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Looking for board game suggestions for non-gamers
Hey everyone,
Growing up, I loved playing board games with friends and family—it was a big part of my life. Now, I’ve moved away, and my girlfriend and some of her family (who live with us) have zero interest in board games.
I’ve tried classics like Catan, Ticket to Ride, and Codenames, but they’re not into them at all. I’m really craving some board game time, so I’m thinking about branching out to more approachable games.
Does anyone have suggestions for games that are fun and easy to ease non-gamers into without scaring them off? Or maybe I’m just not starting with the right type of games? Any advice is appreciated, thanks!
I own a board game store together with my partner. There are some excellent suggestions in this thread so far, but I also wanted to weigh in.
There are a lot of factors that go in to someone getting into games and games resonating with them. We talk about complexity and weight, but a lot of games are a lot less difficult than people imagine. And a lot of people are more capable than they give themselves credit for. I regularly see folks struggle with some relatively simple games, but thrive at more complex games when the theme resonates with them. And if someone is just deadset on the idea that they're not a board game person, it's an uphill battle, personally I wouldn't try to force it.
If they're willing to try, you definitely want to pick something that you know well enough that you can teach without much effort. Games have a language, and as you learn it new games become easier. But at the same time if someone hasn't developed that vocabulary, you'll need to slow down and explain things to them. Someone taking the time to try something new is being vulnerable with you. You don't have to let them win, but you do want to make sure they can make informed decisions and actually play. You can even explain why you're making certain moves. When I play with someone new I usually very actively help during the first few turns, but slowly ease off as the game goes on.
A lot of games also have excellent learn-to-play videos on youtube. Before you play, look for a good one, watch it to make sure it's both comprehensive and not overly long. Once you find a good candidate, send it to them. Get them to watch it before you play. Then when it's time to play, do a quick recap and let them ask any questions.
The final point I want to add before I get to suggestions is that if you find something they've enjoyed, you can use that as a branching off point. Relate the new game to what they've tried before when possible
Some of the games I would recommend are:
Wingspan - It's solidly mid-weight by any sort of assessment of complexity, but the theme carries it. It's a surprising number of people's first modern game. Lots of people love birds and that's often enough
Century: Golem Edition (and the rest of the series) - Trade and acquire gems, fulfill recipes. It's pretty simple conceptually, but very aesthetically appealling. It's a great mix for new players. Additionally it's part of a 3-part series that share major components, but have key differences. So it's a good way to introduce the topic of mechanics. And any two or all 3 of the games in the series can combine into a super-game that takes elements from each and mashes them together. It's also got a strong mathematical foundations around the card design, so it's also interesting to talk about from a strategy/design perspective. It's excellent
Machi Koro 2 - My pitch for this on is that it's sort of like monopoly, but it doesn't take 3 hours and make everyone mad. You're just rolling dice and making money. It's very chill and fun. It's great for people that have been burned by 'traditional' games
Azul (and the rest of the series) - Grab tiles, place them in patterns to try to score the most points. But you have to be careful because you're all pulling from the same pool, so you're racing for the best tiles. Every game in the series share a very similar tile-acquisition method, but what you're doing with them varies from game to game, so it's another great series that lets you say 'this part is the same, this part is different'
Any of those are excellent 'first modern games'. And if they like those, you can move from there. But again, if they're not receptive, I wouldn't try to force it. You're not gonna get anywhere if they're not open to trying.
And if you can provide any additional information I can provide some more targetted suggestions
I think there's a point in here that might also need expanding/reiterating: don't force it.
I, too, have been in this place. I love board games, they are maybe superior to video games, they are social, they are fun. I've tried to get so many people, including my partner, to play games and, for a variety of reasons, some people aren't into them and that should just be ok. There will be a lot less strife in your life if you find a board game group and let people around you get into games whenever/ if ever they see fit.
But also, it's fucking wild how hard people fall for Wingspan. Birds really is a surprisingly strong theme.
Edit: I feel like I'm coming off like a dick in this post and I don't want to just be a cynic. There are a lot of really great games in this thread that could be great starting points. But, I also think it's important to not get your hopes up too high and respect the interests of people around you and not get your heart broken. Perhaps there's some interest in a Tildes game group to play on Tabletop Simulator?
Wingspan just put the care and attention into its presentation. I'm halfway convinced that if the eggs and birdfeeder weren't physical representations that the game wouldn't be as popular.
It has a lot of verisimilitude despite the gamification of "take one of four actions using an action tile". By placing physical eggs on birds and having birds swarm, they simplify the concepts of stacking points through resources or cards.
In my experience, the tutorial cards also are a big help in onboarding new players by simulating a couple rounds of the game. While there are some mechanics that aren't explained, the meat of the gameplay is taught relatively quickly.
Yeah, if you want people to play and have a good time they need to be willing to buy in emotionally. If you try to force it, they may eventually agree in order to get you to stop, but that's not going to get them to buy in.
That's a major reason that theme is so important. If it seems fun and interesting and if the imagery is pretty and evocative, you get people to WANT to play. Once someone wants to play, it's way easier to get them to have a positive experience.
And yeah, god damn birds. Everyone loves birds. Wingspan is wonderful and tricks people into ratcheting up the complexity of games they're willing to try.
Since we are having an expert here I want to expand on OP‘s question:
@PapaNachos Which games do you suggest to play together with kids? Let‘s say from five years old and up. I think co-op games would be great to play together with very young kids and then the older they get sprinkle some competitive ones in as well.
For now I got Cora Quest. I‘m curious to hear about other suggestions, especially games that are also interesting for the adults that are involved in playing.
Not @PapaNachos (though perhaps a kindred spirit), but I have played a lot of games with younger kids. I think it depends a lot on the kid. At that age, they have "sensitive periods" for different things, so different games might resonate at different ages depending on when those hit. My baseline criteria to set the table is games that require little or no reading, but I've seen all these examples resonate with kids as young as five.
Catan Junior - this is nice because it plays well for adults. Everything is graphic. It takes away the two most frustrating things about regular catan: not being able to build somewhere because it's too close and losing half your resources to the robber. There is a robber (pirate) that still blocks a space for resources, but the simplified trading mechanic makes this less frustrating too. Minor self plug, I have a 3d printable organizer design for sale that keeps all the pieces organized so setting up a game is fast.
Ticket to Ride: this one requires some reading for the place names on the cards, but there is hinting in the visual design, and kids who are into it will memorize the place names very quickly. It's got good spatial reasoning dynamics and the turns are quick, so it keeps engagement up.
Boop: this game has a vibe somewhere between checkers and tic-tac-toe. The cat theme is very cute and engaging. It also has a beginner friendly simplified game.
Chess: weirdly a common favorite. I think kids enjoy learning how a the pieces move. No Stress Chess is a good introduction. The cards teach how the pieces move and reduce the deep strategy aspect. Later on, a board with magnetic pieces is helpful for play with developing motor skills.
Don't ignore traditional playing card games. They are great for portability and hold up well:
Crazy eights: same dynamic as uno, but without the adversarial cards, which simplifies the game. This one is a great one to play over Zoom because each location can have their own deck to draw from, and you just treat the last card played as the top of the discard pile for everyone.
Go Fish: obviously a classic, but a classic for a reason. You can start with pairs, and then move to books when you want a more challenging game.
Those are some great suggestions. The only one I would push back on is Chess. Chess (and Go) has its own culture that really breaks it off from a lot of board games. Often people that get in to chess get REALLY in to chess and only chess and a lot of people that play more modern board games don't really play chess at all. It's still definitely worth seeing if your particular kid likes it, but it has a specific place in the larger hobby
Mixing young and old kids can be tricky. How old is the oldest in the group you're looking for?
For younger kids (4-8) a lot of popular modern games have younger equivalents. For instance Ticket to Ride has Ticket to Ride: First Journey. Castle Panic has My First Castle Panic and as @first-must-burn mentioned, Catan has Catan Junior.
More dexterity-based games like Catapult Feud can also be a good avenue
If you're looking for a co-op game that really young kids can play I would recommend My First Castle Panic (listed above) and Mysterium Kids. Though co-op can be difficult because you have to be mindful of "quarterbacking", which refers to when one player tells other (usually less experienced or younger) players what to do. Meaning that one players is functionally playing the game for everyone else.
Additionally when mixing age groups like that it can be a difficult balance to find games that don't overwhelm younger players, while still engaging older players. Younger kids especially can have pretty short attention spans. And older kids don't often go for the softer aesthetic and simplified rules. If there's too much of an age gap, and you have enough kids, you may want to consider breaking into a younger/older group and selecting different games for each.
And if you're looking more long term Gateway Island has a bunch of mini-games showcasing all sorts of different mechanics that then remakes recommendations based on what you like.
One advantage of the 'Junior' versions of Catan and Ticket to Ride is that despite the simplified setup the overall game still has enough complexity and strategy to not be boring to adults as well.
My First Castle Panic is fun for younger kids since it doesn't need reading but you already covered the backseat gaming aspect. That said if you can get the kids to take the lead it's a good training wheels for more complex games.
Thanks for the writeup! I've played Wingspan and definitely enjoyed it and think I could sell it to this group.
These are all great choices, but I want to second Azul in particular. It has a very easy setup, cleanup, and scoring, which can all be daunting phases for the inexperienced. The colors and patterns are pretty on a table, too.
It depends on WHY they don't like board games. Personally, I hate (most) board games because I am very bad at separating tryhard/competitive mode from fun/hang out with friends mode. So the idea of combining the two into a social experience is absolute torture for me. But, I can also see people hating board games because they don't like the complexity or they find the amount of moving parts overwhelming etc.
So for me, there is a really easy answer which is to play cooperative board games. I love cooperative board games! They are super fun and I wish I had people to play coop board games with irl! Spirit Island is a great one. Another option is escape room type board games. I am currently doing the EXIT escape room advent calendar by myself and I am not having a good time with it, so I'm not sure I'd recommend that brand but there's a bunch of brands, and maybe this would be more fun if I had someone to solve the puzzles with.
If the issue is complexity then my advice is to play games where it's easy to play on "teams" where the work to make decisions is easy to divvy up. Also maybe some mafia-style board games, especially if it involves one person being the "GM" so they can participate without playing.
Also, you could try something like playing Catan online while everyone watches over your shoulder. You can start out by explaining the game and then as your gf+family understand it more you can shift to discussing your strategy with them and asking their opinions. That way you're playing board games, and hanging out with them, but not making them play board games - although maybe after watching several games they'll want to play too!
Oh I feel your pain. Until I found some friends that loved my over-competitiveness and helped me appreciate myself for it too. So they hang out, and I try to totally destroy them. And it’s all good.
This is really great feedback. The one series which actually did get a bit of traction was the escape room genre but they ultimately got burnt out on it but it does show a potential soft spot for coop games. I'll do some exploring.
You want party games! This is the way to ease people into the idea of sitting down for a game. Besides the classics, from the same creator as exploding kittens, there is Poetry for Neanderthals. This game involves you and your family saying silly things and hitting each other with a giant inflatable bat.
We think the same. My group does not like fun group games though. Blow up bat make them mad. Next time I try boop more soft.
That sad. Big bat fun. They wrong
The thing to get non-gamers into it is that it has to have little downtime, and easy to explain rules.
There are a lot of great suggestions in this thread about quick play tabletop games from earlier this month. I'll go over my answers from that thread again here:
Hues and Cues - this game features a board that looks like a colour picker tool in your browser, showing 480 colours in a grid. The clue giver receives a card with four colours on it; they pick one of the colours and give a clue to everyone else to try to get them to correctly choose the colour.
Priorities - you get a deck that has a bunch of items on cards. One play turns over 5 cards - you might get something like this list: "$100, a $10 Flat White, Constipation, Awkward Silence, The Lord of the Rings". That player secretly writes down their rating of these things from 1 (best) to 5 (worst). Everyone else debates and ranks where they think that player would put them. You get a score based on how accurate you do as a team. This can be a delightful game, but be warned - you might have to explain to your mother-in-law why your heathen children rank Apple Pie better than God (true story).
Hot Seat has a similar vibe to Priorities. One person reads the topic, and it might be something like "Who is my celebrity crush?" and everyone else writes down who they think you would say on a piece of paper and pass it to you. You read them out, and then people go around and try to guess which one is the correct one. You get points for being right. This is another fun one, but be warned - you might hvae to explain to your mother-in-law why your heathen children have crushes on Zendaya and Tom Holland at the same time.
Wavelength gives you a card that has two opposing concepts - good superpower / bad superpower for example - and a random spot on that spectrum that you have to get people to guess. The game has a specific game gizmo that enables this guessing, and it's kind of hard to describe, so this is one to look at a video or the pictures on BoardGameGeek. This is my favourite of all the ones here. We always have several big laughs and often have interesting discussions when playing this game. This one doesn't even require you to buy anything if everyone has a smartphone - there is an official app: https://www.wavelength.zone (thanks @Minori for the heads up)
The Mind. You play as a team. There's a deck of 100 cards. Each person gets a relatively small number of cards, and all you have to do is play them in order. The catch is that you cannot communicate at all. You just have to vibe it out to figure out when you play your cards. There are definitely ways to cheese the game - you have to discourage people from tapping toes or nodding heads to really get it to work - but this can be a lot of fun.
Here are some other ones from that thread that I think are pretty great for this:
Sushi Go / Sushi Go Party is pretty easy to introduce people to. Take a card, put it in front of you, pass your hand. Try to make sets out of them! More sets is more points. The art is adorable.
Edit: I reread and saw that codenames was on the just of no-gos above, so I might skip this one. Dixit is a popular modern party game where 4-8 players give clues to make some (but not all) players to guess their card from amongst a set of cards with surreal images. Works well with young and old players!
Set has a grid of cards on the table showing 1-3 objects of a certain shape, color, and shading pattern. Everyone plays at once with the goal of finding sets of cards; “A set consists of three cards that are either all alike or all different in each attribute”. When a set is removed, fill in the gaps with three new cards. Game ends when the deck is exhausted and there are no more valid sets on the table.
There are probably several others from that thread, but I haven't played them before.
We have never not keeled over crying from Wavelength at some point. It's always something so stupid. The last time we played with a half-group of randoms, one of the girls had 'underrated actor /overrated actor'. With Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson as her clue, we're all trying to guess if the slider was just all the way 90-degrees to the overrated actor side. When she revealed her 80-degree'd point range on the underrated side, and confirmed her clue wasn't just an accident as she started doubling down on it, the entire room lost its shit. Her own team just pleading with her to admit it was a mistake and she couldn't actually mean it, and the other team lamenting having dared to vote on the wrong side thinking it was going to be a close call. Random shouts of 'Jumanji!' and 'Scorpion King!' and then a full monologue about the cult classic 'The ToothFairy!' until we're all crying of laughter over the bombardment of this poor girl. Wonderful times, I thoroughly recommend this game.
That earlier thread was great, our group of 5 started playing So Clover from a recommendation there and despite a mix of general board game skills it was a huge hit.
Just picked up Wavelength today from this comment. Heres hoping!
Camel (c)up is the most universally enjoyed game I played with non gamers. It is a chaotic betting game that almost always has some wild twists and turns. I love that people who are board gamers try to calculate odds and bet smartly, but if they are u familiar with the game there are possibilities that get overlooked and it can easily lead to players betting on feelings winning. I love that exciting things are happening for everyone, even when it’s not your turn. And it’s not quite like catan where you are dying for a 5 to roll before your turn and if it doesn’t happen, it sucks. I love that there is a lot of hidden information about how players are doing so while it light look like one player is doing great, another player might have better final result bets. I love the feeling of flipping the pyramid over and using the slider to get one dice out. It’s just a pleasure in so many levels.
I actually stopped enjoying board games a while ago so I would sort of put myself in that category. It does have a small amount of explanation to overcome traditional board game expectations. (You are not playing as one of the camels, you are betting on them!).
2nd vote for camel up. I think it helps to explain to new players "here are the 4 things you can do on your turn and in the first half of the game it really doesn't matter what you just pick one". Not entirely true but helps ease them into it and removes the paralysis that can ice people out of a game before it starts.
Depending on what type of humor they're into, I've had success introducing newcomers to Exploding Kittens and Unstable Unicorns for those that don't stray off the beaten path when it comes to board or card games
There are already a lot of excellent suggestions. Here are some that work with my family or when I play with non-gamers:
Concept: essential to make it work is to relax the rules. No points, talking allowed, and let people come and go as they please (no fixed teams);
Dorfromantik or the sequel Sakura: relaxed cooperative puzzling (add the excellent soundtrack of the computer game);
Timeline: find a theme that clicks with the group. Competitive, but in a everyone wants to find the correct answer kind of way;
Zombie Kidz: an absolute hit if there are kids in the party, and sufficiently challenging for the adults (if they are allowed to play, that is);
And as runner up, Railroad Ink: competitive, challenges spatial reasoning, and everyone plays at the same time.
I'm sure you'll find the game that sticks :)
Love Concept, I've dumped a ridiculous amount of hours into it. I'll check out these others - Dorfromantik sounds particularly promising.
Are they into Poker? I've been playing The Gang with my family and that one is basically cooperative poker that might be fun. (In a similar vein, The Crew might also be similar here)
Something like Love Letter would be nice entry level style game as well.
Sushi Go is a good cute way to get into something like 7 wonders.
If they want to be more engaged you can always look into something like Pit.
An easy euro style engine builder might not be as popular, but Project L is the lightest one that I've played that fits that style.
EDIT: Adding more under this as I think of more:
Kabuto Sumo would be a great beginner dexterity game that's unlike a lot of board games I've played!
Sometimes people just aren't into board games tbh! I've run into a few people like that. The only thing I noticed is that in the games you listed some people might tend to not pay attention when it's not their turn so there's more "downtime". A co-op game might help alleviate that.
Allplay's Mountain Goats is a favorite in my house. Quick, simple to explain, and fast to setup and break down.
Allplay has a lot of small box games of various rule sets and I'd say most of them are winners in my experience. Certainly less daunting than busting out Gloomhaven or Deep Rock Galactic.
Have you considered trying card games as a way to ease into games in general with them? Might be able to build a bridge into board games from there.
Hearts, Spades, Crazy 8s, Uno, and the like could all be a great start and for most of them you'd just need a deck or two of playing cards. If any of them are older they might even already know the rules to a few.
The one game that I’ve found everyone at least wants to try is Carcassonne. It’s dead simple, pretty luck-based (even though it doesn’t feel that way), and everyone can join. And it looks fun on the kitchen table, so people are easily interested.
It’s a perfect game for house rules too, as you can make it easier or harder, depending on your mood and the players. Playing with children? Just remove some of the harder to understand rules or simplify them. It’s super fun.
My City is great too, it doesn’t require any specific board game knowledge, just a dead simple set of rules in a fun brick placement game.
Happy Holidays!
Saboteur is absurdly easy to get people into. You have a start of a mine and three potential ends. Each get cards that either lay a path of some shape down, fix/break someone's equipment, or look at the potential end. But some number of players are Saboteurs, and they're trying to mess up the path without making it blatantly obvious they're fucking it up. It's dead simple but terribly addicting.
I have board gamer friends - like, some it's their profession - but whenever there's a big party it gets pulled out pretty quick no matter the skill level of the group. It's a giant meme. Once a couple showed up with matching custom Saboteur shirts to a party. (Including a onesie for their kid.)
As a note to anyone else reading this don't make the mistake I do all the time where you have to play multiple rounds according to the rules!!!
I've seen this a couple of times in different groups actually where some people are content in playing one round for some reason. It's exponentially more fun when you have a meta where people start screwing each other over for a win with gold pieces, than a one rounder where it's extremely difficult for the saboteurs to win. When you have multiple rounds there becomes many saboteurs-lite because people want first pick of the gold