My wife, two kids, and I love playing board games together as a family. One of our favorite times to play is during dinner. It’s a natural setting since we’re already gathered around our dining table. In the fast paced modern world, it can be tough to find a lot of time to sit together as a family and enjoy each other’s company. We tried the suggestions for asking the kids questions about their days but playing a game gets everyone talking in a much less forced manner. This leads to quality time that I look forward to all day.
If you search for dinner games or something similar you will get a lot of conversation games. There are many games that don’t use any pieces; think something like 21 Questions. For a little while, the “toy” in the Chick-Fil-A kid meal was a set of cards with topics and questions to initiate discussions. These don’t tend to work any better than those conversation starters from the family magazines and articles.
My family plays actual tabletop games while we eat. We keep a small bookcase stocked with all manner of games to break out on our dining table. Every few weeks I’ll go through and rotate games from the larger collection in our basement game room. The games I’m about to list are mainstays in our dining room collection.
There’s a few things we’ve found that help make a good family dinner time game.
- The game should support at least four players so all of us can play at the same time. We sometimes work around that by playing on teams.
- There must be distinct player turns that don’t require much activity outside a player’s turn, so people can focus on eating or talking while not taking their turns. This eliminates pretty much the entire roll and write genre and most party games.
- The game should take up a minimum of table space to allow for, you know, dinner plates and such. Only five of the games in this list even have a board.
- The duration of a single game can’t be too long since we don’t want it to last much longer than it takes to eat dinner.
- The stakes should be low so we avoid upsetting anyone if something doesn’t go a player’s way, particularly since it can be easy to lose track of something while eating and talking. Plus, you know, we’re playing mostly family games.
- Ideally there is little hidden information, such as hands of cards. The games in this list that do have player hands don’t lose much playing open hand, and honestly it can be simple to just avoid looking at other players’ hands.
- Ideally we can drop a player without hurting the game state too much. My daughter, in particular, has a tendency to simply walk away in the middle of a game.
So, without further ado, on to the list of games in alphabetical order.
Abandon All Artichokes
Gamewright makes a lot of great family games. Some of the publisher’s games actually paved the way for new games. Qwixx was an early entry in the roll and write genre. Forbidden Island came out at the same time as Matt Leacock’s more renowned game, Pandemic. Abandon All Artichokes doesn’t invent a new genre like those games, but it does innovate on the deck builder (usually epitomized by Dominion).
This has been dubbed a “deck wrecker” and provides a fun twist on the traditional deck building gameplay. Rather than building a deck of cards to continue to get better cards, the goal of this game is to eventually eliminate enough artichoke cards from your deck so you can draw a hand with no artichokes. You can focus on getting rid of as many artichokes as possible or getting enough other vegetables to overwhelm the artichokes. Having seemingly opposite ways to win is a very interesting design.
The game also simplifies the economy of deck building. There is no cost associated with each card. You simply choose one of the available five cards each turn and put it in your hand. There are only ten types of cards you can pick up, so you don’t have to spend any time or energy choosing which cards to include in a play session (something which can slow down setting up some deck builders, including the excellent Sushi Go Party). The action associated with each card is fairly straightforward, but there is still plenty of room for strategy in how you construct your deck and deploy your cards.
The designer, Emma Larkins, wrote a very good designer diary that really made me go out and buy this game. She is also very active on Twitter and co-hosts the Ludology podcast.
Bob Ross: The Art of Chill Game
My wife loves Bob Ross so for Mother’s Day this year I picked up this game. If you’re somehow unfamiliar, Bob Ross hosted the show The Joy of Painting in the 1980s and 1990s. He sported a large afro and talked in a very soothing voice while teaching people how to paint all sorts of nature paintings, all of which is summed up nicely in the box cover art. To this day I have never met a person that actually attempted to paint in front of their television. Well, The Art of Chill Game lets you simulate painting along with Bob.
The game is pretty much a set collection game. You have to collect the right colors of paint and combine them with the correct tool to match an available item on the current painting. Each painting has three items to collect. The items are named after Bob Ross’ catchphrases, such as “happy little trees” and “wondrous water”. Completing items before other players gets you more points. The players are also racing to complete all three items before Bob. Whenever a player or Bob completes all three items, the current painting is discarded and a new painting is brought up.
The game does exude a certain level of chill. There is a race aspect, but no one can be blocked from completing an item. There is no “take that” player interaction, yet it feels more interactive than a roll and write (which tend to feel like multiplayer solitaire). The biggest downside is each game has so few points that we tend to only see about two or three paintings per game. But there’s nothing stopping you from starting up a new game immediately after someone wins. The paintings are presented on huge oversized cards and the Bob Ross artwork is absolutely beautiful.
This game is from designer collective Prospero Hall, a designer with a very diverse resume from Bob Ross to Universal horror monsters to Funko Pop. There is another Bob Ross game, Bob Ross: Happy Little Accidents, also from Prospero Hall. That one appears to have players actually drawing, but we have not played that one.
Carcassonne
Carcassonne is a true classic of tabletop gaming. It’s been around since 2000 and there is a whole family of games and expansions. I first played it on my Xbox 360 but amazingly didn’t play the physical version until this year. This game really stands the test of time and should be on every gamer’s shelf.
The gameplay is very simple. Each turn, a player draws a random tile and must place it somewhere next to an existing tile. The rules for how each tile connects to other tiles are extremely intuitive, although the strategy can get as deep as you want. Once all the tiles are placed the game is over. Points are scored based on completing various items, such as roads, cities, cloisters, and farms. The scoring can be a little confusing for farms and cities so an adult will likely need to handle that part. And depending on how players place their tiles the game could take up a fair amount of table space. But these concerns do little to detract from a stellar game.
I think this game should be included in every child’s early exposure to tabletop games. There is a junior version, which trades in the strategy and advanced scoring for simply matching your meeples to those on the tiles. I feel like the original game, which is rated for ages 7+ anyway, is easy enough to grasp that young children can play well enough to enjoy it, and after a few games start to compete for points.
Catan: Junior
Time to admit something: I’ve never played Catan (previously Settlers of Catan) or any of the Catan family of games. I knew enough to laugh at jokes about people having sheep and needing wood. But whenever I saw (or, more accurately, heard) the game played it felt too hectic and stressful with all the trading.
Thankfully, for me, Catan Junior eliminates the player trading and thus that level of social stress. It also makes it a quieter game to play during a meal. Players gather materials to build pirate hideouts. New hideouts can be built by expanding your territory with pirate ships. Hideouts allow you to gather more materials each time the dice are rolled and whoever places their last hideout wins. You can trade materials with a public market or the bank of remaining materials, so there is still plenty of strategy in how to exchange your materials.
The pirate theme is very light, so don’t worry about scaring young children. The rules are simple enough and each player has a card clearly showing what materials are needed to build each of the three items (hideouts, ships, and bonus tiles). One could, in theory, just skip exchanging materials and wait to accumulate them via dice rolls. You won’t win that way but that does allow even younger children to participate. And it can feel awesome once you get good enough, and lucky enough, to chain together a bunch of exchanges on a single turn.
Eleminis
First there was Rock Paper Scissors. Then there was Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock. Now there is Eleminis. To be fair, it does appear that Eleminis predates the Big Bang Theory’s extension of Rock Paper Scissors. And if anything, Eleminis riffs more off Pokemon’s elemental weakness gameplay. Regardless of origin and lineage, this game is simple and light but still packs a fun time.
Each turn, a player draws the top card of the deck. They can play the card to any empty slot on any player. They can also replace any existing card if the new card has a matching symbol. For example, water can replace fire or rock. There’s also a blocker card, trash, and a wild card, star. And a few simple action cards round out the deck. The player that completes a full set of all five elements wins the game. The icons and logic are clear enough that our four year old daughter was able to play it and win.
Is this game random? Sure. Is it simple? You bet. But this is still a step up from something like UNO or Candy Land. You have to balance completing your own set of elements with messing up your opponents. The five card limit means there might be times you are forced to give an opponent a helpful card. This games has provided more than its fair share of fun for our family.
My First Stone Age
Yet another simplified version of a bigger game, in this case, Stone Age. I did not play the regular game until just a few weeks ago, but I can now say this junior version does a good job of capturing the essence of its big brother.
While Stone Age is a worker placement game, My First Stone Age has players moving gigantic meeples around the board to collect various materials. You can trade in a set of two or three materials to earn a hut. The first player to attain three huts wins. Movement is accomplished by flipping tiles that have either a number or a material. When a player goes to the center space all the tiles are flipped face down and two are swapped.
Movement is basically a memory game, but even if you memorize all the tile locations you will still be stymied by the extremely limited resources. Which leads to a weakness of this game: you could keep landing on spaces with no available resources and be unable to advance your position for attaining a hut. Eventually someone will trade in for a hut and free up some resources, but sometimes the game can get bogged down.
Still, despite the resource limit downside, this game is a lot of fun. The tactile nature of the huge pieces works very well with young children. More than once a game has broken up because the kids just have fun playing with pieces. And you can’t go wrong with giant meeples. Overall it feels like a very well done Haba game.
Parcheesi
OK, this game breaks the rule about taking a limited amount of time. If you thought Monopoly could overstay its welcome, then you haven’t played a game of Parcheesi bogged down by blockades and lack of rolling 5’s on the dice. Fun fact: Parcheesi is the commercialized Western name for the ancient Indian game of Pachisi.
The basic premise of Parcheesi is similar to Sorry. Each turn you roll a pair of dice. You can then move one of your four pawns the total of both dice or move two pawns according to each die. If you land on an opponent’s pawn then their pawn returns home and you can move any pawn forward 20 spaces. The frustration comes in the fact you must roll a five to bring a pawn out of your home and into play. This can lead to an excruciatingly long opening as each player fails to roll any fives.
The other source of frustration is blockades, where a player keeps two pawns on the same space and prevents any other pawns from moving past that space. We had to create a house rule to limit the number of turns you can hold a blockade, since otherwise a player would form a blockade and just keep it for the majority of the game with the other players’ pawns all stacked up behind it while the player leisurely moved their pawns around the board. Sure, the blockade player risks having their pawns “eaten” by the numerous blocked pawns, but that doesn’t avoid the many turns of frustration while the blockade is in place.
Still, this is a classic game with plenty of room for strategy. It also works to help teach simple math.
Pick-omino Deluxe
This is the most recent game to our collection but it’s actually one of the older games on this list. It came out back in 2005 from designer Reiner Knizia, although this deluxe edition is from 2018. We have not yet played with the expansion pieces included in this package, but that’s because the base game is so entertaining.
The goal of the game is to obtain the most Roasted Worm Pieces (RWP). These pieces are basically dominoes, with the top half of each domino being a number between 21 and 36 and the bottom half being a number of worms between 1 and 4. Each turn a player rolls eight dice, sets some aside, and keeps rolling until they choose to stop and pick up a RWP or they bust. The rules about setting aside dice feel complicated at first but soon become second nature.
This is a great push your luck game. Reiner Knizia is a master of games with simple mechanics but loads of depth and replayability (see also Lost Cities). You can read lots of debate about the pros and cons of this game, which almost prevented me from buying it. But I trust in Knizia, and I’m glad I picked it up. And I look forward to mixing in the additional components that extend the gameplay in interesting ways.
Sleeping Queens
The second Gamewright game on this list is one of the first games I bought when I started getting into the hobby. We didn’t even have kids back then. So the game went unplayed (went to sleep, perhaps?) for years until we broke it out as a family. Now it’s one of the most requested games by my daughter.
The goal of the game is to collect queen cards until they total 50 points or you have five queens. You collect, or “wake up”, a queen by playing a king. You can steal a queen from another player by playing a knight, or put a queen back to sleep by playing a sleeping potion. A player can counter the knight with a dragon or a sleeping potion with a wand. The rest of the cards are essentially filler, honestly. They are simply numbered 1 through 10, and you discard them by making simple formulas (e.g. discard a 2 and 3 along with a 5). There’s no real strategy with the number cards except you want to discard as many as possible to get the action cards.
My daughter adores this game. She particularly loves getting the Cat Queen and putting other players’ queens back to sleep. My son enjoys the math element of discarding number cards and adding up the queen points. We don’t take this game too seriously and just have fun with it.
While researching this article, I just learned there is a 10th Anniversay edition with new queens and new kings. I was ridiculously excited to see the new cards and might wind up buying the new edition if I can find it.
Splendor
I almost credited Splendor with getting me into tabletop gaming. After picking up Ticket to Ride First Journey at Target, I started perusing the tabletop game section every time I went to Target. By chance I happened to see Splendor on clearance for half price. I wasn’t really familiar with the game but it somehow grabbed my attention (the clearance sticker certainly helped). My son and I instantly took to this game and it (along with his Ticket to Ride addiction) helped cement my son’s interest in tabletop games.
Splendor is a simple engine building game.Players take gem chips to buy cards. There are five colors of gems: white, blue, green, red, and black. Each card provides an extra gem on all subsequent turns, thus making future cards require fewer gem chips to buy. More expensive cards also provide points. Collecting specific sets of cards earns you a noble worth three points. The first player to reach 15 points wins the game.
This game is addictive. There is a lot of joy in building a collection of cards to reach the higher cards or simply take lower cards for free. We’ve had success with multiple strategies. It’s a relatively easy game to teach, which means it’s one of the first games we break out when we have guests that don’t normally play games. And the gem chips are high quality poker chips that have a satisfying heft.
If you are so inclined, there is a new version, Splendor Marvel. But from the images I’ve seen I much prefer the original artwork even it lacks a strong theme.
Unicorn Glitterluck: A Party for Rosalie
This is my daughter’s most requested game in our entire collection. She loves the unicorn theme. She also loves the party theme and uncovering the various animal guests. It’s a Haba game so all the components are nice and high quality, although I would have liked the cardboard tokens to be wood to match the unicorn pieces but they match the board itself which is fine.
Another good aspect of A Party for Rosalie is the fact it’s cooperative. All the players work together to get the guests to the party and gather the cloud crystals before Rosalie shows up at her party. I’m not sure we’ve ever lost; Pandemic, this is not. There’s enough branching paths on the board that the die roll doesn’t completely dictate where you go. And the fact each player has an assigned party guest to obtain means everyone gets a chance to help no matter what.
One word of caution. Stay far away from its sister game, Unicorn Glitterluck: Cloud Crystals. If you thought Candy Land was too simplistic, Cloud Crystals gives it a run for its money.
Whoowasit
The second Reiner Knizia on this list is another recent one for us. We bought it years ago but left it unopened until both kids were a little older. Now I wish we had brought it out earlier, not because it’s too simple but because it’s so fun. It’s basically cooperative Clue. We also own Clue Jr. and this games blows that out of the water.
Like another Reiner Knizia game, Electronic Labyrinth, Whoowasit relies on an electronic box to provide audio cues. In this case, the box tells you which food you find in each room, what food the occupant of each room wants, and any clues provided in exchange for the food. There’s also a ghost chasing you around the board, but it’s not scary at all. Some of the ghost’s audio has become family in-jokes. This might take up the most table space of any game on this list, but we manage to make it work by extending our dining table.
For a game that boils down to rolling a single die and pressing a button on a box, this game keeps on entertaining us. Sometimes it’s a string of ghost die rolls that wind up chasing all of us back to the start. Too often it’s me tripping every trap on the board as I fall down trap doors and knock over suits of armor. Since it’s cooperative we can help each other. We’ve had a few close games and even lost a couple, but for the most part it’s easy enough to win. It’s still fun each time.
For More Game Lists…
Let me know in the comments what games your family enjoys playing together, even if you don’t play over dinner.
For more family games, go read my two part list of Gamewright games: Part One and Part Two.
For some games that sneakily educate you while being super fun, read my list of games to entertain and enlighten.
This article is part of the 2020 Tabletop Writers Diversity Initiative. Use the tags “Tabletop Writers Guild” and “2020 Diversity Initiative” to find more.
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