Board Game Recommendations?

Question

Any recommendations for family board games?

We've got the usual and perhaps the unusual...

We have and like these:
Cranium
Monopoly (about a dozen versions)
MadLibs
Scrabble
Chess
Balderdash
Risk
Diplomacy
OutBurst

We have and are not so keen on:
Trivial Pursuit (too much entertainment related stuff)
Sorry (gets boring)
Life
Survival (?) Survivor(?)
Clue

Any great new board games?

Answer 1

It seems you enjoy a variety of different game types. I see several word games, some group/party games, and some strategy games, so a few recommendations for each:

Party/group games:
Quelf - Fun, highly interactive, and potentially embarrassing. A ton of fun with the right group. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/19370

Wits and Wagers - A trivia game where you can win without ever getting an answer right! It's got a bit of gambling/wagering to go with the trivia, and is a blast. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/20100

Word games:
Scattergories - It's a classic, but is still very popular and challenging. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/2381

Royalty - A combination of scrabble and rummy. Combine letter sets to spell words, add on to others' words, etc. A great vocabulary stretching card game

Strategy:
Blokus - Competitive tetris, with a twist. Try to place all of your pieces on the board while blocking your opponents. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/2453

Ingenious - A color based twist on dominoes, the player with the highest low score wins. Score 18 points in one color and declare yourself Ingenious. Deep strategy in a good abstract game. Unique scaling mechanism to the board provides solid play from 1 to 4 players. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/9674

Happy gaming!

Answer 2

I looked over the list of current responses. My ideas (and ones others said that I support):

Carcassone - tile based game, easy to learn, fun, strategic and simple.

Settlers of Catan - Another easy to learn game, it forces you to interact with the other players and encourages cooperative competition.

Ticket to Ride - This game has had so much support and won so may awards. It is an instant classic.

Fluxx - A card game where the rules change with each card played. Extremely simple, the rules can be learned in less than five minutes. The game is never the same and is a lot of fun.

Pit - S commodities trading game. It does get load, chaotic, and wild, but that is part of its charm.

King's Blood - This is also a card game, and is based on the idea creating royal bloodlines. It has cute anime style fantasy art and is simple once you learn it.

All of these games are great for kids of all ages, but are still interesting and fun enough for adults too.

Answer 3

Carcassone - Is a simple yet addictive tile laying game, ideal for family gaming. I am looking forward to getting the Inns & Cathedrals expansion.

Settlers of Catan - A little more involved, though still easy to learn. Each game is different due to how the board is constructed. The Seafarers expansion gives even more variety. New edition is being released this month. Link below is an online tutorial.

Answer 4

Try a game called loaded questions. It has become a tradition for me and friends to play this but in a different way. Basically you go around and one person reads a question from a card. Say the question is what is one thing that you could take back that you regret. After everyone answers the person who read the card has to guess who wrote each answer. To make this more fun we added 1.) lots of booze and 2.) we made the answers horribly insulting towards one another, but funny so no one gets infuriated. Anyhow this has been one of the funnest games I have ever played.

Answer 5

There are TONS of games out there.

You might try:

Settlers of Catan - a great game of building and trading.

Cranium Hoopla - fast paced party game played cooperatively against a timer.

Ticket to Ride - popular game where you need to race to make train routes. Very easy to play.

Shogun - like chess and risk? How about an intensive strategic game where you fight over control of provinces, but also need to manage the taxes and food to support them. (Warning: this one is a heavy, hard on the brain game).

Mr. Jack - a 2 player game that mixes deduction and strategy. Very tense and challenging.

Pitch Car - want something anyone can play? A fun race game of flicking carroms.

Qwirkle - scrabble like play, where you try to create the best combinations based on colors and symbols.

And that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of all the games around!

Check out www.boardgamegeek.com for tons of stuff!

Answer 6

We just had a family get together and played these:

Taboo

Quandary

Catch Phrase (Electronic version - very nice)

Upwords

Taboo was a real hoot!

Quandary is a great name for this game because you don't know whether to try to advance your own score at the risk of getting screwed at the end or to just try to screw up your opponent's score. A very unique and simple concept. Doesn't take long to play rounds. You may have to search E-Bay for this game.

We also played the old "Skittles" game where you swing a suspended ball at bowling pins. It's old and my wife found it on E-Bay also...but we had alot of fun with it.

Upwords is like Scabble on steroids because you can also stack letters on top of others to score new words. A very quiet game.

There's also 4-player chess. You may want to search that too.

Answer 7

We've also tried:
Apples to Apples - is simple to play.
Guesstures - charades with subject adn timer.
Scattergories - best answers not duplicated

My family recently played the following games and had lots of fun:

Settlers of Catan (Build and Trade with other players game; may need the Settlers of Catan 5-6 Player Exp for larger families. )
When you play the intermediate rules, the map becomes more random.
http://www.games-for-less.com/settlers-of-catan-p-3.html

Carcassonne with River Tiles (It's a tile laying game where you strategize as you lay the next tile)
http://www.games-for-less.com/carcassonne-with-river-tiles-p-184.html?zenid=9396f9c98359ebc7ce48449f200ca420
You may need the expansion Carcassonne: Inns & Cathedrals for the 6th player.

Non traditional boardgames:
Heroclix

We'll probably check out the following next:
Ticket to Ride
Heroscape
Pirates (Board game version)
http://www.wizkidsgames.com/pirates/

Answer 8

Pit. It's a multi-player stock trading game that gets REAL LOUD at times. First one to trade all their cards and get the corner on the market and RING the final bell, wins.

Mancala. 700 year old 2 player game played by moving seeds around a board. You can play with 4, 5, or 6 seeds by sowing them in a counter-clockwise direction and trying to capture your opponent's seeds

Have fun

Answer 9

Try something like Scene It (lots of different versions), Catch Phrase, Tribond, Sequence, Boggle, Battle of the Sexes (obviously better if you have both males and females in the family)... Also, scan the board game section at the store. Sometimes I see one that looks like a lot of fun that I'd never heard of.

Answer 10

'Scene It' is really fun and has different versions for your favourite genres. It really depends on what you like I guess.
I like: (some of them are probably old)
Taboo
Guesstures
Mystery Mansion
Sudoku

Lots of others too. Go to Toys R Us or something and check out all the new stuff they have!