Any of the four Azul games. They are all loosely based on each other and the rules between them have similarities even though all four are a completely different experience. They fit that great middle ground of being simple to play but have strategic elements for those that want to be competitive.
I didn't know there were 3 more Azules! Which would you recommend getting after the original? Wikipedia mentions Stained Glass of Sintra, Summer Pavilion and Queen's Garden.
In my opinion the rules increase in complexity in order of release, with Queen's Garden being by far the most complex. Depending on how much complexity you like, it's a linear scale in my opinion. All four are fun and they are soon to release a special edition of the first game that is chocolate themed.
It's extremely well-balanced, automatically penalizing or rewarding players based on their ranking as of the previous turn. That prevents players from falling too far behind, and also adds an interesting timing dynamic to the strategy.
Agree. But it doesn't reward bad players (e.g. over-bidding centrals, or not paying attention to the map expansion costs), just don't destroy them in the first rounds so they feel they are dragging the remaining game. Everybody feels the illusion they can win until the last couple of rounds, but only if you played well you win. Only after you lose you rethink your mistakes and how to avoid then in the next game, which makes you want "revenge" instead of hating the game.
This game ruined Catan for me. No more sitting waiting for dice to roll in your favor or getting blocked by the robber. All information is public, there is no randomness, and you have to figure out how best to spend resources to maximize victory points while no falling behind city building. Serious, Catan sucks in comparison.
Not the most in-depth game, but rounds are quick and it requires keeping a lot of state in your head to solve the puzzle in front of you. Also very fun to add in house rules to how pieces interact with each other (eg, the black piece is magnetic and drags others around) to make the puzzles more complex.
I've played Terra Mystica and like it, but it doesn't have what makes me like Catan—interdependence. In Catan, especially in the early game, you can't generate all of the resources you need, so you have to trade with each other to win. Terra Mystica didn't have any of that; your relationship with the other players is purely adversarial.
- Code names. It appeals to a wide crowd because you can approach it as creative fun, or a puzzle to be solved. And it leads you to figure out how the other players think, which is a fun way to get to know someone.
If you like Codenames, be sure to check out Decrypto; it has more of a focus on trying to figure out what the other team is saying, while they try not to give too much away.
I generally like party games over complex, rules-heavy or strategy-rich games and I hate time-pressure games. I play games to socialize, not for the games.
So in all honestly, Trivial Pursuit and variations, followed by whatever casual/party-style game is on offer, like Superfight or Cards Against Humanity.
I like the Unlock! series of "Escape Room" style puzzle games: <https://www.spacecowboys.fr/unlock-english>. They're compact and a lot of fun to work together on, but not much replayabality.
My favorite board game is Gloomhaven. It's a cooperative dungeon crawler with a "campaign" of sorts. There's also a slimmer version of it called Gloomhaven: Jaws of The Lion that is less expansive and expansive, but is a great introduction to the game and feeds into the main product. It's also fun in its own right.
Not strictly a board game, but very board game adjacent, I have recently been playing a lot of Magic The Gathering and having a lot of fun with it. I have had bouts of playing it over the years, essentially one a decade since I was born, and it feels as good as ever.
I didn't find it as bad as I think I would have expected had I played the digital version first. The best part about playing with physical components is that if you get some minor interaction incorrect you don't know you got it wrong and you just keep playing and are not any worse off for it.
You can retcon silly mistakes as well, which is nice if you're like me and are in it for the fun of playing + hanging with friends instead of the fun of "besting" a specific set of rules an interactions.
It wasn’t complex so much as a slog to me. I had to give up eventually. It was just so tedious to set up each map. God forbid you don’t win the map. The actual gameplay was good.
I enjoyed Gloomhaven initially, but I found myself losing interest because it's almost exclusively combat oriented. I wish it had more roleplay mechanics, and interesting choices and story developments more often than every few hours.
Evolution: Climate, a board game about being small furry/scaly creatures at the dawn of time. It uses a fun system of cards with abilities (defenses against carnivores, being able to survive too cold/too hot weather, being able to eat more food when it's available or survive famine) which can synergise very well, and with luck of the draw and a bit of thought you can make a small ecosystem of creatures which all benefit from each others' actions.
Well, I stopped playing when I could't find players: I found myself in a middle ground where playing with noobs was extremely boring, and playing with good/semipro players was only a matter on how many movements would I last before the inevitable annihilation, or just falling in an opening trick they played without thinking.
Love letter: 5 min game where you try to stand as last one. Every card has its unique powers. Princess rocks!
Exploding kittens: Its most backed kickstarter project( as they claim). You should have imploding, streaking and barking extensions, its where fun begins.
Cash & guns : Point prop guns to each other and win the most cash as a mafia.
Magic maze: No talking in the game. You must communicate with the pawn by hitting it on desk.
Pandemic: One of hardest games.
Epic spell wars: tongue twister game with combat fun!
Captain Sonar! It’s a 4v4 game reminiscent of battleship but you can move around and it’s played in real time. You can make moves as often as you want but do so by announcing them. The opposing team has a person whose sole job is to listen and use your revealed moves to deduce your location. Hectic as all hell.
Other than that Twilight Struggle for 1:1. Hopeful that ISS Vanguard will prove to be amazing.
I find it works fine with 6 and 4. You just need to modify the rules so that the captain can’t rapidly make moves on their own. Needing a second person to affirm their decision is critical. Otherwise they’ll inevitably focus on one task too much.
The funny thing is that going into a game where someone absolutely hates me (confined to the game), it was easy to get others to see them as being weak. The more people who hated me in Diplomacy, the easier the game became.
I have a real soft spot for the flavour of the base game, Betrayal At The House On The Hill, even though I recognize it has flawed mechanics (some haunts can be absolute washes - depending on the configuration of the board at the time the haunt is triggered, it might be utterly unwinnable for one side or the other). Betrayal Legacy adds a compelling story throughline to repeated plays of the game, and some minor legacy mechanics (far less than, say, Pandemic Legacy). And, unlike many Legacy games, the "finished" board is still replayable!
I'm surprised not to see Twilight Imperium mentioned in here. It feels like a mash-up of three separate games with all the options and lines of play available, and somehow still manages to remain cohesive and not-overwhelming (the decision trees are broad, but you don't have to plan too deeply, so they can be evaluated quickly).
EDIT: each _individual_ decision in Twilight Imperium is not overwhelming; but a regular game will take 6-8 hours and if you are playing with expansions you probably need to schedule a whole weekend and leave the board set up overnight - so an overall game could well be called overwhelming, even if any individual portion of it isn't.
Taking a different tack, Dixit is a creative game that can highlight some interesting commonalities (or differences!) in how players interpret artwork.
I just wish there were a set of scenarios included that worked for two players: some vs-environment scenarios, some vs-each-other scenarios, and some where it's not immediately disclosed whether you're competing or cooperating.
Twilight Imperium is cool but I would be a bit reserved about "not-overwhelming" since you can't even play it in an evening and need to arrange a whole day for it due to 6-8 hours it takes to play.
Betrayal is a really great game. You have so little agency but it’s still fun to go through the motions of the early game. The late game is total bullshit but that’s all part of it. Kind of like Mario party.
Agricola got me into board games years ago, and it's always been a joy to go back to it. Uwe Rosenberg's games all have a similar vibe that just kinda works for my brain.
If you like Agricola (as do I), you may also like Caylus. It's a perfect information game with no randomness, and it's also the only board game that has ever truly made me feel like I am incapable of planning out even a single turn.
There's no board, but I find that Bananagrams has the fun parts of Scrabble with a faster pace (no waiting for your little brother to figure out his optimal word).
Stretching even further, I love cribbage (hey, there's a board involved!). Of all the card games I've played, I find it's the most compelling combination of chance & skill. Lots of room to apply strategy once you've learned the basic rules.
If you play the "heavyweight" games listed in other comments, there's generally also a need for "filler" board games that are much shorter and useful when someone has yet to arrive or it's getting too late for another full longer game.
– Back an age ago when I was a student with infinite time, Diplomacy (not any more though, it's not as if whole days are free to give up to a single round of a board game): https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/483/diplomacy
Inis - Clever Celtic-themed area control game, with tight drafting of cards for actions, but the ability to gain some crazy special one-time actions unique from anyone else as well. Beautiful artwork on the cards as well.
Spirit Island - Clever cooperative game about building up spirits to protect native tribes and expel colonist invaders. Tons of variety, soloable.
Troyes - Love the puzzle of using dice to take actions, and you're not limited to your own dice, because you can buy the dice that other players drew (and pay them so they can buy dice off you in later rounds). There's no time wasted with negotiation either, you can buy them before they've gotten a chance to spend them. Lots of euro goodness surrounding that central mechanism as well.
Arkham Horror The Card Game - Story based campaigns where it's okay to lose a mission, the story will accomodate for it. Each campaign is very different from the others. Also great solo.
Bohnanza - My favorite light card and negotiation game
Kahuna - Super tight 2 player area control where you can build up conditions to start a cascade of destruction to go from losing big to winning big.
YINSH - favorite 2 player abstract, where you use rings to place tokens, jump other tokens to flip them (like Othello), and once you get a 5 in a row, you remove one of your rings, which makes you weaker but is also how you win the game.
Cribbage - 2 player. For such an old game, it's got a surprisingly modern point salad combo feel to it. Only annoying bit is how often you have to reshuffle, which isn't a problem if you play some of the excellent apps available.
Can't Stop - My go-to push your luck game. I enjoy rolling the four dice and making a decision of how to combine them into two pairs for numbers, advancing down those tracks, and deciding how long I think I can stay in without busting. It's possible to win the game in one turn if you get lucky enough, but odds are you will bust if you keep going too far, so at what point do you lock it in?
> Only annoying bit is how often you have to reshuffle, which isn't a problem if you play some of the excellent apps available.
If you spend an hour learning how to shuffle properly, the reshuffling becomes just another enjoyable part of the process! edit: not implying that you, personally, shuffle badly now, just that I find the act of shuffling pleasing in its own right
But speaking of cribbage "apps", the bsdgames package on Linux distros will generally include a pretty good command-line cribbage implementation.
I get paranoid about bending my cards, so I tend to shuffle in a less swift way to avoid bending them (I don't care as much about it for traditional playing cards but kind of a habit from my hobby board games where everything is a lot more expensive to replace and often out of print).
Command-line Cribbage is interesting, might check that out sometime.
I'm partial to the Cribbage Classic iOS/Android app, as it can analyze your decisions if you enable it, and let you know how optimal your choices are and even can provide a full ranked list of each 4-card hand you can make out of the 6 cards, with minimum possible score and average score.
It can also remind you when you're about to miss a scoring opportunity (like you place a card down to get to 15 and score 2 points, but it goes "yo dummy, you've got a card that can make that a run and score 3 points, you sure you want to do that?). I don't really need that now, but when I was learning it was useful to enable.
I think it helped me get better at the game a lot faster by seeing "Oh damn, my choice is like the fifth best? What's the best one....oh, okay, yeah that makes sense" Although sometimes it's like "Hey, that hand is only going to score on average 6.16 points. You should pick this hand which will score on average 6.18 points!"
Samurai Swords (aka Shogun) by Milton Bradley. It's a Risk like game, but way better balanced, where troop strength is limited to territory held, units are bought (you have cheap, but weak units, or strong, but expensive units) and turn order is randomized each round (although one can bid for turn placement). And there are two variations, the short game (first one to 35 territories wins) or the long game (first to hold 35 territories through a complete round wins) which can change the strategies used in the end-game.
My wife and I have gotten a lot of mileage out of playing these 1v1 games:
- Twilight Struggle
- Hive
- Patchwork
Choosing one really depends on mood. Twilight Struggle is the kind of game you have to buckle up and commit to playing for a while, but it's worth it. Hive and Patchwork are more bite-sized - both have enough complexity to be interesting, but with a much lower time commitment. You also have to refer to the rulebook less often with those two games. :)
Century - Golem edition: grab gems, grab cards, use cards to combine gems into other gems, use gems to buy points or cards.
Azul, as others pointed out.
A lesser known game:
- Titans Tactics: a game without randomness, very deep and intense 1v1 combat
An expensive game that is very immersive:
- Nemesis (all kickstarter expansions): a game set in something similar to the alien universe. Rules are meant to be very immersive, so for example an alien doesn't have hp in the traditional sense, they change hp on every hit, to simulate the fact that little is known about their anatomy.
Finally a master piece that feels like clockwork:
- Vinhos: wineries and wine making, competitive
I stopped playing coop games because I turned into an alpha player and hated myself in the process.
Sadly I don't play anything anymore, my kids are too young and will destroy my precious games.
We do play a board game called Catapult Castle that's intended for kids but fun for adults too
I enjoy crunchier board games, but the fun from games usually comes from playing them with others and most of the people I know don't enjoy games that take a non-negligible time to set up and explain the rules.
If you are looking for tons of board game reviews, https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/ and their youtube channel do a great job IMO of covering a wide range of game types.
My friends and I have moved away from SoC because the haggling that arises takes forever. Ticket to Ride scratches a similar itch with planning and competing over resources (train lines, cards) but gives each player a single action per turn so it moves much quicker.
Nothing beats chess for me though because of the infinite replay value and strategy depth.
Spirit Island; an asymmetric co-op game that the thematic opposite of Settlers of Catan; you play the native spirits of an island just starting to get colonized, trying to kill and scare off the colonizers before they get a fully develop the island.
Blood on the Clocktower. It's a recently released social deduction game (similar to Avalon and Werewolf) that has nearly unlimited setup combinations and presents a different puzzle every game. Players are allowed to continue playing until the end of the game, even after being "voted out," and every player is given some measure of agency via unique character roles.
My favourite are games I can play with my family: Castles of Mad King Ludwig, Tiny Towns, Santorini, Sushi Go, Potion Explosion, Forbidden Desert. But I'd love to have a friend to play Feudum.
Avalon is an amazing board game. It's like a version of Mafia that involves a lot more deduction, and players get to stay in the game until the very end.
Mine is Arkham Horror LCG, one of the best coop games ever made. The complexity of the game is astonishing and the replayability is incredible. There are so many characters to play, builds to create, scenarios and variants. I could probably play this game for ten years and not be done yet!
Was really surprised I had to scroll down so far to see Carcassone mentioned.
Some of the things I love about it include pretty much guaranteed gameplay time: amenable to beginners and experts; easy to explain; multiple strategies available; good blend of luck and strategy; interesting expansions; and more that will likely think of later.
Mom was in her 80s when I introduced her to Carcassone and she got good quick.
Leaving it with my ex was one of my few regrets about the divorce. :-)
Space Alert. The time limit makes it extremely hectic. Most other games, you can think rounds ahead, but Space Alert throws that out the window. There's no "think for 5 minutes per move". It's also co-op, which I enjoy more and more as time goes on.
I have played really many boardgames but I think Isle of Skye is the game that is probably the one I would choose as my favorite one. It has a relatively simple auctioning mechanic and the point system makes it different every time.
I haven’t seen 7 Wonders listed yet. It’s fairly easy to get started but great in that you have to alter your strategy based on what board you get dealt and what your neighbor players are doing.
Because I haven't seen it mentioned and I think it is a very well-executed game: Pan-Am is quite fun and the event deck gives it a good deal of replayability.
On the other hand when I tell to asian people that I play mahjong some of them are hmm looking me at like some lunatic because they instantly think about gambling. Like "hey that's a gambler's game you shouldn't play that" etc. But I never did purely picked up as a board game and I love it.
Secret Hitler. Kind of like a formalized game of mafia
Everyone is secretly assigned a faction: liberals or fascists and one person is hitler. Liberals have to work together to try and find out who the fascists are and win if they vote out hitler.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azul_(board_game)