Celebrate winter with these excellent board games.
Kick the cold away by getting your friends together for an epic board game session. Let them bring their favourite winter warmers (we’re talking about wine, of course), switch off the screens, and let the games begin.
A few important tips to host a successful board game session:
- Invite only those who enjoy board games.
- All invited guests should know that it’s a board game party.
- Know which board game you’ll play in advance.
- Theme it up with snacks and music relevant to the theme of the board game.
- NEVER EVER suggest playing a game of Monopoly. Nobody likes Monopoly.
So without further ado, the best board games to play are:
Monikers
Monikers is pretty simple: get your friends to guess the name on a card. Each team has 60 seconds to get through as many weird, inappropriate names as they can. In the first round, you can say anything you want. In the second, you can only use one word. And in the third, you can’t say anything at all just charades. The same cards are used in each round, so by the end of the game, you’ve made up a bunch of hilarious jokes together. It’s simple, yet brilliant. And you’ll go through lots of wine, for sure.
Settlers of Catan
Your adventurous settlers seek to tame the remote but rich isle of Catan. Start by revealing Catan’s many harbours and regions: pastures, fields, mountains, hills, forests, and desert. The random mix creates a different board in virtually every game. No two games are the same.
Guide your settlers to victory by clever trading and cunning development. Use resource combinations- grain, wool, ore, brick, and lumber-to buy handy development cards and build roads, settlements, and cities. But beware! Someone might cut off your road or buy a monopoly. And you never know when the wily robber might steal some of your precious gains. I’ve found that when you include some wine in your dealings, you might just win.
Pandemic
Four diseases have broken out in the world and it is up to a team of specialists in various fields to find cures for these diseases before mankind is wiped out. Players must work together playing to their characters’ strengths and planning their strategy of eradication before the diseases overwhelm the world with ever-increasing outbreaks. The diseases are out breaking fast and time is running out: the team must try to stem the tide of infection in diseased areas while also towards cures. A truly cooperative game where you all win or you all lose.
Dominion
You are a monarch, like your parents before you, a ruler of a small pleasant kingdom of rivers and evergreens. Unlike your parents, however, you have hopes and dreams. You want a bigger and more pleasant kingdom, with more rivers and a wider variety of trees. You want a Dominion. In all directions lie fiefs, freeholds, and feodum. All are small bits of land, controlled by petty lords and verging on anarchy. You will bring civilization to these people, uniting them under your banner. But wait. It must be something in the air, several other monarchs have had the exact same idea. You must race to get as much of the unclaimed land as possible, fending them off along the way. To do this you will hire minions, construct buildings, spruce up your castle, and fill the coffers of your treasury.
Uno / Uno Flip
UNO, the classic card game of matching colours and numbers that is easy to pick up and impossible to put down, now comes with customizable Wild Cards for added excitement! And when you include wine with customizable Wild Cards it can get pretty crazy. Players take turns racing to get rid of all their cards by matching a card in their hand with the current card shown on top of the deck. Don’t forget to shout “UNO” when you only have one card remaining! The player to get rid of all the cards in their hand wins.
Viticulture
In the game, you find yourself in rustic, pre-modern Tuscany, where you’ve inherited a meagre vineyard. You’ll have a few plots of land, an old crush pad, a tiny cellar, 3 workers and the dream of owning the best winery in Italy. Your job is to allocate your workers and helpful visitors to complete various tasks throughout the year. Each season is different on a vineyard, so the workers have different tasks they can take care of in the summer and winter. Using those workers and visitors, you can expand your vineyard by building structures, planting vines, and filling wine orders as you work towards the goal of owning the most successful winery in Tuscany. You can play this on your own with that special bottle of wine you do not want to share.
Secret Hitler
Secret Hitler is a dramatic game of political intrigue and betrayal set in 1930’s Germany. Players are secretly divided into two teams – liberals and fascists.
Known only to each other, the fascists coordinate to sow distrust and install their cold-blooded leader. The liberals must find and stop the Secret Hitler before it’s too late. It’s a game of scandals and intrigue worthy of a good bottle of wine amongst your friends and enemies.
Azul
In the tactical tile-laying game Azul, the Portuguese King Manuel I commissions craftsmen to decorate the walls of his palace with beautiful mosaics. They can’t just use any old tiles: they need the so-called ‘Azulejos’. Beneath the simple action of laying tiles burns a fierce competition to pick the best tiles from the factories at just the right time. Each turn players have to take all tiles of the same type from one factory. Depending on the position in the mosaic, sometimes the craftsmen need a lot of tiles of one type to expand the mosaic, sometimes fewer. Whoever over-speculates and takes too many tiles will receive minus points. You can earn a lot, however, by tiling connected parts of the mosaic and by having completed rows and columns at the end of the game.
The designer Michael Kiesling has succeeded in this masterpiece: giving so much depth to a supposedly simple selection mechanic, that you’ll want to play this again and again and again.
Exploding Kittens
Exploding Kittens is a kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette. Players take turns drawing cards until someone draws an exploding kitten and loses the game. The deck is made up of cards that let you avoid exploding by peeking at cards before you draw, forcing your opponent to draw multiple cards, or shuffling the deck. The game gets more and more intense with each card you draw because fewer cards left in the deck means a greater chance of drawing the kitten and exploding in a fiery ball of feline hyperbole.