Strategy Bucket List

Denmark to the Arctic for two or three players, with tunnels, ferries and a very long way north.

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

Fifty alien powers, each of which breaks a different rule.

Expansion 10, now sold as Circus & Artists: the big top pulls a crowd across the map and followers stack into human pyramids for points.

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

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.

Plan a route through a fantasy map using transport cards others also need.

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

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.

Paddle steamers race downriver, picking up passengers and running out of coal.

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

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.

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

Cooperative climate policy: decarbonise before the planet runs out of patience.

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

Fourteen alien species terraform a hex galaxy in the sharpest Euro engine on the shelf.

Dam the Alpine rivers, and steal your rivals' water on the way downhill.

Tunnels, ferries and stations on the best-loved map of the series.

A civilisation game in cards, from bronze tools to space flight, without the six-hour map.

Worker dice grow as they move, building a pyramid one tier at a time.

Deck-building married to worker placement on Arrakis, with combat that bluffs.

A two-player quilt of Tetris pieces and a time track instead of turns.

The two-player animal-farming distillation of Agricola, in an hour.

Nineteenth-century Scotland: cheese, whisky and a market that moves as you sell.

Renaissance patronage, dice-driven and unforgiving of a bad round.

Fantasy races overrun the map and then go into decline on purpose.

Viking Tetris: fill your board with goods, raid, and settle Greenland.

The first big expansion to the island-defence game, adding events and beasts.