Board games starting with E include some of the most beautiful tables in the hobby.
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 E at a Glance
| Game | Players | Time | Age | Designer & year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Everdell | 1-4 | 40-80 min | 13+ | James A. Wilson, 2018 |
| Eclipse | 2-6 | 60-200 min | 14+ | Touko Tahkokallio, 2011 |
| Escape: The Curse of the Temple | 1-5 | 10 min | 8+ | Kristian Amundsen Ostby, 2012 |
| Evolution | 2-6 | 60 min | 12+ | Dmitry Knorre and Sergey Machin, 2014 |
| El Grande | 2-5 | 60-120 min | 12+ | Wolfgang Kramer and Richard Ulrich, 1995 |
| Exploding Kittens | 2-5 | 15 min | 7+ | Elan Lee, Matthew Inman and Shane Small, 2015 |
Everdell
1-4 players · 40-80 min · Age 13+ · James A. Wilson, 2018
Woodland creatures build a city of constructions and critters across four seasons, with worker placement feeding a tableau where cards discount each other in satisfying chains. The three-dimensional cardboard tree is decorative rather than functional, and the game would be very good without it. Card combinations are the real draw: the tableau you assemble is different every game.
Eclipse
2-6 players · 60-200 min · Age 14+ · Touko Tahkokallio, 2011
A four-X space game – explore, expand, exploit, exterminate – that compresses a genre usually measured in days into an evening. The influence-disc economy is the key idea: every action costs discs, and stretching too far bankrupts you. The 2020 edition, Second Dawn for the Galaxy, is the one to buy.
Escape: The Curse of the Temple
1-5 players · 10 min · Age 8+ · Kristian Amundsen Ostby, 2012
Everyone rolls dice simultaneously and continuously for ten real-time minutes against a soundtrack that periodically calls the whole party back to the start. There are no turns, so the table dissolves into shouting for help and trading dice under time pressure. It is exhausting, hilarious, and over before anyone can get bored.
Evolution
2-6 players · 60 min · Age 12+ · Dmitry Knorre and Sergey Machin, 2014
Players build species and give them traits – long neck, hard shell, carnivore – competing for a shared and fluctuating food supply. Making your species a predator forces everyone else to adapt, so the table’s ecosystem shifts in response to what you do. It teaches selection pressure better than most classroom exercises.
El Grande
2-5 players · 60-120 min · Age 12+ · Wolfgang Kramer and Richard Ulrich, 1995
The game that defined area-control: place caballeros into Spanish regions and score them in three scoring rounds, with the Castillo hiding a secret reserve that redeploys at the worst possible moment for someone. It won the Spiel des Jahres in 1996 and its influence runs through almost every majority game since. Thirty years on it plays as cleanly as anything published this decade.
Exploding Kittens
2-5 players · 15 min · Age 7+ · Elan Lee, Matthew Inman and Shane Small, 2015
Draw cards until someone draws an exploding kitten and is out, unless they hold a defuse card. It raised over eight million dollars on Kickstarter and remains one of the most-backed projects in the platform’s history, driven largely by The Oatmeal’s artwork. As a game it is light and luck-heavy; as a fifteen-minute filler for a group that does not play games, it works.
