Gaming

My partner and I love playing Wingspan. A game about bird may not sound great but it's full of strategy without being too hard to pick up. It's competitive, but just total points at the end, you can't screw each other up during play.

My current favs are Wingspan, Dune Imperium, and Deep Rock Galactic (both a great video game and board game!).

We have a wider circle of friends who are boardgame enthusiasts, so we go through a rather lot of them. Some stick, some don't. These we play regularly and have a lot of fun:

• Brass: Birmingham
• Codenames
• Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion
• 7 Wonders: Duel
• Race for the Galaxy

There are more that made an impression on me, I remember playing them a few times, but do not want to play them again (Do you know that feeling? :D ), eg. Eclipse (the galaxy-wide battle 4X preparation-takes-as-long-as-playing-and-playing-takes-a-whole-day strategy), Agricola, Mice and Mystics...

Ticket to Ride is our go to.

Not so much a traditional "board" game, but I've been a lifelong enjoyer of Munchkin! It's a whimsical dnd-esque card game with (almost literally) hundreds of different themed versions, from Space to the Wild West to Cthulhu even.

Been really into Azul lately. Pretty simple to explain to people, and the game pieces are very pretty and high quality

I really love Spirit Island because i find the setting really nice. You are Spirits and need to destroy the invaders to your island. Another great part is that its a coop game and you can chose many different spirits with each different playstyle.

Gloomhaven came out at the perfect time in my life- after my party days but before my marriage/kid days. I had a friend group that would play at least one scenario per week, and sometimes we'd just spend an entire Sunday playing. That's been my best experience so far.

I wish I could play Frosthaven with them but we've all moved away and I don't have a group that would ever be consistent enough right now.

Might be a slightly separate category, but I still think of it as a board game. I really like Call of Cthulhu. Tabletop RPG systems in general are typically good fun as long as you have a good group of people to share the time with, but mechanically I think CoC is particularly good. It is simple to learn and the mechanics really assist in the tense storytelling.

We've been playing Camel Up a lot. It's nice because there is some skill and a good amount of luck involved, so no matter your board game experience, you have a shot at winning.

Agricola is my favorite but it is pretty complex so we don't play much.

Machi Koro without a doubt! It’s like monopoly but it card game form.

Since it doesn't seemed to be mentioned by anyone (or I missed it), I'm going to say Robo-Rally... Programming your robot through a racetrack on a moving factory floor using drawn command cards, bumping into others, knocking the off course and ending in a totally wrong spot yourself because you miscalculated a step...

I’ve been getting into Go/Baduk lately, it’s a shame how few people there are playing it in the US! Would love to play in-person instead of always online

It's a card game rather than a board game (but still within the tabletop sphere so I think it still fits): I absolutely love Sentinels of the Multiverse. It's by the same people who made Spirit Island, which I believe is more well-known. It's a cooperative game where you play as superheroes working together to take down a villain. Aside from the game itself being a lot of fun, there's a bunch of hidden story and lore within the card art, and the creators even have a podcast where they create stories and characters within the game's world.

So, with the caveat that my "gaming group", more often than not, is my kids and therefore we're not up for a 6 hour rules-intensive cardboard-based cutthroat brawl, here are some that I like:

• Tiny Epic Galaxies: Blast Off : this is a fun little dice-based game with cute imagery. You need to get control of planets to gain points (21) and you have some resource-wrangling opportunities to get to, and then claim the planets before your pesky competitors get them. This also has the advantage that you can play it solo.
• Star Realms : a deck-builder from a couple of old-school M:tG Hall of Famers. It's really a two-player game, but it's got passable options for 1 to 4 players. Each player had a basic starting deck and a common randomised trade row is populated from a shuffled deck. Your need to knock your opponents life down to zero by purchasing spacecraft and bases from there trade row to augment your combat ability, whilst avoiding your opponents similar attempts. There are four card types that allow you to level-up your trading, health regeneration, combat or enemy-annoyance factor. I love this game, but recommend the Frontiers version as it's a little better balanced.
• Hey, That's My Fish! : a fast, surprisingly cutthroat and, to be fair, rather physically finicky game but it's a lot of fun! It's a hexagonal-tile based game with up to four teams of penguins competing to harvest fish from a rapidly dwindling ice floe, where each penguin leaves a trail of melted-ice destruction in their wake! This one can lead to fisticuffs if someone manages to bisect the ice, leaving an opponent stranded and fishless!
• Wreckland Run : this is definitely outside your preferences, it's solo-only. That said you asked for people's favourite board games, and this is one of mine currently 🙂 It's a Mad-Max-esque campaign theme in which you pick a vehicle and driver (giving you a set of core abilities) and attempt to fight your way through a series of vehicular brawls by judicious dice placement. And luck. Despite the fact that the initial rule book was an unmitigated disaster, I've really enjoyed playing this one and I'm currently battling Chapter 4 after not too many attempts at the previous chapters!

I realise this doesn't really count (well, it does but you know), but chess. The rules are straightforward and it has infinite replayability. And you can play a game online any time you want in an instant.

Other boardgames I enjoy are Arkham Horror and Twilight Imperium, though I haven't played either in a while.

I really like board games that don't take that long to play. It's a lot easier to rope your friends into a game that takes 30-40 minutes to play and is easy to learn rather than a game that takes 4+ hours.

Some that I've found

• Azul
• Sheriff of Nottingham
• Splendor

Some of our favorites are Catan, power grid, ticket to ride, azul, and bananagrams.

For a game that's not on your list, Unfathomable is one I've been playing a lot lately. It's a hidden identity game where you're on a ship and the ship's crew and passengers are combating Lovecraftian horrors that keep climbing aboard from the depths while trying not to run out of food and fuel and sanity before you escape. You or one of your companions may turn out to be a cultist who is summoning the dark ones and attempting to sabotage the escape efforts.

I love the Betrayal games: Betrayal at House on the Hill (horror), Betrayal at Baldur's Gate (fantasy), and Betrayal Legacy (legacy horror) for a campaign style version that is linked over multiple sessions.

For anyone who isn't familiar with them, the players build out a map by exploring a building or city one tile at a time, collecting items and buffs along the way and triggering events. After a certain point a trigger is reached when the "haunt" stage begins. At that point, one player typically becomes a traitor with unique abilities or monsters to control and gets the traitor's tome - a book explaining their abilities and win condition. The rest of the group gets a different book explaining what the group must do to survive and what interactions they can do to foil the traitor's plan. There are a bunch of different haunt scenarios in the books and they are chosen based on the last tile revealed and card drawn, so you never know quite what you'll be facing in the end.

One of my favorites recently is Scythe! It’s can be a pretty long game, but I love that resources stay on the board and its upgrading mechanism

Cosmic encounter was always my favorite in college. Not popular enough that I can find local people to play now though.

I absolutely love Secret Hitler. It’s funny, it’s always a huge hit at parties, the game pieces are very high-quality. It’s amazing.

I really enjoy playing Hanabi. It's a collaborative card game.

Alien Frontiers is always a popular one at my table.

I recently got the Stardew Valley Board Game for my birthday and it's a blast. I was never really in to board games, but I always wanted to play one that is cooperative rather than competitive. Stardew Valley still manages to be a thrilling experience and quite a challenge (at least for a novice like myself).

Hive is a modern, fun take on chess with a dynamic board. Its super fun and unlike chess its not figured out and people just don't bother to throw a "book" at it. Every board game convention I try to find someone wirh Hive and it'd awesome!

I'm not sure what my favorite is. My family and friends and I love Pandemic, Catan, Ticket to Ride, Throw Throw Burrito, and the first Walking Dead board game, the name of which is escaping me currently.

I mostly play big campaign games with my partner, for example currently we're playing Frosthaven and Oathsworn (and have Aeon Trespass lined up). Other favourites are Aeon's End, Spirit Island, Terraforming Mars. Me and my friends have a strong preference for cooperative games!

Some more low key games that we tend to bring out with friends who don't game a lot are Isle of Cats, Thunderbirds, Namiji, and The Crew.

There is a board game I played years ago at a comic shop, and I can never remember the name of it. I only played it once but it was super fun. Kind of like if Freelancer were a board game. You had a huge game board with a bunch of planets and you picked up missions. I dont remember what the win conditions were, but I remember I had a lot of fun with it.

I play boardgames with a few different groups. In one group we play almost exclusively Hanabi and Spirit Island. In the other group, popular favorites are Skull, Shamans, Wingspan, and Dice Forge. We play 6nimmt if we need to waste some time, and Avalon if there are lots of people.

I like the ones that platform socialisation and banter - things like hidden role games, party games, etc. Less focus on the game's strategy and more on the people you're playing with.

Codenames (and Codenames Duel) is slower-paced but an engaging word-based game.

Just One is a simple word game that even drunk people can play (and likely have more fun in).

Detective Club is a bluffing hidden role game, where all of you are using weird art cards to match a prompt, but one of you didn't have the prompt and is spinning bullshit - guess who!

Concept is Pictionary for people who can't draw.

And my all time favourite*:

Telestrations, a blend of 'the telephone game' and illustrations. If you're familiar with Gartic Phone, you already understand the gist. Every event that I've brought it out, it has been a good time.

Related question, but are there board games Lemmy servers, or topics on more general Lemmy servers? (Not sure what they're called. Probably not sublemmies.)

For several years we regularly played my roommates Battlestar Galactica Game. Sadly now I don't have the group for board games anymore.

I really like BattleCon, a fighting game-inspired card/board game that did a really good job translating the mindgames and oki into a turn-based format. They had an online version of it but sadly halted development because they couldn't figure out how to monetize it.

I also love me some good ol' Riichi Mahjong. There's a group that brings tiles to fighting game tournaments since these are becoming cons in disguise, I got some nice hands at Combo Breaker this year.

My best friend and I used to play SubTerra when we hung out every weekend. Company that originally made it is sketchy for a number of reasons, but they're also gone now and another company owns the games. It's a tile based game where you are trying to escape a cave system with monsters in it and you create the board as you play. Each character has abilities to help this and there's a turn limit you have to escape in. It can be really addicting.

I also really enjoy Campy Creatures and Space Park - they're pretty simple games (same creators) that a great for a group of 3-5. Campy Creatures is a little bit like War, where each player gets a hand of monsters and the highest number wins. There are "people" cards laid out and winning lets you pick who you take, with the people having point values assigned (which is what ultimately determines the winner). Hopefully I explained it okay. Space Park is very different - the goal is to get 20 victory points, which are mostly earned by completing tasks. There are 6 "locations" you travel to which give you various resources to help you complete the tasks.

I also love playing Quiddler - it's a fun word game, nothing super complex about it unless you play with people who make up words (we have a rule that half the table has to agree that it's a word).

These come out a lot at my game nights, hopefully I did them justice with my descriptions.

A game which has been unexpectedly evergreen for my friends and I is called Infiltration. It's a cyberpunk heist game set in the same universe as Netrunner. It's cooperative and competitive, you enter a complex where the room order is random (determined by the placements of room cards which start face down) and you move through stealing data. You have to escape before the alarm dial goes off, only those who get out are eligible to win and the winner is the one with the highest value of data stolen. So do you press your luck and delve deeper, or make for the exit before your allies do?

I love it because it's a good length (about an hour), has enough randomness to feel different every time but enough tools for strategic lootin and shootin.

Magic Maze is a collaborative game that’s always fun. Everything is done in “silence” because you’re unable to consult with each other to escape the maze. Warning is that it could get quite chaotic

I mainly play abstracts nowadays for their quick setup/cleanup time - Yinsh, Hive, Blokus Duo are some of my favorites.

My favorite, and most played game is absolutely Arboretum.

It plays quick, it's small enough to stash in a bag, it's easy to teach, and it feels like it has endless play and variation. The game also lets me do one of my favorite things in a board game, which is let me go for high risk high reward "shoot the moon" strategies. Absolutely lovely bit of tension and backstabbing fun, but concentrated all into the reveals right at the end so it doesn't drag the entire experience. Great at every player count, especially at 2 players which is important given that most of my board gaming is just with my wife.

Plus you get to look at lovely art of trees while you playing (with the original edition at least, the newer one has worse art IMHO).

Hi! This is my first post here so I hope I don't make some mistakes. If you like Heroquest you could look at other dungeon crawlers, like the dungeons and dragons boardgames (my favourite is "waterdeep: the dungeon of the mad mage"), or my beloved Star wars: imperial assault or Lord of the rings: Journeys in the Middle earth. If you want to expand to other genres, since you like AH you could try Arkham horror: living card game. Absolute masterpiece.

The latest addiction to my game library is Earthborne rangers and is quite a refreshing take.

I hope that some of these resonate with you!