Congratulations: You decided to take off those training wheels, put down a deck of UNO cards, and immerse your toes in the exciting world of board games! Now, it’s important to achieve that level of game complexity before reaching for a box of Twilight Imperium or running investigator trousers around the city of Arkham (Cthulhu’s, not with Batman). There are plenty of great games that are far more welcome to learn and play to help ease you into things, but the lack of complexity doesn’t mean a lack of fun.
The following games on this list were first edited to direct new players to experience not breaking the bank. Secondly, give them a basic understanding of some popular mechanics and game types. And finally, whether it’s with your friends, partners, or random people at your local game shop, or it’s your friends, partners, or random people, then it’s an explosion to play.
The latest cooperative trend of hitting the shelves after winning the biggest board game award of 2024, Spiel des Jahres, is Sky Team. Especially for the two of them playing the role of pilots and co-pilots and landing passenger planes at increasingly tricky airports around the world. You each have a pool of dice and each has specific requirements for the outcome of the dice to make it work, so each faces jointly. The catch is that your roll is a secret and you need to somehow confuse the path without telling your partner what you rolled over.
coup d’etat
Deceptions, doubts, and deductions are all part of the coup tiny box game. The coup asks a simple question: Do you know when your friends are lying to you? Can you find enough of their stories so that they can confidently call out when they are not true? And when your own “life” is on the line, can you do it?
Coups are easy to set up, learn and play in no time. At the start of a new game, each player is given two cards with occupations, each with their own abilities, such as the Captain’s ability to steal money from other players, an assassin who can kill a single card, or Contessa who can block the aforementioned assassin. The goal of the coup is to be the last person with a role remaining. By using your role (either Actual The role you have or your role Claim (having), objects deceive and trick your way. This is the perfect game to bust out at a party, and it has a good taste in the hidden genre of board games.
Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective
Perhaps the biggest departure from what most people consider to be a “board game”, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective pits the wisdom and know-how of you and your friends against the legendary detective himself, when you work to solve some of his most memorable cases.
Follow up on tips, interview people, look at phone books and newspapers to reveal clues, get to the bottom of the case and take notes of yourself. Once resolved, compare the methodology with Holmes to determine whether they found the right culprit. It’s a great game on date nights and cold nights with friends as consulting detectives solve the mystery and they’re all about working together. It’s also great for those who like board games or not, who like true crime podcasts.
Betrayal at a house on the hill
Betrayal at a house on the hill is one of the games that often appear on nights of games around my table. Especially if you have friends around you who aren’t playing games. This is a game that can be explained in just a few minutes, picked up after a round or two rounds around the table, providing a great moment where everyone holds their breath. Finding a crossbow, a ritual dagger, a man walking in armor turns out to be a traitor and can speak from experience.
We are one of the best horror board games in house here at Passthecontroller ranked house. There are many editions and Restkins that use the same ruleset. So, even if the horror aesthetic doesn’t appeal to you, there are variations that almost certainly appeal to your taste.
Star Wars: Deck Building Game
What do you get when you take one of the most famous and important franchises and mix them with one of the most popular modern game types? Star Wars: Deck Building Game, you can hook all of them SHITH and JEDI with great entry points in the deck building genre.
One player plays as a malicious empire, while the other player is on the boots of resistance. Players will take turns trying to defeat three worlds using the series’ recognizable army of ships, characters and weapons. Unlike some games, Star Wars: Deck Building Game comes in a small box and is easy to set up. In other words, save (or conquer) your galaxy immediately.
Dice onions
Dice Throne is a great way to showcase new future board game players the amazing mess of dice wrapped in Yatzi packages. Dice Onion allows players to choose fighters, each with a small deck and a special set of attacks. Attacks are triggered based on dice rolls. The purpose is to reduce the life of the other person to zero.
There are quite a few strategies that you can learn and understand. Or you can roll the dice at all and see what happens. An additional element that makes dice a great beginner game is the fact that you can try out to buy a small two-pack hero set before investing in a large seasonal box set. That being said, these big boxes are pretty appealing, with Marvel season featuring heroes like Thor and Miles Morales, as well as the upcoming X-Men set. If you want to go to OC, there are two sets of eight original characters designed specifically for Dice Throne. Each character is in their own tray, making transporting and setting up dice thrones is also very easy. In other words, Dice Throne is one of the games that easily involve the beginner’s dice.
Cascadia
The theme is surprisingly important when it comes to introducing people to board games. Something like a nerd or offensive topic that is popular in hobby can make people outside of it uncomfortable. But you can’t mistake the amazing Cascadia, a simple game of building a wilderness from hexagonal tiles and inhabiting it with seductive wild creatures. This rule essentially involves selecting a pair of terrain tiles and animals for each turn, adding them to the growing landscape, and trying to meet a scoring pattern that changes each game. It’s fun for every occasion, as there are simple scoring patterns from the start, with more difficult patterns that are difficult to graduate and challenging solo modes to check off. It’s no wonder that in 2022 it won the biggest board game award, Spiel des Jahres, and it was on the list of the best family board games.
Heat: Pedal to metal
Who doesn’t like the thrills of lace? Unfortunately, many racing games are either a hassle-rolling and moving for kids, or are simulations that edge more complex edges of the game. The heat is based on hitting the sweet spot between the two, shifting the simple yet unning gear up and down. The higher the gear, the faster it moves, but each corner of each track is labeled with the best gear you can try. Take it too quickly and you risk spitting out your turn and losing it. The hand of the card that works in parallel with the gear to move the car guarantees plenty of excitement, but many strategies are guaranteed as you need to predict gear changes and slipstream the enemy.
park
Some games have a strange Zen-like atmosphere of calm and tranquility about them when you play, and they tend to make great referral games. Parks has that mood, along with simple rules, quick play times and an absolutely fun component based on 59 US national parks. Players will take turns crossing the modular trail, one for each season this year. Each space offers the opportunity to score by gathering forest and mountain terrain and photographing animals, allowing you to move as much as you like, but you have a catch. It will determine how far and how quickly you want to go with an incredible strategic importance decision. Enjoy the views along the way, whatever you decide.
Just because a game is suitable for beginners doesn’t mean you’re missing out on a fun gaming experience. There are plenty of great games for those interested in adding cardboard and dice to their friends’ hangouts and date night activities. Whether you’re just a dice rolling battle with Marvel’s heaviest batter, a deck building in the Star Wars Universe, or just lying to your friends and lying for fun, you don’t have to stick to a new variation of your monopoly to entertain your friends in the first board game.
Matt Thrower is an Passthecontroller freelancer specializing in tabletop games. You can contact him on blueski @matttr.bsky.social.
Scott White is an Passthecontroller freelance contributor and supports tabletop games and guide coverage. Follow him X/Twitter or Blue skiing.
