In case you missed it, board games have gotten really good recently. With so much of our lives mediated through screens, it’s refreshing and humanizing to play face-to-face with people. Millions of people have taken the step from the tedious Monopoly and Life of their youth to modern gateway classics like The Settlers of Catan , Ticket to Ride, or Cards Against Humanity , but where do you go from there? We’ve hand-picked this list of fantastic games to suit a wide range of players and interests, showing off just a sample of the most fun and interesting games that have been released in the last few years. With the holidays coming up, these might be just the thing you want for bringing together friends and family. Pandemic Legacy – 2 to 4 players ($50) Please enable Javascript to watch this video The world is being wracked by four horrific diseases. A team of experts must race around the globe to find cures before society descends into chaos. First released in 2007, Pandemic is a tense, fun, and challenging cooperative game for two to four players. Easy to learn and hard to master, it is widely considered a classic and an excellent introduction to what modern games have to offer. Pandemic Legacy uses that foundation for one of the most exciting and surprising games we’ve ever played. Like 2011’s Risk Legacy before it, Pandemic Legacy ties each individual session into a larger campaign, with the events of one game having permanent effects on the board and subsequent games. Each game represents one month of the year and you can play each month a second time before moving on if you fail the first attempt, with the challenge modulating up or down based on how you are doing. Every month adds new mechanics from a veritable Advent calendar of boxes and compartments full of stickers, cards, and components that alter the game in both small and sweeping ways. All at once it would be overwhelming, but the game’s gradual evolution keeps the challenge fresh and creates-a gripping and twisty narrative. Over the course of the year cities will irrevocably fall, characters will form relationships and develop post-traumatic scars, viruses will evolve, and within even just a few games your copy of Pandemic Legacy will be unique. Don’t research too much because surprise is part of the fun; this is easily one of the best games in years. Buy it now from: Amazon Star Wars: Imperial Assault – 2 to 5 players ($64) Please enable Javascript to watch this video This is almost as close as board games come to video games as an exciting action-RPG and tactical miniatures battle set in the Star Wars universe. In an exciting and responsive campaign one player as the forces of the Empire competes against a team of Rebel heroes that grow more powerful and acquire better equipment as the games go on. It can also be played as a straight duel between Rebel and Empire forces. Set during the original trilogy timeline, fan favorites like Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, and Han Solo all make appearances. This game is huge, with heaps of modular boards to create the playing area, fistfuls of tokens and decks of all sizes, and a ton of well-sculpted plastic miniatures. The set-up time involved in sorting through all this for each mission can be a drag at first, but once you get rolling the gameplay is really fun and streamlined. It’s derived from Fantasy Flight’s fantasy dungeon crawler Descent, which is itself already in a heavily-refined second edition, so all the edges have been well sanded off. Expect endless expansions for devoted fans. Buy it now from: Amazon Arctic Scavengers – 2 to 5 players ($34) Please enable Javascript to watch this video Mad Max meets Snowpiercer , the apocalypse has come and gone, leaving the remaining people in small tribes fighting over limited resources in the frozen wasteland wreckage of civilization. Like the popular Dominion, each player starts with a small deck of scavengers and refugees, using a new hand of them every turn to scrounge for valuable tools and medicine, hire specialized mercenaries, and fight over valuable contested resources. All of these are shuffled back into your deck, which grows over the course of the game as you compete to be the largest and most powerful tribe. A common criticism of Dominion- and deck-building games derived from it is that they are not interactive enough, like passive aggressive neighboring games of solitaire. Arctic Scavengers fixes this with the addition of holding back part of your hand for a brawl over contested resources at the end of every round, as well as snipers and other ways to directly thwart each other. Perfect for the theme, it feels scrappy and tooth-and-nail, even when you are doing well. The most recent edition includes a huge amount of modular expansions to tweak gameplay and add even more kinds of interactivity, giving long-lasting replay value to an already excellent base game. Buy it now from: Amazon Skull – 3 to 6 players ($20) Supposedly popularized by biker gangs, this game played with coasters is absolutely perfect for playing at a bar. Everyone has three roses and one skull, laying them face down one at a time in front of them until one player bets on how many they can flip without finding a skull. Everyone else goes around either raising or folding until someone finally has to test their luck. Succeed twice and you’ve won the game, but find a skull and you lose one of your cards at random. It’s like poker, but with much simpler math. Skull is a beautifully stripped down game of bluffing and bravado that is as tense as it is easy to learn. The game is so simple that once you know the rules it’s easy to just make your own copy with a stack of coasters and a marker, which is great in a pinch at a bar, but the artwork and components are so nice that you’ll want to own the official edition. Buy it now from: Amazon Escape: The Curse of the Temple – 1 to 5 players ($74) Please enable Javascript to watch this video Indiana Jones-style adventurers have found themselves trapped in the ruins of an ancient temple, and must work together to evade its traps and find the way out before it’s too late. The twist is that it’s played in real time, with players frantically rolling dice to escape before the 10 minute soundtrack runs out. Escape is fast, fun, and easy to learn. As a cooperative game, it’s a great way to get people of all ages laughing and yelling around the table in short, friendly bursts. Once you’ve mastered the basics, the hard mode adds tricky curses that do things like make you keep one hand on your head, or no longer let you pick up dice that fall of the table. There are a variety of expansions that add more fun complexity to the game for serious fans, but frankly they are a little expensive for the value added. Buy it now from: Amazon Android: Netrunner – 2 players ($28) Please enable Javascript to watch this video Set in a dystopian, cyberpunk future, in this asymmetric, two-player card game a lone hacker (the runner) tries to take down a sinister megacorporation (the corp) in a race to steal or score seven points worth of corporate agendas. It’s a tense game of information warfare full of bluffing, calculated risks, and ingenuity. Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering , originally designed Netrunner in the late 90s, but it was overshadowed by his previous hit. Fantasy Flight’s 2012 reboot, however, has found its footing with an active and growing player community around the world. Like Magic, much of Netrunner ’s pleasure comes from designing decks from a large pool of cards to suit your style of play. Unlike Magic , fortunately Fantasy Flight’s Living Card Game model has new cards released in fixed packs that contain full play sets, meaning you know the cards you are purchasing instead of relying on random luck, making it a much smaller investment to keep up. In addition to the game’s brilliant design, the world-building portrayed through gorgeous artwork and flavor text is a treasure trove for sci-fi lovers. As an added bonus, it also has some of the best representation for race and gender in any game. The core set alone can be a fun game to keep on your shelf for occasional play, but anyone looking for a game to be a reasonably-priced and engrossing hobby should look no further. Buy it now from: Amazon The Metagame – 2 to 33+ players($25) Please enable Javascript to watch this video Similar to Cards Against Humanity and Apples to Apples , The Metagame isn’t a single game, but rather two decks of cards and a variety of games for various amounts of people that you can play with them. One deck contains a huge range of things like the Declaration of Independence, David Bowie, and Pabst Blue Ribbon. The other is a series of prompts, such as “Which will outlive us all,” “Which says the most about gender,” or “Squishy.” It can be silly and irreverent like CAH , but it also allows you to have fun conversations and sideways, comparative thinking about a wide range of topics. There are two expansions so far, which add cards with film and sci-fi themes, respectively, so you can customize your copy to suit your friends’ interest. Like CAH , this is an easy and portable game for parties or out and about at bars and whatnot, with an added bonus of being more family-friendly. Buy it now from: Amazon Spyfall – 3 to 8 players ($25) A game of deception, one player is secretly designated a spy, and they have to figure out where they are before everyone else catches on to their identity. Every player is dealt a card with a location, such as a bank or a submarine, as well as a specific role at that place, such as the teller or the captain. The spy’s card, however, only says spy. In quick, timed rounds, players take turns asking questions of one another about where they are trying to ferret out the spy without revealing to them the location. The spy wins by figuring out where they are, surviving to the end without being caught, or by having someone else be falsely accused. Everyone else wins by finding the spy. Spyfall is fast-playing and easy to learn, making it a great party game that leads to a lot of funny moments as players try to walk the tightrope of revealing just enough information to earn the trust of the other players without tipping off the spy, or appearing to do so if they are the spy. It also doesn’t get nearly as vindictive as other hidden role games with more of a focus on betrayal can get, like The Resistance . There is a bit of an initial hurdle as it really helps to know what all of the possible locations are, so we suggest photocopying the page of the manual that shows all of them so everyone can peek at it without looking too suspicious. Buy it now from: Amazon Two Rooms and a Boom – 6 to 30+ players ($25) In this hidden role party game two randomly assigned teams split arbitrarily into two rooms. The blue team has a president, while the nefarious red team has a bomber. Over a few fast rounds of hostage exchanges between the rooms, everyone tries to figure out who’s who so they can either protect or blow up the president when time runs out. There are very few games that scale up to so many people so well and keep everyone equally involved the whole time. Each game only takes about fifteen minutes, so it’s fast and easy for people to pick up and jump in. A huge variety of additional secret roles with special abilities can be mixed and matched in a given game to add fun variety once you’ve mastered the basics. It plays well with both old friends getting together, or as an ice-breaker for a large number of new acquaintances. Buy it now from: Amazon Last Will – 2 to 5 players ($40) Please enable Javascript to watch this video Your rich uncle died, regretting the frugal life he led. His last wish was to leave his fortune to someone who would enjoy it better than he did. You, his nieces and nephews, all receive a small portion of the estate, and whoever can spend it first wins the lion’s share. Buy lavish mansions and then trash them with expensive, wild parties to destroy their market value. Assemble a cohort of mooching friends who take you out for decadent nights on the town. It’s a race to the bottom fueled by Gatsbyan decadence. Last Will inverts the conventional European-style board game convention of building an engine to amass resources and wealth, rewarding wastefulness instead of efficiency as you race to spend. With clever worker-placement mechanics to keep players interacting, it’s a great mid-weight brain-tickler for people that like indirect competition. Buy it now from: Amazon



More...