Board Game Gift Guides

These pages are for the reader this whole site is written for: somebody buying a board game who does not play board games. They have no price anchor, no idea what “drafting” means, and no way to judge whether a game will actually get played once it is unwrapped.

None of that is a knowledge gap worth apologizing for. It is simply a category where all the public information is written by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, and the useful facts - what things cost, how long they take, what age they suit, how long somebody has to talk before the first turn - are the ones nobody bothers to write down.

So that is what these guides do. Two of them are reference tables built directly from the same data our recommendations use, so they cannot drift out of step: every player count, playing time and age band comes from the publisher’s own page and says which publisher it came from.

Where to start

If you have not bought a board game before, read how to choose a board game gift first. It is four questions in a specific order, it takes about two minutes, and it eliminates almost every wrong answer before you look at a single product.

If you are not yet sure a board game is the right present at all, is a board game a good gift sets out the three situations where it is excellent and the two where it honestly is not.

The reference pages

Three of these guides are lookup tables rather than articles. The age guide lists every game we cover by its publisher-stated minimum age. How long board games take does the same for playing time, and how many players you need for player count. All three are generated from the same typed data our product cards use, so a figure cannot be right on one page and wrong on another.

Where a publisher does not publish a figure, these tables say “not published” rather than estimating. That happens more often than you would expect, and it is set out in full on how we pick.