Which Classic Board Games Have Stood The Test Of Time In Their Genre?

One of the most enjoyable things about being a fan of board games is going to the store and perusing the shelves to find your next hit for game night. But as fun as new games are, the one that’s most likely to delight might already be on your shelf back at home.

With new board games coming out all the time, you’ll never be low on exciting new adventures, but if you’re trying to keep things classic on your next board game night, here are a few older board games that still dominate their genre after all this time.

Go

Perhaps the oldest of the classic board games on our list, Go is more than 2,500 years old and is still incredibly popular today. A strategy game meant for two players, you’ll be facing off against a friend to try and lay claim to the most territory on the grid-shaped board.

You’ll be keeping track of all this with colored stones, placing your own color down to claim a space. You’ll be fencing in areas to lay claim yourself, but watch out for your opponent trying to surround your territory entirely, which awards the entire interior to them. The player with the most territory at the end wins.

Trivial Pursuit

There have been plenty of trivia games throughout our history – people love showing off how much they know – but no trivia game has done it better before or since than Trivial Pursuit, which debuted in the 1980s and shook the trivia game genre entirely.

We’ve seen plenty of newer iterations of the game since, with electronic versions always receiving pretty good reviews on PC and game consoles. You choose a category from six possible options – Geography, History, Entertainment, Sports & Leisure, Art & Literature, or Science & Nature – and prove to your pals how much more you know than them.

Carcasonne

If you’re a fan of laying tiles to claim your medieval lands and establish your own territory claims in the scenic south of France, then we’d feel confident guessing that Carcasonne is likely the board game you’ve been bringing to game nights since its debut.

Place your tiles strategically around the game’s playing area to establish a bustling city, choosing meeple tokens to take on specific roles within the city to help establish your network of roads and religious buildings. Do your best to build your city both first and best if you’re hoping to win at this classic board game.

Scrabble

Are you more into careful wordplay than you are tile placing or piece moving like you’ll do in plenty of other board games? If you’d like to get wordy with your next game night with friends, consider busting out Scrabble, a classic word-based board game that’s been popular with players for almost eight decades now.

You’ll draw a handful of letter tiles at the beginning of the game and work both with and against your friends playing along to string together words on the board. Less-common letters have much higher point values – the letter A is more common than the letter Z in the English dictionary – so do your best to make impressive words to win.

Risk

If you’re interested in territory claiming games that task you with fending off invasions from your competitive friends on board game night as you work to take over the entire world yourself, consider bringing the classic Risk to your next night with friends.

You’ll be assigned territories all around a map of the world, and each turn sees you placing soldiers and moving into neighboring territories with the hopes of conquering them for yourself. Owning entire continents increases your supply of soldiers each turn, so work smart to creep across the globe in the name of domination.

Diplomacy

If you’ve got a modestly sized group for your next board game night and you’d like to do a bit of social deduction and sleuthing instead of just moving plastic pieces around a board, then consider Diplomacy, a game that tasks you with talking your way into and out of global peace during World War One.

Without the need for dice rolling, you’ll spend the evening talking with your friends and seeking to establish alliances for your nations, betray others when it’s most convenient for your quest for power, and conquer the supply centers around Europe to ensure your country is the most successful during the Great War.

Crokinole

A board game that rose to prominence in Canada in the 1870s, Crokinole is an age-old favorite that’s yet to be dethroned. Players take turns flicking colored discs around the board. It’s almost like darts, with the smaller and more precise areas at the center of the board being worth more than the wider, easier-to-hit sections on the perimeter.

There’s a competitive element, though, in trying to knock the discs your opponents have landed off into lower-scoring sections, claiming the higher point values for yourself. Aim carefully and score the highest to win.

Catan

Originally debuting as Settlers of Catan in the mid-1990s and since shorting to simply Catan, this iconic board game is all about collecting resources and shoring up your settlements on the titular island of Catan, seeking to establish yourself as the most prominent new settlement on the island.

You’ll be rolling dice and trying to collect the resources your settlement needs to sustain itself and grow in time. Trade with other players to establish healthy, mutually beneficial relationships with your neighboring settlements. Grow your settlements, build roads, claim new territories, and fend off the robber if you’re hoping to win this classic board game!

Monopoly

A game so infamous that some roll their eyes at the concept of the box hitting the table on board game night, Monopoly is the age-old board game that pits you against all your friends in a race to savagely bankrupt one another. There’s never been a faster way to lose your friends!

Known to be a slower game that really lets you stick the knife in slowly, you and your friends will each be trying to accrue properties and public works around the board, and owning all the properties in one color set will allow you to build on them. Players pay rent to whoever owns the spaces they land on, and rents increase dramatically with the houses and hotels that come from owning sets of colors.

Chess

One of the oldest board games still in play today, there’s an entire community in the world of chess, with professional rankings, clubs, and plenty of opportunities to play in-person and online these days. The game’s history is a bit muddy, with early references to similar games in Asia before its rise to prominence in Europe in the 1400s.

There are more layers of strategy to chess than casual players can ever hope to know, with world champions consistently competing to take the crown in a running World Chess Championship circuit that’s been running since the 1880s.