For most people, there are two types of game nights. For one, you and a group of bored sober friends play Monopoly for five hours straight, two people end up passing the majority of their money back and forth, and no one ever actually wins. In the other, you all get tipsy on cheap wine and craft beer, play endless rounds of Cards Against Humanity, and realize you’re all horrible people. But there are a lot more board games out there besides the classic ones everyone has played a million times, and the one you have to be drunk to enjoy to the fullest.
If you’ve ever been to a board game cafe, you know there are hundreds, if not thousands, of games to choose from, and it’s impossible to run out of options. So why not switch it up a little bit and try out one of these games that will actually have you looking forward to the next time your girlfriend suggests having a game night.
Settlers of Catan
This German-style board game requires players to establish colonies on the island of Catan by spending and trading resources to build settlements, cities, and roads to connect them. It’s mostly a game of chance, relying on rolls of the dice and random card draws to determine what resources you have to work with. But there’s a lot of strategy in how you manage those resources, and sometimes the underdog can come out on top.
Dead of Winter
Dead of Winter is the first game in a series and it places players together in a small weakened colony of survivors in a world where most of humanity are either dead or diseased, flesh-craving monsters. A meta-cooperative psychological survival game where players must work together toward one common victory, each player also has their own secret objective they must achieve as well. Your individual goal could be to sabotage the group’s mission, so you have to learn to be sneaky in your tactics in order to increase your chances of individual success even at the detriment of the rest of the group.
Pandemic
In Pandemic, your mission as a disease-fighting specialist is to treat the many viral diseases that have broken out all over the world while researching cures for four different plagues. A deck of cards provides players with different abilities to aid in their mission, but there are also cards that will accelerate a disease’s activity. Players have to work together, each with different strengths and goals, in order to cure all four diseases before they spread beyond recovery.
Dominion
Dominion is a card game classified as a “deck-builder” where players start with a small personal deck of cards and use them to buy cards from a common pool of card stacks titled Action, Treasure, and Victory cards. The goal is to make it to the end of the game with the most victory points by collecting unclaimed land and preventing other players from doing the same. It’s all about using the cards you draw strategically to improve your position, kind of like they did in Medieval times.
Diplomacy
Created in 1954, Diplomacy was advertised as President John F. Kennedy’s favourite board game. It’s set in Europe before the beginning of World War I and each player controls the armed forces of a major European power. Each player has to move their starting units to win possession of cities marked as “supply centers”. Most game time is spent forming and betraying alliances in order to create beneficial strategies rather than relying on dice to produce random effects. The emphasis is on logic and strategy rather than chance, which is what sets it apart from other war themed games.
Sequence
To win Sequence all you have to do is complete a row of five cards as shown on the game board. For a two player game, each person starts with seven cards. You’ll place a marker on the corresponding space on the board to one of the cards in your hand. Two-eyed Jacks are wild, and one-eyed jacks can remove another player’s marker. The first person to get a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row of five wins.
Zombicide
In this adventure game, players take the role of survivor— each with unique abilities— and harness both their skills and the power of teamwork against hordes of undead. The movements and actions of the enemy (the zombies) are controlled by simple rules and a deck of cards. Your only disadvantage is there are a lot more of them than there are of you. Your goal is to find weapons and kill zombies, but be careful because although the more zombies you kill, the more skilled you get, you’ll also attract more and more zombies as the game progresses.
Balderdash
Balderdash combines trivia and bluffing to create a game out of who can make up the most believable (but fake) definitions for obscure words. You get points for selecting the correct definitions from the pile of fake ones each round, and also when you manage to trick another player into believing your made up definition is the real one.
Bang!
Recreating the scene of a classic western shoot-out, Bang! requires each player to draw a Character card to determine their special abilities. They also get a secret Role card, which determines their individual goal. You could be the Sheriff, whose goal is to kill all Outlaws and the Renegade, the Deputy, who has to protect the Sheriff and kill all Outlaws, an Outlaw whose goal is the kill the Sheriff, or the Renegade, who just has to be the last person standing. Players draw cards for weapons, health, and the ability to dodge attempts on your life.
7 Wonders
In 7 Wonders, you are a leader of one of the 7 great cities of the Ancient World and your goal is to build your city and erect an architectural wonder than will transcend future times. It’s a card development game where some cards have immediate effects, while others provide bonuses or upgrades later in the game. It has won more than 30 gaming awards, and is one of the highest rated games on the board game discussion website, BoardGameGeek.
