If it’s true that a good game’s a fast game, these are some of the best games around.
The longer a game goes, the more likely it is to end in tears. So, in the service of family harmony, we’ve put together this guide to the best family-friendly games thatcan be played in less than half an hour, which coincidentally is the time it takes to resolve an average argument in Monopoly.
Poetry for Neanderthals
The aim is to get your team to guess what word is on your card, but you can’t use words of more than one syllable. If you think that’s easy, I spent several minutes trying to do it in the previous sentence only to fall at the final syllable. And, unlike me, you’ll be working under intense time pressure and your opponents will have an inflatable club with which they’ll hit you if you say a word that’s longer than one vowel sound. PFN is worth the RRP for the marketing slogan alone: “A word game where you must speak good or get hit with stick.”
Part of the genre of games known as “push your luck”, of which Blackjack is the most well known, Flip 7 comes down to a single question: “Should I pick up one more card?” The game requires you to calculate probabilities, count cards, employ telekinesis, make guesses, or do whatever else you think might prove helpful. The more cards you pick up, the more points you get, but if you get a duplicate of a card you already have, you lose everything. There are some “action” cards that allow you to mess with the natural order, but as with all the best games, what makes Flip 7 great is its simplicity.
Ages 8+
Flip 7.
Telestrations
This is effectively a drawing version of the game “Telephone”, in which you whisper something to your neighbour and they whisper what they heard to their neighbour and so on until the last person tells everyone what they’ve heard and everyone laughs. Like all the best games, Telestrations scales perfectly from family games night to intoxicated party night, meaning it offers not just a great time but also great ROI.
It looks like Tetris, and it’s primarily a test of your spatial intelligence like Tetris, but it’s otherwise nothing like Tetris. Players take turns putting blocks of different shapes into a confined space until all the space is gone. Whoever uses most of their blocks wins. The key to the game is that each block must be placed so it touches a corner (and only a corner) of one of their previously-placed blocks. If you think that sounds like a weird and arbitrary rule, that’s probably because you’re not a spatial genius like Bernard Tavitian, the mathematician who invented it and later sold it to Mattel for what was presumably a carefully calculated sum.
Ages 7+
Block Party
This game is often described as Pictionary but with coloured blocks, and while, like Pictionary, you have to get people to guess a word by depicting it, the actual gameplay is wildly different. For starters, you’re building rather than drawing, there are no teams, and everybody makes different buildings at the same time, except for one person whose job is to guess what they all are. Also, there are different rules for each build (try to use most / fewest blocks, most / fewest colours, tallest, fastest etc. It’s fun, creative and almost certain to end with a kid furious at you for not being able to tell that four blocks of the same colour in a square is a house.
Ages 8+
Block Party.
Blank Slate
A game in which the aim is to try to figure out what is going on inside the heads of all the other players. Good luck if you’re playing with your kids. One person reads a word off a card and everyone else has to write down a word that turns it into a two-word phrase. For instance, if someone reads out the word “Blank”, you might write “Stare” or “Cheque”. Your aim is to have exactly one person write the same thing as you. If they do, you get three points. If more than one person does, you get one point. If no one does, you get no points.
Ages 8+
Dixit.
Dixit
Everyone is dealt cards with pictures on them. Each round someone takes a turn to be the “storyteller”. They pick one of their cards and give everyone a clue as to what it is. The magic of the game is that the beautiful pictures are deliberately difficult to describe and you want your clue to induce at least one player, but not all players, to later correctly pick your card out of a pile. Once the storyteller has given their clue, every other player contributes one of their cards to the pile, hoping other players will believe theirs to be the storyteller’s. Everyone then tries to guess the correct card. The game was created by a child psychiatrist and has been used in institutional settings to help with thinking, imagination and communication. It’ll make you feel like your kids are getting better at life.
