The Best Family-Friendly Board Games, According to Experts

If your family is sick of Pictionary, Quintin Smith, editor of the game-review site Shut Up & Sit Down, recommends Pictomania, which he describes as being “more deep, exciting, and competitive” than the old game-night standard. It’s “a side-splittingly funny” game, he says, in which players have to draw and guess at the same time, “resulting in remarkably poor drawings and guesses.”

Kelsey Demers, who runs the board-game blog The Tabletop Family, calls Cover Your Kingdom “a great family card game, and it’s easy enough that you can teach it to anyone in a matter of minutes.” She especially loves the witty cards and the way the gameplay “bounces back and forth” as everyone attempts to recruit clans of magical creatures away from their opponents’ kingdoms and into their own. Demers adds that you can play this game with a wide range of ages and that it’s guaranteed to create “many laugh-out-loud moments.”

For a lightning-quick, pick-and-pass-style card game, Lauren Bilanko, a co-owner of Twenty Sided Store, suggests Sushi Go!, which she says is very easy to learn but still fun enough to play over and over again. The gameplay is simple: Collect cards to create collections of dishes for different point values, and whoever scores the most points wins.

Walsh told us about this “really sweet” game about competitive panda husbandry that’s a favorite of his kids. It asks players to cultivate land plots and grow three species of bamboo for pandas. Walsh describes it as the “perfect Christmas Day game” to break out when you want something family friendly and cheerful. The game takes about 45 minutes to play and is suitable for ages 8 and up.

Three of our experts recommended Telestrations. “This is my favorite party game when mixing kids and adults,” says Scott Cooper, owner of Seattle-based Blue Highway Games. A cross between Pictionary and telephone, each player attempts to draw the word they have been given. When the time is up, all players pass their sketch to the person next to them, who attempts to guess what has been drawn on the dry-erase board. Everyone then passes their guess — which ideally matches the previous player’s word — to the next player, who is then tasked with drawing it. The game is finished once all of the boards have been returned to their original player. According to Dr. Michael James Heron of Meeple Like Us, a board-game-review site with a focus on accessibility, “It plays really quickly, has everyone laughing all of the time, and likely won’t provoke a single argument.” Kurt Refling of Meeple Mountain agrees: “The results are gut-bustingly funny.”

Most ’90s kids will remember this classic. “Nothing could beat being a kid and unboxing this game to build a wacky Rube Goldberg machine,” says board-game designer Rob Sparks. The game is suitable for children ages 4 and up and can accommodate two to four players.

In our roundup of the best board games to break out during parties, five of our experts praised Just One. “Hands down, Just One is our favorite new party game,” says Demers. “It’s simple to play, a breeze to teach, and utterly addictive.” Word-association games are a great choice to play with friends in larger groups because they are “full of inside joke possibilities and they let you make new memories by reliving old ones,” explains Meeple Mountain founder Andy Matthews. Joseph Comings, founder of the Art of Boardgaming, adds that the game can be “learned in a matter of minutes.” The game won the prestigious 2019 Spiel des Jahres, or German Game of the Year, which evaluates board games based on their game concept, rule structure, layout, and design. The main objective, as the title suggests, is for players to help their teammates guess a word by suggesting “just one” word as a hint. Which sounds easy enough, but, as Matthews warns: “Watch out, duplicate words cancel each other out,” so you need to be creative. A right answer scores your team one point, while a wrong answer docks two points, with the ultimate goal being to get as many points out of 13 as possible. This game takes about 20 minutes to play and is suitable for up to seven players, so it’s especially great for large families or families who love to entertain guests.

Walsh describes Dixit as “a great icebreaker of a game, fantastic for getting everyone interacting.” It begins with one player being designated the storyteller; that player makes up a sentence based on the image on one of the cards in their hand. Then each player selects the card in their hand that best matches the sentence and gives it to the storyteller. The storyteller shuffles the cards and presents them to the other players, who place bets on which is the original card with the winners gaining points for correct guesses. As an added bonus, “the card artwork is beautiful, imaginative, and sometimes a little surreal,” Walsh says.

“Charterstone is a campaign-style game in which, over the course of 12 games, you’ll build and expand a village shared by you and your opponents by constructing buildings and unlocking new elements with each play,” explains Demers. “Consider it the board-game equivalent of a Netflix binge,” she adds, because it’s a game you won’t be able to stop playing once you start. It’s a great choice for families with intermediate players looking to try a harder game, but it isn’t too complicated to ease into. The branching story line slowly grows more complicated, and by the end, after you’ve completed your 12-game campaign, “you will have a unique-to-you board game you can play again and again.”