Personally, I go to https://boardgamegeek.com/ and filter for games based on what I’m looking for and then I sort by reviews. Add them to a list on Amazon and keep an eye out for sales (across multiple retailers), especially around Black Friday.

You can often find them used on board game geek, or try them out on boardgamearena first FYI

They could probably do better if they targeted schools. While having Fun seems to be the primary goal, there is a whole lot of Learning happening in many Games.

How do you even publish a game that will resist kids at a school? They will bend the cards, lose the pieces, tear up the manual.

Sounds like a niche waiting to be mastered, then.

You can deal with bent cards and give copies of the manual, filing away an original. You can make sure all the pieces get put back in the box. You can make sure to give them to appropriate ages: High school kids (aged about 14-18) are going to be more responsible than 5th and 6th grades (ages 10-12).

I mean, they let us use computers in a computer lab - you know, back when mice had an actual, easy-to-steal tracking ball. We had to turn the mice upside down so the teacher could see that we didn't steal it. Similar things can be done here and it isn't like they'll be playing games with the frequency that we used to visit the computer lab.

If this all fails, though, you can play digital versions. My game group does plays online sometimes and while it might not work well with everything, it does work.

Plenty of games have been marketed to and played in schools. Games like Extinction: The Game of Ecology [1970][1] were only available for schools. I spent my entire middle school years playing Wff 'n Proof[2] games, like Equations, On-Words, and On-Sets, where we competed on our knowledge of math, English, and symbolic logic.

[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/8434/extinction-game-eco...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Games

Admitting that I splurged a bit when seeing this one - https://montrosebiology.bigcartel.com/category/games (the card game is in the $20 to $30 price range).

Food chain island ( https://buttonshygames.com/products/food-chain-island ) could also be something that could show up in a grade school room. It could also be further laminated for additional durability.

Check if you can borrow board games from libraries around you.

In my area it is the case and I use it frequently.

The cost of production should be much lower? Wonder if they could sell much higher at cheaper prices so the volume is actually incremental. Hope someone tries.

Still cheaper than a family trip to the movie theater here, so worth it to me even if played for just one night.

Indeed, harsh reality.

Movie theater pricing is extreme.

There are a lot of board games in the $20 to $30 price point (and even many under that).

Going by Amazon prices, Azul, Splendor. Deep Sea Adventures is a press your luck game. Scout (also from Oink) is a... rummy with interesting hand management.

Red Seven is one that got a fair bit of play at the office table (Asmadi games).

Chatty Party if you want a cross between Excel and Cards against Humanity.

Ticket to Ride is an excellent train connection game.

Racoon Tycoon hasn't hit the table yet, but it looks interesting.

New York Slice gamifies "one divides, the other decides" and is something that allows for younger players.

Forbidden Island is an accessible cooperative game.

On the topic of cooperative games, The Crew takes tick thing games in a cooperative direction.

Fox in the Forest is an excellent two player trick taking game.

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I admit to a bad case of FOMO with bard games. In the 90s and early 00s, I played board games in the MtG place in the San Antonio shopping mall in Palo Alto... and there were so many great games that I had played that were out then. I realizes there's a sampling bias because those were the games that people brought that were enjoyed... so now I have a low threshold for impulse buys on board games.

I would add The Castles of Burgundy to that price range list.

One of my favorites and easy enough for new board gamers but the new print hurts my eyes!

Well, when it was cheaper I bought various garbage board games and encountered a nice different problem: they take a lot of space.

So, no matter the price, space is a problem.

That being said, I wish they costed just 50$: plenty of them (especially those with miniatures) cost 100+ and maybe you have to buy sleeves and maybe some "adapter" to fit everything in one box once expansion are bought.

Another lesson learned is: never buy expansions. There are some very rare exceptions.

> Another lesson learned is: never buy expansions.

The last game of Carcassonne we played was the first game after we'd just purchased the big box with all of the expansions. It was just... too much.

Japan has something of it's own game renaissance going on (some games make it big in the West), but space is a major consideration there. So almost all Japanese games are very compact (often, but not exclusively, card based)

This view is somewhat biased by what games are small enough to bring over to NA/EU conventions to sell and pitch, and the lower price range of games publishers are willing to take a chance on. This in turn created some expectation that "good Japanese games are small" and became self-reinforcing in terms of what NA/EU publishers were willing to pick up.

Yes, some designers like Pawn and Seiji Kanai keep working mostly in that small-box style (not unlike lots of NA/EU designers), but e.g. Hisashi Hayashi's or Yasushi Kuroda's games weren't small "because of Japan", they were small because they didn't have money to make big ones!

If storage space is a consideration checkout the range of “Tiny Epic Games” by Gamelyn Games. I have about 20 decent games taking up the space of 3 or 4 “normal” size ones.

My city has 3 board game cafes you can go to to try out various games. Pre-pandemic there were more.

I wish there was some way you could have said what city/country you were talking about.

I know a lot of people who are passionate about board games, I hang out with a group of board game players from time to time, and I am quite an enthusiast myself. The complaint about prices is relatively recurring, but I don't think it's justified most of the time. People complain that some games are expensive, often referring to the quality of the material they offer, for the finishes, comparing it to other similar games, $100 seems to be a hard barrier to digest psychologically. When you buy a game, you buy an idea, a design. The cost is in the design, in the innovative mechanisms in it, and also a little bit in the illustrative art, but I think only secondarily. If a game costs me $120 but I play 20-30 games with three or four other friends, is it really expensive? If a game costs $30 but after 2 games I have already exhausted the game strategies and mechanics, was it really a good purchase?

P.S.: The fact that many buyers use the appearance of a game to judge the appropriateness of its price leads to a very unpleasant consequence: manufacturers, in order to justify the price of a game, produce it in a box that is twice as big as it needs to be, because if the game is big it justifies a higher price, and so we end up with libraries infested with games that take 2X or 3X the space needed.

There's really two separate issues in the pricing.

- Games are getting a much higher production level than the past, and this costs more. Sometimes this is good, but often it isn't necessary, it's just to pad out margins. At least you can see where the money is going, but it makes everything less accessible to kids, people with a casual interest, and anyone with limited cash on hand.

- Prices have just plain gone up. Yes, I can understand why a small-publisher POD title or a box of custom plastic is $100 even if I wish there were other options. But why has Catan gone from $25 to $60 MSRP even as the components have dropped slightly in quality? Bohnanza from $10 to $20? RftG, $20 to $35? These increases are a) largely pre-pandemic, b) since ~2015, tracking overproduced editions and industry consolidation rather than general inflation, so the cause is not really a mystery.

Board games have little resale value, so that’s an option.

A classic game has literally thousands of hours of play. I have a Catan set used almost weekly for 10 years.

Reviews are crucial.

Board games sell for nearly as much or more than you paid for them. Resale value is fine. The real problem is weight; board games are heavy enough that reselling for the same price amounts to taking a $20 loss on postage. That's why it's better to buy them 10 at a time than one at a time if you're doing it through the mail.

As someone who spent a big chunk of time in 2021-2022 trying to get rid of boardgames I don't want anymore, there's a lot working against reselling used games.

It's a market where outside of the top ~100 games, a specific product can be hard to find for an individual even when shipping works out. This is also why math trades are popular - but 2020-2022 made popular venues for those more difficult too, and the breadth of games means that while any given math trade is going to contain some hard-to-find games, it's probably not going to contain your hard-to-find one.

It's also a market for lemons. Lots of resellers don't even know if they're missing a critical piece, which printing/edition they have, if expansions are included, if it was a counterfeit to begin with, etc. Buyers have little way to distinguish people who know what they're selling from those who don't without lots of time investment. This also discourages market-makers from helping solve the logistical problems.

I suggest going to boardgame meetups to try games before you buy. I also recommend the second-hand game market to both buy games cheaper and sell on games that you don't want anymore, keeping costs low. I fine-tuned my collection in this way.

Would very much recommend looking on Facebook Marketplace. It has been a source of 90% of our board games for this exact reason. We also use Board Game Geek and some youtube videos to get a feel for things as well.