Looking for a 3-player strategy game that has plenty of interesting decisions without getting too long or complex? Here are our recommendations.
⭐️ Top Picks
Our top recommendations in this category, and games that we personally own to fill this niche.
Wingspan
🟢 Ryan’s #24 All-Time 🔴 Daniel’s #22 All-Time
Summary: Strategically collect and play birds into your wildlife preserve to combo your way into higher efficiency.
You Might Like If… you enjoy games with comboing card effects and low confrontation and want a game that has a really accessible theme and great components.
Heat: Pedal to the Metal
Summary: Manage your car’s speed to prevent overheating as you push to win the race.
You Might Like If… you want an easy-to-learn racing game that plays well across a wide range of player counts and has a really elegant deck-building system that is simple but full of interesting decisions.
Res Arcana
🟢 Ryan’s #21 All-Time
Summary: Make the most of your 8-card deck as you control mages vying for places of power and ancient monuments.
You Might Like If… you enjoy games with card effects and resource management and like the idea of racing for 10 points by finding and executing on combos as efficiently as possible.
Space Base
🟢 Ryan’s #26 All-Time 🔴 Daniel’s #41 All-Time
Summary: Tune the odds in your favor as you assemble a custom fleet of spaceships that will trigger abilities on specific rolls of the dice.
You Might Like If… you enjoy the excitement of dice and want a game where you get to play with the probabilities and build a strategic engine out of a variety of possible card abilities.
Cthulhu: Death May Die
🔴 Daniel’s #14 All-Time
Summary: Work as a team to disrupt the ritual and slay the Lovecraftian Elder One.
You Might Like If… you enjoy thematic games with lots of dice-rolling and want a game that provides a big experience in a reasonable amount of time and has great variety and expandability with the mixing and matching of different Elder Ones and scenarios.
The Search for Planet X
Summary: Use deduction and clever inquiries to narrow down the location of a new planet at the edge of our solar system.
You Might Like If… you enjoy puzzly deduction games and like the idea of an app-based experienced where players ask questions and the app provides answers that help you infer new information in a race to find the answer.
Mechs vs. Minions
🟢 Ryan’s #31 All-Time 🔴 Daniel’s #16 All-Time
Summary: Work as a team and program your mechs to fight off the army of minions and complete scenario-specific objectives.
You Might Like If… you enjoy cooperative games and want a game with amazing components that is still easy to teach and play and has a really fun programming system that leads to lots of interesting decisions and hilarious moments.
The Crew: Mission Deep Sea
Summary: Use deduction and clever card play to achieve varied goals in this cooperative trick-taking game.
You Might Like If… you enjoy traditional trick-taking card games and want a fresh experience where you are all working together and have limited communication that adds some spicy new interest to the genre.
👍 Honorable Mentions
Games that missed being top picks, but that we still think are great choices for a lot of people.
Roll for the Galaxy
🟢 Ryan’s #38 All-Time 🔴 Daniel’s #46 All-Time
Summary: Tactically allocate your dice to develop technologies, settle worlds, and ship goods.
You Might Like If… you enjoy building up your own engine of effects and want a game that plays simultaneously with an interesting puzzle of using your dice results to most efficiently build out your personal tableau.
Dominion
Summary: Strategically build your deck in a race to acquire victory points in this classic game that is the father of modern deck-building.
You Might Like If… you enjoy games with card combos and identifying them in a market of cards and want a really streamlined and quick experience with tons of variety with the card market being randomly chosen for each game.
The Castles of Burgundy
Summary: Strategically use the results of your dice each turn to acquire and place tiles to build out a more prosperous estate.
You Might Like If… you don’t mind a dry theme and enjoy tactical optimization puzzles and want a game that has satisfying turn with combos and building up your own board.
Galaxy Trucker
Summary: Rapidly assemble a ship that can survive the unpredictable hazards of space as you try to turn a profit as a space trucker.
You Might Like If… you enjoy spatial puzzles and don’t mind time pressure and randomness and want a funny and unique game where you prepare the best you can but then hope that it can survive it’s flight as you watch on without much control.
Architects of the West Kingdom
Summary: Strategically hire and build for the good of the kingdom in this variant on the worker-placement genre.
You Might Like If… you enjoy worker-placement games and want one that is a step up in strategic complexity from entry-level options, still plays in 90 minutes or less, and has a few interesting twists on standard worker placement.
Stone Age
Summary: Weigh the probabilities and strategically plan out your round and you take actions with your workers with the uncertainty of how the dice will influence their effectiveness.
You Might Like If… you enjoy worker placement games and want an easy to learn option that has the added excitement of rolling dice to determine the efficiency of your actions, with plenty of strategic options to mitigate the luck and hedge your bets.
👀 Worth a Look
Games we haven’t tried yet ourselves, but we believe could be a good choice in this category.
Bullet♥︎
Summary: Control space heroines defending earth as you clear bullets by forming patterns and triggering special abilities.
You Might Like If… you enjoy spatial puzzles and finding patterns and want a quick and unique real-time game with a dose of push-your-luck as you draw more bullets from your bag.
The Guild of Merchant Explorers
Summary: Explore strange lands, establish trade routes, and search for treasure on your personal map by using the revealed terrain card each turn.
You Might Like If… you enjoy games in the roll-and-write genre or simply like working on your own personal puzzle and want a game that has the neat twist of acquiring powerful custom abilities that will trigger as certain cards are flipped as the game progresses.
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