By price
Board Games $25 to $50
The sweet spot - substantial games at reasonable prices.
Light
Patchwork
Two-player tetris-quilt. Tense, quick, looks great on a coffee table.
Light
Sky Team
Two-player cooperative airplane-landing dice game. Tense, beautiful, 20 minutes.
light
MicroMacro: Crime City
Solve intricate mysteries by examining a giant city map full of clues.
Light
Monikers
Charades with a memory: the same absurd names get funnier across three escalating rounds.
Light
One Night Ultimate Werewolf
One chaotic night, one vote, ten minutes. Hidden role deduction with no moderator and no downtime.
Light
Telestrations
Telephone with dry erase sketchbooks. The worse your group draws, the harder everyone laughs.
Medium
7 Wonders Duel
The two-player version that's actually better than the original. Tense, every choice matters.
Light
Splendor
Gem-trading engine builder. Plays in 30 minutes, scales clean from 2 to 4.
Light
Dixit
Surreal-art storytelling game. Cross-generational. Hits in mixed groups.
Light
Camel Up
Bet on racing camels. Riotous, light, plays loud. The party-night pick.
Light
Horrified: Universal Monsters
Cooperative monster-hunting. Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy. Plays family-friendly.
medium
Carcassonne
Tile-placement game where you build a medieval landscape to score points.
medium
Cryptid
Deductively search for the mysterious creature with your unique clues.
light
Gingerbread House
Build gingerbread houses and attract fairy tale characters to score.
Light
Harmonies
Draft three tokens, grow a tiny landscape, lure animals home. Thirty minutes of calm with more bite than it lets on.
Light
Azul
Pattern-laying tile game. Looks beautiful on the table. Teaches in five minutes.
Medium
Calico
Quilt-pattern puzzle. Solo plays beautifully. Adorable, harder than it looks.
Light
Wavelength
Team-based concept-guessing. Lights up mixed-age tables. Endlessly replayable.
medium
Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition
Strategically build and develop Mars faster than your opponents.
light
Cóatl
Assemble vibrant snake-like creatures to fulfill prophecies and score points.
Light
Cascadia
A calm, puzzly tile layer about wildlife and watersheds that plays as well solo as it does with family.
Light
Bomb Busters
Cut the right wire or the team goes boom. The Spiel des Jahres winner that makes deduction feel like an action movie.
Light
Cozy Stickerville
A cooperative sticker village built across ten cozy years. Legacy gaming with nothing torn up and no one stressed.
Medium
Rebirth
Knizia at his cleanest: place a tile, score it, draw again, and somehow the whole map becomes a knife fight.
Medium
Pandemic
Cooperative classic. Save the world together. The game that converts non-gamers.
medium
Azul: Summer Pavilion
Draft tiles to create beautiful patterns and score points strategically.
medium
Res Arcana
Compete as mages harnessing ancient artifacts and summoning creatures.
Light
Ticket to Ride
Train routes across America. Five minutes to learn, plays for years.
Heavy
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion
The best campaign-game starter. Self-contained Gloomhaven with built-in tutorial.
Medium
The Quacks of Quedlinburg
Push-your-luck bag-builder. Tense, joyful, scales clean to four.
medium
The Castles of Burgundy
Acquire and manage estates in Medieval France to accumulate wealth.
medium
Paleo
Work in teams to survive and thrive in a prehistoric world.
Light
Hot Streak
Bet on off-brand mascots, then scream as the race implodes. Twenty minutes of pure noise for almost any crowd.