Talk to two different board game fans, and you’ll likely get two completely different all-time top-10 lists to pick through. But talk to enough gamers, and you’ll find patterns start to emerge. Some of the common games will be all-time classic board games. Others will be fondly remembered older games that topped the market in their respective eras. And of course you’ll get a sprinkling of recent titles that are soaking up all the limelight at the moment.
All of those categories can rightly be called the best of all time. So we’ve included all of them in our list below, from a genre-defining title that dates back to 1977 to some of the biggest, boldest titles of the last couple of years. Every one a bona fide classic in its own way.
TLDR: The Best Board Games to Play Now
- Ark Nova
- Cosmic Encounter
- Brass: Birmingham
- Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion | Frosthaven
- Pandemic Legacy Season 1 Red Version | Blue Version
- Twilight Struggle
- Agricola
- The Crew: Mission Deep Sea
- Lords of Waterdeep
- Ticket to Ride
- Concordia
- Codenames
- The Castles of Burgundy
- Wingspan
Don't have time to scroll? Here are all the games you'll find below.
Ark Nova
Ever since Wingspan - another entry on this list - designers have realised the value of giving heavyweight strategy games widely appealing themes. The latest and greatest example is Ark Nova, in which players design and run a modern, environmentally-minded zoo. Doing so involves navigating a smorgasbord of the most popular and interesting mechanics of recent years, from action cards that vary in power and timing depending on how you arrange them to spatial and economic elements as you build and populate your wildlife park to attract visitors and plough the cash back into the project. The combination of winning theme, deep strategy and a smidgen of luck has won this legions of fans and acres of acclaim since its 2021 release.
Cosmic Encounter
Lots of games that revolve around grabbing territory tend to involve the kind of tentative alliances and festering enmities that mimic real-world diplomacy. Back in 1977, the designers of Cosmic Encounter had a brainwave: why not get rid of the territory and cut to the chase? The result is this hilarious game of shifting alliances where every player has a game-breaking alien power to leverage in the race to win colonies on five of your opponent’s planets. Crammed with variety, tactical decisions and more dramatic reversals than a prime-time soap opera, Cosmic Encounter may be the only negotiation game you need.
Brass: Birmingham
Brass: Birmingham is a redevelopment of the earlier game Brass - now renamed as Brass: Lancashire - a fascinating combination of history and economics in board game form. Players take the role of business magnates at the dawn of the industrial revolution and must build mills while also constructing the transport networks that supply them with raw materials and export their products. That takes money, of course, which you get from your mills in a delightful yet punishingly tough arc of circular strategy. It’s especially interesting when you start buying and selling raw materials to other players, in a realistic simplification of supply and demand economics. Birmingham adds a new industry - beer - and gives players a bit more control over their hand of cards for a tighter, richer strategic experience.
Gloomhaven
The lords of the board gaming pile got that way through an ingenious bit of genre-blending. If you like old-fashioned dungeon crawls with a strong narrative, well, the huge campaign of fantasy adventure has you covered. If you’re a sucker for tactical combat, then its cunning, card-driven face-offs against a staggering variety of foes will thrill you. But if you want heavyweight strategy, then deck-building and resource gathering over the campaign plus the in-scenario exhaustion mechanic gives you plenty of meat. Truly all things to all gamers -- even fans of the best solo board games -- Gloomhaven and it’s bigger, better sequel Frosthaven deserves their staggering level of acclaim. And if the cost is a bit much, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion offers a smaller campaign at a much smaller price tag. And not for nothing, all of these titles also made it on our best board games for adults list as well.
Frosthaven
This one's not for everyone, but if it's for you then you'll absolutely love it. If you’re one of the rare few who not only have seen everything Gloomhaven has to offer but also remain hungry for more, Frosthaven is the banquet to satiate you. Bigger, bolder and better than the original, if you can find time for it in your life it’s an epic gaming experience like no other. Newcomers to the series, however, would be better suited to Jaws of the Lion, above. In the meantime, check out our Frosthaven review for more info.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 1
If combat-based narrative campaigns aren’t your thing, how about working together to purge the world of infectious diseases? Building on the success of the original Pandemic, this introduces “legacy” concepts to the game, in which components are added or removed as you progress through the game, based on your decisions, successes and failures. After a few plays, your copy will be a unique record of your group’s play. So in addition to offering a very personal tale to engage you, Pandemic: Legacy also individualizes your strategic experience. It’s a magical combination that has spawned two further seasons, creating an epic arc of story and strategy to enjoy with a gaming group or even as one of the best family board games.
Twilight Struggle
Billed as a cold war simulation and with bullet-pointed rules, Twilight Struggle can appear daunting to the uninitiated. But there’s a reason it was widely acclaimed as the best game of all time after its 2009 release. Players have hands of event cards that replicate key moments from the conflict, keyed to either their side or their opponent. If you play an opponent’s card you can still make moves on the board but their event also occurs. This makes every hand a thrilling, tactical dance of play and counterplay as you try to move your plans forward while also nullifying enemy events. In addition to the superb strategic workout, you might even learn some history too with this war board game.
Agricola
Another game that spent its time in the “best game ever” limelight is this unlikely game about farming. Stepping back from the theme, however, growing a family to work on a family farm is a dead ringer for the popular Worker Placement mechanism. As a result, Agricola conjures a real sense of growing and developing your humble plantation into a thriving stead, with plenty of interesting strategic bumps to navigate along the way. Its particular genius is its huge decks of cards, only a handful of which are used in each game, which ensures lots of strategic variety and allows you to tailor things like complexity and interaction to your group’s tastes.
The Crew: Mission Deep Sea
The genius of The Crew: Mission Deep Sea is in taking a very familiar gaming concept - trick taking card games - and using it to build something entirely novel but easily accessible. In this case, the competitive card game concept you know from classics like Whist and Bridge becomes cooperative. Players get a series of goals to distribute, indicating that they must win tricks in certain patterns or containing particular cards. The players must then work together to ensure those people fulfil those goals without being able to tell each other what’s in their hands. The result is a fascinating game of unlikely depth, rippling with tension and missed cues. And because it’s also simple and cooperative, it’s as much fun around the family dinner table as it is in a hardcore gaming convention.
Lords of Waterdeep
By marrying the sensibilities of Dungeons & Dragons with the mechanics of modern board games, Lords of Waterdeep made a smash hit to last down the ages. Players take the roles of power brokers in the Forgotten Realms’ biggest city, hiring adventurers to defeat perils threatening Waterdeep while building new facilities in the town. It’s these additions that take this unusually thematic worker placement game to the next level, with the new buildings entering play ensuring that new strategies are required each time. Throw in a modicum of minor “take that” cards to spice things up and you’ve got a brilliant game with very wide appeal.
Ticket to Ride
One of the few hobby board games to cross over into full mainstream sales, Ticket to Ride is a steaming success story. It’s a combination of familiar concepts with players collecting cards, like a Rummy game, in order to try and claim matching routes on a map of the US. But beware: it’s a tight board with relatively few potential connections between the cities that you’ll need in order to complete your allotted routes. And if another player gets there first, you’ll lose potential points instead of gaining them. Easy to learn and exciting to play and with a wide variety of versions and expansion maps, Ticket to Ride is great fun for all ages. It also works well as a two-player board game, or with a group.
Concordia
While conquest games involving ancient Rome are ten a penny, Concordia instead has you manoeuvring a noble family to gain wealth and contacts during the height of empire. Play is conducted using a deck of action cards that you can expand, using wealth from your trades, as the game progresses, allowing you to tailor your strategy accordingly. But the kicker is that your final scoring is also depending on those cards, with different cards earning you points in different ways, from goods in your storehouse to colonist pieces on the board. This creates a fascinating, rich, wheels within wheels layer of strategy, while the resource management elements also let you mess up your opponent’s plans while advancing your own.
Codenames
Blasting onto the scene in 2015, Codenames changed the face of party games forever. In place of trivia quizzes or trivial tasks, it challenged players to come up with clues to interlink a series of apparently unconnected words. So you might link “Trip”, “Rome” and possibly even “Embassy” with the clue “Holiday”. The concept proved so accessible and addictive that it launched an entire new genre of synonym-based word games, each giving different spins on a similar formula. But for ease of teaching and wideness of enjoyment, the original is still the best.
The Castles of Burgundy
Coming into this game of estate-building in medieval France you could be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed by the options to grow your castle. Fortunately, it’s a dice-based game where the roll each turn limits your choices of where you can take actions. But don’t be fooled into thinking this is a random game: rather, the dice are there to keep throwing you curveballs you have to dodge around as you build a strategy. A classic case of having too much to do and too little to do it with, every action of every round feels weighted with impossible priorities, keeping you stretched right up until the points are tallied.
Looking for more ideas not covered here? Check out our rundown of the best board games for kids.
Wingspan
Wingspan is often sold as a family board game but in truth, it’s a little too complex and challenging for kids and is generally more for board game enthusiasts. It has a perfect weave of tactics and strategy together with a winning theme as you try to attract birds to a nature reserve. Different birds need different foods and habitats but will contribute to your growing ecosystem which becomes a kind of engine, generating resources to allow you to play bigger and more beautiful birds.
Read our review of Wingspan.
What to Consider When Shopping for the Best Board Games
There’s so much choice in modern board gaming that picking a game can be overwhelming, not to mention expensive! So to help winnow down the selection, here are a few things to look out for when making your picks.
How Often Will You Play?
Perhaps the most important one is whether it’s likely to see much play. Aspects of this are fairly obvious: whether it appeals to your friends, what’s the target age, if it’s a long game, will you have time for it, and so on. But there’s still more to these facets than may be immediately apparent. You may feel comfortable learning a very complex game, for example, but will your fellow players, and will you be able to teach it? Do you want a game to play with your partner, or your wider family, or does it need to be flexible enough to cater for both crowds?
Even then, these are often vexed questions. The play times listed on box sides are often hopelessly optimistic. Similarly, a game’s advertised player count can be very different from the ideal. A good tool to clear this up is the game information database boardgamegeek.com. If you search on a game there then, at the top of the page you’ll find, beneath the player count, a “best” suggestion for the optimal player count according to the site’s users.
How Much Space Do You Have?
There are other many other considerations. Some games take up a lot of table space, for example, which is no good if you play on a coffee or smaller board game table. Others can take a long time to set up and put away. These issues are often mentioned in a review if they’re problematic. And they can stack: you may be able to play a much longer game, for example, if you have space to pause and leave it out on the table to resume later.
Some genres of game require greater research than others. Increasingly, games are being released as lifestyle choices with a steady stream of expansions and new content. Which is great if it appeals to you, but you need to know what you’re getting into. Other games merge into miniature modelling which is a whole other hobby in it’s own right. Editions and versions are another thing worth checking out as many modern games come in standard and deluxe editions or may, in fact, be reprints of older titles.
You also need to think about how a game might fit in with your existing collection, both aesthetically and physically. For the former, consider what makes it different enough, mechanically or thematically, from games you already own to make it worthwhile. For the latter, remember that board games are big, and you’ll need to find space to store it!
Best New Board Games of 2024
There's a always a stead stream of new board games to check out as the year progresses. We've reviewed a couple of the biggest board games of the year below:
- World Wonders - 8/10
- Star Trek: Discovery - Black Alert - 7/10
- Apiary - 8/10
- Horrified: Greek Monsters - 7/10
Matt Thrower is a contributing freelance board game and video game writer for IGN. (Board, video, all sorts of games!)
