Board Game Arena

Which games on BGA are highly underrated? More specifically: games that are really fun, but hard to find players for.

For me, it's Gold West and Uptown.

Gold West is a territory building game that is perfect for turn-based games, since it has long turns but isn't a super long game. The mechanism reminds me a little of Terra Mystica (without factions though), but it's shorter, easier to learn and works just as well for 2 players as for 3 or 4. There's no tutorial on BGA, but there's a good tutorial/playthrough on YouTube that explains the game well.

Uptown is an abstract tile placement game. I like tile placement games in general, but this is one of my favorites. You're trying to connect as many of your tiles as possible, and it's so satisfying when it works. I'd recommend the 3-4 player version for beginning players (if you can find enough players) since the 2-player version is strategically more difficult, but I think I enjoy them equally.

Sobek 2p deserves way more love. A similar but inferior game (butterfly) has more than 2x the amount of players. I don’t know what factors contributed to this but I don’t think it is the quality of the game.

Another example of this is sky team and now boarding. Although these 2 games are very different they are both coop plane games that were released in the same month. Sky team got 5x more players. I don’t know if ppl just didn’t want to try another coop plane game but that is a significant difference especially since bga tried to play off the success of sky team w/ now boarding.

On average both now boarding and sobek 2p has more games per player.

Definitely agree with Gold West - it has some clever mechanisms going on, but it's been so long since I've thought to play it.
I would consider Iwari to be tragically underplayed, despite being an exceptionally good implementation.

i really like Caïrn... it's got an epic style theme, but plays like an abstract strategy game.

and Steam Works is in my top 5 games of all times, but is very underrepresented on BGA... maybe because it is an engine builder that really thrives the better you know it, meaning it gets better with each play- but might not shine for the first few tries.

Concept is a delightful and unique game, the idea is to communicate objects, words and phrases conceptually. You can refer to categories, colours, shapes and so on. I've never played a game like it, but it can be frustrating and it's probably best to play with a group of friends, so I understand its lack of popularity. It's more of an in-person game too.

Paint The Roses is a cooperative deduction game, race against the clock mechanic with an Alice In Wonderland aesthetic. I've only played one game so perhaps it's early to declare it as underrated, but I love the conept and itching to play more games, except there aren't many players.

Colt Express is a quick game for 2-6 players with high luck factor and many place for tricks and bluffing. The key is to memory opponents open moves and predict they hidden moves.
Fun fact: Characters, and even they special abilities are from classic western movies, like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
2 players gameplay is differs from 3-6 players game.

Donuts (formerly Insert) is a Bruno Cathala designed pure abstract game. [Putting a new skin on Insert doesn't mean it's not abstract, just like Disney themed chess pieces doesn't make chess non-abstract.]

for me it's decrypto and haiclue - i think mostly because it's hard to get a number of players real time. i love world traveler and just one as well, but i prefer the competition the first two offer.

MrsHayden wrote: ↑27 April 2024, 14:21 for me it's decrypto and haiclue - i think mostly because it's hard to get a number of players real time. i love world traveler and just one as well, but i prefer the competition the first two offer.

Decrypto is my favourite game and I am able to play it quite a lot. While it's hard to find random players, there is an active community, there's often a game or two going at certain times during the day. I recommend you join this group, we advertise tables in there:

https://boardgamearena.com/group?id=15639913

Wish we could get the table stats back to see which game are underplayed.
Meridians is a top-tier abstract game which i can't recommend enough.