

* '''TabletopGame/{{Battleship}}''', a guessing game originally created for scrap paper "boards" (akin to Tic Tac Toe), but successfully adapted into a commercial form by Milton Bradley. If characters are seen playing this, it usually indicates they've had ''way'' too much idle time to kill. Due to the deeply embedded memories of MB's marketing campaigns, nobody ''ever'' is depicted destroying a cruiser or carrier, but within 3 turns one player ''will'' finally announce "You sank my battleship!" (Particularly suspect, considering a battleship must be hit 4 times before it will sink.) This is more often than not done ironically, or with a {{lampshade|hanging}} on it, at least recently.
* '''TabletopGame/{{Chess}}''', [[SmartPeoplePlayChess the supreme Western test of intellect]]. Expect to see two characters staring at the board for long periods, looking like ''The Thinker'' statue. TheSpock, TheProfessor, the [[Main/{{CriminalMindGames}} riddling villain]], and ([[CaptainObvious of course]]) TheChessmaster will all play this superbly. Show them a game in progress, and they will confidently announce, "Mate in three/five/seventeen." In practice, even the world's best professional chess players would not be able to consistently do this well. Spock, of course, has the excuse that he's an alien. Sometimes, as in ''Series/{{House}}'' and Robert Heinlein's ''Sixth Column'', it's just a bluff.
** '''Three-Dimensional Chess.''' Several varieties of this exist, including one based on the complicated boards seen in ''Franchise/StarTrek''.
** And of course, sometimes a character plays ChessWithDeath.
* '''{{Go}}''', the supreme ''Eastern'' test of intellect. Several orders of magnitude more complex than chess (which is not quite the same as "more complicated than chess"). Knowing how to play well typically signals a character has likewise intellectually surpassed "mere chess". The aura of inscrutable Asian wisdom doesn't hurt either, though in reality playing either game at world championship level is equally difficult. And then, in the other direction, there's...
* '''{{Shogi}}''', finally, lies somewhere in between: a Japanese variant of chess, it is typically used in anime as an excuse for old men to sit on porches of rice-paper houses, above the stone lanterns and TheThingThatGoesDoink, and discuss in slow grunts the vagaries of life.
* '''TabletopGame/{{Monopoly}}''', a game for the whole family (so long as the whole family understands real estate, mortgages, land development, and math at at least the fifth grade level). Expect lots of squabbling, convenient luck and complicated trades, often [[{{Metagame}} extending outside the game]].
* '''{{Scrabble}}''', a game for people with big vocabularies. TheMagicPokerEquation applies here. The winner always has just the right letters for a long, high-scoring, but recognisable word, and there's somewhere on the board that it'll fit. They rarely resort to kind of obscure words common in professional Scrabble: ''aa'', ''cwm'', ''etui''. (Although one can occasionally expect ''ComicStrip/CalvinAndHobbes''-esque arguments over the [[ScrabbleBabble legitimacy of such words as]] "zarf", "[[WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons kwyjibo]]," "jozxyqk" or "zqfmgb.")
* '''TrivialPursuit''', a combination of luck and knowledge. Entire books have detailed not only strategies for both asking and answering questions, but also the game's inaccuracies and ambiguities.
* '''[[DungeonsAndDragons Dungeons & Dragons]]''' While technically a roleplaying game, it is always portrayed using maps and minis. Shorthand for [[RevengeOfTheNerds NERRRRRRRRRRDS!!!]]

There are many more board games, but these are [[SmallReferencePools the only ones commonly played]].

Often, the trademarked ones will have an in-world BrandX equivalent.

Note: In Hollywood Board Games, it is important to let the [[Franchise/StarWars Wookiee]] win.