This lets you store those annoying little tokens in their perfect insert slots without resorting to a million plastic bags. So your games are stacked well, but have you ever noticed the wear and tear that a shelf takes on your games? Friction— from both your shelves and other games— can rub ink and material off your boxes.
You may want to invest in clear contact paper , which can be trimmed to fit the size of the game box you want to protect. Alternatively, many games will fit inside record sleeves. Inside the box, consider swapping out elastic bands for plastic bags or hair ties.
Gentler storage methods help keep your cards in good shape. Once again, little plastic bags prove to be even more beloved in our hobby than by your friendly neighbourhood drug dealer. For particularly valuable or rare games, you may want to re-box to protect against acid damage. Wood and cardboard are both common culprits to acid leaching, which can discolour your game and its contents.
Now might also be a good time to swap your plastic bags and elastic bands out for archival envelopes. Special thanks for this article go to the Interactive Museum of Gaming and Puzzlery, who were gracious in answering my questions. When not playing an egregious amount of board games, Kurt spends his time swing dancing, cooking, and pretending there are more hours in the day than there really are. Sign me up for Meeple Mountain's newsletter!
I think you should add Box Throne storage as one of the best ways to keep board games from not scuffing each other in a stack on the shelf. Email address. Our epic holiday board game gift guide has nearly 30 recommendations for every kind of board gamer!
There are wallet-sized games and wallet-friendly games. There are games for the first timer and for friends who have been playing for years. From lightweight stocking stuffer games you can play in minutes to multi-hour games your gamer will love. Read more…. Board Game Giveaways. Enter a Board Game Giveaway! Player count: one to five Duration: 90 to minutes or more Rules: website Ages: 14 and up.
Why we love it: Between reading and deciphering the dense rulebook and having to correct multiple mistakes during each turn, our first playthrough of Scythe ended up taking six hours. Since then, our play times have fallen in line with the to minute estimate. And Scythe has taken over weekly game nights and inspired a dedicated group chat for discussing strategies, making and sharing memes, and planning impromptu sessions. You might be wondering what kind of people want to invest that much time in a game, returning to play over and over again.
But once you learn the mechanics, playing Scythe will be the only thing you want to do. Players begin with resources including power, popularity, coins, and combat cards , a different starting location, and two optional hidden objectives. Scythe is an engine-building game, so the goal is to set up systems that will continue to reap resources as the game progresses. With each turn, every player chooses one of four actions on their assigned faction mat.
All players have the same set of actions but receive different rewards for them, and each character has a set of unique strengths. The game ends after a player places their sixth achievement star on the Triumph Track, and whoever has the most coins wins. Scythe is a game of capitalism in its purest form. The game comes with multiple boards and enough small pieces that it took about 40 minutes to initially set up.
Thanks to the multiple game boards, Small World plays just as well with two people as it does with five. Each race is paired with a separately shuffled stack of powers, which modify what the troops of that race can do.
For instance, if you pick up Wizards with a Flying power, you get bonus gold for occupying magic spaces the Wizards feature , and you can send your troops anywhere on the board the Flying feature. Once a player picks their characters, they get a set of tiles representing their troops; during their turn they use the tiles to take over land on the board.
This continues for a number of rounds, depending on the number of players. Whoever collects the most gold earned mostly by acquiring land throughout the game wins.
Player count: three to six Duration: 25 minutes Rules: website Ages: 10 and up. Why we love it: Some games require sharp focus, advance planning, and subtle strategy, and this can lead to a lot of intense, furrowed-brow looks around a silent table. Then there are games that are so quick, with such engaging energy, that if you play them too late at night, your neighbors might end up filing a noise complaint.
Yet in practice it develops dramatic tension as cards are flipped, symbols are revealed, and players race to come up with an answer before someone else does.
Anomia is also replayable because the rounds usually take less than half an hour and there are almost cards that can come up. But if you do get bored with this version or, more likely, once your game group has memorized all of the cards , there are other editions, including Anomia Party and Anomia X , that add all-new card decks while keeping the same gameplay dynamic.
Each card has one of six colored symbols and a category. When you think of playing a board game, someone sitting alone at a table may not be the first thing that comes to mind. In Calico , you are fashioning a quilt in hopes that cuddly kitties will snuggle up and take a nap on it.
Hidden behind the delightfully colorful artwork and components is a tight puzzle that requires a surprising — though not overwhelming — amount of mental deftness.
You must play your patch tiles paying attention to patterns, colors, and design goals to maximize your score. Despite its bite, Calico is easy to learn and quick to play, and it gives a generous nod to solo players in the form of a series of challenges and premade scenarios. Tiny Towns similar vein to Calico , with a sweet theme covering up a tricky spatial puzzler. This game has you constructing the titular village by placing resources on a grid in particular shapes to create buildings with unique scoring conditions.
As your grid gets smaller, your options decrease and everything gets a bit more challenging. From there, you build a 5x5 grid of words and use a key to identify which words each team must guess. Each spymaster then shares a one-word clue and a number to indicate the hidden word s on the board for their operatives. Once a team has correctly guessed their words or accidentally uncovered the assassin card, the game ends.
Winner of the Spiel des Jahres award , "Codenames" has earned its spot in the tabletop pantheon by offering a consistently fun experience for groups of all sizes. If you grew up playing games of "Taboo" in your household and wish you could take that gameplay experience to the next level, then "Codenames" may be a perfect addition to your board game collection.
At the cost of a movie ticket, it honestly might be the most bang you'll ever get for your board game buck.
From movie theaters to video games, our media is awash in superhero stories. But for those raised on a healthy diet of comic books, the ability to create your own tales, to wage wars in your head, and to argue power rankings with friends and family was always part of the fun. And that's what makes "Marvel Champions: The Card Game" so appealing: We get to retake control of our friendly neighborhood crime-fighters.
In "Marvel Champions," players will take on the roles of their favorite superheroes and use a combination of powers and allies to defeat their enemies. The cards you select and the order they are shuffled into your hand will determine your success in advancing through the game. But unlike "Arkham Horror: The Card Game" and other deck-building games, the complexity has been pared down for less experienced audiences. The result is a game that offers variable gameplay without unnecessary confusion.
Like other Living Cards Games LCGs , "Marvel Champions" does away with the randomness of booster packs and introduces new heroes and villains through a series of scheduled expansions.
This makes "Marvel Champions" a strong choice for the blossoming board gamer or Marvel fan in your household. Sure, I've moved my fair share of meeples over the past decade, and the ongoing boom of app store board games has made it easier than ever to try a little bit of everything. But when push comes to shove, I will always be more interested in building the most satisfying little economic engine than doing the necessary things to score victory points.
So if I'm going to lose, I want to lose in style. Players take turns selecting actions and launching raids on neighboring settlements; as the game unfolds, the raid requirements become increasingly complex, requiring players to make essential tradeoffs in the management of the resources.
Three separate end-game triggers also mean players have a welcome degree of control over when to start wrapping things up on their boards. Colorful designs and the fun feeling of worker placement "combat" combine to make "Raiders of the North Sea" an enormously engaging game and the relative simplicity of the rulebook — seven pages! Plus, "Raiders of the North Sea" translates particularly well to platforms like Tabletopia, making it easy to play board games online with friends from far away.
Losing has never felt this good. When it comes to serial board game content, nobody holds a candle to Fantasy Flight Games. The publishing giant owns the rights to several major film and book properties, including an embarrassment of riches in both the Marvel and Star Wars universes. But even with its murders' row of intellectual properties, H.
Lovecraft-inspired games remain the company's creative bread and butter. If you have played any version of the Arkham Horror Files — a collection of Lovecraft-themed board games that includes titles like "Arkham Horror" and "Elder Sign" — then you are already familiar with the basics. Players take on the role of private investigators, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and potential for madness. As you and your allies work to solve the mystery, you will find yourself confronted by all kinds of horrible creations from beyond the void.
One of the most significant updates to this game is the addition of app-assisted gameplay. Fantasy Flight is no stranger to app-based content — "Descent: Legends of the Dark" recently ditched its DM-like overlord role in favor of a virtual moderator — and this change allows players to focus on the fun stuff, aka investigating rooms and fleeing from monsters. Even if you are unfamiliar with the Arkham Horror universe and just want to get your elder gods on, this remains one of the best introductions to the property.
Confession time: I own "Terraforming Mars. And yet, in all that time, I've never quite managed to get my butt to mars. When you are responsible for organizing your board game nights, there are always games that are easier to teach and faster to play. So, while I will continue to page through the rulebook and tinker with the app version of the game, I feel like I have yet to truly experience one of the best board games of all time.
In "Terraforming Mars," players take on the role of corporations racing to bring a dead planet to life. Over several generations, you will work to complete projects, improve the global parameters — temperature, oxygen, and ocean — and ultimately stake your claim as the financial power behind the future of Mars.
While player interactions may be more limited than in some of the other titles on this list, the details inherent in building the perfect little economic engine provide endless complexity and variety. For those looking for a more contemporary version of "Terraforming Mars," the "Ares Expansion" was released in and offers players a standalone, card-based variation on the original game.
This makes it a strong alternative for newer players, especially given the original game's reputation as being mechanically perfect but aesthetically, uh, a little rough around the edges. Over the past two decades, gamers have lumped most titles into one of two broad categories.
On the one hand, you have American-style board games that heavily favor the theme and often introduce an element of luck to much of their decision-making. On the other hand, there are Eurogames, board games that abstract out their subject matter in favor of precise, predictable mechanics.
Each has its place, and the best games — in my opinion, anyways — find a fascinating balance between the two sides. Given that most Eurogames are inherently a bit more complex than their American counterparts, it's rare for one of those titles to become a board game superstar. But Elizabeth Hargrave's "Wingspan," a light Eurogame that pays homage to the designer's love of birdwatching, is the exception that may have just shattered the rule.
In "Wingspan," players take turns building their aviary by balancing the birds, food, and eggs on their player boards. Managing resources is critical — each type of bird requires a slightly different diet, and balancing your resources ensures that you can keep one foot bird?
With dynamic artwork and a little real-world knowledge on each card, you may find that "Wingspan" is a gateway game into birdwatching proper, too.