Board games are an incredibly popular hobby and have been since the beginning of human history. There is something of a divide between the modern board gaming hobby, which often includes highly-specialized games with specific themes and rules intended to capture a specific experience, and classic board games like Scrabble or Life.
Modern board games are popular among people of all ages today, but lots of people still get their start on the classics. There are certain games that are sure to crop up on the shelf of any family game room, coffee shop, or rental cabin. These are classics for a reason, but their omnipresence can get to be a bit much.
10 Catan Started It All
Formerly known as Settlers of Catan, this resource-gathering game is often credited with launching the modern board game movement. Its gameplay can seem somewhat simple and even unbalanced to modern audiences, but upon its release in 1995, it was a revolutionary piece of design. For decades now, it has served as the bridge from casual family games to more specialized board games. With dozens of expansions and variants, Catan is a surefire inclusion in most board gamer collections.
9 Risk Is The Classic Strategy Game
The game of global domination has dominated many a summer afternoon. Risk has players duking it out for global supremacy with brightly colored armies across a stylized version of the world map.
In many ways, Risk represents the upper limit of what casual board gamers are willing to tolerate in terms of complexity, strategy, and length. It's not a great example of the strategy genre, as it's easy for players to get eliminated hours before the game is over. A Risk board of one kind or another is a common sight in most board game collections.
8 Betrayal At House On The Hill Is A Great First Modern Board Game
Betrayal at House on the Hill combines dungeon exploration with a hidden-role type game as investigators explore a mysterious haunted house until one of them becomes the Traitor. It is another common jumping-on point for people interested in getting into more complicated board games, and for good reason. Betrayal gets a bit tedious after about the tenth playthrough, but it's always handy to have on the shelf for new players.
7 Scrabble Is One Of The Most Famous Word Games
Word games have been popular for centuries, and Scrabble is one of the most popular examples. It's great for a casual game night, but it features one of the biggest potential skill gaps in casual games.
Not only are players with bigger vocabularies going to be at an advantage, but experienced Scrabble players know the distribution frequency of tiles and how to build towards certain bonus spaces. Scrabble's omnipresence is helped by countless digital adaptations and knockoffs, and almost everyone is at least familiar with the concept.
6 Othello Always Somehow Crops Up
Reversi is a game with a contested history, with several Englishmen claiming to have invented it in 1883. Most modern audiences will know Reversi as Othello, a standardized version of Reversi first patented in Japan in 1971 by salesman Goro Hasegawa. After Mr. Hasegawa passed away in 2016, the New York Times reported that Othello has sold more than 40 million copies. Othello is the kind of game that always seems to be sitting in the corner of a classroom or under someone's bed, regardless of if anyone can remember where it came from.
5 Battleship Is A Childhood Favorite
It's possible to play Battleship with nothing but a set of graph paper and a pencil, but plenty of physical versions of the game exist as well. Players take turns guessing at the position of enemy ships on a grid, using small pegs to keep track of their hits and misses. Lots of people have a Battleship game pass through their hands at one point or another. Even after they give it away, it's pretty common to find those little pegs kicking around in the corner of a drawer for years to come.
4 Trivial Pursuit Can Be Played Casually With Just The Cards
The perfect game for collectors of obscure knowledge, Trivial Pursuit is surprisingly versatile. It can be played as a board game, with players advancing their tokens around a wheel collecting wedges of different colors from different categories. But the cards that contain the questions can be used to simply swap trivia without needing to break out the full board. Plenty of households have a deck or two of Trivial Pursuit cards sitting around, perfect for burning an hour after a family dinner.
3 Checkers Can Be Made Out Of Anything
It's hard to even call Checkers one game. In reality, it is a collection of strategy games using two sets of colored tokens and a checkered board. The most popular format uses an eight by eight square board and has players jumping to capture the opponent's pieces.
Thousands of variations of Checkers boards are available, and almost everyone has one somewhere. Many people even choose to make their own Checkers sets, as they are incredibly easy to fabricate.
2 Monopoly Is Popular, For Some Reason
In many ways, Monopoly is the archetypical American family board game. It has been heavily marketed throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, with hundreds of variants and upgraded versions. The original remains the most popular, having sold over 250 million copies and estimated to have been played by billions of people. Monopoly has a bad reputation among more discerning board game players, potentially with good reason. It can be extremely long, and often results in one player being marked the clear winner long before the game actually ends.
1 Chess Is One Of The Most Popular Games Ever
Chess is one of the oldest games still popular today, and popular it is. A chessboard can easily be displayed on a coffee table in addition to being a part of a larger board game collection. Chess saw a huge boom in popularity in 2020 thanks to online platforms like chess.com and the first wave of Coivd-19 quarantines. Online Chess can be a great way to improve, but plenty of players prefer the look and feel of a real, physical board.