Round board game

The idea of the game is that you all control a group of inhabitants of the island of Atlantis, which is in the process of sinking in the water. You need to get your people from the central island, made up of hexagonal tiles, over to the safe islands in the corners of the board.

The key twist is that not only do you get to move your people, but you also control the various sea creatures patrolling the oceans, which are capable of destroying boats, eating people who have fallen in the ocean, or both. Every tile also does something when you flip it — some bring more sea monsters onto the board, some give you a power-up to use later in the game, some are whirlpools that immediately destroy everything within a certain area… and one is a volcano that immediately ends the game.

It will feel a little different to play every time, because you never know when and where new sea creatures will pop up, or how your other players will choose to use them. And it's a game where it's okay to be mean — it's built right into the game! The one possible downside is that it's possible for one player to feel like they have no chance, either through the luck of where sea creatures appear, or actions by other players, or both. But it's such a fast, breezy game that you'll be done quickly even if this happens, ready to try again.

In this light game but that has a lot of pieces to spread out , one player is a ghost, and the other players are mediums investigating their murder. The ghost player has to communicate with the mediums via dreams, pointing them towards what really happened. What this means in practice is that each medium needs to guess a correct combination of person, location and weapon very Cluedo from a selection in the middle of the table.

But the ghost can't talk or gesture at all to guide them. Instead, the ghost has a big deck of cards, each of which has unique surreal art on it. Every turn, the ghost draws a limited number of these cards, then has to use them to try to point the mediums in the right directions. This requires some major creativity: if a dream card has a soldier on it and the weapon was a sword, that's a safe bet… right? But if there's nothing that's such a good fit, can you give them a a dream with a key in and hope them assume that metal means sword?

But maybe you didn't notice there were mushrooms in the background, and one of the other possible weapons was poison, and now that medium is convinced in the wrong direction. On future turns, you can give more dreams to the mediums, hopefully helping to narrow things down but sometimes making confusion worse.

However, you only have seven turns to solve the whole murder, so don't get too comfortable. The sense of deep satisfaction you get from Mysterium is unrivalled, both as a ghost player or the medium — much like charades, when a set of clues is perfectly interpreted right from the off, it feels great. And sometimes great minds simply do not think alike. But whether you're successful at solving the murder in time or not, you'll still want to go again straight away with someone else in the ghostly hot seat, and all new murders and dream combinations to unpack.

Dead of Winter is the best board game for that TV drama feeling — who can you trust in the apocalypse? The zombie apocalypse has happened. You and your friends play as survivors, holed up in a makeshift colony, working together to complete a goal that will guarantee your safety and win the game. Oh, and one of you might be a secret traitor who actually wants the whole group to fail. Withholding supplies might not be as effective as you wanted, though, so maybe you'll resort to actual sabotage, but then everyone will know there's a traitor, even if they don't know who.

You can choose to play with no traitor at all if you prefer, and it's still a very fun cooperative game that way. Adding to the confusion around the traitor is that every player has a secret personal objective they must complete by the end of the game on top of the main objective, and they personally only win if they achieve both. All of these ingredients mixing together makes every game a cocktail of stories about how you narrowly escaped zombie hordes at the old school, only to find yourself betrayed back at the base, before wrestling the colony back back to safety and kicking out the traitor just in time to escape to safety… or any other mix of stuff.

During your turn, a player will draw one of these cards and read it to you, and it will contain a small piece of narrative fiction, and often a moral quandary.

Maybe you find a small group of survivors, who you can leave at the mercy of zombies and steal weapons from, or you can rescue… but then the colony will need more food. Big-name licensed titles tend to be more about paying homage to the licence than making a great game. So it's a joy to find that Jaws is the rare fish that does both.

It's an asymmetrical game, meaning different players play in totally different ways. It's also an 'all-versus-one' game, meaning some players are working to cooperatively to beat one player who's all on their own. In this case, one player steers the toothsome wooden shark piece secretly around Amity Island, eating swimmers and probably humming the movie soundtrack. That player records where they're moving on a secret notepad, and has a small selection of bonuses that help them cause extra carnage.

Be too greedy and the other players, taking the roles of Hooper, Brody, and Quint, will track you down fast. They have ways to make the shark reveal where they are, and can lay traps to that effect, or rescue swimmers just before the shark can sink its teeth in. It's a great game… well, it's not really cat and mouse, more cat and even pointier cat, since everyone is doing hunting of some kind — the humans are hunting for the shark, the shark is hunting for swimmers.

But that's just Act One! When the shark has eaten its fill of swimmers, or gets found twice by the crew and harpooned with a barrel, you flip the board over for Act Two, which is set on the boat, mimicking the finale of the film. This is a thrilling slice of tactical action as the humans rush around trying to predict where the shark will surface and attack them. The crew has access to weapons, and the shark to horrible special attack cards — but what you get depends on your respective performances in the first round.

The two acts are like two games in one box, equally exciting, which you could even play separately if you like, though there's obviously more satisfaction to working through the whole experiences. Both are full of spills, strategy and quotable shark events. These kind of three-vs-one games are great for groups where different people enjoy competition at different levels — someone who likes to be ruthless can take the role of the shark, while people who enjoy cooperative games can be part of the human trio.

Because of this setup, it works best as either a four-player game or as a two-player game in which one player controls all three humans. Flamme Rouge is a game of bicycle racing in the early 20th century, before all the doping and transfusion scandals.

In it, each player has two riders in a team, and the idea is to get just one of them over the finish line before your opponents. Each of your two riders has a small deck of cards, and every card has a number on, which is how far the rider can move in a turn. One of your riders is a Sprinteur, and their deck has some very high numbers, but also some low ones, and some gaps in between. Your other rider, the Rouleur, has more middling numbers. Just like real bike racing, Flamme Rouge encourages you to form a pack.

Of course, it never works out so neatly. Everyone else is doing the same in secret. Then the cyclists move on the track, in order from front to back, and carnage ensues: your careful plan rapidly backfires when it turns out you're at the front because everyone else went slow… but actually that means they've saved your other rider from falling behind!

Or maybe your plan goes perfectly, but someone else predicted it and is now leeching off your slipstream. The cards you use are then removed from the game for good. But that's a big if… they might have picked up too much exhaustion to find the card they need when it really matters, or they might have used their high cards to catch up after some early missteps.

An expansion adds supports for players, plus adds cobbles as a road surface, which are really great for adding even more variety if you've already played a lot. Men at Work gives you all the tension of Jenga, but with the knowledge that you build this wobbly tower you're now cursing. Men at Work is a dexterity game, meaning that it's all about keeping a steady hand. The game tasks players with building up a construction site, placing girders and workers on a series of platforms that increasingly looks like a game of Ker-Plunk — and a collapse is just as inevitable as in that game….

On your turn, you'll flip a card that will tell you whether you'll place a new girder a very long and thin block or a worker a little person-shaped block , but more importantly it will tell you where you have to place that thing, and any additional conditions.

These are what make the game tricky — the card will tell you do something like place a red girder that's touching girders of two different colours, or that must be balanced perfectly on only a single support. Or maybe it'll tell you to place a worker anywhere you want, but then you have to make it so that they're carrying a small a very fiddly brick piece.

And then there are panic-inducing cards that ask you to do things like place a girder so that it's being held up by one of the much less stable worker pieces, or that makes you place a brick on a worker before you even pick it up, and then place both brick and worker on the site together. When and it is when, not if you slip up and cause a collapse of beams and people across the site, you'll lose one of the three Safety Certificates you're issued at the start of the game. Lose all three and you're out of the game though we actually don't like this elimination rule, so we tend to just say that you can no longer win if you're out of certificates — last one left wins.

Hilariously, though, it only counts as an 'accident' if something falls and touches the surface you're playing on — it's so funny to see pieces slip and pin a worker between two girders, but because nothing touched the floor it's not technically an accident…. Given that accidents lose you the game, you'll just play super-cautiously, right? The final brilliant idea of the game is that it tempts you into playing the riskiest versions of your turn that you can: after you've been building for a short time, a new rule comes in that if someone places a block that's the highest thing on the whole construction site, they'll get an Employee Of The Month award — if someone gets three of these, you can win the game that way instead.

So suddenly, instead of drawing a card and looking at the most sensible way to place your piece, you find yourself desperately trying to work out if it'll balance stably on the increasingly precarious top of the structure. It's a really silly game, it's really simple to play, it's just as amusing for adults as it is for kids, and it requires no brain power at all, so is ideal for times when you just want mindless fun. Do make sure your table doesn't have a major wobble, though….

Here's how you learn the tiny rules of Tiny Towns. On your turn, you choose a resource such as brick or glass. Everyone gets one unit of that resource and places it on their four-by-four grid board. If you've got a pattern of the right resources in the right shape, you get to replace them with one nice wooden building piece. Buildings score points based on their position relative to other buildings. That's it! Except it isn't, of course. This basic formula is a gentle roll down the ramp into a sea of decisions, which may or may not come back to haunt you.

Your first builds are easy, but a mere sixteen squares is not much space at all. Soon, you'll be cursing your earlier cavalier attitude to placement as existing buildings cramp your space to make new ones. Half-made patterns you'll never finish will litter your mat.

Players will start making cheeky hate-picks of resources, forcing others to take something useless that will clog up their board. If that's not enough, there's a random selection of building types in use every game. It's good that there are only tiny rules for Tiny Towns, but it's even better that the game inside is very big indeed. You each play as a character, with traits drawn from a set of cards that inform your goals for what you want out of life ie, what you'll aim towards during the game and how your character would act.

You'll be role-playing, effectively, through a plot given to you by the game. You open written information about scenarios your characters find themselves in, which give you different options for what your character would do. You each choose which option your character would go for, and then you see if they match. Do you choose one that would push your character closer to what they want, even if that puts you in conflict with the other player, or do you just follow their lead on this one because it's the nice thing to do?

In this way, though it's not a competitive game in any way, it's not exactly cooperative either. A narrative is built not just from the scenarios that come up and how you react to them, but also extra 'Scene' cards you have, which could be funny or serious, adding more to the feel that you're playing out a romantic comedy or drama.

And it reaches a peak with the Destiny cards, which are the final game-ending state you're working towards, meaning you might be intending to be a Heartbreaker based on how the game is going, or maybe that you're together in Unconditional Love… and you might both have different ideas about this based on the personal private information you have. You're creating a new story of love each time, and it can't help but lead to smiles and laughter, and possibly some awkward conversations the game regularly reminds you that you're role-playing!

It's a really thoughtful game, and a revised version improves the option for playing as same-sex couples, while expansions add more scenarios and situations. It's also incredibly easy to learn — in that you don't really have to learn it in a dedicated way.

The tutorial that teaches the rules does so by just having you play the game in a simple introduction scenario. It's fun from the moment you unfold that board. Isle of Skye lets you build a bucolic countryside, and also to rinse your friends for their cash. What a mix! Enjoy the calming bucolic beauty of building your own Scottish isle… but then mix it with a bit of cunning financial fighting to get all the best stuff for your own island.

To actually get the tiles to build your island, you go through a kind of auction. At the start of each turn, everyone draws three tiles from a big bag. If no one buys them, you get to keep them but the money goes back to the bank. So just price the tiles you like really high, right?

If only. If someone does buy one of your tiles, they then give you however many coins you demanded for that tile, but you also get your own coins back. And if their turn for buying was before yours, then instead of having no coins, you're the richest chieftain in Scotland…. This section is like a mini game-theory experiment every turn.

Or, equally, maybe you have a tile that you think another player would like, so how high can you price it to extract big money from them, without putting them off? And once the thinky part of buying tiles is over, you then get the much more relaxed task of fitting them into your island, giving the game a lovely rise and fall. Picking the best board game to start your collection or for adding to it with a new option is all about what kind of game you want to play.

Matt is T3's master of all things audiovisual, running our TV, speakers and headphones coverage. He also handles smart home products and large appliances, as well as our toys and games articles. He's the only one on the team who can explain both what Dolby Vision IQ is and why the Lego you're building doesn't fit together the way the instructions say, so is truly invaluable.

Matt has worked for tech publications for over 10 years, in print and online, including running T3's print magazine and launching its most recent redesign. He's also contributed to a huge number of tech and gaming titles over the years.

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England and Wales company registration number Select your region. Sign up to our newsletter Newsletter. Cosmic Encounter is our pick as the best board game overall thanks to its sheer variety. Cosmic Encounter.

The best board game is a brilliant mix of genuine strategy and unpredictable hilarity. Specifications Players: Playing time: 1 hour. Reasons to avoid - Some may not like the unpredictability. The best party game — perfect for people who don't usually play board games too. Specifications Players: but you could have more. Playing time: mins. Reasons to avoid - Some may struggle to be creative on demand. Reasons to avoid - More experienced players definitely have an advantage.

The best cooperative board game with loads of expansion potential. Playing time: 60 mins. Reasons to avoid - Losing to luck can be frustrating.

Jaipur may be small, but it's still our pick as the best board game for two players. Specifications Players: 2. Playing time: 30 mins. Reasons to avoid - Not much variety built in. Ticket to Ride: New York. Playing time: 20 mins. Reasons to avoid - Can finish very suddenly. The Quest for El Dorado. A racing board game that's much more interesting than rolling dice. Reasons to avoid - Can be frustrating if cards don't go your way. Quacks of Quedlinburg. Reasons to avoid - Some won't like its random nature.

Reasons to avoid - Fairly complex and think-y. Reasons to avoid - Some may want a meatier experience. Azul is a deeply pleasing game for aesthetes — how many games reward you for being neat? Playing time: 45 mins. Reasons to avoid - Placement and points rules are a bit fussy.

Survive: Escape from Atlantis. Reasons to avoid - Possible for players feel ganged up on. Mysterium will teach you how frustrating it is to be a poltergeist.

Reasons to avoid - 'Ghost' role can feel very difficult. Dead of Winter. Reasons to avoid - Traitor games can cause some stress. Reasons to avoid - May need bigger boat. Hungry Hungry Hippos is a fast-paced marble-chomping game suitable for young players. Four colorful and hungry hippos on the game board are trying to chow down on 20 marbles that are launched into the middle of the board. Players rapidly press a lever, which controls the hippo, in an effort to gobble up the most marbles.

After all of the marbles have been consumed, count how many your hippo caught. The player whose hippo chomped down on the most marbles wins. Boggle consists of 16 six-sided letter dice in a square tray. First you have to scramble the letters, which means putting the cover on the tray and giving it a good shake.

Start the sand timer and write down all the possible words you can find. Words can be made from letters that are horizontal, vertical, or diagonal to one another, but they must be at least three letters long. Once time is up, compare your lists of words with the other players. Any words that appear on more than one list are crossed out. Hurry, scurry, little mouse! Try not to get trapped as you circle the board and collect cheese tokens.

Roll the die to advance spaces, but be sure to keep an eye on the other sneaky mice as you move around the board. Some mice might evade the trap, but in the end, all but one will have been captured. The last mouse still in play wins. We love Jenga for its ease of play. Setup is quick. Build a tower from the 54 small wooden blocks provided—three blocks wide by 18 blocks high.

Players then take turns removing one block from within the tower and placing it back on the top. Cross your fingers and hold your breath as the tower grows taller and more unstable with every move. See how many rounds you can go before the tower comes crashing down.

The last person to successfully place a block before the tower tumbles is considered the winner. In each round of this two-person game, one player gets to create the code and the other player tries to crack it. Using any combination of the six colors provided, the codemaster secretly creates a code that is comprised of just four pegs. The second player then begins a guess-and-check process to figure out the code by placing a series of any four pegs onto the board.

After the first guess, the codemaster provides feedback for any pegs that are accurately placed or any pegs that are the right color but in the wrong spot. The second player then guesses again by placing a second row of pegs, and the process continues until either the code is cracked or the second player runs out of guesses.

Qwirkle is a game of colors and patterns. The game contains wooden tiles with different colored shapes on them. Players start with six tiles drawn at random from a bag. Use your tiles to create lines on the playing area that have the same color or pattern, and earn a point for each tile you play. Lines can be built vertically or horizontally and or played through an existing line kind of like Scrabble. Ready to get your Qwirkle on?

Gather your loved ones for an evening of friendly competition. These board games include fun options for families with young children, school-age children, and grown children. All you need to play this fun family game is the Uno card deck. There are no other marbles, spinners, or game pieces required, which makes this quick to clean up and great to take on the go. An Uno deck contains cards—25 cards each in one of four colors, plus 8 special action cards like Skip and Reverse.

Players take turns matching a card from their hand by number or color to the card in the middle of the game. That, and the obligatory victory dance after you win. We love this game because it gets the whole family humming, sketching, solving, and thinking. Each color along the game path indicates which of the four card categories you have to pull from to proceed. If you successfully complete the challenge presented on the card you get to roll a die and continue that number of spaces.

As an added bonus for time-crunched families, the game board offers three different rates of play. Dominoes is great fun for players of all ages, so grab Grandma and a set of dominoes and start play! While there are a variety of games you can play with dominoes, one of our favorites is Mexican Train. The first player to complete his or her train wins. The Chutes and Ladders game board contains squares and depicts a series of ladders and slides. Each ladder represents a good deed and its reward, but every slide represents the consequences of bad behavior.

Every player starts in the first square and a spinner dictates how many spaces a player can advance from there. The first player to the square wins. Watch fields, roads, and cities rapidly expand in the Medieval-themed game Carcassonne. Players take turns placing one of the game tiles in an attempt to build up their land. The role and subsequent point value of a follower varies depending on what piece of property you put them on. For instance, a follower placed on a monastery tile is a monk who earns different points than a follower placed on a road tile as a thief.

Calculate your moves carefully, because once all the tiles have been played, the player with the most points wins. In this single-player game, try to free the red escape car by maneuvering the cars and trucks out of the way. This will likely take lots of little moves, as the blocking vehicles can only move forward or backward in the direction they are facing. Traffic Jam comes with 40 different challenges with varying levels of difficulty. Depending on the puzzle, up to 15 cars and tracks can be in the way but, slowly and carefully, you can shift them to free the red car.

Buy It: Rush Hour Jr. In Trouble, the goal is to be the first player to get all four of your pieces around the board and back home again. The premise is simple, but there are challenges along the way. For a piece to leave home base, you first have to roll a six. After that, pieces can advance normally based on the die roll. If another player lands on a spot occupied by one of your pieces, your piece is sent back to home base and has to start the process again. All aboard! The stakes are high in this game to see who can visit the most cities in North America in just seven days.

In Ticket to Ride, players lay claim to railroads across the United States and Canada and compete to connect the most cities with their trains.

Draw cards to see what kind of train car you can play or what your next destination might be. Earn points for placing trains and for successfully connecting two destination cities.

The game ends when a player has less than two trains remaining, and bonus points are then awarded to the player who created the longest continuous route. The player with the most points wins. You have a ticket to ride, so where will your journey take you? Move your four pawns around the board and safely navigate them home again in the game of Sorry. Sorry is a competition, and there are two ways to set back your opponents.

Win by being the first to get all four of your pawns home. A scoring system exists if you wish to play multiple rounds of this game. Buy It: Sorry! Each round, players receive three opportunities to roll up to five dice.

After each roll, you can evaluate the dice and choose which, if any, you want to roll again. You are looking for a pattern that will work for one of the 13 possible Yahtzee categories. At the end of your turn, choose which category you will use for that round and tally the score accordingly.

You can only use a category once per game, so choose carefully. At 50 points, a Yahtzee is the highest possible score you can roll.

Play up to 13 rounds and then tally your scores; the player with the highest score wins. Nothing gets the fun going like an invigorating game that prompts players to shout, act, and strategize on the fly.

Pictionary is a party game suitable for players of all ages. Teams take turns drawing and guessing as many words or phrases as possible in a timed round. You might think a game of drawing sounds easy, but this game can be more difficult than it seems.

The path on the Pictionary game board is comprised of different colored squares, each denoting a different level of difficulty for a word on the corresponding game card. Play using the board and be the first team to make it all the way to the finish line, or ditch the board altogether and play just for the laughs. We dare you to try and keep a straight face during a game of Apples to Apples. This clever party game will have everyone laughing out loud.

Each box contains a set of green apple cards, which have adjectives on them, and a set of red apple cards, which have nouns on them. Each round, a new player gets to be the judge and presents a green apple card to the group. The rest of the players select one of the red apple cards from their hands to play. Sometimes the nouns match the adjectives perfectly, sometimes they make no sense at all, and sometimes they are downright hysterical.

Once everyone has contributed a red card, the judge chooses a favorite. Depending on your group you could play just for fun, or designate a set number of rounds and see who can play the most winning cards in that time. Scattergories is a fun list-making game that requires thinking fast. The idea of the game is to come up with creative answers to 12 different categories—things like TV shows, U.

At the start of each round, you roll a sided letter die which decides the letter that every answer must begin with. Then you set the sand timer and get going! When the time is up, players compare their answers with one another.

If the same answer appears on more than one list it gets crossed off, but a player receives one point for each unique word. The winner is the player who has the most points after three rounds. In this fast-paced game, players try to get their teammates to say the word on an electronic disc without actually saying that word or any variations of it. The disc has some 10, words stored in it. Get your teammates to say a word and then quickly pass the disc to the opposite team.

This process continues, passing the disc from team to team until the round ends. A timer embedded in the disc gradually beeps faster and faster until it abruptly sounds a loud buzz, signaling the end of a round. Move fast!

Taboo is the game of forbidden words. Try and get through as many cards as possible in the given time. Your team will get one point for each card correctly guessed, but you will lose one point every time you say one of the taboo words. A one-minute hourglass and a buzzer button will be in the possession of the opposing team during your round. Buy It: Taboo Kids vs. This game is a riot to play at parties. In Speak Out, players read a phrase from one of the game cards while wearing a special mouthpiece that makes it hard to enunciate.

Have your group form teams and take turns trying to guess the phrase on a game card. Try to get through as many cards as possible in the given time. Each game comes with 10 dishwasher-safe mouthpieces, but you can buy additional packs of mouthpieces if you have a big crowd. A friendly suggestion: Keep some napkins or paper towels handy to wipe up your drool.

In Password, one player on each team knows the secret word and gives a one-word clue to his or her teammate. This continues until the secret word is finally guessed or until 10 clues have been given, whichever comes first. Every password starts with a point value of 10 but decreases by one point with each clue given. Play 10 secret words for a total of five rounds, and in the end, the team with the highest score wins. Think you can guess the password?

The goofy game of Mad Gab is like the reverse of that. If you repeat a strange series of words enough times, they actually sound like a common word or phrase. Enjoy playing this game where everyone sounds silly. These multi-player games combine strategy, wit, and humor. Play them at a party or bring them to a brewery to enjoy in a lively setting. Baby zebras are born without stripes. True or false? Put your knowledge to the test with the classic game of Trivial Pursuit. Players travel around the wheel-shaped game board and answer questions from the different categories.

Colored squares along the game path denote which category to pull from. If you answer a question right, you get to go again. Collect one pie-shape game piece when you land on each category hub, then be the first player to make it to the center of the board where you must answer one final question to win.

The premise of this chip and card game is simple: Play a card from your hand and place a chip on the corresponding square. In sequence, each card from two card decks is represented on the game board. Players take turns playing a card from their hands and then placing a chip on one of the spaces that match that card. The first team to create two sequences wins.