The Best Board Games for Adults, in my opinion. These aren’t in any order just some of my favorite adult games. I grouped like games together, so if you were planning on going out and buying new games you wouldn’t spend money on multiple similar games.
1. Catchphrase/ Hedbands (Ellen Degeneres’ Heads up app)/ Taboo
These games are charades style games. “Heads up” is really nice because they also have an app so you can easily bring it with you. Last I knew it was free for android users and about $1 for iPhone users. This is just for the basic version and you can buy more categories if you would like. With “Heads up” there are a few categories with slight variations that require you to sing or act. Taboo is a little more challenging because they give you a list of words you can’t say as clues, which are usually the most common words you would want to use.
2. Apples to Apples and Cards Against Humanity
Apples to Apples is the more kid friendly/people that get offended easily version. If you have a good sense of humor you will get some funnier cards and have a better time with the cards against humanity version.
For Scattergories you start by roll a letter dice to determine the letter you all of your words/names/phrases must begin with that round. Each player gets a board and lists of categories and you have three minutes to try and think of something for each category. Each one-word answer is worth a point. However, if you have proper nouns that both begin with the same letter, each word/name is worth a point. ie. Ronald Regan.
5. Ticket to Ride
You start the game out by randomly drawing “tickets” which are the routes. The object of the game is to get the most points by completing those routes on the map game board. On each player’s turn, you have an opportunity to draw colored train cards, build a train route, or draw more routes. To build the route you will need the proper number and color train cards as the board indicates. At the end of the game the player with the longest consecutive route gets an additional 10 points. There are also a European version, an anniversary edition, and expansion packs. If you get board of the original edition the expansion pack adds extra routes and variation of rules to change up the game and make it more interesting.
6. Dutch Blitz
This is a card game that reminds me of a combination of the card games “Solitare,” “Speed,” and “500 Rummy.” There will be 4 piles of cards: Blitz pile, Post piles, wood pile, and dutch piles. Like “Speed”, it is very fast paced and you want to be the first to get rid of all of your 10 “Blitz pile” cards. When a player goes out, every other player gets negative 2 points for every blitz card they have left, so this should be your main focus. Each player will have a “wood pile” and “post piles” which is similar to solitaire. Your “wood pile” is like your deck that you use to flip the cards over to play in descending order and every other card having to be a boy then a girl on the individual “post piles”. These help you have more places to get rid of your blitz cards. There will also be stacks of cards in the middle called the dutch piles that everyone can play off of. These will go in ascending order and have to be played on the same color card. Yes, this game has a lot going on. Even when you play the first few times there are so many things to think about, especially at such a fast pace, but once you get it down it’s fun.
7. Settlers of Catan
Settlers of Catan is fun because the game board is in pieces and each game you shuffle them and they are put in a different place. They also have different expansion packs you can buy to change it up a bit. Each player is a settler and you have to try and build and develop roads, cities, and settlements with different varieties or resources. Each settlement is worth one point and cities worth two points. The player(s) with the longest road and largest army also gets two additional points, this changes throughout the game. The first player to 10 points wins. There are different things that can come up throughout the game to make it a little more challenging.
8. Pandemic
This one is pretty fun because it’s the only game I’ve played that you work together. Either everyone wins or everyone loses. The object of the game is to cure the 4 diseases. The game board is a map and each game the players have different job roles, and the diseases are in different cities. You can also set the game level to make it harder or easier which is nice.
9. Phase 10
10. Mexican Train
The list will keep growing once I discover new ones 🙂
