18 board games that will keep your brain fit - and everyone entertained

Regular board game sessions can slow cognitive decline, improve memory, reduce depression and enhance the quality of life, especially among older individuals. Photo / 123rf

Doing your Christmas shopping this weekend? Research has found that playing board games can slow cognitive decline, so add one to your basket and give your family’s minds a collective workout this festive season.

Keeping your grey matter in shape is just a couple of dice-rolls away, according to scientists. Research presented at the World Congress of Neurology in October found that regular board game sessions can slow cognitive decline, improve memory, reduce depression and help with quality of life, particularly among older people.

This will come as no surprise to the legions of board game fans, a group that has swelled in number over the past five years, fuelled by the rise of board game cafes and people’s desire to de-tech their lives. Indeed, figures show we’re living through a gaming golden age – there are more varieties of tabletop games (as board games are now known) released each year than at any other time in history. The pandemic reintroduced a lot of people to the pleasures of scheming, strategising and bluffing over cards and counters, and the revival continues apace. Last year the global board games market was worth more than $18.5 billion, and it’s forecast to grow to $41b by 2030.

If you’re reading this and reminded of childhood Christmases spent limping through endless games of Monopoly, then it’s time to give board games a second go. A new school of design that came out of Germany in the 1980s has done away with games that run on forever or where you can be knocked out and have to sit on the sidelines, snarking at other players’ inept tactics while the game grinds to a conclusion. Some of these have become huge hits – take strategy title Catan, which has sold 32 million copies around the world. So why not refresh your collection with some new titles, build a mental gym to banish the brain fog, and tone up your cerebellum in time for 2024?

Here is a selection that will stretch your cognitive function and guarantee some fun for all the family, too.

Best game for memory

Trivial Pursuit is more than 40 years old, and has evolved beyond the classic green box to be faster and smarter, with different play-modes and a timer to encourage slow-coaches to get on with it. Try playing in teams, or giving players a number of Mastermind-style passes to get different questions. For those with kids, there’s a family edition, with a separate set of questions specifically for children. Alternatively, Articulate has a faster vibe and encourages imagination and lateral thinking.

Trivial Pursuit has evolved over the years with different play modes and faster gameplay, making it a great choice for memory enhancement. Photo / 123rf

Best for strategy and reasoning

Cluedo is still a great introduction to logical deduction and puzzle-solving, but the modern classic Scotland Yard introduces a fantastic social angle to the mix. One player is the enigmatic Mister X, escaping across a map of London, while the other players are detectives who must work out where he is and where he’s going, based only on knowing what type of transport he’s on. They have to work together and co-ordinate their moves to trap him while he listens to their plans and tries to find a hole in their net. It’s a wonderfully tense 45 minutes.

Best for visual memory

Dixit is a delightful game of pairing cards with beautiful surreal art to clever phrases, trying to convince the other players that your image is the closest to the phrase. If that sounds a little too whimsical then Micro Macro is half puzzle, half game, played on a giant poster-map of Crime City, which if the name didn’t give it away is a city full of bad stuff. Across 16 different cases you have to identify the victims and perpetrators, spot locations and evidence, and work out what happened. Surprisingly replayable, it’s like Where’s Wally? with more plot and murder.

Dixit involves pairing cards with beautiful art to clever phrases. Photo / 123rf

Best for spatial reasoning

The Italian research recommends the classic Asian game Go, which some claim is better than chess, but it can take a lifetime to master. Carcassonne, named after the medieval-era town in France, is a more approachable game of laying tiles to build and control towns, roads, farms and monasteries. Easy to learn and fast to set up, its tactical depths become clear the more you play, and the moment someone realises you can block other players from finishing their constructions, it becomes surprisingly vicious. Finding the right place to play your tile becomes increasingly hard as the map grows and by the end, whoever wins will have built a whole kingdom.

Carcassonne is a popular family board game, inspired by the medieval-origin French town of the same name. Photo / 123RF

Best for verbal-linguistic intelligence

Codenames comes from the Czech Republic. Don’t be fooled by its thin veneer of espionage elements because this is a fiendishly clever game of identifying words from a grid of cards, based on a single-word clue. If the spymaster says, “Formula, three cards,” you might choose “scientist”, “maths” and “car” ... or “board”. Two teams of agents compete to identify their own spies, while not accidentally revealing any bystanders (bad), enemy agents (very bad) or the assassin (disaster). It works well with larger groups.

Best for social intelligence

The Mind is a brilliant co-operative game where all players combine their efforts to succeed, either everybody wins or everybody loses. Its core idea is easy to explain: players get a hand of cards with numbers between one and 100, and together must play them face-up in the correct order, lowest to highest – but without speaking to each other. In round one everyone has one card, in round two everyone has two, and so on. What sounds simple becomes an interplay of tension and tentative moves, meaningful pauses, long looks, and trying to read cues and body-language. When it goes well it’s like magic, and beating the higher levels is as exhilarating as summiting a mental mountain.

Out with the old

If you still love the classics but fear they’re getting a little long in the tooth, then here are some alternatives that pack a similar punch.

Monopoly

Monopoly Deal is a cut-down, fast-playing version that keeps all the fun of the original but in a card game. Alternatively, Catan has you playing as tribes, competing to settle on an island, manage resources to extend your towns and cities, and out-compete your rivals.

Monopoly Deal is a card game that offers all the enjoyment of the classic Monopoly but in a fast-playing card format. Photo / Whitcoulls

Cluedo

Mysterium is about solving a crime but here you’re guided by the ghost of the victim, who communicates the murderer, location and weapon to you with dream-like cards. Or if you like accusing family members of horrible things, Werewolf is the game that the hit TV show The Traitors is based on – there are boxed versions you can buy but all the rules you need are on Wikipedia.

Scrabble

Bananagrams and Boggle both scratch the same word-making itch as the tile-laying classic, but if you want a change of pace, Qwirkle replaces the letters with coloured symbols, creating a game that’s just as tactical but delightfully different.

Twister

Yogi condenses the essence of the bone-cracking classic into a deck of cards: you’ll laugh just as hard, but will ache less in the morning.