Top 10 Greatest Board Games Without Dice (Ranked)

Using dice have become synonymous with board games, although not everyone enjoys their success at the mercy of six-sided cube. There are, however, plenty of board games that omit the use of dice completely. Here are the best picks, ranked.

Note also that this list excludes dice-adjacent systems, such as replacing dice with special decks of cards that provide the exact same feature. These games are for those who want to be in control of their turns throughout the game for maximum strategic capabilities.

Furnace

When thinking of games with little to no random elements, I instantly think of engine-builders; and few are as tight and strategic as Furnace.

In Furnace, you’ll be engaging in auctions with other players to either gain, or simply use, different properties and facilities. With your resources and property cards, you’ll be forming grand and complex engines that are only as efficient as you can make them.

If you want a game to outwit your opponents instead of out-rolling them, then Furnace is worth looking into.

Ticket To Ride

Ticket to Ride is an incredibly popular game of laying out trains and railway systems and is incredibly popular for a reason. It’s another purely tactical game of taking opportunities and denying your opponents points.

The only feature of randomness in Ticket to Ride is the shop. You’ll be picking up train cards of different colors that correspond to the different tracks you’re trying to fill for points. However, how you approach taking from the shop allows strategy, and the colors you end up with can be used for a variety of tracks, meaning this randomness isn’t as condemning as dice systems and still gives you plenty of control.

Taking railways and watching your opponents inhale sharp enough to cut the tracks in two is endlessly satisfying. And if you want to, you can add one of the many other Ticket to Ride expansions to make things even more complicated.

Carcassonne

If engine builders aren’t your thing, then you may prefer a lighter, yet no less tactical, game of Carcassonne. You and your opponents will be vying for control over a procedurally-generated land of pastures, fields, castles, and cities.

The random order of the tiles in Carcassonne greatly benefits the game, as you get to choose where those tiles get placed, allowing for winding cities and area denial to thwart your opponents. As different structures and zones get grown, you’ll each be trying to place your meeples to claim them as they get bigger. With conflicts and difficult decisions, Carcassonne is infinitely replayable without a dice system.

Carcassonne also benefits from numerous expansions that add new meeples, new ways to earn points, and much more complexity for the established city-builders.

A Feast For Odin

Fair Warning, A Feast for Odin does technically have two dice, however, you can play this game endlessly without touching them. This game is a strategic dance of worker placement and resource management as you and your opponents try to get as much stuff as you possibly can in seven turns. And out of the many systems the game has to gain stuff, you can avoid the couple that uses a dice system.

There is so much choice in A Feast for Odin that it’s almost overwhelming, and yet I’ve failed to meet someone who hasn’t enjoyed diving into the systems to be as efficient as possible on their turns to gain as many items as possible. Whether you wish to tend to livestock, go hunting, trade, craft fine goods, go pillaging, or explore entire new lands — you can.

And even then, unlike other games that use dice, A Feast for Odin has dice systems that reward you whether you fail or succeed the roll. Failure gives you resources to be even better at the system next time, or can be simply used elsewhere. It’s a marvelous system that has the same exciting gambling feeling as rolling dice, without the consequences that typically come around with a poor dice roll.

A War Of Whispers

It’s a shame that so many military and action board games use dice to facilitate for the numerous other factors that are present in real battles. However, A War of Whispers allows you to enjoy a military game without dice that positions you as an opportunistic spectator.

Instead of amassing armies and going to war with your friends, each of you will have varying allegiances to the five factions on the board. Each of you will influence all of the factions, by making them raise troops or go to battle, whilst trying to figure out who is sided with what faction — and to what extent.

A War of Whispers is the ultimate espionage game that relies only on your own guile and subterfuge; no randomness required.

Scythe

Scythe is one of the few militaristic games that has no dice, something I was pleasantly surprised about. What’s more is that it’s dieselpunk, a genre that really needs more attention. Despite having loads of mechs and heroes, Scythe also doubles as a resource management game.

Starting from the corners of the rich and abundant map, the players will very slowly expand their operations dictated by their unique economy boards and by what they did the last turn. So methodical is Scythe that it is less of an action game and more of a high-stakes resource management game.

If you want a war game without dice that makes you lament the grand amount of resources it takes to facilitate battles, then look no further than Scythe.

Secret Hitler

Resource management and battles are all well and good, but what about any lighter games that everyone can get involved in? Allow me to introduce Secret Hitler. Many party and all social deduction games may not use dice, but personally, I find Secret Hitler to be one of the best.

Like a political game of Mafia where the mob is actually the Nationalist Socialist Party in 1934, the players are divided into two teams — the fascists and the liberals. However, Hitler won’t know who their secret fascist supporters are, leading to a government of distrust and deceit.

With revolving presidency and chancellorship, liberal and fascist policies that the chancellor may or may not be forced to put in place, and abilities such as assassination, Secret Hitler is always a tense blast whenever I get asked to bring it off the shelf.

Quacks of Quedlinburg

If I can find a way to put Quacks of Quedlinburg on a list, I’ll do it. Instead of using dice or dice-adjacent systems, this game instead uses opaque bags that you’ll be diving into to try and secure the alchemical ingredients you swear you’d put in already…

Each turn of Quacks of Quedlinburg will have everyone trying to form the best potion they can. However, there is lots of room for error, as potions may explode if the wrong ingredients are placed inside. And the system for getting ingredients? The illustrious bags.

You can go shopping to secure specific ingredients, but it’s never a guarantee that you’ll be able to pull them out when you need them. Quacks of Quedlinburg constantly puts everyone in a gambit where he who dares wins—or explodes.

The Quest for El Dorado

The Quest for El Dorado is an incredibly popular deck-building obstacle course race track. Deck builders may have their own randomness, but El Dorado has supporting systems to turn that into a feature rather a frustration, and none of these decks are dice-adjacent.

In The Quest for El Dorado, you and other players will be balancing your turns between advancing through the track using your cards, to purchasing new and better cards, to slimming down your deck for more streamlined travel. Not moving can be terribly anxiety-educing, but with the right purchases, will allow you to zoom ahead in future turns.

This is simply a fast-paced game where striking the balance between perfectly optimising your deck and just using it to race ahead is something ever-evolving.

Pandemic

It’s the opinion of many that Pandemic, and it’s many expansions, are of the greatest board games ever made. Incredibly accessible yet with a high skill ceiling and great replayability, Pandemic easily secures the top spot as one of the greatest board games that doesn’t use dice.

In Pandemic, the players (after having chosen a role) will go around the globe trying to stop the spread of infection to win. However, there are so many ways to lose the game that you all need to be constantly on top of. With no dice to influence your actions, you are free to be as strategic as possible and plan for almost every single eventuality as you all try to win together.

Pandemic is one of those games that almost everyone, universally, will enjoy. And being free of dice and competition will make it appealing to anyone you approach about it.

Now that you’ve got a fine list of board games that leave the luck up to you, you can propose a fantastic game to play for those who’ve grown tired of dice.

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