Game night is a great way to let loose, foster some friendly competition, and bring people together. Even losing is fun when you do it with loved ones. But with literally thousands of games to choose from, narrowing down your options can be a little overwhelming. We’ve picked a few of our favorites to help guide you, whether you’re looking for classic board games, team-based party games, strategic tabletop games, guessing games, or something else. One thing they all have in common? A good time!
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Sequence
Sequence has been a game night staple since the 1980s. Playable by as few as two players and as many as 12, it’s part board game, part card game, part strategy, part luck of the draw. The object of the game is to complete sequences, or rows of connecting poker chips, by playing cards that correspond to spaces on the board. Some lucky cards even let you remove your opponent’s chips to block them from completing a sequence. (Recommended for ages 7 and up.)
Carcassonne
An award-winning game that is particularly popular in Europe — where its namesake, the French city of Carcassonne, is located — this board game is different from many others in that it requires you to actually build the board as the game progresses. Players lay terrain tiles (featuring various combinations of cities, roads, fields, or monasteries) to create a medieval landscape and claim control of different territories with their “meeples.” It’s sort of similar to Catan but perhaps a little simpler, and the versatility of the build-as-you-go board ensures you’ll never play the same game twice. (Recommended for ages 7 and up.)
Ticket to Ride
All aboard this cross-country adventure game! Ticket to Ride is a favorite of family game nights, and has been for nearly two decades. Accessible, fast-paced, and engaging, it can be played by two to five people, who will have to channel their inner railroad magnates to create literal paths to victory across the United States. The object of the game is to rack up points, which you do by claiming railway routes throughout North America and connecting the cities on your destination tickets. It requires a certain amount of strategic thinking, but it’s easy to learn and endlessly replayable. (Recommended for ages 8 and up.)
Monopoly
First sold in the 1930s (and inspired, ironically, by the anti-monopolist Landlord’s Game), Monopoly is one of the bestselling board games of all time, with more than 275 million copies sold in the last 90 years. Players have been buying, selling, and charging rent on the game’s fictional properties for decades, all in a bid to “dream and scheme their way to riches.” We’re partial to classic Monopoly — and its rich history — but there are also thousands of special editions themed around pop culture phenomena such as Stranger Things, Star Wars, Disney animated films, and Pokémon. You can’t lose with any of them — unless, of course, you go bankrupt. (Recommended for ages 8 and up.)
Codenames
Codenames is a great option if you don’t have a lot of time — it can be played in 15 minutes, according to the box — or if you want a quick party game you can replay over and over for hours on end. The premise is simple: At the start of the game, each team elects a “spymaster,” and 25 cards bearing random words (or “codenames”) are laid out in a five-by-five grid. A separate key card, viewable only by the spymasters, indicates which cards in the grid are the codenames for each team’s secret agents. The spymasters have to use simple one-word clues to get their teammates to correctly identify all of their agents, without accidentally choosing codenames belonging to the other team or — worse — unmasking the dreaded assassin. (Recommended for ages 14 and up.)
Yahtzee
Another oldie but goodie, Yahtzee is a classic dice game in which players roll five dice — up to three rolls per turn — to try to score in 13 different categories, such as “Three of a Kind,” “Full House” (three of one number and two of another), “Small Straight” (four sequential dice), and “Yahtzee” (five of the same number). It relies a lot on luck, of course, but there’s a certain amount of skill and strategy involved, too. Bonus: You can play with others or by yourself, so it’s a great game to have on hand for a rainy day. (Recommended for ages 8 and up.)
The Game of Life
A family favorite since the 1960s, and a 2010 National Toy Hall of Fame inductee, The Game of Life takes players on a journey of major life milestones, from graduation to college to starting a career, raising a family, buying a home, and finally retiring. The goal is to accumulate more money and assets than your opponents, and while there’s a certain amount of luck involved (just like in real life), you do get to make several big decisions for yourself, so you have at least some say in how your adventures will play out. And even if you “lose” in the end, you can start over and play again. If only real life worked that way! (Recommended for ages 8 and up.)
Concept
Concept is a team-based guessing game, similar to Pictionary, but instead of drawing to illustrate a word or phrase, you create clues by placing markers on illustrated symbols on a universal icon board. (Great news for those of us with no artistic ability!) To get your team to guess “Dumbo,” for example, you might place the green question mark — indicating your main concept — on the icon representing “film,” with additional green cubes on the symbols for “child” and “animal,” to show that it’s a children’s movie about an animal. From there, you can create “subconcepts” using different-colored exclamation points and cubes — perhaps by placing a red exclamation point on the “animal” icon and adding red cubes to the symbols for “gray” and “ear,” to show that the animal in the film is gray and has prominent ears. It’s a simple premise, but it’ll get you thinking (and playing) creatively. (Recommended for ages 10 and up.)
Ransome Notes
Remember those Magnetic Poetry sets that were all the rage in the 1990s and early aughts? Ransom Notes turned them into a game. Players have to respond to funny prompts — such as “Tell someone you’ve clogged their toilet during a party” or “Ask a child in the airplane seat behind you to stop kicking” — using only the magnetic words in their limited pool. (A sample response to the airplane prompt is “young man / why foot enemy / I suffer.”) The results are sure to be hilarious (and hilariously bad), and since your pool of words will change every time you play, the game won’t get stale. (Recommended for ages 17 and up.)
Chickapig
In this humorously named “farm to table game,” players have to use chess-like strategic thinking to move their flock of “chickapigs” from one end of the board to a corresponding goal on the other — all while dodging their opponents’ chickapigs, hay bales, and a pooping cow. (There are even Poop Cards for when your chickapigs pass over a pile of poop. They’re bad, obviously.) The game was co-created by Dave Matthews (of Dave Matthews Band fame) and his friend Brian Calhoun, and it won Best Board Game in the 2019 National Parenting Product Awards. There are also Chickapig-themed books and merch, so you can share your love of the game with everyone you meet. (Recommended for ages 8 and up.)