Everybody’s got opinions and really, everybody is entitled to them. Thing is, though, opinions aren’t fun when you’re all trying to have a nice family dinner but your relatives keep getting into verbal sparring matches while cutting into the rotisserie chicken. So, how do you get everyone else to shut up? Board games! Let’s skip the Monopoly this year because goodness knows that just spawns more arguments. These Christmas board games are the ones that will actually distract your family from arguing this year.
Lizzy Loves Darcy: A Jane Austen Matchmaking Game: Board Games
If you’ve got a relative who loves Jane Austen, you’re about to be their favorite relative. The Lizzy Loves Darcy board game is a Pride and Prejudice-themed twist on Chutes and Ladders. Sounds like a weird combo, but it actually works.
The goal of the game is to find the love of your life by landing on the golden rings on the board (a.k.a marriage). To get there, you have to answer Jane Austen trivia. Right answers let you progress, wrong answers hold you back. Obviously, this game has a very niche crowd so make sure your family is full of literature geeks or bring it to an English Literature faculty Christmas party.
Dungeon! Board Game
Dungeon! Is a Dungeons & Dragons-themed board game that has you and your adventuring family, I mean, party moving through a series of dungeons, fighting monsters, and collecting treasure. You know, the usual D&D session but simplified. This is the board game to bring if you want this year to be the year you finally convince your favorite cousins to play D&D with you.
Foodie Fight
GET FOODIE FIGHT
Food Fight is a food trivia game that covers everything from real-world cuisine to fictional recipes from your favorite games and movies. It has everything food related to suit everyone’s interests. Aside from pop culture food facts, the 1,000 questions included in Foodie Fight include questions on food science and history that, at the very least, won’t bore your more academically inclined relatives.
X-Files Board Game
The X-Files board game may be giving more Halloween than Christmas, but it still works as a fun Christmas board game because you only need 1-4 players. That’s just enough for most nuclear families or to accommodate the X-Files fans in your family. One player takes up the role of the Smoking Man, a mysterious figure who is behind the strange ongoings of the game, while the rest try to foil his plans and uncover the shadowy network turning the wheel behind the scenes.
Wonderland: The Board Game
GET WONDERLAND: THE BOARD GAME
You probably figured it out from the name that Wonderland: The Board Game is an Alice in Wonderland-themed game. The game requires 2-5 players to play faction leaders who each have to leverage their cards to move through the board. It’s fun, but maybe not the best game to bring out if only one of your relatives is an avid TCG player since the game has a ton of TCG mechanics. That’s not to say that Wonderland won’t be fun for the whole family, but imagine who’s going to win most of the games if only one of you is familiar with TCGs.
Papercuts: A Party Game for the Rude and Well-Read
GET PAPERCUTS
Can we get a hooray for Christmas board games designed for nerds? Personally, this is the game I wish my relatives would bring out for Christmas.
Papercuts is a card game that basically functions like Cards Against Humanity but with literature-based prompts. Like ‘Why does the caged bird sing?’ and ‘Last year’s Booker Prize-winning novel is told from the perspective of ____. “ Even without a lot of previous literary knowledge, the cards are funny as heck and have enough overlap with pop culture to make it delightful for your movie adaptation-only relatives.
80s Bingo: A Throwback to the Freshest Decade Ever
GET 80s BINGO
The 80s entered, exited, and re-entered the microtrend cycle in recent years so you won’t have to worry about generational differences with this board game. 80s Bingo: A Throwback to the Freshest Decade Ever is a cheeky trivia game about 80s pop culture. Aside from unrelenting replays of Cindy Lauper’s Girls Just Want To Have Fun, expect to cringe while saying ‘tubular’ and doing aerobics routines in neon skin-tight
Blots
GET BLOTS
It’s a bird? No, it’s a plane? Wait! It’s generational trauma. Kidding aside, Bliots is a Rorschach-based card game without a ton of rules. Think charades with a side of pop psychology. There are 30 blot cards to look at, 30 choice cards, and 24 numbered cards to structure your sharing session about why this blob looks like a dog or reminds you why you want to put grandpa in a nursing home. Don’t tell anyone that second thought, though, the goal with this listicle is to keep your family from arguing this Christmas.
Haikubes
GET HAIKUBES
Jenga is great and all, but you and your family are probably bored with it at this point. Haikubes is a more stimulating alternative to your typical Jenga game even if they have nothing alike aside from the wooden cubes.
In Haikube, you roll your cube dice to see what word prompts it gives you. You then take those words and come up with a haiku on the spot that incorporates them. Before you decide it’s not for you, think of the novelty of it and how easy haikus are. You don’t need to rhyme, just come up with a short “poem” that has a combination of two sets of 5-syllable lines and one 7-syllable line.
The Believer Box of Bad Advice
GET THE BELIEVER BOX OF BAD ADVICE
Family Christmas dinners are a gold mine of okay to bad to downright shitty advice so why not stick the theme with a board game that’s all about taking and giving bad advice? The Believer Box Advice is a card game split between Question and Answer cards that players take turns reading out until you all find the most awful piece of advice during that round. Bonus points if one of your relatives actually agrees with the shitty advice.
