£19.99, age 8+, 10-15 minutes
The bestselling railway route-building game Ticket to Ride sees players battle to connect cities across North America, racing to seize vital stretches of track. This smaller, faster version shifts the action to the streets of London, replacing the original’s plastic trains with double-decker buses. With fewer, shorter routes up for grabs, it is not only quicker than the original, it is also tighter, meaner and more competitive, with plenty of opportunities to wreck your rivals’ plans.
£26.99, age 10+, 30 minutes
An elegant game of renaissance jewel merchants, Splendor challenges you to develop a network of mines, trade routes and glittering showrooms, attracting the rich and powerful to marvel at your collections of diamonds and rubies. Underneath its dazzling theme, though, it is a ruthless and economical game, where you will fight for resources and try to constantly think a few turns ahead. It gets surprisingly aggressive and it is hard to stop at just a single play-through.
£12.99, age 6+, 10-15 minutes
Essentially a souped-up version of snap, Dobble consists of a deck of circular cards. Each shows a collection of different images – lightning bolts, trees, candles, clocks and others – distributed so that any two cards share only a single picture. As you play you will reveal cards and hunt for the matching pairs, aiming to shout them out before your rivals. It is quick to set up and explain, and simple enough to play with young kids. Annoyingly, they usually turn out to be much better at it than grownups.
£17.99, age 8+, 15 minutes
A game of rival rulers competing to build prosperous domains, Kingdomino revolves around a shuffled stack of tiles showing different types of terrain – seas, forests, grasslands, plains and caverns. To win, you will need to join matching areas together in point-scoring configurations. But with your opponents all hunting for the best tiles, it takes some careful planning, packing a lot of fun into a very small box.
£16.99, age 13+, 20 minutes
Team-based games hold a special place in many players’ hearts, providing a chance to bond with your teammates or spectacularly fall out with one another. Taboo sees competitors try to help their companions guess a series of words printed on cards, but each comes with a list of phrases that you are not allowed to use in your description. Could you describe bacon without saying pig, egg, breakfast or sausage? With a strict time limit adding to the pressure, it is much harder than it sounds.
£17.99, age 6+, 10 minutes
Quilt sewing might not seem like the most ruthlessly competitive of activities, but this two-player game throws you and an opponent into a battle for crafting supremacy. You will each start with a blank board, adding new scraps of fabric to your design as you play. Fitting them together is an evolving spatial puzzle; the game also uses a clever system where bigger or more complex pieces take longer to stitch, meaning you can sometimes sneak a win using smaller, apparently less useful patches.
£12.99, age 8+, 5 minutes
This fast-paced word game comes with a collection of dice showing different letters on each side. In each round, players shake the box to jumble them up, then try to spot connected words in the resulting mix of vowels and consonants. It is quick and undeniably addictive, but if you are looking for some more modern lexicological fun, also check out the brilliant Wordsy and Letterpress.
£17.99, age 8+, 20 minutes
An ingenious party game, each round of Just One sees one player trying to guess a word printed on a card visible to everyone around the table except themselves. To help them out, you will write down a one-word clue. For instance, to nudge someone towards the word circus, you might write clown, lion or tent. The tricky bit is that if any players choose the same word, the guesser will not get to see it, depriving them of vital information. This means you will need to find less obvious ways to guide people towards the answer.
£24.99, age 5+, 20 minutes
On first inspection, Blokus looks like a tranquil kaleidoscope built from coloured plastic tiles. But beneath its laid-back veneer there is a savagely competitive game where players try to snatch as much territory as possible on its square-grid board. Each block you place must touch corner to corner with another of your pieces, but you can never place them edge to edge. It means space quickly evaporates and you will hunt for spots to hold your awkwardly shaped bits while blocking off your opponents. The only downside is that it really requires four players.
£52.99, age 10+, 40-70 minutes
As avid birdwatchers, you and your rivals aim to spot the broadest possible variety of avian species. To do that, you will need to build habitats that attract different birds, catering to their desires for food and nesting locations. It is an absorbing challenge, but what really stands out about Wingspan is its gorgeous illustrations, like something from a birdwatcher’s guidebook, as well as the painstaking research that has gone into ensuring that each species in the game feels and acts like its real-world inspiration.
£12.99, age 6+, 5-10 minutes
If there is anything kids love more than building things, it is watching them fall down. This classic stacking game satisfies both these deeply ingrained desires, with players pulling wooden blocks from a dangerously tottering tower and laying them carefully on top without bringing them crashing to the table. While we would never recommend such a thing, we hear that for grownups, a couple of drinks only adds to the challenge.
£44.99, age 8+, 20-40 minutes
This game, inspired by the Danish capital, sees players constructing brightly coloured houses along the city’s waterfront. Like a kind of tabletop Tetris, it challenges you to assemble differently shaped bricks to create a striking facade. Along the way you will gain useful power-ups, letting you pull off special actions to complete your masterpiece before your rivals. It is simple, intuitive and brain-ticklingly satisfying.
£23.99, age 10+, 25 minutes
This game of rival property developers comes smothered in 1950s Americana, with its orderly rows of suburban houses tucked behind white picket fences. In each round, you and your opponents flip over a selection of cards to reveal an assortment of houses and amenities, choosing the ones you want to scribble on your personal scoring sheets. Along the way, you will aim to hit a variety of targets set by the mayor’s office to earn extra points. It is charming and challenging in equal measure, and as an added bonus, its artwork flips tired 1950s gender stereotypes on their heads.
£12.99, age 10+, 20 minutes
Space is big. You might think that would allow everyone to share it nicely, but you would be wrong. This two-player card game sees you become the head of a powerful galactic faction, building ships and orbital bases to cement your military and economic might, while launching raids to reduce your opponent’s forces to drifting clusters of space junk. While it comes with a grand sci-fi theme, Star Realms’ real draw is its simple deck-building system, where you start with a handful of cards and gradually upgrade them as you add more lethal ships to your interstellar navy.
£46.99, age 8+, 20 minutes
The Greek gods have decided to construct a beautiful town on the island of Santorini, and this brainy construction game tasks players with building clusters of towers to please the deities. Each god in the game comes with their own special power, and match-ups between different characters come with different tactical possibilities. It combines real depth, variety, replayability and stunning 3D presentation.
£34.99, age 8+, 30-45 minutes
The fast-paced Formula One racing game Downforce puts you behind the wheel of a superfast car hurtling around one of two tracks on its double-sided board. On your turn, you will play a card from your hand showing how many spaces your vehicle can advance. But the cards you play also move your opponents forward, and you will have to think tactically, creating choke points and bottlenecks that allow you to open up a lead over the rest of the pack.
£13.49, age 12+, 60-120 minutes
Escape games – where players uncover clues to break out of a sealed room – have become a hot trend in recent years, and this series of small-box releases aims to recreate the experience. Packed with interlinked brain teasers, it tests your powers of logic, observation and lateral thinking in all sorts of inventive ways. With multiple versions available, you will be able to explore a sinister lab, escape a haunted mansion and solve a murder on a famous steam train in a manner similar to, but legally distinct from, a popular detective novel.
£54.99, age 10+, 480+ minutes
This game of murder and intrigue features a branching narrative system similar to the classic Fighting Fantasy game books, but it is no bandwagon-jumping copycat; it comes with a host of clever touches that are entirely its own. Players become investigators attempting to expose a sinister plot against a noble family, and it boasts memorable characters, snappy pacing and a brilliantly rendered fantasy village setting that feels genuinely alive. While it supports up to six players, it is best with one or two – an adventure you will be glad to sink hours of play into.
£29.99, age 8+, 20-30 minutes
A quick, light but deceptively deep game by the veteran designer Reiner Knizia, Blue Lagoon revolves around Polynesian tribes exploring and settling on a verdant chain of islands. As your people spread across the board, they claim territory and resources, while founding villages to cement their presence on their newfound homes. But with space limited, the competition for prime spots quickly becomes heated and you will look for ways to block off your rivals’ access to the most attractive bits of the archipelago.
£36.99, age 10+, 45 minutes
This masterpiece of crisis management and rising tension puts players in the shoes of a team of medics responding to deadly disease outbreaks around the globe. It steadily ramps up the level of danger as you play, with infections leaping from city to city as you frantically treat the sick and research cures. The only way to overcome the threat is to work together, which now seems eerily prescient.
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