Another vote for Dominion—my young adult kids and their friends played it non-stop Thanksgiving weekend. Also, someone brought!Cathedral — board game for two—and my son-in-law really enjoyed it.
Has anybody tried Cards Against Muggles? Supposedly just like CAH (and just as amusingly rude), but entirely Harry Potter themed.
Loaded Questions- great to play with a group of 5 or more people who know each other at least fairly well (like dorm mates or family members)- you have to guess who wrote each answer to a question. Can range from as innocent or risque as the people playing it! I have played this one with family gatherings of people ages 8 through 78. Great fun!
Secret Hitler- another large group game- you have to figure out who the secret fascists are from their actions in the game. I have never played it myself, but I know high school kids like it.
Apples to Apples- another group game; if you enjoy words and nuances of word meanings, this game is lots of fun and brings about lots of laughter.
LOVE Settlers of Catan. I didn’t think it could get any better until I was introduced to Catan: Seafarers Edition. DOUBLE LOVE.
So, if they already love Catan, but haven’t ventured into the Seafarers Edition (with 5-6 player expansion), that would be my suggestion!
I’m going to put in a plug for Gloomhaven, for people who love games like Pandemic, Terraforming Mars and Settlers of Catan. This is NOT a party game but a gamers’ game. It is a legacy game, which means there is a storyline, and your group advances in the storyline each time. So each play of the game is different from the last play.
Gloomhaven is addictive, because it’s fun and because as you play, you open new content. At a conservative guess, I’ve played it 150 times and haven’t yet opened all the content yet.
There is a reason Gloomhaven rocketed to the #1 position on Boardgamegeek when it came out, and is still there. There’s a reason the first three printings sold out quickly. The reason is, a large percentage of people who have tried it love it.
Gloomhaven is cooperative, but the rules are cleverly and deliberately designed to prevent someone from taking over and directing all the other players’ plays. Each player secretly selects which cards to play each round, and the rules restrict what the group is allowed to discuss before players select which cards they will play.
@mathmom, I think you might like Gloomhaven.
Gloomhaven can be played by 1-4 players. To me, play with three players is best, but solo play, two-player games and four-player games are all also fantastic.
Ticket to Ride. If they already have the U.S. version, they might like the slightly harder Europe version. But I wouldn’t recommend trying the Europe version first.
Thank you all for the wealth of ideas.
@Cardinal Fang thanks for the suggestion. Since the boys took all the good games away, we need some that stay in our house - ones that work for one or two people as well as a crowd are welcome. I think Dominion is best with three or four though DH and I spent last summer playing with the new basic box.
Another vote for Cards Against Humanity!
Carcassonne is fun and has a lot of expansions to add to the fun. The rules are also simple enough that it’s not daunting to play the first time.
We spent a lot of the break playing dominoes. Not strictly a board game I know . . .
We had 4 generations playing Wits and Wagers last Christmas.
Dominoes…chicken or Mexican train
I like Carcassonne a lot, I just wish I were better at it. It’s not the way my mind works! It’s so pretty I don’t really mind losing and the game play is fun, but not so onerous you can’t also talk.
We are huge gamers and own a huge number of board games that get used all of the time. I agree that if you have been playing basic versions of Catan, Dominion, and even Ticket to Ride, expansion packs make the games better. I can’t imagine playing Catan without multiple expansions. They add so much dimenision to the game. Sails and Rails is by far my favorite Ticket to Ride game, but getting 1910 or 1912 expansions for the main ones still adds more challenge. Hinterlands and Prosperity are our favorite Dominion expansions. Alchemy makes a couple of my kids mad bc a few of the cards are very agrressive, so it might not be a good one. (One of our kids refuses to play if we use Alchemy.)
Some that we enjoy that haven’t been mentioned and are faster to play than Catan are Alhambra, Kingdom Builder, and Fresco. Dixit is a fun large group game that you can learn in seconds. It is also a game that can be played across a wide range of ages (just takes on different dimensions with different groups of players.)
For those who are not used to gaming, if you get a new game like Dominion or Catan where the directions are far more complicated than actual playing, see if you can find a YouTube video that teaches set up and basic play. It makes understanding the rules way easier than trying to read the directions without any context.
Anyone have a good suggestion for us that an almost 9 yr old who is used to playing games might enjoy? Our tradition is to open a game before Christmas and boardgamegeek over it. I looked at Terraforming Mars and Gloomhaven bc those are the types of games we like, but their complexity rating seems similar to Civilization and it is too complex for her. (Games that can be played with 5-6 players are also a preference bc we still have 3 kids plus our adult Aspie living at home.)
@Mom2aphysicsgeek Check out Castles of King Ludwig, though I think it’s only for 4 players so that would be an issue - two of the same game seemingly would expand it to eight. We enjoy that one too and I consider it easier than Terraforming Mars. It’s been a long time since I’ve had an 8-9 year old playing with us though.
Scrabble is our favorite board game! I’ll never forget how excited my son was the first time he beat us 
Gloomhaven is not too complex for an eight year old. Someone at the table has to understand the complexities of monster movement, but that somebody doesn’t have to be the eight year old. Lots of families play Gloomhaven with the kids.
The eight year old is going to be making decisions like, “I’ll go over there and attack and poison that Inox Archer with my Venom Shiv,” or “I’ll throw a rock over in the corner where the demons are.” Eventually, the eight year old will learn about more rules and more powers, but although there are many rules, they’re mostly intuitive.
Beware, though. You won’t be opening up Gloomhaven and playing it right away. Getting it organized the first time takes hours, and setup takes a while the first time few times you play. Still, that huge 20-pound box makes an impressive present under the tree.
Unfortunately, Gloomhaven is for 1-4 players, so if you want a game where 5 people play, it’s not ideal. (You can play with 5, and some people do, but this is something not provided for in the rules.)
If you want a game for five people, how about Small World? It’s a world of (s)laughter after all.
Here’s the basics of Gloomhaven, so you can judge whether it’s too complicated for your child:
Every player selects a character from those available. Initially, there are six characters to choose from, but as the campaign progresses, more are unlocked. One great thing for girls and women is that unlike in other games, about half of the characters are female.
The characters will play a scenario. Every scenario is different, but usually the shared goal is to go around a dungeon and kill all the monsters. If the players win by achieving their goal, they get to unlock more scenarios to play. If they lose, they can play the scenario again.
Each character has cards, all different from other players’ and different from each other. Each characters’ card hand size is different, but it’s about 10 cards. A card has an initiative number, a top action and a bottom action. The actions are things like move, attack, do some special action this character can do but nobody else’s can do, like go invisible so they can’t be attacked, buff the character so it takes less damage, etc. Each turn, the player secretly selects two of those cards to play, and one of the initiative numbers on one of the cards.
Then all the cards and initiatives and the monsters’ actions and initiatives are revealed. Then, in order of initiative, the players and monsters do their actions. On their turn, the player selects one card’s top action and the other card’s bottom action and does them. On the monster’s turn, it does whatever its revealed action says it does. Monsters and characters have hit points. Once all the monster’s points are gone, it is dead and is removed from the board. A player can take an attack and lose hit points, or lose a card from her hand to mitigate damage from attacks, but once all a character’s hit points are gone, they are exhausted and are removed from the board.
Since the players can’t perfectly coordinate, and since they don’t know exactly what the monsters will do and when they’ll do it, plans are imperfectly and frequently foiled. Maybe I was planning to move early and attack that monster, but oh no, it goes before me and moves out of my way to attack someone else, for example. Maybe I was planning to have my turn after another player’s so they could help me, but oops, my initiative ends up before their initiative. Oh well.
After the player plays their cards, the cards are discarded (with some exceptions I won’t discuss here). After four, five or six rounds, the player has played and discarded all their cards. Now, they get back all the cards, except they lose one. This is the clock on the game; each time the player gets back one less card, plus there are other ways to lose cards, and eventually they will run out of cards and get exhausted. If the players meet the scenario goal before all are exhausted, they win. Otherwise, they lose.
There’s a lot else going on in Gloomhaven, but if the child can grasp what I’ve just written, they can play Gloomhaven and have tons of fun.
@“Cardinal Fang” Thank you for typing all of that out. I appreciate it. Since it is a collaborative game, it does sound like something she could probably handle. It also sounds like a game that our Aspie would like and finding a game that fits both of those criteria at the same time is next to impossible.
I have a 20% off coupon for B&N. I am going to try and see if it will work in the game.