My Top 10 Board Games
2 - Everdell
What’s not to love about building a little village for critters with slightly edible-looking pieces, gorgeous art work, and a flatpack tree as an extension of the game board! This resource management game and pretty much all of its expansions are a staple in my collection. With so many critters looking for a cute little home and so many ways to make victory points, this is a much loved one in every board game group I play with. Its expansions add whole new sections to the board and loads more things to do, and every time they give us even more cute critters to play as! The game design as a whole balances different methods for exploration and resource gathering in step with your other village builders, while also giving you sneaky ways to cut your opponents off from various resources along the way or even filling their village spaces with worthless Fools! There are so many different tactical ways to play this game, generating more victory points by having excess resources or going for the crown and snatching the monuments and special events; it really is a game for everyone.
4 - Sagrada
Adorable critters and dragons not your thing? Then how about a relaxing time with your friends building the stained glass windows of Spanish cathedrals? This adorable puzzler comes with beautifully coloured dice and a thought-provoking placement rule set you must follow in order to fill your whole board, but be sure you plot ahead to take the dice you need before your competitors do! The puzzle-style elements and placement rules make this game stand out above the rest; no adjoining colours or numbers in any orthogonal direction make this game the perfect head scratcher. This gamr is perfect for a more relaxed vibe, slotting nicely into a chilled session with your friends in the sun without getting too heated or worked up. They even have a legacy edition which I am yet to play, but I cannot wait to build more and more windows with the aid of my ancestors.
6 - Pandemic
The cornerstone of my board gaming journey, this game is a co-operative race around the world to cure four different diseases that are slowly killing the population. This is another mechanically amazing game that forces you to make difficult decisions with a limited moveset and ever-encroaching epidemics that will keep you on the edge of your seat all game. The game changes every time with each player having a role card with a unique ability that can turn the tide of play, or even a bio-terrrorist secretly working against everyone else to kill off the human race! Outbreaks and chain reactions really make this game a nail biter, one wrong move with too many cubes on the board can turn the game from an easy win to hopelessly lost with one wrong card draw.
8 - Coffee Rush
Coffee Rush has me reliving my teenage years and early twenties working in coffee shops and restaurants, making coffee orders for guests and hoping they don’t get mad at me for making them wait! But this time around, it’s with tiny cute coffee cups and tiny cute ingredients! As much as the functional mechanics of games are the real things that keep me coming back to them, aesthetics mean a lot, and this game has it all. Walk your barista around the board collecting ingredients and hoping to whatever deity you believe in that someone else doesn’t land on the chocolate or caramel you’ve been needing for your special order first, thereby blocking you from taking any, whilst trying to decide whether to sacrifice a much needed victory point for a sweet character upgrade that could be worth so much more to your point earning potential. This charming yet often frantic puzzler gets a regular showing in my gaming circles.
10 - Alice is Missing
This is possibly the best roleplaying game I have ever played. Me and my friends did not think this would work on the first read, but it works so well, and 10 minutes in, we were all sat in silence in the same room, gripped to our phones and hooked on this whirlwind of a story. What makes this RPG so special is that all of its ‘gameplay’ is done over text message. The setting starts out simple: you are a group of friends in a quiet American town, and you find out your friend Alice is missing. You are trying to piece together all the clues of her disappearance using card prompts on the table revealed at specifically-timed intervals, however, the only method of communication you have with your assembled players is through text message. No talking, no lip reading, no charades. This is a timed game, but it truly was one of the best hour long stories I have ever been a part of. The fact that you are also playing from behind a screen means that friends that don’t usually feel comfortable with traditional roleplay for fear of being embarassed, or confused by heavy mechanics, all have the potential to design a character, find their voice, and really shine while getting a taster for what a true roleplaying session is like. All in all, I would recommend this game to any gaming group that wants to do a quick one hour one-shot campaign, but wants to get truly immersed in a fully soundtracked, rich, and surprising gameplay experience.
1 - Blood on the Clocktower
It’s no secret that social deception games are all the rage at the minute, and there’s nothing I love more than being a game master, so this blends all of that into one. Watching my social circle slowly start to break down while the Poisoner makes the Empath believe that there are multiple evil people in their close vicinity, the Imp slowly picking them off one by one while the Drunk Washerwoman swears they know that one of two players is an Undertaker, so why are they all lying?! It is one of the best social deception games on the market and provides countless hours of fun, while simultaneously having perfect mechanics for any given situation. Someone needs to leave early? Then maybe they are a traveller who is a Scapegoat, being able to be killed in place of other members. The game needs to finish quickly? The fabled Fiddler comes into town and settles this whole thing over an old fashioned Fiddle duel!
3 - Wyrmspan
Following on with the absolutely adorable art, this one is my favourite in the ‘-Span’ franchise of games, or ‘Spanchise’, if you will. The first game in this spanchise, Wingspan, became a staple in my collection with so many cute birds and, again, more suspiciously edible-looking pieces. So when they brought out a variation with dragons, I preordered it so quickly. The art of each dragon is so beautifully realised, and the whole thing comes with a book of facts written for each of these magnificent mythological beings. When it comes to gameplay, this game again has it all; digging out some caves for these hungry little dragons to live in, gathering resources to entice new dragons in and going spelunking with your little adventurer meeple. This is another game where there is so much variety in winning strategies: do you entice as many dragons in as possible to get victory points? Do you power through the Dragon Guild track to collect more end game bonuses than anyone else? Or do you raise dragons up from their young and ply them with resources aplenty so they generate a victory point farm? This is another massive staple in my collection and one that will continue to be played monthly for years to come.
5 - Terraforming Mars
Leaping from a simple puzzler to a much more intense, multiple-hour headscratcher, Terraforming Mars is the ultimate in resource management. Mars needs terraforming so that the human race can comfortably live there, therefore you and your other scientists need to build lakes, forests, and even cities to generate resources and fight for who becomes the best terraformer! This game is another with brilliant game mechanics, with a whole deck of cards built to give you tough decisions, leading to endless possibilities of play styles and victory point generation. Do you go for the most forests to help generate oxygen and covet the most ground? Do you vye for the milestones and awards? Do you focus on making all of your other players weaker with tricky cards to make your points worth more overall? There really is a play style for everyone here, and while this isn’t one that is constantly brought out with bigger groups, this is one that me and my husband love to play two player!
7 - Secret Hitler
Another hit in the social deception line of games, Secret Hitler has you all secretly pick a role between Fascist or Liberal, with one person secretly taking on the role of Hitler himself. The Fascist players’ aim is to put more Fascist policies than Liberal ones into play, or in the later game, ensure Hitler’s succession to the role of Chancellor, but they can’t let the Liberal players know that they are working for the sinister regime, or else they will be frozen out of deliberations and policymaking. If the board gets filled up with 6 Fascist policies, then Hitler and the Fascists win! But if the Liberals manage to get their board filled up first then they triumph over evil! Between enacting policies in secret without showing your hand to the group, and the soul-crushing feeling of ultimately relying on both your Chancellor and President to enact Liberal policies on behalf of the group as a whole whether you trust them or not, all the while dealing with a deck that holds more Fascist policies than Liberal ones, this is another excellent example of game design, one that sows the seeds of doubt brilliantly, it could tear friendships and relationships apart if you let it.
9 - Betrayal at House on the Hill
After experiencing some car trouble, you and your wayward band of explorers enter an auspicious-looking house to seek help, but the malevolent creatures and spirits within, or sometimes, even the house itself, begin to plot against you, and sooner or later, one of you stumbles upon a creepy idol or blood-covered dagger, some ominous object that triggers a haunting, one which may even send you and your party completely mad. This game is in my top 10 for the sheer impact it has had on my friendship group. How the tide of play turns in the space of one minute from playing a fun little co-op exploration game, to the next when all of a sudden, one of your friends has been turned against you, and is now stalking you through the house with swarms of bats, hordes of zombies, or other eldritch horrors at their disposal to either convert all the other survivors into one of their kind, or leave no man alive. With so many different haunt scenarios to uncover in this game, it never feels too samey, with great homebrew rulesets that allow you to customise your game to your frienship group, and with expansions that add whole new levels to the house, this game provides hours of endless fun, and betrayal!
