If you enjoy the simple, tactile pleasure of pulling back the arm on a toy catapult and yeeting a plastic boulder across the table at your opponent, your choices are tragically limited – in fact, Catapult Feud is about the only board game on the market that currently features working catapults. I consider that a missed opportunity, so today I’m proposing five classic board games that would be vastly improved by the inclusion of a working catapult or two.
This is a very serious list full of serious suggestions. If you’re a serious board gamer, make sure you check out Wargamer’s guide to the best board games of 2026 – all excellent games, though sadly not a catapult in sight.
Jenga
In every game of Jenga, there’s one cocky player who never, ever slips up. No matter how wedged-in the piece is, or how precarious the tower, not once do they so much as break a sweat. It’s a foregone conclusion that whoever tips over the tower, it’s not going to be them. Well, let’s see how cool they are under a fusillade of catapult munitions.
Mousetrap
The problem with Mousetrap is that you spend the entire game building that Rube Goldberg machine, and then when you finally trigger it, the net gets stuck at the top. You know what always works once you’ve built it? A catapult. When I was about 13 years old at a boy scout camp we built a six foot tall mini catapult from wooden beams and sisal rope, and sure, it didn’t have great range, but it still fired. Let’s see the mouse survive that.
Monopoly
One of the dominant tactics in competitive Monopoly tournaments (yes, they’re real) is to trigger a housing shortage by refusing to upgrade your houses into a hotel, thus keeping them out of the bank’s housing supply and stopping other players ever climbing onto the housing ladder. Working catapults would add counterplay, letting lagging players obliterate their opponents’ expensive houses. And it would return the game to the anti-capitalist roots of Elizabeth Magie’s ‘Landlord’s Game’, the precursor to Monopoly appropriated by the Parker Brothers.
Catan
Catan‘s original name was ‘Settlers of Catan’, which was about as close as it ever got to engaging with the politics of ‘terra nullius’ colonialism it unwittingly evokes. I doubt that its simple yet effective dice-rolling gameplay would be substantially improved with smallpox epidemics and colonial genocides. But replacing the ‘robber’ with a working catapult that could sweep colonial settlements off the map would better capture the spirit of resistance and self-determination of indigenous peoples that is missing from the game. Though if you want to play a postcolonial response to Catan, and a better game in general, go play Spirit Island.
The Campaign for North Africa
Two UK board gamers have made the news recently for their attempt to play one full game of The Campaign for North Africa. This fastidious simulation of the North African theatre of World War 2 is so minutely detailed that it’s taken them two years to complete just the six turn practise scenario.
It’s a landmark in game design that everyone can respect – but I think we would all respect it a lot more if it also involved working catapults. I’m not suggesting a complete overhaul! Just replace one of the subsystems with a small catapult battle. It doesn’t matter which one. It’s not like a human will ever complete this game.
There you have it – five classic board games that would be immensely improved by working catapults. Which games do you think most need a siege engine glow up? Let us know in the Wargamer Discord community!
The toy catapult that appears in all the images in this article is made by Papo.
Source: Wargamer
