Ready to discover the world of board games? Here are some must-haves to get started. These board games are perfect for beginners because they are simple, fun, and quick to learn. Feel free to explore and find the ones that suit you best! Opinions are subjective.
Sorted in no particular order:
Qwirkle
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Codenames
Two rival spymasters know the secret identities of 25 agents. Their teammates know the agents only by their codenames, single-word labels like “disease,” “Germany,” and “carrot.” Yes, carrot. It’s a legitimate codename. Each spymaster wants his team to identify his agents first… without accidentally discovering the assassin.
In Codenames, two teams compete to see who can contact all of their agents first. Lay out 25 cards, each with a single word on them. The spymasters look at a card that lists each card’s identity, then take turns giving clues to their teammates. A clue consists of a single word and a number, with the number suggesting how many cards in play have an association with the given clue word. Teammates then identify an agent they think is on their team; if they are correct, they can continue guessing up to the specified number of times; If the agent is from the opposing team or is an innocent bystander, the team’s turn ends; and if they have identified the assassin, they have lost the game.
The spymasters continue to give clues until a team has identified all of its agents or the assassin has removed a team from the game.
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Kingdom Builder
In Kingdom Builder, players create their own kingdoms by skillfully building their settlements, with the goal of earning the most gold at the end of the game.
The variable game board is made up of nine different types of terrain, including locations and castles. During a player’s turn, they play their terrain card and build three settlements on three hexes of that type. If possible, a new settlement must be built next to one of that player’s existing settlements. When building next to a location, the player can capture an additional action tile that they can use starting on their next turn.
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Harmonies
In Harmonies, build landscapes by placing colored tokens and create habitats for your animals. To earn the most points and win the game, integrate habitats wisely into your landscapes and install as many animals as possible.
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The Crew
In the cooperative trick-taking game The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, players embark on an uncertain space adventure as astronauts. What do the rumors say about this unknown planet? The eventful journey through space spans 50 exciting missions. But this game can only be won by completing individual tasks common to each player. In order to master the various challenges, communication within the team is essential. But this is more difficult than expected in space.
With each mission, the game becomes more difficult. After each mission, the game can be paused and resumed later. During each mission, it is not the number of tricks that counts, but the right tricks at the right time.
The team only completes a mission if each player succeeds in completing their tasks.
The game comes with 50 missions, with three additional missions released in spielbox 2/2020.
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Cascadia
Cascadia is a tile-laying, draw-along puzzle game featuring the habitats and wildlife of the Pacific Northwest.
In the game, you take turns building your own area of terrain and populating it with wildlife. You start with three hexagonal habitat tiles (with the game’s five habitat types), and each turn, you choose a new habitat tile with a wildlife token attached, then place that tile next to your other tiles and place the wildlife token on an appropriate habitat. (Each tile represents 1-3 wildlife types from the game’s five types, and you can only place one tile on a habitat.) There are four tiles on display, each tile randomly paired with a wildlife token, so you have to make the most of what’s available, unless you have a nature token to spend to choose your choice of each element.
Ideally, you would place habitat tiles to create matching terrain that reduces fragmentation and creates wildlife corridors, primarily because you score points for the largest area of each habitat type at the end of the game, with a bonus if your group is larger than every other player’s. At the same time, you want to place wildlife tokens to maximize the number of points scored by them, with wildlife goals determined randomly by one of four scoring cards for each wildlife type. Maybe hawks want to be separated from other hawks, while foxes want to be surrounded by many different animals, and bears want to be in pairs. Can you achieve this?
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Scout
SCOUT is a “climbing” type game in which cards have two potential values, players cannot rearrange their hand of cards, and can pass their turn to take a card from the current set of high-value cards in their hand.
Specifically, the cards are dual-indexed, with different values on each half of the card, with all 45 cards having every possible combination of the numbers 1 through 10. During setup, the shuffler must randomize both the order of the cards in the deck and their orientation. Once each player has received their entire hand of cards, they take that hand without rearranging any of the cards; if they wish, they can rotate their entire hand of cards in order to use the values on the other end of each card, but again, they cannot rearrange the order of the cards in their hand.
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That’s Pretty Clever!
Choose your dice wisely in Ganz schön clever (in German, it’s rather clever) to place them in the corresponding coloured areas on your scoresheet, creating tricky chain scoring opportunities and racking up the points! The dice you don’t use are just as important as the ones you do, as any die with a lower value than the one you choose can be used by other players, keeping everyone in the game at all times.
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Draftosaurus
Your goal in Draftosaurus is to create the dinosaur park that is most likely to attract visitors. To do this, you must select dinosaur meeples and place them in enclosures that have placement restrictions. Each turn, one of the players rolls a die and this adds a constraint to the enclosures that any other player can place their dinosaur in.
Draftosaurus is a fast-paced, light drafting game where you don’t have a hand of cards that you pass around (after selecting one), but a pile of dinosaur meeples in the palm of your hand.
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