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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 run a board game store so my list will be rather lengthy.

But short answer is Gaia Project... Until Age of Innovation drops

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!

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.

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.

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!

The Red Dragon Inn is fun, especially when you drink real alcohol when you "drink" in game

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

Lately our group has been playing a lot of Betrayal at House on the Hill, wish I would have got a copy of Betrayal Legacy when it was in print. Other ones in the current rotation are Root (which I adore), and Call to Adventure. I really want to give Twilight Imperium a go, but I haven't convinced enough friends yet haha.

My single favourite board game is the Game of Thrones. No dice. No luck. Pure tactics and the occasional alliance.

I have apparently terrible luck so games that involve dice, especially d6's do not interest me.

It might be Marrakech now that I think about it. It's not too time taking and friendly to casual players yet not completely luck based. Also placing the rugs just feel so good. Are there other board games that comes with neat little items like Marrakech?

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).

Frosthaven! We’ve also really loved playing Quacks of Quedlinberg - it’s a great one for friends who are less into board games

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.

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.

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've been absolutely loving a couple of the Button Shy games at the moment! They're really nice because I can just slip them into my work bag and play them at lunch. In particular, I've been playing a fair bit of Sprawlopolis and Food Chain Island, both of which are really great solo games.

With other people, I've been playing a whole lot of Spirit Island, which is probably one of my all-time favorites. The amount of diversity in how each of the spirits play is mind-boggling and makes every game feel very different. My regular play-group is also getting pretty excited for the new expansion that's coming out in the next couple of months.

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!

I really like Lords of Waterdeep and Xenoshyft:Onslaught.

My city is an astoundingly good game. My wife and I are playing it basically every weekend at the moment. Super easy to learn, tactically rich, the art is lovely and you make your own city story to some extent. It's just wonderful.