10 New Board Games to Get You through the Long, Cold Winter

Looking for a new family game? From numbers to words to cards to charades, there’s something here for everyone!

My family loves board games. Like, we love board games. When I come home for Christmas, we probably average three to five different games a day for three weeks straight, and that’s a conservative guess. The game room in our house has an entire wall of board games. I’m guessing… 200? Maybe 300? It’s a lot.

Anyway, we like games. They’ve become a staple Christmas present. This Christmas my family got 10 new games (most of them from ourselves) and then, as per tradition, played them to death. I know how hard it is to find a good new game everyone likes, so I thought I’d write a little about each one, what we liked and didn’t like.

Below is a review of ten popular new board games. There’s a brief description of each with some highlights or lowlights plus a few rankings. How easy is the game to learn? Does it adapt well for various ages or numbers of players? What skill level is required to play, and how much strategy is involved? And of course there’s an overall rating, all from one to five stars.

There are games of skill, games of chance, party games, strategy games, and more —something for everyone. Take a look and find the right one, and if you have any questions or comments, be sure to add a comment at the bottom!

Blank Slate

Quick, fill in the blank. Christmas ______? Hot _______? Check _______?

Did you pick Christmas Eve, hot chocolate, and check box? Too bad, I was thinking of Christmas tree, hot potato, and checkmate. So it goes with Blank Slate. Each player is given a simple prompt and asked to fill in the blank on a small white board. The goal is to match at least one other person’s answer — and preferably just one person’s.

You’ll be shocked how often you read a prompt and are absolutely certain you’re all going to match, and then four people write four completely different and totally viable answers. That was what was most fun for us, just being consistently caught off guard about how differently we all thought. The more that play, the more fun it’ll be.

Skill Level ★★ Adaptability ★★★★ Strategy ★★ Easy to Learn ★★★★★ Overall Rating ★★★

Codenames Duet

We got the original Codenames last Christmas and it was a hit, my favorite new game from the last five years. Still, I was skeptical about Codenames Duet because I figured it was just another $20 on a bunch of new cards and the same game. But it’s really not. It’s a nice twist on the game with some new rules and a worthy purchase. And, more importantly, it allows the game to be played well by just two people. That means Mom and Dad can play all year, not just when the kids are home at the holidays.

If you already know Codenames, the basic premise is similar. You set up 25 code-name cards — by the way, the 400 brand new codenames included work with the original game, and that alone is worth the price of admission — and use a key card to show which words you need to guess. But in this version, each of the two players (or teams) has its own version of the same Codenames clues to guess, and you’re working together to find all the spies in a certain number of turns without landing on the bad guys. The game play is similar enough to Codenames that you’ll be able to play right away, but the strategy is different enough you’ll enjoy finding new methods of working together to find all the spies.

If you aren’t familiar with Codenames, you “find” a spy by giving a single-word clue and a number. You might say “Cold: 3” and your teammate has to look at 25 words on the board and figure out which ones you mean. Maybe the spy words include Ice Age, coffee, sweat, buffalo, Russia, shower, and call. You think to yourself “Ice is cold, Russia is always cold, and I like iced coffee, so that must it.” But be careful! Your partner might be in a cold sweat pondering your clue, and they might think about how Buffalo, NY, is one of the coldest cities in America and how they hate cold calling people at work. You might even need to take a cold shower when they guess all of your clues wrong. Oops — turns out “cold” wasn’t a good clue this time!

Codenames is one of our favorite games, and Codenames Duet is a worthy follow-up. The two-player-only option is great, but it’s also unique enough that our whole family sometimes plays Duet in teams just to mix things up. A very strong recommendation, even if you already have the original.

Skill Level ★★★★ Adaptability ★★★★ Strategy ★★★★ Easy to Learn ★★ Overall Rating ★★★★★

Dos

Hey, remember Uno? Dos is like Uno 2.0! Get it? Dos!!

Except.. it’s not. Dos is more like crappy, unnecessarily difficult Uno. Uno is an easy, accessible card game any age can play without thinking too hard. Dos tries to add some twists but succeeds only in making the game complicated without actually making it more interesting. Goodbye Reverse and Skip. Hello Wild Dos and the millennials-will-love-it # Card.

Instead of just matching number or color, now players should add two numbers to make a match, and even better if your two numbers are the same color so you get a match bonus. Confused yet? We were. It took way too long to learn how to play and we never really got the hang of it. I heard several friends getting Dos for Christmas. They should’ve stuck with Uno.

Skill Level ★★ Adaptability ★★★ Strategy ★★ Easy to Learn ★ Overall Rating ★★

Hoopla

Hoopla is from the makers of Cranium. Think of it as a cooperative party-version Cranium. We've always loved Cranium and its little-bit-of-this-game-little-bit-of-that attitude, and Hoopla takes that up a notch.

Just like Cranium, there are four categories. Blue means drawing your clue, and green means charades. Yellow means using word clues that start with the same letter (like “greatest Greek God” for Zeus) and red lets you use “bigger than a _____, smaller than a _____” clues. Each person gets a handful of cards, you start the 15-minute timer, and off you go. The clock doesn’t stop, and boy does it get frenetic. When it gets to you, roll the die to see which type of clues you can give, then quickly pick the card you want to act, draw, etc and go for it. You’ve got to get something like 24 clues in 15 minutes, all while frantically jumping up to charade or hurrying to think of several same-letter adjectives. That’s always the hardest one for us.

We don’t play many cooperative games, so this was a nice change of pace as we all got to be competitive together. It’s a whirlwind 15 minutes and a real accomplishment when you get through them all. We learned the hard way to do your toughest cards first and to plan ahead to have multiple different ways to get to each card.

It’s like Cranium on crack. An absolute blast.

Skill Level ★★★ Adaptability ★★★★★ Strategy ★★★ Easy to Learn ★★★ Overall Rating ★★★★★

Know It or Blow It

Know It or Blow It is a pretty straightforward trivia game with one simple twist — it’s trivia in teams!

Each trivia question has a list of answers. You’ll need to name the five human senses, Snow White’s seven dwarfs, or the nine planets in the solar system. The catch is you’re on a team and must take turns answering. You can decide who answers first each round, and you try to get as many right as possible… but if you get one wrong, you lose all the points from that round, so be careful!

The team trivia concept is nice because it helps offset various levels of trivia knowledge and adds a twist of strategy as you determine who should go first each time. Our only complaint is there aren’t a ton of trivia cards and the board is really small, so the whole game takes only 10 or 15 minutes and one easy or hard question can determine everything.

Skill Level ★★★★ Adaptability ★★★ Strategy ★★ Easy to Learn ★★★★ Overall Rating ★★★

The Mind

The Mind is the one game our family can’t stop playing.

The concept is simple. There are 100 cards, numbered from 1 to 100. Each player gets a card. Then without talking, everyone must play their cards one at a time together from lowest to highest.

Sounds easy, right? After all, you got a 9 so that must be lowest out of four cards. You quickly play your 9. Oops! Dad had a 7 and Mom had an 8. Tough draw. Maybe the next time you get that set, all three of you grab your card and start to play it. Now you have to use logic and coordination to determine which of you goes first. Without talking. It’s so simple and so impossible.

Get past round one and now each player gets two cards for round two, three in round three, and so on. Eventually you’ll have to silently order 25–30 numbers to beat the final round. Good luck trying to figure out when to play your 61, 67, 72, 74 when Dad has 59, 70, 71 and Mom has 63, 65, 66. We’ve done a set like that. It sounds impossible, but you get used to each other’s rhythm and learn to trust the timing. It’s the simplest game but so quiet and tense and absolutely mesmerizing.

Skill Level ★★ Adaptability ★★★ Strategy ★★★★★ Easy to Learn ★★★★★ Overall Rating ★★★★★

Relative Insanity

You know Apples to Apples? Relative Insanity is like that, only very personal and very adult.

Instead of matching famous people and places to an adjective, one player reads a prompt about a relative. Something like: “When my brother introduced his new girlfriend to our family, my mom blurted out ______” or “When MeeMaw saw Granddaddy get out of the shower naked and dripping wet, she looked at him and said ______.”

Each player has a handful of cards that fill in the back half of the sentence. And again, this is an adult game. Maybe when your brother introduced his girlfriend, Mom blurted out “Nice rack!” or “She’s a couple French Fries short of a Happy Meal!” And tears will roll when MeeMaw says “I ain’t never seen one so small” or “I could ride it, but it’d probably hurt.”

Cuz remember, you’re playing this with your family. This isn’t just any old MeeMaw — this is your Grandma. Everything about this game is personal and sometimes mean or gross, but you just have to go with it and let it all hang out. Well. Maybe not actually. But that’s probably one of the cards, too.

We have laughed so hard we cried many times on this game… especially when we remember we got this game from our uncle’s family, and he’s a pastor. We can’t wait to play it with them.

Skill Level ★ Adaptability ★★★★ Strategy ★★ Easy to Learn ★★★★★ Overall Rating ★★★★

Snippets

The instructions for this one are pretty easy, but it’s Mensa-level difficulty. Players are given a three letter prompt — say CAT — and have one minute to write as many words as possible with that exact three-letter snippet anywhere in the word.

Ready? Go. Cat. Cats. Cate. Cathy. Catch. Catches. Catching. Category. Categorization. Catastrophe. Catatonic. Catchphrase. Scattergories. Scatterbrained. Scatological. Bobcat. Tomcat. Alcatraz. Time’s up!

All those words count. The game specifically says that just about any word goes, including proper nouns, foreign words, multiple versions of the same word with different prefixes or suffixes, etc. But there’s a little more strategy. If someone else has your word, cross it out. Only unique words count. Now add up your words, one point for each. Add a three-point bonus if you have the longest word, and another bonus if you crossed out the least words. Sometimes there are other bonuses too, and there are easy, medium, and hard snippets. If CAT was easy, NTI might be harder, and RCO is difficult.

I love words, so I loved this game. The minute goes by quickly, and it’s fun to come up with unique and long words that fit the snippet.

Skill Level ★★★★★ Adaptability ★★★ Strategy ★★★★ Easy to Learn ★★★★ Overall Rating ★★★★★

Stinker

Stinker is a chance to just be goofy and fun while also quick on your feet. It’s a fun, lighthearted party game. Each player gets 25 letter tiles. One person reads a question prompt — what food should you eat after a hangover, or why did the chicken cross the road? — and each player quickly uses their letters to come up with an answer. The game specifically says spelling doesn’t matter and answers don’t necessarily need to make sense, so just be creative and come up with something quickly.

Quickly is key, because once you have your answer spelled out, you yell out Stinker! The last person to yell stinker is out that round and becomes the judge. The other players give their answers and can defend if they like, and the judge chooses a winner. It’s quirky and fun, and it’s a fun game to play late at night when you’re tired and come up with mostly silly answers.

Skill Level ★★★ Adaptability ★★★ Strategy ★★★ Easy to Learn ★★★★ Overall Rating ★★★★

Zoinx!

If you’ve played Farkle or another similar dice game, you’ll get the hang of Zoinx! pretty quickly.

There are four dice. Two sides on each die are a pink circle — those are good — and four sides are blue squares, which are bad. On your turn, you roll the four dice and try to rack up pink circles. If you get at least one, you can keep going. If you get all four blue squares, you Zoinxed and your turn is over.

Each player also has a die with the numbers 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 on it, and you also get points by correctly guessing how many pink circles each opponent will get on their turn. It’s mostly random, but there’s some strategy as you get used to it. It’s a short and simple game that is often over after two or three times around the table. Not really my kind of game, but Scooby and Shaggy would love it. Like, Zoinx!

Skill Level ★ Adaptability ★★★ Strategy ★★★ Easy to Learn ★★★ Overall Rating ★★

Any questions about the games above? Any game recommendations? Leave a comment below!!

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