We're talking about board games today at Bolt FM - you may have noticed a picture of my collection posted on our Facebook page. I saw a few people talking about what they like to play, so I thought I'd put together a list of the best games for anyone looking to start or expand their own collection.

Mysterium

This is a cooperative game, where the players are trying to solve a murder at a haunted mansion. One player is the ghost of the victim, handing out vision cards to the rest of the players, who must try to figure out which set of suspect, location and murder weapon the ghost is trying to lead them to.

The cards are beautiful. but entirely abstract. A rat king on a chess board, or a lamp post with a scarf and thermometer. At first, it seems nearly impossible for the ghost to accomplish anything. But as the game goes on, you'll find there's usually something useful to work with.

This is possibly the greatest game ever made just because everyone who plays it, likes it. I've played it with a group of mostly strangers, I've played it with close friends and with just my father and brother (pictured above), and each game sparks the same questions. The psychics will say, "what on earth did you mean when you gave me that card?" and the ghost will say, "it was so obvious!" or "it was the best card I had" or "I literally had nothing else remotely close to what I needed you to guess."

The only caveat: The box says this is for two to seven players, but I'd never play with fewer than three.

Ticket to Ride: Europe

It seems so easy. Pick up cards! Play sets of certain colours to put down your trains and get points! Connect distant cities to get even more points!

Then someone builds the London-Amsterdam route before you, which means you'll have to go the long way around, through Dieppe, to reach Berlin. And you notice someone building a suspiciously long route that would be worth way too many points, so maybe you should put down some trains in their way to slow them down. But you also need to connect Riga to Bucharest, and two black train cards you need just turned up on the market.

Now you're really playing Ticket to Ride.

Publisher Days of Wonder have released a few different versions and many expansions, but the Europe board is where I'd start.

Carcassonne

Like Ticket to Ride, this is a simple game that becomes far more cutthroat once everyone around the table has a few games under their belt. Starting from one lonely tile, players take turns building a lovely medieval French countryside, playing their pieces - known as Meeples - to claim cities, roads and fields for points. The player with the most Meeples on a given feature when it's finished gets the most points.

The catch is that you can't play a Meeple on those features if someone is already on them - you have to find more creative ways to steal them, by placing a Meeple on an unconnected city, for example, then connecting it to another player's.

It's great fun, and Carcassone is one of the few games that shines just as bright with only two players. 

7 Wonders

I need to get something out of the way - 7 Wonders is a hard game to teach yourself just by reading the manual. When you open the box you'll see the cards all have weird symbols on them, and you'll have to do actual math to figure out how much the science cards score at the end of the game.

Stick with it though, because once you get the hang of it 7 Wonders is one of the fastest strategy games around, even with the full seven players at the table.

Each player represents an ancient city-state trying to build the most wonderful civilization around. You select a card from your hand to build - maybe a theatre, or a library, or barracks - and then pass your hand to another player. So if you see the person to your left is collecting science cards, which get more valuable the more you have, you probably want to build one just so they can't have it. But the player to your right is quickly building an army to match yours, so you need to build those barracks. Except you can't actually afford it, so you could build a mine to have more resources to use in later turns ...

If solving that problem sounds like fun, definitely check out 7 Wonders. Be warned, though, that it's abysmal with just two players, as the card drafting mechanic completely breaks down. For 2-player friendly city building, check out San Juan or Citadels.

Pandemic

You and your friends are working together to save the world from four diseases spreading across the world. It's easy, at first. I'll head to Beijing to treat some people, while you head back to the research station to cure one of the diseases. But then Hong Kong has an outbreak, which spreads in a chain reaction all the way through southeast Asia. All of a sudden instead of aiming to win, you're just trying to not outright lose.

Pandemic is regarded as one of the best cooperative board games ever made, for good reason. It's a tough, simple puzzle, relatively cheap, and powered by rock-solid mechanics that power multiple expansions and Pandemic: Legacy, which makes your decisions permanent over the course of a multiple game campaign.

If you're ready to take the plunge, Dragon's Den and McNally Robinson in Saskatoon probably have what you're looking for, and you can order games online at 401games.ca, www.starlitcitadel.com or boardgames.ca. To learn more about the hobby, I recommend checking out Shut Up & Sit Down.