The strategy is in the scoring: You get points for roads and cities you control (meaning you have more meeples on them than any other opponent), and through clever tile placement and meeple management you can secure unclaimed areas to score points for structures you didn’t help build. Carcassonne is a tile-laying game with no board you build the board, so to speak, as you go, drawing from a bag of unplayed tiles and placing new ones adjacent to the tiles on the board, lining up roads or cities as permitted, and sometimes placing one of your wooden tokens, called “meeples,” to claim areas. The best Eurogame out there is Carcassonne, in large part because its rules are simple and turns are quick, but there’s a world of strategy within it, including a high degree of interaction with your opponents. Catan is very good, but its importance in board game history exceeds its actual value as a game, and because it can take quite a while to play, it’s never my first suggestion for folks new to the hobby.
Whether you’re looking for accessible, all-ages options for a post-dinner family session, or new challenges to explore with gaming-minded friends during your holiday break, here are 14 titles worth clearing the table for.Įveryone will tell you to start with Catan (formerly known as Settlers of Catan), which is the best-selling Eurogame ever, and the one most responsible for the size of the market and the hobby. in full, with an array of engaging titles appearing on the shelves at Target and Barnes & Noble as well as at specialty retailers online and across the country. The board game renaissance that started in Germany over 20 years ago, which spurred a cascade of games now called German-style or Eurogames, has reached the U.S. Board games are relatively trendy right now, though not the sorts that your parents had on the top shelf of the coat closet, like the interminable Monopoly or that useless word memorization game Scrabble.