Choosing Your Next Boardgame

Before I talk about how to choose your boardgames or things to consider, I want to give a slight warning so you aren’t surprised when you wonder where your time (and your money!) went. On the surface, boardgames come across as a cheap hobby, but without proper care and thought you’ll quickly find yourself either:

  1. Overwhelmed with the amount of options and choices and frozen on what to buy
  2. Spent more money than you realized and have a large backlog of games to get through

Neither of these cases are ideal, so you need to try and find a balance. To help find a game you will enjoy check out both the concept of boardgame genres and categories. These concepts are very similar and often used interchangeably, but it can be helpful to think of them as two distinct ideas. Once you have some concept of what type of game you might enjoy, I would head over to boardgamegeek.com and see what games are popular and see if they fit the type of game you thought you might be interested.

Once you know both the type of game you might be interested in and some possible candidates, spend some time watching reviews (try a few different ones to get a balanced idea) and then watch a “Watch it Played” type video (see example). Watching someone else explain the rules and how the game is played will give you a really good understanding of the flow of the game and see if this is a game you will enjoy. Its also important to consider storage space, table space, and setup time.

Finally, sometimes you are just going to have to take that risk. You won’t always know until you buy the game yourself and handle the pieces. If a piece is hard to handle, or a card art is hard to see, I highly recommend checking out the associated boardgamegeek page to see if any fan content or ideas can be added to improve the overall experience. A lot of hobby websites (such as Etsy) also include custom made content for boardgames as well.

This hobby is a great investment and I hope you will take some time and explore some games and give something new a shot. You never know what type of game will just click!