Let’s continue to prepare for the holidays, and that’ll be the plan for a little bit coming up here. I talked about two player games yesterday. You can read that here. And today I’m going to be giving some suggestions for campaign games. Before we dive into that, I want to talk a little bit about what campaign games are, because it might be a new area for you when it comes to board games.

Campaign games are board games where it remembers or something persists throughout it. Probably an easier example of this would be Dungeons and Dragons. You play as character and that character levels up and gets better. Or in video games, Baldur’s Gate 3, Dragon Age: Origins, or even games like Halo campaign demonstrates what that is. It’s a story where it remembers where you are in a story and you continue playing through that story.

Campaign Games

Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion

Let’s start off with the small version of one of the biggest and well known campaign games. Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion has you leveling up your characters and fighting through a twenty mission campaign of Gloomhaven. It uses the same mechanisms, but it gives you a nice five scenario tutorial and then lets you explore the rest of the story and game with unique characters.

The game is a dungeon crawler as well as a campaign game. That means that you’re moving around a dungeon and fighting monsters, or moving around a location and fighting monsters tactically on a board. And it uses Gloomhaven’s great card mechanism of using two cards to activate your character. Top of one card and bottom of the other for movement and attack and how you play around with that is great.

Arkham Horror: The Card Game

Next up we’re going to go with a card game. Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a great cooperative game, as are all of these campaigns, but it’s just cards. So no minis, standees really anything like that. In this game you’re trying to solve cases and figure out what is going on through several scenarios.

This game is great because there is a ton of content for it. And because there is interesting deck construction and hand and resource management going on. But let’s talk about the content. You can buy the main box and have a short campaign to play. If you like the game there are more campaigns, more investigators, and more cards to play with. So you find that you can dive deep into what Arkham Horror: The Card Game has to offer.

Aeon’s End Legacy

Another card game for the campaign games. I wanted to try and do a few different types. Plus I wanted them to be available. The next one is maybe the hardest to get. But Aeon’s Legacy builds on the Aeon’s End system, and really is a great spot to jump in and learn the system.

You are breach mages who are protecting the town of Gravehold against a nemesis. In the Legacy version you don’t start with a character, you build that character throughout the game. You get new cards and you make choices to unlock some cards and not others and add some abilities and not others to characters.

Plus you get a new nemesis to face off against each time. And that is a great element of the game. Because not only are your mages unique, the nemesis is going to give you a different experience each time. And they give you a lot of fun options to deck build as you play.

Sleeping Gods

Sleeping Gods might be the hardest of the campaign games to find. But there are a few different versions out there, so hopefully it won’t be too bad. This is a game of exploring a new world that was created, written, and illustrated by Ryan Laukat, mainly, and his wife.

So you find as a crew that you’re dropped into a new world. It is a world where the gods are sleeping, and you are tasked with waking them, or at least finding totems, so you can get back home. But it’s not an easy task and you are only given some vague leads to go on.

This one is less of a campaign than some of the others because as players you have more freedom in what you are doing. You explore the world and decide which direction you want to go. But there are stories and quests that will persist between times playing the game. Because the game is too big to play over just one sitting.

Finally, I know you play as nine different members as the crew. And that is intimidating to play with all of that in front of you, or in front of multiple people. But I think of it as you have a whole team of people. They work and act as one. You need to know what they do, but it’s not like one crew members takes a turn and then another. The ship, and the crew as a whole are what take the turn.

Paper Dungeons

And now for a finale one that is really different. This one is just in the campaign games category because of the story that it has. But I really think that Paper Dungeons is a fun game. So I want to get it into this group for your consideration.

This is a roll and write game. That means that you roll dice and use those dice to fill in spots, the write part, on your sheet. Paper Dungeons is about leveling up your heroes, delving through a dungeon, crafting loot, and beating the boss monsters. All of this is done through die rolls which is a simple mechanism.

I like how this game makes you think on your feet. And how you can get combos and really explode with some great exciting turns to level up quickly, fight a lot of little monsters, or whatever it might be. The campaign part is lacking, though. It’s just a loose story that holds it into a campaign. But the game itself is fun, and it’d be a nice one to play a game every once in a while without needing to remember as much from other campaign games.

Final Thoughts

I kept the campaign games on this list smaller rather than larger. I love campaign games, and a lot of them are very large. That isn’t something that is reasonable for everyone to ask for or give. So what I put on the list is much more reasonable and sometimes even budget friendly.

If you want bigger games, tracking down things like Tainted Grail, Gloomhaven, or ISS Vanguard are going to provide those big box options. And there are a ton more I could mention as well. Those games are going to provide a much longer and more in depth campaign. So if you want to jump in at that point, or you know you already love campaign games, than those will be great options for you.

Do you have a favorite game in the campaign games genre? And are you putting any on your holiday list this year?

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