Board games don’t belong on computers. They’re a refuge from the screens that bore into our eyeballs and our lives, a chance to bask in the musky glow of fleshy humans. But sometimes those humans are far away, and sometimes stores give digitised board games away for free. The Epic Games Store is handing out the tile-laying town-planning sheep-appreciating Carcassonne, along with the railway-building Ticket To Ride. Ticket’s fine, but Carcassonne is way better.

Epic were originally going to give Pandemic away too, but issued a press release saying they’d scrapped those plans until “a later date”. Presumably someone rethought the optics of using a game about global infection to advertise their store during the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.

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Did you hear? Board games are cool again. In fact, they re so cool that big hitters from the cardboard world are making their way over to the digital one on a more and more regular basis. To help you get your virtual collection of cardboard started, we ve gathered the 10 best board games available on PC today, all in one handy list. You ll find co-op hits, thinky strategy and everything in-between. The thing they all have in common is that they re worth your time and precious pennies, so there s no need to roll the dice, so to speak.

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Sometimes, when a board game loves a personal computer very much, they create something new. Fanatical have got seven digified board games on sale, and there are some gooduns tucked between those I’m not familiar with. Small World 2 and Splendor are my highlights, though there’s also the likes of Pandemic, Carcassonne, Mysterium and Ticket To Ride.

Digital board games tend to be a poor substitute for playing against real world fleshsacks. But sometimes there are no fleshsacks within reach.

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