Board Games Frequently Asked Questions – You ask, we answer

Games have been around for millenniums, but the modern board gaming is a relatively new activity (having risen after WWII and really taking off in the last 20 years), and as such still relatively unknown to the general public. Too embarrassed to ask a newbie question? Here’s a frequently asked questions article to help present our hobby to new players and potential new players. There are examples and links to articles that digest the matter in more detail. And if your question is not here, ask below and it will be added.

What is the easiest board game to play?

The easiest board games to play are roll-and-moves. Games like Snakes & Ladders, Goose game, Pachisi, etc. Everyone can play those in a matter of minutes. However, when it comes to modern board games, there’s more than one candidate. In fact, a whole category of games, popularly called gateway games, are designed with the intention of bringing new players to the hobby. These games feature simple, intuitive rules, often introducing game mechanics, that will be useful to know later down the line, while still offering decent strategic depth and replay value. You can find 10 examples in our What is a Gateway Board Game article?.

What are the top 5 most popular board games?

According to BoardGameGeek, the 5 most popular modern board games are:

1. Pandemic (cooperative struggle against four deadly diseases),
2. Carcassonne (tile placement, set in a picturesque French countryside),
3. Catan (economic set-collecting and colonizing),
4.  7 Wonders (card drafting, building an ancient city, including mighty wonders), and
5. Dominion (a deck-building game that started the genre).

You can see the full list of the Top 10 Most Popular Board Games here.

What is a fun board game?

Board games are fun when they comply with the following five reasons (read the full article here):

• Theme and components that immerse you in the game.
• Players have to make meaningful choices, that impact the gameplay.
• There’s a random element, that adds suspense and excitement.
• Game mechanisms should encourage interactivity among the players.
• The group has to be right for the game.

To give you an example, one of the most fun board games you can get is Quacks of Quedlinburg. It’s a family-friendly push-your-luck game. You’re drawing chits out of your bag with the goal of creating the best potion. What makes it great is that you are responsible for building the contents of the bag and you decide if you will stop or draw just one more. Draw one too many, and your potion will explode, leaving you empty-handed … This creates plenty of suspense, forces you to make choices, has a strong random element, and is just all-around fun.

What is America’s favorite board game?

After many decades of presence in mainstream pop culture, Monopoly is still going strong when it comes to popularity in a common household. While many modern board games look down on Monopoly for its simplicity, ruthlessness, reliance on luck, and too long playing time, its economic success is undisputed. It has been and still is a gold mine for its publisher, and it’s no surprise it receives many reskins every year. Chess is another great presence. A several hundred years of age, this board game has seen several peaks and dips throughout its lifespan. With the show The Queen’s Gambit being highly popular, it looks like chess is in for another rise in popularity.

What is the most popular board game in the UK?

The answer here is similar to what I said about America. Monopoly still rules the sales charts.

How do you pick a board game?

Anytime I’m looking for a board game, I take it game through 5 steps of recognizing if it’s a good game. These are:

1. Looks and First Impressions – What drew my attention to it?
2. Pedigree (designer and publisher) – What can I expect, based on their previous titles?
3. BoardGameGeek – What is the playing time, player count, complexity, main gameplay mechanisms, and how do others rate it?
4. Written Reviews – In-depth opinion of a trusted reviewer.
5. Video Reviews and Playthroughs – To see the game in action.

With these five steps, my research is thoroughly complete and I can confidently claim whether a game is for me. As kids’ board games are simpler and cheaper, you can skip a lot of these steps and still get satisfactory results. You can also include social media, but those are normally not dependable sources of information. How to choose the best board game for a preschooler?

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What is the board game of the year 2021?

It depends on who you ask. But there’s a silent consensus that Ark Nova, Oath, and Cascadia are definitely high up there.

In Ark Nova, you’re in charge of a zoo, while Oath simulates generations of political struggle for power in a fictional realm. Cascadia, on the other hand, is the most family-friendly. It’s a tile-placement game, where you build a lush natural landscape and fill it with animals.

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What is a good board game for adults to play?

Scythe, a strategic engine-building game set in a post-apocalyptic diesel-punk Eastern Europe is a game, that is highly recommended for adults.

 

It features an excellent theme and components, the rules are intuitive, yet complex. It demands a high level of planning and there’s plenty of interactivity between players, including mech combat.

You can read the full Scythe review or our Top 10 strategy board games for adults, where Scythe came comfortably on top.

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What are the funniest or best board games for parties?

When at a party, the atmosphere is much more relaxed than at a gaming night. Usually, the crowd is also larger and often softened up with alcohol. Therefore the choice of board games must reflect this state. You want simple, funny games, that play swiftly and can accommodate a larger crowd.

 

Best board games for parties are Trivia/Quiz games (i.e. Trivial Pursuit), guessing games (Taboo), action and reaction games (Cards Against Humanity, Dixit), social deduction games (The Resistance, Secret Hitler), and dexterity games (Jenga, Crokinole).

You can read the full Best party board games for adults article here.

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What is the oldest board game in America?

The first known board game in modern America is Travellers’ Tour Through the United States from 1822. It’s a simple map movement game, but instead of dice, it used a spinner to give a random number from 1 to 8. You know, because dice were considered Devil’s toys back then.

 

Interestingly, the map comes without the names of the cities. Rather, the players must correctly name the cities in order to further their advance, which adds a strong educational element and makes me wonder how many of today’s gamers would flop at it. Even more so in the advanced variant, where you also have to state the city’s population.

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What is the best board game in US history?

According to BoardGameGeek, the largest online board game database, the best game of all time is Gloomhaven.

 

It’s a cooperative dungeon crawler, set in a dark fantasy world. You can picture it as Dungeons and Dragons, only with strong euro-mechanics, particularly the clever card play, that determines what your character does.

 

The game is absolutely massive. There are close to 100 scenarios and numerous playable characters. The scenarios are connected to form a story-rich campaign, where you’ll be faced with many difficult choices that will help shape not only your destiny but the world around you, as well.

 

Luckily, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion – a younger, smaller brother – was published in 2020. It retained most of the elements that made Gloomhaven a hit, but it presented itself in a more beginner-friendly manner.

 

If this is your first date with the franchise, you should definitely consider it. It will ease you in nicely with its tutorial, its campaign is shorter, and it’s also considerably cheaper.

Is Bingo a board game?

It depends on what your definition of a board game is. Technically, it could be a board game – it’s played on a table, and has physical components. But, if you ask modern board gamers what they think, I doubt anyone would put it in the same category. Modern board games have veered so far off those mindless party games from the past, that they are worlds apart.

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What are board game characters called?

If you’re referring to wooden people-shaped figurines, they are called meeples. The term was coined in 2000 by Alison Hansel and it comes from blending the words “my” and “people”. The game that inspired him was Carcassone, a tile-placement board game. You place your meeples on features on the map to score them.

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What do most board games have?

The core ingredients of a board game are the theme, components, and game mechanics.

Unless it’s a strictly abstract game, most board games have a clear setting/theme. Often it’s historic, fantasy, or something else. The goal of this is to immerse players into the world and contextualize the game’s mechanisms. Components and artwork go hand in hand with the theme. They present the game to players and range from standard wooden pieces and cardboard tokens to intricate plastic miniatures and metal coins. This element has a high effect on the end price. Game mechanics or the rules of the game determine how the game is played. Some of the more popular are worker placement, dice placement, deck building, tile placement, hand management, resource management, card drafting, push your luck, etc. Most games (particularly the complex ones) combine several game mechanics and try to find innovative ways how to blend them together.

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Is Snakes and Ladders a board game?

Yes, Snakes and Ladders is a board game, albeit an extremely simple one. There’s a track that you move on from start to finish using a 6-sided die. Some spaces on that track are connected by snakes or ladders. If you end on a space with the bottom end of a ladder, you immediately move up to the top of the ladder, gaining a lot of squares. Likewise, if you end up on top of a snake, you slide down, losing squares.

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How many types of board games are there?

This depends on how you decide to categorize board games. You can use the prevailing theme, mechanics, number of players, complexity, etc.

 

Perhaps one of the more rudimentary ways is to split them into just two types: cooperative and competitive. In the former, you play against a game, trying to achieve a common goal, while in the latter, players compete against each other.

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What is the longest-running board game?

This title presumably goes to The Campaign for North Africa: The Desert War 1940-43. The behemoth wargame is somewhat of an urban legend in board gaming.

 

It’s a wargame that covers the entire North African campaign and it goes into details such as supplying your armor vehicles, managing prisoners-of-war, and so on.

 

It’s said to require 5 people per side to manage every detail and, in total, it requires 1200 hours to complete, if all 10 players participate. For comparison, that’s almost 4 months if you play 12 hours every day. And even longer if you have fewer players.

It’s probably safe to say that very few if anyone at all has ever completed it.

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What’s the oldest board game?

Humans have played board games since ancient times. Bones and rocks were probably used to play simple games from the dawn of man. As civilization progressed, so did the games.

But the title of the first proper board game goes to Senet dated back over 4500 years ago. The exact rules are unknown, but reconstructions have been made, allowing the game to be playable even today.

 

The oldest game that we know the exact rules for is The Royal Game of Ur. Basically, it’s a simple roll-and-move game. And it’s not solely luck-based, there’s an element of strategy involved as well.

Although it’s rudimentary to today’s standards, it’s (just like Senet) still available to buy as hand-crafted collectibles that look great on your shelf.

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What board game is harder than chess?

Only one game has outlived chess, both in age and the years it takes to study it. The game is Go and it originated in China over 2500 years ago.

The rules are a lot simpler than in chess. Basically, it’s an area control game where you try to encircle enemy stones by placing them strategically. But the board is large and the strategy can often go layers deep, there are battles for local, as well as global domination. There’s a possibility to go deep into each other’s minds and masters study the game for their entire life.

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What is the hardest game to master?

Any game that is played internationally on a competitive level is difficult to master (if we define master as a level where you at least understand what the best players are doing). Some examples:

• Chess is an obvious example. You can play and study the game for years, but face a master and you’ll be humiliated. The same could be said about Go, which we mentioned in the above answer.
• Poker requires an immense amount of mathematical and psychological knowledge, as well as rock-solid mental stability. Moreover, playing against the best players puts you at risk of losing some serious dough.
• Moving on to modern board games, several of them are quite popular when it comes to tournament play, for example, Magic: The Gathering, Agricola, or Terra Mystica. These are perhaps the ones where the competition is the toughest, although many modern complex board games (i.e. Mage Knight or A Feast for Odin) allow you to dig yourself in and study their strategies for years.

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Is Azul a good game?

Azul, an abstract tile-laying game is an excellent board game. It’s easy to learn and it looks great on the table, which makes it excellent for families or casual gamers. Yet, it possesses that elusive ingredient of easy-to-learn, but hard-to-master, making it equally appealing to regular players.

 

It’s no wonder it came on to of our Best abstract board games article, as well as played highly reputable on our other lists. It truly is a game I can recommend to everybody.

 

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How do you play Scrabble?

Scrabble is a relatively simple board game to play. Each turn, you draw up to 7 letters, and it’s your task to come up with a legal word that you can place on the board, using already placed words as cues. The words are scored according to the rarity of letters used and multipliers on the board.

 

Of course, there’s more strategy beneath the surface. Having a large vocabulary is mandatory, but you can also make clever plays by keeping the board tight and denying multiplier squares to your opponents.

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Is Catan a good board game?

Yes, Catan is still a good board game and a recommended purchase today. It took the board gaming world by storm in 1995  and is singlehandedly responsible for the widespread popularity of board games today. It was just that good.

Today, almost 30 years later, it has been surpassed by many games, both mechanically and thematically. Many experienced players look down on it, but it’s mainly because they’ve grown tired of it, not because it would be a bad game.

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Why is it called Yahtzee?

The popular dice rolling game has quite a history. Its publisher Hasbro claims the name originates since the founding anonymous couple played it on their yacht.

It was first patented in 1956, while its predecessor, the English dice game named Yacht dates back to 1938. And this is where its name and gameplay foundations originate. And in that game, the term yacht means a five-of-a-kind, an event when all five dice show the same face.

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Which Pandemic board game is the best?

Out of the many games in the Pandemic family, the Legacy games are rated highest. They have a campaign of interconnected scenarios, there are twists in the story, players must make tough choices, and these choices seriously affect the game world in future scenarios.

The series started with Season 1, followed by Season 2 and Season 0. Opinions vary on which one is the best, but you should definitely start playing with Season 1 and find out yourself.

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What should I play after Pandemic?

It depends whether you want more of the same or something more demanding. For the former, you should definitely check out Pandemic: Legacy. It’s the same game, only enhanced with a story-driven campaign, where you are faced with tough choices that affect and change the game universe. There are three seasons available. Play them in this order: 1, 2, and 0.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for something more complex, yet still within cooperative waters, I recommend Spirit Island. Each player plays as a spirit of nature, and your task is to protect your island from human invaders, by using fear and the forces of nature. Very challenging and a lot of fun. Also plays great solo.

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Can you play Pandemic by yourself?

It’s possible to play Pandemic by yourself. You would play multi-handed. That means you control multiple characters yourself. Then you play normally, character by character. Multi-handed play is quite popular among solo board games – there are games that do it very well, i.e. Spirit Island.

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What are the 4 diseases in Pandemic?

Officially, the diseases have no names and are set apart only by color. But unofficially, every player group has a name for at least some of them. My favorites are zombie plague for black cubes, yellow fever, “bluemonia”, black plague, red death, “purpes”, as well as more conventional names such as ebola, HIV, or even coronavirus.

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Which Pandemic should I buy first?

After the success of the 2008 game, Pandemic has become a large franchise with many games in its family. If you’re looking for your first Pandemic title, you can’t really go wrong with any of them. The gameplay is roughly similar, only the setting is changed. Pick the one that intrigues you the most.

But if you want me to name just one, here it is: Pandemic Legacy Season One. You’re still saving the world from diseases, only now you’re doing it throughout a 12 scenario long campaign. A campaign, where you’ll often be faced with tough decisions, which will affect the game world around you. Decisions (I don’t want to spoil anything) such as razing cities etc. Extremely immersive game with many powerful moments. After it, continue with Season 2 and Season 0.

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How big is the board game industry?

If we believe statista.com, the board gaming industry was worth 7.2 billion dollars in 2017 and is rising. While this may seem a lot of money, it’s peanuts compared to behemoths such as PC gaming with 37 billion and mobile gaming at 77 billion (both 2020, statista).

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