Board games are a great way to break the ice, whether you’re at a party or hosting a get-together with folks you haven’t seen in a while. But with so many options available — from strategy board games to social ones that require singing or drawing — it can be hard to find the right one for you and your friends. So while we’ve written about board games before — including the best two-player board games, best family board games, and best board games for kids — here, I’ve rounded up the 26 best board games for adults, according to fellow Strategist staffers, contributors, and a variety of people who play them all the time.
Update on December 10, 2024: Updated prices and checked stock for all products.
Best party board game for adults overall
“Hands down, Just One is our favorite new party game,” says Kelsey Demers, who runs the board-game blog the Tabletop Family. “It’s simple to play, a breeze to teach, and utterly addictive.” Word-association games are a great choice to play with friends in larger groups because they are “full of inside-joke possibilities and they let you make new memories by reliving old ones,” explains Meeple Mountain founder Andy Matthews. The main objective, as the title suggests, is for players to help their teammates guess a word by suggesting “just one” word as a hint. Which sounds easy enough, but, as Matthews warns: “Watch out, duplicate words cancel each other out.” A right answer scores your team one point, while a wrong answer docks two points, with the ultimate goal being to get as many points out of 13 as possible.
Best strategy game for adults
“The premise of Saboteur, an inexpensive, whimsically mining-themed game designed by Frederic Moyersoen and produced by German games company Amigo, is relatively simple: Players work toward a shared goal, but some of their number — the saboteurs — are secretly working against the majority, the miners,” explains Strategist writer Erin Schwartz, who compares it to similar games like Mafia and Among Us. “Although Saboteur is a tabletop game, the basic unit of play is the same, which is talking to your friends to figure out who’s working against the group.” While the game can be played with as few as three, Schwartz finds its best for larger groups of five or more players, to keep things interesting. The game scales well to groups of different skill level and competitiveness, they add. “But with a group of seasoned liars and scammers, it can get downright Machiavellian with increasingly baroque tests of fidelity, side deals, and emotional appeals to the friends you intend to betray.”
Best beginner strategy game for adults
If you’re looking for a more entry-level strategy game, Ticket to Ride is an adventure-style game in which players attempt to cross the country and connect cities by building train routes. It is easy to pick up “but also offers a level of strategy and tactics just deep enough for competitive gamers to return to time and again,” says Ian Ross, who runs the popular Instagram page Board Games As Art.
Best fast-paced strategy board game for adults
Strategist senior writer Liza Corsillo discovered this game by way of her “strategy-game connoisseur” brother and it quickly became a family game-night staple. According to Corsillo, Raccoon Tycoon combines the fast play of Ticket to Ride with the social interaction of Settlers of Catan, “but is more engaging and fun to look at.” Like Ticket to Ride, a player will win the game by collecting the most points, “but there are multiple ways to earn them — amassing wealth and owning railroads, towns, or buildings — so it’s harder to get bored.” Corsillo also notes that part of what sets Raccoon Tycoon apart is “the intricate, uncanny illustrations,” designed by painter Annie Stegg. “Every time I play, I discover some clever detail that makes me laugh,” she adds. “Another perk is that you can play with as few as two people or as many as five, and though you have to pay attention to multiple things at once, it’s not so complicated that a beginner or child couldn’t win on their first time playing.”
Best adult board game for pop-culture fans
“Based on the classic parlor game Celebrity, Monikers is a silly social affair for four to 20 friends,” says Dylan Speed of Meeple Mountain. Players give clues to teammates, hoping they’ll guess what’s on the card which could be anything from a world-famous pop star to a brief viral sensation, or even an obscure concept like sausage fingers, he explains — which makes it an excellent pick for pop-culture fans. “Over three rounds that allow progressively fewer words — from unlimited, to one, to none (charades) — everyone will shout and laugh their way through an evening of making nonsense and new inside jokes,” promises Speed.
Best word-association board game for adults
“Using only a couple words as clues, can you get your team to correctly guess your words?” Dr. Joey J. Lee, director of the Games Research Lab and coordinator of the M.A. Program in Design and Development of Digital Games at Teachers College, Columbia University, asks about the basic premise of this spy-themed Czech favorite. Similar to the basic elements of charades, players divide into two teams with one designated spymaster providing clues. By guessing the words correctly, players unveil the other teams’ agents. The first to unmask all of its opponents’ spies wins.
Best drawing-focused board game for adults
“This is my favorite party game when mixing kids and adults,” says Scott Cooper, owner of Seattle-based Blue Highway Games. A cross between Pictionary and telephone, each player attempts to draw the Telestration word they have been given. When the time is up, all players pass their sketch to the person next to them, who attempts to guess what has been drawn on the dry-erase board. Everyone then passes their guess — which ideally matches the previous player’s word — to the next player, who is then tasked with drawing it. The game is finished once all of the boards have been returned to their original player. According to Dr. Michael James Heron of Meeple Like Us, a board-game-review site with a focus on accessibility, “It plays really quickly, has everyone laughing all of the time, and likely won’t provoke a single argument.” Kurt Refling of Meeple Mountain agrees: “The results are gut-bustingly funny.”
Best adult board game for Solitaire fans
Strategist contributor Lauren Guidry loves Dutch Blitz, which has been described as a kind of “very energetic solitaire.” Guidry calls the dopamine hit from a quick game “euphoric,” and says she’ll often persuade her husband to play a few hands between meetings when they are working from home together. Dutch Blitz can also be played solo.
Best adult board game for game night
The party game we recommended as a gift for a “34-year-old neurosurgeon son who is into Magic: The Gathering.” The game is suitable for up to 12 players and takes around a half hour to play. Players are split into two teams, with one player designated as the “psychic.” The team must move a needle to the correct position on a dial. The “psychic” knows where said target is and then selects a card with a scale. The psychic then must give the team a clue to try to get them to place the needle correctly. For example: where, on a scale from hot to cold, would you place coffee? If the team is able to interpret the clue and position the needle, they win a point. The first team to score ten points wins.
Best illustrated board game for adults
As our friends over at Vulture put it: “I can’t think of the last time a new board game received the kind of widespread acclaim and mainstream attention as Wingspan, a game about birds and bird-watching that truly integrates its theme into gameplay and features beautiful artwork.” The game incorporates over 150 species of birds and asks players to collect the best birds to add to your aviary. It’s also a favorite among actual birders for its attention to detail and beautiful illustrations.
Best fast-paced card game for adults
Strategist writer Lauren Ro, who admits she finds most board games “needlessly complicated and mind-numbingly boring,” says Bohnanza converted her from a game skeptic to an enthusiast. “It’s fun. It’s fast. The artwork is delightful. Best of all, it’s easy to learn, even for a dolt like me.” The concept is simple enough: Each player is a bean farmer who plants different varieties of beans; players harvest their crops in exchange for gold, and the more beans you harvest, the more coins you collect. However, the game dictates that you play with a fixed hand, meaning you have to play it in the order the cards were dealt or drawn, which makes things a bit more complicated since your hand dictates which bean you can plant in each field at each turn. Players must then barter with one another to trade beans, which adds elements of strategy and negotiation to the gameplay. “I didn’t think I could ever love a game, but this is the only one I actually look forward to playing and introducing to friends when there are four or more adults in my home,” Ro says.
Best push-your-luck-style board game for adults
The Quacks of Quedlinburg is one of board-game enthusiast and Cartamundi tabletop games ambassador Sean Amdisen-Cooke’s “all-time favorite games” to play. “It’s a push-your-luck-style game where players draw blindly from their ingredient bags,” he says. Some ingredients will help you gain points and coins which you then spend on more resources. “But if you draw too many of the wrong ingredients, your pot will explode and you’ll have to make the hard choice between getting only victory points or coins,” which will put you behind your opponent, he explains.
Best beginner campaign-style game for adults
“Charterstone is a campaign-style game in which, over the course of 12 games, you’ll build and expand a village shared by you and your opponents by constructing buildings and unlocking new elements with each play,” says Demers. “Consider it the board-game equivalent of a Netflix binge,” she adds, because you won’t be able to stop playing the game once you start. The branching storyline slowly grows more complicated, and by the end, after you’ve completed your 12-game campaign, “you will have a unique-to-you board game you can play again and again.”
Best cooperative board game for adults
If you find battling a fictional pandemic soothing compared with living through one, Pandemic, Greg May, owner of the Uncommons and Hex & Company, calls it a “stellar cooperative game.” The main objective is for players to work together to stop the spread of four diseases and save the world. “This is considered a modern classic because it has a simple set of rules, it has a theme everyone can get into, and it is highly replayable,” adds Ronny Alexander of the cooperative board-game review site Co-op Board Games.
Best easy-to-learn board game for adults
If you’re looking for a “quick, snappy” game that is easy to pick up, but “still has a bit of substance to it,” board-game blogger Eric Yurko suggests Cascadia. The goal of the game is to create a Pacific Northwest ecosystem by collecting different animals. And Yurko has one word to describe the work of game designer Randy Flynn: “exceptional.”
Best tile-placement game for adults
According to Yurko, Carcassonne is a “classic,” which asks players to build cities, roads, and farms. While the gameplay is “very simple,” the complexity and fun come from its numerous expansions, making it a game you can play for years to come.
Best adult board game for two players
Patchwork, created by accomplished game designer Uwe Rosenberg, is one of the best two-player games for beginners. The game challenges players to strategically collect different pieces to create a quilt. May calls it “the perfect game for couples” that is sure to delight “fans of Blokus or Tetris.” Cooper adds that although the rules are simple to understand and it only takes about 15 minutes to play, the “subtle strategy keeps it interesting.” May agrees: “Games are usually quite close, and there are just enough layers to keep you coming back without dragging things out.”
Best story-telling game for adults
Walsh also loves the party game Dixit, which he describes as “a great icebreaker of a game, fantastic for getting everyone interacting.” It begins with one player being designated the storyteller; that player makes up a sentence based on the image on one of the cards in their hand. Then each player selects the card in their hand that best matches the sentence and gives it to the storyteller. The storyteller shuffles the cards and presents them to the other players, who place bets on which is the original card with the winners gaining points for correct guesses. As an added bonus, “the card artwork is beautiful, imaginative, and sometimes a little surreal,” Walsh says.
Best resource-management game for adults
Another popular option is 7 Wonders, “a trading and resource-management game in which players build up their architectural wonder across three ages of time,” explains Lee. “Efficiently building your civilization’s commercial routes, military, or technology can give you an edge in the future.”
Best immersive board game
Heron also recommends the “clever and beautiful” Parks, which he describes as “a wonderful, evocative hike through the National Park System of America.” Players take on the role of hikers as they navigate different trails, collecting memories of the different places they visit. The game is played in four rounds, each one representing one of the seasons with the trail tiles being rearranged before players begin the next round. The game features 48 unique illustrations from over 35 artists, as well as 102 color-coded wood tokens that feature 12 delicately carved animals native to the country’s parks.
Best advanced board game
“Fans of Risk should definitely give Scythe a try because of its fantastical art and beautiful miniatures,” says May. Scythe takes place in a post-WWI dystopia where players have to vie for resources and land. Since the rules are complicated and the gameplay long, it’s a good option for serious gamers who are looking for a game to go on for hours.
Best replayable card game
“This small card game is unlike anything else out there right now,” promises Alexander. The gameplay seems simple: You have to work together to play cards in ascending order. The twist? No one can talk about the cards in their hands. Because of this surprise element, the game has lots of potential for replaying. Alexander says, “There are plenty of exciting moments in every game of The Mind.”
Best role-playing game
Arkham Horror is “a rich storytelling experience filled with unique encounters, secrets to uncover, and a campaign that unfolds whether you win or lose,” according to board-game designer Rob Sparks, who calls it “a great game to get lost in with a buddy.” It blends together a traditional card game with role-playing elements as players take on the roles of two investigators — each with their own set of strengths and weaknesses — who attempt to solve the game’s mysteries. “This experience of mystery and horror is totally worth your attention,” he promises.
Best role-playing game for beginners
Strategist writer Amelia Jerden just got finished playing this game with a group of friends over the past few months and says it’s a good option for those who want to dip their toe into the world of role-playing games. “It’s a cross between a board game and a tabletop role-playing game,” she says. “Less complicated than Dungeons and Dragons, but more complicated than Monopoly.”
Best dominos-esque board game
“In Kingdomino, players use tiles featuring different land types to build kingdoms within a set-size grid,” explains Amdisen-Cooke. Its name — a portmanteau of kingdom and domino — nods to how you play it: Players can only add a tile to the grid if the one it touches contains a matching land type to theirs (like how you’d match dominoes). The game can be played with either two or four players.
The Strategist is designed to surface the most useful, expert recommendations for things to buy across the vast e-commerce landscape. Some of our latest conquests include the best acne treatments, rolling luggage, pillows for side sleepers, natural anxiety remedies, and bath towels. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change.
Every editorial product is independently selected. If you buy something through our links, New York may earn an affiliate commission.
