Ars Technica’s ultimate board game gift guide, 2021 edition

Heavier fare

Longer and more complex, the games in this section are "gamer's games." Here are a few recommendations to keep those brains churning.

Spirit Island

1-4 players, 90-120 minutes, age 13+ / $80 at Amazon, Walmart

Many board games put you in the shoes of colonizers exploiting a "newly discovered" land and its people. Spirit Island turns this all-too-well-worn theme on its head, letting you and up to three friends play as the spirits defending an island being ravaged by outside explorers. Like Pandemic, it's a cooperative game—all players fight together against the game itself—but unlike Pandemic, it's not for board game beginners. The deep card play and complex upgrade paths make for a decidedly thinky (and crushingly difficult) co-op experience, and if you or your giftee is the type of gamer who loves long, brain-burning turns, Spirit Island is a great buy. If you get bored of the base game (unlikely—there's plenty of content, here), you can always pick up the game's Branch and Claw expansion. Read our review here.

Scythe

1-5 players, 115 minutes, age 14+ / $63 at Amazon, Target

Set in an alt-history 1920s Europe, Scythe suits players up in giant mechs to spar for control over hexes on a giant board. But although it looks like a big ol' wargame, Scythe is actually a deep, puzzly Euro. Wins usually hinge less on overt violence and more on how effectively you've been able to set up an efficient production chain. Military posturing—puffing up your chest to dissuade other players from horning in on your slowly growing kingdom—provides the game with a constant source of tension and interactivity.

Scythe is a huge, lavish production with top-of-the-line components and fantastic gameplay. Playing a game of Scythe feels like An Event, even though it won't take you the entire day to get through. Highly recommended. You can read our review here.

Terraforming Mars

1-5 players, 120 minutes, age 12+ / $50 at Amazon, Cardhaus

There are plenty of Mars-themed board games, but Terraforming Mars is the unquestioned daddy of the genre. It packs a hefty punch into its two-or-so hours, and there's something ineffably satisfying about watching the desert bloom under tiles of ocean and grass.

Terraforming Mars has piles and piles of colored and metallic cubes that really make the experience on a primal level, but the artwork is unfortunately a bit bland and unpolished. That doesn't really matter when you're having so much, though. It's a game of card drafting, as players take on the role of corporations paid to turn the Red Planet green. You start with lichen and balance six resources in the hope of ending up with cities and oceans. If there's one criticism, it's that there's not much player conflict, but Terraforming is a deep and deeply replayable puzzle. Read our review here.

Great Western Trail

1-4 players, 75-150 minutes, age 12+ / $70 at Amazon, Miniature Market

Great Western Trail just got a long-needed reprint and update this summer, getting rid of some of the problematic art in the first edition while boosting the components, including a two-layered board that lets tokens and pieces sit in recessed spaces. It also added an official solo mode that plays extremely well. Designed by Alexander Pfister (Port Royal, Maracaibo, Isle of Skye), Great Western Trail turns players into ranchers. You collect hands of cow cards, hire workers to help you grow your operations, build stations along the board's main path, and eventually deliver cows to Kansas City, where they'll be slaughtered and shipped to parts beyond. (The game is less gory than that makes it sound.) The solo mode is appropriately hard and makes it clear how much you have to focus on building up your deliveries so that you get your money's worth each time you reach the end of the path.

Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar

2-4 players, 90 minutes, age 13+ / $42 at Cardhaus

Tzolk'in has one of the most striking boards you will ever see in a tabletop game: There are five interconnected plastic gears sitting on top of the board. Players place their meeples on the lowest unoccupied space on a gear, and after every turn, you move the largest gear one space, which turns all the other gears as well—and moves every meeple to a more powerful action space. There's a delicate dance of placing and retrieving meeples and building powerful moves in which you can retrieve several meeples at once. You have a lot of things to keep track of: the three temple tracks, buildings and monuments, and making sure you have enough corn to feed your workers. The game is co-designed by Simone Luciani, who also made the brilliant Grand Austria Hotel and Lorenzo il Magnifico, all of which are complex yet accessible, and are somewhat limited in player interaction.

The Red Cathedral

1-4 players, 30-120 minutes, age 10+ / $35 at Barnes & Noble

A heavier game in a small box, The Red Cathedral marries multiple game mechanics you've seen elsewhere into a brilliant, intricate race to build six sections of the titular cathedral and rack up the most points. Players will claim up to six sections of the cathedral, which changes form each game and has exactly six sections per player, and then will move communal dice around the rondel on the board to gather resources, money, or other bonuses. You can also spend an action moving the resources you've collected to complete the sections you've claimed or build decorations on completed sections (even those your opponents finished) for further points. There's a small random element when you roll the dice, but you do so after you move them to a new space and gain any resources or rewards, so the randomness applies to what actions you can take rather than whether your chosen action will work out. It plays well with two to four players and runs 90 minutes or so once you get the hang of it. It also has a fantastic solo mode.