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Meeple Like Us Best Board Game Apps – Introduction

It’s sometimes hard for me to find the time to play physical boardgames, and harder still to find that time when others have time also. That makes board game apps one of the primary ways in which I engage with this hobby. It’s not my favourite way, but it’s a great backup when I don’t have my favourite way available. I don’t own them all, but I own a lot of them. Many of them I have played for hours – dozens, hundreds of hours even. And you know what’s great? There are dozens of these apps. Hundreds, even. Hundreds of games you can play for hundreds of hours. No-one could realistically ask for more from their mobile devices. But still – life, eh? It’s so short. Too short, really – too short to spend time playing anything but the best possible apps. And that’s why I have gathered you all here today. Today I’m presenting my top ten list of board game apps so that you can focus, laser-like, on the best that’s available. That’s the topic of our special feature today – the best board game apps that money can buy in 2019.

For this, I have considered games from two angles – how much I like the game, and how much I like the implementation. You won’t find any games on here that are well ported but that I don’t really enjoy. If you did you’d likely find things like Elder Sign, Tsuro, or Kingdom Builder making their way into the post. These are great implementations of games that I don’t hugely care for. I figure here that you don’t want to me to pick games on the basis of an endorsement of their technical merit. Also a game being great isn’t reason enough to include it or you’d find things like Tigris and Euphrates, Suburbia and San Juan on the list. These are great games but with implementations that are sub-par, lacking, or just a little clunky.

The games here then are great implementations of great games, at least in my view, and I’d recommend each every one to your attention.

Since we’re talking about mobile games here, I am not going to ignore accessibility but I’m going to talk about it from a different angle – I’m going to discuss what options the game gives you for fine-tuning the experience and then leave it up to you to decide the rest. Mobile devices already come with many accessibility tools and third-party support is reasonably good. I can’t really assess accessibility in an environment where there is such a wide range of variability. At least with a physical game everyone has the same starting point in the box. Generally speaking though, game apps tend towards inaccessibility and that’s something to bear in mind. If anyone has specific questions, I’ll be happy to answer them if I can in the comments.

As a point of context, all of these were played on android devices (usually phone and tablet). If the iOS version is different or non-existent, blame… I don’t know, Tim Cook.

So, with no further ado – on to the list!

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