By: Norman Corrion
The holiday season creates a unique demand when it comes to tabletop gaming. The perfect games for families have simple rules, shorter play times, accommodate a larger number of players and still need to be fun. This list contains seven games that will leave your family members addicted and wanting one more round.
The recommended number of players is two to eight, but it can easily accommodate a few more. The premise of the game is that there are two teams of spies racing to contact all their agents before the rival team. The players are split into two teams and 25 cards are laid out with words on each representing an agent. Each team identifies a spymaster who will learn agent locations and give their team a word clue for cards that match their agents. Their teammates then guess what card they believe is associated with the given clue. If they guess one of their agents, they can guess more, if a bystander or opposing agent the turn ends and if they guess the assassin card, they lose. The first team to identify all their agents wins.
With a recommended number of players from two to six the fun increases with the number of players. The premise here is you are trying to stockpile wealth and literally need to cover your assets to do so. Players are dealt a number of assets and take turns either adding to their stockpile or challenging others to steal their wealth. Things on the top of your stockpile are vulnerable to theft. The game is a fun back and forth of bouncing assets. You will find players pressuring others, attempting to get them to steal from someone else while you all race to a million in wealth.
This deluxe version of this game is for two to eight players. The idea here is everyone is passing around happy looking sushi cards and trying to make certain combinations. Players are each dealt a starting hand, everyone picks a card to keep, reveals and then passes the remaining cards to the player on the left. This is repeated until there are no cards left to pass. As you pick your cards you look at what others are picking to see if it will impact your strategy or if you want to impact theirs. The game takes three rounds with each round adding to your points.
If you have always desired to be a dwarven miner, then the Saboteur is the game for you. The game can accommodate two to 12 players but is more fun with at least six players. In this game you are either trying to dig a tunnel to some gold or sabotage your fellow miners to prevent them from reaching the gold. The catch is you don’t know who a saboteur is. The game is played over multiple rounds with each player being dealt a new role every round. You don’t know who you can trust as players contribute, confuse or just plain sabotage the group. If players reach the gold, the non-saboteurs get gold if they prevent the saboteurs from getting some gold. The dwarf with the most gold after round three wins.
A very simple but fun game for two to eight players. Each player is dealt a number of paths squares, and picks a starting point on the edge of the board for their token. They then take turns placing a square in front of their token causing their token and any others touching to follow the path they created. You don’t want to run into another player’s token or the edge of the map as it causes you to lose. You keep placing squares until one token remains and is the winner.
Another simple and fun game for two to six players where everyone creates a timeline together. This game has multiple versions with themes like inventions or events. Each version contains cards with two sides, both have an event, but one side also has the date. Players are dealt cards with the date side down, one is placed in the middle, date side up, as the start of the timeline. Player takes turns, placing a card at a time in the timeline, if correct the card goes into the timeline if wrong the card goes to a discard pile and the player gets a new card. As the timeline fills with events it becomes harder to place cards and the first player to place all their cards wins.
Lastly, we have a game for two to five players, based on the French Revolution. Players take turns as rival guillotine operators trying to collect the heads of the most prominent nobles. The game is played in three rounds, each representing a day. At the start of the day 12 nobles are lined up for execution and players are dealt a number of action cards. Players take turns getting to play one action card impacting the line order or points, then receive the next noble in line. Once the line is empty that ends and new nobles are placed in line for the next day. Once all three rounds are complete, points are determined by adding up all each player’s beheaded nobles to determine the winner.
