Our Favorite Board and Card Games to Play with Family
This post is super random BUT I felt compelled to share it because it’s the holiday season…and if your family is anything like mine, you play a lot of games when you get together! For us, that means a lot of games are played during the holidays because that’s usually when we’re all together; most of my immediate family is local except for my mom and step dad (Washington) and one of my brothers (Colorado). We all love a good board or card game (among others)!
I rounded up 10 of our favorite family-friendly board and card games to play below. I personally prefer games that do not last a long time because I get bored/lose interest easily. A lot of these are perfect if you are the same way. I also included some games that my brothers and other family members love but that I don’t simply because I don’t have the attention span for them, haha. Any of these would make great last-minute gifts if you’re in need of ideas!
Did I miss a game that your family loves? Let me know your favorite games to play with family in the comments!
Best Family-Friendly Board & Card Games
Sequence
Sequence is a fun game that involves both a board AND cards! The game itself includes a game board, poker chips, and two decks of cards. You can play it with as few as two people all the way up to 12 (there are 3 sets of poker chips, so if you play with more than 3 people you need to break into 2-3 teams of up to 4 people per team). The object of the game is to get 5 poker chips in a row to make a “sequence”! It involves a little bit of strategy and a little bit of luck. I find it more fun to play offense (trying to get a sequence) than defense (trying to block your opponent from getting a sequence). I like that this game moves quickly and doesn’t require a whole lot of thought!
Wizard
Wizard is a card game involving a modified deck with additional “trump” cards (called wizard cards) and another special card called jesters. For every round, everyone receives a certain number of cards (starting with 1 and working up to however many cards use up the whole deck based on how many people are playing) and you bet on how many hands you think you’ll win based on the cards in your hand. There’s a fun little dial that everyone uses to place their bet. It’s a little more complicated than that but that’s the gist of it! It takes a few rounds before you get the hang of it, but it’s really fun. It’s another mix of luck and strategy and also really fast paced, which I like.
Joker’s Wild / Jokers and Marbles
My mom calls this game “Joker’s Wild” but I couldn’t find much of any information about it under this name and so maybe it’s called something else? Like “Jokers and Marbles”…? Anyway, this game is essentially Sorry! but with marbles. And you can play with more than four people! Plus, there are way more fun moves you can make that I don’t remember being able to do in the Sorry! game. This game also involves decks of cards WITH the jokers, and the jokers act as wild cards that allow you to make moves to help you and your teammates OR help you and set back your opponents. This game can be pretty cutthroat if you’re competitive! We played this game I think twice in Cabo (women against men) and we women kicked their butts both times. 😉
Sprat / Nerts
This is a really fun card game that I learned from my step family as “Sprat” but that you may have heard called “Nerts” (that’s how Korri’s mom learned it in Canada and how it’s called on the official Bicycle Playing Cards website). You can play alone or in teams of two. Every person or team has their own unique deck of cards (with no jokers). It’s basically a game of solitaire with the goal to play all of the cards in your “Sprat”/“Nerts” pile either in your own solitaire game or in the community piles laid out on the table. It’s kind of hard to describe and much easier to understand once you play it! This game is very fast-paced and generally involves a lot of yelling and/or swearing LOL.
Genius Square
If you’re looking for a low-key game that you can play on your own or with others anytime you want, Genius Square might be the game for you! I only recently heard of it when my mom brought it when they were here for Thanksgiving. Every person has their own grid with squares that are blocked by moveable cylinders, and you have to fill in the rest of the open squares with the game pieces that are made of clusters of blocks in different shapes and sizes. This is a great problem-solving game for kiddos especially, but I really enjoyed it even if some of the puzzles stumped me, ha.
Mexican Train Dominoes
I guess dominoes aren’t technically board games OR card games…but they’re fun and a classic in my family! We love the Mexican Trains version, where you set up your own train of dominoes and can add to the “community” train whenever. You can get royally screwed if an opponent plays a double they can’t “back up”, and if you have the domino to play on it, you have to play it even if it’s in the middle of the train you made. But you can also win by playing entirely on the community train! This game involves a set of dominoes (we like the colored dots) and little train pieces for each person.
Chicken Foot Dominoes
The dominoes game I like even more than Mexican Trains is Chicken Foot! It’s really similar but way more fun because you don’t need to worry about building a train from your dominoes; you just play to get rid of your dominoes in any way you can (though I usually build some sort of loose train and see how it goes from there). When you play a double, you have to lay three more dominoes to back it up (hence “chicken foot”); if you can’t, then it goes to your opponents. This version is more chaotic but I like it better because it’s more fast-paced! All you need is a set of dominoes for this game so you can easily use the same set you use for Mexican Trains.
Splendor
Splendor features a simple economic structure but it doesn’t take too long to play, which I like! It’s also a great game for older kiddos. Up to 4 people can play, and the object of the game is basically to collect gems and earn development cards, which can be used towards more gems that are worth more. The game setup involves cards and tokens and is different every time, meaning it has great “replayability”!
Power Grid
Power Grid is a relatively new game that my brother discovered that doesn’t sound very exciting (power plants?), but that’s actually pretty fun if not fairly long. The setup is probably the longest part of the game. It can feel slow at the beginning, but things start picking up once people starting making more money and are actually doing things (this game involves buying power plants, buying the fuel for the power plants, building in cities, etc.). This game is on the edge of being too long for me but mostly because it can feel like it takes forever until we can start doing things! That said, even my young nephew was getting into this game for a few rounds. There are expansion packs available!
The Farming Game
If you like long economic/strategy games, you’ll probably love The Farming Game (and its successor, The Construction Game, which may have been discontinued?). My brothers will play this game for literal hours…and I just can’t do it. It’s too long for me LOL. In the farming version, it’s exactly as it sounds: you’re a farmer and you can buy up land and animals and such to make money and grow your farm, and you move from growing season to harvest. The construction game is similar but I believe it involves buying property/building things on it. I think if you and your family are fans of Monopoly-style games, you’ll like this one!