Ro's Recz

While I normally write about things I recommend, I want to have more variation. I will continue to do recommendations of things I come across, but I also want to post my findings of questions that I have (on any topic). These are not questions unique to myself; however, I have taken the time to research the topics and find out the answers. When I find an article that has been written about the subject, I will simply summarize the findings and direct you to the article (for further investigation).

Since I have been playing a ton of board games recently, I wanted to find out what the most popular board games are. To find out, I looked mainly at two sites. One is Money Inc’s article about the highest selling board games of all time, while the other is Amazon’s best seller list (for a better look at the current most popular board games).

For Money Inc’s article, the list was significantly different than Amazon’s top 10. Money Inc’s list was as follows:

1. Chess
2. Checkers
3. Backgammon
4. Monopoly
5. Scrabble
6. Clue
7. Trivial Pursuit
8. Battleship
9. Candy Land
10. Game of Life

For Amazon’s best seller list, the top 10 was as follow:

1. Catan
2. Ticket to Ride
3. Pandemic
4. Monopoly
5. Connect 4
6. Candy Land
7. Apples to Apples
8. Guess Who
9. Game of Life
10. Sorry

As you can see, the two lists are very different, with only Monopoly, Candy Land, and the Game of Life being featured on both lists. Money Inc’s list was a little different because it was the highest selling of all time, which meant that older games had an advantage. Also, while chess and checkers are extremely popular, there is no one dominant version of the game that everyone buys on Amazon; therefore, while it is likely a ton of checkers and chess boards are sold on Amazon, the manufacturers are different (whereas games like Catan and Monopoly only have one company producing them).

I have played almost all of the games on both lists (except for Pandemic, which may be selling well on Amazon because of the time we are living in), and I enjoy all of them. While many of these games are made for younger kids, there are still many great games that you should check out regardless of what age you are!