5 Top boardgames for beginners

Back along I would have had Carcassonne in this space. After all, at a boardgame convention in Frome many years ago in the summer of 2003 (Or 2004. It’s been a while!) I was asked to attend to demo the abstract game Tantrix, my wife really got into playing Carcassonne and I think payed 4 times in a row before begging me to take a break from the stand and play it myself. My lifelong obsession with this hobby really started then - and Carcassonne has been recommended as a gateway game ever since.

These days I would go one step further and say “Hey! Look at what we built” by bringing in the co-op element of Dorfromantik. The game just screams coziness, and if that isn’t a mixed metaphor then well, don’t judge a game before it’s hatched!

Dorfromantik challenges you to create areas of a certain size. This seagull wants a field spanning 5 tiles, this businessman wants a train track spanning 6. The beauty is in the rapidly expanding options of where to place your hexagonal tiles, letting you cultivate the 5 different types of areas as you wish (river, train track, field, forest and village) whilst only constraining your choices by the presence of the train track and river. You see, where a river leaves a hex edge it must continue into the next hex, but a forest can just as easily be continued in the next hex or be stopped by butting up against a new village.

Where Dorfromantik has wonderfully simple beginnings it has room to grow, and grow it does with its campaign mode. After your introductory games you will unlock achievements to conquer, many of which rewarding you with new tiles to learn about and score points with, hearts which reward you for going above and beyond the rules of tile matching, and even a little warehouse to store away that one tile you really did want to draw, just not yet! Your skills will grow alongside the game - the new unlocks will give you new ways to score, but your improving skills will also be increasing the score you squeeze from your existing tools.

Verdict: Co-op is the way to go for those who already think gaming isn’t for them - too afraid to lose or be shown up as less intelligent, the safer world of a co-op “Us against the game” environment can be attractive. A Co-op campaign with such a gentle on-ramp as Dorfromantik has will leave your audience wanting more. Just don’t tell them where to put their tile, unless they ask first.

In my experience, Flamecraft has been a huge hit with boardgame beginners. I have to admit that I have some experienced friends who found the amount of information and the way it’s presented spread out in Flamecraft to be a little overwhelming, but I think in there is the secret to this game’s success - it’s not hard to find a decent move. It just might be hard to find the best move. That is a concept for an entire article methinks!

The core game of Flamecraft is a resource collecting extravanaganza that ramps up - you place dragons in a shop to get resoruces from that shop and all other dragons in the shop, so the more full a shop gets, the more resources it’s worth to visit. Filling shops also open other shops with special abilities, a nice gating mechanism that stops you from needing to worry about shop abilities until you’re a little further into the game. With 6 types of artisan dragon in the main deck, there are only 6 dragon abilities to learn, and they’re each relatively simple.

Verdict: If there’s any chance at all that your friends will look at Flamecraft and go “Ahhhhh, so cute!” then they’re going to love the cozy world that Sandara Tang has drawn for them - and they’ll definitely love the pun-tastic shop “Sew Cute!” You might have to patiently explain the Fancy dragons a few times - especially as these are hidden in your hand so are difficult to explain in advance.

Drafting is a great concept in board games. If you were an economist you would recognise that drafting is all usually about opportunity cost. That is to say - I can get a card for free, but when I make my choice all the cards I didn’t choose go off to other players and I may never see them again.

This concept changes a lot with player count. If I’m playing a drafting game 2-player, I should definitely care about what cards might come back to me, because most of them are. When I’m drafting 6-player though I can forget them, the cards that come back will be unrecogniseable, and it’s more important to be in tune with what the player to my right is leaving me.

Verdict: Both games make great use of their theme for great art, so either are great choices, but with Azul has a maximum of 4 players. I would recommend Azul at 2 or 3 players, Sushi Go at 4-5 or the larger Sushi Go Party if you need to accommodate 6-8.

All 3 of these recommendations do something well - they take a theme that’s based in nature, and make a coherent game around it that you can enjoy on both a mechanical and spiritual level. Part of the attraction of the board game hobby is, after all, to get away from computer screen and the internet, so what better way than to embrace nature.

Harmonies and Cascadia sound like the same game from the elevator pitch - both want you to draft land and animals and combine them to form an ecosystem that scores points by making ecological sense.

Cascadia does this by concentrating on the animals. Their scoring features make a certain amount of sense - hawks want to be isolated from other hawks, bears want to be in mating pairs whilst Elk want to be in larger groups. Salmon want to be in a long run (you can almost picture the very stream they’re swimming up) and Foxes want to be surrounded by diversity. The land also scores, but only in the sense that your largest area of each type scores.

Harmonies spends its rules baggage on the land, with a player aid showing you how bushes, trees, mountains, fields, houses and the river score. But the game still feels concentrated on the animals, as you draft cards that show you what shapes those animals want. There’s a very satisfying feel to Tetris-ing all the shapes together efficiently, and the variety of animals to play with just feels a little more satisfying than Cascadia’s 5.

You will get precisely 8 actions in the first round, 7 in the second, then 6 then 5 in the final fourth round (and, let’s be honest, at least 3 of those final actions are laying eggs). That’s 26 actions full stop, and each action has exactly 4 choices - Play a bird, or activate your food row, your egg row, or your card row.

As with Flamecraft I think finding the best move amongst these possibilities is hard, but finding a good, or at least a satisfying move is much easier. You’ll frequently see a bird on display that you want, and realise that you want to draw it, you’ll need an egg to hatch it, you’ll need the food to pay for it, and then you’ll need to play it. Just like that, 4 of your actions have gone by.

Verdict: Get Harmonies. It’s been on the BGG bestseller list pretty much since it came out for a reason. But if you cannot find a copy of Harmonies, Cascadia is a very suitable alternative. Go to Wingspan only if you’re already familiar with it yourself, you want to show off a slightly longer game with combo opportunities, or your target is specifically an avid birdwatcher.

By far the game I’ve had the best results with for teaching newcomers is Ticket To Ride: Europe. That’s not to say that USA would be a bad choice, just where I live, Europe is more familiar.

It helps that the rules can be explained very succinctly. Each turn you either take cards or build track. If you take train cards you usually get 2, unless we see you take a joker, in which case you only get one. You build track with the right number of cards of the appropriate colour - you have to build the whole track in one go. Some tracks need jokers, and there are no grey cards so if you see a grey route that means use any colour you like, just make it all the same colour. You score points every time you build, but the big points are for connecting up the cities on your tickets.

That’s about 80% of the game explained right there. I usually start then, and only later mention that

And then there are tunnels. Oh how am I torn on the addition of tunnels to this game! On the one hand, yes I do like the moment of tension when you reveal what your additional cost is with an accompanying drum roll if you are so inclined. Sometimes players are delighted when they ‘get away with it’ and the extra cost is 0, especially on a Hail Mary play to close out the final turns. Other times players are delighted when the deck hates you and spits up 3 matches and you get to tell that bad beat story for months to come. On the other hand, it takes me about as long to explain tunnels as it does the rest of the game!

When you build track with a tunnel, first you show me the cards you were going to build with, then we see - because tunnels are notoriously hard to build - whether you hit a snag along the way, costing you some extra cards. I reveal 3 cards from the deck - always 3 no matter how long the tunnel is - and any that match the colour you are paying cost you 1 extra card of that colour. Yes, revealing jokers hurts because they always match. Yes, you can pay with jokers. Yes, paying for the whole tunnel in just jokers is amazing because then only jokers will match and cause you hurt - but where did you get all those jokers from anyway??!? What happens if you can’t pay? You get your cards back but lose your turn and can try again next turn if you still want to. I would say always have 1 spare card when you try to build a tunnel just in case.

See? The very existence of tunnels in this game has doubled my word count right here! But honestly, the beef is worth it. Try to make sure that you’re the first player to attempt a tunnel, it’s worth the sacrifice. And don’t worry if the game appears to drag in the first 10 or even 15 turns, people are embedding what they need to know and making choices. As the game moves on, you’ll find people check their tickets less because they remember where they are going now. They already know what colours of train they want because the options have been dwindling fast. Like in Baz Luhrman’s Suncreen song, enjoy the power and beauty of the empty board, but never mind, you’ll not understand how much possibility laid before you until your opponents took it and closed the walls in around you.

You’ll know you’ve succeeded when the players start slamming down their cards as quick as they can, as if holding on to them for even a second might let someone get in their way.

Verdict: Ticket to Ride has never failed to make an impact on a newcomer, and it’s still the go-to game that my eldest daughter now off at university teaches people that she wishes to play with. With a very short ruleset, this is also a fantastic entrypoint to teach yourself and bring other friends into the hobby with you!

Are your friends keen word gamers? They like the crossword, or Scrabble? Paperback can be used to great effect to introduce the concept of deckbuilding. They love nature? A lot of games are fighting for attention here, but Wingspan or Finspan for bird or fish lovers respectively work simply because the theme keeps the mind open long enough for the game to take root.

Do you know any trick-taking fanatics? Lovers of Bridge, Whist, Hearts, etc? They might be wowed by The Crew, bringing their trick-taking knowledge into a co-op environment, or by the more recent Fellowship of the Ring Trick Taking card game if you prefer your co-op journeys to be held in Middle Earth.

Just a little bit of what they know for the familiarity, sprinkled with something new to ensnare the imagination, and any one of the games here can be a winner.

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