The 15 Best Board Games Of 2021

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In any other industry, the best titles of the year would hit the market with an appropriate amount of fanfare and industry coverage. But for board game publishers — an industry dependent upon crowdfunding and limited by global supply chain issues — many titles can slip into circulation unnoticed, even with a regular dose of fulfillment updates available to the masses. So, unless you receive advance review copies or have embarrassingly deep pockets, this may be the first time you hear about a few of the titles on this list.

But none of that should distract from another great year for board games, one that featured a title for everyone, regardless of your preferred style of play. Want to engage in countless evolving campaigns against your friends? Try "Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile" or "Descent: Legends of the Dark." Need something the whole family can enjoy? Break out a copy of "Streets" or "Cascadia" and place people and animals on colorful tiles. Every board game category had its moment in the sun.

And since the board game industry has yet to spawn its version of Rotten Tomatoes — seriously, someone should get on that — the following titles were selected based on a combination of BoardGameGeek scores and independent reviews. It may not reflect every good game that came out in 2021, but it should hopefully highlight some of the titles that will endure in the months and years to come.

For everyone who fell back in love with board games in the early 2000s, Corey Konieczka's "Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game" was a pivotal work. Combining now-ubiquitous gameplay mechanics like cooperative challenges and hidden roles — Konieczka's rulebook crawled so "Dead of Winter" could run — the game offered just the right combination of mainstream appeal and crunchy gameplay for a new generation of cardboard aficionados.

But as is so often the case with out-of-print titles, the secondary market for "Battlestar Galactica" quickly made it impossible to play. Thankfully, Fantasy Flight Games has stepped in to fill the void, working alongside Konieczka to create "Unfathomable." Fantasy Flight's new game, set in its popular Arkham Horror universe, is an unapologetic spiritual successor to "Battlestar," trading space for the ocean and Cylons for cultists and placing players aboard the steamship Atlantica.

Like "Battlestar Galactica," "Unfathomable" promises to test the loyalties of your board game group and ensure that at least one person goes home nursing a grudge. Will the human players protect the ship and chart safe passage back to land? Or will the cultists throw a wrench in their plans, revealing themselves at the worst possible time and sacrificing all passengers to the Deep Ones and their gods? Whatever the outcome, the team behind "Unfathomable" has earned nothing but rave reviews — and maybe, just maybe, found a way to improve upon a modern board game classic.

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It is often said that every movie is a miracle. Even the worst titles on Netflix require a near-superhuman combination of collaboration and lucky breaks to find their way to the screen. And for those of us far removed from the production side of the industry, there may be no better way to test that adage than with Malachi Ray Rempen's "Roll Camera!: The Filmmaking Board Game." Another successful 2020 Kickstarter title, "Roll Camera," premiered in homes everywhere this past summer.

In "Roll Camera," players become the crew of an independent film — the director, production designer, producers, and more — to beat the odds and cobble together an award-winning feature. By rolling and allocating Crew dice, your team will overcome production problems, collaborate on new ideas, and string together scenes into a coherent film. Make a masterpiece — or even a "So Bad It's Great!" title — and you win, but be warned: Your budget and your schedule are working against you.

While "Roll Camera" may not be the first board game to tackle the movie industry, it comes from a place of unparalleled authority. Rempen may be a successful board game designer, but during the day he works as a filmmaker and educator; he has a background in film production and has taught at at Catalyst, an accredited creative arts and technology institute based in Berlin. No word yet on whether beating "Roll Camera" counts as a final project in his course.

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I have a confession to make: I am a sucker for transparent cards. So, even though "Gloom" no longer holds a place in my collection, I still cherish the experience of stacking different mood modifiers to create the perfect state of unhappiness for my family. Given the wild success of Jeff Chin and Andrew Nerger's "Canvas" — which managed to narrowly beat its original $14,000 Kickstarter goal by, oh, almost $700,000 — I'm probably not the only one.

Even in a year with a fair share of accessible games, "Canvas" may be one of the simpler games to hit your table. Each player starts with a handful of inspiration tokens and a few abstract background cards. Then, during their turn, each player will either draft from a communal board of art cards or combine the art cards in their hands to finalize their canvas. Once someone has finished three paintings, scores are tallied, and the best artist wins.

It's hard not to compare "Canvas" to "Dixit," another simple game that benefits significantly from the original artwork on the cards. Both seem positioned to be delightful change-of-pace games, things you can break out to help your group catch their breath between taxing big box experiences. And while "Canvas" seems like a game designed for groups of friends, the rules do include variations for both one- and two-player combinations, just in case you're the one who needs a breather.

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As a recent "Gloomhaven" devotee, I have learned to accept that I will never have time to play "Descent: Legends of the Dark." The latest Realms of Terrinoth game from Fantasy Flight Games is the board game equivalent of a summer blockbuster, with all the breathless hype that comparison implies. But much like a summer blockbuster, popularity and quality are not inversely correlated, and "Descent" is already climbing the charts on BoardGameGeek.

If you are already familiar with the "Descent" series and its unique blend of tabletop mechanics and RPG storytelling then you know what to expect here. You and your group of brave heroes battle monsters and explore new areas, with the app-based Overlord managing much of the combat and exploration pieces. With an average playtime of around 50 hours, you and your party will also squeeze every last drop of value out of the game's hefty $140-plus price tag.

By all accounts, "Descent" is also a triumph of technology. App-assisted gameplay is nothing new for the board game industry — even offline games often generate virtual trackers or generators to help move through the crunchier bits of gameplay. Lean too hard into the virtual experience, though, and some board games can make it hard to justify all those fiddly in-person bits. But with publications like Dicebreaker specifically praising the "careful balance struck between physical impact and digital convenience," it seems that "Descent" warrants its hefty price tag after all.

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Some board game designers compartmentalize. Others prefer to do everything themselves. The latter is undoubtedly the case for Ryan Laukat, who has served as designer-slash-artist on popular titles like "Above and Below" and "Near and Far." With "Sleeping Gods," Laukat is pushing his design elements even further, resulting in an exciting new open-world concept for board gamers to enjoy.

The year is 1929, and you and your crew have been transported to unfamiliar lands by, well, sleeping gods. To get home, players will manage the resources available on their ship, confront events spawned in the region, and explore an ever-expanding map. As the game unfolds, players will also be tasked with managing their crew's health, morale, and mental state — oh, and they'll battle monsters in the process, naturally. What kind of gods would bring you to a magical realm called the Wandering Sea and not make you fight mythical creatures?

Of course, the more freedom you offer players, the more locked-in your rulebook must be, and "Sleeping Gods" offers a not-inconsequential 40 pages of rules and definitions for aspiring players. But anyone who reads the first page of the rulebook — where Laukat defines "Sleeping Gods" as a campaign game, an atlas game, and a storybook game over three separate paragraphs — will know immediately if this is right for their group. And with 13 unique endings available to players, those who take the plunge will find plenty of replay value available to them.

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Being a board game collector means managing an ever-expanding collection of expansions and rulesets. Take a game like "Summoner Wars," Colby Dauch's 2009 card game that smartly downsized the miniature experience. Long a favorite of gamers everywhere, "Summoner Wars" eventually spawned over 30 expansions, making it difficult for a new player to know how best to break into the game. So, when publisher Plaid Hat announced a second edition of "Summoner Wars," it became an excellent opportunity for new fans to try a streamlined version of the game.

Much like the original game, the new edition of "Summoner Wars" sees players summoning units and moving them around a shared battlefield in a show of magical combat. Players manage their magic supply to spawn powerful units and roll dice in combat. As always, units who choose not to attack will sustain damage — these units live to fight and die in your name, and we cannot have anyone lollygagging around the battlefield.

Much like the first go-around, Plaid Hat has announced plans for future expansions, with dates tentatively scheduled for both late 2021 and February 2022. But even with a few new titles on the way, the relative lack of bloat makes this version of "Summoner Wars" accessible in a way that the new titles are not. Jump in with the Master Set and the starting six faction decks and see for yourself what all the fuss was about.

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When sitting down with your family to play a board game, you need to be able to check several boxes. You need to have an engaging theme; you also need mechanics that are both simple and expansive, allowing newbies to understand the rules quickly but leave determined to do better the next time around. By all accounts, Randy Flynn's "Cascadia" is exactly the kind of game that might lure your mother-in-law out for an evening of board games during a long holiday weekend.

In "Cascadia," each player is responsible for building (and balancing) their own slice of the Pacific Northwest. You will choose tiles and place animals, maintaining the balance between bear, elk, salmon, hawk, and fox in a delicate ecosystem based on their real-life needs. Elks are communal and score points for existing in clusters; meanwhile, foxes balance their ecosystem and are rewarded for living alongside other animals.

With a gentle theme and unforgettable artwork from artist Beth Sobel, "Cascadia" will appeal to families less interested in goblins or aliens. In addition, since each player is responsible for their own terrain, you can avoid some of those head-to-head moments that pop up in games like "Ticket to Ride." After all, stealing someone's preferred terrain tiles is much less aggressive than breaking up their longest route. Win or lose, everyone has a majestic batch of woodland creatures to call their own.

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