Top best board games

You and your opponent are each responsible for 12 uniform game pieces, which you are allowed to move diagonally across the 8x8 checkerboard. Checkers is relatively easy to learn, making it a great way to introduce younger players to games of strategy. Chinese Checkers is an approachable multiplayer strategy game that you can play with your whole family.

The wooden game board features a series of holes in the shape of a six-pointed star. Each point on the star is home to 10 colored pegs or marbles. Players take turns moving one of their pieces at a time. You can only move one space at a time. However, if you have arranged your pieces in such a way that you can jump over them, you can advance multiple spaces in a single play much to the chagrin of your fellow players.

Heading out on a road trip? Try making your own magnetic Chinese Checkers game. Each player is given a set of 21 tiles in a specific playing color, and every tile in that set is a different geometric figure. To start the game, each player places the tile of his or her choosing in one of the corners of the square game board.

As play continues, it grows increasingly tricky to place your tiles on the board. Tiles of the same color are only allowed to touch at one corner, while tiles of different colors may share sides. Try to play all 21 of your tiles to win Blokus. In Agricola, if you work hard and play smart, your farm will flourish.

The game is based on the premise that you are a farmer in 17th century Europe, and as such, you must perform the necessary duties to take care of your animals and land and provide for your family. Work the fields and build up your homestead.

Then grow your family to have more helping hands, but make sure you have enough resources to feed them come harvest. There are six harvests in a round game of Agricola.

Players accrue points during that time for things like owning animals, having fenced-in stables, and building bigger houses. After the final round has been played, the farmer with the most points and likely the most prosperous farm wins. These games are fun for kids to play and help them develop skills like critical thinking, creativity, and team building. All you need to do is take turns with another player dropping tokens into the open slots on the game.

To win, connect four of your colored tokens as quickly as possible, whether horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. If they have three in a row, you just might need to use your next turn to drop a strategically placed token to prevent them from connecting four of their own.

Twister will, as the box promises, have you twisted up in knots and probably doubled over laughing, too. The mat has four rows of different colored dots and a cardboard spinner broken up into quadrants that dictates what body part goes on what color dot. You will definitely be eliminated if you fall, but you also risk elimination if someone catches you resting a knee or elbow on the mat. See who can hold out the longest and become the Twister champion. The retrieval process can be tricky though.

After all of the operations have been completed, the doctor with the most money wins. Players take turns tapping out ice cubes with one of the small plastic mallets provided.

A player has to keep tapping the same ice cube until it becomes dislodged and falls from the ice tray, even if additional ice cubes also become dislodged in the process. The more ice cubes that fall, the more precarious things become for the little penguin.

Play continues until the penguin eventually falls through the ice. Hungry Hungry Hippos is a fast-paced marble-chomping game suitable for young players. Four colorful and hungry hippos on the game board are trying to chow down on 20 marbles that are launched into the middle of the board. Players rapidly press a lever, which controls the hippo, in an effort to gobble up the most marbles. After all of the marbles have been consumed, count how many your hippo caught.

The player whose hippo chomped down on the most marbles wins. Boggle consists of 16 six-sided letter dice in a square tray. First you have to scramble the letters, which means putting the cover on the tray and giving it a good shake. Start the sand timer and write down all the possible words you can find. Words can be made from letters that are horizontal, vertical, or diagonal to one another, but they must be at least three letters long. Once time is up, compare your lists of words with the other players.

Any words that appear on more than one list are crossed out. Hurry, scurry, little mouse! Try not to get trapped as you circle the board and collect cheese tokens.

Roll the die to advance spaces, but be sure to keep an eye on the other sneaky mice as you move around the board. Some mice might evade the trap, but in the end, all but one will have been captured. The last mouse still in play wins. We love Jenga for its ease of play. Setup is quick. Build a tower from the 54 small wooden blocks provided—three blocks wide by 18 blocks high. Players then take turns removing one block from within the tower and placing it back on the top.

Cross your fingers and hold your breath as the tower grows taller and more unstable with every move. See how many rounds you can go before the tower comes crashing down. The last person to successfully place a block before the tower tumbles is considered the winner. In each round of this two-person game, one player gets to create the code and the other player tries to crack it.

Using any combination of the six colors provided, the codemaster secretly creates a code that is comprised of just four pegs. The second player then begins a guess-and-check process to figure out the code by placing a series of any four pegs onto the board. After the first guess, the codemaster provides feedback for any pegs that are accurately placed or any pegs that are the right color but in the wrong spot. The second player then guesses again by placing a second row of pegs, and the process continues until either the code is cracked or the second player runs out of guesses.

Qwirkle is a game of colors and patterns. The game contains wooden tiles with different colored shapes on them. Players start with six tiles drawn at random from a bag.

Use your tiles to create lines on the playing area that have the same color or pattern, and earn a point for each tile you play. Lines can be built vertically or horizontally and or played through an existing line kind of like Scrabble.

Ready to get your Qwirkle on? Gather your loved ones for an evening of friendly competition. These board games include fun options for families with young children, school-age children, and grown children. All you need to play this fun family game is the Uno card deck. Most birds also have a special ability related to their species. The real-life Inca Dove, for instance, builds and lays in multiple nests, so its in-game equivalent nets you extra eggs.

These powers create constant, erm, chicken and egg problems to solve, as you often have to juggle priorities to get the best use out of them. That's not the whole secret to Wingspan's success, though. The components, from the lush bird art to the smooth resin eggs, are fantastic.

There's even a cardboard dice tower in the shape of a bird-feeder, and the thoroughly pleasant theme of building an aviary has very wide appeal. That, together with its relative simplicity for such a deep game, makes it great for family play with older kids. Players get points for the birds in their reserve, with harder-to-play cards worth more. There are also secret and public goals, such as having the most eggs in a certain type of nest, for bonus points.

With just enough randomness to how games will play out and a good level of interaction to keep things exciting and social, Wingspan has the plumage to pull anyone deeper into its engrossing nest of strategies, as our full Wingspan review explains. Splendor is one of the best board games for beginners, with its simple yet deep system of buying cards that enable you to buy more cards. For a small and light board game that contains enough strategy to play over and over, while also not being intimidating to new players, Splendor is the ideal option.

It's a game of buying cards by paying a cost in gems of different colours, and every card you buy gives you more gems you can use to buy cards more easily, so everything snowballs satisfyingly as you play — the only way to buy the higher-value cards is to have a great suite of other cards in front of you.

Some cards have points values on, too usually only the more expensive ones , and when someone reaches 15 points, the game ends that round, though other players have a chance to buy one last card which could net them even more points.

On your turn, you can do one of three things: take up to three gems from the central pool these are in the form of poker-style chips, and are deeply pleasing to play with which you'll use to buy cards later; buy a card using gems you already have; or reserve a card, which you can then buy and use it later, but that no one else can grab it in the mean time.

Everyone is buying cards from the same market in the middle, and any that are bought are immediately replaced, so even if you're not keen on the cards available, new ones appear as other people play.

But this also means you might all be planning the same strategy, and you may find someone grabs the card you want from under you, or takes the last gem you need from the pot.

Our full Splendor review talks more about why this is such a great entry-level game. Azul is a game of building a patterned wall using beautiful plastic tiles, and is surprisingly straightforward to play each round. Finally, you can place a tile on the Wall. Well, except that every part of that is full of twists that bring scope for strategic thinking and interesting decisions. When you take tiles, you can only take one colour of tile from one Factory Token though you can take all tiles of that colour.

Any tiles left over on the Factory Token go into the middle — and this repeats as other players take their turns. Each line must be filled with tiles of the same colour, and when filled, you can put exactly one of those tiles into the Wall the rest are recycled to be used in future turns.

But maybe those sacrifices are worth it to get something in the perfect place on the Wall…. But where you can place tiles is limited by what you did with your Pattern Lines, so you can wind up wondering what you-from-three-turns-ago was thinking, or praising your earlier self for your visionary genius. Crucially, even when that's not how it goes, it's still a lot of fun, and fiddling with its chunky plastic tiles is reason enough to buy it, to be honest.

And, as our full Azul review says, it's also so good-looking it's hard to resist. Survive is great fun because ruthlessness is built right into the game's design. No more Mr Nice Guy.

Adorable wooden whales! Dump your friends in the water, then eat them with sharks! The idea of the game is that you all control a group of inhabitants of the island of Atlantis, which is in the process of sinking in the water. You need to get your people from the central island, made up of hexagonal tiles, over to the safe islands in the corners of the board. The key twist is that not only do you get to move your people, but you also control the various sea creatures patrolling the oceans, which are capable of destroying boats, eating people who have fallen in the ocean, or both.

Every tile also does something when you flip it — some bring more sea monsters onto the board, some give you a power-up to use later in the game, some are whirlpools that immediately destroy everything within a certain area… and one is a volcano that immediately ends the game. It will feel a little different to play every time, because you never know when and where new sea creatures will pop up, or how your other players will choose to use them.

And it's a game where it's okay to be mean — it's built right into the game! The one possible downside is that it's possible for one player to feel like they have no chance, either through the luck of where sea creatures appear, or actions by other players, or both.

But it's such a fast, breezy game that you'll be done quickly even if this happens, ready to try again. In this light game but that has a lot of pieces to spread out , one player is a ghost, and the other players are mediums investigating their murder.

The ghost player has to communicate with the mediums via dreams, pointing them towards what really happened. What this means in practice is that each medium needs to guess a correct combination of person, location and weapon very Cluedo from a selection in the middle of the table. But the ghost can't talk or gesture at all to guide them. Instead, the ghost has a big deck of cards, each of which has unique surreal art on it. Every turn, the ghost draws a limited number of these cards, then has to use them to try to point the mediums in the right directions.

This requires some major creativity: if a dream card has a soldier on it and the weapon was a sword, that's a safe bet… right? But if there's nothing that's such a good fit, can you give them a a dream with a key in and hope them assume that metal means sword?

But maybe you didn't notice there were mushrooms in the background, and one of the other possible weapons was poison, and now that medium is convinced in the wrong direction.

On future turns, you can give more dreams to the mediums, hopefully helping to narrow things down but sometimes making confusion worse. However, you only have seven turns to solve the whole murder, so don't get too comfortable. The sense of deep satisfaction you get from Mysterium is unrivalled, both as a ghost player or the medium — much like charades, when a set of clues is perfectly interpreted right from the off, it feels great. And sometimes great minds simply do not think alike.

But whether you're successful at solving the murder in time or not, you'll still want to go again straight away with someone else in the ghostly hot seat, and all new murders and dream combinations to unpack. Dead of Winter is the best board game for that TV drama feeling — who can you trust in the apocalypse?

The zombie apocalypse has happened. You and your friends play as survivors, holed up in a makeshift colony, working together to complete a goal that will guarantee your safety and win the game. Oh, and one of you might be a secret traitor who actually wants the whole group to fail. Withholding supplies might not be as effective as you wanted, though, so maybe you'll resort to actual sabotage, but then everyone will know there's a traitor, even if they don't know who. You can choose to play with no traitor at all if you prefer, and it's still a very fun cooperative game that way.

Adding to the confusion around the traitor is that every player has a secret personal objective they must complete by the end of the game on top of the main objective, and they personally only win if they achieve both. All of these ingredients mixing together makes every game a cocktail of stories about how you narrowly escaped zombie hordes at the old school, only to find yourself betrayed back at the base, before wrestling the colony back back to safety and kicking out the traitor just in time to escape to safety… or any other mix of stuff.

During your turn, a player will draw one of these cards and read it to you, and it will contain a small piece of narrative fiction, and often a moral quandary.

Maybe you find a small group of survivors, who you can leave at the mercy of zombies and steal weapons from, or you can rescue… but then the colony will need more food. Big-name licensed titles tend to be more about paying homage to the licence than making a great game.

So it's a joy to find that Jaws is the rare fish that does both. It's an asymmetrical game, meaning different players play in totally different ways. It's also an 'all-versus-one' game, meaning some players are working to cooperatively to beat one player who's all on their own. In this case, one player steers the toothsome wooden shark piece secretly around Amity Island, eating swimmers and probably humming the movie soundtrack.

That player records where they're moving on a secret notepad, and has a small selection of bonuses that help them cause extra carnage. Be too greedy and the other players, taking the roles of Hooper, Brody, and Quint, will track you down fast.

They have ways to make the shark reveal where they are, and can lay traps to that effect, or rescue swimmers just before the shark can sink its teeth in.

It's a great game… well, it's not really cat and mouse, more cat and even pointier cat, since everyone is doing hunting of some kind — the humans are hunting for the shark, the shark is hunting for swimmers. But that's just Act One! When the shark has eaten its fill of swimmers, or gets found twice by the crew and harpooned with a barrel, you flip the board over for Act Two, which is set on the boat, mimicking the finale of the film.

This is a thrilling slice of tactical action as the humans rush around trying to predict where the shark will surface and attack them. The crew has access to weapons, and the shark to horrible special attack cards — but what you get depends on your respective performances in the first round. The two acts are like two games in one box, equally exciting, which you could even play separately if you like, though there's obviously more satisfaction to working through the whole experiences.

Both are full of spills, strategy and quotable shark events. These kind of three-vs-one games are great for groups where different people enjoy competition at different levels — someone who likes to be ruthless can take the role of the shark, while people who enjoy cooperative games can be part of the human trio. Because of this setup, it works best as either a four-player game or as a two-player game in which one player controls all three humans.

Flamme Rouge is a game of bicycle racing in the early 20th century, before all the doping and transfusion scandals. In it, each player has two riders in a team, and the idea is to get just one of them over the finish line before your opponents. Each of your two riders has a small deck of cards, and every card has a number on, which is how far the rider can move in a turn.

One of your riders is a Sprinteur, and their deck has some very high numbers, but also some low ones, and some gaps in between. Your other rider, the Rouleur, has more middling numbers. Just like real bike racing, Flamme Rouge encourages you to form a pack. Of course, it never works out so neatly. Everyone else is doing the same in secret. The board shows the tallest mountain on each of the seven continents, and each mountain has a four-sided die assigned to it that is rolled in each round.

Each player then chooses one die, moves their explorer up that mountain that many spaces, and must decide whether to keep rolling—but to do so, they also roll the Risk die, which might reduce your progress by one or two steps, or drop you all the way to the base of the mountain.

There are a lot of goodies you can collect along the way to make your climbs a little easier, but the core of the game is the race to the top of each mountain, with bigger points gains for the player who reaches each summit first. Genotype takes Mendelian genetics and turns it into a surprisingly fun worker-placement and set collection game, one that could also help introduce younger players to the core concepts that underlie it.

Players collect pea plant cards and use their worker tokens to collect dice representing different combinations of genes across four traits rather than the seven Mendel examined , trying to complete as many cards as possible by matching the genes shown on them. And the board looks fantastic. You get the most points for finishing cards, the earlier in the game the better, and can also get points for collecting stars and for gathering moon tokens, all from finishing rows or columns, but the player with the fewest moon tokens loses points at the end of the game.

That all makes Mercado de Lisboa , a lighter spinoff of Lisboa , such a pleasant surprise: It takes just a few minutes to learn, and turns can be very quick, but the limited space on the board can make it extremely competitive and tense as it fills up. Players do this until there are only four spaces left on the grid, or only four entrances left for customer tiles. The initial release was in December , so it sneaks under the wire for this list. It combines multiple elements common to other roll-and-write games, including dice-drafting, checking off resources on your personal scoresheet to spend later, drawing polyomino shapes on your sheets, and moving along tracks to gain bonuses, all into one game.

Players draft dice, take the resources shown, and then place them on the shared Action board to take the associated actions. It plays out over six turns of dice-drafting, with a Tour phase after every two turns that lets you trace a path through your park for points and more bonuses. In this simple but absolutely classic board game, players use lettered tiles to form words, crossword style. The player that uses up all their letter tiles while spelling words that give them the highest point value wins the game.

Any words from the standard dictionary counts, but there are even Scrabble-specific dictionaries to get the creativity flowing. Most of all, Scrabble encourages linguistic skills, developed vocabulary, good spelling, and imaginative associations between letters.

The game also encourages numeracy and arithmetic skills for tabulating totals and keeping score. Since the s, Clue has helped us all become detectives, as players gather information to successfully deduce who, where, and how a crime was committed. A mansion is the setting for the board. Players move around rooms, hallways, and secret spaces as they evaluate suspects, determine which weapon was used, and where the crime was committed.

Once a player feels confident they have deducted the facts of the case, they venture to make an accusation. If they are wrong, they must sit out and effectively lose the game, but if they successfully solve the three components correctly, they become the winner. While solving a murder, Clue is never graphic. The game teaches deductive reasoning, fact-based research skills, and story and plot development. It also encourages the development of significant strategic and critical-thinking skills.

In the game, up to four players or two teams of two draw cards to move their three pawns, borrowing from the classic chess piece shape, out of their safety area. The original game version features four pawns per player, but an upgraded version was released in using only three pawns along with new fire and ice tokens that give your pawns additional strengths. The jumping and sliding, elementary counting, and probability all keep players returning to say Sorry!

Monopoly is the most easily identifiable board game on the planet. As we wrote earlier, Monopoly has been around in one form or another since and is a must-have for any board game collection.

Players use their money to buy property or for property ownership upgrades like the iconic greenhouses and red hotels, but if renovation costs are due, this can also backfire. One drawback to Monopoly, though, is games can last for hours. Yahtzee, the next board game in our ranking, is a fixture on game shelves around the world.

Yahtzee is not a difficult game to play — a scorecard, dice, shaker, and writing utensil are the only apparatus needed in the game. After rolling the five dice, players choose which scoring category they are vying for in that round. Each player has up to three shakes per turn to create the best scoring mix of that category.

After 13 rounds, the scores are tabulated and the winner is declared. As much fun and passion as this game generates, it also involves quite complex mental operations involving probability and overall quantitative skills.

Players team up and roll the dice, the first round, rolling for ones, second round twos, and so on. The objective being to get the highest score. If someone gets a Bunco, or all dice in the current same denomination, they ring the bell, and the round stops. Then, simply trade partners and do it all over again. Or rather, the point is to be social, to laugh, engage, and get to know other people at the party. This combination of easy-to-learn rules and social interaction have both contributed to Bunco being one of the most enduringly popular games in our ranking.

You can play with up to 12 players, and modern Bunco sets come complete with everything you need to get started. Appropriate for ages 8 and up. The ancient Chinese game of Go is up next in our list of the best board games pres.

Some estimate the game has been played in one form or another for the past 4, years! Most modern Go sets come complete with a board, bakelite game pieces, or stones, and bowls to keep the pieces organized.

Another classic game in our ranking is Checkers, sometimes called Draughts. Played since approximately 3, BCE, opponents use light- and dark-colored pieces in alternating turns to move to any unoccupied adjacent square. That piece is no longer in the game. That piece can now move and capture backwards. Fun for up to two players, Checkers is a great starting point for teaching kids 8 and up about strategy.

Lots of different game sets exist of varying quality and varying size. One of the most iconic games in history is the sixth pick in our ranking of the 10 best board games since the s. Chess is an incredibly complex game that many spend years mastering, but gameplay is versatile enough for whole families to enjoy. The player who has done so has won the game, though simplified versions are also fun in which the player who takes the most opposing game pieces wins.

Chess sets are traditionally wooden, as are the game pieces, but these days many are made from plastic or also high-end metals like brass. Picking up an adequate chess set can be as cheap or as expensive as you choose. The two-player game is generally considered suitable for ages 6 and up, but advanced play takes time—and those who gain mastery start young. Played in China since at least the s, rules to the ancient game of mahjong vary widely.

Most commonly, though, the game involves both skill and chance. Many play the game with an element of betting. These days, Mahjong sets are available in all sorts of styles and made from all sorts of materials — such as wood and plastic — and include extra chips, dice, pushers, and betting chips. Most come with bags to keep all the pieces organized. Four-player Mahjong is the most common way to play the game, though three- and even two-player Mahjong variations exist with their own sets of rules.

The game is recommended for ages 12 years and older. Like many ancient games that continue to be played today, the modern version of Dominoes got its start in China around the s, though mentions of the game go all the way back to the 12th and 13th centuries.

There are a few different ways to play Dominoes. One common way is to shuffle the tiles and place them face down. After the tiles are shuffled, each player draws a domino. The order in which the dominoes are drawn can vary, but the most common order is left to right.

The game can be as simple or as complicated as you choose. Backgammon has been played in some form or another for about the past 5, years, and like a lot of games that have been around a long time, gameplay and rules related to Backgammon vary somewhat. Most often, though, the game is played between two people with a board, dice in a cup, and 15 checkers of different colors.

After the checkers or pieces are arranged in a certain order on the board. Gameplay is limited to two players. Backgammon sets are common and vary widely in quality. Most sets are portable, coming with nice felt-lined carrying cases that include everything you need to get started.

Backgammon is good for both young and old, but the game is generally recommended for ages 14 and up. The first player draws a yellow card from the deck and follows the instructions on the card, moving forward. Sometimes the card instructs a player to draw a red card, which can instruct the player to move forward or a certain number of spaces backward. When a player reaches Dr. The next step is to host a game night.

The first step to hosting a great game night is, of course, the game. The first step in planning any game night is to invite people.