What Board Game Should I Buy? | How NOT to Collect Dust Gatherers

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What’s up, Chaos Heroes!

Familiar feeling? You’re standing in a store, or scrolling through a webshop, and you see IT. The perfect box, so beautiful it melts your retinas. You take it home, rip off the shrink wrap like a hyperactive golden retriever destroying a new chew toy, unpack it, and… you realize you just bought an expensive shelf protector. A game that just stares at you from the shelf like a cockroach on the wall, one you never actually want to touch.

I grabbed my virtual pen today because I made these exact mistakes in the beginning. Today, I’m showing you 6 blunders you should avoid if you are constantly asking yourself: What board game should I buy? Welcome to our ultimate board game buying guide.

1. Flying Blind

This is the most common mistake. You see a game and throw it in your cart with zero research. There are a few reasons for this.

One is that the box art is epic, the graphics are gorgeous, and you fell in love with the miniatures. Done, sold, I need it! Hold your horses! This is like a perfectly decorated, multi-tiered cake that turns out to taste like sawdust. At least to you—someone else might think it tastes like glitter-unicorn bubblegum. Beautiful artwork might just be hiding a boring or frustrating mechanic for you. Of course, the opposite can also be true: an incredibly ugly game might have gameplay so captivating it glues you to your chair for hours.

The other scenario is walking into a store and seeing a game with a 50% discount. Or someone selling it “below market price” on the second-hand market. You don’t even really know what it is, but at that price, it’s a crime to leave it behind!

A cheap game you never play is the most expensive game in the world. A full-priced game you play to shreds is the best investment. A sale is only a sale if you buy a game cheaper that you were going to buy anyway!

2. Choose a Game That Fits YOU

Things can go sideways on multiple fronts here. Perhaps the first and most important is the style of the board game. Do you like luck in a game, or is calculating math more your thing? Based on this, the game could be an Ameritrash (lots of luck) or a Eurogame (less or almost zero luck). Or maybe hybrids, but let’s not get into that right now. This alone can be a massive dealbreaker in whether you’ll love a game or not.

It also matters whether you are the competitive type, love to bash your friends (confrontational), or if you prefer to win as a team against the game (cooperative). Because your personality heavily dictates which of these will be the winner for you.

3. The Math Ain’t Mathing: “Wait, this needs 6 players? We’re always just two.”

This is a classic mistake. You buy a party game designed for a large group, while you play 99% of the time with your partner. Or conversely, you buy a hardcore two-player dueling game and constantly try to force it on your 4-player friend group. Even though the box says how many people can play, not every board game works well at every listed player count. It’s highly recommended to check BGG to see what player counts the community actually recommends.

4. The Complexity Maze

Playtime is usually correlated with complexity. If “1.5-2 hours” is scribbled on that miserable box, be suspicious. The difficulty of the rulebook will rival assembling an 800-piece IKEA furniture set. As a general rule, board games that fit into a 1-hour slot won’t make your brain bleed; anything above that is for more advanced players to browse. Except for Monopoly and its clones, which I wholeheartedly do NOT recommend to anyone.

5. The “Dave Factor”: “My brother-in-law’s friend’s dog’s coworker said it’s awesome!”

Dave, or Steve (or even me) sings odes about a game. It clicked for him, he idolizes it, says it’s the best in the world. If he says so, it must be good! Well… no.

Dave might be a hardcore, brain-burning Euro-fan who can sit in silence for hours trading wood for wooden cubes, while you prefer fast-paced, thematic, take-that games. Just because someone else likes a game doesn’t mean you will too. The question isn’t “Did Dave like it?”, but rather “WHY did Dave like it, and do those mechanics appeal to you?”. So don’t even buy it just because I say I like it. Look at the pros and cons, and weigh whether you can live with the parts of a game that are less appealing to you.

6. Derailing the Hype Train

Everyone is talking about it. Everyone is buying it. It sits on the throne of the BoardGameGeek top list. (By the way, BoardGameGeek—or BGG—is the internet bible for board gamers. A brutal database where you can find everything about every game, from its weight to player counts. If something isn’t on BGG, it doesn’t exist.) There’s no way it’s bad, right?!

The hype train is the most dangerous vehicle. It’s entirely possible that the BGG Top 1 is a hardcore, 4-hour cooperative strategy game that would make you climb the walls. Popularity does not equal personal entertainment! Trust your own taste, not the crowd’s!

The Dicepool Magic Advice

Before you buy a game, ask yourself the four sacred Dicepool questions:

1. Who and how many people will you play with?
2. How much time do you have?
3. What type of games do you like?
4. And most importantly: Did I do my research properly?

The playtime and player count on the box are already telling; always check those!

Dicepool Magic and other great channels don’t exist by accident! Take 15-20 minutes to watch a video, read a blog post, or do some digging on BGG. Look at the mechanics and the comments. Don’t throw away your hard-earned cash on a future dust gatherer, which you’ll probably lose money on even if you sell it later. If you follow this board game buying guide, your shelf will become a treasure chest full of experiences!