Best Strategy Board Games of 2024 – Top 10 Review

If you are a fellow strategy board games aficionado, you would have gone through the elaborate and time-consuming process of searching for the best strategy board games without perhaps even finding one. Or maybe, everything sounds great to you and you just want to buy everything.

We get it. It is an exciting but overwhelming time for strategy board games as they have come a long way since Battleship. Nowadays, the market offers much more – immersive themes and art, innovative gameplay, brain-burning puzzles, and gritty battles of wits. Especially with Kickstarter churning out more and more quality board games every year, it is a struggle to decide which are the best ones to buy.

In this article, we have compiled a list of the 10 best strategy board games that add some top bang for the buck to your games collection. Regardless of what you are looking for, we’ve got your back!

Best Rated Strategy Board Games – Top 10

1. Best Selling Strategy Board Game – Catan

At the beginning of the game, you build your board with hexagon pieces with a resource type on them and ‘claim’ the resource with your starting settlements. Then, you assign a number token to every hexagon on the board.

With every dice roll, you get raw materials on the corresponding hexes if you have a settlement on them. Catan incorporates bartering and trading, so plan to negotiate with your neighbors for the top deals. It also doesn’t restrict your card limit, so you can hoard as many cards as you want.

The thief is another layer of strategic depth ingrained in the game. Instead of a number, the sandy desert tile on the board is assigned a thief. The thief steals half your hand if you have more than 7 cards when you roll a 7. Not only that, but you can also make any resource tile a wasteland by moving the thief there. So if you don’t like to play nice, you can find yourself royally screwed over by your neighbors’ strategic thief placements.

There are tons of decisions in Catan that will make or break your game. It is a fun entry game for beginners, but also an awesome game for experienced players to sharpen their wits. It can be slow when people are taking their sweet time making decisions. Although originally made for 2-4 players, you can expand it to include up to 2 more players with their expansion packs.

2. Best Light Strategy Board Game – Wingspan

With so many different bird cards, you might struggle to draw the rare bird you need if Lady Luck frowns upon you. However, the easy-to-play but hard-to-master philosophy is exactly why we love it.

Between balancing your food source, growing your habitat, using bird abilities, laying eggs, it is a solid engine-builder game that needs you to crack your head for the most mind-blowing combos. There are many ways to nullify bad draws in the game if you look carefully enough.

In addition, the game can be great learning fun for your kids as well. Asides from the strategic aspect of the game, each bird card comes with an interesting bird fact, which makes it a great educational piece. Besides, if you are into a solo learning session, you can play the game by yourself too!

The Wingspan game is an unexpected but refreshing twist on typical strategy games where game designers have nailed the theme and the gameplay. Every round is tight – you have to pay attention to all the details to maximize your chances of winning. The theme of the game is further elevated by the thick stack of beautifully-designed cards. All in all, it is hands down one of the best strategy board games for families, and don’t let the theme turn you off.

3. Best Engine Building Strategy – Scythe

It is a bit of a worker placement game as you control and place workers on the map to acquire land riches and take actions.

Everything you can do is listed on your action board: constructing buildings, make enlistments, and so on.

The difficulty in Scythe lies in its many components and levels. Just to mention a few, you have your action board, faction board, mechs, faction-specific skills, character abilities. Besides that, everyone starts with different stats. With so many things on your plate, you have to balance each component to do what’s best for your faction while keeping a wary eye at your enemies.

Military engagements are won by making the right choices and having a strategic skill. You can use combat cards to give you an edge when you have to battle your enemies. Albeit challenging, you can also incorporate military encounters into your winning approach so that you get to control what happens.

Once you get the hang of the gameplay, you can link up efficient and deadly combos for your faction. However, it takes at least 2 hours to play for experienced players despite having streamlined action mechanics.

Scythe is an imaginative but hardcore engine-building strategy board game that has lots of components and space for you to flex your strategic capabilities with. You can either play it solo or with up to four other players. It is a long game, but with streamlined action mechanisms, time flies by. Especially if you are having fun annihilating other factions.

4. Best Cooperative Strategy – Pandemic

Teamwork is at the core of the game and it is crucial to get it right if you want to win the game and cure four diseases characterized by neon color cubes.

Pandemic features 7 characters with unique abilities that make sense with the story, like the ability to travel further or use fewer cards to cure diseases. That being said, they are not obscenely powerful, so no worries of anyone sitting idly while you play. You can also get more characters from expansions to add more variety to your game.

The ability to share knowledge is also a great mechanic that elevates teamwork and makes players think collectively on the best ways to collaborate. It opens up a deeper layer of planning since you can only share cards under certain circumstances. You have to think carefully or else you might tank your team’s approach.

Urgency and tension are ever-present in Pandemic. Diseases are constantly spreading while you are working around the clock to eradicate it. After every turn, you draw 3 city cards to infect cities. When you add the 4th same-colored cube to a city, an outbreak spreads the disease to adjacent cities.

Synergizing your approach with your teammates and making the best calls are essential since drawn city cards get reshuffled into the deck and will come back to haunt you again.

Ultimately, Pandemic is one of the best cooperative strategy board games because it encourages a lot of precise planning. The winner is the team and so is the looser, hence the ability for a group of people to effectively collaborate is crucial to winning the game.

Despite its challenges, it is a very accessible game that works with everyone, no matter how experienced you are. The game can be punishing and brutal, but with enough communication, you can alleviate some of the constant tension and urgency in the game.

5. Best Family Strategic Fun – Carcassonne

The way to win Carcasonne lies in claiming tiles. You can claim any area to score points unless somebody claimed it first. However, you can’t always predict what your rivals will do, and vice versa.

Sometimes you claim a city with great potential, only to have your rivals thwart you by putting down borders that end your growing city. Sometimes you snub your opponent’s winding roads. The possibilities are endless!

Competition isn’t treated as seriously in Carcasonne as other competitive strategy board games. You can almost always catch up, so you don’t have to make many loaded with thinking decisions upfront.

Ultimately, Carcassone is about fun while putting together a beautiful landscape from small mosaic pieces with your friends. The game can be played in a mere 30 minutes, making it a staple for quick game nights.

Carcassonne is a great casual strategy game for beginners. It is a board game built on simple board gaming elements and has simple rules, yet it ripes with opportunities to sabotage other players with a very surprising strategic depth.

It is one of the best strategy board games for 2 players as this speeds up the turns and creates a more competitive atmosphere for two people to have a healthy head to head rivalry. Beautiful game board landscapes are the icing on the cake that really adds to the overall enjoyment the game manages to deliver.

6. Best War Strategy – Axis & Allies Pacific 1940

No matter which country and which side you take, there are tons of things to keep track of, like kamikaze attacks, neutral nations, and military formations. The new anti-aircraft artillery also adds depth to the game, since there are many rules imposed on the use of these effective machines.

Japan feels overpowered early in the game, hence the game may feel punishing at first. Thematically, this design is intentional, it does so to reflect the real historical events of the time and it does it well. Later, the entry of the USA in the third round is a major game-changer. With a wartime economy, the USA can generate a lot more income, which means the game can tilt heavily towards the Allies’ favor if you are not careful.

At the same time, the perceived lead doesn’t guarantee your win since the game has enough potential for surprising twists. As Japan, you have lots of opportunities to retaliate, especially since you know what is coming. We love the constant back and forth between players on the board as it creates a tense and stressful war-like atmosphere.

For a global scale world war 2 theatre, you can combine Axis & Allies Pacific 1940 with Axis & Allies Europe 1940 boards. With the world at your control, get ready to play through tons of grand drama, story, and strategic play.

With improved mechanics and high-quality miniatures, a huge board, as well as immersive storylines, Axis & Allies 1940 2nd edition is easily one of the best military strategy games of all time. It requires thinking through, concentration and time to play, but its attention to history is impeccable. You and up to 4 of your friends are sure to enjoy the game night if you are into WW2 strategy games.

7. Best Adventure Strategy – The Voyages of Marco Polo

The dice determines how many actions you can take. Two of your dice are used to determine how far you can travel while others are used to determine things like raw materials to buy.

The spirit of The Voyages of Marco Polo lies within how you allocate dice for your actions. It is played over 5 quick rounds. So, you have a lot to do in a very short amount of time. Without proper planning, your journey is doomed to fail.

Like true traveling merchants, you have to complete contracts for specific rewards or Victory Points. Contracts are integral to the game since they give you an extra 5 VPs for the most contracts completed. You have to deliver goods from bazaars or set-up trading posts to people you meet in your journey.

Doing anything requires funds and/or camels, which is why built trading posts are such important commodities. It generates extra income for you to fund your travels or give you extra physical materials needed for your contracts.

Thankfully, if you are stuck in a rough spot, you can sometimes turn the tables with your character ability, like getting an extra Meeple to move or choosing a dice number. With so much to do in so little time, The Voyages of Marco Polo can bring out the indecisiveness in all of us. But with seasoned players, this game promises a world of fun and adventure.

The Voyages of Marco Polo is essentially a worker placement game with a couple of well-executed and streamlined mechanics thrown in. Coupled with great thematic and character design, it creates an immersive world filled to the brim with complex strategies and competitive spirit.

8. Best Colt War Strategy – Twilight Struggle

The gameplay for Twilight Struggle is surprisingly simple for such a deep and complex board game.

Essentially, you try to defeat your enemy by drawing cards. But here’s the catch, both the US and USSR’s cards are shuffled into the same pile, so it is possible for you to draw your opponent’s cards. How would you negate the effects of these draws becomes a crucial part of your strategy.

In practice, the game is much more complicated and challenging than throwing cards at each other. The main elements of the game are controlled but ripe with opportunities for planning and sabotage. Take advantage of knowing each side’s strengths and weaknesses as well as when to exploit them.

Moreover, there are always things you have to look out for. How close to DEFCON 1 are you? Is your enemy planning to stage a coup? Are you falling behind in the space race? One wrong decision and you can kiss your victory goodbye. So what will you do, comrade? The choice is yours.

Twilight Struggle is an exceptional 2-player military strategy board game that recreates the ever-present tension of the Cold War. The tight and precise gameplay leaves no room for mistakes, which adds to the thrill of matching your strategic wit to your opponent’s. It will be a long and grueling game night, but the results are well worth the time and brainpower.

9. Best Economic Strategy Game – Brass: Birmingham

When you build your network, you will inevitably link yours with your competition, whether you like it or not. Instead of a disadvantage, you can make it work by tapping into your competition’s resources and accessing their market. This increases the interaction between players, which adds an element of tactics into the game.

Brass: Birmingham brilliantly injects information into the game in a way that leaves you both informed and uninformed at the same time. For example, you don’t know how much your industries are worth until you can flip them over after exhausting them.

But how would you keep generating income when they are depleted? By coyly reserving information from you, the game creates a lot of tension that encourages good strategy and smart decision making.

Because of this tendency to reserve information, it can be confusing to deal with the transition between two eras. At the end of the canal era, all the canals are removed from the board. It could be pivotal for some players, especially less experienced ones, as they may have no idea what to do or how the canal placements affect the next, rail era.

Brass: Birmingham is one of the best strategy board games for adult gamers interested in economy or business. The game deliberately leaves you in the dark sometimes, forcing you to think hard and work smart. Once you get over the steep learning curve, expect a huge payout in satisfaction from great strategic decisions and interactive plays.

10. Best Civilization Strategy – Through the Ages

The civilian and military cards consist of leaders, military tactics, and events that will make your civilization thrive. Leadership is an important part of history and it shows in your civilization. Leaders in every age help grow your civilization with a special skill, the benefits of which you need to assess and choose wisely. Events drawn could be brutal and could potentially throw your chances in the bin as they are often unpredictable.

The military tactics system in the previous game is often abused to get the most overpowered military. But, in this game, tactics cards are shared and can be bought with military points. Besides that, you also build your army through military units, which complicates the decision-making process as points are scarce. Thankfully, since there isn’t actually a map, you can’t ever lose territory.

As you build your civilization, more factors come into play. Worker placement is important since they build buildings that produce raw materials. But at the same time, you have to take care of your urban and military development so that your population stays happy and you’re safe from foreign attacks. A balanced run is key here since if you lag too far behind, you might never catch up.

Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization is an exceptionally-designed civilization-building strategy game. It simulates many decisions a pioneer have to make when creating a new society, which makes decision making a lengthy but fun process. Long playtime aside, you might also find it hard to catch up if you fall behind.

Conclusion

Playing strategy board games are naturally harder since you need some brainpower to play them well and usually plenty of time on your game night. At the same time, there are some strategic entry-level options that can be enjoyed in around 30 minutes. So if you’ve managed to get things organized and have the right group of people – spending time with a top pick strategy tabletop game can make a remarkable and memorable game night.

Before you dash out buying and making difficult purchase decisions, we would like to quickly recap the games featured in our top 10 review to help you choose the right one.

If your group is into WW2 movies, we would recommend Axis & Allies Pacific 1940 2nd edition for being dramatic and historically accurate. By that extension, Twilight Struggle is great for history buffs since it is based on true events of the Cold War tension between the two world superpowers.

Alternatively, if you are into the business side of history, Brass: Birmingham can be a thrilling ride as you build your business network across Birmingham during an industrial boom. On a side note, Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization is also a great worker placement and civ-builder board game to recreate history with.

Wingspan and Carcasonne are some of the most recommended games for family fun. These games are easy to learn and quick compared to other strategy board games. Pandemic is also an awesome way to learn cooperation through board games for your kids.

Lastly, if you are looking for a strategic nirvana for a wider group of six players, make sure to check out Game of Thrones that made it to our top 10 six-player board game review.

Do you agree with our picks? Let us know what kind of strategy board games you like in the comments below and what you would have picked for your game night?