Best board games 2023 - must-play tabletop titles

There’s never been a better time to pick up one of the best board games and be a board gamer. The musty old world of cardboard counters, paper money, and interminable arguments that you may remember from your childhood is long gone. Today’s tabletop fare, helped by decades of evolution and an influx of ideas from the game-playing powerhouse of Germany, are sleek, quick-playing powerhouses of joy, shining with great art and cool components. These are not your parent’s Monopoly.

In fact, the cavalcade of brilliance has become so diverse that it’s really very difficult to pick games that truly represent the best of what’s on offer. But, always up for a challenge, we’ve tried. Below you’ll find titles that take you from outer space to the Normandy landings of World War 2 and might see you building an art collection out of scrap or puzzling over clues to identify secret agents. There should be something for everyone.

Either way, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Dive in, use our list of the best board games as a starting point, and explore everything that modern board gaming has to offer. If you want to try before you buy, there are now board game cafés in many towns and cities that will let you check these out for a modest cover fee. Otherwise, just get gaming with friends and family alike. You won’t regret spending time with our suggestions, whatever way you choose to do it. 

If you’re looking for more games that require a table (or a set of hands) instead of a screen, visit our lists of best board games for two players and the best card games for adults.

Best board games 2023

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 coloured 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

When Codenames came out in 2015 it wasn’t obvious that it had reinvented both the word and the party genres but it’s only gone from strength to strength, spawning spin-offs and copycat versions in abundance. The conceit was simple: lay out a grid of word cards and give one player on each of two teams a secret card showing which cards in the grid were “theirs”.  That player had to give a one-word clue to connect as many of those cards as possible, leaving the other players to puzzle it out.

You can illustrate the complexities of this with the example of what’s allegedly the best ever clue: Jedi, which links Film, Force, Cloak, Knight, Princess, Space, Star, and War. Actually achieving an epic result like that while the timer ticks down and your teammates stare at your expectantly is another thing entirely. Especially when there’s the ever-present danger of having them accidentally reveal an opponent’s cards or, worse, the instant loss of the “assassin”. And if you’re too worried by the pressure, there’s a harmonious cooperative variant included in the box. 

Best board games 2023 - FAQs

How we made our best board game list

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.

If you want some of the best video games to complement these tabletop adventures, then check out our guides to the best PS5 games, best Xbox Series X games, and best PC games going right now.