10 Best Strategy Board Games

Ark Nova (1-4 Players; 1.5 - 2.5 hours)

Ark Nova is a card drafting and hand management Strategy board game in which players are tasked to plan and design a modern zoo. To achieve the ultimate goal of owning the most successful zoological establishment, players will need to build enclosures, hire specialists, place animals, and support conservation projects. All these actions are available to all players as a set of 5 cards.

Every turn, each player can only choose one among the five cards to perform their chosen action. Moreover, the effect of that card is determined by the slot it currently occupies with the most recently played card being the less effective etc. While this system looks pretty simple, which card you play and when has a tremendous impact on the game forcing players to think ahead and plan carefully their strategies.

In addition, victory is only achieved by balancing your zoo’s appeal and your conservation points. The first one is mainly obtained by introducing new animals while the last requires players to pursue randomly picked conservation projects and end of the game scoring objectives.

Card/Action mechanism and victory scoring are two of the main reasons Ark Nova's complexity is above average. New players will require a few games to get into it properly and having different maps with 3 increasing levels of difficulty definitely helps. At the same time the more complex asymmetric maps add a great level of replayability. On top of this, having more than 200 animal/specialists cards ensures that each game will always feel different.

Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition (3-6 Players; 4 - 8 hours)

Twilight Imperium is a very iconic strategy board game of galactic conquest released for the first time in 1997. The game is set in the unstable aftermath of the decline of the Old Empire ruled by the Lazax race. During the game, players will be the leaders of one of races once part of the Old Empire and they will need to grow their culture and civilization in order to become the new galactic emperor.

In order to succeed, each player has full control on all aspects of their civilization, including military, politics, technology and trade. On the other hand, players have a limited number of actions they can take during a round that is based on their supply of command tokens. Each aspect of a civilization has to be planned carefully to allow players to score victory points on both public and personal goals. Politics plays a key role in the game as players can vote new laws that could impact players growth. The voting power of each player is based on the quantity and quality of the planets they control thus growing and expanding your race is key to achieve victory.

Overall, the game's goal and mechanics are reasonably straightforward, but the gameplay could become extremely complex due to the length of a single game. Twilight Imperium's games are in fact well know for taking typically more than 5 hours as they require an average of 1.5 hours per each experienced players. This long game duration matched with very deep game mechanics, can either make the game experience amazing for some players or quite poor for others.

On the other hand, the amount of races and the variable setting make this game replayability very high.

Terraforming Mars (1-5 Players; 2 hours)

Terraforming Mars is an engine-building and card management game where players take the role of corporations involved in making Mars a suitable planet for mankind to live on. All players cooperate together to complete the planetary project while, at the same time, competing against each other to obtain the biggest share of the government funding.

The game is played over a number of rounds (generations) where players take turns performing actions, buying and playing cards. Each card can provide abilities and actions in addition to those available on the board but players need to purchase them first. Some of the actions will allow players to increase some of the planet main parameters (atmosphere's oxygen, ocean tiles, temperature). Whenever a player manages to improve any among them, their Terraforming Rating (TR) increases providing them a higher income at the end of each turn and increasing their victory points for end of the game scoring.

One of the key aspect of Terraforming Mars is that there are many paths to victory. This is mainly due to the large variety of cards available. Every game feels unique and players' strategies need to continuously change and adapt depending on what other players are doing. Moreover, buying and playing cards require a long term and careful planning. In fact, it is not only a matter of which cards players can afford to buy, but also which ones could be played (and when) basing on their requirements. The game is not too complex per se but players may need some time to adapt to the amount of available strategies and option.

Through The Ages: A New Story Of Civilization  (2-4 Players; 2-4 hours)

Through the Ages is a civilization building game based on a card drafting and auctioning mechanism. Each player is in charge of the development of their own civilization and they need to balance multiple aspects of their population and society to ensure a steady growth. The aim of the game is to score the most Culture points at the end of the game, however, there are many ways to produce culture including for example war and aggression.

The game takes place throughout three different ages, beginning in the age of antiquity. At each round, players take turns to acquire any of the 13 cards in play to obtain new technologies, buildings, wonders, and leaders. Cards will become cheaper to acquire the longer they are in play but they will also be removed from the market row after a certain amount of turns if no player buys them. This mechanism doubles also as game timer to trigger the transition though the ages and the end of the game.

Together with purchasing and playing new cards to growth their civilisation, players will need to balance their population, their buildings and the resources produced, as these aspects are all interconnected.

Through the Ages is not an easy game. Game mechanics are not too complex to understand although new gamers would benefit by playing the first few games with someone that has already played the game. The complexity of this game mainly comes from the number of aspects of your civilization that have to be balanced in order to win the game. This aspect also contributes to the very high replayability of this game as players can explore multiple strategies to win the game and adapt to which cards are available or are purchased by their opponent.

Spirit Island (1-4 Players; 1-2 hours)

Spirit Island is one of the very thematic, cooperative strategy games about defending your island from colonizing Invaders. As spirits of the land, each players must use their unique elemental powers to free the island and to defend the indigenous population. Players all cooperate to achieve their common goal and push the invaders back from the shores of the island.

In Spirit Island each spirit has a different growth path and starting powers. Moreover, some of these powers have “fast” effects that can be played before the invaders will take their action while other will affect the gameplay after the invaders phase. The Invaders take actions sequentially by exploring new territories, build new cities and attacking the land and the native population. Each of these actions affects one semi-random territory at each turn forcing spirits to spread across the island and plan their moves to efficiently deal with the threats.

In terms of gameplay, Spirit island is definitely complex and deep enough to push players to think carefully before taking any action. Interestingly, developers have made a lot of efforts to support the learning curve by ranking all the spirits based on how difficult is to use them efficiently. Each spirit card also lists a basic strategy and some key tips players could follow for their first games. Finally, being this a cooperative game, the experience and skills of all player benefits the group overall.

Spirit Island also shines for replayability. This is the result of multiple factors as: the amount of spirits available (including the expansions) and the choice of their powers; the variable setup and spread of the invaders; the possibility to use famous adversaries and to use scenarios.