Payday has been and gone, your bank account is looking a little healthier, why not treat yourself to a new little board game to bring on your upcoming summer holidays?
I’ve already wrote about some fantastic bargain priced board games, and today we’re going to speak about some games that might hit your wallet a little bit harder, but still at half the price of any Nintendo Switch 2 game!
From excellent gateway games to incredible legacy quests, these games will all add something a little different to your collection without costing the earth. So these are 5 Great Board Games under £40 you can get on Zatu, today!
All prices correct as of 12.06.25
1. The Quacks of Quedlinburg
With the absolute perfect combination of being a gateway game that even your parents can enjoy, along with an experience full of strategy and ideas that your biggest board gamer can sink their teeth into, The Quacks of Quedlinburg is a steal at under £40.
A bag building/push your luck game, in Quacks you play as titular Quack doctors brewing a whole host of potions with different ingredients, scoring points if you can brew the greatest potion. But as we know with any homemade cocktail we’ve concocted or cake baked, if you add too much to your potion things can go horribly wrong.
Each turn you and your opponent’s pick ingredients blindly out of your own individual bags, adding it to your cauldron score board. The further along the cauldron you get, the more points you score. However in your bag of goodies is some white ingredients. These bad boys score you points, but if the total score of your white treats ever exceeds 7, your cauldron explodes, and you’ve busted for the round.
After this turn, you go and spend your hard earned money buying new and better ingredients to add to your bag, adding more and more in there to dilute how many white tokens you’re left with.
It somehow balances being silly stupid fun with actual properly thought provoking mechanics, all the while leaning into its theme seamlessly. The push your luck mechanic works so well, as if you ever get close to 7 white ingredients you can decide to leave your cauldron there and cash out, but you know you just need one more purple ingredient to score big… Do you risk it!?
I have so much fun every time I play this. Its almost underrated in my collection as I don’t think I play it nearly enough in favour of potentially meatier games, but there is actually so much to The Quacks of Quedlinburg that just writing this entry makes me want to whip out my cauldron and get brewing again.
2. Great Western Trail
Doing my research for this list, I honestly couldn’t believe Great Western Trail was available for under £40. Despite owning it for a couple of years I must have forgot how much I paid! For the price you pay for this modern classic, you get a hell of a lot of game.
Playing as rival cattle ranchers, you move along the western trail taking actions, trying to get to Kansas city with a unique hand of cows to score the most amount of points.
With elements of deckbuilding, hand management and set collection, Great Western Trail offers incredibly tight gameplay which has allowed it to become a modern great of the board gaming sphere.
Its cozy theme makes it a delight to play on a lazy Sunday, with the second edition offering much better visuals and style to truly make you feel like a good old American cattle rancher. (It is honestly really difficult not to play with a ridiculous American accent throughout the game).
It won’t be for everyone, the gameplay while easy to get your head around after a turn or two, is complicated enough to put a few non gamers off, and its theme while wonderful, doesn’t have that bombastic, in your face approach you might get from Sci Fi and Fantasy games.
Instead, its just a nice little competition between you and up to 3 more players to be a cattle rancher. There’s not much backstabbing or moments of oh my god why did you do that! You just move along the trail, serenely navigating the US with your cattle, hoping to call yourself the number one rancher.
Go make yourself a coffee, put on your best cowboy hat, and just relax into the wonderful Great Western Trail. And if the theming of America doesn’t suit you, you can get Great Western Trail: Argentina or New Zealand also bafflingly under £40!
3. Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective
From cattle ranching to crime solving now, the next entry on my list is less of a board game, and more of an activity, with the excellent Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective.
I won’t recommend a specific one, as they are generally all under £40, so it comes down to taste, but the one me and my wife are currently working through is The Thames Murders.
In this game, you play as a detective trying to solve a case up against the worlds most famous sleuth, Sherlock Holmes. Using the days newspapers, a directory of phone numbers and addresses, a large map of London and your best deduction skills, you need to work out who did the crime, along with a few other bits of info to score extra points.
Consulting Detective has tested my mind, and sometimes my patience, unlike any other game! It gets your brain working as you speak to a variety of different witnesses, potential suspects, and other characters who might help you crack the case, trying to sift through what they’re telling you to find the detail you need. You decide who to go to, using all the tools at your disposal to work out which individual you need to interrogate, piecing together bits of information crucial to the case.
The aim of the game is to try and solve the case speaking to as few people as possible to score points at the end on how accurate you were, comparing yourself to the legend Sherlock Holmes.
But my main advice for anyone interested in Consulting Detective is simply to ignore the scoring. Don’t engage with it. You will literally miss out on some of the best parts of the game and story if you bog yourself down in thinking I don’t want to talk to too many people as it will effect my score. You won’t beat Holmes and I feel you almost ruin the game by trying.
Instead, just dim the lights in your living room, grab yourself a whiskey, and immerse yourself in the wonderful production of the game. The newspapers are a wonderful touch, the text is all written in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle himself, and when you figure out from a seemingly insignificant bit of information a key bit of evidence, you’ll honestly feel like Holmes himself.
With ten cases in the box you can work through them at your own pace. I have found it’s not something I want to get out every week or even month. I’ve owned it for a couple of years and we’ve only solved five cases. Instead, when the moment strikes and the evening feels right for a bit of crime solving, we open that bottle of whiskey and try our hand at Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective.
4. Disney Villainous
This entry might be a little reductive, as at this point do people really even need to recommend Disney Villainous?
The incredible mash up of Disney and Board Games, Villainous is the ultimate game for fans of the animation superpower, with the surprise being how little you have to pay for a truly wonderful, groundbreaking card game.
In the base game you play as one of six villains, ranging from the nefarious Jafar to the sinister Ursula, playing against other iconic Disney villains as you look to achieve your chosen characters individual goal.
Each round you choose where to move your villain along their individual board, and do the actions on that space. You can battle, play cards, get money, or even Fate your opponents. Fating allows you to play a variety of cards to stop your opponent achieving their goal, often playing a hero that villain is all too familiar with to their board.
Each character looks and plays differently which allows for such scope, making every game feel different. It also scales wonderfully, working brilliantly as a one on one battle if that’s your preference, or a six person war of villainous attrition.
And if you’ve had your fill of the six base villains, you can add many expansions to the game, all coming with new iconic villains, like Scar from The Lion King or Hades from Hercules.
Often tie in games to existing IP can be underwhelming, especially one as big as Disney. But Villainous has somehow perfectly meshed probably the best part about their films, the villains, with a back and forth card battler. One which will always have pride of place in my collection.
5. Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion
Don’t worry, I haven’t gone mad and put Gloomhaven on this list. I know that game is the sort of expense you need to discuss with your other half before you get permission to buy. No, the game I am including on this list really is incredible at under £40, and that’s Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion.
For the amount you get in this box, the price is the kind of bargain you don’t often find these days.
Jaws of the Lion is a legacy game set in the world of Gloomhaven. You play as one of four characters in the titular mercenary group, going on quests and adventures to level up your character, buy better equipment, and explore an incredibly engaging, fleshed out fantasy world.
I finally got my hands on this last year as a present for Christmas, and I have barely stopped thinking about it since.
Jaws of the Lion does an incredible job slowly teaching you the game scenario to scenario, with even the tutorial missions proving enough of a challenge to engage you the whole time. There are too many mechanics to go through here in a small blog, but essentially you complete scenarios by defeating horrible creatures out to harm your heroes or by completing objectives, as you and your team carefully manage your hand to get the most out of your character.
It can be a HARD game. I won’t go into how long it took my wife and I to defeat scenario 4, but all I can say is I have a hatred of stone golems that is unparalleled in my everyday life. But if you’re struggling, just like in a video game you can lower the difficulty. It translates video game and D&D mechanics so well into a board game, and after a difficult challenge when you finally overcome it together, the joy and adulation is amazing.
In our last session we won with my wife’s character defeated and me on one health, with a literal last throw of my axe saving us from certain defeat. The moment it created is something that just can’t be replicated in other mediums.
Like other legacy games it runs into the same problems, the time sink is big, and the setup for the game can feel like it takes as long as the scenario itself. But its worth it. It keeps you wanting to go back time and time again, no matter how much life (or my Labrador) gets in the way. When we’ve finished it, we know we’ll just do it all again with new characters and perhaps new players.
All of this game, this massive undertaking, under £40. Incredible. So do yourself a favour and buy Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion as soon as possible, as surely someone will realise soon they could charge double for this masterpiece!
About the author:
Paul Websell is a freelance contributor for Zatu who spends his time either playing board and video games or talking about them. While he’s not on social media, you can view his other blogs right here on Zatu!
