Board Games Bucket List

Build a town straight through everyone else's outhouses, then vote on the mess.

Expansion 9, now sold as Sheep & Shepherds: hill tiles sit on top of a second tile and break ties, and a shepherd grows a flock until the wolf comes out of the stack.

Price your own tiles and hope nobody buys them; a Scottish tile-laying auction.

Semi-co-operative survival horror aboard a ship with a secret objective each.

Expansion 4, now sold as Towers & Thieves: stack tower segments to take any meeple within reach hostage, then trade the prisoners back.

Cut the wires in the right order, telling your team just enough and no more.

Build postal routes across Bavaria, drawing cities that fit end to end.

A Canadian dexterity board where you flick discs at a centre hole.

Percentile rolls, 1920s investigators and a sanity score that only goes down; the oldest RPG still in print after D&D.

Sculpt something in clay and let the others guess it, slowly, with questions.

Pull ingredients from a bag and stop before your cauldron explodes.

Expansion 11 puts historic wonders on the map, each one with a rule of its own.

A cycling race with dice, drafting and a peloton that behaves like one.

Five detectives hunt Mister X across a London map; he surfaces every five turns.

Move your own columns higher without bringing the whole villa down.

An action-point expedition through the jungle, uncovering temples and treasure.

The original industrial-revolution canal-and-rail game, meaner than its Birmingham sequel.

No dice, no cards; just seven players lying to each other about 1901 Europe.

The palace garden on hexes, where a tile has to share a colour or a plant with its neighbour.

Hike a trail through the US National Parks, collecting memories and photos.

A global campaign against an Ancient One, one doomed expedition at a time.

A partnership climbing game from Taiwan with bombs and a bet on going out first.

The 200-hour sequel: a frontier outpost to rebuild between dungeon crawls.

A two-player market duel of camels, commodities and bonus tokens.

A twelve-card engine duel: mages, artifacts and essence, in thirty minutes.

The first expansion, and the one that makes long roads worth the risk.

Trick-taking where you must predict exactly how many tricks you will win.

Avoid the tricks, or take them all: the classic shedding game.

Dice, tiles and the purest small-decisions-add-up Euro ever printed.

Factions reshape terrain into their own home ground and race for shared cult tracks.