Written by monthly contributing writer, Natalie Didlake.
Ready to pull out the board games for the cold weather, but tired of Monopoly and Clue? Playing games as a family is a great bonding experience and builds memories for years to come. A collection of games is also very useful for hospitality events in your home. It is an easy way to break the ice, build relationships, while enjoying good laughter together!
There are lots of great board games out there you may not have seen before. Many are European made, just gaining popularity.
We’ve been collecting these games for a few years, so I’ve assembled a list of our favorites. They are all wholesome, engaging, and lots of fun!
(Note: You’ll pay a little more for these games, but I promise you will not get tired of them! We have played these over and over, and they still haven’t gotten old!)
KIDS GAMES
Orchard – This is our favorite kids’ game! Roll a wooden die to collect fruit before the bird eats it! Well-made, sturdy pieces. Great for colors and matching. Our 2-year-old even plays. Best of all, it’s a team game! Players work together instead of competing against each other.
Hisss – Players build colorful snakes by matching colored cards. It’s so fun to wait and see who will draw the last card of a snake! Very simple and easy to play, also short. We can usually play at least 2x in one sitting.
Uno Moo – Great for preschool age and older. Variation on Uno, obviously. Get rid of your farm character pieces by matching either color or animal. Great for learning basic strategy. Very colorful and cute!
Bingo Link – Get a “bingo” by connecting hexagonal spaces across the board. Each hexagon contains a tiny photographed object. If you like the “I Spy” children’s books, you’ll love this game, because it’s made by the same people! Also easy enough for the youngest children to play. Sturdy boards and pieces.
ADULT GAMES
Ticket to Ride – Start with this game if you’d like to try one but aren’t sure where to begin! Simple to play, but challenging. Build train routes across the U.S. from city to city, before someone else does. Would be great for geography fun, probably 8 and up.
Dominion – My all-time favorite! A game using cards, in a medieval setting. Build your deck in order to gain the most points. Cards can be changed each game, making each time you play unique and very exciting!
Some may not want to purchase, as this game has a witch card and a curse card that deducts points for the person who receives one. Alternately, the game could be played without these cards.
Settlers of Catan – This game is becoming more popular, so you may be familiar with it! Takes one or two games played through to catch on, but very fun once you master it. Players barter for sheep, wheat, bricks, and other commodities in order to build the most roads and cities. 3-5 players required.
Big Boggle – My first love (at least in games) is for word games, so I have to list at least one! Boggle is great, but this version has a 5 x 5 grid instead of 4 x 4, so you can make more and longer words. My hubby and I keep in our room and play a round (or 5) before bed sometimes. Don’t forget the dictionary!
Agricola – We think this one is the ultimate board game! Has about a million tiny, wooden pieces, takes 2-3 hours to play, very involved, but soooo fun. Especially for those who love strategy games. Another medieval game, build your farm, buy animals, add children, and feed your family. Can be played with 2, but best with a small group.
Do you have any favorite games to add? We are always looking for a new one!
We have a family of 6, and the adult games listed here go up to 5 players. If you get an expansion pack, does it add more players, or just change the game up? We have Settelers, I would love a new game for Christmas that the whole family could play.
We LOVE Dominion too! We have all the expansions but we actually play most often online at http://dominion.isotropic.org/ While hubby is at work we can play a game or two, and it’s so fast, since you don’t have to set it all up, or shuffle. (Sometimes we’ll coordinate with friends and all play a few games during the week, when getting babysitters would be a hassle…)
We like the other ones mentioned, although we WAY prefer Puerto Rico over Agricola.
And a couple fun ones that haven’t been mentioned are Stone Age and Dixit! Dixit is always a hit.
Orchard sounds fun, I’ll have to check that out. Thanks for this fun post!
Yes, Carcassone!! Have you played it? It is made by the same people who made Setters, I believe. It’s a nice game for two players, whereas Settlers usually isn’t as fun unless you have more than 2! Great multiple editions too!
I love most of the games mentioned. A new love for us is a fairly new game called Morphology. It is like pictionary, but using small objects instead of a pencil and paper. It’s so fun, and very simple to play!!
Love hearing of other people who enjoy Dominion as much as we do, we’re obsessed really. We have all of the expansions. It is actually just nice hearing of people who even know that the game exists.
Another one mentioned here that we love is Bohnanza. We like Carcasonne, but am surprised at the large number of recommendations as we like it but it is something we sort of got bored with easily.
My other top favorite that I did not see mentioned, not sure if anyone here has tried it, but Ascension. I did not think I would like it until I played one game and I have loved it ever since and have never gotten bored of it!
My husband and I love Ticket to Ride! I would definitely recommend, for an adult game, Carcassonne. It still involves strategizing, but is better when your mind is just too tired for a game like Ticket to Ride. It’s so fun and different everytime. Plus there is about a million expansions for it.
Your post really hit home for me. My husband and I moved from CO to TN and opened our own boardgame store a year ago which features most of the games you mentioned. My husband has loved boardgames since he was a child and feels so passionately about getting people to connect through spending time playing boardgames together. My two favorites are Dominion and Cargo Noir. Also, Animal Upon Animal is a great one for the kids that adults will love as well.
Favorite adult game: Pit. It is a card game that is similar to commodity trading. There is a mix of commodities – corn, wheat, barley, etc. Each ‘suit’ or commodity is worth a different amount. The first person to get all of one suit wins that round. You can play infinitely. It is really hysterical to see a group of 8 adults screaming loudly above one another as they trade cards.
Our family also loves Rumikub. Kids and adults love it!
I will agree with just about everyone else – Carcasonne is fabulous! It’s challenging and interesting for adults, yet my 7 year old can play and enjoy it, too! We haven’t played Settlers since we got this game.
For my preschoolers, I love simple card games like crazy 8′s/Uno. They don’t take too long to play and they are interesting enough for the adults unlike the classics (CandyLand) that take no thought at all!
And oh yeah, how could I forget my most favorite game – Cathedral! It’s one of those easy to learn, difficult to master games that my husband and I enjoy playing yet even my 3 year old can play (we leave out some rules when she plays). It’s a two person game but it’s so quick that we can watch each other play and take turns. It has some resemblance to Blokus. There are city shaped pieces (castle, cathedral, misc. buildings) and you take turns placing your pieces on the board until you can’t fit any more pieces. Whoever has fewer pieces left wins. Simple but so fun! I recommend this for all ages!
Love the list – thanks!
Our favorite board games are Ticket to Ride (European edition) and Carcasonne. We love Carcasonne so much because there are so many expansions…you really never play the game the same way twice! We got it right after we got married and have wonderful memories of playing just the 2 of us during our first year of marriage.
We love card games too. A fun one that my parents introduced us to is Five Crowns (you can usually get it at Barnes & Noble). My husband calls it “rummy on steriods” because you play 13 rounds and there are 5 suits. Super fun!
Yes! We greatly enjoy Dominion (and all its expansions) and Agricola (and its absolutely necessary expansion, Farmers of the Moor)—and that’s just a few of our 285-game-strong collection. You should also try Twilight Struggle (recreates the Cold War), Le Havre (by the designer of Agricola), Innovation (mind-blowingly brilliant game; after you’ve played it enough to get very familiar with how it works, also add in the Echoes of the Past expansion for greater depth), Wings of War (World War I tabletop card-based dogfighting, easy enough for the whole family), Carcassonne (great tile-laying game), Samurai (beautiful and stunning Japan-themed abstract), and Cuba (island-building in pre-Castro Cuba; absolutely get the El Presidente expansion)—among many, many others.
The central site (free and open community) for all board games like this is http://www.boardgamegeek.com. It opens your world.
Our username there is HuginnGreiling, and you can take a look at our collection (to get an idea of what’s out there) at http://boardgamegeek.com/collection/user/HuginnGreiling?sortdir=asc&rankobjectid=1&own=1&trade=0&ff=1.
We also love Settlers, Puerto Rico, and Carcassone.
If you love Settlers, you should try the Cities and Knights expansion. I have come to enjoy it even more than just Settlers.
Thanks, this is a great list.
We have been playing Settlers of Catan for a few years and love how it involves all players so much instead of just waiting for turns. Our 7 year old even plays it.
We’re Scrabble people.
Thanks for the list of games for kids. I am always looking for fun games that develop those critical thinking skills for my little one. I was raised playing games with my family, and for us, that is good clean fun!!!
We absolutely love Ticket to Ride and Settlers. We have added the other two parts of the Settlers game as well (Sea Farers and Castles) and these two definitely add a different dimension to the game.
Another fun game is called Bang. It’s a card game where different people get cards of characters in the game such as the villian, the sherriff and the deputy. You have to guess who has which card.
We LOVE Ticket to Ride, though we prefer the Germany edition. I’d also add Carcassonne. You build the board as you go, placing guys on it as you build. As the board expands, it changes the worth of your guys, so it has a good bit of strategy to it. It’s like a cross between Catan and Chess, but is about a 30 min game.
Carcassonne is fun. If you like Ticket to Ride and Settlers and Dominion I think you would enjoy it as well. Fun list, thanks!
We also second Carcassonne. Our favorite part of the game is that it is 2 player so my husband and I can play it by ourselves for a cheap date night
Thanks for the great ideas!!! We have a three year old, eight year old and a sixteen year old. Loving ideas that the three year old should be able to try soon.
Have you tried Bible-opoly? Its really neat too for like 8 yrs through adults.
Obj pinning this for Christmas! Thanks
I’m excited to add orchard to our Christmas list – I’ve been wanting a non competitive game for my very sensitive 4 year old. We bought Zimbos & love it – we play it like a game & also make a game of trying to match the pictures in the instructions. We also bought Quack Quack. I think it’s a great game, but my 4 year old has a lot of trouble trying to play it fast the way it was intended, so I usually just take turns instead of making it competitive.
Oh I should have mentioned that over the years we’ve collected many of our games (especially the classic ones) at thrift stores. Even if some pieces are missing we sometimes can use pieces from another game eg. marbles or dice depending on the game. Keep your eye out for games we’ve collected ours mostly for $1-4 each.
These are great games. We have a variety of games at our house. I’ll have to look into the ones you mentioned that are non competitive. Most of our games are. Sometimes that can be an issue for my 5 year old who loves to play, but doesn’t enjoy losing. However its also a skill to learn. We enjoy Chinese checkers (my 5 year old is getting the hang of it), Rumikub (adults) (might have spelt that wrong), cross crib (adults), snakes and ladders, Old maid, crazy 8′s/uno (works well for my 5 year old). We also now have a simple game that doesn’t require reading (so my 2 year old can even play) that is called Feed the Kitty and it also takes very little time to play a round. My 2 and 5 year olds both like it a lot. Another good one is memory- where you turn cards all over and match two to each other (that are the same) I made one of these off of an online templates and cardstock and my printer. Again no reading so works for my 2 and 5 year olds.
I remember Boggle! The rest of the games I haven’t heard of but am excited to try some of them (especially since I FINALLY convinced my husband to get rid of the cable and am looking for family entertainment ideas!)
What a fantastic list! We have never heard of any of the games you listed, but most of them are now on our kids list for Christmas! We are a board game playing family and how wonderful to have exciting new games to explore soon!
Thanks so much!
We are HUGE Dominion fans! They have multiple expansion packs and the game changes every time. Expansion packs add tons of new cards and you can have up to 6 players.
Another game we love is called Acquire. You buy stocks and merge companies, trying to be the majority in your investments. Great for 12 and up but it does require at least 3 players. This game is fierce (but maybe that’s because my husband and I are both very competitive). You have tiles that are randomly selected but their placement and your purchase of stocks is extremely strategic.
We love games, thanks for these recommendations!
We like a lot of those games, but one to add would be….I guess we just call it the paper game. Not a board game, but always hilarious. Here’s what you do:
Everyone sits in a circle. Each person gets a stack of paper with as many pieces of paper as there are people in the circle (if there are 10 people, each person gets 10 pieces of paper) Everyone thinks of a common phrase and writes it on the top piece of paper. (like..”take me out to the ballgame” or something)
Everyone passes their stack of papers (with the phrase still on top) to their right. They read the phrase on the top paper, put it on the bottom of the stack, and then draws a picture of their interpretation of the phrase on the “new” top paper. Like Pictionary.
After 30 seconds (or 60, whatever you choose) everyone passes their stack to the right, keeping their drawing on top. They then look at the picture that is on top of their new stack and try to figure out what the original phrase was. They put the picture on the bottom, and write their guess of the phrase on the “new” top paper.
Repeat until you have your original stack. Read through the papers and laugh at how the phrase got twisted and interpreted by each person in the circle. This game works best with at least 6 people.
I have played this game before! I nearly died laughing!!! We called it “Picture-phony.”
Known to many people as “Eat Poop You Cat”, after some apocryphal jumbled picture interpretation.
Ahhh…I think that’s like Telestrations. You can buy a spiral bound flip book with markers and pages that you wipe clean after each game. Your version is much more frugal!
I’ll have to remember that!
We love Settlers, and would join others in recommending Puerto Rico and Carcassone.
If you have learned and love Settlers, the Cities and Knights expansion is very fun. My other favorites are the various rails games–Eurorails, Empire Builders, India Rails, China Rails– and these are great for learning geography too!
Bohnanza is a great German card game. You are a bean farmer and collect different types of bean crop cards. So fun!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00008URUS/ref=redir_mdp_mobile
We LOVE Dominion too! We recently picked this one up at the big gaming convention in our town and play it all the time.
Thanks for the recommendations. I am having a baby in December, so I’m already getting my shopping done for Christmas. I will be ordering Orchard today!
We also love Carcasonne and we also like one called Puerto Rico. I recently played Al Hambra at a friend’s house and that one may go on my Christmas list. I’m going to go add Orchard to our son’s list.
We play Settlers a lot when we have gamer friends over. My husband’s family also loves Fill or Bust (a card and dice game) and we play that when we visit them.
Such a fun post! I’m also a big fan of games that don’t require a board–question games or guessing games! They definitely need to be played with a bigger group, but still so much fun!!
One of our favorites for adults is Bohnanza
Some favorite cooperative board games for kids are Hoot, Owl, Hoot and Count Your Chickens
Oh, we love all of these – especially Agricola. Pandemic is fun – including the expansion with a Bioterrorist. Quite fun to have everyone either win or lose together.
We love carcasonne too – hunters & gatherers is our favorite version.
Quirkle, Ingenious and Blockus are other fun ones too.
For card games – we love a good traditional game of hand & foot, cribbage and Euchre!
Our family LOVES hand & foot. Unfortunately we find it hard to commit to a lengthy game with little ones around.
Too funny! The adult games are all on our favorites list too! We also have Carcasonne. That’s a nice one along w/ Dominion b/c you can just play with two people–Agricola too. I don’t know about the others. Settlers has a two person card version or you can find adapted rules online, but it’s just not as fun.
Another good game for a group is Telestrations. It’s like the grade school telephone game where you whisper a phrase in someone’s ear but with drawing. We’ve played it several times with our small group at church and it is ALWAYS a huge hit!!
For kids we like – Uno Attack, Mille Bornes, Rivers Roads and Rails, Blokus
We love Ticket to Ride and Settlers. Some other suggestions would be Ingenious and Carcassone,
We love carcasonne!! It’s a german game. You build cities and farms along a river for points. And there are lots of expansion packs to change it up!
Great game list! One of our favorites is a collaborative game called Pandemic. Instead of playing against each other, you play against the game itself. It seems complex at first, but once you start playing, it all comes together easily. A great strategic game for up to four players.