Category Archives: Board Games

I’ve only played Ticket to Ride twice in the past few years, finding it to be rather long for the type of gameplay it offers. I bought Ticket to Ride: San Francisco for a gaming buddy in 2023, and it’s become a staple at our table ever since—it captures the essence of Ticket to Ride in a game that can be played in 20 minutes.

Cycladic League is a browser-based BASIC pixel-art civilization game where you lead the people of your island to explore more of the Cyclades archipelago, to construct buildings, and to recruit sailors, warriors, priestesses, and more. You can play it in about twenty minutes.

In 1956, to implement chess on the MANIAC I, Paul Stein and Mark Wells reduced the size of the chessboard from 8×8 to 6×6. Their Los Alamos chess variant is possibly the first bit of chess ever programmed.

The boyfriend of one of my best friends calls me “The Logger.” Not “The Blogger”: “The Logger. He knows I log my beers, log my boardgames, log my books, log my rides, log my weight. (He should see our work logs, where I’ve kept timesheets since 2012 so I can conduct time-usage analysis on myself.) Why do I log so many things?

The most played board games are old; some are even ancient (#2 most played, Checkers; #3 Chess; #13 most played, Backgammon). The only game to make the list from this century—and just making the list, at #22—is Ticket to Ride. 

The fundamental tension of the Twilight Struggle series of Cold War games is that you often have to play cards that help your opponent. The strategy centers around determining when to play such cards.

Dark Tower was one of my favorite boardgames as a kid. It was an “electronic boardgame,” a category that came to life in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dark Tower really was a boardgame, complete with a board and player pawns (nicely sculpted plastic warriors, as well as a dragon miniature) with a rotating computer assistant shaped like a black tower.

⭐⭐⭐⭐, 4 of 5 stars, a fun mobile boardgame if not quite as thematic or challenging as I’d like. I wanted something heavier to play on my phone while I travelled, so I picked up Steam: Rails to Riches by Martin Wallace (available, no surprise, on Steam as well as for the iPhone and Android). The game is a redesign of Age of Steam, which I’ve played a bit and always found to be a taut experience.

We asked over 1,000 U.S. adults what tabletop games they had played last year, “in real life, not on an electronic device.” The most played board games were Monopoly (37% had played), Checkers (25%), and Chess (24%). The most played card games were Solitaire (32% had played), Uno (29%) and Blackjack (25%).

If you were invited to a beer-and-pretzels game night, but you’re the designated driver, here are my favorite “non-alcoholic” beers to consider, though technically some of these do have up to 0.5 alcohol by volume (ABV). Or perhaps you’re thinking of abstaining or limiting your alcohol consumption.

Dune: Imperium is a deck-building worker placement game about political intrigue that plays best with 3 or 4 players. With great implementations on Steams, Google Play, and the Apple App Store, it is also a fun board game to play electronically. You play a character representing one of four Great Houses (e.g., the Atreides House).

I ignored the release of Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition when it came out. I thought the original edition was a phenomenal Ameritrash-style civ game, and I’d already decked my copy out with 3D models of the wonders and with custom wooden tokens for resource tracking. I was wrong to ignore it. Earlier this year, I re-played the original a few times and realized that certain advances (e.g., technologies) were overpowered and that the beginning of the game was pretty scripted. So I downloaded the revised rules [PDF] and compared them to the original. To […]

One of the things that Axis & Allies is not particularly concerned about is modeling the rapid technological change that took place during World War II. For the most part, a tank at the start of the game has the same capabilities as a tank at the end of the game, a fighter plane at the start of the war has the same capabilities as a fighter plane at the end of the game, etc.  This is most unlike the actual war. For instance, just look at the proliferation of bombers and […]