5 Tabletop Games You Should Try

Around the country, players and game stores are celebrating International Tabletop Day, a day to get together with friends and play some games.

The board game industry is going through a boom period, so there’s no shortage of great board games to choose from. The staff at your local game store can usually help you find the game that’s best for you, but we’re here to provide a little extra help.

We’ve compiled a list of five great games that span several different board game genres. These games are tried and true favorites and will serve you well in your Tabletop Day festivities.

If you’re looking for more, or just want something with a particular theme, we’ve also got lists of games for comic book lovers and games for Star Wars fans.

Keep reading to see which games you should check on this International Tabletop Day.

Ticket To Ride

Ticket to Ride was designed by Alan R. Moon and released by Days of Wonder in 2004 and helped spark an interest in European-style board games in North America. It has also long been a favorite standby for board game aficionados trying to get their friends and family into the hobby.

In Ticket to Ride, each player is a railroad tycoon trying to expand their railroad network across the United States. The problem is there’s only so many routes to go around. Players compete to be the first to claim those routes, earning points based on how long the route was. There’s also bonus points to be had for claiming routes that connect two specific cities and for having the longest continuous route at the end of the game.

Ticket to Ride is a great game because it is simple to learn and plays fast. A player can only take one of three possible actions on their turn, so it is never too long before play makes it way back around to any given players.

Ticket to Ride is addictive fun that’s perfect for game night.

Gloom

There’s a subgenre of modern board games that invite, or require, players to flex their storytelling muscle by improvising scenes and stories on the spot.

The card game Gloom, from Atlas Games, is a great introduction to this style of gameplay because it mixes that softer, storytelling style of gameplay with solid, crunchy game mechanics, making it easy way to dip your toes rather than leaping in all at once.

The idea behind Gloom is that each player controls an eccentric family that exists in a gothic world. The player then tries to ruin that family’s life in the most creative and depressing ways possible before ultimately killing them off.

Players play cards that either make their family members’ lives miserable or brighten things up for an opposing player’s family. These cards change each character’s numerical happiness value for the better or for the worse.

Gloom also has a unique visual design. All of the game’s cards have transparent backgrounds with only the necessary descriptions and values on them so that they can be placed on top of other cards to replace their values. In addition to looking cool, it also makes scorekeeping easy.

Gloom is a great game for anyone with a twisted sense of humor, a taste for the macabre, or an interesting in telling stories.

Legendary

Plenty of people growing up in the 1990s and later have fond memories of playing trading card games like Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon. Those same players also usually have some unfortunate regrets about how much money they spent on those games and how much additional time was spent hunting down specific, rare cards for their decks.

Deckbuilding games take all of the fun gameplay of a TCG and remove the card chasing by making building your deck part of the game. Legendary from Upper Deck is a Marvel-themed deckbuilding game with an enormous amount of customizability and replayability.

Each player in Legendary begins the game with a deck of generic SHIELD agents and troopers. They use those SHIELD characters to recruit more exciting Marvel hero cards. The heroes in the base set include Spider-Man, and several Avengers and X-Men. They then use their constantly improving deck to battle supervillains and stop the game’s mastermind.

One of the common complaints about deckbuilding games is that players don’t actually interact with each much or at all, instead just battling non-player controlled cards on the board. Legendary gets around this by making the gameplay cooperative. Players need to work together to defeat the mastermind because the masterminds’ scheme is constantly in motion and if it finishes before the mastermind has fallen, the evil wins and all of the players lose.

Each game of Legendary uses a randomized assortment of heroes, villains, scheme, and mastermind, meaning no two games are ever the same. There’s even a solo play mode, so if you’re looking for a way to celebrate Tabletop Day but can’t get your friends together, Legendary should work for you.

King of Tokyo

If you’re looking for a fun way to celebrate Tabletop Day with your children, look no further than King of Tokyo. The game was designed by Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering, and has players taking control of kaiju monsters to vie for control of Tokyo.

King of Tokyo uses dice to represent the epic monster battles taking place in and around Tokyo. Only one player’s monster at a time can occupy Tokyo, which gains more points for them. However, if a player occupies Tokyo, that means all of the other monsters in the game will be attacking them.

The art and characters design really helps sell this game to the younger crowd while keeping it fun for adults as well. Players can control a traditional kaiju type like a giant lizard or an ape, or something a little more out there like Cyber Kitty or Space Penguin.

Dungeons & Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons gave life to the roleplaying game genre, which has grown into a major part of the tabletop gaming hobby and community. More than forty years later, Dungeons & Dragons is on the fifth version of its rules set and is still the premiere game in the RPG world.

D&D players get to create an adventurer who lives in a fantasy world. They embark on exciting adventures concocted by the Dungeon Master, the player who serves as storyteller and rules arbiter. These adventures can stand alone or can be part of a much larger saga.

The fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons was designed specifically with newer players in mind. The base are rules start simple and DMs can layer on more complexity as they see fit.

The Dungeons & Dragons starter box comes with a pre-written adventure and pre-generated characters to make it easy to jump into D&D and see if the adventuring life is a good fit for you.