What's Your Game Night Vibe?

I've lost count of the number of times I've stood in front of a shelf trying to pick a game, found something that works perfectly for the number of people around the table, checked that everyone is happy with the complexity, pulled it out feeling pretty pleased with myself and been met with a collective “meh”, a couple of “maybes” and eventually the question every board game collection owner knows is coming: “What else have you got?”

The problem isn't necessarily the game, the player count or how difficult it is. The vibe is wrong.

Sometimes everyone wants to spend the evening plotting against each other, stealing things, blocking plans and desperately trying to win, while other nights you want to sit around the same table but spend most of your time puzzling over your own decisions and seeing who can build the cleverest little machine. Those could both technically be described as fairly strategic games for the same number of players at roughly the same complexity, but they can produce completely different evenings and knowing which one you're actually in the mood for makes choosing what to play much easier.

That's why one of my favourite additions to the new Boardgamist is Shop by Vibe, where instead of expecting you to know what mechanism or genre you're looking for, you can start with a much simpler question: how do you want game night to feel?

You might want something Social, where the people around the table are really the most important part of the game, or Competitive, where you're getting in each other's way and somebody is absolutely going to care about winning. Maybe you want to work together with something Cooperative, create an evening full of tension and big moments with something Dramatic, settle into a Strategic game that gives your brain a proper puzzle to chew on, or choose something Cosy where the pleasure comes as much from spending time in the world of the game as beating everybody else at the table.

Competitive and Strategic are probably the best example of why I think this matters because on paper the games can sometimes look quite similar. Both might be relatively complex, both might take a couple of hours and both might have you thinking several turns ahead, but there's a big difference between wanting to test your brain against an interesting puzzle and wanting to test it against the person sitting opposite you, and if everybody arrives expecting one and gets the other then even a brilliant game can feel like the wrong choice.

Ultimately that's what Shop by Vibe is here for. I don't want you to buy a game because it's highly rated, currently popular or seems like the sort of game somebody with your collection is supposed to own, I want you to find something that actually fits the evening you want to have together.

So next time somebody asks “What shall we play?”. Start with the vibe.