What are your favorite board games? I'm looking for games that are satisfying and lead to a sense of accomplishment or fulfillment or connection.

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You may want some commas or another space added, friend. They show up as a single uninterrupted line for me and I'm assuming others

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One I haven’t seen mentioned is Puerto Rico. One thing I like is there is essentially no random chance to this game; everything that happens is a result of choices you or your opponents make.

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Imagine is one of the favourite games in my IRL friend group whenever we get together. It's basically Alias, but instead of explaining the word verbally, you use transparent cards with shapes drawn on them that you can overlap and move around. It's chill, fun, and fits any group size.

P. S. The link isn't where I bought the game - I just googled the English version and posted the first link I found.

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Waaay obscure, but one of the few board games I've ever really enjoyed is solarquest.

I've played plenty of the usual board games over the years. They just weren't anything I ever played because I wanted to play them. It was something to do, and people seem to naturally gravitate towards card and board games.

I had a chess phase in my younger days. I still play checkers checkers from time to time. "Chinese" checkers too, along with go. But those are still things that I'll suggest when I'm with someone and looking for something to do while bullshitting.

I hate Life, and only play monopoly with the understanding that when I'm done with it, I'm going to give everything I have to whoever is the most behind. Sorry is okay, as is parcheesi.

But solarquest, I'll find people willing to play with me because I like it. That and heroquest, but heroquest isn't really a board game the way I think of the term, it's a constrained ttrpg.

Both of those, my mom got me for Christmas after I begged for them, and I've never once been disappointed with them. I got both of them the year they came out, so we're talking decades of play with both.

Heroquest, I used as a board with the figures good my d&d play for a long time as well as playing it as its own game.

Heroquest is cooperative, so I can definitely recommend it for low to zero conflict play. You're uncovering a map, finding treasure, building a character. It's d&d lite, in the best way. Original versions are expensive, but there's a ton of printable versions out there, and it was rereleased in 2021.

Solarquest is essentially space themed monopoly on the surface. But, beyond your pieces being rockets and the concept of buying up parts of the solar system, there's the flight mechanics where you have to have the fuel to go from one planet to the next. It adds a layer of thought and fun to it. Plus, you're learning some local astronomy.

There's rules for laser fights, and special roll actions, available as optional rules. It's just fun. There's an updated version available with more recent astronomy, fancier supplies and such, but I haven't bought it yet.

Both of them are games I play with other old farts, as well as kids of all ages. I genuinely can't recommend either of them enough.

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Betrayal at the House on the Hill has about 50 different scenarios so almost every playthrough is different. But it's best to have at least 4 players to be more fun

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Mansions of Madness. It's my wife's new favorite game. The game has many different scenarios and they play out pretty differently each time. The game is almost all co-op, so it's players VS. the game. I washable the need for an app at first but not does it simplify a lot and helps keep track of a lot of the mundane stuff.

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There's actually a specifically cooperative expansion for Carcassonne, called Mists Over Carcassonne. It adds an element of managing a ghost population while trying to cooperatively reach a target score based on certain scenarios.

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Just wanted to add, for the fully cooperative Heroquest experience, they came out with an app for the new edition (but it's compatible with the original base game) that fully takes over the Zargon/DM role.

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Just One can also do a lot more than 4 players. If you add additional writing surfaces and erasable markers (or pencils or whatever) it's pretty much unlimited.

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Zombie Kidz is quick, cooperative, and has plenty of achievements (with a sticker book to record them) as well as unlockables through gameplay. You get to use teamwork and planning, and turns occur in quick succession.

I think it might tick every box you mentioned.

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I don't know how the game does it, but in so many sessions the last actions are so important. I have often won the game within the last possible action. Such a great feeling.

Going from "easy, everything is fine" to "everything on fire, NPCs dead, several Monsters" in two rounds. Then winning by a clever set oft actions, where several player habe to coordinate, is peak feeling oft accomplishment.

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I see the app as the DM. Plus, you can tell it what expansions you own, and it includes it all when it makes the map — you can play the same scenario and get different layouts.

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Ok, if you are against hard feelings, cross off anything that is directly competitive, that would be any game where players directly and willfully interact with each other in a way where one gains while another loses as part of the core gameplay. To varying degrees things like blood rage, root, monopoly/solarquest, everdell, 7 wonders, clank, carcassonne, ticket to ride, dominion, etc.

If your group must have competition, you'll need to stick to independent competitive games, this is anything where players are primarily taking actions in their own space and are progressing largely independent from each other. Example recommendations include things like Quacks of Quedlinburg, Shifting Stones, most roll and writes (welcome to series, cartographer with a minor exception), cascadia, verdant, etc

If you can do without competing with each other, cooperative games are definitely the way to go to minimize hard feelings (it'd only come up then if someone thought another player did something suboptimal causing a loss). The variety here is actually pretty large:
simple trick taking games like The Crew series
Information sharing games, like Mysterium
"Combat" games of all complexities (generally ascending: Lord of the rings storybook, marvel united, D&D board games, Heroquest, Stuffed fables, Atlantis Rising, legends of andor, horrified, Arkham horror, marvel champions, mansions of madness 2nd edition, spirit island, Gloomhaven)
Mystery/puzzle games (Adventure Games series, Exit The Game series, Animals of Baker Street)

I'd also like to call out 2 other games specifically:
Stella, while it is a 1 winner competitive game where your score depends largely on other players, the push your luck and prisoner's dilemma aspect of how you earn points I think largely removes the feel bad aspect of competition.
Kitchen Rush: pure cooperative, but it's also a real-time game where everyone is taking simultaneous actions to run a restaurant in 4 real time minutes stretches.

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You’ll never perfectly solve the “no pissing people off” issue because in competitive games you necessarily have people benefit at the expense of others and in cooperative games you’ll fall into the trap of backseat-driver players telling you what to do on your turn.

That being said, here are some of my favorites I’d like to suggest:

Cooperative:

Time Stories (kinda like a time-travel themed mystery-solving role-playing game where the pre-built deck is your DM. 1-4 players. You can buy more decks, each with a different setting and story.).
Pandemic (Stop ~~COVID~~ a deadly disease from killing off the planet. Work together to limit the spread and find the cure before it’s too late) (1-4 players)

Competitive:

The Settlers of Catan (claim resources and land strategically to build the most prosperous kingdom) (2-4 players but there are expansions and spinoffs so this could be like 1-6 players)
7 Wonders (draft cards to build the most prosperous kingdom) (3-8 players IIRC)

In-Between:

Betrayal in the House on the Hill (explore a haunted house until you find a dark secret that turns one of you into a villain the rest have to fight) (3-6 players)

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I will always recommend base Catan. It's simple enough that anyone can learn to play fairly quickly, and moves quickly enough that no one gets that mad if they lose. If anything, I find losing a game usually coincides with people understanding it better and being open to playing another round so they can demonstrate that understanding.

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Seconding Forbidden Island/Desert/Sky. Island is what I break out to introduce new folks to co-op gameplay, then switch to Desert once they get the hang of it.

Pandemic hits a lot of the same notes, and can get really hairy at the end.

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I love spirit Island sooo much. I've played the game regularly for over 2 years now I'm I'm still not tired of it. I did get myself the expansion and it's worth every penny.

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I really don't like Monopoly. It's very widespread in the US, I'd guess one of the top three games, but it has a lot of technical failings as a board game.

I think that it's actually a really good example of why popular American board games are not that fantastic. Europe has a stronger board game tradition, stuff like Settlers of Catan. I really didn't appreciate how bad things were until I spent a while poking at European games.

Monopoly has a hard-to-predict game time. One thing that a lot of European games that I've looked at do is to have a fairly-predictable amount of time a game will last. That makes it much easier to plan fitting a game into a schedule.
Monopoly eliminates some players from the game early. They then have nothing to do while the rest of the players continue to play.
Monopoly tends to wind up in a situation where a losing player will know well in advance that they're going to lose. Yeah, they can concede, but it's not a lot of fun to play the thing out.
There's a limited amount by way of strategy and it's not very sophisticated. There aren't a lot of variable paths that one weighs against each other. When it's not your turn, there's not much you can be planning or doing, just watching the person whose turn it is roll.
It has a high RNG depenedence.
Most of the actual tasks you spend time doing aren't very interesting. Linley Henzell, who wrote the roguelike Crawl, has a famous quote, something like "everything you do in a game should be an interesting decision, and if it isn't interesting, it should be removed from the game". I think that that is a very true element of game design. The banker counting out money to players or players paying rent or whatever is just drudge work -- they aren't making interesting decisions.

The game was originally designed by a Georgist as an educational game to argue for a land value tax. It wasn't principally to entertain.

I really wish that a new, better game would replace Monopoly in the US as the big non-ancient (checkers, chess) board game.

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Catan is nice because you spend 90% of the time building your stuff, and only 10% losing to one of the other players.

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Honestly, it depends

My favourite board game without a doubt is diplomacy, but those games go for like 6+ hours and requires 7 people. Also everybody will be yelling at everybody at some point, so yeah probably not a good pick lol

That being said, my favourite game to bring out for people not too into board games is wingspan. Fairly simple board game with enough depth to it. Also it has cute drawings of birds

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What are your favorite board games? I'm looking for games that are satisfying and lead to a sense of accomplishment or fulfillment or connection.