really are top-tier. Best expansions: There’s Chibis, which allows the panda to start a family if he ends the turn on the same square as a the new female panda (!) and adds some new land tiles and mission cards for added complexity. We’ve not tried it. 2-4 players | Ages 8+ | Takes 45 minutes | Difficulty: Easy The odd, asymmetric semi-cooperative structure of Scotland Yard is its first hook. The second is the clever way it hides information from most of the players. The detectives move their pieces across the board (a map of London) quite openly, paying for taxi, bus and Underground journeys from their limited budget; but Mr X moves about in secret, checking the board for the optimum route (wearing a cool visor to stop players from spotting where he’s looking) and noting down his position each turn on a pad. Scotland Yard is different every time but always tense. The moments when the net is closing in and escape seems impossible are exceptionally memorable. • 3-6 players | Ages 10 and up | Takes 45 mins | Difficulty: Medium Dominion is the defining example of that slightly different beast, the deck builder. Deck builders are great levellers, because everyone starts with the same (extremely basic) deck; you build the deck over the course of the game by playing cards that give you money, then spending that money on new cards (that may in turn give you more money, or have some other beneficial effect). But the cards on offer vary from game to game – being most commonly chosen by random at the beginning so nobody knows exactly what to expect, although sensible beginners’ setups are offered in the rulebook. Be warned that Dominion is sometimes described disparagingly as “multi-player solitaire”. A lot of the time each player is essentially doing their own thing, trying to build an efficient card engine for generating victory points (although there are a few cards that actively mess with other players and need to be countered). If you can live with that, you’ll have a great time with Dominion – and you don’t need to spend all your money on card booster packs, either, since everything you need is in the box. Best expansions: I haven’t played any of Dominion’s intimidating range of expansions, but experts say they improve the game a lot. If you’re getting seriously into Dominion, try this article for advice on the expansion to pick first. • 2-4 players | Ages 13 and up | Takes 30 mins | Difficulty: Medium Catan‘s board is made up of rearrangeable hexagons indicating various terrain types, each of which produce (on a certain roll of the two dice) a certain kind of resource. A forest tile with a 6 or an 8 (high-probability numbers on two dice) is likely to produce a lot of wood. A mountain tile with a 12 is likely to yield ore only very rarely. The aim of the game is to build roads and towns across the board, gain control of the most valuable hexes, and rack up victory points. Be warned that there’s quite a large random element – it can be annoying to control a valuable 6 or 8 hex then watch that number never get rolled – but there’s a huge satisfaction in gradually working towards whatever scheme you’ve come up with, whether that’s upgrading all your towns to cities, controlling key ports for superior trading, or systematically ruining your son-in-law’s day. Best expansions: Seafarers is excellent and simple, adding sea tiles – which you can expand across using ships instead of roads – and goldmine tiles, which produce whatever resource you like. Cities & Knights is more drastic, changing the entire tenor of the game and making it far more ruthless and complex, but we’re rather fond of it. Traders & Barbarians is fun but a bit of a hodgepodge. Steer clear of the 5-6 player expansion; it’s a pain because you’ll also have to buy the additional 5-6 player expansion that goes with Seafarers, Cities & Knights and so on, and the wait between turns gets too long. (And whatever you do, don’t improvise a 10-player game!) • 3-4 players (although there is a 5-6 player expansion) | Ages 10 and up | Takes 60–120 mins | Difficulty: Medium One of you controls a small group of human space marines exploring an abandoned space ship, who move slowly and excel at ranged combat; the other controls a limitless supply of speedy aliens – Genestealers – who haven’t got guns but will tear the marines to pieces if they can get close enough. And on each of the missions, you’ll each have to achieve one or more objectives in order to be declared the winner – kill something, get to a room, activate, collect or destroy an object or feature. Don’t die. Most of the mechanics will be familiar: each character has a number of action points each turn, which can be spent on moving, turning, shooting etc. But there are some wonderful touches. There’s Overwatch, a mode whereby a marine waits for the alien turn and shoots anything that moves – blasting away at the creature rushing towards him until it dies or his gun jams, the tension! And the Genestealer player moves not individual aliens but ‘blips’ on the marine player’s motion detector which may turn out to contain anywhere up to three creatures. Playing as the Genestealers tends to be a bit less engaging than playing as the marines: while he’s checking sight lines and planning formations, most of the time you’ll just be sprinting full-pelt at the nearest human and trying to bite his throat out for him. To compensate for this, the game’s makers encourage you to play each scenario twice, so you each get to play as both sides. Well worth it if you’ve got time. Sadly Games Workshop stopped selling the fourth edition of Space Hulk in 2014. Your best bet now would be to try eBay, where we’ve seen the game for around £100 and sometimes considerably less. • 2 players | Ages 12 and up | Takes 60 mins | Difficulty: Hard
