Excellent board games online shopping? Decrypto is a great game for fans of code-breaking. Teams split up on opposite sides of a table try to send codes back and forth to their teammates, and their opponents attempt to intercept those communiques. If you love puzzle-solving, Decrypto is a competitive and cooperative game that’ll satisfy that craving. If letter and word games are more your bag, Letter Jam might be a better fit for you. Players each get a letter that they cannot see, then take turns spelling words with other people’s letters to try to signal who has which letters. For word lovers, this is a great game with endless replayability.
Looks can be deceiving, and Root is the perfect example of that. Despite a bright and inviting art-style that’s reminiscent of the Redwall series, this is about as hardcore a strategy game as it gets. The action takes place in a quiet woodland realm, but all is not well beneath those trees. To be precise, the anthropomorphic animals that live there want to kick the stuffing out of each other. You command one of several factions vying for power (from the ruling Marquise de Cat to mouse villagers), and they each have unique mechanics that set them apart from one another. Although it’s a lot to wrap your head around, doing so is worth the effort. This is one of the best board games for tactical thinkers. Especially because it encourages players to think creatively. Root rewards unusual strategies, and you’ll need to learn the ins and outs of a particular faction to get the most out of them. With that in mind, it’s amongst the best board games for a regular gaming group. If you fall in love with Root, you’ll be pleased to note that it’s not going anywhere either – if anything, it’s blossoming into a franchise. In addition to the Riverfolk expansion that adds otters and a lizard cult, you can pick up a Clockwork add-on that deploys automated factions for solo, competitive, and co-op matches. You can even get a Root tabletop RPG if you want to take your forest adventures further. Discover extra details at Board Games Store.
We like to say that Cosmic Encounter is the board game equivalent of Mario Kart – practice will make you better at it, but just enough wild stuff happens in each game that a beginner always has a chance of winning, which makes it great for both first-time players and veterans. The basic rules are pretty simple: every turn, a player is randomly matched with another player (an ‘encounter’), and the two must either fight (using numbered cards from their hands) or negotiate. They can invite other players to ally with them in the fight, in exchange for rewards. The idea is to be the first to have five colonies on other players’ planets, either by winning battles or negotiating well. It’s a very easy set of rules to learn. The wrinkle is that every player has a unique alien power that totally breaks those rules. One alien actually wins battles if it loses them. One alien gets to take other players’ discarded battle cards, becoming more powerful the more others use their best cards. One can just invite itself into others’ encounters as an ally even if they don’t want it, raking up the rewards. Another actually wins the whole game if it loses all of its ships, meaning no one can tell whether you’re going to try to win or intentionally lose any given battle.
Grab your friends and family for a fun game (that’s also educational, but don’t tell the kids) where players race against each other to build crossword grids. Truth be known, this game will drive you bananas! Want to get your tweens and teens to put their phones down (if only for a while) and battle their boredom? Not Parent Approved is an inappropriately appropriate hilariously funny game that was designed to reintroduce a love of family games in these screen-obsessed times. Find more info at https://www.shirotoys.com/.