👈🏻 Back to Medium-High Complexity
Looking for a 3-player strategy game that is deep and filled with tough and satisfying decisions? Here are our recommendations.
⭐️ Top Picks
Our top recommendations in this category, and games that we personally own to fill this niche.
Agricola
🟢 Ryan’s #1 All-Time 🔴 Daniel’s #2 All-Time
Release Year: 2007 Complexity: Medium-High
👥 1-4* Players
⏰ 60-150 min
💸 ~$60
🎬 Review
🔗 Buy
*6 Players with 5-6 Player Expansion
Summary: Strategically build out a well-balanced farm by gathering resources, playing occupation and improvement cards, and growing your family; all while keeping enough food on the table.
You Might Like If… you enjoy tight games of resources management where you are constantly adapting to execute your strategy more efficiently, and want a game that has a ton of depth and replay value due to the randomized hands of card abilities that are dealt at the beginning of each game.
Terraforming Mars
🟢 Ryan’s #2 All-Time 🔴 Daniel’s #4 All-Time
Summary: Compete with rival corporations as you try to contribute the most to efforts to make Mars habitable through strategic card play and engine-building.
You Might Like If… you enjoy building up a powerful engine through a variety of card effects and combos, and are looking for a game with lots of strategic and tactical options that will play out differently every time.
Dune: Imperium
🟢 Ryan’s #6 All-Time 🔴 Daniel’s #34 All-Time
Summary: Strategically take actions with your agents to optimize your card effects, build your own custom deck, and position yourself in battles in the Dune universe.
You Might Like If… you enjoy worker placement and deck-building and want a game that combines them in a novel way that leads to constant interesting decisions and player interaction within a thematic sandbox with tons of flavor from the Dune books/movies.
Great Western Trail
🟢 Ryan’s #4 All-Time 🔴 Daniel’s #17 All-Time
Summary: Wrangle your herd of cows across the Midwest prairie and deliver it to Kansas City as you upgrade your efficiency and increase your potential to reach more distant and lucrative delivery cities.
You Might Like If… you enjoy games with a lot of interconnected mechanisms without the options on an individual turn feeling overwhelming, and want something that feels fresh with its unique game loop where players control the pace of how quickly they try to reach Kansas City each time.
Underwater Cities
🟢 Ryan’s #13 All-Time 🔴 Daniel’s #19 All-Time
Summary: Build a futuristic network of cities of the seafloor by tactically selecting actions that will allow you to play matching cards from your hand.
You Might Like If… you enjoy strategy games that keep feeding you new opportunities that you can tactically work into your strategy and want a game that has a feeling of progression as you build out your infrastructure to produce more resources and achieve your long-term goals.
Ark Nova
🟢 Ryan’s #8 All-Time 🔴 Daniel’s #18 All-Time
Summary: Plan and build a modern zoo through card effects and a spatial puzzle, managing your appeal while also supporting conservation initiatives.
You Might Like If… you enjoy games that require you to carefully optimize interconnected actions and adapt to various card effects, and like the idea of a game that gives you a feeling of building something up while also racing to be the first to reach the target amounts of conservation and appeal.
Lorenzo il Magnifico
🟢 Ryan’s #3 All-Time 🔴 Daniel’s #11 All-Time
Summary: Avoid excommunication and lead your family to power during the Italian Renaissance by building up a powerful engine of production and commerce.
You Might Like If… you enjoy engine-building and worker placement games and want one that feels very tight while still giving you a strong sense of progression and power, especially with the Houses of Renaissance expansion that is now included in the Second Edition of the game (shown above).
Brass Birmingham
🟢 Ryan’s #14 All-Time 🔴 Daniel’s #28 All-Time
Summary: Build networks, grow industries, and navigate the world of the Industrial Revolution.
You Might Like If… you enjoy games with a lot of emergent strategy where the board state evolves in interesting ways, and want an economic network-building game that rewards repeated plays to explore its depth of strategy.
👍 Honorable Mentions
Games that missed being top picks, but that we still think are great choices for a lot of people.
Scythe
🔴 Daniel’s #35 All-Time
Summary: Vie for dominance in a war-torn, mech-filled alternate history of 1920s Europe by upgrading your actions and expanding on the map.
You Might Like If… you enjoy games with that are a hybrid of strategic building and direct player conflict, and are looking for a game with asymmetrical player powers and great table presentation.
Troyes
🟢 Ryan’s #11 All-Time
Summary: Defend the city and rise to power by influencing the merchants, knights, and clergy represented by dice that you can use to activate powerful abilities.
You Might Like If… you enjoy games with clever mechanisms and tight resource management and want something that feels fresh game after game due to the randomized activity cards that drive the combos in the game.
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion
Summary: Cooperatively vanquish monsters with strategic cardplay across a 25-scenario campaign.
You Might Like If… you enjoy dungeon-crawling games, prefer less luck, and have a consistent group for a campaign, and want a game with interesting hand management, character upgrades, and tactical cardplay.
👀 Worth a Look
Games we haven’t tried yet ourselves, but we believe could be a good choice in this category.
Kemet: Blood and Sand
Summary: Play as warring Egyptian Gods, building and upgrading the most powerful army to dominate Egypt.
You Might Like If… you enjoy games of direct conflict and war, and are looking for a game with lots of action and the ability to gain upgrades that differentiate you from other players.
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