Codenames is super easy to learn, and the variety of codename combinations available keeps each round interesting. Exploding Kittens is another party favorite and a great family game for younger kids and adults alike. This card game involves tense minute rounds of drawing cards and using various actions to avoid drawing an exploding kitten, which means losing the game immediately.
You'll draw certain cards that let you defuse an exploding kitten, peek at the next card in the deck, activate special powers, and more, so you can both save yourself and set up your fellow players to lose if you play your cards right. Recommended for ages 7 and up, Exploding Kittens is one of the best party games to have around for family game night or a casual get-together with friends.
This beautiful card game has a simple premise: You're growing a tree in a forest and must expand it outward with branches that contain various icons, like mushrooms, caterpillars, or fireflies.
The goal is to link branches that contain some of the same symbols on them, which will earn you points in return. With each season, the rules of the game and your hidden goals will change, earning you the chance to score extra points at the end of each round if you meet certain conditions.
Essentially, Kodama is a strategic pattern-matching game, but there's also something so calming about just trying to grow the best tree you can. It's a low-stress strategy game I'd recommend to anyone looking for an easy-to-learn game with a cute aesthetic.
In addition to the standard edition, you can buy Kodama Duo , which tweaks the base game to make it more ideal for two players, and Kodama 3D , which maintains the same basic gameplay except you're actually building out the tree three-dimensionally, making it feel more immersive. Stardew Valley the video game is often thought of as a casual, relaxing game in which you go around romancing NPCs, planting crops, and taking care of animals, but Stardew Valley: The Board Game is neither casual nor relaxing.
Instead, it's a fairly deep and challenging co-op strategy game that involves racing against the clock to complete a series of goals before the end of Year 1. Don't get us wrong: It's incredibly fun. Whether you've already put hundreds of hours into the video game or just love a challenging co-op board game, you'll find a ton to love here.
The board and pieces are absolutely gorgeous, and almost every gameplay mechanic from the video game is represented in some fashion, including mine diving, fishing, and befriending villagers. Because players only have a limited amount of moves and actions each turn, intense cooperation and planning is required in order to achieve everything you need to by the year's end. Be warned that this is a longer game as well--a four-player game can easily take three hours to complete. However, we still highly recommend Stardew Valley: The Board Game as a faithful and challenging tabletop adaptation of everyone's favorite farm sim.
As of August , the game is currently out of stock at the Stardew Valley store, but developer ConcernedApe has promised future printings , so keep an eye out.
Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news gamespot. Number of players: 1 to 4 Time to play: 1 to 2 hours It's difficult to talk about great board games without mentioning Gloomhaven, which multiple GameSpot staffers listed among their personal top three. See at Amazon. Pandemic Legacy. Number of players: 2 to 4 Time to play: 60 minutes Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 ranks right behind Gloomhaven on BoardGameGeek's list of the best board games, and it happens to be one of our favorites as well.
Betrayal at House on the Hill. Number of players: 3 to 6 Time to play: 60 minutes If you're someone who finds haunted houses thrilling, you're sure to love Betrayal at House on the Hill. Number of players: 2 to 4 Time to play: 60 to 90 minutes Don't be fooled by the adorable woodland creatures on its cover--Root is an asymmetrical war game that's fairly complex, and you'll probably need to play multiple times to fully get the hang of it.
Number of players: 1 to 5 Time to play: 90 to minutes Scythe is designed for one to five players, but it also comes with a built-in single-player mode, if you have trouble getting a group together or live alone. King of Tokyo. Number of players: 2 to 6 Time to play: 30 minutes Designed by Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield, King of Tokyo is a card game that has you and your friends go head-to-head as monsters battling for control of Tokyo.
Blood Rage. Number of players: 2 to 4 Time to play: 60 to 90 minutes Blood Rage is a board game inspired by Norse mythology, casting you and your fellow players as Vikings during the time of Ragnarok.
Mountains of Madness. Number of players: 3 to 5 Time to play: 60 minutes Inspired by the H. Number of players: 2 to 4 Time to play: 30 to 45 minutes Azul is an easy-to-learn game where you collect tiles based on azulejos , a type of Portuguese tile used as decoration in buildings. Number of players: 1 to 5 Time to play: 40 to 70 minutes Wingspan is a newer board game released in , but it's become an instant hit, winning the Kennerspiel des Jahres award and selling out at launch.
Deception: Murder in Hong Kong. Number of players: 4 to 12 Time to play: 15 to 30 minutes Deception: Murder in Hong Kong is one of the most fun social deception games we've ever played, and it's a great choice for big groups as well, as you can play it with up to 12 people. Number of players: 2 to 6 Time to play: 15 minutes Coup is a card game about bluffing and bribing your way to power, so get ready to put on your poker face before challenging your friends.
Number of players: 2 Time to play: 15 minutes If you love playing Tetris, you'll probably enjoy Patchwork, a two-player game where you place Tetris-like tiles on a 9x9 board of squares to slowly assemble a quilt. Number of players: 3 to 4 Time to play: 60 minutes Even those who don't play board games have probably heard of Catan, a classic board game that focuses on resource-gathering and settlement-building that's simple to learn and addictingly fun. Ticket to Ride.
Number of players: 2 to 5 Time to play: 30 to 60 minutes Another classic game, Ticket to Ride is incredibly simple to learn, but it also maintains enough tension to keep things interesting. Number of players: 3 to 6 Time to play: 15 to 45 minutes Skull is the ultimate bluffing game, and the best part is that it's incredibly easy to teach to new players. See Skull at Amazon. Mansions of Madness. Number of players: 1 to 5 Time to play: to minutes Despite their similar names, Mansions of Madness has nothing to do with another game on this list, Mountains of Madness, although both are inspired by the works of H.
Fog of Love. While some board games were first created in the 20 th century, others can be traced back to the days of the pharaohs and beyond. According to Money Inc. Unlike other board games, The Game of Life mirrors real life by asking players to decide between getting a job and going to college and then completing a series of goals using cards.
In its first year, the game sold 45, copies. It seems that people like experiences that mirror reality since by , it had sold 50 million copies. Not a bad figure for Rob Daviau, who created the game! But one famous and successful board game that is a favorite amongst the kids in Candy Land, which was designed in This is a simple game that just requires a basic knowledge of counting, making it ideal for children who simply follow the directions on the cards.
By , 60 years after it was first released, the game had sold 40 million copies. Interestingly, Battleship was already a popular game by the time it was published. Anybody of any age can get into the game and have a good time — making it remarkably accessible and a fun way to pass the time.
This game made Concept and Telestrations possible, and for that, we can be grateful. The core engine of the game is fueled by answering questions about anything and everything.
Trivial Pursuit has over fifty special versions , which has laid the groundwork for games like Ticket to Ride to release multiple versions of a game based around the same engine. Trivial Pursuit swaps the questions and Ticket to Ride swaps the maps. In any case, the prodigious growth of Trivial Pursuit as a franchise raised interest in party games, giving us delights like Balderdash, Codenames, and Dixit in the future.
These are all really, really old games. As such, they are pure abstract strategy games unmarred by the ephemeral themes du jour of modern board games. Othello is not an ancient game, but it feels like it could have been even though it came out as late as Othello packaged up abstract strategy qualities into a new package, laying the groundwork for Santorini , Patchwork , Azul , Onitama , and other modern hits.
Even the most purely intellectual games like Chess or Go have elements of bluffing and deduction. It is out of the mansion, yes — the very one where Miss Scarlet committed a murder with a lead pipe in the billiards room — that more sophisticated tabletop games that receive critical acclaim today were born. Nearly everybody I know has played Monopoly. Roll the dice, buy properties, pay rent to other players, and curse at the dice.
Monopoly is not a good game. In fact, the game was created initially by socialists to show why unchecked capitalism sucks. Yet it has served the hobby board game industry in two incredible and contradictory ways.
First and foremost, it more or less made the market for mass market games. That, in turn, led to the hobby board games we know and love. We owe Monopoly our gratitude for this. Second, Monopoly managed to open the floodgates while being a decidedly broken game.
Scrabble is the foundation of just about every word-based tabletop game out there. That alone is an achievement for the ages, but I think there is something more important going on.
In Scrabble , the pieces you work with are thrown into a bag and doled out by random chance. Backgammon is one of the oldest games in existence. King Tutankhamun was rumored to have played this game at one point.
It has been in existence since In the game, the player tries to turn pieces of the opponent to their color, and it has got the name Reversi. The goal of the game is to have many pieces as your color when the last square is played. It is doing well in the market with 40 million units sold by While others referred to it as the chairman of the board, others were asking if you were playing it since the rest of the world was.
Rummikub is among the most played and highest-selling board games of all time. There was a time it was sold door-to-door, yet by , the sales were 30 million.
By , the units sold had increased to 50 million, and this figure is bound to hike over the next few years. Rob Daviau created the game, and Hasbro published it in The game revolves around what usually happens in our daily lives.
The game starts with each player deciding whether to get a job first or go to college and get the job later. They then complete the goals by playing with the cards that they fill their hands. They pay for the cost of their goals in terms of time or money. The money and time that a player will have to pay get assigned at specific points and the player that will have the most points at the end becomes the winner.
Upon its release, this game sold 45, copies in the first year, and the number had risen to 50 million copies by Eleanor Abbo designed the game in when he was recovering from polio. Children who were in the hospital tested it, and due to the interest that they got in the game, they suggested that it gets published.
Candy land is a game that does not require many skills. Anyone can play the game provided that they know how to count. The simplicity of the game makes it suitable for young children. The players are not required to make any choices in the game but follow the directions of the cards. Shuffling of the cards determines the winner in the game. Since it hit the shelves in , by , over 40 million copies had been sold according to AJC and continues to sell at least a million copies yearly.
It is a game played by two players and involves guessing. It played mainly by pencil and paper and started during World War I. Each player has their fleet of battleships in the form of drawings on the paper. The opponent will try to conceal where the battleships are located and destroy them.
The winner is the player who manages to destroy all the battleships of the opponent. From being a paper game in the s, it was published as a board game by Bradley in Video games, apps and electronic versions of the game have developed, and sales as of now are over million copies according to Battleship Wiki. It was invented out of the game of scrabble by two journalists from Canada. The two journalists, Scott Abbott, and Chris Haney realized that some parts were missing when they wanted to play scrabble.
They went ahead to create trivial pursuit with the help of Ed Werner by dividing the questions into different categories. The game later gained popularity and sold over twenty million copies in There are several editions of the game. The game needs excellent reasoning skills.
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