Best Beginner Board Games

With colorful plastic tiles and a simple premise – collect sets of similar tiles to score points – Azul is a great game for folks who want to dabble in the hobby of board games. The goal is to fill up a small grid, earning points by completing lines and connecting filled-in spots on your grid to each other. It's been said before, but it rings true for Azul: It's quick to learn, but it takes time to master and figure out strategies. This makes Azul a great addition to any existing board game player’s collection as well.

As an added bonus, there are a number of variants that change out the theme while retaining the core gameplay. For example, if you are more of a fan of chocolates and treats than colors and patterns, perhaps Azul: Master Chocolatier would be more up your alley.

In Faraway, you're exploring a mysterious land peopled by peculiar strangers, represented by the play of cards from your hand, illustrated by suitably exotic art. The cards have a potential points value and a set of icons that you must match on other cards you've played in order to win those points. Sounds easy enough, but there's a delightful brain bending catch in that your assess your cards backwards, so the last card you played has no other cards to match with, whereas the first can match them all. It's a simple trick but it transforms this tableau-builder into a most peculiar and engaging puzzle.

Ticket to Ride is one of those games that could find a place on any person's game shelf, whether they’re longtime players with an established game group or a family getting into the hobby. The premise is relatively simple: use matching colored train cards from your hand to turn them into train routes that connect the specific cities listed on your goal cards.

Ticket to Ride also has a wide range of versions that will take you around the world – from the United States to Europe, Paris to Amsterdam – you can find the version that interests you the most. For families with younger players, Ticket to Ride First Journey will be a good choice, and groups that get together frequently may want to check out Ticket to Ride Legacy.

For those new players seeking a cooperative experience rather than a competitive one, there are few games that offer it quite as well as the pandemic. Each player will be assigned one of six potential jobs, such as the Dispatcher, which can move other players around the map, or the Medic, which can remove extra diseases from their location; you and the other players will need to work together to cure and eradicate four deadly diseases that are quickly spreading around the globe.

Few games can offer such a tense and rewarding experience while still remaining easy to teach and not taking overly long to set up or play. With plenty of expansions as well (including one that makes the game one-player versus many), if you find yourself enjoying Pandemic, there are tons of options and expansions available to keep your games fresh.

The latest cooperative craze to hit the shelves after winning board gaming's biggest prize, the Spiel des Jahres, in 2024 is Sky Team. It's specifically for two, who take the roles of a pilot and copilot, landing an airliner at a series of increasingly tricky airports across the world. You each have a pool of dice and are jointly faced with a panel of instruments, each of which has particular requirements for dice results in order to make it work, often requiring a balance of numbers from each player. The catch is that your roll is secret and you must somehow muddle a way through without telling your partner what you've rolled, creating a dense and exciting web of hidden hints and uncertain communications.

Coup

Deception, suspicion, and deduction are all part of the small-box game of Coup. Coup asks the simple question: Do you know when your friends are lying to you? Can you spot their tells well enough that you can confidently call them out when they aren’t being truthful? And can you do it when your own “life” is on the line?

Coup is an easy game to set up, learn, and play quickly. At the start of a new game, each player is given two cards with occupations on them, with each one having unique abilities, including the Captain’s ability to steal money from another player, the Assassin that can kill a single card, or the Contessa that can block the previously mentioned assassinations. The goal of Coup is to be the last person with a role left. By utilizing your roles (either the actual roles you have or those you claim to have), the object is to deceive or trick your way to the top. This is a great game to bust out at parties and a good taste of the hidden-role genre of board games.

Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective

Perhaps the biggest departure from what most people consider a "board game," Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective pits you and your friends' wits and know-how against the legendary detective himself as you work to solve some of his most memorable cases

Take your own notes as you follow up on tips, interview people, and look through the telephone book and even newspapers to uncover clues and get to the bottom of the case. Once you have it solved, you compare your methodology against Holmes’ to determine whether or not you found the right culprit. Since Consulting Detective is more about solving a mystery and having everyone work together, it’s a great game for date nights or a chill night with some friends. It's also a great one for folks who like true-crime podcasts, whether you like board games or not.

Betrayal at House on the Hill

Betrayal at House on the Hill is one of those games that frequently comes out during game nights around my table – especially if friends who don’t play games are around. It’s a game that can be explained in just a few minutes, picked up after a round or two around the table, and offers great moments where everyone will hold their breath. Discovering that the guy who found a crossbow, ceremonial dagger, and is walking around in armor turns out to be the traitor can really make you sweat, speaking from experience.

We here at IGN rank Betrayal at House on the Hill among one of the best horror board games around., There are a bunch of editions and reskins utilizing the same ruleset, so even if the horror aesthetic doesn’t appeal to you, there's almost certainly a variation to appeal to your tastes.

Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game

What do you get when you take one of the most well-known and important franchises and mix it with one of the most popular modern game types? You get Star Wars: The Deck Building Game, a great entry point in the deck-building genre to hook all those Sith and Jedi out there.

One player plays as the nefarious Empire, while the other straps on the boots of the Resistance. Players take turns trying to defeat three worlds using an army of recognizable ships, characters, and weapons from the series. Unlike some games, Star Wars: The Deck Building game comes in a small box and is easy to set up, meaning you'll save (or conquer!) the galaxy in no time.

Dice Throne

Dice Throne is the perfect way to introduce new prospective board game players to the wonderful chaos of dice rolling wrapped up in a Yahtzee package. Dice Throne has players choose their fighters, each with a small deck of cards and a set of special attacks. The attacks are triggered based on the dice rolls, the aim of which is to reduce your opponent’s life to zero.

There is a decent amount of strategy you can learn and figure out, or you can quite simply roll the dice and see what happens. An additional element that makes Dice Throne a great beginner game is the fact that you can purchase smaller two-pack sets of heroes to try before investing in the large seasonal box sets. That being said, those big boxes are pretty tempting, with a Marvel season featuring heroes such as Thor and Miles Morales, as well as an upcoming X-Men set. If you'd rather go for OC, there are two sets of eight original characters designed specifically for Dice Throne. Since each character comes in their own tray, transporting and setting up Dice Throne is incredibly easy, too. In other words, Dice Throne is easily one of the best beginner dice-rolling games out there.

Cascadia

Theme is a surprisingly important factor when it comes to introducing people to board games: the kind of nerdy or aggressive topics favoured in the hobby can be off-putting to folk outside it. But you can’t go wrong with the wonderful Cascadia, a simple game of building a wilderness out of hexagonal tiles and populating it with enchanting wild creatures, building your very own corner of unspoiled American paradise. The rules essentially involve you selecting a terrain tile and animal pair each turn and adding it to your growing landscape, trying to meet scoring patterns that vary each game. There are easy scoring patterns to start with, more difficult ones to graduate onto and a solo mode with challenges to tick off so it’s fun for every occasion. No wonder it won board gaming’s biggest prize, the Spiel des Jahres, in 2022 or made it onto our list of the best family board games.

Heat: Pedal to the Metal

Who doesn’t love the thrill of a race? Unfortunately, a lot of race games are either tiresome roll and move for kids, or are simulations that edge the more complex edge of gaming. Heat hits the sweet spot between the two, with a simple yet cunning system based on shifting gears up and down. The higher your gear, the faster you can move, but each corner on each track is labelled with the highest gear you can attempt it at. Take it too fast, and you risk spinning off and loosing your turn. A hand of cards that works in tandem with your gears to move your car ensures plenty of excitement, while the need to anticipate your gear changes and slipstream your opponents ensures plenty of strategy.

Parks

Some games have a strangely Zen-like air of calm and tranquillity about them as you play, and they tend to make great introductory games. Parks has that mood, alongside straightforward rules, quick play time and absolutely delightful components based on fifty-nine national parks from the US. Players take turns traversing a modular trail, one for each season of the year. Each space offers opportunities to score by collecting forest or mountain terrain, or by photographing animals and you can move as far as you like, but there’s a catch: you can only go forward, and you can’t share a space. That makes deciding how far and how fast you want to go a decision of surprising strategic importance. Whatever you decide, make sure you enjoy the scenery along the way.

Just because a game may be good for beginners, it doesn’t mean that you're missing out on fun game experiences. There are plenty of great games out there for folks who are interested in adding some cardboard and dice to their friend hangouts or date night activities. Whether it's deck building in the Star Wars universe, dice rolling battle with Marvel's heaviest hitters, or just lying to your friends for fun, you don't need to be stuck with a new variation of Monopoly to entertain your beginning board game friends – thank the dice gods for that.

Matt Thrower is a contributing freelancer for IGN, specializing in tabletop games. You can reach him on BlueSky at @mattthr.bsky.social.

Scott White is a freelance contributor to IGN, assisting with tabletop games and guide coverage. Follow him on X/Twitter or Bluesky.