board-games recommendations
Over the past few years, I’ve amassed a collection of board and card games. This post goes over my favourites in a variety of categories, ranging from complex strategy games such as Terraforming Mars to “simple” classics such as UNO. Sit back and enjoy!
In Terraforming Mars, players play as corporations trying to make Mars habitable for humans by raising the heat, increasing the oxygen levels, and creating oceans. The main mechanics of the game include managing your resources (and their production) with cards, standard projects, or tile placement. I love this game because it has some player interaction (competing for tile spaces, milestones, and awards), but still lets you focus mostly on what you want to do with the resources you have.
Tip: We’ve noticed that the following base-game corporations are better than others, so we try to distribute those among the players:
Gardener
milestone and Landowner
award)Mayor
milestone and Banker
award)Terraformer
milestone)Thermalist
award)The first time I played this game, I enjoyed it so much that I still woke up in a good mood the next morning. It feels like this is the “encounter” mode of role-playing games like Pathfinder (or D&D), which is always my favourite part. The rules are easy to grasp, and they simply make sense. The cooperative nature makes everyone enjoy the evening, and the difficulty keeps you on the edge of your seat while not seeming impossible.
The only complaint I have is that since it’s a campaign game, I can’t just play it whenever I want.
Building trains and connecting cities, Ticket to Ride is easy to explain and play. I enjoy it most with 3 players, since that causes competition for certain tracks, but doesn’t completely ruin your chances. I do sometimes get nervous when playing, worried someone will snatch my card or track before it’s my turn again… I’m told that’s part of the magic.
Tip: If you value your nerves, play this with people who won’t do things on purpose, just to prevent you from completing your objective.
Usually, I hate any kind of element of luck in a board game, but the way it’s incorporated in Clank! is wonderful. The premise of this game is that you are a thief trying to steal treasures from a dragon’s lair. Certain actions make you Clank!, generating noise, and making it more likely that the dragon will harm you in its next attack. You can still be unlucky when you get drawn to receive damage, but hey, it’s your fault you made so much Clank!
This game really feels like a video game brought on the table, and it made me love deck-building as a mechanic.
Activity has been a part of my extended family for ages, and it’s a game that we always played on ski holiday evenings or at family gatherings. I think this particular version is specific to my part of the world, but there are many games with a similar premise: you explain, act, or draw a word for your team and get points when they guess correctly. A popular alternative with a fun twist is Poetry for Neanderthals.
Faster than fast, quicker than quick. I am Lightning.
Ligretto is a real-time game, where everyone plays at the same time, trying to place cards in ordered stacks in the centre of the table. This game really brings out the competition in my family, and is the only one where trash-talking is tolerated and even enjoyed.
The OG friendship-ruining game, UNO is perfect for evenings with friends.
There is, of course, only one correct way to play it, called “Olympic UNO”. It is played over multiple rounds of UNO games and works the following way:
Other correct rules include:
skip
card to propagate your own skip onto the next player.
In case a player plays X skip
cards at once, the following X players are skipped.
The skipped players can all play their own Y skip
cards, and propagate them to the Y players after the originally skipped players.
Yes, you can even skip yourself this way.+2
cards to propagate any +2
s played at you.+4
cards to propagate any +2
s and +4
s played at you.+2
cards to propagate any +4
s played at you only if the first +2
matches the colour chosen by the player who played the +4
.+2
or +4
, your turn is skipped.+2
/ +4
chain that loops back to you.
In this case, you have to draw all of those cards.+2
or +4
, and you must draw those cards.A game I learned to play with my grandma and the go-to small game of my family, this version of rummy has the following rules:
Note: My family always plays this game without jokers (even though the game is literally called “Joker” is Slovak). While this means that the game completely depends on the luck of the draw, we all just enjoy the challenge of puzzling out how to add a card.
In this case a 4-player game, “Srdcia” definitely has similar versions in other cultures, with different decks of cards. It’s played in multiple rounds, until a certain player reaches a pre-defined amount of points and loses (yes, points are bad).
A game works like this:
There are a few extra rules you can add to make it more interesting:
Tip: To play this with 3 people, just remove all the 7s and 8s from the deck.