Games Initiates

What is a board game for intermediate players?

This term comes from the As d'Or award, which grants a specific trophy to the 'Initié' (Intermediate) category each year, alongside the Family, Children, and Expert awards. The goal: to highlight games whose rules require a bit more attention and whose sessions often last over an hour, without reaching the complexity level of expert games. The winners of this award since its creation have been: Living Forest (2022), Challengers! (2023), Faraway (2024), and Behind (2025), illustrating the diversity of this category.
An intermediate game, therefore, stands out by blending mechanical depth with a reasonable playtime, perfect for those who’ve moved past Carcassonne but aren’t ready to dive into Terraforming Mars just yet.

Which intermediate board game to choose?

Like the other categories, board games for intermediate players come in a wide variety of themes and mechanics:
• Deck Building: build and improve your deck based on opportunities and possible combinations
• Worker placement: manage and optimize your resources and actions through your choices
• Cooperative: win or lose together against the game
• Investigation games: Solve puzzles during a live investigation. Guaranteed immersion.
• Strategy: Organize, plan and manage your strategy over several rounds in order to win
How to choose your intermediate game?
Depending on your affinity for the type of board game you want to play, you have the possibility to use our different filters to help you choose the game that will please you. Many information such as descriptive videos or our description of the game will allow you to better know each of the board games for insiders.
To help you in your choice of comparative articles, they will allow you to facilitate your choice.