Video games? Who needs them, when you and your friends can gather around a table and play some board games? Here are our favorites. Start planning game night.
In case you missed it, board games have really made a comeback over the past couple of years. Especially now that we’re allowed to gather again, board games are a good choice. With so much of our lives mediated through screens, it’s refreshing and humanizing to play face-to-face with people. Millions of people have taken the step from the tedious Monopoly and Life of their youth to modern gateway classics such as The Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, or Cards Against Humanity, but where do you go from there? What is the best board game? We’ve hand-picked this list of fantastic games to suit a wide range of players and interests, showing off just a sample of the most fun and interesting games that have been released in the last few years. Since you have likely been stuck at home for months, these might be just the thing you need for some new activities to do with the family. Ah, the simple pleasure of laying down tiles to build a bustling French town. What could be better? How about squatting on your friend’s plot of land and claiming it as your own, turning all their hard work into sweet, sweet points for yourself? That magical feeling can be yours in Carcassonne, a game that looks charming and simple, but hides a competitive core. Gameplay in Carcassonne is straightforward: When it’s your turn, you draw a tile at random and then place it next to one of the already-placed tiles that make up the growing landscape. Connect roads to roads, fields to fields, cities to cities, and then place your workers down to claim these features as your own. If two different areas eventually collide, the player with the most pieces there will end up scoring all the points in the end, so you have to decide whether to build in isolation, watching from afar as you friends bludgeon each other over prime land, or get in on the action yourself. Modern board gaming isn’t just about zombies and elves and space marines. Sure, there’s a ton of that, but every year the range of possible tabletop experiences grows by leaps and bounds. Enter Fog of Love: a romantic comedy board game for two. Both players create their own fictional character and work through one of several scenarios with fixed chapters and randomized scenes, charting the course of their relationship to its happy (or unhappy) ending. It’s an elegant game that strikes an incredible balance between mechanics that create an interesting puzzle to solve while keeping story and character forward, instead of getting lost in abstract min-maxing. Fog of Love ’s genesis speaks worlds about its revolutionary place in the industry. Designer Jacob Jaskov played and loved hundreds of board games, but his wife was never interested in any of them. For all the industry’s growth and diversification in the last several decades, games still almost exclusively focus on external conflicts, and never on internal, character-driven stories. Jaskov developed Fog of Love for this uncompromising audience of one, and the result is an exquisitely sharp application of some of modern gaming’s best design practices and ideas, while also totally defying industry convention. Its Walmart-exclusive distribution deal in the US hopefully speaks to a radical diversification of the mainstream board gaming industry in the near future. Buy at Walmart Some games are built entirely around a single idea or theme, with every mechanic designed to serve it. For others, a “theme” is just a thin aesthetic veneer over its crunchy, abstract systems. Azul, a game about laying beautiful tiles for the Portuguese royal palace, is squarely the latter. Players compete to build the most complete and aesthetically-pleasing square of colorful tiles. Drafting tiles from a shared pool, combined with rules for how to lay them or save them for future rounds, makes for a satisfying puzzle that’s easy to learn, but hard to master and plays well (and differently) at its full range of two to four players in just about half an hour. When building a game collection, it’s important to have a range of weights and interaction-styles. Azul is a fantastic “opener” for a game night, since it plays quickly and provides a constant stream of interesting decisions without ever overwhelming players into “analysis paralysis.” It also features a pleasant level of passive-aggressive interaction (through denying tiles to other players), making it important to keep up with what your friends are doing without ever putting you into direct clashes, which can be the perfect, congenial tone that some people like to set for an evening of laughter and conversation around the table, with games as the excuse to get there.
