Board Games

The classics, and where to find them

• Backgammon is the oldest game on the site by a distance, and the best played thing in this category that is not mahjong.
• Checkers and Master Checkers are the plain draughts games.
• Chess is here in several versions, including Chess Challenges for puzzle positions and 2 Player Chess for two people at one keyboard.
• Ludo Fever, Ludo Hero, Parcheesi Online and Snakes and Ladders are the family board games, all of them decided largely by dice.
• Rummikub and Dominoes BIG are the tile laying games, and 5 Roll is the dice game where you keep what you want and reroll the rest.
• Sea Battleship and Battleships Armada are the grid and guesswork games, along with Mine Sweeper and Dots and Boxes, both of which are pencil and paper games that moved onto a screen without losing anything.
• Peg Solitaire is the one you play alone, on the board with the marbles, and it is much harder than it looks.

Why there is so much mahjong here

Mahjong sits here as well: layouts, connect variants and the Onet style tile games, including Kris Mahjong, Mahjong Dimensions and Onet Connect Classic. They arrived tagged as board games from the catalogue this site was built from, and the tag is defensible, since mahjong is a tile game played on a laid out surface. It does mean the classics above share the page with a second genre, so if tiles are what you came for, mahjong is the page organised for them.

Against the computer, or against someone else

Almost everything here plays against the computer. The exceptions announce themselves in the title, and 2 Player Chess is the clearest of them: one board, two people, one keyboard. There is no matchmaking on this site and no accounts, so a game against another person means the two of you in the same room, which is how most of these were played long before they were on a screen.

What is genuinely missing

Worth saying rather than implying otherwise. There is no Go, no Othello or Reversi, no Yahtzee under that name and no Mancala. Those are real gaps in the collection rather than an oversight in the filing. If you want the card games instead, they are in cards, and the word board games, the ones played with letter tiles, are in scrabble.