The Tabletop Family 2018 Board Game Gift Guide!

The gifting season is upon us! If you’re anything like us, putting a list together can feel a little intimidating. There are so many options out there, it can be hard to narrow it down and choose what is the best for you, your kids, and your family. 

We believe that one of the best gifts you can give are board games! (surprising, right?) Board games bring people together for wonderful quality time, challenge the mind, and provide hours and hours of joy as they are continually brought back to the table for multiple plays. 

But some of the best games you can buy for you and your family aren’t always advertised in the toy catalogs, so we’re here to help you navigate the dense and diverse market of games available to you! 

To help in your search for the perfect games to add to your list, we’ve broken it down into these categories:

Family Games
Littlest Gamers (2-5 years)
Young Gamers (5-8 years)
Teenagers and Adults
Party Games
Stocking Stuffers + Gift Exchange

In each category we’ll give you a list of some of our favorite games that fit within this category, and we’ll also let you know what games we are looking at for our own Wish Lists this year and why! 

So without further ado, let’s get to it!

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Family Games

Games that a wide variety of ages can play are always a hit. The key components to these games are easy to learn rules, creative mechanics, and relatively quick play times. These will be a hit whether your gamers are 8 or 88.

Ticket to Ride: You cannot go wrong with this modern classic. We have had the base game for years and it is still played frequently all throughout the year. This game is great to introduce non-gamers to the hobby, and to challenge experienced gamers as well. If you already have the standard game or know someone who loves this, we recommend looking into the varied and many expansions for this game. There are many different maps that feature different locations and countries that increase the difficulty and add new challenges from the standard game. One of our favorite expansions is the Volume 5: United Kingdom & Pennsylvania maps. We love the addition of set collection and share acquisition in the Pennsylvania map! 

King of Tokyo: If you know how to play Yahtzee, you can play this game, promise! King of Tokyo is a hit with everyone as players take on the role of monsters, robots, and aliens all battling each other to be the lone remaining King of Tokyo. One of the main reasons why we like this game is because it is fun for a wide variety of ages. Our 6 year old can play this one without it feeling like a kid game. 

Isle of Skye: This is our go-to for people who are ready for that “next step” board game but who aren’t ready for a 2+ hour strategy session. We love everything about this game, from the selling of tiles, placement strategy, and the money management! Because there are so many different scoring tiles, each game will feel different and will cause players to switch up their strategies and tactics from game to game, keeping it feeling fresh for years to come. This beauty is evergreen!

Flash Point: Fire Rescue: If cooperative play is more your thing then you might love the fast play and fun strategy involved in Flash Point: Fire Rescue! You and your teammates will work together to save people from a burning building by extinguishing fires, locating people, and getting them to safety before the building collapses. It’s a fun game where each turn moves quickly and plays satisfyingly under an hour. Because of the randomness added in by the dice, the double sided board, and the included expert variant rules, this game stays fresh and challenging with endless replayability! There are also a few expansions available as well for those expert firefighters looking for a different challenge!

Azul: It’s always good to have an abstract strategy game on your shelf that is beautiful, unique, and offers decent strategy and Azul definitely hits this sweet spot! Players take turns drafting colored tiles for their player board. You score points based on how you’ve placed your tiles on your board with extra points scored for specific patterns and completed sets with wasted tiles costing you points. Player with the most points wins. This is a true, blue abstract strategy game but it is a lot of fun and just stunning to look at. You can find it pretty easily as it has broken through the hobby wall to secure itself a spot on Target’s shelves. If you want to test it out before purchasing to see if it is a good fit for you, we talk about how you can easily make this game at home in this post right HERE! 

What family game are we looking at for our wish list?

Welcome To…: We finally got our hands on this little Flip-and-Write (the new, less random cousin of the Roll-and-Write) and we see what all the hype is about! It’s a fun little strategy puzzle where you must design the best new town by choosing one of the three number/action card combinations (instead of dice) available and mark them on your score sheet. You’ll fill in your house numbers in numerical order, just like on a real street, and take the action to try and increase your point value through building pools, parks, or duplicating valuable housing numbers. Available to the group are three public goals that everyone is racing to complete before the game ends. This game is all the rage right now and hard to come by, we actually kickstarted it for its second printing to secure ourselves a copy, but if you can find it its a great addition to any game shelf as it plays 1- however many you’d like!

Littlest Gamers

Finding quality games for young children ages 2-5 isn’t always easy. When walking the aisles of target or Walmart the best titles certainly aren’t readily available that truly provide a quality gaming experience that not only engages but teaches young kids the very fundamentals of game play. You can purchase any of these titles with confidence that not only will your kids love them, but you won’t hate playing them either!

My Very First Games: First Orchard: First Orchard by Haba is our go-to game recommendation for parents looking to introduce their kids to board games for the first time. Not only is it the perfect length (<15 minutes), and cooperative, but it is also a great way to sneak in a bit of learning as well! If you’d like to read our in-depth review of why we love First Orchard so much you can find that HERE!

Here Fishy Fishy!: This is another Haba “My Very First Games” game and it is probably the best one we have found for the truly little under-2 gamer. It has a great toy factor, and is fun, colorful, and most importantly sturdy for those sweet little hands to grasp and transfer. Toddlers can work on their hand-eye coordination and color recognition as they roll the dice and attempt to snag the correct fish with their magnetic fishing rod, or parents and toddlers can just have fun as they go fishing and not worry about the rules just yet. Either way, this game is made of quality materials you’d expect from Haba and will stand up to whatever they put it through. 

Hisss!: Hisss is another all time favorite for our youngest gamers. It’s a fun game that begins to sprinkle in the concept of winning and losing but you can choose to keep it completely non-competitive and cooperative if that’s more your jam. You’ll mix up a whole bunch of sturdy card board tiles that all have pieces of a snake on it, (head, body, or tail.) Each part of the snake is either one or two colors and on your turn you must select a tile and match its color to another tile, building a colorful snake. If a player completes a snake, making a snake with a head, tail, and at least one body tile, then they get to collect it for themselves. When the center tiles run out and no more snakes can be made, the player with the most tiles from completed snakes wins!

Young Gamers

Young children ages 5-8 are some of the most fun ages to game with. Seriously! They are voracious learners and are so excited to start playing “big” games with the adults but maybe aren’t quite ready for the family game genre. Lean into that and get them titles that will challenge and excite them without being overwhelming that will also be a fun experience for the whole family.

Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters: This may be the most perfect kid game available. No seriously. We love it! It is fun for kids, adults, and it comes jam packed with some of the best game components you will ever find inside a kid’s game box! You’ll take on the role of Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters and you must bravely inter a haunted house, fight ghosts, stop Haunts, and get all 8 pieces of treasure out before the house becomes too haunted. It’s awesome, and yes, we have played it without our kids before! If you want to read our full review of this game you can find that HERE! 

Monza: Haba’s Monza is a fun introduction to strategy games for the younger audience that still clocks in under 15 minutes play time. You’ll roll dice with colors on them and then use those colors to make the best combinations to move your car on the color coded board as you race your car to the finish line. We talk about this game in more depth in THIS POST about why it is one of our top three favorite Haba games. 

Chicken Cha Cha Cha: Memory games are fun, but the old tile grid can get boring. Enter Chicken Cha Cha Cha! Your chickens are learning to dance and need to complete circuits around the yard. Players are trying to “cha cha” their way past every other player’s chicken, nabbing their tail feather in the process, the first person to get all the tail feathers wins. The chickens move around the board by players correctly selecting the image on the tile in front of the chicken from the face down tiles in the center of the table. This game is easily scaled down for younger players (we’ve played with as our son when he was 3) by limiting the number of matching sets from 12 down to 6, increasing the sets as they get better and better. The components are sturdy and the wooden chickens are cute and will hold up to overzealous little players. 

Magic Labyrinth: We love this game! You must navigate a maze to collect different items. The first person to collect five items wins the game – there’s just one catch, no one can see the maze because it’s hidden under the board! Players move a magnetized wizard on top of the board while below a small ball is sliding along the underside and must attempt to avoid the path blockers that can stop and knock the ball down, forcing the player to start over. We play this game not only because it is fun, but because it is a great way to teach kids the importance of perseverance, which we talk about in depth in HERE!

What are we looking at for our Wish List?

Dragon’s Breath: Whenever a game wins the Kinderspiel des Jahres we’re interested, when it’s a Haba game, we’re doubly interested! This is a set collection, dragon themed game where players “melt” the ice ring that holds all the treasure they want to bring back to their cave. It looks beautiful and as we have come to expect from Haba the components appear top notch, since winning the award however it has been hard to come by, going in and out of stock. But we’ve got our eyes focuses on this one hoping to snag a copy for the kids before Christmas arrives.  

Teenagers + Adults (Strategic Games)

Ready for a bigger challenge? Lets do it! Here are a list of games that are great for players that are looking for a higher difficulty level, more player interaction, and tougher choices. These titles will provide just that! 

Orleans: One of our top favorite games, Orleans is a bag building game where players must assemble farmers, merchants, knights, monks, and more to gain supremacy through trade, construction and science. Rather than drafting cards and building a deck, you will place your workers on action spots that will then score you either more workers to use in your worker pool or points. At the start of the game you’ll be using all the turns you can afford to gain more followers which you will then put into your bag to be drawn blind and used in subsequent turns. That’s not all though, you’ll also have to manage the trade map where you’ll want to move along the routes to collect the finest goods and build trade posts that will all score you points in the end. There are many paths to victory in Orleans and a multitude of strategies you can employ from game to game giving this one high replayability and one you’ll want to keep returning to again and again. This is a heavier game, but the rules are well written and easy to follow and play is relatively straight forward, even if you have a lot of options.

Mangrovia: This mid-weight euro style game is packed full of beautiful wooden pieces, a gorgeous board, and a strategic game that will have players battling over the best locations for their huts they must build to score points. If you build your huts the wisest you will win the game. Players must manage their hand, make sure that they control specific high value areas of the board, and place their action selectors wisely to give themselves the best options to do so. This is game that has a lot going on with lots of great options and paths for players to pursue but still clocks in just a touch over the hour mark for playtime, which is great! We love Mangrovia and have written a full review all about it which you can find HERE! 

Voluspa: Sometimes its good to have a smaller strategy game with a faster playtime that is quick to teach and for us Voluspa fits that bill. This is an abstract strategy game set in the theme of Norse Mythology. This is a tile placement strategy game where there are just 12 different tiles, each with their own powers and abilities, that players must use and place to score points. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins. You need to manage your hand and weigh options not only of what you need to do, but what might be in the best interest of your opponents and how you can best block them without harming your own game. There is a surprising amount of depth to this game with many different strategic opportunities and great replayability.

What game are we looking at for our wishlist? 

Clank! or Clank! In! Space!: Deck building is one of our favorite game mechanics. We are so excited by how Clank! Takes that mechanic to the next level by adding push your luck and spacial movement elements that keeps the style feeling fresh and unique. Now we just have to decide if we want a fantasy or a space theme. Decisions, decisions…

Party Games

Everyone loves a good party game! When you’ve got a big group, you’ll be looking for something that is fun, light, and original (read: not Pictionary!) that will get everyone involved, laughing, and having a good time.

Banned Words: This party game has been an utter smash hit for us this last year. In Banned Words, two teams go head to head over three rounds. At the start of each round, each team gets a card showing five words or phrases that the other team will have to guess. They then have to quickly write down up to sixteen words they think someone might use when trying to get their teammates to guess the words. Once the teams have written down the “banned” words, each team selects a clue giver and they then swap cards. Each team takes turns giving their clues during a time allotment. While team A is giving their clues, team B is listening for them to say one or more of the banned words they wrote down. If they do, team B scores a point while team A scores a point for each word their teammates correctly guessed. Banned Words is so much fun and feels like such a fresh spin on the sometimes overdone “guess the word” games.

Deception: Murder in Hong Kong: Who doesn’t love to pretend to be super smart investigators? In this game, you’ll all be trying to solve a murder case, except there’s just one problem…the killer is one of the investigators! Roles are randomly assigned to players at the start of the game, while investigators attempt to deduce the truth, the murderer and his/her team attempt to mislead the investigators without getting caught! The investigators will be helped along by the Forensic Scientist, a player who knows the solution but can only give clues to the investigators by using special scene tiles that help show investigators what is or is not important. If you love games where the action plays out by the players ability to interact and react to one another through deduction and misdirection, then you will definitely love this game. This game plays up to 12 players and it is definitely one you’ll want to play with a big group, but I feel like I must warn you, some of the cards are a bit graphic, so it may not be suitable for kids under the PG-13 zone.

The Chameleon: In The Chameleon, you have one of two goals. If you are the Chameleon, you want to keep your identity secret by blending in while attempting to deduce the secret word. If you are not the Chameleon, you try to figure out who is without giving away the secret word. At the start of the round, players are dealt cards that let them know if they are or aren’t the Chameleon. Then two dice are rolled that gives everyone except the chameleon coordinates to a specific word on a topic card. This is the secret word. Now everyone must come up with one word to say that relates to the secret word. If you are not the chameleon, you want to say something that is close enough to let everyone who knows the word know that you know the word, but isn’t so obvious that the Chameleon can figure out the world as well. If you’re the Chameleon, you just have to make an educated guess based on all the words in front of you and hope you get close. So simple, yet so fun.

Sushi Go!: A fast paced card drafting game that will definitely leave your tummy rumbling, Sushi Go! Bottles up all the fun had from a game like 7 Wonders and packages it into a tiny tin box game that can be played in under 30 minutes by kids as young as 6. Can I get an AMEN?? This is a simple draft and pass game with simple rules that’ll get a lot of play time as it offers players the ability to quickly strategize and make combinations and blocks and they decide which cards to keep and which cards to pass. The original game plays up to 5 and is one of our go-to games to play when starting off a night of games. If you’ve got a larger crowd, consider looking into Sushi Go Party! Which plays up to 8 in an expanded version of the game that still keeps the play time under 30 minutes. 

Games we’re looking at for our wish list:

Hail Hydra: We are huge Marvel fans. Marvel Legendary is one of, if not our most favorite game. We also are big fans of social deduction and deception games. So when a game comes along that combines both of those things, we are incredibly interested. Similar in vein to The Resistance, players will take on the roles of Marvel superheroes while trying to figure out which members are secretly Hydra members. (…..hail hydra!) 

Stocking Stuffers + Gift Exchange

Did you know that there are some amazing games that can fit in your pocket? These are the perfect games to get when you are looking for a small, inexpensive purchase to sweeten a stocking or be the coveted “non-gag” White Elephant gift that everyone wants! 

Quixx!: This is, without a doubt, our most gifted game. This little roll-and-write is a fun, simple game that plays quickly and still makes you think as you must cross off numbers in ascending or descending order based on what is rolled and leveraging your likelihood to get more points out of a color category. We like this one so much we even own two copies and keep one permanently in our van’s glovebox just in case we need to break out a game on short notice. If we come to a White Elephant exchange, there’s a good chance this is what we brought. There is also a deluxe version with dry erase boards so you never have to worry about running out of sheets.

Unlock!: Do you like the escape room experience? Wish you could get that puzzle solving thrill for much cheaper and without a group full of strangers telling you what to do? So did we! That’s why we purchased the Unlock! Escape adventures put out by Asmodee, and let me tell you, we loved them so much we bought every single one and gifted them to all our family members! These were a complete hit at our Christmas gatherings last year and they could be at yours this year too! If you’re not sure if you’d like them, we talk about how you can print and play your own demo copy of these (straight from the publisher!) to try it out before you buy in THIS POST!

Spot it!: Here is another game that is fun to play with a wide variety of ages that comes in a package so small you can fit it in your coat pocket or purse easily! In this game everyone will be racing to match an image on their card with the active card. First one to “Spot it!” and say it out-loud gains the active card to their victory pile. It comes in many different versions so you can find the one that best suits your needs. If you’re wondering about the younger ages, we have the original game and play it with our 4 year old son with no problems. 

Skull King: This game is a fantastic one to pull out with the card players in your family. It is fun new take on the classic trick taking mechanic. It feels familiar to Up and Down the River, but still unique and challenging as it incorporates the pirate theme perfectly and adds special card powers that really up the strategy without making it too difficult for younger players to grasp. This game is all about having a great time with your family and you’ll all be laughing as you say “Yo, Ho, Ho” and throw out your bids. Players who get their bid right are awarded points, those who missed their bid lose points. The player with the most points at the end of the game is the winner and the loser does the dishes! What’s not to love? 

Rory’s Story Cubes: We’ve had Rory’s Story Cubes forever and absolutely love them as a stocking stuffer for children. In this game you have 9 six-sided dice where instead of numbers each side has a different picture representing a story element. On your turn you roll the dice and then attempt to tell a short story that incorporates all of the story elements rolled. This is a phenomenal way to encourage your children to craft stories, use their imagination, and work on their speaking skills! Don’t think its just for children though! We’ve had this since before our kids as its a fun little improv game or party game where you can have each person add to the story in a “yes and” type play and work on crafting cohesive storylines and find unifying themes!  

Happy Salmon: Like a game that gets loud fast? Great, then you’ll love Happy Salmon, where there are no turns and everything happens all at once in this silly, fast paced card game. Each player has a small deck of cards that tells them various actions that they must match up and perform with another player. “High 5,” “Pound it”, and the weird fish arm smacking “Happy Salmon” are just some of the actions players will perform together when they make a match. Make a match, discard the card. First to discard all their cards wins! It’s weird but also weirdly fun and everyone loves it, even the pre-game skeptics (which I might have been).  

What game are we looking at adding to our collection in this category?

The Mind: Is it a game? Is it an experiment? We don’t know! We haven’t played it, but we want to! This game contains a deck of numbered cards, 1-100, and a variety of levels that players attempt to complete. You receive a handful of cards equal to the number of the level and players must discard cards to the discard pile in ascending order without communicating with each other in any way as to which cards they have. Basically you just gaze into each others souls and attempt to telepathically deduce when the time is right for you to play your lowest card. If no one holds a card lower than yours, then play continues, if they do, well then you blew it for everyone! Just kidding, you lose a life, but if it was your last life then you did blow it for everyone. Could we print this out and play it….yes, but we want to own the actual copy so this guy is on the wish list! Due to popularity though, it’s kind of hard to come by, so keep your eyes peeled!