The best board games are so plentiful these days that it can be hard to choose one or two for those family or social gatherings. However, we're here to help, and if you're in the market for something to play with all the family, games targeted at older crowds, card games, or something a little more practical, you'll find all our top picks to suit all budgets and preferences right here.
We've done our best to provide an eclectic mix of genres and styles as there's much that can be done with some of the best board games in 2024. That's why you'll find contenders for some of the best card games and options that wouldn't be out of place in our best board games for two players guide. You'll even find representation from some of the best classic board games if you prefer to kick it old school with something more immediately familiar.
While this list primarily focuses on groups, teens, and the younger players, we do cater towards a more aged-up audience as well. For a curated round-up of titles aimed at parents and older people, the best board games for adults should be your next port of call. And if you're looking for the most up-to-date bargains, make sure you check out our Amazon Prime Day board game deals hub for the latest discounts.
The quick list
The best board game overall
With equal parts depth and accessibility, Ticket to Ride takes the top spot as the best overall board game to play right now.
The best board game for teenagers
As far as board games for older crowds go, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion ticks all the right boxes with its engrossing dungeon crawler action and complexity.
The best co-op board game
The Crew: Mission Deep Sea requires intense cooperation between pairs or groups of up to five people in order to see the missions through, and it's consistently entertaining.
The best two-player board game
If you're after something strictly for pairs that offers a good amount of player freedom and depth then Undaunted: Normandy is about as good as they come.
The best board games for families
If you'd rather have some physical for all the family to play then Junk Art is hard to beat. With tons of pieces and a myriad of combinations, no two rounds are ever the same.
The best board game for groups
Cosmic Encounter is one of those board games which only gets better when you add more people into the mix. A full total of five players can hop in, and that's when this one's at its best.
Best board games 2024
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Best board game overall
✅ You're after a casual-friendly, yet involving board game: Ticket to Ride is a very simple game to learn, and provides hours of low-stakes competitive fun for all the family.
❌ You want something a bit more complex: With a quick runtime and fairly simple rules, those after something with a bit more meat on the bone could be left wanting.
You’d never imagine that a game about building train routes across America could contain quite such breadth of appeal, nor such vicious moments of frustration - but it does, and that's why it's on our best board games list. You start with some random ticket cards that give you bonus points for connecting the two cities named on the card, and you can draw more during play.
The kicker is that if you fail to do so, you lose the points instead of gaining them. So in between collecting and putting down matching sets of colored train cards to claim routes you need, it’s inevitable you’ll have the satisfaction of sticking spanners in someone else’s plans, too.
It’s hard to overstate quite how ubiquitous the appeal of this game is. The Rummy-style set collection mechanics make it intuitive to learn, fast-playing, and fun for families. Learning the right time to take tickets and block choke points on the board gives it a bit of depth for gamers, enough for it to have won the 2004 Spiel des Jahres, board gaming’s biggest prize. And if that’s not enough for you there are variants and expansions galore, letting you build routes and block your enemies in every corner of the globe.
Best board game for teenagers
✅ You enjoy D&D-like experiences: Gloomhaven is fantastic for players who love to get stuck in with character building, involving narratives and complex scenarios.
❌ You're short on free time: With sessions potentially lasting upwards of two hours, Gloomhaven isn't ideal for folks who'd prefer brevity.
The original Gloomhaven and its sequel, Frosthaven, were multi-million dollar Kickstarter board games that became critical darlings of the board game scene. The core of their appeal was the marriage of deep, demanding dungeon combat with a long-running narrative campaign. They were great if you had a couple of hundred hours and pounds to invest in them. For everyone else there was the prequel, Jaws of the Lion, which kept all the best stuff about the original games and jettisoned all the nonsense, leaving a brilliant, accessible adventure title that's made our list of the best board games.
Each player has a character with a unique deck of cards representing their skills and abilities. Cards are divided into two, with different effects on each half and a number in the middle. You play them in pairs, getting an ability from each half and choosing a number to determine when you act. Your deck slowly runs down as you become exhausted exploring the dungeon and fighting monsters. Trying to decide which set of effects is best suited to the gamut of traps and horrors thrown at you through every scenario is a puzzle that never gets old, and neither does the delight of upgrading your deck and spending loot between quests.
Best co-op board game
✅ You're looking for intense co-operative play: You and your allies will often need sharp wits and careful decision making to see success.
❌ You'd prefer something more laid back: Every turn in The Crew: Mission Deep Sea rests on a knife edge. Consider a more relaxed board game if you're after something less intense.
Cooperative games are a genre that has gone from strength to strength since they were popularised pre-pandemic by Pandemic. The modern crop, including the outstanding The Crew series, have a few clever design tweaks to stop the common problem of the most experienced player bossing everyone else around. In this instance, it’s hidden information. The Crew is a trick-taking game in which players have tasks that state they have to win tricks containing certain cards. The kicker is that they’re not allowed to say much about what’s in their hand. They can only communicate once per hand, revealing one card.
This is far harder and more engaging than you might imagine. It’s particularly brilliant in The Crew: Mission Deep Sea which jettisons the card-based tasks of the original for a far more diverse palette including winning particular numbers of tricks, tricks of certain values or tricks with specific cards. Every hand has you walking on tenterhooks as you wait to see if one of your idiot crewmates will fail to read the implications in the card you’ve revealed and fail the whole mission. But you’ll soon forgive them as you re-rack, try again, and try to work your way through the brilliantly varied campaign.
Best two player board game
✅ Your friend groups are relatively smaller: Undaunted is very easy to play, owing to its need of just a couple of players.
❌ You're not keen on the subject matter: Given its nature as a game based on war, you might want to look elsewhere for a more light-hearted experience.
Most military games go all-in on historical simulation which can make for fascinating play but tends to leave them with rulebooks and play times liable to break your teeth. The genius of the Undaunted series is that it takes a completely unrelated and fun mechanic, deck building, and uses it to proxy the command and control of infantry units in World War 2.
Unit cards let you move and fight with troops on the tile-based board, while officer cards let you add more unit cards. The number of cards representing each unit thus mimics the morale of your troops as they’re battered by the tides of war.
The resulting game works on two levels, the strategic one of managing your deck and the tactical one of trying to gain ground on the enemy to reach and hold objectives. This is interesting enough in the initial scenarios where you only have scouts and riflemen to command. But things quickly ramp up to include snipers, mortars, and machine gunners, allowing you to enact complex combined-arms tactics with simple rules. It’s proved such a potent formula that this original game has spawned several sequels.
Best board game for families
✅ You're after variety: Junk Art offers many pieces, modes and therefore solutions to problems. If you like the idea of thinking outside the box to win, this is the game for you.
❌ You don't want stuff to go missing: There's a lot to Junk Art in the box, so much so that it's easy to misplace pieces or key game elements.
We couldn’t really curate a list of the best board games without including at least one from the oft-maligned but highly accessible and family-friendly dexterity genre. And there wasn’t much question about using Junk Art to represent it because it is, effectively, pretty much all the dexterity games you could ever want in a single box of weird-shaped pieces. You’ll presume this is a stacking game, and it is. But it’s also any number of other games because each round you’ll draw a new card and the card will tell you what the rules are for playing with the shapes.
Sometimes it is a stacking game. Sometimes it’s a stacking game with a weird twist like getting a bonus for doing it fast or adjoining pieces of the same colour. Sometimes it’s a cooperative affair where you rotate seats and work on each other’s structures and sometimes it’s a trick-taking game where the winner gets to choose the easiest piece to stack. There are even blank cards for your own ideas and plenty of internet suggestions as to what to put on them. Why own many dexterity games when you can own them all in the same awesome box?
Best board game for groups
✅ You want a game with a high skill ceiling: Cosmic Encounter is the definition of easy to learn, hard to master, and rewards repeated and learned play.
❌ You want a more compact experience: In our experience, games of Cosmic encounter can last upwards of one or two hours.
There are few games more iconic than Cosmic Encounter which has been in print almost continuously since its release in 1977, when it was light-years ahead of its time. It's a conquest game of sorts except it doesn’t have a map and you don’t choose who to attack. Instead, you have five planets stacked with troops and your goal is to get five of those onto enemy planets, with your target each turn determined by the random draw of a card. Each player in the conflict chooses a card in secret, invites allies then the total number on each side is added to the value of the card to see who wins.
What makes this formula something timeless is the fact that every player has a rule-breaking alien power. These range from the simple, like the Void who removes enemy ships from the game completely, to the crazy, such as the Masochist who wins if they can lose all their own ships. All of them completely upend the game and the interactions between them spiral into crazy, fascinating places that make every play unique. It’s conquest as you’ve never known it, wrinkled with diplomacy, luck, and bizarre strategic permutations you’ll remember for years to come.
Best board games - FAQs
What is the most popular board game ever?
You can frame “popular” in many different ways, but most of the answers are going to be classic board games like Chess and Checkers, Backgammon, and Go, not least for their wide appeal but for their popularity down the ages. The simple deck of playing cards, for which there exists a mind-boggling array of different games, might actually trump the lot, however. The modern usurper to their throne is, of course, Monopoly and its endless editions, despite its long play time and limited strategies making it something of a whipping boy among game enthusiasts.
What's the best board game of 2024?
According to the users of hobby website BoardGameGeek, the best game of the year so far is Earth from Inside Up Games, a tile-placement and hand-management game that simulates a changing biosphere. Several other titles such as Darwin’s Journey, Distilled, Hegemony, and the hot new Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game are all close behind it. The winner of gaming’s biggest prize, the Spiel des Jahres (it’s German) has just been announced, with Drof Romantik - The Board Game collecting the gong. The author’s personal favourite is the steampunk-themed hidden movement game City of the Great Machine.
How we choose the best board games
We selected entries for this list by looking at the most acclaimed and popular board games around, throwing out the heavier and more complex titles, and then narrowing it down to those that we felt could best represent a wide range of different styles, genres and themes. So The Crew, for example, serves as our cooperative game pick but also trick-taking and family fare while its long campaign will please hardcore gamers. There were lots of others jostling to make the cut but we feel this gives the broadest representation of accessible games.
