…and not Card’s Against Humanity!

Suitable for 14 to 80 year olds.

Munchkin is ace, dungeon petz is great, chaos marauders is brilliant (if you like happy families with orcs and goblinz) zombicide and pandemic are great for co operative play and everyone working togeather

codenames, exploding kittens

Uno.
Top Trumps.

Monopoly! bagsy the top hat.

Another vote for Exploding Kittens (even though it’s not really a board game of suitable for little ‘uns)

Pandemic.

Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, Love Letter, Colt Express, Power Grid, Codenames, 7 Wonders.

Oh and not a board game as such, but Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is great.

strip Jenga

thought you said for 2

DOH

Ticket To Ride Europe

Not too long. Feels different, no dice. A good blend of strategy and luck

Ticket To Ride – easy to pick up and play, relatively short games (up to an hour) with 2 players so doesn’t drag on. We have the original, Europe is harder and I believe wind and sail (or whatever the Great Lakes on is) is harder still. Add on packs are available for all editions.

https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwih3dH2vofRAhWdF8AKHQvVBZUQtwIIIzAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DBk8X2fn9a4I&usg=AFQjCNEV3RwNhCaImf2-yZUex12f7uvKHA&bvm=bv.142059868,d.d24

For more ideas see here: http://geekandsundry.com/shows/tabletop/

Damn you Ampthill!

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is great.

Keep meaning to get a copy. Does look thoroughly entertaining.

Nothing has ever been better than Lost Valley of the Dinosaurs.

🙂

Agree with the above. Personal faves are Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne.

I’d also add Mascarade. Bit of a curve ball, but great fun, easy to learn and you can play with up to 13 players! See for info (and a generally great resource for all things board games)…

Cranium
Articulate

I’d say none, but I hate them and I hate what they make me, I begged my wife not to – but she’s bought Family Trivial Pursuit – I’m meant to play this with her, my Son and most of my outlaws…

I don’t want to win, I NEED to win, I want to crush them so badly they never want to play it again, I want tears – I’ll let them team up if they want, I’ll take them all on, me verses the world, I am terrible loser and worse winner.

I’ll try to be modest, for about 30 seconds, but it won’t work. I have a rare and mysterious talent – I can’t remember anyone’s name, nor what I did 15 mins ago and I can’t spell for shit, but my brain retains useless information in perfect HD clarity.

I begged them not to.

Beer Chem-pong. Just combine a table tennis table, plastic pint glasses, table tennis ball, 5 x 2l bottles of White Lightning and some aunts and uncles. At least you wont be board. Geddit?

Use wine if middle-class aspiring.

Another thumbs up for Ticket to Ride.

How many people? Some of the above don’t work well for larger groups, or need expansions or similiar (I was going to pick up a copy of catan for the family this year til I realised how expensive it is with the 5-6 player expansion, **** that!)

Frinstance Ticket to ride’s weird team-play 6-player mode is awful imo. Looks fairly bad on paper then in practice becomes an exercise in cheating.

Lots of good suggestions, I’ll throw in Dixit and Forbidden Island

Dominion

Ticket To Ride… Add on packs are available for all editions.

… except the Merklin edition and the Anniversary edition. If you’re getting TTR (and you should, it’s ace), get either USA or Europe. Europe is newer and so has a few extra rules and mechanics, USA is simpler.

What have you got that you like already?

Just my humble opinion, but exploding kittens is a gimmick for ‘oatmeal’ fans. And Cards against humanity is dreary rubbish for stoners.

Ticket to ride is bloody great, you can try to win, or have loads of fun watching what the leaders are up to, and nobbling them…

Power grid, and ‘kings of air and steam’ are my new favourite games, but perhaps a bit complex for a group of non game-geeks…

I’ll try to be modest, for about 30 seconds, but it won’t work. I have a rare and mysterious talent – I can’t remember anyone’s name, nor what I did 15 mins ago and I can’t spell for shit, but my brain retains useless information in perfect HD clarity.

We have the same type of brain, I have astonishing recall for information I didn’t know I knew, can’t remember names and my spelling is terrible too.

For a game idea, we’ve got Lattice, a bit like a cross between dominos and scrabble, games are quite short too. Works will a wide range of ages, gets a bit strategic like Othello as well.

War on Terror
Risk: World Domination
The Hen Commandments
Exploding Kittens

King of Tokyo. 2 – 6 players, played it with my 2 and 5 year old this morning, (2 is a bit young for it, but she likes rolling the dice and stomping in to Tokyo. She still wins sometimes)

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGaCjM2hal4[/video]

Roll for it, 2 – 4 players (or 8 with expansion). Easy, quick fun dice game.
Sushi go!, 2 – some players. Easy, quick fun card game.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu9RB-N4T3g[/video]

—

Next on my list are:

Shadows in The Woods, 1 v n players. Adult versus kids. Gnomes have to hide from the light. I can’t find a video of this one, but it’s popular (ish) in Germany.

Tsuro, 2 to 4 players.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMtlQxJeWvc[/video]

I guess, I like quick and easy games. I love the idea of Dread, but it’s a bit much for the kids and anyone who isn’t in to gaming. I made up a similar Adventure Time based game (my 5 year old loves Adventure Time) that went down well, but the rules were very “fluid”.

Power grid

How does that compare with TTR? They look to be similar, I’ve never played it though.

Scrabble

Cougar – Moderator
Power grid
How does that compare with TTR? They look to be similar

They are similar, the aim is to build a network connecting cities, but power grid has the added interest of bidding / buying power stations, and then there’s the fuel market… (if no-one wants coal, it builds up, and gets cheaper, which will change the economy, etc.)

Rummikub

Just a box, bag of tiles and 4 stands.

Powergrid’s awesome, it’s got the basic feel of an 80s kids game but it’s clever. Does take a couple of games to get the hang of though because of the way the economy changes.

Articulate

power grid has the added interest of bidding / buying power stations, and then there’s the fuel market…

Sounds like it won’t scale well to two players then?

As a proper all-in-the-box game:

The Really Nasty Horse Racing Game – a game about cheating – you’re racing your own horse but betting on other people’s to win.

If you already have a few boardgames in the house then James Ernest / Cheapass Games has produced a few games that you play with with existing dice / counters / money from other games. They’re sold in an A5 envelope of rules, game cards and a paper playing board.

“Kill Doctor Lucky” is like a reverse version of Cluedo – the aim being to commit a murder out of the view of other players rather than solve it. It has some really clever game theory going on within it.

And its out of print…. but if you can find it anywhere ‘Vegas’ – you play it with the money/counters from Monopoly and a deck of playing cards. It mimics the gameplay of monopoly but you are gambling in, or buying stakes in casinos rather than buying and renting property. It improves on monopoly in that the game plays out in a shorter timescale and theres no attrition- everyone’s in it to the end and there can be big changes in fortunes as the game concludes. (The big shift in fortunes is an excellent aspect of the Really Nasty Horse Racing Game too)

The other major improvement with Vegas over Monopoly is so far I haven’t had my teeth kicked out in a game of Vegas.

Quirkle

Munchkin

Gloom

Im sure you could make cardscagainst humanity suitable for kids, its a CC licence so just download the template and replace the more offensive ones with “farts”.

There is a family version of CAH. Apples Vs Apples is basically the same game.

We got Labyrinth for a nine year old but all adults love it. really good with four players as the board is alway changing so makes planning moves ahead more tricky.

It is a combination of luck and skill so nobody gets suicidal.

Labyrinth Game

Agricola

Quite easy and you can add extra rules in to make it more complex after a few goes. Quite quick to play but if the more people you add in the more tactical it gets which is surprising for a game essentially about farming.

If you are on the geeky side I cant recommend the X Wing ‘board’ game enough. or the Star wars Amanda game if you like something a bit more strategic.

We played Articulate as a family on one of the first times I met my wife. She was shocked and apalled at our competitiveness. And I thought the games were perfectly reasonable and mild mannered…

For a better version of Scrabble that’s less dependent on how much of the infamous 2 letter word list you can memorise, try Upwords.

Agricola

Quite easy and you can add extra rules in to make it more complex after a few goes.

Agricola is brilliant, but I wouldn’t fancy teaching it to “family” whose idea of a board game is Ludo. It’s got a lot of concepts alien to non-gamers.

I’d suggest the best way to get into Agricola perhaps is to play the 2-player version (All Creatures Big And Small). It’s a cut-down version, plays out in under half an hour, is a lot of fun and explains mechanics like worker placement without getting bogged down in lots of other stuff going on.

Speaking of which – has anyone played the full Agricola as a 2p game? Does it work?