5 of the best board games of 2026 that I'm adding to my collection

Published Nov 10, 2026, 6:30 PM EST Adam has a degree in Engineering and has a life-long interest in technology. He has been writing for over a decade for various print and online publications, with a focus on consumer tech. He joined How-To Geek in 2024 while working at Pocket-lint. As well as being a long-term fan of Apple products, he also has a strong interest in smart home tech, running a Home Assistant server at home to automate all his smart home devices. He believes that the ideal smart home should work with minimal interaction from the user, with automations running as if by magic rather than requiring you to push buttons on a control panel. You can find more of his work on Muck Rack. I love a good board game. We've all played games like Monopoly and Mastermind, but it wasn't until I played The Settlers of Catan that I discovered how awesome board games could really be. There are several games that are going on my Christmas list this year. Wingspan Pocket Same fun game, smaller wings Wingspan Pocket is a smaller and shorter version of the popular bird-based engine-building game, Wingspan. The original game, designed by Elizabeth Hargrave, involves trying to attract the finest birds to your wildlife preserves. Attracting birds helps you gain food as well as giving you the opportunity to lay incredibly cute eggs. Wingspan Pocket makes things a little simpler, reducing the play time from around an hour to around 30 minutes. Players only build a single row of birds instead of multiple habitats, but the core concept of trying to build the best combination of birds remains the same. The original Wingspan could be a little daunting for casual players, so I'm looking forward to getting my hands on Wingspan Pocket and playing it with the family. It's suitable for up to five players, and you can also play solo. Cats Knocking Things Off Ledges Be as annoying as a real cat My daughter is obsessed with cats and keeps begging us to let her have one. The next best thing might just be Cats Knocking Things Off Ledges. This is a game for two to four players and is a reasonably fast game that only takes around 15 minutes. It's based around something that every good cat knows how to do: pushing stuff off furniture. The players have to build an increasingly precarious tower of pillars and platforms, and place cats and toys onto the platforms. You then have to use a stick in the shape of a cat's paw to try to knock down the toys without bringing the whole tower down. You get points depending on how far the object falls and which platform it lands on. Once someone gets to 10 points, the remaining players get to try to surpass that score on their final turn. If you love cats, and you love knocking stuff off stuff, then this is the game for you. Sanibel Collecting shells is more fun than it sounds Credit: Hasbro Games Sanibel is another game from Elizabeth Hargrave, and if you've been paying attention, you'll remember that she also designed Wingspan. In this game, you're not collecting birds, but instead collecting seashells. On the seashore. Of Sanibel. When you collect a shell, you add it to your bag (your game board), and you have to arrange the differently shaped shell tiles on the board almost Tetris-style. Different shells score different points, and so do different arrangements in your bag, so choosing which shells to collect and when is key. It takes around 45 minutes to play and is suitable for 2-4 players. If you like solving spatial puzzles, or you just really like shells, it's worth checking out. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Trick-Taking Game One does not simply give a game a short title Credit: Middle Earth Enterprises The original Lord of the Rings trilogy is almost half a million words long, and the title of this game is only a little shorter. Each chapter of the game only takes around 20 minutes to play, although there are 17 chapters in total, so don't expect to complete the game in one sitting. It's a follow-up to (you guessed it) The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game, but you don't need to have played the original game in order to play TLOTRTTTTTG, as I'm calling it from now on. It's a co-operative game for 1-4 players, where players take on the roles of characters from the second book of Tolkien's classic trilogy. Each character has their own objective that needs to be met for the players to succeed, and as you progress, more characters and challenges appear. Players take turns playing cards, and the highest card wins the trick. The challenge is ensuring that the right players win the right tricks to achieve their objectives. If you love the books, the movies, or just saying really long game titles, this could be the game for you. Illimat It's not new, but it's new to me All of the games on the list are 2026 releases, and this one most definitely isn't; it was released way back in 2017. However, I played it for the first time this year, and will definitely be buying it this year, so it absolutely counts. While I played the game earlier this year, I'd kind of forgotten about it until last week, when I went to see the excellent movie Wildwood, which is based on a book by Colin Meloy, the frontman of the band The Decemberists. I was reminded of Illimat, because the game was designed by Keith Baker in collaboration with The Decemberists, and includes cards based on some of their songs. As you'd expect, the game itself is very cool, with a cloth board, beautiful metal tokens, and incredible artwork by Carson Ellis, who happens to be Meloy's wife and also illustrated the Wildwood books. You collect cards from four areas of the board, called fields. Each field has a season that can change through the game and impacts the actions you can perform. It's a stunning-looking game, and a lot of fun to play. Despite its relative age, I'm definitely going to be adding it to my list. There's always room for one more board game There are five games on this list, and all of them are very different from one another. There are always new games with new mechanics to try, and the hardest part is often finding room to keep them all. That, and reading their ridiculously long titles aloud without running out of breath.