Types of Board Games I'm Looking For
Article • 689 Words • Board Games, 2026 • 03/22/2026
An overview of the kinds of games that I enjoy and am searching for to add to my collection.
There are 720 words in this article, and it will probably take you less than 4 minutes to read it.
This article was published 2026-03-22 00:00:00 -0400, which makes this post and me old when I published it.
Introduction
I am a bit of a board game newbie who is looking to get more into games. I’ve mostly been enjoying from the playing together aspect of it, but also I really appreciate the fact that it is an analog hobby so I can take a break from looking at screens.
My Game Catalog is here if you are curious about the games that I already own. I haven’t tried a lot of the various types of games. I don’t really know what trick taking or engine building really is despite having played a game or two with those mechanics.
I am treating this post like this: A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox, so if anyone has any recommendations if you find this post please email me at hi [at] reeswrites [dot] com (obfuscated to make it harder for bots to email me)!
Player Interaction and Gameplay
In some ways I’m looking for board games that don’t require too much strategic thinking and are not too competitive.
- Luck is one way I’ve seen balancing against strategic play, and while I don’t want things to feel too arbitrary or random, I am open to it.
- I don’t need the game to be cooperative, but I don’t really want it to be too adversarial either.
- I don’t want games that breed too much player adversity. Zero sum actions especially can make me feel bad because my gain is directly at the expense of another player.
I play most of my board games with two players, but I do like games that hit the 2-4/6 range because it’s fun to play games where the dynamics change a bit depending on the number of players.
Creativity in Curation vs Generation
These notes are more applicable to party games but I would say that is a large amount of the games that I have since it allows more people to be able to play together with less complexity of instruction.
For awhile I described it as “random word access”, but I think I was struggling to articulate this more broad concept of curation/rearrangement versus generation. For example, I really struggle with Wordle (not a board game, but still a good example) because randomly accessing words in my brain (generation) just does not work in an efficient manner; I just completely blank when I’m playing. I can brute force it a bit when I get close to the word, but the early stages of the game is tough. Like in Wordle, generation is usually constrained, some conditions make it easier, some harder. I think that the constraint of five letter words in the NYT dictionary makes it tougher.
In general, I find curation and rearrangement is easier because you have everything provided for you versus ex-nihilo (from nothing) generation. Here are some examples of games/mechanics that are in order of easiest to hardest for me:
- Cards Against Humanity/Apples to Apples/What Do You Meme?
- Cards to answer prompt (curation)
- Poetic Injustice
- Word bank to assemble to answer prompt (rearranging)
- Poetry for Neanderthals/Codenames
- Hidden word w/ certain communication allowed (constrained generation)
- Charades/Pictionary
- Skill based
- You have a communication constraint but otherwise relatively free
- Quiplash
- You can basically say anything to get a laugh
- There’s a game where two people say random letters where one represents the first letter of a word and the second represents the last letter and then the players have to be the first one to say a word that matches these parameters
- “Random” generation really gets to me.
I don’t mind some difficulty for thinking through clues to give people or other words and such because it can be a lot of fun to have a Eureka moment or be particularly creative, but I definitely get performance anxiety, especially when I’m playing with people that I might not know very well. It also uses more brainpower, so if I am particularly tired that day I usually won’t want to expend more cognitive energy on a game where I have to use my brain more.