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The best board games of all time, ranked by the world

6 November 2026 · Games

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Board game lists usually come from one of two places. Hobby sites rank games by the scores their most dedicated players give them, and the result is a list of long, heavy strategy games most families have never opened. Shop lists rank by sales, and the result is Monopoly, UNO and Scrabble. GOATvs does it a third way: two games side by side, pick the one you think is greater, and the world's list is built from all of those small choices. The box above shows where the leaders stand today in the world's list of the greatest games of all time, video games included; the full order of the tabletop games alone is on our Top 100 board games list.

At the top, two modern classics are almost impossible to separate. Catan came out in Germany in 1995 as The Settlers of Catan, designed by Klaus Teuber, and won the Spiel des Jahres, the German game of the year award, that same year. Trading wood for sheep with the people around the table turned out to be the game that brought a generation of adults back to board games, and it opened the door for everything that followed. Pandemic, designed by Matt Leacock in 2008, did something different: everyone plays together against the board, trying to stop four diseases before they spread too far. Put the two side by side on GOATvs and it is one of the closest calls on the whole list.

Right behind them is Carcassonne, Klaus-Jürgen Wrede's game of laying tiles to build roads, cities and monasteries, which won the Spiel des Jahres in 2001. Ticket to Ride, Alan R. Moon's race to claim train routes across America, won it in 2004. Newer games have pushed into the top group as well: Codenames, Vlaada Chvátil's party game of one-word clues, and Wingspan, Elizabeth Hargrave's game about attracting birds, which won the Kennerspiel des Jahres, the award for more experienced players, in 2019.

Then there are the games that are thousands of years older than all of these. Chess grew out of the Indian game chaturanga and took its modern rules in southern Europe around the end of the 15th century. Go, the game of black and white stones on a 19 by 19 grid, began in China more than 2,500 years ago, and in March 2016 it gave the world one of the great moments in computing when Google DeepMind's AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, one of the strongest players of his time, four games to one. On GOATvs the old rivals meet head to head, and the vote is close.

The most interesting line on the list may be where Monopoly ends up. Parker Brothers first sold it in 1935, and it grew out of The Landlord's Game, patented by Lizzie Magie in 1904 to show how land ownership made a few people rich. It may be the most played board game in history, and it is also one of the most argued about: long games, family fights, house rules nobody agrees on. When the world puts it next to Catan, Catan wins clearly. Against Scrabble, the word game Alfred Butts invented in the 1930s, Monopoly loses too. It is in the board games Top 100, but far from the top of it.

The heavy hobby games have a place as well. Gloomhaven and Brass: Birmingham have each spent time at number one on BoardGameGeek's ranking, and Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, the version of Pandemic whose board changes for good from one game to the next, held that spot before them. With the wider world voting, they sit lower than on the hobby sites, behind the games more people have played. Classics like Risk, UNO and Clue are spread across the list too.

Nothing on the list is fixed. Every pick moves it, and the best way to argue with it is to vote. Start with Catan against Pandemic below, or build your own board game Top 10 and see it next to the world's.

Vote: Catan vs Pandemic

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