Wirecutter - How we test board games

Before we could go about testing strategy games, we had to get through the tricky task of defining what they actually are. There doesn’t seem to be an agreed-upon standard within the tabletop gaming industry of what exactly makes a game a strategy game. So categorizing them often means relying on some combination of mechanics, perceived level of complexity, and a general gut feeling.

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This “I know it when I see it” vibe wasn’t particularly helpful when we were trying to gauge which games we wanted to test. So we dug into the different definitions we found online. And we spoke with some of the people who work at The Brooklyn Strategist—a Brooklyn board-game shop and café—and with Eric Yurko, a board-game reviewer and committee member of the American Tabletop Awards. After having those discussions and examining our research, we’re focusing on games that heavily emphasize players’ decision-making skills, are more complex than the picks in our guide to beginner board games, and will take between 45 and 120 minutes to play.

Armed with this definition, we dug through other reviews, got recommendations from the experts we talked to, and read over dozens of Board Game Geek entries to end up with the 13 games we’ll be testing.

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To explore a cross section of how different strategy games evoke that brain-burning feeling, we tried to include games with a good mix of mechanics and feels—big, chunky economic games like Brass: Birmingham, war games like Root and Small World, engine-building games like Scythe, and even Cryptid, a deduction game.

Determining the quality of any board game is a deeply subjective exercise, so our testing process for games is different from our testing process for a lot of other things we cover at Wirecutter. Unlike with vacuums or pressure washers, with board games there really isn’t one game that can be best for most people. So instead, we invite players with a wide variety of backgrounds and experience with tabletop games to test each contender. As we play, I take notes on things like play time, how easy it is to teach and learn the game, what the game is like to set up, how the pieces feel, and, most importantly, how fun the experience is. I also try to find the context in which the game might fit best—any situation from a simple family game night or a fun bar hang to an intense multi-hour strategy odyssey.

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Then we talk about it as a group, and I incorporate the other players’ thoughts into my notes. We don’t test every game with the same group of people. This is partially because it’s more fun to bring as many people as possible into the process. But it’s also due to the fact that if we all played all of the games with the same group, we’d have lost the perspective of a less-experienced player by the final one we tested.

James Austin

We’re only a quarter of the way through testing, so there are no conclusions yet, but I was surprised by how well Cryptid works as a game. The deduction aspect is fun, if subtle—most of the game is like a competitive version of Minesweeper, but each player has one piece of vital information they can use to eliminate areas, and trying to take actions that give you more insight into the other players’ knowledge without giving away your own is tricky. Yet this game plays very quickly, and it might be a bit light compared with the other games.

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I am also curious how some of the staff-favorite games—Small World, Scythe, and Wingspan—fare next to the games we’ve found to test specifically for this guide.