Sadly, a majority of my favorite games are currently out of print and painfully expensive. Here’s my recommendations for people putting their first or second feet into the modern boardgames pond, tilted towards the accessible, the crucial, and the still in-print or easy to find used.
Or maybe it’s because I have so many damn boardgames that I actually have to keep a spreadsheet to remember where they all are. (Here’s my new book on games as an art form.) The main change in my life is that everybody now asks me for board game recommendations at Christmas. After a recent professional pivot, I am now literally an academic specialist in the philosophy of games.
