About

Cardboard Consensus exists because board game advice is scattered across a million forum threads — and you just want to know what to buy.

Hi, I'm Tim. I spend an unreasonable amount of time reading board game discussions: BoardGameGeek forums, Reddit threads, review comment sections, year-end lists, the works. Somewhere along the way I realized the hobby's best information doesn't live in any single review — it lives in the pattern across hundreds of players arguing in public.

So that's what this site does. For every guide, we pull together BoardGameGeek's public data (ratings, complexity, player counts) and the recurring themes in community discussions, then distill it all into something you can actually use: a score, a tier, a clear "get it if / skip it if." No 3,000-word meanders. No "it depends" without telling you what it depends on.

What we are (and aren't)

We're honest about our method: we synthesize community consensus; we don't claim to have personally tested every game we cover. You can read exactly how our scores work on the How We Rate page. When the community is split on a game, we say so. When a beloved game has a real flaw, we name it.

Some links on this site are affiliate links, which may earn us a small commission at no cost to you — details on our disclosure page. Commissions never change a score. A game earns its tier or it doesn't.

Where to start

New here? Three good doors: what board game "weight" means (the number we cite constantly), the best 2-player co-op games, or what to play after Catan.

Questions, corrections, or a game you think we've misjudged? The comment sections are open — disagreement is literally our raw material.