Board games you should be playing during coronavirus lockdown
Want to unplug the family from devices during the long hours at home? Join the board game revival. If you don’t know where to start, we’ve enlisted an expert to produce this guide to games which suit every member of the household.
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Spending days lounging on the couch and swapping business attire for trackies sounds like a dream scenario at first, but cabin fever can set in pretty quick.
And with people forced to work from home and free-to-air TV dishing up slim pickings, internet usage is set to soar.
If you’ve already cleaned your house from top to bottom and colour co-ordinated your bookshelf and sock drawer, you’ll be looking for a new lockdown hobby.
Board games could be the answer. They’re a social activity that won’t use up your monthly data allowance.
The board game industry has seen a resurgence in recent years and is expected to carry on growing further.
Industry forecasters predict the global board game market will be worth more than £9bn by 2023.
Board game enthusiast Greg Collins, who has hundreds of them in his games room, said there’s a game out there for everyone.
“My family had about two board games when I was kid — Monopoly and Scrabble — so I sort of rebelled and now I have about 800 or 900,” he said.
Through the YouTube channel Tabletop Knights, Collins and a passionate team of gamers share insider previews of upcoming releases and how-to-play demos, as well as game reviews.
From complex strategy games to cards games, to games perfect for two people, here are some of Collins’ top picks to help you bust the boredom.
And with most major games retailers still open for business online, you could be unboxing some of these beauties within days.
FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY
Telestrations
Players: 4-8
If you’re keen to test your family’s communication skills, this is the game for you. Each player starts by sketching a word dictated by the roll of a die on one of the game’s erasable sketchbooks. Each player then passes their sketch to the next person who must guess what’s been drawn. Players then simultaneously pass their guess on to the next person who must try and sketch that word.
A games lasts for about 30 minutes — and is pretty much guaranteed to end in shrieks of laughter as people reveal how “this” became “that”.
Just One
Players: 3-7
In this cooperative party game players work together to discover as many mystery words as possible. You must figure out the best clue to give to help your teammate — but be unique because identical clues will be ruled out.
The goal is get a score as close to 13 as possible, with one point awarded for a right answer and two points lost for every wrong answer.
Dixit
Players: 3-6
This is a fun game to get the imagination flowing. Players are dealt a hand of six picture cards. One player, the storyteller, makes up a sentence inspired by one of the cards in their hand and says it aloud (without showing the card to the others). Each of the other players must then choose the card in their hands which best matches the sentence and gives it to the storyteller who shuffles the cards (including hers) and lays them out face up.
Players must then guess which card was the storytellers. If nobody or everybody finds the correct card, the storyteller scores zero and each of the other players scores two points.
Otherwise, both the storyteller and whoever found the correct answer scores three points. Players also score one point for every vote for their own card.
The game ends when the deck is empty or if a player scores 30 points. The player with the most points wins the game.
The base game has 84 cards, while expansion packs with extra picture cards are also available.
Heist
Players: 2-4
In this family-friendly interactive electronic game, players must work together to pull of the heist of the century and get rich quick — or lose it all.
It’s a co-operative game, so hopefully that means less fighting among family members as they take on the roles of different characters of money man, hacker, lookout or explosives expert, and work together to open an electronic safe and grab $50 million.
Choose your character, use and trade tools to complete the task and listen closely to your team leader because one false move could trip the alarm.
And for those who are just too good at cracking the safe, Heist comes with five progressive difficulty levels, plus a bonus top-secret sixth level just waiting to be unlocked.
King of Tokyo
Players: 2-6
In King of Tokyo, you play as mutant monsters, gigantic robots and strange aliens who are destroying Tokyo and battling each other in order to become the one and only king.
At the start of each turn, you roll six die to determine three symbols. Over three throws, choose whether to keep or discard each dice in order to win victory points, gain energy, restore health or attack other players.
The fiercest player will occupy Tokyo and earn extra victory points, but that player can’t heal and must face all the monsters alone.
Top this off with special cards bought with energy points which give you added bonus affects including extra armour, and it’s one of the most explosive games going around.
In order to win, you must either destroy Tokyo by accumulating 20 victory points, or be the only surviving monster once the fighting has ended.
STRATEGY
Disney Villainous
Players: 2-6
In Villainous, each person plays as one of six Disney villains striving to win a unique mission. Each player has their own villain deck, fate deck, player board and 3D character.
On a turn, the active player moves their character to a different location on their player board, takes one or more of the actions visible on that space by playing cards from their hand, then refills their hand to four cards.
Cards can be allies, items, effects, conditions and (for some characters) curses.
You need to use your cards to fulfil your mission but some actions allow you to choose cards from another player’s deck, ultimately messing with that villain’s chances of winning.
Players: 2-4
As a master artisan, you must use the finest materials to honour the Portuguese royal family and create the unfinished summer pavilion while carefully avoiding wasting supplies.
Summer Pavilion, the third (and arguably best) in the Azul range, last six rounds and in each round players select coloured tiles and place them on to their individual player boards to score points.
After placing tiles on your board, players can carry over four tiles at most into the next round and must discard any others, losing one point for each wasted tile.
At the end of the game, bonus points are awarded to any players who complete one of the seven coloured stars on their board.
Whoever has the most points wins.
Added bonus: the tiles are plastic so you can easily sanitise them to keep them free from germs!
Ticket to Ride
Players: 2-5
Ticket to Ride is known in gamer circles as a “gateway game” — simple enough to be taught in a few minutes and with enough action and tension to keep new players involved.
Players collect cards of various types of train cars they then use to claim railway routes in North America. The longer the routes, the more point they earn.
Extra points are awarded to those who fulfil destination tickets — goal cards which connect distant cities — and to the player who builds the longest continuous route.
The high-quality illustrations and components, including huge board map of North America, make it all the more enjoyable.
There are also several expansion packs and various incarnations of the game, including a super simple (and quick) New York City version, as well as London, Paris and Europe editions.
Wingspan
Players: 1-5
Wingspan sold out within a week of being released last year, with people selling their copies on eBay for more than $300 — and just a month later it was already entering its sixth print run.
Now fairly readily available, you can pick up a copy for about $99 and see what all the fuss was about.
In this competitive card-driven, engine-building board game, you play as bird enthusiasts trying to attract birds to your individual aviaries.
Birds are represented by beautifully illustrated cards, which slot into one of three rows your personal player board. The rows represent three different habitats: forest, grassland and wetland. As birds are added to your habitats, they enable you to perform more actions and become more powerful with each turn.
At the end of four rounds the player with the most points wins.
Zombicide
Players: 1-6
Zombicide is a collaborative game in which players take the role of a survivor — each with unique abilities — and harness both their skills and the power of teamwork against the hordes of unthinking undead.
Zombies are predictable, controlled by simple rules and a deck of cards — but there’s a lot more of them than you have bullets.
You goal is simple: find weapons, kill zombies.
The more zombies you kills, the more skilled you get, and the more skilled you get, the more zombies appear.
Play 10 scenarios on different maps made from the included modular map tiles, then download new scenarios from the designer’s website, or even create your own.
CARD GAMES
6 Nimmt!
Players: 2-10
The aim of the game is to score as few points as possible.
Start by shuffling the 104 number cards then lay out four cards face-up to start the four rows before dealing 10 cards to each player.
Each turn, players simultaneously choose and reveal a card from their hand then add the cards to the rows, placing them in ascending order based on their number. When the sixth card is placed in a row, the owner of that card claims the other fie cards and the sixth becomes the first card in a new row.
Each card has a point value and after finishing 10 rounds, players tally their score and see whether the game ends (it’s over when someone tops 66 points). When this happens, the player with the fewest points wins.
The game works with two to 10 players, but the dynamics change when you add more players.
Gloom
Players: 2-4
The world of Gloom is a sad place. The sky is grey, the tea is cold, and a new tragedy lies around every corner.
Debt, disease, heartache and packs of rabid flesh-eating mice — just when it seems like things can’t get any worse, they do.
In the Gloom card game you assume control of the fate of an eccentric family of misfits and misanthropes. The goal of the game is sad but simple: you want your characters to suffer the greatest tragedies possible before passing on to the well-deserved respite of death.
You’ll play horrible mishaps like ‘pursued by poodles’ or ‘mocked by midgets’ on your own characters to lower their self-worth scores, while trying to cheer up your opponents’ characters with marriages and other happy occasions.
The player with the lowest total family value wins.
Welcome to the Dungeon
Players: 2-4
Welcome to the Dungeon is a push-your-luck dungeon delve in which 2-4 players take turns daring each other to go into a dungeon with less equipment than they start off with, while filling the dungeon with monsters.
The game is played in rounds and each round the start player can choose to draw a card from the monster deck or pass their turn.
If the draw, they can either keep the card and remove a piece of equipment, or place it face down in the dungeon to create the ‘dungeon deck’ and fill the area with monsters the challenger will have to face later.
If they pass, they cannot participate in the rest of the round.
When only one person is left, that player becomes the challenger and must enter the dungeon. The player then flips the cards off the dungeon deck and fights the monsters. If they survive the dungeon with at least 1HP, they win the round.
The game ends when someone has won two rounds, or one player is the last man standing.
Star Realms
Players: 2-6
Star Realms is a fast-paced space combat card game combining the fun of a deck-building game with the interactivity of outer trading card game-style combat.
As you play, you make use of trade to acquire new ships and bases from the cards being turned face up in the trade row from the trade deck. You use the ships and bases you acquire to either generate more trade or to generate combat to attack your opponent and their bases. When you reduce your opponent’s score to zero, you win.
There are multiple decks available with each deck adding capabilities for another two people to play (up to six people maximum).
Friday
Players: 1
If you’re in complete isolation (or you’ve won all the other games and no one will play with you anymore), try your hand at Friday.
In this solo adventure, you play as Friday and must help Robinson Crusoe survive the island and prepare him to defeat the pirates.
Friday is a solitaire deck-building game in which you optimise your deck of fight cards in order to defeat the hazards of the island and two pirate ships.
During a turn the player will attempt to defeat hazard cards by playing fight cards from their deck. If defeated, a hazard will become a fight card and is added to the player’s deck. If it fails, the player will lose life tokens but also get the opportunity to remove played cards fro their fight deck.
Finally, the player will use their optimised fight deck to defeat two evil pirate ships to allow Robinson Crusoe to escape the island.
GOOD FOR TWO PEOPLE
Mr Jack
Players: 2
In Mr Jack, one of the two players represents Jack the Ripper, who will be one of the eight characters on the board. This player knows which character is Mr Jack, and his goal is to flee from the district as soon as possible (or avoid being accused for eight turns).
The other player represents an independent investigator (not represented on the board) who tries to guess the identity of Jack — but he can make only one accusation during the game.
During each turn, the players move the characters, using their special powers and placing them either in shadow or light. At the end of each turn, the witnesses declare whether Jack is visible — that is, n light or adjacent to another character — or not (alone in the shadows).
This allows the investigator to know which characters are innocent.
As the turns progress, the investigator tries to eliminate suspects while Jack tries to escape.
Intuition, logic and cold blood are needed for players of Mr Jack.
Chronicles of Crime
Players: 1-4
Chronicles of Crime is a cooperative game of crime investigation which mixes an app, a board games and a touch of virtual reality.
With the same physical components (board, locations, characters and items), players will be able to play plenty of different scenarios and solve as many different crime stories.
Players start the app, choose the scenario they want to play then follow the story.
The goal being to catch the killer of the current case in the shortest time possible.
Each component has a unique QR code, which will activate and trigger different clues and stories depending on the scenario selected.
This means players will be able to get new stories way after the game is released simply by downloading the app’s updates, without any shipping of new physical components involved.
The VR experience only requires a mobile phone: players put the (optional) VR glasses on and hold the mobile in front of them to be immersed in the game’s universe and search for clues in the virtual world.
Each session lasts about 1.5 hours — and many scenarios are connected to each other and reveal a much bigger story.
The Fox in the Forest
Players: 2
The Fox in the Forest is a trick-taking game for two players. As well as the usual ranked and suited cards used to win tricks, fairy characters such as the fox and witch have special abilities that let you change the trump suit, lead even after you lose a trick, and more.
You score points by winning more tricks than your opponent, but don’t get greedy. Win too many tricks and you will fall like the villain in so many fairy tales.
Funkoverse
Players: 2-4
Face off in the ultimate Pop! battle in the Funovers strategy game.
Combine your favourite characters and go head-to-head in four exciting game scenarios. Use your characters’ unique abilities to gain points and achieve victory.
Each turn, you select one of your characters and perform two actions. Each character has access to basic actions like moving and challenges as well as several unique abilities that may be performed only be spending ability tokens.
Funoverse uses an innovative “cooldown system”, meaning the more powerful the ability the longer it will take for the ability token to become available again, so players have to spend their ability tokens wisely.
Each character is unique, so players are encouraged to try out different combinations of characters and items in order to discover their favourite synergies and powerful strategies for all four game scenarios.
The game comes with exclusive Funko Pop! figures that aren’t available anywhere else, a double-sided board, tokens, cards and die.
Splendor
Players: 2-4
In this chip-collecting and card development game, players are merchants of the of the Renaissance trying to buy gem mines, transportation and shops in order to acquire the most prestige points.
If you’re wealthy enough, you might even receive a visit from a noble at some point, which will increase your prestige.
On your turn, you may collect chips (gems), or buy and build a card, or reserve one card.
If you collect chips, you take either three different kinds of chips or two chips of the same kind. If you buy a card, you pay its price in chips and add it to your playing area.
To reserve a card so that you get it later (or so that your opponent can’t have it) you place it in front of you face down for later building. This move costs you a round but you also get a joker chip, which you can use as any gem.
All the cards you buy increase your wealth but some of them also give you prestige points. To win the game, you must reach 15 prestige points before your opponents do.