Considering the popularity of Factorio and Satisfactory I'd recommend RoboRally. It gets a bit silly but it's accessible.

For much more depth I recommend Dominant Species by GMT.

Terra Mystica, Brass Birmingham, Scythe, Root, ARCS and its expansions, Nemesis: Retaliation and SETI would all get shouts from me for that sort of thing. Slightly depends on your definition of complex and sophisticated, but I'd put all of those in that list.

18xx, hardcore economic train games. Think war games with money.

There is a lot of love in my group from years of MtG for drafting games, so 7 Wonders and Dune Imperium are consistent favorites. When we have the time, we'll do Twilight Imperium. We've enjoyed all three Nemesis games. We are currently also really enjoying Spirit Island. We've completed Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion and put in some serious time with regular Gloomhave as well. As LotR fans, we've also enjoyed the LotR LCG and War of the Ring.

The article is more about a certain style of "modern" games, which is an interesting strand but does not exhaust the category: classic games (chess, go, shogi, backgammon), card games (bridge, poker), TCGs (magic the gathering, hearthstone) often are as complex and sophisticated as any of those.

If you're looking specifically for games in that style, Twilight Struggle has been studied extensively and there's significant competitive play and a well-developed theory. 7 Wonders Duel and Dominion also have significant depth.

I've been dipping my toes into High Frontier lately

I super recommend Innovation. If you enjoy nuanced gameplay like in TCGs, this is for you. Everyone starts in the Stone Age and the goal is to race to 4-6 achievements, advancing through technological ages. Cards represent technologies and they have powers, like drawing cards, forcing other people to give you cards, score points, etc. It's a great game of resource management, politics, and sabotage.

I think the most complex board game I've really played any amount of is Carcasonne (Not particularly complicated). Often, if I'm playing a board game, I prefer it to be on the simpler end, more of a relaxing thing.

One memorable board gaming experience I had was playing Splendor (I believe) with my cousin, and it ended up being almost completely silent, just passing tokens around and the occasional "oh..." when another player did something undesirable.

Pit is also popular in my family when there's a gathering of us, with rounds often lasting only a minute or so, and getting quite frantic, and it is a very simple game

On Mars, Great Western Trails, Obsession, Luthier, and Spirit Island are some of my favorite games.

And Netrunner of course!

- 18xx games (1889, 1830, The Old Prince 1871, etc.). Basically stock market games built around running train companies.

- Games by the publisher Splotter Spellen (i.e. Indonesia, Food Chain Magnate, etc.). Interactive games, usually with an economic bent. Turn order manipulation is a large part of these games. Splotter games often feel like they are designed in a lineage similar to Uwe Rosenberg games, where you can see threads of design traits shared between games.

- Carl Chudyk designed games (Innovation, Glory To Rome, etc.). Games that feel random and broken but have lots of tactical play embedded in them. Tempo is challenging to figure out in these games (IMO), and sometimes there is a non-linear progression aspect to them.

- Older euros, predating the trend toward solitary play: El Grande, Tigris and Euphrates, Bridges of Shangri-La, Medina, etc. No single connective feature, but these are games that are more on the combinatorial and strategic side but predate the development of the "personal player board" as the primary place the game is played.

- Pax Games: Pax Pamir, Pax Porfiriana, etc. History-based card tableau games that all feature a conveyer-belt market mechanism (where you buy cards from a market and cards get progressively discounted the longer they're visible and give you turn lookahead). Semi-economic, but more about the interaction of card abilities (and sometimes map play). Very fun weird games, just ignore the footnotes in games designed by Phil Eklund (I also don't love the futurist optimism in Matt Eklund's Pax Transhumanity, but that's me).

- Some abstracts (such a time investment to get deep into these, but they're obviously fantastic games): The Gipf Series, TwiXt, Hive, Paco Ŝako. I'm not yet sure what type of abstract games I most enjoy, still figuring that out.

I tend to like strategic, competitive games with higher interactivity, but with lower amounts of "take that"-type interactivity.

Ark Nova. It's not Agricola-scale, but it has some similar "move maximization" vibes.

You can also play it on Steam if you can't find a crop of folks to sit down for three hours with you (though you can run through a full game against the computer in 35 minutes).

The terms "board game" and "tabletop game" are considered pretty much interchangable by the vast majority of hobby board gamers, "board game" just tends to be the default. There's no requirement for a board game to have a board. BGG is full of card games, tabletop RPGs, dexterity games like jenga, junk art etc - none of which have boards

D&D is not a board game, nor is Warhammer 40k.

Tabletop games is already used as the broader category (covering board games, role playing games, miniatures games, and whatever I'm forgetting).

I distinctly remember Spyfall having cards...

I just checked it out, what's the difference between it and non-board-games like werewolf and mafia?

I enjoyed this one digitally but it took me a really long time to grok the rules, maybe my first standalone deckbuilding game outside of the Witcher 3 in game card collecting quest. The expansions didn't make the game more fun IMHO outside of seeing new birds. It seems like a lot of rules to keep track of if doing it in person - is that normally an issue when playing it with physical cards and pieces? After I got decent enough to beat the CPU on high difficulty a bit I ventured online for multiplayer with real people - the online community was very small - I tried a few times and there's such a small pool of players for matchmaking I always ended up against the same player who was much better than me so I could never manage better than second of three.

I love the Wingspan soundtrack, it's available on Bandcamp! https://monstercouch.bandcamp.com/album/wingspan-original-vi...

We did it before we had kids. And now we do it virtually. Or very occasionally.

I play D&D once a week with local friends.

We all met, and picked a day that was likely to work for us regularly, going forward - for us, it's a Tuesday. That way we know, and can plan ahead for the foreseeable future, that Tuesdays will be D&D nights. People with kids can get babysitters, or get spouses/grandparents to take care of them. People with other obligations can keep that night clear. Etc., etc.

I used to prefer the whole "let's schedule the next session at the end of the night", but that has 100% led to campaigns falling apart. Consistency is key.

(Also, it helps to have a big enough group - either for D&D or boardgames - that the absence of any one or even two people doesn't tank the night.)

Doing things virtually is also a good suggestion, but I'm pretty burnt out of staring at people's faces on a screen, so I hate playing D&D or other games over a screen - but your mileage may vary.

This is such a sad comment. You can call people and make a plan. It's called socializing.

that's the ultimate board game I guess.

I play a lot of games solo it’s how I got into board games. Was looking for an alternative to video games when I was having RSI issues.

There are lot of solo only games and most cooperative games allow for solo play. During the pandemic it became pretty popular.

I do a mix of solo, in person and online with boardgamearena.

I play mostly with the aforementioned wife and kids!

We were shocked by how early our kids could pick up board games, including many of the ones mentioned in this article. Our 2 oldest kids were playing Ticket to Ride and Carcassone well enough to beat us form time to time at 3 and 4 years old. Now that they're a little older, slightly more complicated games like Catan and Flamecraft are on the table!

> and cheating is part of the game

My main problem with this is that if the other players are not in on this and just minimax, any such game becomes really boring.

Hey! Hey! Some of us _enjoy_ Axis And Allies! /s

Humor aside, you're not wrong - spending an hour setting up and then 10 minutes per player to actually play was a lot more fun when I had a lot more free time

I agree. I generally bounce off those sort of games.

I gravitate towards games that have simpler rulesets with deep gameplay. I’m a big fan of Reiner Knizia but also Phil Walker-Harding and David Thompson.

>Far too many board games want to be computer games

very concise way to nail the root cause of this problem. I dont think it is intentional. I am developing my own board game right now with my brother, currently playtesting with close friends with solid results, and due to growing up with video games I cannot tell you how often we have had to confront the urge to add a state tracker here or a system there or maybe if we use cards with stats on them then .. etc. because a lot of our love for games has been influenced by video games. We managed to overcome that and keep things fun and simple, but we also have the luxury of working on this over the past couple years in our spare time and not pressed to meet a deadline or other corporate constraints. By that I mean when we hit a wall that could be solved quickly by increasing the games complexity, we are able to step away for a while until a good idea hits us.

there is certainly some room to bridge the gap between video games and board games, to have systems the players dont need to learn but operate in the background while still enabling tabletop interaction - but i dont see how to do it on a budget, so maybe a future project. we need projector enabled coffee tables to get popular in general or something maybe

100% agree, I think the past 10-15 years of changes in the hobby have been profoundly negative.

- The trend towards videogame-ifying board games

- The trend towards "cozy" games, i.e. games that are not interactive, have no potential to produce negative emotions, and focus efforts on a solitary optimization puzzle.

- The kickstarter-ification of games that focus on early release exclusives, excessive plastic, aesthetics over game design, etc.

I really urge players today to look at some of the games from the 90s to early 2000s if they're interested in getting into the hobby. Seek out some of the "classic" hobby games. Even some games predating that are fantastic, but you will also run into a lot of over-the-top simulationist war games during the 80s period.

I’d argue we’re past the peak though.

These days far too many board games are designed to appeal on Kickstarter with needless plastic minis and content. All that time and effort could have gone to play testing and improving the game but instead you get 2kg of plastic that doesn’t improve the game in anyway, increasing costs, and day one expansions or bonus content that’s often mediocre.

For every truely innovative game out there, there’s many more that look great and have incredible table presence but are throughly mediocre rehashes of the something else and rely purely on hype or great art.

Now you see people backing KS or buying 2nd hand games specifically for scalping, and Kickstarters preying on people with FOMO.

Also you can no longer trust Board Game Geek ratings.

The good news is, the vast majority of what’s really good, is probably already out there and available new or 2nd hand for a fair price.

We're living in a renaissance in terms of the quantity of board games being released, but personally I am finding a declining number of titles I'm even remotely interested in each year, and many of the titles I am interested in are remakes/reprints of older titles!

I think with the increased public interest in hobby board games, the pursuit of profit has lead to some really negative changes in the games that tend to get published.

You're definitely surrounded by nerds, just to use your words. I'm even in a PhD right now and most people just aren't in the hobby. It's something they did as a kid, ran out of interesting things, moved on to video games and either grew out of those or never looked back. Of the people that did, they started D&D campaigns and have little time for anything else. Boardgame culture is still very much niche, even among the broader nerdgeist

> victory points

TIL this is an established term and not a joke term invented by a certain YouTube personality.

I always enjoy the first playthrough(s) the most, because learning the system and strategies is the fun part. Once everyone knows all the rules and how to beat me, it's only going through the motions as a social experience.

I ran into the same issue with my play group. I told them that I will only learn 3 new games a year.

Since I added the rule about a decade ago, we've never once hit the 3 game limit. Just having the rule made them rethink if it was worth learning a new game or playing one we had a lot fun with already.

Sure, there are lots of good lightweight card games. For example:

* Skull: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/92415/skull

* Cockroach Poker: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/11971/cockroach-poker

* Flip 7: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/420087/flip-7

The Gang: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/411567/the-gang

This has become one of my favorite low-key games. It has a great poker "feel" without being as complicated.

Give terraforming mars a try. Massive replayability with a lot of expansions to add to replayability and the theme is really really good. It isn't a worker placement game but you do get a lot of RNG from card drafting each round. The drafting is really great for strategic play as you can see what your opponents picked and build a plan around it

It is also a fantastic 2 player game. My wife and I have played hundreds of matches and it was our go to game during the pandemic.

PSA: don't bother with the steam edition. It has been plagued with bugs and is honestly more infuriating to play as the bugs can be game breaking. And the bugs have been around for years.

If you aren’t finding Arcs or Root “deep” or competitive enough you’re probably playing it wrong. Both have war game elements and a lot of subtle shenanigans you can play.

If you’re pure euro gamers but need a bit more interaction maybe try Brass Birmingham, Food Chain Magnate, 1846, City of the Big Shoulders, Inis, Kemet.

Agreed that Captain Sonar is awesome, if you can find 7 other players that are into it. It's a rare thing: a real-time board game. No turns!