Top 10 Board Games Under $50 [Buyers Guide]

10. UNLOCK!: Escape Adventures

UNLOCK! is a series of escape adventures for up to six players. With one hour on the clock, players must work through a deck of sixty cards as a team, searching for clues, combining objects, and solving puzzles.

9. Codenames

The teams compete to see who can make contact with all of their agents first. Spymasters give one-word clues that can point to multiple words on the board. Their teammates try to guess words of the right color while avoiding those that belong to the opposing team.

8. Star Realms

Star Realms offers all the thrills of traditional trading card game style combat, combined with the fun of a deck building game.

Play powerful ships, destroy enemy bases or blast your opponent directly on your way to victory!

7. Just One

Just One is a cooperative party game in which you play together to discover as many mystery words as possible. Find the best clue to help your teammate. Be unique, as all identical clues will be cancelled!

6. That’s Pretty Clever! (Ganz Schon Clever)

Choose your dice well in that’s pretty clever! to enter them into the matching colored area, put together tricky chain-scoring opportunities, and rack up the points. The dice you don’t use are as important as what you do because every die that’s smaller than the chosen one can be used by the other players, keeping everyone in the game at all times.

5. Hive Pocket

Hive is a boardless game that builds strategy skills. Hive is a fun game to play, because of its simple rules, yet challenging for its depth.

4. Cartographers

In Cartographers, players compete to earn the most reputation stars by the time four seasons have passed. Each season, players draw on their map sheets and earn reputation by carrying out the queen’s edicts before the season is over. The player with the most reputation stars at the end of winter wins!

3. Monikers

Monikers is pretty simple: get your friends to guess the name on a card. Each team has 60 seconds to get through as many weird, inappropriate names as they can.

2. UNLOCK!: Epic Adventures

Unlock! is a co-operative card game inspired by escape rooms that uses a simple system which allows you to search scenes, combine objects, and solve riddles. Play Unlock! to embark on great adventures, while seated at a table using only cards and a companion app that can provide clues, check codes, monitor time remaining, etc.

1. The Crew: The Quest For Planet Nine

In the co-operative trick-taking game The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, the players set out as astronauts on an uncertain space adventure. What about the rumors about the unknown planet about? The eventful journey through space extends over 50 exciting missions. But this game can only be defeated by meeting common individual tasks of each player. In order to meet the varied challenges, communication is essential in the team. But this is more difficult than expected in space.