Look, if it has a “-building” in its genre, it’s almost certainly going to be good. There’s engine-building, bag-building, deckbuilding, hand-building; if you can thinking of it, someone’s probably working on a game about building it. And with video games like Slay the Spire and, well, the entire “roguelike deckbuilder” genre really surging in popularity, some folks are bringing it back to the board games that inspired them. There are so many!

• Deckbuilding games are all about cycling cards through a deck so that you (usually) draw a stronger and stronger hand for each subsequent turn. Dominion is the classic, but there are plenty of others!
• Engine-building games take that energy and turn it laterally. Your goal here is to reduce costs or increase output so that each turn you generate more and more and can go faster, do better, and build higher.
• Tableau-building games let you sprawl across the tabletop, as different cards with different effects start comboing off of each other in pursuit of that perfect engine.

And each of these genres blends and mixes together with other genres for even more exciting combinations! I love these kinds of games, and I think it’s worth mentioning some of my favorites here. Each game dives into a bit of what makes that genre great, and the top of the top are games that get players enthusiastic and inspired about the art of creation, not just the act. What can you build, how does it perform, and can you beat your opponents trying to do the same thing? All good questions.

Here are a few of my favorite games where your goal is to outbuild your opponents!