1. Today's best deals
2. For fantasy fans
3. For co-op fans
4. For relaxing
5. For families
6. For strategy fans
With the Black Friday sales now upon us, it’s a great time to expand your library of board games for a fraction of what it might normally cost. This can be an expensive hobby, especially if you particularly enjoy the intricate, expansive, or especially immersive games, so saving even a small percentage really helps.
With many online retailers and friendly local gaming stores offering good discounts as a part of the wide-ranging Black Friday board game deals, it can be difficult to parse through all the choices and decide what’s the best next purchase for you and your gaming circle, so here are five of my favourite board games that I think are worth picking up, especially at reduced prices. This list could have been a lot longer, but hopefully here we can point you in the right direction of something that excites you and will bring many hours of fun to your table! Honestly, they could even qualify for our list of the best board games...
Today's best deals
Best for fantasy fans
Draw your sword and ensorcel your foes in this classic game of myth and magic, normally an expensive purchase that is sure to come down in the Black Friday sales, allowing you and your friends to embark on an epic… well, hero's quest.
With the new reimagining of this classic game, courtesy of Avalon Hill, HeroQuest has never been slicker, and the dungeon-crawler both retains so much charm for fans of the fantasy genre and offers an exciting experience for players casting Fire of Wrath for the first time.
This version of the game features new artwork and contains some gorgeous new miniatures, but the core of HeroQuest will be familiar to those that have played the it before; there’s still a meatgrinder’s worth of mythic monsters for Elf, Dwarf, Wizard, and Barbarian to hack and slash their way through, and it remains one of the best classic board games years after it first debuted.
Even beyond the sword and sorcery nostalgia, there’s a lot to love in HeroQuest
Once you’re set up and going, HeroQuest isn’t too complicated, certainly not compared to other games of its ilk that followed, and you can complete a quest in around an hour to an hour and a half. One player takes on the role of the evil sorcerer too, adding a touch of competitiveness to the game, and in that way it's a TTRPG-lite game, so if you find HeroQuest whetting your appetite for more of that sort of thing, I highly recommend checking out the best tabletop RPGs.
HeroQuest is a classic, a staple of that 80s, Conan, sprayed-on-the-side-of-a-van fantasy, and for that reason alone some gamers might want to pick it up in the Black Friday sales. But even beyond the sword and sorcery nostalgia, there’s a lot to love in HeroQuest.
Best for co-op fans
You live in a shared house and your housemates just keep putting up the weirdest decor. Sound familiar? Decorum is some of the most fun I’ve had playing a board game this year, and also one of the most relatable; it’s a game dedicated to all those bathroom movie posters, the Live, Love, Laugh stencils, the coat hooks that look like sea creatures. In Decorum you try to cooperatively guide the decoration of your house, based on the hidden criteria given to you as part of the scenarios provided (the game gives you thirty), but you can only say three things to your fellow players: “I love it”, “I hate it”, or "I’m fine with it."
The game is easy to learn and quick to play as a result, with games running about half an hour each, and the puzzle of meeting everyone's criteria before time is up leads to a lot of fun, especially when you start undoing each other's good work and putting some spice into that “I hate it.”
Fun and frustrating in equal measure
Decorum is fun and frustrating in equal measure, and its simplicity and premise means it's easy to get even the most resistant friends and family members playing with you.
I’d highly recommend picking up Decorum in the Black Friday sales, especially if you’re not looking for anything competitive, too complex, or if you just want a reason to tell your housemates you hate the way they decorate.
Best for adults
Wingspan is simply gorgeous in aesthetic and execution, with an ecological theme that taps into our collective appreciation of our feathered friends, from the Noisy Miner to the Mute Swan, and the Abbott’s Booby to the Plumbeous Redstart. It's easily one of the top board games for adults.
This competitive, strategic, card-based game, has players attempt to outdo each other by attracting an array of beauteous birds to their wildlife preserves. The game requires thoughtful play as you balance habitat, tokens for food, and hatchings, scoring points as you go, and though once you get going the gameplay loop isn’t too complicated, it does require care to learn and strategy to win.
Games can run an hour or so, depending on how many fellow ornithologists you can get to play with you, so it’s a great pick for an afternoon when the weather turns and twitching out in the rain doesn’t seem so appealing.
Easily one of the most beautiful board games I’ve played
The game has multiple expansions to the core set of birds that draw from wildlife across the world, allowing you to court toucans, peacocks, and kookaburras alongside the humble robin, and the game’s creators and publishers are laudably committed to the American Ornithological Society’s endeavours to ensure that wildlife is named and represented in a way we can all celebrate and is not exclusionary or offensive to indigenous peoples and cultures.
Easily one of the most beautiful board games I’ve played, Wingspan is also one of the most celebrated, for good reason, so if you’re a board game fan yet to pick this one up, or somehow haven’t heard of it before, I really recommend finding it the Black Friday sales.
Best for families
No, this is not another bird game. Quacks of Quedlinburg is about over-enthusiastic alchemists crafting exploding potions in pseudo-medieval Germany. (Yes, Quedlinburg is a real place apparently.)
The game is fun and fast-paced, revolving around building a bag of ingredients (color chips) and then hoping to pull the right colors to stir yourself around the cauldron, scoring victory points and making money as you go.
Each of the ingredient colours have special powers that add a level of strategy to the game, but at its heart Quacks of Quedlinburg is simple, making it perfectly suitable for players as young as 10 or so. In a perfect world, you and your competitor potion-brewers would be alchemically adept, but Quedlinburg is full of Quacks, and your cauldron is liable to explode if you pull the wrong ingredients from you pouch, putting a damper on your growing reputation as the town’s top tincture seller.
It's a game you can keep coming back to
The game is primarily luck-based and accessible, full of bright colors and intoxicating designs, and can be played in around 45 minutes, with the winner declared after nine rounds of gaining victory points. Multiple expansions now out for the game increase the variety and replayability too, meaning it's a game you can keep coming back to, especially given its addictiveness already, proving it a great choice for the family over the festive period.
Quacks of Quedlinburg is one of those light-hearted games that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but is still brilliantly designed and wonderfully executed, and though you should be able to pick it up for a reasonable price anyway, the Black Friday sales should make it a no-brainer for any level of board-gamer.
So strap on your goggles, stir up the cauldron, and keep an eye out for this one.
Best for strategy fans
You’ve played Root, you love Root, but if you’re anything like me, there may have been a honeymoon period and then it just became another game on the shelf, something I admittedly feel a little ashamed about, given how fun the gameplay is, how evocative the art and aesthetics are, and how cool the implied wider world is. But my solution for falling back in love with Root is to pick up some of the game’s expansions, which are myriad now, allowing you to play as mercantile otters, fanatical lizards, conniving crows, majestic moles, creepy clockworks, armoured badgers, and pyromaniac rats.
Each of the expansions offer new rules for their factions, allowing you to mix up the gameplay, and can help you bring new players in with the core factions whilst keeping yourself on your toes with the new ones.
Thematically, I love the moles’ Great Underground Duchy, which digs holes all over the map and pops up through them, but with these expansions there are play styles to suit every gamer wanting to return to Root, including the highly strategic lizard cult, and the surprisingly flexible, knightly Keepers in Iron (the badgers).
The Root expansions are interesting and exciting additions to a fantastic game
In terms of what to buy first, I’d simply go with what sounds coolest, but fall back on the order of their release if in doubt (Riverfolk, Underworld, Clockwork, then Marauders) as you’ll be able to find increasing levels of guidance online if you want to really explore that faction to the fullest. The Root expansions are interesting and exciting additions to a fantastic game, so if you feel like a return to the woodlands of might and right this festive season, consider looking out for them in the Black Friday sales.
Want more offers? Don't forget to check out the best Black Friday gaming deals so far.
