Board Games = The Best Gift To Bring To A Gathering 🎲
Not only does it turn out that I love a certain type of strategy board game, but I have learned that it's also a great way to diffuse difficult dynamics in group settings, aka larger family holiday gatherings where everyone has something else to focus on (than say politics) but can still spend time together.
Also, it turns out that board games are just a fun excuse to get together with friends regularly. So, may I suggest bringing a board game to your next family gathering just to have in your back pocket. These are ones I carry at the shop and are some of my current favorites starting with easiest to more complicated:
I am personally terrible at Spot It, but also I think it is just in relation to how good my husband and daughter are at it because of their photographic memories. This is a good game to keep in your bag if you have elementary school aged children (but it's good for anyone that age and older) and bring out at restaurants to keep kids busy, plus you can play as long or as little as you want.
Skull is an easy and fun game where you bet how many cards you can unlock before a skull is exposed. This is a very low stakes, party game that requires little thinking.
I used to play checkers on a special side table everytime I visited my Granddad when we would visit North Carolina from Northern Virginia where I grew up. It was a soothing way to connect but also taught me strategy and planning ahead. I have found that recently it's fun to play with my teenage daughter as just a way to be together without deep conversations or prickly angst.
Like checkers, bananagrams has been around for a while but is still a favorite. It's a faster paced version of scrabble and is both competitive and easy.
Skull King is a fun game to play with a large group of people. It is essentially similar to poker but with each player betting on how many hands they can take with the stakes getting harder with each round. It's a crowd favorite.
Azul is a simple pattern matching game and can be picked up quickly by most people and older kids, but there is a little strategy involved in the matches you make as well.
Wavelength is a team-based party game where you try to figure out what the other team is guessing. I am still new to this game
With Splendor you collect gems and strategize how to be the first person to collect a certain number of points based on cards you buy. This is easy and not as ruthless as say Monopoly.
I would say with Machi Koro my love of thoughtful strategy games emerged. I deeply dislike (and get bored) with games like Monopoly, Catan and Ticket to Ride where oftentimes the outcome is predicted early and it can skew heavily to the winner early on and it's just not as fun to play out (but still long and cumbersome). Enter Machi Koro, you have to purchase properties similar to Monopoly but each property has a different action and outcomes that build upon one another. It's usually hard to tell who will win until the end and it's really about building your best city and each time you play there's still a luck element too. This is a good one for older kids as well and moves fairly quickly.
Wingspan is a lovely engine-building game where each card has a different bird on it and similar to Machi Koro you build out your board with different powers and strategies which ultimately determine how many points you will get. There is a lot of strategy, a little bit of luck and it is different each time. While this one is more complicated to learn, it usually becomes people's favorites once they do. This is a good game for two players but you can play with four (and more with various expansions that I also carry at the shop too).
In addition to Wingspan, Wyrmspan has similar mechanics but is a little bit different playthrough. My husband and I have been playing more of this lately than Wingspan but they are both really nice. These games are more of a sit down and thoughtfully play it out at just under an hour (or longer depending on how long it takes players to decide on their moves) and do require some time to learn the rules.
If you've played Wingspan for a while and are looking for something similar I recommend Everdell, it is similarly an engine building game but a little more complex than Wingspan and has cozy forest creatures built in as part of the game. This is probably not a game you bring to first-timers and to a family outing unless everyone knows how to play or enjoys this level of complicated game play and strategy.
Lastly, I recommend American Mahjong. While it has a pretty steep learning curve it's actually not that complicated of a game and is fun to play consistently with a group, but you need four players and ideally you've all taken a handful of lessons beforehand. My evening January mahjong teaching class is sold out but I do still have space in the the daytime January 20th class at 10am. You can sign up for that here. I am hoping to add in a Wingspan teaching class as well as more mahjong classes in future months.
And if all that feels too cumbersome for your crowd, you can't go wrong with simple trivia cards.
