There are so many great gateway strategy games that you can try your hand at, from CATAN to Ticket to Ride. While these games are great family favourites and an excellent way to get started with strategy games, you might feel like it’s time to challenge yourself with something more exciting and in-depth.
This guide will take you through some of our top picks for strategy games that go beyond the basics, including Wingspan, Cascadia, and Stardew Valley. Jump in now to find your new favourite!
Pandemic
Designed by Matt Leacock and published by Z-Man Games, Pandemic is a cooperative and challenging game for two to four players. Your group of players will work together as a team of medical specialists who are trying to stop the spread of four deadly diseases across the world. The real strategy comes from the tension of your teamwork! If you miscoordinate or mistime your actions, you risk cascading outbreaks, and that strategic risk-reward balance is a big step up from the likes of CATAN.
Each player has a role that has unique special abilities, such as the Medic, or the Researcher, so players have to always be thinking about how their roles work together, division of labor, and combining their strengths. Your team has to coordinate to discover cures for all diseases before any of the different losing conditions occur - too many outbreaks, running out of disease cubes, or not enough player cards.
The game also has expansions (On the Brink, In the Lab, State of Emergency) if you really want to crank up the tension. While the base game has lots of strategy, the expansions allow for even more challenge, new twists, and more complexity.
Wingspan
Wingspan is a competitive engine-building game, published by Stonemaier Games and designed by Elizabeth Hargrave. In the game, players try to attract birds to their wildlife area by using bird cards in three different habitats: forest, grassland, and wetlands.
Each habitat allows you to do something different:
- One helps you get food.
- One helps you lay eggs.
- One helps you get more bird cards.
As you add more birds, you improve their habitats, which makes each action easier to do. The game has four rounds, and in each round, players can do fewer actions. At the end of the game, you score points by counting how many bird cards you placed, how many round goals you completed, how many eggs you laid, how much food you stored, and how many cards you put under other cards.
Deciding which birds to play with, when to use their special powers, and matching them to your habitat strengths requires planning and thinking ahead because you will always be looking for different combinations. You can try various strategies, like working on end-of-round goals, concentrating on specific habitats, using birds with strong powers, or making the best use of eggs and tucked cards, taking this a step up from classic getaway board games.
Mysterium
Mysterium is a cooperative deduction game, where one player is a ghost and the others are psychics trying to solve their murder. The catch is, the ghost can’t speak, they can only communicate through vision cards, meaning the group has to interpret abstract imagery and piece together all the aspects of the murder, including the suspects, locations, and weapons.
Both sides have to work on their strategies - the ghost must choose cards carefully while the psychics debate, deduce, and sometimes misinterpret clues under pressure. Every round feels tense as you wait for the final reveal. This keeps everyone on edge until the very end!
With expansions like Hidden Signs and Secrets and Lies adding even more variety, Mysterium is a perfect next step for players who want something more strategic and challenging than lighter games like Ticket to Ride.
Cascadia
Designed by Randy Flynn and published by Flatout Games and AEG, Cascadia is quite a peaceful puzzle game about building the Pacific Northwest. Each turn, you take a habitat tile and an animal token, then place them into your growing map.
The challenge for your inner strategist is choosing which is more important - making big connected habitats for points or placing animals in the right patterns to match scoring goals. The choice is yours! You can also earn special nature tokens, which let you break the rules and pick any tile and token you want.
Every game feels different because the animal goals change, and there are so many ways to build your map. Cascadia is a great game to up the ante with your next board game night, because it’s easy to learn but has plenty of different strategies you can employ to keep things interesting.
Stardew Valley
For those who enjoy playing strategy games on their own, Stardew Valley is a great pick to help you develop your planning and management skills for those larger board game sessions. Created by ConcernedApe, it’s a beautifully designed (and quite calming) farming and life simulation game where you build your ideal life in the countryside.
The aim of Stardew Valley is to grow crops, raise animals, explore caves, go fishing, and get to know the residents of Pelican Town. While classic strategy games like Ticket to Ride focus on careful planning and competition over shorter sessions, Stardew Valley encourages you to balance your time, energy, and resources to shape a life that’s all yours - all with gorgeous graphics and a relaxing soundtrack.
Stardew Valley blends calm creativity with strategic depth, making it a perfect next step for anyone who loves the planning and satisfaction of board games, but who wants a world they can truly live in.
