Best board games 2024: our favorites reviewed

Why it’s great

Imagine a wild hybrid between Pictionary and the game of Telephone, and you’ve got Scrawl – a superbly simple party board game that we’ve found ourselves bringing to friends’ houses more than any other. You and your pals will be drawing pictures to match weird and wonderful prompts, then trying to guess just what in the heck your neighbor’s manic, er, scrawl is supposed to be. More than any other party board game we’ve played, it generates non-stop laughs from start to finish.

How to play

Each player gets a clipboard, several wipe-clean drawing cards, a marker pen, and a prompt card. This prompt provides the object, person, action, or abstract concept that they have to draw (often ordinary, but occasionally NSFW, too).

You have just one minute to create your masterpiece, before passing it on to the next player, who then has another minute to work out what they think it is, write that on the next card, then pass their guess to the next person, who must then draw that, and so on.

This cycle continues until everybody gets their original clipboard back, at which everybody shares the bizarre journey from their original prompt, through all the group’s drawings, to the final product. Just like in Telestrations, expect it to match the prompt less than 1% of the time – and it’s all the more brilliant for it.

Why it’s great

Ticket to Ride is positively the first modern board game you should play, the absolute best gateway game to the board gaming world. The rules are simple, making it quick and easy to teach and learn – but there’s enough player interaction to create a bit of drama, and just enough strategy to get your teeth into as a newbie. Most importantly, it really can be played with mixed groups of all ages and skill levels – perfect for families, or inducting non-gamer friends into the tabletop hobby!

How to play

The core premise here is simple: collect train cards with matching colors and play them to claim a particular route on the US map. Every player starts the game with a secret series of city-to-city journeys they must map to score points, and a bonus for completing the longest route is also up for grabs. You can either draw train cards, play train cards to claim a route, or draw new routes to aim for on your turn.

To begin with, Ticket to Ride is calming and non-confrontational, but there’s only a certain number of routes to claim, and competition between players quickly starts to heat up as you realize where your pals are trying to get to, and race to cut them off.

Read our Ticket to Ride review.

Why it’s great

Oink Games’ breakout hit Scout has deservedly won tons of awards. It’s a smart, quick-playing card game that delights the eye and tickles the brain by twisting accepted tabletop norms on their head.

Its core premise might seem confusing at first, but once you’ve spent 15 minutes getting to grips with it, you’ll want to play this easy card game a lot. Which is convenient, because it’s dead cheap, well designed, and extremely portable.

How to play

On the surface, Scout is similar to classic playing card games like Rummy or Whist. Your goal is to collect and play matching or sequential sets of numbered cards. On your turn, you can gather cards by ‘Scouting’ or play a set by ‘Showing’. You’ll earn points if other players Scout a card you previously played or by showing a stronger set than previously played.

The twist is that you’re not allowed to change the orientation or order of cards in your hand – so if you want to play down that lovely set that could win you the round, you’ve got to find a way to get all those cards together first. This means you’re not just playing against your opponents, you’re also fighting the cards you’re holding, trying to plan ahead to get the big plays you need.

Learn more in our Scout review.

Why it’s great

Ah, Catan – a.k.a. The Settlers of Catan. First released in 1995, designed by beloved German designer, the late Klaus Teuber, this medieval-themed game about settling a desert island has survived and thrived for decades because, at its heart, it’s just reliably good fun for so many people.

Because it’s so simple, it’s incredibly easy to go from not knowing the game at all to keenly working out your tactics and plotting how to outmaneuver your rivals. Once you’ve topped out with the base game, you can tack on some great Catan expansions, too. Strategy aficionados may sneer at Catan, but they’re wrong to – this famous game has a place in every collection.

How to play

Players compete to dominate the island by building settlements near key resources – grain, ore, wool, lumber, and brick – so they can rake in resource cards every turn and spend them on expanding their empire. Things start off benign, but there’s only room on this little island for one player to build the roads, cities, and extra buildings they need to win – so it gets competitive fast.

Read our Catan review to learn more.

Why it’s great

One-part space strategy and one-part trick-taking game, Arcs was hyped up to an incredible degree when Leder Games first released it. Happily, we can confirm that the hype is well-deserved.

Arcs is a compact yet complex strategic experience, where every turn can dramatically change the tide of play. New players may succumb to analysis paralysis thanks to Arcs’ immense, interlocking systems. However, once you’ve understood its mechanics, Arcs is as tense and exciting as any space opera.

How to play

Everything you do in Arcs is determined by the cards you are dealt. The suits decide what actions you can take in a round, from aggressive movement and combat to careful construction jobs. The numerical value of your card decides how much influence you have in the great space race – the highest-value card played lets its player take the maximum possible actions, leaving opponents to best their number or take a turn with reduced efficiency.

Players can also sacrifice the value of their card to declare an ambition. You lose your lead in the race, but playing an ambition you’re likely to achieve is a great way to score points. Stockpile resources to score end-of-round points, and you’re even more likely to steal the win.

Learn more in our Arcs review.

Why it’s great

7 Wonders Duel is a streamlined, fast-playing game for two that has you building your own ancient civilization from scratch. It’s a highly satisfying, tightly designed experience that packs most of the strategic welly of the main, multiplayer version, but converts it perfectly to suit two players.

How to play

Choosing fresh cards from a shared selection each turn, you’ll add them to your city to either generate more resources to pay for later card plays, or build your way through one of various paths to victory. You can win by cultivating the best city overall; building a great wonder of the world; excelling in scientific advancement; or dominating your opponent with superior military might.

Like its big sibling – the original 7 Wonders – this game uses rivalry over the cards on offer to create competition – you could pick the card you need, or you could discard something you think your opponent fancies, and collect some coins as a payoff.

Why it’s great

The Quacks of Quedlinburg offers some of the most outlandish fun you could possibly have with a board game. It’s a chaotic push-your-luck game where bravery could net you big wins – or blow up in your face.

Its subtly thoughtful design choices mean no bout of bad luck is ever too punishing, and the thrills of a well-played round will fill a room with energy. Better yet, it’s simple enough that players of any age can enjoy it.

How to play

In Quacks, everyone takes their turn at the same time. You’ll randomly draw chips from a bag to add to your swirling cauldron, hoping for the most valuable picks that will increase the points and cash you can claim. But if you pull too many white tokens from your bag, the concoction explodes, severely limiting your yield for that round.

Between brewing sessions, everyone will have a chance to spend their hard-earned money on new, more useful chips for their ingredients bag. While this exquisite family board game plays out across nine rounds, ‘fortune teller’ cards impose special rules that further disrupt play. With so many changing variables, Quacks of Quedlinburg is anyone’s game to run away with – the question is how much are you willing to bet on your brew?

Read our Quacks of Quedlinburg review.

Why it’s great

Coop board games have taken off in recent years, but to our minds none has yet surpassed the 2008 smash hit Pandemic, which does such a good job of nailing board game teamwork that we still play it regularly over a decade later (even though some world events in 2019-2020 kind of made the theme a little dicey for a while).

How to play

In this game, four deadly, brightly colored diseases have each simultaneously infected a large part of the world map. You and your pals each play one of a variety of disease-fighting specialists – with every player granted one specific, powerful ability to use. Every turn, the diseases will spread quickly across the planet, and – as a team – you must plan out your limited actions to contain their growth and develop cures for all four as quickly as possible.

Be warned: while the rules aren’t complicated – we stand by our 2 / 5 complexity rating – the game is a genuine challenge, you’ll have to learn to make the most of all your characters’ abilities in combination with each other, while racing against disease outbreaks that can come at any time. Luckily, working together to achieve that is endlessly satisfying, and Pandemic is a genuine thrill every time we play.

Read more in our Pandemic review.

Why it’s great

Azul is possibly the most tactile board game that we’ve ever played. It’s all about placing clack-y mosaic tiles in the most aesthetically pleasing – and highest-scoring – pattern. The gameplay loop is oddly soothing, but the strategy hidden underneath quickly grows competitive. Although Azul is an abstract board game of low complexity and short runtime, its core premise is so strong that we find ourselves returning for multiple games.

How to play

Each player has their own board, which they want to fill up with certain combinations of mosaic tiles. To obtain these, you’ll need to take turns drafting from several pools of tiles in the middle of the table.

When you draft a particular color tile, you must take all matching tiles from that pool at once. These are then placed in a row beside your mosaic, which must be filled with matching tiles before one can be added to the final piece (and scored). But draft carefully, as any tiles you don’t have room for spill over and become minus points.

Completing rows and columns on your mosaic is the best way to rack up points, although there are bonuses for collecting all the tiles you need of a certain color. And don’t forget to keep a close eye on your opponent while drafting – half the fun is anticipating their moves and drafting the exact tile they need to take the lead.

Read our Azul review.

Why it’s great

Wingspan is as satisfying as it is stunning. Gorgeous art and components, combined with its surprisingly laid-back mechanics, make this a perfect game for thoughtful, quiet nights in. When you manage to pull off a combo and get all your eggs in a row, the strategy is immensely rewarding. And even if you missed out on drafting a crucial card, it’s hard to feel stressed when gathering food and discovering new birds.

Plus, the consistently excellent Wingspan expansions give this game plenty of replayability. It might not be complex enough for hardcore engine builders, but for us, it sits perfectly between gateway game and intense strategy session.

How to play

Wingspan requires you to draft cards and resources, then play these to trigger increasingly powerful abilities on future drafts. The main goal is to score as many points as possible. Food and eggs (which you spend to play birds) have value as points when hoarded, but the more consistent way to score is to play lots of birds with large wingspans.

Your player board has three habitats in which you can place birds. Each habitat also has an associated action – gain food, lay eggs, or draw birds – which grows more powerful as you place more birds there.

A particularly efficient player can fill their entire board with birds, but the drafting mechanics often throw a bit of randomness into the fray. This means that, most of the time, you’ll need to carefully choose ways to specialize your ‘engine’ in order to maximize points.

Read our Wingspan review.

Why it’s great

Gloomhaven: Buttons and Bugs takes the expansive dungeon-crawling mechanics of Gloomhaven and squashes them into a travel-sized solo board game. Despite its teensy components, Buttons and Bugs is still jam-packed with strategic depth – perfect for puzzling over while playing on a moving train.

You lose some of the majesty of the real deal game, of course – miniatures are swapped for teeny colored cubes; many rules are slimmed down; and the story writing isn’t as inspired as the original. But in exchange you get a cheaper, more convenient board game that’s much easier for newbies to learn, and doesn’t need a forklift to carry around.

How to play

Buttons and Bugs is played in scenarios, each with its own tiny hex map, filled with monsters and hazards. You’ll control the most adorable, pinky-sized mini, who can hack, slash, and spellcast their way across the field thanks to your hand of cards.

You’ll play two cards each round, selecting the top ability of one and the bottom from the other. Many allow you to attack enemies, and a modifier board determines whether you deal more or less damage than usual (or miss entirely). These modifiers are open information, so they encourage careful planning.

The cards too take some wisdom to play effectively. Once you’ve used a card twice (front and back), that card is removed from the game. Lose all your cards or hit points before completing the objective, and that’s game over.

Read more in our Gloomhaven: Buttons and Bugs review.

Why it’s great

Like escape room games, but want a mystery that properly immerses you in real detective work, with a proper whodunit to unravel via detailed, in-universe clues? Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective is simply the best. The game has far more in-depth storytelling than other murder mystery board games, with lengthy introductions to each case, and a variety of pleasingly authentic-feeling newspapers, police documents, and other clues you’ll have to pore through to get to the bottom of things.

How to play

Each case plays a bit like a choose-your-own-adventure book: you’ll pick a lead to follow, and turn to the relevant page of the case book to find dialog with in-game characters to read out, which changes depending on how much of the truth you’ve already uncovered. There’s an optional element of time pressure, as you try to unravel the clues in as few moves as possible – but you can ignore that and take it at your own pace (which we prefer).

There are four different ‘Investigations’ you can buy, and each contains multiple cases to solve. The Jack the Ripper box above is our favorite, but they’re all excellent.

There are some niggles. Sherlock Holmes superfans might find nits to pick here or there; the ‘adventure gamebook’ element can be distracting as you try to look up the right page without seeing spoilers; and if we’re honest these boxes are a touch overpriced for the materials you get. But all things considered, Consulting Detective is the best detective board game around. The game, as Holmes says, is afoot!

Read our Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective review.

Why it’s great

If you like social deduction games with more meat on their bones, we can’t recommend Blood on the Clocktower enough, based on our extensive experience (that’s Wargamer and Network N staff playing in the picture above).

This beefy box expands on the ever popular ‘hidden roles’ genre, marrying cheeky bluffing antics with complex mechanics in a way that’ll please casual party game lovers and fans of brain-warping strategy board games. It’s a lot pricier than other social deduction games on the market, but there really is nothing else like it out there.

How to play

The core rules are essentially the same as any other hidden role game. One person among the players is a demon who kills innocent villagers in a ‘night phase’ where everyone has their eyes shut. They and their minions win the game if they can cull the majority of good players, while the noble players win if they can execute the demon before their numbers deplete.

Here’s how Blood on the Clocktower takes that formula and makes it even better. Firstly, everyone in town has a unique power which can help (or hinder) efforts to solve the mystery. This means no one is left twiddling their thumbs, and all players (even the storyteller who organizes and facilitates gameplay) have plenty to mull over. Different combinations of roles give the game endless replayability.

Secondly, when you die in this game, you can keep playing. Most social deduction games get boring fast if you’re killed on the first night, but murdered villagers can still speak, vote, and help their team.

All these features are packaged in a luxury box which helps set the grim, Gothic tone of the game. We recommend playing with a tense background soundtrack, and relishing in the reveal as everyone learns what really happened once the game is over.

Read our Blood on the Clocktower review.

Why it’s great

War board games are very much our cup of tea around here, so it’s no mean achievement that 2023 release Undaunted Battle of Britain comes out top of the pile. It’s a thrilling WW2 aircraft dogfighting game that pits squadrons of British RAF and German Luftwaffe pilots against each other in a beautifully designed dance of death where every plane is a constantly moving target.

Since the series’ debut game, Undaunted Normandy, came out in 2019, it’s been celebrated for translating the authentic tone and detailed tactical gameplay of traditional tabletop wargames into an accessible board game that anyone can play and enjoy. For our money, Undaunted Battle of Britain is the pinnacle of that formula, and an essential play for any wargamer.

How to play

Built on the core of previous games in the series – some of the best WW2 board games ever created – Battle of Britain has you direct your warplanes across the hex-grid board using tactical card plays, but every hit you take knocks vital cards out of your deck and hand, making each turn feel like life or death.

Clever mechanics around Commander and Communications cards can recall some of those losses and bring you back into the fight, but every move has a cost – and while you’re pulling your squadron back into line, your opponent could be carefully repositioning to line up their next pinpoint attack.

Read our Undaunted Battle of Britain review.

Why it’s great

As a sequel to the already-enormous Gloomhaven, Frosthaven is an expensive, expansive dungeon-crawling RPG that requires a lot of commitment to complete. Despite these barriers to entry, it still deserves a place among the greats.

Its combat-focused gameplay is challenging yet satisfying, it offers a variety of player classes to unlock and explore, and its legacy-style base-building mechanics make you feel fully immersed in the snowy world. We’re completely addicted.

How to play

We don’t have space here to explain the huge number of modifiers, conditions, hazards, and minor rulings you’ll encounter in Frosthaven. What we can do is break the game down into two key phases: dungeon-crawling and returning to base.

Each dungeon has a unique map, monsters, and objective (though expect to see ‘kill all monsters’ pretty often). Your chosen class gives you a hand of cards, and you’ll play two each turn – one using its top ability, the other the bottom.

Combat is made less random by a eurogame-inspired deck of cards that modify your chances of dealing damage. Completing a dungeon is a careful dance of maintaining your dwindling hand size and hit points until the objective is complete.

Whether you succeed or fail, you’ll return to home base with a bit of gold and experience. Spend these fortifying your home to survive story events, leveling up your character, or unlocking new adventures to go on.

Read our Frosthaven review.