Score Great Games for Cheap with These Black Friday Deals

Klaus Teuber’s Catan is often regarded as the boardgame that kicked off the modern board gaming movement.

The classic title pits players against each other to colonize the island of Catan, carefully trading resources, controlling the area of the board, and connecting settlements with roads. It’s a must-have for any collection and you can grab it on the cheap.

Ticket to Ride is another modern classic. In this game players strive to become railway barons, establishing dominance over the early American rail system.

Chicago to LA? Portland to Miami? It’s a simple game to understand and pick up, but tons of fun to master. Ticket to Ride comes in a variety of flavors too, and the Ticket to Ride: Europe edition is also on sale this week.

The premise of Azul is you (and the rest of the players) are artisans creating beautiful mosaics in a royal palace.

To play the relaxing (and visually appealing!) game players take tiles from the marketplace and lay them in their mosaic grids to create matching colors and patterns. The pieces are super high quality and the whole game is beautiful.

If you’re looking for a game with extremely high replayability, you can’t go wrong with Betrayal at House on the Hill.

It’s a haunted mansion cooperative where players work together to survive. The game has 50 scenarios players face off against but, on top of that, the board itself is modular and changes with each play. It’s great value at full price and an absolute steal at nearly half off.

Take the basic premise of Pictionary—that players have to figure out meaning from visual symbols and clues—and mix it up with paranormal investigation and you have Mysterium.

In the game, one player takes on the role of a ghost trying to communicate with psychics (the other players) who are trying to solve a mystery. The game relies on the use of beautiful painting cards for the ghost to leave clues for the investigators. Lots of replay value and lots of fun.

If you strip away the backstory of Mysterium but keep the really cool abstract paintings, you have Dixit.

It’s like playing Apples to Apples but with paintings. The “judge” says a word, a phrase, or even hums a song or pantomimes, and the other players play the painting cards from their hands to match what the judge has suggested as a clue. It’s super easy to learn and super fun.

This game is a Marvel Cinematic Universe spin on the original game, Disney Villainous. (The Disney version is so popular it’s hard to get your hands on a copy, so scoring the Marvel version for under $20 is a steal).

In the game, players take on the roles of one of the following Marvel villains: Thanos, Hela, Ultron, Taskmaster, or Killmonger. In turn, they face off against a host of classic heroes like Iron Man, Captain America, Black Panther, and more.

At a few cents over five bucks, it’s tough not to impulse buy The Crew.

The card-based game takes common card game techniques such as trick-taking and following-suit and weaves them together into a fast-paced cooperative deep space adventure that plays in only 5-10 minutes.