Highlights
- Marvel Champions: Play as iconic heroes, manage threats, and feel the real struggle to save people in a deckbuilding card game.
- KeyForge: Experience the fun and wackiness of randomized decks in a low barrier card game with a world of possibility.
- Star Wars: Imperial Assault: Dive into a detailed Star Wars universe through cooperative missions and character progression.
Fantasy Flight games is one of the biggest names in board gaming, alongside giants like Wizards Of The Coast. Since the company was founded in 1995 they have released games to cover every genre and niche, even digging into licensed games to make incredible systems and stories for the tabletop. With a focus on larger-than-life universes, the company has released massive-scale war games, deckbuilding card games, and everything in between.
With dedication in the company for quality components, as well as their continued practice of picking up the license for out-of-print games to revamp them for a modern audience, a fan of tabletop games will find something here to bring some excitement back into board game nights.
1 Marvel Champions: The Card Game
BoardGameGeek Rating: 8.1
One of the more recent licensed games that Fantasy Flight has produced, Marvel Champions brings hectic deck management mechanics to the Marvel universe. Up to four players each choose one of the starter heroes to control – Iron Man, Black Panther, Spider-Man, Captain Marvel, or She-Hulk – and their deck will feature cards suited to their chosen character. Crucially to Marvel Champions though, each player will have to manage threats from various attacking villains from across the classic comics by kitting themselves out with skills, and items, and even by protecting their alter ego and their interests.
T’Challa will have to take off the Black Panther armor and manage his kingdom, Peter Parker will have to defend his grades as well as New York City. This focus on the humanity of the characters makes the game feel like more than a fan service power fantasy; Marvel Champions becomes a real struggle to save people. A huge spread of expansion characters has been released to let fans take control of their favorite heroes. More interestingly are the villain expansions that challenge players with new evils and beloved belligerents to face off against.
2 KeyForge
BoardGameGeek Rating: 7.1
Changing the style of trading card games from Pokemon and Magic: The Gathering‘s obsession with the best cards and engineering the most perfect decks, KeyForge has an incredibly low barrier for entry and games-like-yu-gi-oh/”>a charm that the other popular card games fail to indulge. Two players need to purchase one deck each, and then they can start to play. Every deck is completely randomized, completely different, and identified by a unique name that is often hilarious but always intriguing. From there, fans can explore the intricacies of their decks.
Some will undoubtedly be better than others, but the process of figuring out how each deck plays at its best is some of the most fun gameplay in card games. The narrative in KeyForge, two masters trying to forge keys faster than each other, often takes a backseat to the more wacky moments: Martians with ray guns fighting beside fantasy elves or evil giants. There is a world of possibility in KeyForge and the level of accessibility that is captured makes it hard to dislike and harder still to stop playing.
3 Star Wars: Imperial Assault
BoardGameGeek Rating: 8.0
In one of Fantasy Flight’s most inspired licensing pair-ups, they have released a good number of Star Wars games that range from mammoth space battles to smaller and much more tense skirmish battles on cluttered battlefields. Imperial Assault sees up to four players working cooperatively against an Empire player and trying to complete missions as part of a larger campaign. This gives players time to connect with their character, helped along by character-specific missions – a quest to save the Wookiee player’s brother or to steal back a weapon that the empire confiscated.
This also enables the game to have a real sense of progression; the heroes will get more skilled and better equipped, but all the while the villain has more tools at their disposal and more tricks and traps to try to catch the players. It can often feel like a complex role-playing game. The detailed models of Jedi and Stormtroopers bring life into an exceptional game that begs to be played again and again.
The appearance of recognizable Star Wars characters is exciting, but never the focus. And the heroes can lose, left fleeing with tails between their legs and terrified of the next time they have to engage the Empire. games-with-strange-systems/”>For fans of TTRPGs, and games-that-adapt-movies/”>fans of the Star Wars universe, Imperial Assault is a no-brainer.
4 The Lord Of The Rings: The Board Game
BoardGameGeek Rating: 6.7
The Lord Of The Rings is a timeless story of good versus evil across the world of Middle-earth. In the classic board game, revamped and re-released by Fantasy Flight, players will each become one of the four Hobbits in the Fellowship of the Ring. Play will see fans managing a hand of cards as they travel towards Mordor. Certain locations push the characters onto an Action board where players will use cards to progress the story in different ways. Gorgeous art helps to bring the adventure to life, and the Hobbits will have to battle their way through Moria, Helm’s Deep, Shelob’s Lair, and Mordor all while trying to resist Sauron’s corruption by having the perfect cards at the perfect time.
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Each Hobbit has a special ability, but from playing through the Action boards, players can also collect runes that can be traded for special one-use cards that indicate Gandalf’s incredible support. For any fans of the timeless trilogy, this game runs players through all the most cinematic and exciting moments and for any who survive the challenges that Sauron poses, a final score encourages players to try again and to work better as a team with more strategy to do better.
5 Star Wars: Rebellion
BoardGameGeek Rating: 8.4
Another game that attempts to capture the magic of the Star Wars saga, Star Wars: Rebellion is a game for two players in which one will take control of the Rebel Alliance and the other will become the Galactic Empire. What follows is a war game across every location that Star Wars fans can imagine, with players using detailed models of TIE Fighters, X-Wings, Stormtroopers, and even the Death Star. The Rebels will place a base secretly on any planet of their choosing and the Empire will frantically struggle to find it. Although the Empire player has a distinct advantage in terms of troops and weapons, the Rebel forces are not fighting to defeat the Empire – their alternate motive is to rally the troops and gain support to cause a full-scale rebellion across the map.
Rebellion lets players create their own stories. The Rebels can place their base at Naboo, or the Empire can detonate Dagobah with the Death Star, killing Yoda and cutting the forces of good off from Force training. Leaders make combat across the board feel familiar and exciting as Princess Leia is stopped in her mission by the Emperor himself. The massive scale of this game tactfully recreates the struggle across an impossibly big space that will be a delight and a curiosity for many fans of the Force.
6 Cosmic Encounter
BoardGameGeek Rating: 7.5
Another classic game that Fantasy Flight has made timeless is the space-hopping, war-faring chaotic game of Cosmic Encounter. games-need-reboot/”>Beloved by all who have battled through it, Cosmic Encounter pits players against each other in a space race to have five foreign colonies in other players’ planet systems. Each player takes their turn to “encounter” another, choosing whether to battle or negotiate peace. Players can then call for aid from the others around the table, or settle any negotiations by trading battle cards, special one-use cards or even giving each other colonies. The real hilarity arises from the identities of each player’s aliens.
A huge cast of strange and wonderful monsters has been compiled and each has a weird ability that will let them manipulate the board in one of a hundred ways. The Loser, for example, can choose that the loser of a combat actually wins. The Masochist wins if they lose all their ships in combat. The Pacifist wins battles by negotiating. The Macron’s ships count as four of anybody else’s. Cosmic Encounter‘s real heart comes from how these crazy abilities clash and conflict and how players are forced to manipulate the table to inch closer to galactic dominion.
7 Mansions Of Madness
BoardGameGeek Rating: 8.0
One of the most inspired combinations in board gaming, games/”>Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and Fantasy Flight has produced some truly spectacular games. Mansions Of Madness is the biggest of these, the huge box stuffed with map pieces, special tokens, cards, and lovely miniatures. Players will team up to take on the unfathomable horrors across a spread of missions that will send them from cult-like parties of aristocrats to far-flung fields fighting local fish people. Players control characters who seem right at home in the charming cliche setting: a disgraced cop, a jazz saxophone player, a hardy private investigator. But each has a personal objective, inflicted on them by the madness that is encroaching.
Some of these are relatively harmless, like having to collect as many light sources as possible in an obsessive state. Others are more self-destructive: win the scenario while having another player die. These are kept secret and help to steep the game in a sense of paranoia. An app runs the game by telling players where monsters appear or move to, with players then moving things around the physical board. The assistance of the app means that players will find it hard to predict how things will play out in a way that is bitterly true to the original Lovecraft tales.
8 Twilight Imperium
BoardGameGeek Rating: 8.6
One of the games that made Fantasy Flight the behemoth that they are today in the gaming space, Twilight Imperium is an enormous game that is filled with complexity and possibility. Players control factions of alien races, each with their own specialties and technologies, as they vie for control of the planetary capital. Uneasy alliances, brutal wars that will wipe whole forces of starships off the map and sneaky politics will determine a winner in a game that can, games/”>infamously, last as long as twelve hours. While the run-time and the table space can be off-putting for new players, every game of Twilight Imperium becomes a story that can be told for years to come.
Tricky backstabbing with friends is always fun at the tabletop and if one player manages to shoot into an early lead they can quickly become a villain that the other players will have to fend off – or perhaps serve under for their own interests. Video games like Stellaris, with all of its micromanagement and exciting exploration pale in comparison to one of the largest boxes in gaming. Players will get to vote, trade, and hide away for sneaky private conversations as if they were all council members in a Galactic Senate.
9 Arkham Horror: The Card Game
BoardGameGeek Rating: 8.1
Another Lovecraftian game with a more customizable experience, Arkham Horror: The Card Game invites players to create a deck for one of the same loveable characters from Mansions of Madness. These decks paint a picture of a character, letting players tweak and change their kit to be whatever they want. The crucial part comes from the weaknesses – every character has a unique stress on their life that will show up from their deck to wreak havoc on Investigators’ plans to save themselves and potentially the world. A reporter’s drinking problem, or mob enforcers showing up to collect their money; none are good when players are head-to-head with salivating ghouls.
This makes for amazing moments that have to be played to be really felt, where against all odds the players pull the perfect token from the pouch and their characters win the day. These moments are rare – games/”>the game is intended to be difficult and played over and over to let players solidify a good deck to find clues while fending off any dangers. The evil plots of cultists and ancient gods are carried out by an independent secret deck that slowly progresses and acts as a ticking clock to incentivize the team to work quickly and efficiently. Fantasy Flight has released several expansions to give players more stories to bring their characters into, and the progression that decks can have across these stories will let players bring their all into every encounter with the darkness.
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