Board Games

repo: edm00se/awesome-board-games
category: Miscellaneous related: Game Development · Chess

Board games are played on a tabletop, often employ combinations of strategy, skill, and luck, and are a great way to pass the time with friends and loved ones.

Contents

• Family
• Strategy
• Party
• Contribute

Family

Takenoko

Takenoko: A long time ago at the Japanese Imperial court, the Chinese Emperor offered a giant panda bear as a symbol of peace to the Japanese Emperor. Since then, the Japanese Emperor has entrusted his court members (the players) with the difficult task of caring for the animal by tending to his bamboo garden.

In Takenoko, the players will cultivate land plots, irrigate them, and grow one of the three species of bamboo (Green, Yellow, and Pink) with the help of the Imperial gardener to maintain this bamboo garden. They will have to bear with the immoderate hunger of this sacred animal for the juicy and tender bamboo. The player who manages his land plots best, growing the most bamboo while feeding the delicate appetite of the panda, will win the game.

Shadows of Brimstone: Swamps of Death

Shadows of Brimstone: Swamps of Death is a fast-paced, fully cooperative, dungeon-crawl board game set in the Old West, with a heavy dose of unspeakable horror! Players create characters, taking on the role of a classic Western Hero Archetype, such as the Law Man, Gunslinger, or Saloon Girl. Forming an adventuring posse, the Heroes venture down into the dark mines, overrun with all manner of ancient demons and foul creatures from another world. With tactical gameplay, lots of dice, and a robust card-driven exploration system, no two games are ever the same as the heroes explore the mines finding new enemies to fight, new loot to collect, and new dangers to overcome.

Players can even find portals to other worlds, stepping through to continue their adventures on the other side!

In Swamps of Death, players will encounter portals to the otherworld Jargono, a humid swampland inhabited by sentient reptiles, vicious dinosaurs and a tribe of humanoids, cut off from return to their homeworld untold years after their own portal closed.

The Crew: Mission Deep Sea

In the trick-taking card game The Crew: Mission Deep Sea, you and the other players work together to search for the lost continent of Mu. This new adventure takes your crew deep down into the abyss on a search for the fabled sunken land. How far you get depends entirely on how well you work together as a team. Card by card, trick by trick, your search party will discover the challenges that lie ahead and forge a path to Mu.

This new version of The Crew has the same innovative co-operative trick-taking mechanism as the highly lauded original game — but with some exciting new surprises! While communication between your crew members is severely limited by your submerged state, it is also critical to your success; finding the hidden land in the murky depths depends not only on winning tricks, but also on carefully negotiating the order in which they are won. If things don't go as planned, you might just be able to salvage the operation, but it will take near flawless execution and perhaps a little luck to finally reach Mu.

Dungeon Mayhem

In this action-packed Dungeons & Dragons card game, you win by being the last adventurer standing.

Play as one of four brave, quirky characters—Barbarian, Paladin, Rogue, or Wizard—battling it out in a dungeon full of treasure! With magic missiles flinging, dual daggers slinging, and spiked shields dinging, it's up to you to prove your adventurer has the guts to bring home the glory!

That's Pretty Clever

Choose your dice cleverly in Ganz schön clever (German for "That's Pretty Clever") to enter them into the matching colored areas on your score sheet, putting together tricky chain-scoring opportunities, and racking up the points! The dice you don't use are as important as those you do, because every die with a lower value than the chosen one can be used by the other players, keeping everyone in the game at all times.

Wingspan

Wingspan is a competitive, medium-weight, card-driven, engine-building board game from Stonemaier Games. It's designed by Elizabeth Hargrave and features over 170 birds illustrated by Beth Sobel, Natalia Rojas, and Ana Maria Martinez.

You are bird enthusiasts—researchers, bird watchers, ornithologists, and collectors—seeking to discover and attract the best birds to your network of wildlife preserves. Each bird extends a chain of powerful combinations in one of your habitats (actions). These habitats focus on several key aspects of growth:

• Gain food tokens via custom dice in a birdfeeder dice tower
• Lay eggs using egg miniatures in a variety of colors

Stationfall

A game of blackmail and betrayal, murder and mayhem, danger and destruction. What is Stationfall? Well, imagine a dozen or so random humans, robots, and none-of-the-aboves, each with their own abilities, goals, and secret relationships, have been turned loose on a space station that is going to be incinerated upon its inevitable reentry into Earth's atmosphere. You are one of these characters, and the others are collaborators you have on hand ready to assist you in achieving your goals. But choose them wisely, as any one of them could secretly be another player waiting to betray you!

• Stationfall is a box full of creative solutions, but that box is going to morph, twist, and grow teeth over the course of play. Your best turns will exploit the unique tactical freedom of being a secret conspiracy, as well as deductions about your opponents’ identities and motives. Stationfall is messy, intricate, and full of dangerous variables.

Clank!: Catacombs

The catacombs of the skeletal dragon Umbrok Vessna are mysterious and dangerous. Portals transport you all around the dungeon depths. Wayshrines offer vast riches to intrepid explorers. Prisoners are counting on you to free them. Ghosts, once disturbed, may haunt you to death. Despite all that, it's time to leave the board behind with Clank! Catacombs, a standalone deck-building adventure.

Each trip into the catacombs is unique since you lay tiles to create the dungeon. You can play using only the all-new dungeon deck, or you can include cards from previous Clank! expansions.

Find your fortune (and escape the dragon!) in Clank! Catacombs.

Ghost Blitz

Balduin, the house ghost, found an old camera in the castle cellar. Immediately he photographed everything that he loves to make disappear when he is haunting  – including himself, of course. Unfortunately, the enchanted camera takes many photos in the wrong colors. Sometimes the green bottle is white, at other times it's blue. Looking at the photos, Balduin doesn't really remember any more what he wanted to make disappear next. Can you help him with his haunting and quickly name the right item, or even make it disappear by yourself? If you grab the right items quickly, you have a good chance of winning...

Lost Ruins of Arnak

On an uninhabited island in uncharted seas, explorers have found traces of a great civilization. Now you will lead an expedition to explore the island, find lost artifacts, and face fearsome guardians, all in a quest to learn the island's secrets.

Lost Ruins of Arnak combines deck-building and worker placement in a game of exploration, resource management, and discovery. In addition to traditional deck-builder effects, cards can also be used to place workers, and new worker actions become available as players explore the island. Some of these actions require resources instead of workers, so building a solid resource base will be essential. You are limited to only one action per turn, so make your choice carefully... what action will benefit you most now? And what can you afford to do later... assuming someone else doesn't take the action first!?

Istanbul

There's hustle and bustle at Istanbul's grand bazaar as merchants and their assistants rush through the narrow alleys in their attempt to be more successful than their competitors. Everything must be well organized: wheelbarrows must be filled with goods at the warehouses, then swiftly transported by the assistants to various destinations. Your goal? Be the first merchant to collect a certain number of rubies.

In Istanbul, you lead a group of one merchant and four assistants through 16 locations in the bazaar. At each such location, you can carry out a specific action. The challenge, though, is that to take an action, you must move your merchant and an assistant there, then leave the assistant behind (to handle all the details while you focus on larger matters). If you want to use that assistant again later, your merchant must return to that location to pick him up. Thus, you must plan ahead carefully to avoid being left with no assistants and thus unable to do anything...

Ticket to Ride

...a cross-country train adventure where players collect cards of various types of train cars that enable them to claim railway routes connecting cities in various countries around the world.

Pandemic

Can you save humanity in this cooperative game where deadly viruses are spreading across the globe? Together, you will treat diseases, share knowledge, and fly all over the world to prevent outbreaks and slow down the epidemic.

Forbidden Desert

...players take on the roles of brave adventurers who must throw caution to the wind and survive both blistering heat and blustering sand in order to recover a legendary flying machine buried under an ancient desert city.

Everdell

Within the charming valley of Everdell, beneath the boughs of towering trees, among meandering streams and mossy hollows, a civilization of forest critters is thriving and expanding. From Everfrost to Bellsong, many a year have come and gone, but the time has come for new territories to be settled and new cities established. You will be the leader of a group of critters intent on just such a task. There are buildings to construct, lively characters to meet, events to host—you have a busy year ahead of yourself. Will the sun shine brightest on your city before the winter moon rises?

Everdell is a game of dynamic tableau building and worker placement.

On their turn a player can take one of three actions:

Forbidden Sky

Soar to dizzying heights in the electrifying cooperative adventure. Work as a team to explore a mysterious platform that floats at the center of a savage storm. Connect a circuit of cables to launch a secret rocket — all before you are struck by lightning or blown off to the depths below. It's a high-wire act that will test your team's capacity for courage and cooperation. One false step and you all could be grounded.This latest installment in the Forbidden that game series takes you to new heights with several novel challenges, including collectively planning a terrain using only limited information and constructing a real electrical circuit.

Elder Sign

Set in a world of Lovecraftian horror, cooperatively investigate a museum full of strange artefacts and stranger demons. Collect eldritch symbols, "elder signs", to close the portals and prevent the creatures from invading our world. Collect enough before the time is up or suffer the wrath of the Ancient Ones.

Betrayal at House on the Hill

Players all begin as allies exploring a haunted house filled with dangers, traps, items, and omens.
As players journey to new parts of the mansion, room tiles are chosen at random and placed on the game board.
Eventually the "haunt" begins, one player usually "betrays" the others and takes the side of the ghosts, monsters, or other enemies, while the remaining players collaborate to defeat them.

Crokinole

Crokinole is a traditional dexterity game.

Crokinole is played on a circular wooden board, with wooden circular disks as playing pieces. Players take turns shooting disks across the circular wooden board by flicking the disks with their fingers. Players try to land their disks in scoring regions on the board, with the highest scoring area the recessed hole in the very center of the board. Each round, each player/side alternately shoots a set number of disks (usually 12 or 8), shooting one disk each turn.

As a traditional game, there are often many variations played, but the following method is based on the National Crokinole Association's rules which also govern the World Crokinole Championship.

Welcome To

As an architect in Welcome To..., you want to build the best new town in the United States of the 1950s by adding resources to a pool, hiring employees, and more.

Welcome To... plays like a roll-and-write dice game in which you mark results on a score-sheet...but without dice. Instead you flip cards from three piles to make three different action sets with both a house number and a corresponding action from which everyone chooses one. You use the number to fill in a house on your street in numerical order. Then you take the action to increase the point value of estates you build or score points at the end for building parks and pools. Players also have the option of taking actions to alter or duplicate their house numbers. And everyone is racing to be the first to complete public goals. There's lots to do and many paths to becoming the best suburban architect in !

Dixit

Using a deck of cards illustrated with dreamlike images, players select cards that match a title suggested by the "storyteller", and attempt to guess which card the "storyteller" selected.

Contrast

Tall, Small, Big, Thin, Heavy, Light, Round, Square, Yellow, Red, Blue and Green. Pick the symbol that matches the picture best! Don't worry, there is no wrong answer, but you only get a point if the majority of players has picked the same symbol as you!

Unstable Unicorns

Build a Unicorn Army. Betray your friends. Unicorns are your friends now.

Cascadia

Cascadia is a puzzly tile-laying and token-drafting game featuring the habitats and wildlife of the Pacific Northwest.

In the game, you take turns building out your own terrain area and populating it with wildlife. You start with three hexagonal habitat tiles (with the five types of habitat in the game), and on a turn you choose a new habitat tile that's paired with a wildlife token, then place that tile next to your other ones and place the wildlife token on an appropriate habitat. (Each tile depicts 1-3 types of wildlife from the five types in the game, and you can place at most one tile on a habitat.) Four tiles are on display, with each tile being paired at random with a wildlife token, so you must make the best of what's available — unless you have a nature token to spend so that you can pick your choice of each item.

Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft

The master of Ravenloft is having guests for dinner – and you are invited!
Evil lurks in the towers and dungeons of Castle Ravenloft, and only heroes of exceptional bravery can survive the horrors within.
Designed for 1-5 players, this boardgame features multiple scenarios, challenging quests, and cooperative gameplay.

Exit The Game the Abandoned Cabin

After seeking shelter in an abandoned cabin and spending the night, you and your friends realize that someone has secured the door with a combination lock. The only way to escape your predicament is to work as a team, crack codes and solve various puzzles in order to deduct the combination that leads to freedom.

Candy Land

The race is woven around a storyline about finding King Kandy, the lost king of Candy Land...game requires no reading and minimal counting skills, making it suitable for young children...players are never required to make choices, just follow directions.

Chutes and Ladders

Also known as Snakes and Ladders, Chutes and Ladders is simple and easy to play, even for those who can't read. Going up the ladders and down the chutes, a child will learn (by the pictures) the rewards of good deeds and the consequences of naughty ones.

Sorry

Slide, collide and score to win the game of Sorry! Draw cards to see how far you get to move one of your pawns on the board. If you land on a Slide you can zip to the end and bump your opponents' pawns or your own!

Klask

Klask is a board game that has a ball field shape with two deep holes functioning as goals in each end of the field. The purpose of the game is to push the small ball around on the field with your magnet/gaming piece, shoot the ball past the obstacles and your opponent and into the goal hole.

Battleball

Battleball is a football board game but with teams made of players with physical and mechanical enhancements - which has made the sport more intense and more deadly. Plan a strategy and do your best to score two touchdowns without having all of your players be destroyed!

Heat: Pedal to the Metal

Based on simple and intuitive hand management, Heat: Pedal to the Metal puts players in the driver's seat of intense car races, jockeying for position to cross the finish line first, while managing their car's speed if they don't want to overheat. Selecting the right upgrades for their car will help them hug the curves and keep their engine cool enough to maintain top speeds. Ultimately, their driving skills will be the key to victory!

Drivers can compete in a single race or use the "Championship System" to play a whole season in one game night, customizing their car before each race to claim the top spot of the podium. They have to be careful as the weather, road conditions, and events will change every race to spice up their championship. Players can also enjoy a solo mode with the Legends Module or add automated drivers as additional opponents in multiplayer games.

Parcheesi

Pachisi, the national game of India, dates back to 4 AD and remains popular today. Parcheesi is the westernized version. Parcheesi is typically played with two dice, four pieces per player and a gameboard with a track around the outside, four corner spaces and four home paths leading to a central end space. Moving all four pieces to the home position wins the game.

Tokaido

In Tokaido, each player is a traveler crossing the "East sea road", one of the most magnificent roads of Japan. While traveling, you will meet people, taste fine meals, collect beautiful items, discover great panoramas, and visit temples and wild places but at the end of the day, when everyone has arrived at the end of the road you'll have to be the most initiated traveler – which means that you'll have to be the one who discovered the most interesting and varied things. All of the actions in Tokaido are very simple, and combined with a unique graphic design, Tokaido offers players a peaceful zen mood in its play.

Santorini

Santorini is an accessible strategy game, simple enough for an elementary school classroom while aiming to provide gameplay depth and content for hardcore gamers to explore, The rules are simple. Each turn consists of 2 steps. those are Move (move one of your builders into a neighboring space) and Build (construct a building level adjacent to the builder you move). If either of your builders reaches the third level, you win.

Sushi Draft

Sushi Draft is a card game that looks good enough to eat! Sushi Draft includes a deck of 32 sushi cards (8 ikura, 7 ebi, 6 maguro, 5 tamago, 4 kappa and 2 "wild" triples) and 18 point tokens (three each for the five types of sushi and three for dessert); the point tokens range in value from 1-5, with the more plentiful sushi dishes being worth more points. Over three rounds, players draft plates of sushi and collect sushi points, which are drawn randomly. The player with the most diverse menu gets dessert. Players tally their points, and whoever has the highest score wins. Sushi Draft is quick to learn and fun for the whole family, and is the perfect introduction to the classic genre of pick-and-pass/card-drafting games!

PARKS

PARKS is a celebration of the US National Parks featuring illustrious art from Fifty-Nine Parks. In PARKS, players will take on the role of two hikers who will trek trails to see sites, observe wildlife, take photos, and visit national parks over the course of the game. They will take actions and collect memories of the places your hikers visit. These memories are represented by various resource tokens like mountains and forests. Collecting these memories in sets will allow players to trade them in to visit a National Park at the end of each hike. Each trail, represented by tiles, represents a different season, and as each season passes, the trails change and grow steadily longer. Each turn, players send one of their hikers down the trail. While on the trail, hikers will see beautiful sites and perform an action when they arrive. When a hiker reaches the end of the trail, they can spend tokens they have received to visit Parks and earn points. Your goal is to have the most points from your Parks, photos, and personal bonus at the end of the year.

The Quest for El Dorado

In The Quest for El Dorado, players take the roles of expedition leaders who have embarked on a search for the legendary land of gold in the dense jungles of South America. Each player assembles and equips their own team, hiring various helpers from the scout to the scientist to the aborigine. All of them have one goal in mind: Reaching the golden border first and winning all of the riches for themselves. Whoever chooses the best tactics will be rewarded!

The Quacks of Quedlinburg

In The Quacks of Quedlinburg, players are charlatans — or quack doctors — each making their own secret brew by adding ingredients one at a time. Take care with what you add, though, for a pinch too much of this or that will spoil the whole mixture!

Each player has their own bag of ingredient chips. During each round, they simultaneously draw chips from their bags and add them to their pots. The higher the face value of the drawn chip, the further it is placed in the pot's swirling pattern, increasing how much the potion will be worth. Push your luck as far as you can, but if you add too many cherry bombs, your pot will explode!

At the end of each round, players gain victory points and coins to spend on new ingredients, depending on how well they managed to fill up their pots. But players whose pots have exploded must choose points or coins — not both! The player with the most victory points at the end of nine rounds wins the game.

Kingdomino

In Kingdomino, you are playing as a lord who is seeking new lands to expand your kingdom. You must explore all the lands, including wheat fields, lakes, and mountains, to spot the best plots, while competing with other lords to acquire them first. This game is like Dominoes. It uses tiles with two sections. Each turn, player will select a new domino to connect to their existing kingdom, making sure at least one of its sides connects to a matching terrain type already in play. The order of who picks first depends on which tile was previously chosen, with better tiles forcing players to pick later in the next round. The game ends when each player has completed a 5x5 grid and then points are counted based on number of connecting tiles and crowns symbol.

SCOUT

SCOUT is a ladder-climbing game in which cards have two potential values, players may not rearrange their hand of cards, and players may pass their turn to take a card from the current high set of cards into their hand.

More specifically, cards are dual-indexed, with different values on each half of the card, with the 45 cards having all possible combinations of the numbers 1-10. During set-up, whoever is shuffling the cards should randomize both the order of the cards in the deck and their orientation. Once each player has been dealt their entire hand of cards, they pick up that hand without rearranging any of the cards; if they wish, they can rotate their entire hand of cards in order to use the values on the other end of each card, but again they cannot rearrange the order of cards in their hand.

Cobra Paw

Players take turns rolling the dice — which feature six unique symbols — then race to grab the tile with the matching pattern before anyone else. Whoever grabs six tiles first wins!

Splendor Duel

Confront your rival guild in a race for victory. Take Gem and Pearl tokens from the common board, then purchase cards, gather bonuses, royal favours, and prestige.

Discover new twists and strategic opportunities derived from Splendor, the original best-selling game. Acquire cards with impressive powers, take advantage of special Privileges, and fight over scarce access to Pearls.

Splendor Duel is a two-player only standalone game based on Splendor that retains some of the main gameplay mechanisms of that design, while being a bit more complex, dynamic, interactive, rich, tense, and mean.

The game features a main board shared by both opponents, card powers, and three victory conditions.

Sagrada

Each player builds a stained glass window by building up a grid of dice on their player board. Each board has some restrictions on which color or shade (value) of die can be placed there. Dice of the same shade or color may never be placed next to each other. Dice are drafted in player order, with the start player rotating each round, snaking back around after the last player drafts two dice. Scoring is variable per game based on achieving various patterns and varieties of placement...as well as bonus points for dark shades of a particular hidden goal color.

truncated — full list on GitHub