It seems fitting to start out our review of the country’s largest playable game library with our START HERE section!
Why “Start Here”? Because for so many people new to board games, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed with the almost 3 thousand games in our library and many will revert to a game that they played as a kid instead of taking a chance on something different. This section’s full name is actually “Start Here: Spielbound Favorites that are easy to learn”, but that’s a mouthful!
Our intention with Start Here is to highlight a wide variety of game types/categories that are truly easy to try out. None of the games in this section should take more than 5 minutes to learn or more than an hour to play. If you like a game here, there are often many similar games to it that are available in the library to delve into. For example, Forbidden Island is a wonderful entry into cooporative games. It is NOT easy to win, and if you like it, there are several games that have a similar theme/mechanic in our Cooperative library category such as Forbidden Desert, Pandemic, and Flash Point. If you don’t like it, it’s only 30 minutes of your time spent and you can move on to other games. Similarly, we have Ticket to Ride Amsterdam, London, & New York in Start Here, which take 15 minutes to play instead of the full original Ticket to Ride, which can take over an hour. We have found playing one of these shorter games is a great introduction to the Train category, and players aren’t as disadvantaged when playing with more-experienced players at the larger games.
We purposely tried to not have too many overlapping kinds of games in Start Here. And this section is up front and easiest to see when you first walk into the library. We also have multiple copies of most games in Start Here as it’s purposefully the most popular. Due to the increased wear and tear, we are constantly updating this category as new games are published that are more available for replacing.
Even though it’s not an official part of The Spielbound Challenge, we highly recommend that you try ALL of the games in Start Here to get quick idea of what kinds of board games you may like most. Either way, we’re curious of what Start Here game you played to satisfy your Spielbound Challenge – please be sure to let us know over social media or in the comments below!