The 1990s is when board games got good.
That sounds harsh on everything that came before, and it’s not quite fair. But something genuinely changed in that decade. A wave of German designers started making games where you weren’t eliminated in the first twenty minutes, where the winner wasn’t decided by a dice roll, and where sitting at the table for ninety minutes felt like time well spent instead of time served. The hobby we all play in now was built in those ten years.
Click here to jump to the comparison table…
Here’s the thing that surprised us when we started pulling this list together: most of these games are still in print. Not as museum pieces or anniversary cash-grabs, but as games people actively buy and play. A few of them would still be considered excellent if they came out next year.
We should be upfront about what this list is not. If you searched ”90s board games” hoping for Crossfire, Jumanji, and Dream Phone, you want our other list — that’s the toy-aisle side of the decade, and it’s a genuinely fun rabbit hole. (Mall Madness, despite everyone’s memory, is 1988 — it’s in the 80s nostalgia list.) This one is about the games that changed what a board game could be.
What We Were Looking For
- Published between 1990 and 1999 — no cheating with early-2000s games that feel 90s
- Still playable today — good on a table in 2026, not merely important in a history-of-the-hobby sense
- Available to buy — we note where a game is between editions, but we didn’t want a list of eBay hunts
- Range — auctions, area control, tile-laying, trading, two-player. The decade was more varied than its reputation
We’re aware this list could be argued about endlessly. That’s half the fun of it — tell us what we got wrong in the comments.
Part of our complete guide to the Best Board Games, where these fit into the wider hobby.
Best Board Games of the 90s Comparison Table
(Click the thumbnail to jump down to the entry)
| Image | Game | Year | Players | Time | Our Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Catan | 1995 | 3–4 | 60–90 min | — |
 | El Grande | 1995 | 2–5 | 90 min | — |
 | Tigris & Euphrates | 1997 | 2–4 | 90 min | — |
 | Bohnanza | 1997 | 2–7 | 45 min | — |
 | Modern Art | 1992 | 3–5 | 45–60 min | — |
 | Ra | 1999 | 2–5 | 45–60 min | — |
 | Tikal | 1999 | 2–4 | 60–90 min | — |
 | Samurai | 1998 | 2–4 | 45 min | — |
 | Lost Cities | 1999 | 2 | 30 min | — |
 | Elfenland | 1998 | 2–6 | 60 min | — |
 | For Sale | 1997 | 3–6 | 30 min | — |
1. Catan (1995)
You knew it was going to be here. Klaus Teuber’s island-settling game is the one that broke through — over 32 million copies sold, translated into more languages than most novels, and still the game people name when they mean “a board game that isn’t Monopoly.”
What Catan actually did was teach a generation of players that a board game could have trading in it. Not just moving around a track — actual negotiation, where you have to convince the person you’re beating to give you the wheat you need. That’s the whole engine of the game, and it’s why it survived. Robber jokes and blocked ore ports are just the decoration.
It has aged, though, and we should say so. Catan can run long when a player gets shut out by bad rolls, and there’s a real feel-bad state where you sit there for forty minutes with nothing productive to do. Modern designs have mostly solved this. Catan hasn’t.
But it’s still the right game for the right table. If someone has never played a strategy game and you want them hooked in one evening, this remains the play. We’ve written a full Catan review and a simplified how-to-play guide if you want to go deeper.
The current edition is the 6th, released in 2025.
2. El Grande (1995)
El Grande came out the same year as Catan and won the Spiel des Jahres the following year. It’s the game that basically defined area control as a genre, and thirty years on nobody has really improved on it.
You’re a Spanish noble pushing caballeros into nine regions of the map. Every round, everyone secretly picks a power card, and turn order shakes out from those bids. Then you take an action, move some knights around, and periodically the game scores every region and pays out to whoever has the most presence there.
The tension is in the timing. You can see scoring coming. Everyone can see scoring coming. So the whole game becomes this slow-motion standoff where you’re trying to look weak in a region you actually intend to win, and trying to bait someone into overcommitting somewhere that won’t pay. The Castillo — a tower where you place knights secretly and reveal them all at once — is one of the best single pieces of design in any game from the decade. We’ve had Castillo reveals that flipped the entire board and had four people talking over each other for ten minutes afterward.
It plays 2–5, but it’s a five-player game really. At two it’s a much drier, more calculating thing.
Honest caveat: the rules take a while to teach, and the first game is always slower than you want. Give it two plays before you judge it. The Big Box edition bundles the base game with every expansion, which is the version worth owning.
3. Tigris & Euphrates (1997)
Ask a certain kind of board gamer for the best game of the 90s and this is the answer you’ll get. Reiner Knizia was already prolific by 1997, but Tigris & Euphrates is the one that gets called a masterpiece.
You build civilizations in ancient Mesopotamia by laying tiles, and you score in four separate colours — temples, farms, settlements, markets. Here’s the part that breaks people’s brains the first time: your score is your lowest colour. Not your total. Not your best. Your worst. So you can’t specialize. Every point you pour into the colour you’re already winning is a wasted point.
That one rule does an enormous amount of work. It forces you sideways into areas you’ve neglected, it makes attacking someone’s strongest suit pointless and attacking their weakest suit devastating, and it means the leader is never quite comfortable. Conflicts between civilizations are brutal and swingy in a way that stays fair, because you always chose to start them.
It’s the hardest game on this list. Not the most complex ruleset, but the most genuinely demanding to play well. If your group’s ceiling is Catan, this will be a rough night.
One thing to flag: availability is awkward right now. The Fantasy Flight edition is out of print and prices have crept up, and the new 25th Century Games reprint with Ian O’Toole art went to crowdfunding in early 2026 but isn’t on shelves yet. If you find the FFG edition at a sane price, grab it. Otherwise it might be worth waiting for the reprint.
4. Bohnanza (1997)
A card game about bean farming, by the man who later designed Agricola. It is much funnier and much better than that description makes it sound.
The rule that makes Bohnanza work is that you cannot rearrange your hand. Cards stay in the order you drew them, and you have to play from the front. So you’re constantly stuck holding beans you don’t want, in an order that doesn’t suit you, watching the one card you need slowly crawl toward the front of your hand.
The only way out is trading. And unlike a lot of trading games where negotiation is optional flavour, here it’s mandatory — on your turn you flip cards that you’re obligated to get rid of somehow. That forces conversation with everyone at the table, including the person in the lead, including the person who just refused you.
It plays up to seven, which is genuinely rare and genuinely useful. Seven-player games that aren’t party games basically don’t exist. This one is a real strategy game that seats your whole table.
Small warning: the trading can drag if you have one player who wants to optimize every deal. We have one of those. It’s worth agreeing up front that trades happen fast and imperfectly, otherwise a 45-minute game quietly becomes ninety.
5. Modern Art (1992)
The oldest game on this list and still the best pure auction game we’ve played.
You’re art dealers. You put paintings up for sale, other players bid on them, and at the end of each round the paintings by the most-traded artist are worth the most money. The twist that makes it sing: you’re setting the value of the thing you’re selling by selling it. Push an artist hard and their work becomes valuable — including the pieces sitting in everyone else’s collection.
Modern Art also cycles through five different auction types — open bidding, one-shot sealed bids, a fixed-price offer, a rotating “first person to say yes” — and each one draws out different information about what people think things are worth. The variety keeps it from settling into a solved rhythm.
The reason this game works is that money is public and tight. You’re always reading the table, always aware of who can afford what, always calculating whether letting someone else win a painting hurts you more than winning it yourself.
Needs the right group. With players who bid randomly, it falls apart. With people who pay attention, it’s razor sharp. It also really wants four or five players — three is playable but thin.
The CMON edition from 2017 is the current one, with real contemporary artwork and oversized cards.
6. Ra (1999)
Knizia again, and if Modern Art is the best auction game, Ra is the most nerve-shredding one.
Tiles come out of a bag one at a time. Anyone can call “Ra” and start an auction on the tiles accumulated so far. You bid with sun tokens — you only have a few, they’re numbered, everyone can see them, and when you spend one you take the sun that was up for grabs and it’s now the lowest value in play. So every bid permanently reshapes what you can do for the rest of the epoch.
The whole game is about greed. Do you call the auction now with three decent tiles, or let it ride for one more draw and risk someone else calling it, or risk the third Ra tile coming out and the auction happening at the worst possible moment? We have watched people talk themselves into waiting one more tile and lose an entire epoch over it. Every single time it’s funny.
Three epochs, forty-five minutes, and it plays 2–5 with the current editions.
The Deluxe “Pharaoh” edition from 25th Century Games is what’s readily available now — wooden tiles, metal scoring tablets, and Ian O’Toole artwork. It’s a nicer box than the game strictly needs, and the standard edition is worth hunting for if you’d rather not pay for the components.
7. Tikal (1999)
Tikal won the Spiel des Jahres in 1999 and is the best-looking game on this list by some distance — a Mayan jungle that grows outward tile by tile as players hack their way in.
You get ten action points per turn and you spend them: revealing new jungle tiles, moving explorers deeper in, excavating temples, claiming treasure. Ten points sounds generous. It never is. Moving one explorer through dense terrain can eat half your turn, and there’s always one more thing you wanted to do.
The action point system is what makes it. It’s a small idea that turns every turn into a real puzzle — you’re not choosing one action from a menu, you’re budgeting. Kramer and Kiesling used the same system in Torres and Java, but Tikal is where it’s most satisfying, because the map itself is changing while you plan.
There’s a variant in the box that replaces tile drawing with an auction for tiles. If your group likes auctions, try it — it removes most of the luck and tightens the whole game considerably.
The honest downside: at four players, downtime is real. Someone deep in a ten-point turn takes a while, and there’s not much to plan while you wait because the board will look different by the time it’s your go. Three players is the sweet spot.
8. Samurai (1998)
Feudal Japan, hex tiles, and one of the cleanest rulesets Knizia ever wrote.
The map is Japan, broken into hexes. Cities hold three kinds of pieces — rice, Buddha statues, and helmets, representing the peasantry, the religious class, and the military. You place tiles adjacent to those cities to exert influence over one type or another. When a city is completely surrounded, whoever has the most influence there takes the piece.
The scoring is where it turns vicious. You need to lead in at least two of the three categories to win. Leading massively in one and coming second in the others loses. So you can’t just chase whatever’s convenient — and everyone at the table can see which category you’re weak in, and can gang up accordingly.
The game plays in forty-five minutes and teaches in five. That ratio of teaching time to depth is close to unmatched. It’s the game we’d hand to someone who says they like chess but has never played a modern board game.
Two players is genuinely great here, which isn’t true of most games on this list. The Fantasy Flight edition is the one to look for.
9. Lost Cities (1999)
Sixty cards, two players, half an hour, and more agonizing decisions per minute than games ten times its size.
You’re mounting expeditions in five colours. Cards played to an expedition have to go in ascending order, so once you play the 7, the 4 in your hand is dead. Starting an expedition costs you 20 points immediately, and you have to earn that back before you score anything at all. Play a colour and fail to develop it, and you’ve just handed yourself a penalty.
Every single turn is a small tragedy. You want to start that green expedition, but you only have two green cards. Do you commit and hope? Or discard the green and watch your opponent pick it straight out of the discard pile? There’s no fog here — you can see what they’re building, they can see what you’re building, and the whole game is a slow read on whether they’re bluffing commitment or actually holding the cards.
This is the two-player game we recommend most often to couples, and it lives permanently in a bag or a coat pocket. Games take twenty minutes and nobody has ever played just one.
The current Kosmos edition includes the 6th expedition and a two-sided board.
10. Elfenland (1998)
Alan R. Moon won the Spiel des Jahres for this in 1998, six years before he won it again for Ticket to Ride. You can see the same brain at work.
You’re young elves travelling around a fantasy map, trying to visit as many towns as possible. The catch is that you don’t control the routes directly — everyone places transport counters on the roads, and those counters determine what vehicle is needed to travel each stretch. Dragons, unicorns, giant pigs, elfcycles, magic clouds. Everyone shares the same network.
So the game is really about laying track for yourself while looking like you’re not. You place a counter that opens up the route you need, and hope nobody notices it’s exactly the route you need. Meanwhile someone else drops a troll wagon on the road you were counting on and your whole plan for the round quietly dies.
It’s lighter than most of this list and it seats six, which makes it a good bridge game for a mixed group. It’s also very funny in a way that a lot of 90s Eurogames aren’t — riding a giant pig has a certain dignity to it.
Fair warning: there’s more randomness here than in the heavier games above, and a bad card draw can leave you stranded. Play it for the journey, not for a tight competitive contest.
11. For Sale (1997)
Stefan Dorra’s tiny real estate game is the shortest thing on this list and one of the best-designed. Thirty minutes, two phases, done.
Phase one: you bid for properties, numbered 1 to 30. When you drop out of the bidding you get the worst remaining property but you take back half your money. Phase two: everyone plays a property face down, they’re revealed at once, and cheques get handed out — the best property takes the biggest cheque.
The whole game is knowing when to fold. Bidding hard on a good building feels great until you realize you spent everything and the person who bailed early has a mediocre property and a full wallet. The second phase then punishes you again, because playing your best property into a round where everyone else played junk wastes it entirely.
Fifteen minutes to teach a table of six. It’s the filler we reach for while waiting for a late arrival, and it’s beaten longer games for the “let’s play that again” vote more than once.
The Travel Edition is the version currently easiest to find, and it’s a small enough box to live in a bag permanently.
So Which One Should You Actually Buy?
Start cheap. Lost Cities if you mostly play with one other person, Bohnanza if you’ve got a full table. Both teach in five minutes and both are still genuinely excellent, which is a strange thing to say about games older than some of the people reading this.
The one that best represents what the decade actually achieved is Tigris & Euphrates, but we’d hold off unless you can find a copy at a fair price and your group already likes heavy games. El Grande does similar work and is much easier to get hold of.
And if you just want to understand why everyone talks about this decade, play Catan with people who’ve never played it. Watch the trading start. That’s the moment the modern hobby began.
Looking for the other side of the decade — the flashing lights, the electronic voices, the games from the toy aisle? We covered those in 90s Nostalgia Board Games. And if you want to see what the hobby looked like before the Germans turned up and tightened everything, Best Board Games of the 80s is a genuinely different world — longer, weirder, and full of plastic.
If there’s a game from the 90s you think deserved a spot here, tell us which one in the comments — and tell us why. We’re always up for a good argument about El Grande.
Thumbnail image artificially generated for illustrative purposes.
