Catharine Proctor

Disclaimer: this post contains some affiliate links which may earn me a small commission at no cost to you if you choose to purchase from the link.

As you may have guessed, my husband Jack and I love playing board games and have accidentally become board game collectors of sorts. It’s been so fun to get to talk to my students about these games before and after lessons, so I thought I would share our current top five games!

(The rankings are honestly completely arbitrary and change by the day. I highly recommend all five of these and many more.)

5. Welcome To your perfect home

This is the first “roll-and-write” game we ever played (besides the original roll-and-write, Yahtzee), and we have loved it since day one. Roll-and-write games involve an element of chance and a writing component. In Perfect Home, the chance element is cards with house numbers and corresponding effects, and you write chosen numbers and effects on your individual board to create your perfect neighborhood. This is easily our most played game of all time! Our favorite expansions include Summer, Winter Wonderland, Spring, and Halloween.

4. The Isle of cats

Imagine Tetris meets cute cats meets a rescue adventure story, and you have The Isle of Cats! This is an incredible game that includes card drafting and polyomino cat-placement. The premise is that cats of all shapes and sizes are stranded on an island and you have five days (rounds) to rescue them with baskets before the Evil Vesh’s Ship arrives. Everyone is working on filling their own boats, scoring points for lessons, filling rooms on the boat and more. There is also a family mode variant included in the base game that is great for families with younger children. The expansions for this game are also incredible! *insert even cuter kittens.

3. Wingspan

Wingspan is the most complex game on this list, but quite possibly the most outstanding game of them all in terms of thoughtfulness of the game design and aesthetics. If you love birds, you will love this game. If you don’t love birds, this game will make you love birds. Wingspan is an “engine-building” game where each player places bird cards in three different habitats and upgrades their ability to gain food, lay eggs, or draw more bird cards. You only have a set number of actions per round so you have to choose wisely how to spend your turns! Each bird card contains facts about the bird and the powers in the game are based on its real-life habitat, diet, and behavior. You learn so much! The Oceania and Asia expansions are our personal favorites.

2. Azul

Azul is a beautiful tile-placement game with three other unique standalone game variations. In the original Azul, you are creating a mosaic with different Portuguese tiles by drafting tiles in turn and placing on your own individual board. All the variations use a similar tile-drafting and placement mechanism but truly feel like different games. Azul Queens Garden is the most complex and strategic variant, while Azul Stained Glass and Summer Pavillion are a similar level of complexity to the original. Original Azul and Queens Garden are our favorites!

1. Cascadia

Finishing in the top spot is Cascadia! It has remarkably simple gameplay with incredibly thought-provoking decisions. Like Azul, Cascadia is a tile-placement game where you place biome tiles and animal tokens on the tiles each turn. There are five biomes and five animals that all score uniquely and change from game to game with four sets of scoring cards you can mix and match. Cascadia Landmarks expansion adds goal cards for the biomes adding an element of complexity and competition that we love!

Our favorite games are replayable, beautiful, strategic but playable in an hour or less, and competitive but rarely mean. Let me know if you check any of them out!