Board gaming, as one of humanity’s oldest hobbies, can be one of the most welcoming activities around. Here is a list of board game types:
Abstract: board games with no theme at all, such as "Chess" and "Go".
Area control: board games with some form of map or board defining a space that players compete to dominate, usually through adding their own pieces to regions or areas or removing opponents’ pieces, such as "Small World" and "Risk".
Campaign/legacy: individual plays following a series of connected scenarios, where the actions and outcome of one scenario will usually affect the next, such as "Gloomhaven".
Deckbuilder: each player starts with their own identical deck of cards, but alters it during play, with more powerful cards being added to the deck and less powerful ones removed, such as "Dominion" and "Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle".
Deck construction: a type of board game where the players use different decks of cards to play, constructed prior to the game from a large pool of options, according to specific rules, such as "Magic the Gathering" and "Pokemon Card Game".
Dexterity: board games involving physical skill, whether using the whole body as in "Twister" or just the fingers for moving things about, as with removing blocks in "Jenga".
Drafting: drafting is a mechanic where players are presented with a set of options (usually cards, though sometimes dice) from which they must pick one, leaving the remainder for the next player to choose from, such as "7 Wonders" and "Sushi Go".
Dungeon-crawler: players take the roles of characters making their way through a location, often depicted by a map with a square grid or a page in a book, defeating enemies controlled by another player, a companion app or the game system itself, such as "Star Wars: Imperial Assault".
Engine-builder: over the course of an engine-building board game, you’ll build an “engine”: something that takes your starting resources and/or actions and turns them into more resources, which will usually turn into a form of victory points, such as "Race for the Galaxy".
Roll-and-move: board games where you roll one or more dice and move that many spaces - commonly on a looping track of spaces, or a path with a start and finish, such as "Monopoly".
Roll-and-write: roll some dice and decide how to use the outcome, writing it into a personal scoring sheet, such as "Yahtzee".