Liar’s Dice is good for two people, but better with more.
Settlers of Catan is nominally for three or four people. What are the rule modifications to play with two? The essence of Settlers is trading with other players, but that makes no sense with only two.
Backgammon is another good two person game.
Regarding Settlers, we play with the Knights and Cities upgrade, which involves a large amount of strategy. There is still some trading (only if you want to) but the primary focus is on the many different pathways to the 13 points needed to win. So two players works very well.
I haven’t played backgammon in forever. There was a bar in town that had boards out on the table and a bunch of us would go after work; this was 40 years ago! I think we gave away the backgammon along with all the other games when we moved; not sure why we didn’t keep anything other than we were down sizing and figured we could rebuy if we really wanted something.
Matter of Fact is a great trivia game.
So, since I started this thread I thought I would give a post Christmas follow up.
What Do You Meme: Young adults really enjoyed it with lots of laughs. Very raunchy. Our generation tried playing with the young adults and it was uncomfortable especially for my kids LOL.
Sequence: enjoyable strategy/card game. Can be played with two or more players. Depending on number of people can be played individually or in teams.
Most Likely To: My son found this not too enjoyable. He was bored.
Settlers of Catan: Enjoyable strategy game with a learning curve.
Telestrations After Dark: BIGGEST HIT OF ALL. Adult version of Telestrations. Gut busting laughter and lots of fun. Great party game.
We had backgammon tournaments in middle school. I was obsessed for a long time and would play against my self. LOL! My son received a Bob Ross:Art of Chill board game for Christmas. The teens kiddos seemed to have fun, as there was loud laughing and claims of cheating.
Pandemic Legacy (Season 1) is proving to be an enormous hit in the Fang household. In plain Pandemic, players play various health care professionals traveling around the world trying to cure four infectious diseases (the Fang family call them Ebola in Africa, Yellow Fever in South America, SARS in Asia, and The Sniffles in Northern Europe and North America). The diseases keep spreading and popping up in various places around the globe, and the players must cooperate to eradicate them before a global pandemic happens. Each character has a special ability, to travel better or cure diseases better or cooperate with others better. So that’s fun.
Pandemic Legacy is the similar, but it’s a series of games. The game comes supplied with “secret dossiers” and sealed boxes of components. As you play, the disease situation gets worse, the game changes and the rules change, and in general things get worse-- but you don’t know what is going to happen until you are instructed to open up the secret dossier and make the instructed changes, all of which are permanent.
The first time a disease breaks out in a city, the city panics-- and you put a sticker on the city indicating it panics. The next time, it riots, making it more difficult to treat or cure the disease there. And this is permanent-- the next game, the city is already panicking or rioting. The first two times a character is an the outbreaking city, they get a “scar”, which makes their abilities worse. The third time, they die. The player rips the character card up and has to play a “civilian” with no special powers.
Players play one or two games each game month, from January to December, and once they finish December, with a game board and game cards covered with stickers indicating changes over the game, that’s it.
It’s like a cross between Pandemic and Dungeons and Dragons. We’ve finished February. So far we have no dead characters, and not too many panicking cities.
So far this break, my sisters and I have played Monopoly, Risk, and Bazaar. There’s also Clue, and of course chess. If you have an even number of people and more than 1 chess board you can play mini tournaments.
I’m the super competitive sort too. I win Monopoly almost all of the time, and when we play Risk with 2 or 3 people I usually win faster than at Monopoly. My sisters are better at Bazaar, and none of us is good at Clue (if my mom plays, she wins). Chess is fun imo. You can also play as teams to decide the best moves. (I’m a tournament player, though.)
So this was a banner year for games. The kids ended up getting Secret Hitler, Small World, 7 Wonders, Puerto Rico, Snake Oil, Code Names, Go and Japanese the game. Right now they are playing Small World but Go has also been very popular.
Left Center Right was a blast to play with a five year old and 4 adults. Thanks!
Passed the time and was entertaining. No one kept the winnings (we used quarters) because we
had to play over and over and over.
We seem to need some new games. We all suddenly were tired of what we always play. Went back to our old Harry Potter Trivia game this last week from the very first book that is quite difficult (and D2 pretty much always wins). Every other HP game that came out after was silly or too easy, in our opinions. We agreed that everyone would seek out a suggestion for one new game we should get for our next get together (spring break).
Exploding Kittens was a lot of fun. Perfect because it’s super quick to learn and games are short. We played it a lot.
Codename Words is easier than Codename Pictures (think I like words better but not sure). The picture one was fun but took longer.
Code Names was a multigenerational hit at our gathering. Thanks to those who made and supported that suggestion.
^^^^
us too
@oregon101 Glad to hear you enjoyed the game. When my nieces were little, they played with small candy pieces (skittles, M&M, etc…) and ate the winnings! This allowed them to play multiply games like you did; we have also played with poker chips, but for Thanksgiving we play for money.
For new to us games we got Code Names Pictures. Everyone liked it more than the original Code Names. We also got Ethnos which was a fun board game - many different ways to win because there are so many different ways to collect points. Before we played we watched this review which had us in stitches: https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/videos/review-ethnos/ Then we watched a much more sober how to video that was more helpful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNfpSfEQaL8
Want to add one more suggestion, though it’s not actually a board game. We played Drawful2 ( https://jackboxgames.com/project/drawful2/ ) which you set up on the computer but play by drawing on your smart phones. It’s a very silly version of Pictionary. The fact that no one can draw on their phone is a plus. There were seven of us playing - it’s hard to find games for seven people that still move fast enough!
“We didn’t playtest this at all” is a lot of fun.
Settlers of Catan & Cards Against Humanity are always popular.
We got Carcassonne and Kodama for Christmas and loved them both, although Kodama was more time-consuming than we expected. I’m sure part of that was a learning curve, but it also required a lot of decision making. My daughter also got a card game called 3 Up 3 Down that was surprisingly fun, given how easy it was to learn to play. And of course there was our old favorite, Dutch Blitz, which is always a lot of fun.