Here's how it works: A card deck in the middle of the table players draw from contains multiples of five different characters, each of whom has a unique ability, and each player starts with two face-down character cards. Because no one knows which cards you have, you can bluff and use a character's unique ability, like stealing from the treasury or attempting an assassination, even if you don't have that card in your hand.
At any time, another player can challenge whether you actually have that card. If you do have the card in your hand and choose to prove it, they'll have to lose one of their cards.
On the other hand, if you're bluffing or choose not to reveal the card in your hand, you'll lose one of your own cards, turning it face-up on the table. If both of your characters get turned face-up, you're out of the game. Coup is easy to learn, and rounds will only take you about 15 minutes to play, making it a great card game to whip out at parties.
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. Each player has a stash of buttons, which you use to purchase tiles for your quilt, and you'll also keep track of your progress on a separate time board, which will net you more buttons and tiles as you progress. By the end of the game, you'll be scored based on how many buttons you have left, subtracting 2 points for each empty tile still left on your board.
Patchwork is a relaxing game to play--there's something satisfying about fitting tiles together and searching for the perfect piece to fill space on your board, even when there's no hand-eye coordination involved.
Two-player board games like Patchwork are also nice to have around if you live with just one other person, as you'll always have a game you can play together. It's available on Steam too. 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. The gameplay of this family board game involves creating settlements adjacent to tiles that each have a number and resource on it.
Each time that number is rolled, anyone with a settlement adjacent to that tile will get resources, and you can build new roads and settlements using the resources you gather. The goal is to be the first to get 10 points, which you can achieve by building settlements, having the longest road, and more. If you try out this German-style board game and enjoy the basic gameplay, there are numerous expansions and themed editions available to spice things up.
I recently tried out the Game of Thrones edition of Catan , which adds the Wall and a northern area with White Walkers that will try to break through it. This can completely change your strategy and requires you to consider wall defense on top of managing your resources and settlements. Modern board games have certainly introduced some new ideas to the genre, but you can't deny the simple magic of one of the best turn-based games out there.
Another classic game, Ticket to Ride is incredibly simple to learn, but it also maintains enough tension to keep things interesting. In Ticket to Ride, players collect cards of various train types, which you'll use to claim railroad routes across America. To claim a single route, you need the required number and type of cards in your hands at once. Once you claim a route, it's yours for the rest of the game, and you'll earn points based on how long the route is.
From the start of the game, you'll also have destination cards giving you specific goals connecting Chicago to Houston, for example , which will give you bonus points at the end of the game; however, you'll also lose points for not completing your destination ticket. The simple but satisfying gameplay of Ticket to Ride has made it a long-standing favorite in the board game community, and it's received multiple follow-up versions and expansion packs to extend your weekly game night sessions.
Skull is the ultimate bluffing game, and the best part is that it's incredibly easy to teach to new players. To get started with a game of Skull, you pass around a stack of cards to each player, with each stack including three rose cards and one skull card. Each player goes around placing card of their choice, and at any point, a player can use their turn to starting calling out numbers--the number indicates how many cards you think you can turn over without seeing a skull.
There are plenty of different strategies you can employ here, but to win a game of Skull, you just have to successfully flip cards without seeing a skull twice. That's way easier said than done, as Skull is a game where everyone will be doing plenty of lying, bluffing, and risking their own cards just to mess up others. Because of how easy it is to learn and how few pieces there are to set up, Skull is an awesome game to break out at parties, and it's pretty much a guaranteed hit with any crowd.
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. Instead, the premise of Mansions of Madness is much more similar to Betrayal at House on the Hill--you and your group will enter an eerie mansion, explore its hallways and rooms, find items, and encounter horrors that will test your sanity. In Mansions, however, you can see the full layout of the board from the start, including the location of clues, and the scenario for a playthrough is in effect from the beginning.
While the first edition of Mansions required one player to take the antagonistic role of Keeper, who actively works against the other players, the second edition introduced a free companion app that absorbs this role and allows the game to be completely co-op or even single-player.
The second edition's base game comes with four different scenarios, with more available through paid DLC. However, this is a high-quality board game with detailed miniatures and tiles made to last, and its thrilling scenarios require deep strategy and cooperation that will keep your team fully engaged over the course of a two-to-three-hour playthrough.
Another two-player board game, Fog of Love is a romantic drama played out in tabletop form. In this game, you and the other player will play as two characters who meet, fall in love, and navigate the ups and downs of a modern relationship. You'll have awkward encounters, funny moments, and painful situations to work through, and the decisions you each make in these moments will affect your character's satisfaction and traits, which in turn affect whether you achieve your long-term goals.
There's also a possibility for one or both players to have hidden secrets, which will be revealed at the end and may affect the outcome. Like any relationship, your characters may find true love or end up heartbroken at the end, but the act of playing out this story together makes Fog of Love a truly unique and compelling experience. Codenames is a ridiculously fun turn-based game that works with a larger group or even just two people ideally, you'd have at least four.
In Codenames, you have two rival spymasters, each of whom knows the identities of 25 secret agents, which are reflected by their codenames on a 5x5 grid. Each spymaster's teammates are trying to make contact with all of their agents before the other team.
To do this, spymasters give one-word clues that could point to any number of codenames on the grid; for example, "animal" could refer to codenames like "Cat," "Dog," and "Turkey. Players have to guess which codenames on the board belong to their team's spies while also avoiding codenames that could belong to the other team.
Some cards on the grid are neutral, belonging to no team, and there's also an assassin--flip that card, and the game is over. 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.
Cleverly, you can make the game harder or easier by adjusting how many Epidemic cards you include. You can't beat the core Pandemic game for a solid half-hour of panicked fighting against the tide — although the Legacy series see further down might get you more long-term invested in your disease-fighting role.
The classic game of Pandemic introduces core roles like the Medic, who can remove all cubes of a single colour from a city and administer cures for free, and the Scientist, who can discover cures using fewer cards. It's very balanced, offers a number of different difficulty levels, and doesn't heap on too much complexity, though you may need to calm down that one player at the table who tries to railroad everyone else's decisions, and definitely don't give them the Dispatcher role which would allow them to move other people's pawns.
It's a great cooperative game that demands coordination — just make sure it stays fun for everyone! Oh man, the diseases are getting stronger. With the On The Brink expansion, the base game of Pandemic grows to include virulent strains which are harder to treat, a possible and difficult to snag fifth disease, and the Bio-Terrorist role, which sees a fifth player joining the fun to secretly trip around the globe spreading infections working against the other players.
There are also seven new roles included, which vastly increases the replayability of the main game, as well as new events. Some, like Borrowed Time, are actually pretty handy to have around, but the seventh Epidemic card which opens up the game's brutal Legendary difficulty might be a bit much if you ask us. The best part is that you can include these new modes individually or together, so there's loads of new variety here.
This expansion adds a new sub-board which lets you apply all kinds of science shenanigans to the viruses after collecting samples from around the main board, making the process of divining the cure much more of an involved challenge. You can play with six players total split into teams in this expansion, fighting primarily for the prestige of being the medical company to get the various viruses best under control, or you can use the new cards to play a solo game making it a good lockdown buy — though you can play the original solo too, if you just control more than one pawn yourself.
Whereas On the Brink added variation, this is a larger overhaul of the game, and you can play with the two expansions together — particularly interesting if you're using the three new role cards here — though we'd suggest opting for On the Brink first if you're not going to buy the whole load at once.
This Pandemic expansion offers up three unique challenges. The Hinterlands challenge sees the disease jumping from animals to humans; Emergency Events throws up a number of tricky effects that might, say, make outbreaks more damaging, put ongoing restrictions on your actions or, in the case of Patient Zero, even bring back previously eradicated diseases; the Superbug challenge follows On the Brink and In the Lab in adding a fifth disease, but this time there's no cure, forcing you to vaccinate the affected cities in order to get rid of it.
More Pandemic is never a bad thing, and State of Emergency primarily offers variety — particularly cool if you've already played all the other expansions with which it is compatible to death.
Pandemic Legacy takes the core principles of Pandemic and wraps them up in a 'living' board game — one which changes every time you play, with your actions in one session permanently affecting cards, cities and even diseases on your way into the next. It's not the only 'Legacy'-style game out there, but Pandemic Legacy's first season blew a lot of people away. We can't really say too much the point is to discover the surprises as you go but every playthrough of Season 1 is unique and final.
Your investment gets you pretty translucent cubes, but it also gets you a time limit: this is a game you can play with up to three other people for between 12 and 24 sessions, depending on how you do. That said, you can play standard Pandemic on the board before the events of the game start messing it up, and savvy gamers have developed homebrew 'Aftermath' rules to allow you to continue to play even after you've plunged the world into virus-coated ruin.
The game is an incredible experience that we can't recommend enough, even if you haven't played Pandemic before — as we say, you can play 'normal' Pandemic using the board before you start the 'Legacy' aspect.
In the second Pandemic Legacy game, everything has gone particularly badly: it's set seventy-odd years after from society's crumble at the hands of a brutal plague, and you and your chums fall into the roles of a rag-tag bunch of survivors working to work out what happened, find out how things are going, and ideally rebuild society. Season 2 is a more open game than the first, and offers some very different mechanics while still having Pandemic's DNA at its core. It's hard to judge which of the first two Legacy games is best, since everyone's experience is going to be different, but we'd recommend going for Season 1 as a priority and moving on to Season 2 if your group is eager for more.
It's a more complex game overall it starts simple, but by the end has a lot going on , but nothing people who already know Pandemic well can't handle.
Pandemic is about pandemics, except when it's not. Here, it's about Cold War-era spy machinations — while there is definitely a bioweapon involved, and you're certainly going to have to do your best to determine the fate of the world, this latest in the Pandemic Legacy series takes an interesting CIA vs Soviets sidestep that might even make it more appealing in the ahem current climate. It offers the same sessions and two to four players format as Seasons 1 and 2, and again has Pandemic's core but with a new twist.
You don't need to have played the others to enjoy this, but we'd still recommend you hit Season 1 first, for more of a feeling that you're viewing parts of a whole story. Whether you play this or Season 2 after Season 1 makes no difference.
Fancy a bit of historical drama in your Pandemic? Pandemic: Iberia has you covered by throwing the game back to midth Century Spain and Portugal, and infecting the peninsula's poor citizens not with a nasty case of 'generic red disease', but with malaria, typhus, cholera and yellow fever. It's a standalone game, not an expansion.
Medicine isn't so advanced, so you're searching more for preventative measures like purifying the water supply, traveling between places is handled very differently, and the roles have predictably been switched out for jobs like Sailor and Rural Doctor.
This is one of the most-loved alternate versions of Pandemic, and adds to real variation, such as being able to build railroads to make it easy to travel between places — but only if they're on your networks of tracks, of course. It means you're changing the landscape a little as you play your game — a small dose of the legacy games, in a way.
So cute: it's like normal Pandemic, only dinkier, cheaper and faster. You may not be able to physically be with them, but virtual board and card games are now an option. Here are some of the best online games to play with friends that are guaranteed to bring you and your clan together during this time of social distancing:.
Cards Against Humanity boasts it's a party game for horrible people. In this hilarious and certainly adults-only!
My friends and I played the free online version and had a blast even though we were hundreds of miles apart from each other. Skype with your friends to see each other's reactions. Up to six players can use PlayCards. Where to play: Visit playingcards. Fortnite is an online video game that exploded onto the scene three years ago and became a hit with school-aged children.
The family-friendly first-person shooter game continues to draw in millions of daily active users, adults and children alike. My best friend told me she learned how to play the game from her 8-year old son and said it's a fun way to unwind after a long day of homeschooling.
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