One of the best ways to bring people together for a good time is with a board game. Every year hundreds of new board games are released, making it difficult to track down the absolute best games to share with your friends.
Thankfully, we’re here to sift through all the board games available to track down the absolute best board games to bust out for whatever type of gathering you’re hosting. Whether you’re playing with a younger audience, by yourself, or are looking for something new, you’ve come to the right place.
Dominion
Design Your Own Deck Every Game
The deck-builder that kickstarted the genre, Dominion is a great entry point into board games while also having plenty of depth so no two games are the same. Get ready for some deceptively intense games as you compete to build the best kingdom around.
Inlay
Rule Booklet
It’s Friday night, you’re hosting games at your place, and you need a versatile game to start the night off with. What do you pick? There are plenty of options out there, but if you want one of the most entertaining deck-building games around, you can’t go wrong with Dominion.
First released in 2008 by Rio Grande Games, Dominion is an award-winning deck-building board game that more or less defined the genre. In Dominion, you take up the role of a monarch looking to develop the most valuable kingdom around, which is represented as your deck. Winning the game means having the most victory points, which can be earned by purchasing estates or other cards to boost your deck.
How Do You Win In Dominion?
Since Dominion is a deck-building game, you have to pay close attention to the cards in play and work to make sure the deck you build has enough synergy to help you win in the late game. On an average turn, you will be able to do a limited number of things per turn, unless you have cards that modify the number of things you can do. As you grow your deck with more cards, you’ll be able to do more things, making your turns much more rewarding and giving you all sorts of possibilities in each game.
While building a deck and learning all the ins and outs of the strategy behind it might take some getting used to, the rules themselves for Dominion are straightforward, making it a quick game to pick up for anyone who is just starting out.
I love going in and trashing all your low-value cards, both in victory points and cards that give only one gold, both thinning my deck out and increasing the average value of each card in my deck. Is that the best strategy? I don’t know! But it does let me have a ton of fun drawing good cards all the time.
The really nice thing about Dominion is how much support it has gotten over the years. Dominion has 15 expansions so far, with the most recent one, Plunder, having been released in 2022, and another expansion, Rising Run, expected later this year.
If you find yourself loving Dominion,I definitely recommend picking up the Renaissance and Adventures. Both expansions add a lot to the game by expanding on mechanics already there and adding new types of cards to your deck-building options that I really enjoy.
Dominion is intended for 3–4 players but can be upgraded to include 5–6 players if you pick up additional products or expansions. The rules change slightly and are covered in the rule book.
Shadows Over Camelot
Not All Knights Are Noble
When there’s evil afoot, it is up to the Knights of the Round Table to save the kingdom, but not all is as it seems. Among the noble knights sits a traitor, and it’s up to you to discover who is truly a Knight, and who wants the kingdom to fall to ruin.
168 Character, Event, and Loyalty cards
7 Coats of Arms
16 Swords of the Round Table
2 Rule Books
You are a Knight of the Round Table, serving as one of King Arthur’s noble vassals as you venture out into the world, performing quests to ensure the world remains safe. Rumors tell of a traitor among the Knights, and it’s up to you to save the kingdom or fall to the forces of evil.
Days of Wonder brought the forces of Camelot together back in 2005 and combined teamwork with elements of social deduction mechanics in a single board game. Each game has players venturing off on quests to keep the kingdom safe. Players will team up to complete different quests while trying to sniff out the traitor.
Missions can pass or fail, depending on who is sent out and what the results of each quest are. You win the game by completing quests with more successes than failures, while there are plenty of ways to lose the game, including all the knights being killed or failing to protect Camelot.
I’ve never considered myself particularly good at guessing who the traitor is in a game, but I’m pretty darn good at throwing enough confusion into the ranks to throw my opponents off if I’m the traitor which is an important element in these types of games.
It Only Takes One Traitor
The game begins with each player getting a random Knight assigned to them, each one with unique characteristics to help make the Knights feel mechanically unique. You are working with your fellow Knights to defeat the board itself, so you will need to be as open and communicative with all the players to get quests accomplished. However, since there is a traitor in the court, you never truly know who is on your side.
Turns are comprised of two phases, The Progression of Evil, where the player whose turn it is has to pick between three unfavorable choices to push the Court further into the hands of evil, and The Heroic Action phase, where you pick a new quest to venture on, heal yourself, or even accuse another player of being a traitor.
Shadows over Camelot can be a bit complicated to start off with since there are a fair number of moving parts to be aware of, but once you start playing, it is easy to get going. That said, Shadows over Camelot isn’t an easy game, and the odds are pretty good that the traitor is going to win fairly often.
If you don’t mind a challenge and want to turn your friends into enemies, it’s a great game to pick up. If I recall correctly, of the games that I was a Knight of recently, I only won one or two, with the traitor taking the game every other time. Each game was a blast through so I was never discouraged from facing down bad odds.
With fewer players, the game becomes much more difficult, but one of the nice things about Shadows over Camelot is that it has special rules to let players jump right in mid-game!
1 Wooden Robber Pawn
1 Rulebook
When you think of a family game you might expect something cutesy or easy to pick up for younger players but pretty boring for older audiences. That’s where you’d be wrong. Catan is a fantastic game for players of all ages, with the game designed to be played with kids as young as ten.
Settlers of Catan, often called just Catan, comes from Catan Studios and designer Klaus Teuber. The board game has been around for almost thirty years now, having first broken into the board gaming scene back in 1995. There arefour expansions that you can pick upthat will expand your Catan experience, smaller addons, and a ton of different variants out there that have different themes. The base game has players exploring an uninhabited island to collect resources, trade with other players, and try to expand their settlements as much as possible.
There’s A Reason Why This Game Is Recommended Everywhere
Each game starts on a randomly laid out island made up of hexagonal tiles, each one depicting a different terrain ranging from forests to mountains to deserts, each one producing a different material, or nothing at all. Each tile then has a number token randomly placed on it, ranging from 2 to 12. On your turn, you start by rolling two dice. All players who have a settlement or city on a tile that has the rolled number on it claim an associated resource.
It takes a fair amount of mental work whenever I attempt to place my settlements on tiles that give the most resources, but once that’s done I have plenty of time to plan out roads and other cities. I always make sure to keep track of other player’s cards to some degree too, since trading is such a crucial element of the game that often goes underutilized.
You can take those resources and attempt to trade them with others or you can build new settlements and roads, or even purchase special cards to help you get ahead of your opponents. Turns are quick and snappy since everyone has a chance to get new resources every turn, meaning there’s little time for players’ attention to waiver.
Once someone hits 10 victory points the game ends! Victory points are calculated based on a few different conditions, but having the longest road or the most settlements is a great way to take the lead in the game.
Catan is a fantastic family game thanks to its relatively easy rules, but make sure to have some patience with younger players!
Frosthaven
A Year’s Worth Of Fun
Eager for an adventure that will take literal months to complete? Frosthaven is an intimidating board game, with thousands of pieces to keep track of and a world so deep you can get lost in it. Dungeon-crawling adventures have never been so deep.
32 Boss Stat cards
17 Character Initiative Order Tokens
17 Character Sheets
Frosthaven is not for the faint of heart. I am used to big board games and even larger role-playing adventures, and I was nowhere near ready for this game.
Frosthaven is a dungeon-crawling adventure board game at heart, with so many pieces that it tips the scale at an absolutely massive 34.5 pounds, making it one of the biggest board games around. There are multiple rule books, hundreds of pieces to punch out, storage boxes included to keep everything in place, and more than a thousand cards to keep track of. Much of my first dive into the game was spent punching out all the individual pieces from their sprues and unwrapping cards from their cellophane.
Built from the Gloomhaven system from Cephalofair Games, veteran players will feel very familiar with stepping into the world of Frosthaven. Designed to be played with two to four players, you create a character from a set of classes, each one with a special deck of cards and unique abilities associated with them.
I picked the Blinkblade character first, thinking I was ready for a challenge since it’s considered one of the more difficult characters to play, and it was rough. It took me a few scenarios to even begin to grasp all the ins and outs of the character, but based on what my playgroup described, all characters have their quirks and challenges.
How Deep Does Frosthaven Go?
As you play more games, the world of Frosthaven will develop as well. The titular Frosthaven is an outpost far into the icy wasteland to the north, though it doesn’t stay that way for long. You play as a mercenary who comes to the outpost to keep the small city safe from various threats and, as you do, you get to expand Frosthaven’s own character sheet. Thankfully, Frosthaven has a companion app that shoulders a hefty amount of work in terms of tracking progress and creating NPCs to interact with.
Completing Frosthaven isn’t as easy as other games on this list. Individual scenarios might only take a few hours, but with 138 different scenarios, it can easily take more than a year to actually accomplish everything the game has to offer. Outside the main scenarios, there are also new types of sidequests, items to craft, and so much more. If you have a committed friends group and don’t mind dedicating hundreds of hours to a single game, Frosthaven might just be the adventure of a lifetime.
Two important things to keep in mind about Frosthaven. If you’re having trouble getting friends together to play, there is a solo mode with Frosthaven, though the difficulty of certain scenarios can be overwhelming. More importantly, Frosthaven is intended to be a legacy game, meaning you’re only meant to play it once and then buy a brand-new one to play. There are ways around this limitation, of course, but then again, it’ll take you so long to complete Frosthaven that it might not make much of a difference.
Cartographers
Draw Your Own Game
The world is open to you, all you have to do is record it. Cartographers lets you design your own kingdom based on cards revealed on the board. As you keep exploring, you’ll have more complicated maps to build around.
4 Edict Cards
4 Pencils
Exploring the long-lost lands of a once greater kingdom is the premise of Cartographers from Thunderworks Games. Through this unique style of board game, you’ll have to draw your own map out on a special sheet, exploring various terrains and trying to earn more points than your opponents.
Described as a flip and draw game, Cartographers has you drawing a map of the land laid out on the board before you. Each card has various shapes, patterns, designs, and terrain to keep track of. As the game progresses through the different seasons, different cards can be scored, so keep that in mind as you play. Map sheets are double-sided too, with the back side being more difficult to draw around.
How Does A Solo Game Run?
Each season will care about specific cards, broken into sections A through D. In Spring, only cards from sections A and B will be scored, and this will change each season. You can draw the tiles in any way you like on the map, so you can rotate and turn them to better fit with what you have already drawn. I ended up grabbing some colored pencils on other sessions since different tiles have matching colors, like forests being green and monsters being purple. Just verify you commit to your placements cause trying to erase colored pencil doesn’t go so well.
There aren’t many pieces to keep track of in Cartographers, and one of the key components is a pencil, since that’s how you’re going to be drawing your map. As you explore more of the land, you can encounter ambush cards, enemies that can be found across the land, that will disrupt your map, and potential plans you might have on how you want to lay out your map.
While it might be a somewhat simple game at first, I found a lovely amount of depth with Cartographers. I threw on a podcast to listen to on one play-through, and some fantasy adventuring music on another to set the mood.
While Cartographers makes for a fantastic solo game, you can play it with up to 100 other players too!
25+ Plastic Seastones
25+ Plastic Mushrooms
Thefirst standalone expansion from the lovely Everdell game, you explore the rugged lands to the north of Everdell Valley, known as Farshore. From Starling Games comes this surprisingly complex game about sending your little critters to gather resources to build your seaside city to be more prosperous than your opponents.
At the start of the game, you get two workers, with your choice of little beavers, crabs, ducks, and puffins, and a handful of cards. On your turn, you can do one of three things: place one of your little critters somewhere, play a card, or prepare for the next season. Personally, the little puffins are my favorite character to play, the little pieces are super cute and really look like the critters.
One Of My Favorite Game Aestheics
Things start to heat up as more turns go by. Each location on the island can only hold one critter at a time, so it can get a bit heated as competition for resources gets tighter. Your city only has enough space to play 15 cards, so you need to plan your plays out ahead of time and watch your resources carefully otherwise you could end up with a city without much synergy.
I definitely messed up a few games early on by over-committing to my city with cards that didn’t do much for me later in the game so don’t be discouraged if your city isn’t shaping up the way you want. you’re able to always learn from your mistakes and try something different next time.
One of the more interesting elements of Farshore is that one of the options you may pick on your turn, preparing for the next season, effectively takes you out of any further moves for your current season, letting your opponents continue to perform actions until they all choose to prepare as well. Doing so has some strategic advantages, but can put you behind at times as well.
Everdell is so charming that you can fall in love with it on aesthetics alone. All the little critters featured on cards in the game have little outfits and jobs, making them the cutest little things.
If you’ve already played the original Everdell game you might not notice many differences between it and Farshore. That said, the environment and aesthetics alone are still very worth picking up.
Disney Villainous
Feels Good To Be Evil
Disney Villainous takes some of the most vile characters in animated history and lets you fulfill their evil desires. Each character has their own agenda to fulfill, letting you work towards your unique goals while disrupting your opponents at the same time.
Some of the best parts of Disney animated films are the villains and Ravensburger’s Disney Villainous lets you step into those character’s shoes and complete their villainous scheme first. Villainous gives you a choice of picking between Captain Hook, Maleficent, Prince John, Ursula, and the Queen of Hearts.
The mechanics of Disney Villainous are quick and relatively easy to pick up, though the number of icons and rules associated with them can be a little difficult to follow at times. Each character has a board associated with them, with four locations and a specific objective they need to reach.
Locations will come with icons letting you do only those actions. Some might let you gain Power Tokens, resources you can spend to play cards or activate abilities, use Fate cards to trip up your opponents or discard cards from your hand to draw new ones. I found out pretty quickly how important Power Tokens are, especially while playing as Prince John. His objective is to gain 20 Power Tokens, and having to spend your win condition to play cards put me in a unique problem that the other players in my game didn’t have.
For the most part, you only really need to worry about your own board and game plan, which can make it feel a bit asymmetrical since each Disney Villain has their own objectives they need to meet. You can mess with your opponents by playing Fate cards to disrupt them, but if you’re not paying close attention to your opponent’s board and objective, wins can sneak up on you.
There are plenty of expansions for Disney Villainous to pick up, including someMarvel and Star Wars expansions!
