Board Games Bucket List

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

The whole galactic civil war, with the Empire hunting a hidden rebel base.

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

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

Expansion 6 is the compilation box: The Count of Carcassonne, King & Scout, The River II and The Cult in one package.

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

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

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

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.

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

Fill your zoo with animals from tile trucks without overcrowding a pen.

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

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.

A twelve-game campaign west across nineteenth-century North America, where each session changes the board for the next one.

Magnetic air hockey for two, played with a handle under the board.

Cable cars over the hills of 1960s San Francisco, collecting tourist attractions along the way.

Recreate a photograph with shoelaces, cubes or sticks and let the table guess.

A river, cannons that jump to capture, and generals who may never meet.

The German map, with passengers who ride your finished routes to collect the goods sitting in each city.

Place settlements on the terrain your card allows and chase the scoring goals.

Program your moves along a 3D train, then watch the plan fall apart.

A huge black-and-white city poster and a stack of crimes to trace through it.

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

Great Old Ones fight over the ruins of Earth in an asymmetric area-control brawl.

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

Expansion 2 adds wine, cloth and wheat to collect off finished cities, the builder who buys you a second tile, and the pig who fattens a field.

Bid, steal and exhibit antiques; simultaneous card selection with a lot of bluffing.