Seven great board games the whole family can enjoy
Your family deserves to play great board games.
Growing up, I wanted to play every board game I could get my hands on. That list wasn’t particularly long, though — my parents weren’t somehow deep into German game design (nerdy as they were and still are — I got it from somewhere!), so the revolution in board game design wasn’t something I had much experience with. Still, I loved the games we had, and I was happy to play them, even if others around sometimes weren’t.
I look now and see a very different world my son will be growing up in. Rather than a world of board games that are either fairly meaningless or bound to create tension, there will be games I can introduce him to in the forthcoming years that are interesting, fun and thoughtful. Even now, I often have the chance to play games with younger members of my wife’s extended family. We’ve played modern classics like Bohnanza, Dominion and Carcassonne together — all games that I would have loved in my youth, I suspect. They’ve had games like those in their lives already, giving them a wider perspective on board games than I had at a similar age. I’ve had the opportunity to introduce them to games, too, and it’s simply one of my very favorite things.
With that in mind, here are seven great games the whole family can enjoy. If that’s four or five people gathered around the table for game night, or if it’s four teenage cousins playing together, these games are approachable, interesting, and engaging.
Can’t Stop
Rolling dice repeatedly is a recipe for a great family game, isn’t it? Think about Yahtzee, a family classic. What is it, but an exercise in rolling dice? Can’t Stop takes that idea — it’s fun to roll dice — and turns it into one of my all-time favorite games.
In Can’t Stop, you’re competing to compete columns by rolling four dice, making two groups of them, and advancing on columns from the sums of those pairs. You can only commit to advancing in three columns on any given turn, and if you ever can’t advance on one of the columns you’re committed to, you’ll lose all your progress for the turn. Of course, when you feel happy with your progress, you can choose to stop, locking in that progress — but you wouldn’t stop, would you? See, you’re trying to reach the top of the column before anyone else. Stopping now, when you’ll probably roll just the number you need to complete the column? I wouldn’t dream of it. (And that’s why my success rate is only 26 percent. I just can’t get enough. I mean, I can’t stop. There we go.)
Designed by the legendary Sid Sackson, published in the U.S. these days by Eagle-Gryphon Games.
The Fuzzies
Imagine, if you will, a tower of little fuzzy pom-pom balls. Now imagine you’re tasked with removing a ball of a specific color, then placing it higher on the tower somewhere. That’s The Fuzzies. That’s (mostly) it. Oh, sure, you could play with the slightly more advanced rules, where if somebody drops one or more balls (so long as it’s not the whole tower toppling), they have to draw a card that features one of five challenges on it, then they have to perform their next turn with that challenge. They’re pretty simple themselves — use your non-dominant hand, for example — and do add just that little extra bit to the game.
The Fuzzies kind of rules. I don’t know exactly what it is about this game. Maybe it’s the simplicity of the action, the brightness of the colors, and the familiar play that combine to make a really, really nice game the whole family can enjoy.
Designed by Alex Hague, Justin Vickers and Wolfgang Warsch, published by CMYK.
Quirky Circuits
I’ve been programming on computers for a long time. My first language was BASIC. My fifth-grade science fair project saw me write a program to track earthquakes using USGS data across Utah. It’s been my profession for more than 20 years. But none of that prepared me for programming board games, where you execute a series of instructions in sequence according to some set of rules.
Quirky Circuits takes that particular mechanic and imbues it with a much-appreciated cooperative bent over a campaign. The programming, even as the game ramps up, remains pretty easy to handle. It’s not dissimilar from the games they often use to teach kids to program on computers — think turtle graphics. (I don’t know when I first did that on a computer, but I remember it fondly — just not how old I was.) During each mission, players will play face-down cards with programming instructions, forming a sequence of commands. Half the game, then, is inductive reasoning — can you figure out what everyone else played and when you should play your card? What happens if you get it wrong — can you recover? Can you find moves that work well in multiple scenarios?
This isn’t a taxing game, but it’s definitely one that will stretch young minds a bit, and it provides plenty of opportunity to enjoy the game if you’re proficient. Just don’t expect to go in for a three-hour brain-burning excursion.
Designed by Nikki Valens and published by Plaid Hat Games, who provided a review copy of Quirky Circuits: Penny & Gizmo’s Snow Day.
MicroMacro: Crime City
As a child, I loved the Where’s Waldo? books. (Yes, I know it’s actually Where’s Wally?, but you can’t take my childhood away that easily.) There’s a real charm about looking at a picture for an extended period, hunting for that man in stripes with glasses. MicroMacro: Crime City, which spans several games now, takes that idea and adds a bit of a mystery to the equation.
You’ll play through a campaign in which you’re attempting to solve little mysteries, answering questions along the way. Yes, there’s sometimes some crime — it’s in the name — but the game does a good job giving you guidance on which missions might be appropriate for your family. The further you go in the campaign, the less appropriate it might be for younger players, but that’s very much up to you — not me. (Maybe this is a great one for families where the youngest is a teenager?)
Designed by Johannes Sich, published by Pegagus Spiele.
Switchbacks
Traversing a mountain is difficult enough, but doing it while keeping your numbers straight? That’s what Switchbacks, the newest game on this list, has you doing. Each turn, you’ll be blindly drawing a tile with a number from 1 to 37 on it, placing the tile somewhere on the mountain board, then potentially placing a hiker on that tile. At the end of the game, you’ll earn points for every hiker you have on a tile that’s part of at least a four-number consecutive sequence. So if you’ve got three hikers on tiles 35, 36 and 37, and they connect sequentially to 38, congratulations — that’s three points.
But you’re not the only one making your way up this mountain. Other players can get in the way, or they might try to take advantage of your progress. This isn’t a particularly complicated game, but the simple gameplay features an interesting little game.
Designed by Susumu Kawasaki, published in the U.S. by AllPlay. Originally published in Japan by Kawasaki Facxtory as Connect37.
3 Second Try
Most of these games on this list are reasonably fast-paced. There’s not a lot of down time between turns. 3 Second Try puts them all to shame. This is essentially a bidding party game: A card is drawn each round from one of two piles, Brain or Physical, then read aloud. It might be something like “How many times can you spin your arm” in the case of a physical selection, or “How many movie titles can you name” in the case of a brain selection.
The fun begins: Everyone has three seconds to say how many times they think they can do the specified action within a three-second span. The player who says the highest number is tasked with demonstrating that fact, which they will attempt to do while a small metal ball is rolling down a zig-zag track. If they can’t successfully perform the action their specified number of times, the player with the next-highest bid will have a chance, and so on and so forth.
This is the sort of party game that just works. The brain category might work to the benefit older players, but spry kids might be better at spinning their arm at a high velocity than I am. And by “might be better,” I mean that they almost certainly are.
Designed by Daichi Chihara and Masayuki Ikegami, published by Itten.
Well, here we are again! Who’d have thought. Welcome to all you newcomers — I’m so pleased you’ve found this newsletter. I’d love to hear your thoughts. What games are you playing with your family? I’m still very early on this journey, which I hope is a lifelong one, so I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Next week: It’s the fifth Wednesday again. Last time we had one of those, I talked about the characters in Seinfeld, for some reason. This time, expect something a little further-flung — maybe something among the stars, beyond the final frontier.