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It doesn’t have to be this way, though. Cheap board games can be hard to come by due to the expense of making them, but there are plenty out there that will set players back less than $20, just a third of the price of a new AAA video game.
10 Snake Oil - Improvisational Marketing
An excellent game for players who enjoy the social interactions of tabletop, Snake Oil is all about improving products based on prompts. Players draw six cards, each of which has simple, single words on them. One player will be the customer and draw a job, which could be just about anything.
The other players then have to put two of their words together to make a fake product, and then everyone gets 30 seconds to pitch their product to the customer, who can ask questions afterwards. It’s fantastic for groups familiar with each other’s vibe and style of comedy, where the game provides the tools for laughs but doesn’t get in the way of the player’s creativity.
9 Anomia - Snap, But Harder
One of the easiest games to explain out there, Anomia is named after the sensation of not being able to recall simple information under pressure. Players take turns drawing cards that have symbols and categories on them like “football player” or “vegetable”. Whenever someone turns out a card whose symbol matches someone else’s card, they have to name something from the category on the other person’s card.
There’s an element of fast reactions and simple trivia that makes it slightly more tricky than it seems. Players have to always be focused and alert for when a match comes up, and it even brings laughs when players under pressure shout out completely the wrong word for the situation.
8 The Mind - Cooperation Without Communication
A head-scratcher of a game that sometimes feels more like a social experiment, The Mind will test just how well players can read each other and work to overcome limitations. Players will be dealt cards that all have different numbers ranging from 1 to 100. Players must then work together to place down all the cards in number order without communicating in any way.
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It’s a fantastic thought experiment as players sit there in complete silence, looking at each other, trying to determine if they’ve got the lowest card and should go next. Trying to read everything about people, seeing if they’ve got high cards, or if two players have very similar cards. It isn’t easy, but play with the same group of people enough, and they might start to form an innate understanding of each other’s subtlest changes in attitude.
7 Sushi Go - Picking From A Conveyor
One of the more famous party games, Codenames has a surprising amount of strategy and tactics, yet can still be easily explained to just about anyone. A hand of cards with various adorable little pieces of sushi/sashimi on it, players pass it around, taking one and passing the rest on. Players will then score points based on what they picked and any sets they collected.
Every round is straightforward, and it makes the game go by in a breeze, but there’s still a slightly deeper layer of thinking in there. As players see what everyone else is picking, they start making decisions on what to take based not just on what they need but on what others want.
6 6 Nimmt - Risky Pickings
Another very simple game that brings a layer of bluffing and reading to a light strategy game. In 6 Nimmt, there are 104 cards numbered from 1 to 104. At the start of the game, four are laid out as the start of their own rows. Ten cards are then dealt to each player, and each player picks a card from their hand to play; everyone reveals their cards simultaneously. Cards are then placed in the rows of the card their number is closest to, and the game carries on.
However, once one of the rows becomes six cards long, whoever put the sixth card there has to take the whole row and all the points therein. The catch is that the winner is the player with the fewest points at the end. Meaning players will have to avoid laying cards that could get them in trouble and plan ahead, so they use all the cards in their hands wisely.
5 Skull - Bluffing & Reading
A beloved classic in the hobby gaming community, Skull is a tense and simple game about bluffing and reading opponents. Every player starts the game with four cards; three are flowers, one is a skull. Each round, players place one of their cards face-down and then go round, either placing a new card or ‘starting the bidding’. ‘Bidding’ is where players bet how many flowers they can turn over without finding a skull.
The player who makes the highest bid must then turn over people’s cards to find the flowers. However, they must always turn over their own cards first, meaning if they put a skull down to try and screw someone else over, they’ve just done themselves in. It’s a simple formula, but it can get extremely tense as players turn cards one by one praying they’re not skulls.
4 Coup - Liars & Murderers
Another game all about bluffing, Coup has a slightly wider set of options to keep the game tense and engaging at all times. At the start of the game, everyone gets dealt two cards, with one of six different characters on them. Every character has different abilities, and players can use these abilities at any time. However, they can use the abilities of characters they don’t have. The catch is that if another player calls the bluff, the bluffing player has to lose one of their characters.
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Players can gain coins, and when they have enough coins, they can launch a coup and force another player to lose one of their characters. When a player loses both their characters, they’re eliminated, the last person standing wins. It’s a quick game, but with really intricate social reads and tactical plays, and with six abilities in play, there’s plenty of variety from game to game.
3 Codenames - Obtuse Wordplay
One of the more well-known party games out there, Codenames makes the most of its core concept and has the potential to be both very simple and quite complex. Players are split into two teams of at least two. Cards are laid out in a five by five grid, and all have different words on them. The team leaders have a cheat sheet and know which cards their team needs to get to win.
Naturally, the team leaders can’t just out-right tell their team which cards to pick. Instead, they have to say a related word to the words they want their team to pick. As may be expected, some of the words will be very similar and could accidentally lead teams to turn over the opposing team’s cards instead. It’s a puzzle for all players as they try to work to their teammates’ strengths. This one has a good digital version too.
2 Muffin Time - Random
A game based on the asdfmovie YouTube series, Muffin Time is a unique game that bases what happens on the qualities and actions of the players in the real world/outside of the game. The goal is simple when a player gets ten cards in their hand, every other player gets one more go, and if that player still has ten cards by their next go, they win. This can make for a very long or very short game.
To gain, steal or force others to discard cards, players must play either Action or Trap cards. Action cards resolve immediately and will be things like “The shortest player takes two cards from the tallest player”, but the trap cards are where the real hilarity lies. They lie in wait, face-down. No one knows what they are until it’s too late. These are things like “If a player yawns, steal three of their cards”. It creates this paranoid atmosphere (in a fun way) where anything another player does could be a ploy to bait out a Trap card, and it never ceases to be funny.
1 No Thanks - Picking The Right Moment To Strike
No Thanks has a little bit of everything. There’s some strategy, bluffing and reading, and a lot of risk-taking. In No Thanks, cards of every number from 3 to 35 have a point value the same as their number. However, players want as few points as possible. A card is turned over from the deck, and a player can either take it, which will give them points, or use a token to pass it on to the next player.
It’s an exciting balance because tokens are a limited resource, so players don’t want to spend too much. There is also the fact that when a player takes a card, they get all the tokens people put on it. So it could be worth it to take a big card to get the tokens. Consecutive cards have the potential to cancel each other out, meaning they score no points at all, creating the potential to take a card another player wants and cause them problems.
There’s a massive amount of possibilities, and no game ever feels the same, which is definitely worth it for less than $20.
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