These board games beginning with D range from ancient classics to modern deck-builders.
Every game below is listed with the details that actually decide whether it suits your table: player count, playing time, the age it works from, and who designed it.
Board Games Starting With D at a Glance
| Game | Players | Time | Age | Designer & year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dixit | 3-6 | 30 min | 8+ | Jean-Louis Roubira, 2008 |
| Dominion | 2-4 | 30 min | 13+ | Donald X. Vaccarino, 2008 |
| Diplomacy | 2-7 | 4-6 hours | 12+ | Allan B. Calhamer, 1959 |
| Dead of Winter | 2-5 | 60-120 min | 13+ | Jonathan Gilmour and Isaac Vega, 2014 |
| Downforce | 2-6 | 20-40 min | 10+ | Rob Daviau, Justin D. Jacobson and Wolfgang Kramer, 2017 |
| Draughts | 2 | 20-40 min | 6+ | — |
| Dune: Imperium | 1-4 | 60-120 min | 14+ | Paul Dennen, 2020 |
| Deep Sea Adventure | 2-6 | 30 min | 8+ | Jun Sasaki and Goro Sasaki, 2014 |
Dixit
3-6 players · 30 min · Age 8+ · Jean-Louis Roubira, 2008
One player gives a clue – a word, a phrase, a hummed tune – for one of their surreal illustrated cards, and everyone else submits a card of their own to match it. The scoring is the clever part: you gain nothing if everybody guesses your card, and nothing if nobody does, so the clue has to be pitched exactly between obvious and impenetrable. It won the Spiel des Jahres in 2010 and remains the easiest storytelling game to teach non-gamers.
Dominion
2-4 players · 30 min · Age 13+ · Donald X. Vaccarino, 2008
Every player starts with the same weak ten-card deck and buys better cards from a shared market, shuffling their purchases back in as they go. That single idea – the deck itself is the thing you are building – created the deck-building genre that Ascension, Star Realms and Dune: Imperium all descend from. It won the Spiel des Jahres in 2009, and because the market uses only ten of the available kingdom piles per game, no two setups play the same.
Diplomacy
2-7 players · 4-6 hours · Age 12+ · Allan B. Calhamer, 1959
Seven European powers manoeuvre across a 1901 map with no dice and no cards – every unit is equal, and the only way to win a fight is to have talked someone into helping you. Orders are written in secret and revealed simultaneously, so the whole game lives in the negotiation phase and the betrayals it produces. It is famously hard on friendships and famously good, and John F. Kennedy and Henry Kissinger were both reported enthusiasts.
Dead of Winter
2-5 players · 60-120 min · Age 13+ · Jonathan Gilmour and Isaac Vega, 2014
A colony of survivors shares a common goal, but each player also holds a secret personal objective, and one of those objectives may be betrayal. The crossroads deck triggers story events based on what players actually do, so the narrative bends around the table’s decisions. It sits in the awkward, excellent space between a cooperative game and a traitor game, where nobody is quite sure whether the person hoarding food is a problem.
Downforce
2-6 players · 20-40 min · Age 10+ · Rob Daviau, Justin D. Jacobson and Wolfgang Kramer, 2017
Players bid for racing cars at the start, then play cards that move whichever colours are printed on them – including cars they do not own. The tension is that a card good for your car is often better for someone else’s, and secret side bets mean the player in last place may still be quietly winning. It is a modern reworking of Wolfgang Kramer’s 1990 design Daytona 500, and it plays in about half an hour.
Draughts
2 players · 20-40 min · Age 6+
Known as checkers in North America, draughts is played on the dark squares of an 8×8 board with pieces that capture by jumping and are promoted to kings on the far rank. It is one of the oldest games still in wide play, with ancestors traced to boards found in the ancient Near East. English draughts was weakly solved in 2007 by the Chinook project at the University of Alberta, which proved that perfect play by both sides ends in a draw.
Dune: Imperium
1-4 players · 60-120 min · Age 14+ · Paul Dennen, 2020
Cards do double duty here: they send agents to board spaces for resources and influence, then the same hand is revealed for combat strength in the round’s conflict. That fusion of deck-building and worker placement is why it broke out of the licensed-game ghetto and onto serious strategy shelves. The solo mode is genuinely well regarded, which is rare for a game built around table politics.
Deep Sea Adventure
2-6 players · 30 min · Age 8+ · Jun Sasaki and Goro Sasaki, 2014
All divers share one dwindling air supply, and every treasure you pick up slows you down and burns more of it. Greed is punished immediately and publicly, because the diver who stays one turn too long drowns and drops everything. It comes in a box the size of a deck of cards and is one of the purest push-your-luck designs ever published.
