Best board game
Twenty-five board games, from ancient classics and family favourites to modern hobby hits.
Tier list by PairTier · 25 items
- Chess — Two-player strategy game of kings and queens, played in its modern form since the late 15th century.
- Go — Ancient East Asian game of surrounding territory with black and white stones on a 19×19 grid.
- Backgammon — Ancient two-player race game combining dice luck with tactical decisions.
- Monopoly — Property-trading game of buying streets, building hotels and bankrupting your opponents.
- Scrabble — Word game in which players score points by forming words from letter tiles on a grid.
- Risk — Strategy game of world conquest played with armies on a map of the continents.
- Cluedo — Murder-mystery deduction game, known as Clue in North America.
- Trivial Pursuit — Quiz game where players collect wedges by answering questions in six categories.
- Stratego — Two-player game of hidden army ranks where the goal is to capture the enemy flag.
- Diplomacy — Negotiation-heavy strategy game set in pre-First World War Europe, with no dice.
- Catan — 1995 German game of settling an island by trading and building, originally called The Settlers of Catan.
- Carcassonne — Tile-laying game of building a medieval landscape of cities, roads and fields.
- Ticket to Ride — Family game of collecting train cards to claim railway routes across a map.
- Pandemic — Co-operative game in which players work together to stop four diseases spreading worldwide.
- Agricola — Worker-placement game about running a 17th-century farm and feeding your family.
- 7 Wonders — Card-drafting game of developing an ancient civilization over three ages.
- Codenames — Team word-association game where spymasters give one-word clues to find their agents.
- Dixit — Storytelling game of guessing which surreal illustrated card matches a clue.
- Azul — Abstract tile-drafting game inspired by Portuguese azulejo tiles.
- Splendor — Quick engine-building game of collecting gems to buy cards and attract nobles.
- Wingspan — Engine-building game about attracting birds to your wildlife preserves.
- Terraforming Mars — Game of corporations competing to make Mars habitable.
- Gloomhaven — Huge campaign-driven dungeon-crawling game with tactical card-based combat.
- Twilight Imperium — Epic space strategy game of galactic politics, trade and war that can last all day.
- Brass: Birmingham — Economic strategy game about building industries during the Industrial Revolution.