Board Games Bucket List

Chess with a shuffled back rank, so the opening book is useless.

Double-decker buses around 1970s London, and the fastest game in the series to teach.

Spend carrots to move; the first Spiel des Jahres, and still a clean race game.

A crew of thieves in a city lit by demon blood, where the heist is planned backwards through flashbacks instead of at the table.

The grim Old World from the bottom up: characters start as ratcatchers and boatmen, and the critical tables take limbs off.

Vikings fight for glory in a doomed world, with drafted powers each age.

Move your canoes across a river of moving discs and do not go over the falls.

The version for six-year-olds: shorter routes, six tickets to win, and no points to count.

Build castles upward and score by the level your knight stands on.

A South Asian tabletop strike-and-pocket game, all wrist and chalk.

Stack blocks into skyscrapers and take over the ones already built.

A tournament in eight rounds where everyone plays at once and the deck fights for you.

Two players, no talking, dice on a cockpit panel; land the plane together.

Night City between the corporate wars, the current edition of the Pondsmith line that Cyberpunk 2077 was built on.

Expansion 3, now sold as Dragon & Fairy: a dragon walks the board eating followers, the fairy protects the one she stands with, and magic gates drop a meeple anywhere.

Draw your own track on the map with a crayon, then race the trains you built.

Character creation runs a career term by term and can kill you before play starts; the first science-fiction roleplaying game.

Ocean exploration with a crew you build; the 2025 winner and a sharper Endeavor.

Your workers age and die, and the good deaths score; a worker placement about generations.

Colours and shapes on wooden tiles; Scrabble without the words.

Carts through the canals of the Dutch Golden Age, with merchandise bonuses for the goods you deliver.

Haul freight across Europe by lorry, bidding for the contracts nobody else wants.

Expansion 5 adds abbey tiles that plug any hole in the map, mayors whose strength is the pennants in their city, barns that score a field early, and wagons that move on when their feature closes.

Expansion 7, and the only one with dexterity in it: a fair tile starts a round where everyone flicks tokens off a small wooden catapult to knock out or steal meeples.

Expansion 8 lets a road bridge a field, turns a two-tile city into a castle that cashes in on the next thing scored nearby, and auctions tiles at bazaars.

Trams and U-Bahn lines across the city, with sightseeing stops that score at the end.

The Generic Universal RolePlaying System: one point-buy rulebook built to run any setting, from Imperial Rome to interstellar war.

Lay tiles into a peaceful landscape, campaign by campaign; the digital game as cardboard.

A push-your-luck deck-builder about spirits putting out a forest fire.

Move stones up five tracks, each of which you can only ever go one way along.