TableTop Day is fast approaching! On Saturday, March 30th, 2013, the inaugural event is set to kick off worldwide. While there are plenty of official events announced, it’s also a great opportunity to invites friends and family over for a raucous day full of plastic figurines, cards, dice, and cardboard maps. Everyone is familiar with the classics (Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, etc.), but there are plenty of new games made every year that deserve time in the limelight. Why not try something new this TableTop Day? I’ve compiled a short list of suggestions for various types of gamers.
TableTop recommendations
A great place to start checking out new games is the web series that inspired the holiday. Even better, you can watch some of your favorite nerds from TV play the games to get the gist of them yourself. (Sure beats thumbing through the manual!)
- Small World – a riotously fun family strategy game for up to 5 players.
- Settlers of Catan – are you resourceful enough to take on up to 4 others?
- Ticket to Ride – more like ticket to FUN!
- Munchkin – this game isn’t short on hilarity
And many more. The TableTop series is a great place to start learning about new games. By watching each episode (roughly 30-45 minutes), you can learn the basic setup and get an idea of how the game is played pretty quickly.
Family Games
These games are fun for kids AND parents.
- Carcassonne – a fun map-building game that’s easy to pick up and a challenge to master
- Pandemic – cooperation is the cure to boredom
- Forbidden Island – who doesn’t love collaborative treasure-hunting?
- Blokus – a quick, creative competitive strategy game
Word Games
Whether your vocabulary is exceptionally exorbitant, or just okay, word games are a great way to have fun while learning.
- Word on the Street (and Word on the Street, Jr.) – indubitably a fantastically addicting amusement of vocabulary
- Balderdash – what’s that word mean again?
- BuyWord – buy low, sell high?
- Upwords – Scrabble in three dimensions!
The very naughty, but outrageously hilarious Cards Against Humanity is a different type of word game that’s also worth checking out. Sorry kids, this one’s for mommy and daddy (and their friends) only.
Abstract mind-bending two-player games
For the more cerebrally-inclined, these games are great for stimulating the mental juices.
- Yinsh – this ain’t no ring around the rosey
- Go – if it’s good enough for A Beautiful Mind, it’s good enough for me
- Ingenious – you can even play this ingenious game by yourself
- Set – can you find the matching (or non-matching) set?
Want other suggestions?
There are tons of resources online to find more great board, card, and dice games. Here are a few good starting points.
- TableTop the series – seriously, go watch already!
- The Board Game Geek – pretty much all you need to find the right game(s) for you
- The Board Game Family – if you’re looking for family games, this site is perfect
- GeekDad’s Best Boardgames of 2010, 2011, and 2012
Or you can be boring
You can always dust off your classics from the closet, but really, if the above games don’t inspire you to try something new, then maybe TableTop Day isn’t for you.
Got your own favorites? Share them below (or create your own post)! What will you be playing on TableTop Day?
Header image courtesy of: Wikimedia
Product images courtesy of: Amazon
Published: Mar 21, 2013 02:21 pm