My fuzziest childhood memories are of being barefoot in a Bloody Pond bunkhouse deep in the Plymouth pines playing tabletop games with my brother and Sam Geer, a third-cousin on my father’s mother’s mother’s side. We started a Monopoly game in the early 90s that lasted until Clinton’s second term. We permitted federal government levels of debt and we wagered our orange bills, property deeds, or future passing-go income on side-games of poker, Risk, croquet, home run derby, paper-boat races, ABPA baseball, Spinjas, Streaks, and Blood Bowl. I’m still trying to build that hotel on Marvin Gardens.
Why the nostalgia trip? Because Sam just released a prototype of Boy Band Builder, a deck-building card game in which you can create, manage, and steal royalty payments from your very own Boy Band.
This post is in honor of Sam, who introduced most of the games on this list to me. He is raising money to fund Boy Band Builder on Kickstarter. If you like any of the games on this list, you should go buy an advanced copy (or six!) of Boy Band Builder through Sam’s Kickstarter page. The Kickstarter campaign ends on Friday (11/13), so reserve your game today.
1. Ticket to Ride
Ticket to Ride balances everything I love about board games. Success requires a combination of luck and strategy. It is easy to learn, but difficult to master. Each game requires a different approach, depending on the cards you draw. Most games take less than an hour… unless you are playing with my father, who is still deciding whether to take an orange card or build a train from Omaha to Duluth. The cherries on top? Ticket to Ride has both trains and maps. I’ve yet to meet someone who has played this game and not liked it.
2. Settlers of Catan
All of the features that I love about Ticket to Ride, except instead of building a train between Winnipeg and Sault St. Marie, you haggle wheat and wood for sheep and bricks to build roads, settlements, and cities on an ever-changing topography all while trying to avoid being rock-blocked. Settlers can be slow if you play by the rules. But you can get wood (and bricks, rocks, wheat, and sheep) faster by adding a second pair of dice.
3. Celebrities
My favorite party game. All you need is paper, pens, a couple of buckets, and a smattering of cultural knowledge.
More below…
How to Play Celebrities
Set-up
Cut up the paper into small pieces.
Each player writes the names of five to fifteen famous people, historical figures, or popular fictional characters. One name per paper piece.
Shuffle the names into a hat, pot, bowl, bag, basket, or bucket. This is the new namebucket. Keep a second hat, pot, bowl, bag, basket, or bucket nearby to use as a used namebucket.
Split into two teams. Name them. Say, the “Yooks” and “Zooks,” for example.
Round 1
During Yook turns, the Yooks pick a player to go first. This player, let’s call him VanItch, draws a name from the new namebucket. VanItch needs to describe the name to his Yook teammates. For example, if he pulled “Donald Trump”, VanItch could say, “the 45th President of the USA” or “an obese turtle on his back, flailing in the hot sun” or “Fuckface Von Clownstick.” Other Yooks need to guess who VanItch is describing.
When the Yooks guess the name on the paper (“Donald Trump!”), VanItch pulls and describes another name. VanItch tries to get the Yooks to correctly name as many names as possible within a minute.
Players get to skip one name per turn. If VanItch pulls a name that he does not know (e.g., Mary Trump), once per turn, he can put the name aside and pull another name.
If VanItch pulls two names he does not know, he has two options: he can curse out the crapbag who put the unfamiliar name in the namebucket, or he can try to describe the name he doesn’t know by relating it to names that he does know. For example, VanItch could describe “Mary Trump” as, “she has the same first name as umbrella-flying-Poppins, and the same last name as Donald Fuckface Von Clownstick.”
Players cannot use rhymes or other phonetic clues. VanItch could not describe Mary Trump by saying “her first name begins with ‘M’” or “her last name rhymes with “frump.”
After a minute, VanItch’s turn ends. He counts the names that the Yooks guessed correctly and puts them into the used namebucket (you’ll need them again later). He puts any names that Yooks did not guess back into the new namebucket.
VanItch passes the new namebucket to the Zooks, who take their one-minute turn describing and guessing.
This continues until all of the names have been named.
Round 2
Repeat the procedure in round 1 with one important rule-change: you can only use one word to describe each name. For example, if VanItch pulls Donald Trump again, he could say “president” or “turtle” or “clownstick.” Once he says one of these words, VanItch needs to be silent until and unless his teammates say “Donald Trump.” As in round 1, players get one skip per turn.
Round 3
Name charades. Repeat the procedure but without words. If VanItch pulls Donald Trump, he could lie on his back and flail like an obese turtle in the hot sun, wave his arms around to imitate Trump making fun of a disabled reporter, or perform any other non-verbal gesture that helps the Yooks name Donald Trump.
Ghost Round
If three rounds is not enough, refill the namebucket and repeat round 3 beneath a sheet.
4. Cards Against Humanity
Cards Against Humanity describes itself as “a party game for horrible people.” It helped ignite my career as a humor researcher, and, provided prescient examples for the benign violation theory. Some might argue that “two midgets shitting in a box,” “kids with ass cancer,” and “Sean Penn,” are not benign. If you find yourself playing with people like this, find better friends.
5. Poker
It’s the only game in Vegas where skill, and the fact that you are not playing against the house, can tip the odds in your favor. But I prefer low-stakes poker – games where whiskey flows, no one remembers who’s turn it is, and bad cards cost you less money than sharing a round of Jagerbombs with townies at the tavern.
6. Dominion
The online version (dominion.games) of this deck-building card game helped me survive quarantine. Andrew, Penny, and I have played 173 games since March. Our most recent game ended in a three-way tie, bringing our victory totals to 52.833, 50.833, and 69.333, but who’s counting?
Dominion earns bonus points for being the only game on this list that works well with two-players. And robots.
7. Coup
Coup combines the bluffing of poker with the political strategy of Risk. You start with two players, and need to raise money to kill your opponents while avoiding their wrath. Lying helps, but only if you don’t get caught. Alliances help, but they don’t last. If you lose both of your players, wait a few minutes and try again next round.
8. Blood Bowl
Blood Bowl offers a rare cross of fantasy world-building and sport. It lets you manage quasi-football squadrons of elves, dwarfs, orcs, goblins, trolls, ogres, rat-mutants, zombies, and, yes, even hobbits. My favorite team was the Grateful Undead. I fielded vampires (“Dark Star”, “Sunshine”), mummies (“Black Peter”, “Bertha”), wights (“Casey Jones”, “Jack Straw”), ghouls (“St. Stephen”, “Sugar Magnolia”) skeletons (“Loose Lucy”, “Candyman”), a werewolf (“Dire Wolf”), and a chainsaw-wielding zombie (“Alligator”). Unfortunately, the Grateful Undead were better at maiming the other team (and sometimes fans) than scoring touchdowns.
Blood Bowl is the perfect game for people who like fantasy as much as fantasy football, provided they have the patience to learn the rules (which are complicated), time to play the games (which are long), money to buy the miniature figures (which are stupid-expensive), and the artistic chops to paint them (which is also no easy task).
9. Risk
Risk would be higher on my list if it didn’t take so damn long. It’s a warmongering game that lets you mobilize armies, build alliances, and roll the dice to do the same thing that Brain (friend of Pinky) does every day: try to take over the world.
Risk introduced me to places like Irkutsk and Siam, the difficulty of conquering Europe, and the strategic importance of fortifying Kamchatka, Greenland, and Indonesia. I created a flag (think USSR, but black and with a chainsaw rather than a hammer and sickle) for my army, which I named the “Bad Motherfucker Fascist Empire.” Doesn’t seem as funny now that I’m not 15 and actual fascism has made a comeback.
10. Balderdash
I love the premise of Balderdash:
(a) You read an abstruse but factual question: e.g., “what is a natterjack.”
(b) Other players bullshit an answer: e.g., “a wrench used to remove sticky peanut-butter jar tops.”
(c) You get points when you pick the real answer (a European toad, in this example), other players get points when you pick theirs.
You can sidestep Mattel by playing bookshelf Balderdash. Pull a novel off of your bookshelf and ask the other players to bluff its first sentence. I’ll never forget my cousin Eric’s opener for a book called Gossip Girl: “Madison and Meredith are such fucking bitches they probably won’t even get in to Vassar.” (Corrigendum: Vassar is a great school. Our grandmother went there.)
Honorable Mentions
Monopoly - better when you add shady financial deals, like futures and joint-ventures.
Oh Hell - solid card game for 3 to 7 people.
Rummy 500 & Spit - solid card games for two people.
Scrabble - double the points for dirty words.
Asshole - cards + drinking + discriminatory status hierarchy. What could go wrong?
Loaded Questions - learn things you probably didn’t want to know about your friends and family.
Pandemic - too real this year.
Bridge - playing this game makes you eligible for AARP.
Exploding Kittens - overrated. I have no idea why this game is popular.
What did I miss?