Board Game Suggestions

Hello everyone! This has probably come up in other threads, but I can't immediately find it, so I've started this one.

Because the holidays are coming up and there probably aren't very many places people can actually go this winter, my parents have suddenly decided that they would like to get into board and/or card games so we have something to do when I visit. I have now found myself put in charge of picking up a selection of suitable games we can play over the holidays. Problem is, I really haven't touched a board game in like 15-20 years (basically since I left home for college), so I'm not sure what's out there or what's "hip" so I'm looking for suggestions.

There are a few restrictions, since this will involve a couple of 65+ parents:

• The game should be suitable for 3 people. More is probably OK, so long as it can be scaled down, but three is the ideal number.
• The game should be pretty quick. Ideally no more than 60 minutes, tops. The specific quote was "not a game that goes on forever like Monopoly."
• It should be easy to learn. Things on the level of Yahtzee or Trivial Pursuit are fine. MtG would be way too complicated.
• Probably nothing that involves any figures, collectibles, or any "expansions" that you need to keep buying for the game. Despite my parent's newfound enthusiasm, I strongly expect these things are going to go into a box after Christmas and not come out again until next year.
• Per my dad, "nothing too mathy."

Splendor - it's a little mathy? But not really. It's very easy to learn. There's an iOS app version as well.

Gloom - it has clear plastic cards that stack on top of one another. It's really just a mechanism for collective story telling and this game will live or die by how into story telling your players get. (NOT Gloomhaven. Not only will you die trying to carry that beast, it is math, and minis, so many parts that an hour -might- be enough time to put the components you need to play on the table.)

Catan - it's pretty quick, easy to learn, but the board is randomized so it's pretty different each time.

Munchkin - quick, silly card game. And it's themed so if they're not into goofy fantasy, there's stuff like Marvel.

Fluxx - another quick, silly card game. Rules constantly change. It's like calvin-ball but with cards. Also, it's themed but I think it's all parodies of stuff.

Forbidden Island - A quick game of uh adventure and tile flipping.

Tsurro - I dunno. I think I'd describe it as a board game version of snake? Or Tron Light Cycles?

These are probably the games we use most often for lighter board game nights, or when we have guests over and they won't want to play heavier titles. They're also themed in such a way that no one's going to be upset over a cat vomiting into a pooping cat's butt (Looking at you, Exploding Kittens!).

I'd also suggest fluxx. You can teach someone in 2-3 sentences. Games are usually 5-10 mins. There's enough depth and strategy where it doesn't feel like pure RNG like some card games

I'd say look up the Dice Tower on youtube. They have a ton of top 10 lists that give good suggestions for really any type of person.

For my own suggestions:

Camel Up. I play this one a lot with family of all ages. Simple, fun, and chaotic

Ticket to Ride. Really can't go wrong with this one. It's popular and been around awhile for a reason.

Dice Town. Fun dice rolling game trying to make poker hands and collect points.

All of the modern gateway games are good choices. Somehow I’ve never played Catan but everything else I can vouch for.

Carcassonne - Tile laying game, it’s kind of like building a puzzle but you claim roads, cities and churches and try to expand them. It has a little math but unless someone is cut throat, it can just be fun to make a nice landscape.

Ticket to Ride - Build a railway system across a map. The gameplay itself is simple. Collect different colored cards in sets to place your trains on a map connecting different cities. The math is very straightforward and it plays great with three people.

Splendor - Collect gems and mines to win the game. As someone else mentioned, this is a good choice. The math is light, it’s just a race to 15 points. It is another game about collecting multiple things of the same color but the end goal is to own the most valuable jewels.

Azul - Build the most beautiful ceramic tile floor you can. Collect all of the same type of tile from a group to add to your tableau. This may be the most math heavy but again, it can largely be ignored. As long as you group your tiles near one another you will do fine.

Pandemic - Save the world together from diseases plagueing the planet. Timely I know but it has become the gold standard of cooperative games. Once again, as a team you try to collect 5 of the same colored cards to eradicate 4 diseases. Do it 4 times before the diseases spread too far and you win.

Dixit - Try to mind meld with your family using fantastical art. You play a card with some art on it and give a word or phrase to clue the other players. They all get an opportunity to add a card of their own to the pile. Then everyone but the host gets to guess which was your original picture. It’s fun and very different from the other games mentioned so far.

Love Letter - Try to get your love letter the closest to the princess. This is sort of a guess who deduction game. You have cards with powers and try to determine what cards everyone else is holding. It is very fast but a lot of fun. There are only 7 different kinds of cards so it is easy to learn what they all do.

Coup - Have the most political power and be the last one standing. Quite similar to Love Letter, you have two characters and try to eliminate each other’s cards by guessing what they have and using powers. This game however can have and encourages bluffing.

Sushi Go - Have the best meal of sushi by gathering cards. This is a drafting game where you collect sets of different sushi to score points. There are different strategies to collecting each type of sushi but you can try to predict what your opponents are going for, as well as what you should collect.

Those last three are smaller card games that should be easy to find for $10-15 pretty easily. I enjoy all of the games I mentioned but there are tons of others worth checking out. Do a google search or YouTube for “Gateway Games”. Find one with a theme you think everyone will enjoy and doesn’t seem too complicated.

Oh! And go to BoardGameGeek dot com, look up the game there and check its “weight”. This is a rough estimate of its complexity. They range from 1-5 usually. I wouldn’t start them on anything on a 2 or higher. You can also see their average rating but don’t read into it too much, it is an enthusiast website and they can be snobby about simpler games.

I second Forbidden Island. It's a fun, quick game and easy to pick up, my brother and I played this with my parents (ages 60 and 56) recently and they enjoyed it!

We also played a game called Horrified, in which you play as a team trying to investigate and defeat the classic Universal Studios horror monsters. Frankenstein, Dracula, the mummy, the creature from the Black Lagoon, the Wolfman, that kind of thing. It has various scenarios to play (the first one recommended involves Dracula and the Black Lagoon creature). Each character has a special ability and you pick up color-coded items that you need to weaken and destroy the monsters. Again, it was easy for parents to learn and took less than an hour.

I'd actually highly recommend Monopoly Deal. Card game version that typically lasts under half an hour and does an amazing job at streamlining the full experience.

Spyfall is one of the few social deception games that works with 3 people as well. Very simple game to understand - GBEast played it on an Extra Life stream a couple of years ago

Forbidden Island, Carcassone, Ticket to Ride, all great games.

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone! I'll probably start with Forbidden Island and Ticket to Ride and see how those go.

A lot of what has been suggested already is fantastic; in addition to those I'm going to recommend Bohnanza. It's a card matching game where the order of your hand matters (i.e. you can't rearrange your hand). It's a pretty simple ruleset and a ton of fun

I second Carcassone and Ticket to Ride! If you play Carcassone, you can omit the fields rule (where you lay the pieces on their side) to make the counting at the end a little easier. This will make sense as you're reading the rules so check back here if you end up getting it :p I really like that game because it's simple, not too long, aesthetically pleasing and your group can decide how competitive you want to get.

One of our favorites is Dominion.

In Dominion, each player starts with an identical, very small deck of cards. In the center of the table is a selection of other cards the players can "buy" as they can afford them. Through their selection of cards to buy, and how they play their hands as they draw them, the players construct their deck on the fly, striving for the most efficient path to the precious victory points by game end.

Dominion is not a CCG, but the play of the game is similar to the construction and play of a CCG deck. The game comes with 500 cards. You select 10 of the 25 Kingdom card types to include in any given play—leading to immense variety.

If it sounds like a good fit, I'd start with the base game. If you guys end up liking it there are a lot of expansions that add new cards and mechanics to the game.

I'll just back up Splendor here. There are a few other really good simpler ones mentioned above (Forbidden Island, specifically) but Splendor's one of those games that anyone new seems to learn quickly and enjoy.

Recently, my wife and I have really been digging Clank. It's a deck building game where you are racing against other players to delve into a dungeon, take an artifact and other gems, and escape the dungeon alive. The surviving player with the most gold at the end wins.

I would recommend checking out Spiel des Jahres winners for the entirety of the OPs needs. The Spiel des Jahres is an award for family games that are light, fairly deep, replayable, and non-combat oriented which made a splash in Germany (a major hub for non-violent board games over the 20th/21st century). It includes titles such as Catan, Agricola, Ticket To Ride but has been going since the 70s, so there's plenty to dig into. My personal favourite SdJ winner is Hoity Toity. The best simple auction game ever made 30 years after it's initial release. You play as cliché awful rich noblemen trying to prove everything they buy is Of Notable Value. It's regarded as incredibly accessible if you can find a copy these days, which will be easier in Europe than anywhere else.

I will list a few other games I find have been a home run with people who aren't into board games. They aren't incredibly heavy/difficult (I'm one of those people who played the original Brass 1000 times who also manages to teach it to non-board game players as it's so grand though, so your mileage may vary).

• Quadropolis is an easy to come to grasp competitive tile placement puzzle game which will make sense to anyone who's ever played a 90s city builder ala Sim City, but is very easy to grasp conceptually. Many routes to victory, no one dominant strategy, and is ideal with 3 players. It may be out of print at this point, sadly, but if you see a copy I'd wholeheartedly recommend it.
• Monopoly Deal was already mentioned (and I believe Jeff Bakalar mentioned it a year ago on the Beastcast?), and it is indeed a fast, easy to learn, and very fun card game experience which retains the ideas of Monopoly with very few of the terrible design elements of the original. Plus it's incredibly cheap unlike most board games. It's still very random and not a game which relies on tons of skill, but is an introduction to basic card combos in take that games.
• Project Elite is, much like many thousands of video games, Aliens The Film The Co-Operative Game. But you play half of the game in real time which is the real difference maker. It is a dice chucker which feels fair while keeping a lot of tension after dozens of plays. It recently got a re-release via CMON games too. The game consists of several 2 minute (or less!) rounds where you have to complete a goal (rescue civilians, plant detonation charges etc) while aliens rush towards your team, where one of the faces of the many dice you throw marks 'move an alien of your choice' towards you. You win if you complete the goal and none of your team dies. You lose if any aliens get to your ship or kill anyone. Simple. But very satisfying.
• VIllagers is a combination of set collection, light engine building, and a focus on intelligent card play that takes a game to learn, but makes thematic sense. You are trying to form up a village (represented by an ever increasing card tableau per player) from people with a variety of skills, and you win if you make the most of your economy. Thankfully the economy despite being represented by money for simplicity isn't actually about Money, and there's no combat or take that elements to sabotage other player's turns. The winners will generally be those who play the odds with the cards on the table in the most effective way.

People recommending Carcassonne and Ticket To Ride I can back up. Also recommend the game Love Letter(Different publishers I think, I have the Asmodee). Love Letter is an absurdly small game that can be played sooososo quick. When I've taken some board games travelling with me, the three are Carcassonne, Love Letter and Machi Koro - because I can get the parts all into one box(Elastic bands and bags to tidy up contents a bit after removing the included box divider).

Machi Koro is maybe a step above what OP outlines as what they're looking for, and can be intimidating to glimpse at first, but it's a fairly simple card trading game with lots of criss-crossing multipliers. My own take on Machi Koro is that it needs the first expansion pack(The Harbor), but then again I'm the kind of person that believes Civ can only be reviewed after the last expansion is released. I'll leave some links for Machi Koro and see if it takes fancy. But Love Letter is something almost worth having spare copies of.

Amiable Brits split review of Machi Koro and another game

Amiable American reviews Machi Koro

Saw someome recommend Clank; I'd disagree, it may be too "crunchy" for your needs.

I always recommend Codenames when people need a good, simple boardgame. It's all about wordplay/word association. A modern classic.

Potion Explosion (2-4 players)

It's really simple and fun. You collect colored beads to make potions. The beads are on top of each other inside four vertical tracks. On your turn, you grab a bead, which causes the beads above it to fall down onto the beads below. If this causes two beads of the same color to touch, it combos and you collect all of those beads. This can happen multiple times, which leads to fun chained combos ala Tetris Attack. You can use completed potions to activate simple power-ups, which add a bit of strategy to the game.

It's basically a Bejeweled-style matching puzzle game with points and abilities. It's really easy to learn. Everyone I've shown it to likes it, even my non-board gaming friends.

Oh and "Skull" is fun. It's a simple(Especially in smaller groups) card game played with beermats(I think I read that's where the games comes from, ppl playing originally with beermats). Nice enough card stock on the cards in the one I have, but it's so simple and over quickly that it's a palate cleanser/intermezzo between other things. Or for when unable to deal with more complicated games I guess? I linked to videos by Dice Tower and Shut Up & Sit Down which are both valuable review insights, but I'd also recommend Watch It Played. Partly because if you get a game and want to know how to play it, that guy has it on lock, imo - but also if you want to get a game and want to know how it plays before committing to purchase, a few watches of a video on the game in question might help.

I agree, the people in here recommending Clank (or Dominion) are totally nuts. Neither one is "too mathy" (though one dad's "too mathy" is another dad's "not mathy enough"), but both are far too complex to be the starter board game for OP's two 65+ parents. OP also openly suspects that his parents may just play these games this holiday season then put them away for 11 months, and I think you really need regular board game nights to get a good feel for drafting games like Clank and Dominion. It takes time to learn contextually when certain cards are good or bad to draft into your deck, and you're not going to make progress on that learning curve if you buy it, play it twice this Christmas, then don't play it again for 11 months.

As for Codenames, it's a great game, but I think it struggles at 3 players, and it seems that the game is really only going to be played by OP and their 2 parents. I guess I haven't looked at the rulebook in a while, and Google tells me that technically the rules support 2 and 3 players? I don't know if that's a rules variant or only in certain editions of the game, but I've mostly played Codenames with ~4-10 people.

Choo Choo, in comes the Hot Board Game Take Train.

A lot of people will suggest Settlers of Catan, Dominion, Carcassone, Ticket To Ride, or Pandemic with little reservation for new players, but I would like to posit that those five games are trash that belong in a Big Dumpster set out to open sea, never to be a pox on humanity again. The reasons for my opinion, for you to judge whether or not our tastes are aligned, are as follows:

• Excruciatingly uninteresting theming - All of these games are absolutely dreary and miserable to look at. With the exception of Pandemic, they all have extremely boring themes that are like a parody of boring board games for pseudointellectuals, although any joy to be had in Pandemic is lost in the fact that it looks like a mid-2000s Powerpoint template. If I'm paying too much money for a box of plastic and cards, I want it to look nice.
• Highly uninteractive - When I bring a board game to the table, I'm doing so because I want to spend time with my friends or family and playing with or against them. These games are very light actual cooperation or competition, with most of the interaction coming from the fact that most players are pulling from a pool of shared resources (usually simply board space), and thus your only mode of interaction is a denial of resources. The benefit of this is that people really can't mess with or ruin your plans in these sorts of games, at the cost of players not really being able to interact at all.

Games I love but don't think are good fits:

• Coup: I absolutely love Coup to death. I own 5 copies of Coup, in three different languages. I'm, frankly, one particularly long bender away from getting a Coup tattoo. Coup is terrible with three players. At that player count, players are too easily pidgeonholed by pure probability, and the game is just a slog. Minimum 4 players to get this engine a'runnin'.
• Spyfall/Any Social Deduction: Social deduction games, in which players must use social interaction to determine which among them are a traitor while traitors attempt to sow confusion (Among Us is an example of classic social deduction in video game form) are my favorite tabletop games, they literally make up 1/3 of my collection, but I just don't think they tend to work at 3. 50/50 odds to find the traitor just aren't that interesting, and there's too little "noise" from game to game behind which the traitor can hide.

Games I actually do recommend:

• Inhuman Conditions: Remember the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner? They made that into a board game. It's only 1-on-1 (quick rounds though), where one player gets interviewed by another. If they're human, their goal is to just pass the interview. If they're a robot, their goal is either survive or complete a series of secret objectives (e.g quote a movie 4 times). Very tense, very fun game of trying to read another person and of paranoia. Very fun.
• The Bloody Inn: Your family is now the proud owner of a delightful inn in the French countryside, yay! You're also serial killers, yay! The goal is to accrue as much money as you can, by collecting fees from your lucky guests, picking the pockets of the corpses of the unlucky ones, dodging the ire of the (surprisingly lax) cops, and obtaining accomplices to gain aditional abilities. Good middleweight game, pretty math-light.
• Win, Lose, Banana: Ok, bear with me on this, because it's the only social deduction game I like at 3, and it's free. There are three cards, as described in the title. Whoever draws Win, wins, but only if they can then guess which of the other two players has Banana. If they pick the player with Lose, they and Banana lose, and Lose wins. Absolutely the simplest essence of social deduction, but it's got that pure energy that I love.
• Cryptid: This game is the big-brain puzzle game for brain geniuses that makes me feel either like a colossal idiot or Albert Einstein. The board is divided up into hexagonal tiles with certain attributes, and a cryptid is hiding on one of them. Each player is secretly given one clue about the cryptid's location (e.g in a mountain space, not within 2 hexes of water), and the space the Cryptid is on is the only space on the board satisfying every player's rule. Players take turns marking tiles that do or do not satisfy their rule, as everyone tries to suss out what everyone else's rules are and try to find the cryptid first.
• Twilight Imperium: lol jk please don't buy this one it's $120 and takes eight hours to play
• Welcome To/Railroad Ink: both of these are darlings of an up-and-coming game genre called Roll-and-Writes (not, as I first thought, the works of prolific designer Roland Wright). They're semicompetitive games where you have to place things on a grid (house numbers and infrastructure, respectively) based on the randomized results of dice or cards. They're games all about gambling on what you'll get in the future, and while there are very good videos on the internet about both, let me just say that playing them captures the same sort of chaotic energy as "how big should I write the letters on this 'Happy Birthday' sign"

Some great suggestions in here. Going to add my contribution and suggest The Mind, which some might argue isn't really much of a game but rather an experience. It's a cooperative game where all players attempt to place numbered cards down into a central pile in ascending order without any communication allowed. It's extremely simple but if everybody 'buys in' it can lead to some absolutely thrilling sequences.

Tokaido comes to mind - it's a game about taking the most relaxing vacation in Japan, collecting items and experiences along the way, simple linear progression of moving your piece.

The other suggestions are also great - hope you have a great gaming experience!

Cash n Guns is a really fun, goofy social game where everyone plays as mafia members fighting over the loot after a heist. You get a handful of cards that are mostly blanks, with 3 real bullets mixed in. Everyone points these goofy foam guns at each other at the same time and everyone has to decide whether or not they think they person aiming at them is bluffing and whether you want to risk staying in that round or not. It's really silly fun and is 100% made by the foam gun props.

Try Skullking. Or Sushi Go Party. Especially Skullking was an unexpected hit among groups of people I played with. Dale of Merchants?

It's tough to think of board games that are under 1 hour to play in groups.

There are some wild recs on here for 65+ non-gamers (trust me, alien fighting likely won’t be for this boomer set). But the Carcassonne/Ticket to Ride crews are right on the money. Carcassonne can feel like working on a puzzle together, easily relatable experience. Ticket to Ride is rummy the board game. Both give you a chance to chill and talk.

Honestly, I’d even consider shying away from Forbidden Island/Desert for now. They are great, very easy, just not what I’d put as a holiday older family game.

If you get a group, 4+ people, try Just One.

Ticket To Ride is our current crowd favourite, and you can play it with 2 to 5 players. There's also loads of different expansion boards you can play on, which slightly alter the game each time.

Lost Cities card game was recently recommended by the Eggplant podcast, and I completely agree with their recommendation for a good, easy to get into 2 play card game.

I suggest Apotheca, which fits all of those criteria, and is at its best with exactly 3 players (there's also a fun little "Hi-Q"-esque solitaire mode). To put it poorly, it's a competitive match-3 game. My parents, who don't play anything fancier than Rummikub, had a grand time with it, but more game-literate folk will have no problem seeing plenty of depth there.