The Best Board Games of 2024
boardgamequest.comEvery new year brings about a fresh start, a chance to improve oneself for the new year with new year’s resolutions (spoiler: they’ll be broken by President’s Day) and looking forward to a new year (spoiler: that’ll be a different post for our most anticipated games). It’s also a time to reflect back on the year that was. And in the board game space, that means making a list of our favorite games which, for some of us, is as anxiety inducing as trying to figure out the rest of the holidays.
We live in a wonderful era of gaming that no matter what style of game you like, there were probably quite a few quality releases last year. Here are the staff’s picks for our favorite board games in 2024:
Chosen by Dylan (and Bailey)
When you tell others that Wilmot’s Warehouse is a cooperative memory game, you have to follow it with assurance that it is a good game. The basic idea is that you put out 35 titles in a grid and you have to quickly remember which one is which after they are flipped face down. Where the magic happens is that you tell stories to facilitate based on the shapes, their placement on the grid, and what they are adjacent to. I still remember the first time I played five months ago where we built a story of a math teacher who was passionate about the arts. That is what the game does, and in that game, we had a 90% success rate at saying what tiles were flipped down. It feels like magic to have the success rate players do.
Chosen by Tahsin
At first glance, Harmonies is a disarming little game about placing blissfully colored tokens on a simple hexagonal board with few restrictions. The art aims for softness and has a children’s book quality in the way it renders pictures of friendly forest animals. But beyond the looks here hides a web of thorns of delicious point scoring for token placement creating landscapes and representation of animal habitats. I will happily play this gem of a game anytime. For what it is, it easily beats out Cascadia and Azul while
