Games where theme is, for all practical purposes, absent. Classics include Chess and Go, while more recent classics include Hive, Ingenious and the GIPF series.

This mechanism describes games where players choose what to do on their turn from a predefined list of actions – often by choosing a card/token, or by worker placement (see below). Popular examples in [..]

Used to describe a player who, when playing a co-operative game, tends to take over and talk over other people’s ideas.

A phrase, seen as derogatory by some, used to describe games usually heavy on sci-fi, zombie or fantasy themes that involve lots of story elements, random chance and character customisation/miniatures [..]

 Used to describe games that paralyse certain players with indecision; usually because they have  wide range of options whose values can change drastically when any other game state changes. Some play [..]

 Games where players compete for parts of the board to win the game. The classic example is Risk, although more recent games such as Twilight Struggle, Small Worlds, Eclipse and Five Tribes have taken [..]

Short for ‘collectable card game’ (or TCG

A co-operative game, where the players are working together against the game to claim a joint victory. You may also hear the term hidden traitor

A game mechanism first made popular by the card game Dominion. Borrowing from the CCG concept (see above), deck-building games make the deck-building element the game itself: you start with a small ha [..]

This covers quite a range of games, including abstract word/number/picture games (such as Codenames, Hanabi, Mysterium), detective games (Scotland Yard, Letters From Whitechapel) and social deduction/ [..]