The five best thematic board games

Thematic games put you somewhere specific — a haunted house, a derelict ship, a colony on the edge of collapse — and let the mechanics serve that place. Expect dice, expect swings, expect a story.

They are the natural next step for anyone who found strategy games satisfying but a little bloodless, and the easiest games to sell to people who like films more than they like spreadsheets.

How this list is chosen

These five come from the same query that powers the finder, run with one filter pre-set. Expansions are excluded, so everything here is a game you can buy and play on its own, and only games with at least a hundred ratings are eligible.

Ranking is by community rating adjusted for how many people voted, not by raw average — otherwise a game rated 9.0 by a hundred devotees would outrank a classic rated 8.6 by forty thousand. The full method is here, and you can set your own filters to narrow this further by age, complexity or player count.