Ant Cule is responsible for introducing me to most of the board games I’ve ever played and would have probably introduced me to a whole lot more if I my shout-out-while-the-teacher’s-talking tendencies didn’t mean he had to repeat the rules several times. While I flounced around Tuscany, he wrote about some of them. Should you have a nerdy bone in your body, you should take his advice. Under his guidance, I’ve played six of these and enjoyed them all.
The classics
The sorts of games that probably put you off board games as a child
Chess
There are many true tests of a relationship, but I think the ultimate one is whether it can sustain a tense, silent hour hunched over a chessboard. Can it survive the forks and the pins? The forgotten knight attacks? The pawn sacrifices? The revealed attacks? Chess is the fire that forges a friendship. A game that has stood the test of time, honed to cruel perfection. Part brain teaser, part social deduction, part objet d’art, all adding up to a lazy but useful metaphor for spy thrillers. You could spend several lifetimes trying to uncover its mysteries, but it will never yield them all. It’s the grandmaster of the balancing act all games must perform, simultaneously kind of boring and tedious but also endlessly fascinating and fun. This is because rules are kind of boring and tedious, but limitations breed creativity. Be too boring and you won’t get played; be too fun and you won’t be taken seriously. A PLUS
Monopoly
I played this early on in my relationship with my now-wife and now-in-laws. I won. They don’t remember because they left the table one by one as I bankrupted them. I remember because I sat at that table for the whole five hours. *
Never-fails for first-timers
There needs to be a class of game in your collection that guarantees a good time for people who have never played a board game before and/or whose only experience is one of the classics. These games are simple enough to grasp after a single round and complex enough that you’ll want to replay them immediately.
Camel Up
I’m yet to play a round of Camel Up with newbies where they haven’t come out the other side in love. The premise goes like this: camels race around a track and you gamble on the outcomes. You can place bets on who will be ahead at the end of a round, who will win the whole race, or who will lose the whole race. You can also choose to roll the dice and get the camels moving. This is where things change, as the camels stack up if they land on the same square. Camels at the top of the stack are counted as ahead of camels at the bottom and camels at the bottom can carry camels on top of them. As you can imagine, it’s wildly unpredictable. Surefire bets become head-in-hand yelling in a teetering blend of playing the odds, feeling like a professional gambler, and blind chaos. The perfect start to a game night, with the added bonus of a palm tree that pops up in the middle of the board and never fails to delight. A MINUS
Six Nimmt
There is a breed of German game that is, simply put, good, efficient fun. Not much in the way of theming or art, but a game engine so refined it’s like well-spent taxes. Six Nimmt is a game of laying cards down on rows whilst trying to avoid laying the sixth card in a row. Sounds simple to achieve. Is addictively not. ***
Games for when you’ve played a few in your time
So, you’re ready to play more—and more challenging—games. Where next? These games blend interesting mechanics with fun theming and eye-catching art.
Quacks of Quedlinburg
One of the most fun things about playing games is pushing your luck. It’s also the reason why people make fortunes off gambling. Sure, the house wins most of the time, but that doesn’t mean today isn’t your day. The Quacks of Quedlinburg finds that itch and scratches like hell. The central gameplay loop is pleasingly simple: as a quack who’s creating a potion, you draw ingredients from a bag one at a time to add to your pot and score points to buy better ingredients next time to score even more points. But draw too many pesky garlickes and your pot explodes. The theme is great, the art pleasingly garish. There are also different options for the effects the ingredients have, meaning no two games are ever the same. But it’s all secondary to that mercilessly compelling gameplay loop. A
Root
An asymmetric game about cute little woodland critters at war, all vying for supremacy of a woodland. And by asymmetric, I mean each player plays as a faction with its own powers, skills, and ways of winning. Some play armies, some individual creatures. So far, my experience of Root has been like the World Cup—you play your best for 90 minutes and the Marquise de Cat still wins. ***
Roleplaying games
Part of the reason people think games are for nerds is that fantasy is for nerds. And roleplaying games blend fantasy and gameplaying. Of course, there is much more ludic theory to it—the dice actually represent the pure chaos of the universe, and the mechanics reinforce and generate the themes to create meaningful stories. On the other hand, play too much and you’ll acquire vocabularly like “ludic theory”.
Dungeons & Dragons
My first character was a gnome bard who had black hair and used his lute to play Ye Olde Emo. His name was Crumblesnout. He was brave, more than a little reckless, and stood by his friends no matter the cost. His friends were all played by people I’d only ever met playing D&D in a game cafe in Greenwich. I didn’t speak to any of them about their lives outside of our fantasy world. But that’s the point. Humans are storytelling creatures; we love to find out what happens next when people get into trouble, when the danger is greater than we possibly imagined. We love to see what people will sacrifice for what really matters to them. Roleplaying games are distilled, shared storytelling. A communal experience that truly lives in the mind. I last played Crumblesnout four years ago, but still remember his experiences as if they were my own. From Crumblesnout I moved to DM-ing (dungeon mastering, ed) a campaign that lasted three years, got us through the pandemic, and got mentioned in my wedding speech. Roleplaying is one of the most purely creative acts I’ve ever undertaken, and it has truly changed my relationship to creativity. A MINUS
Goblin Quest
A short, sharp, funny introduction to what roleplaying can be. You play a bunch of incompetent but enthusiastic goblins and try to carry out a madcap scheme. Did I mention the goblins die the moment something goes wrong? But it’s okay because each player plays a group of 5 goblins. Violent, deranged, hilarious goblin deaths ensue. **
Social gaming
When your game evenings become the stuff of legend, you may find yourself with more players than your collection can handle. That’s when you need a good bank of games based on social interaction that can handle more than six players.
Werewolf
You think you know your friends, and then you play Werewolf with them. The rules are so simple that the game can be played without any equipment. Everyone playing is a villager, except not everyone is just a villager, because one or two of you are werewolves. The game is played through two phases that loop: a nighttime phase (where the werewolf/wolves strike), and a daytime phase (where their victim is revealed, and the villagers must vote to execute one of their number suspected of being a werewolf). The number of villagers gradually whittles down. If there’s the same number of werewolves as villagers at any point, the werewolves win. If the werewolves are successfully discovered, the villagers win. Otherwise, it’s all casting suspicions, lies, counter-lies, and evasion. Shifty looks are punished, being too quiet is punished, being too loud is punished. A social game of cat and mouse that all but guarantees everyone wanting to play another round. A MINUS
Champion of the Wild
I like storytelling games. Most often that manifests itself in D&D or similar. Sometimes, though, it manifests itself in loudly trying to convince my friends that my leatherback turtle would be unbeatable in a game of capture the flag. ***