Ready to get your friends and family together for an unforgettable game night? Then you’ll definitely want to check out the ten dinner party board games that we’re highlighting with this list. They’re all guaranteed to get everyone at the table talking together and making jokes.
1. The Resistance: Avalon
Avalon is a social deduction game that’s always full of surprises, no matter how many times you play. Everyone at the table gets a secret role at the beginning of the game. Merlin, Percival, and the other knights of King Arthur’s court make up a team and must succeed in three quests to win. Meanwhile, Morgana and her evil cronies rise up to oppose them and will do everything in their power to sabotage the quests. The trouble is, you won’t know which of the other players around you are actually on your side. In each round, everyone votes for the three or four players that are actually going on the quest. If you trust the wrong people, it’s game over.
2. Citadels
Have you always dreamed of building your own city? In Citadels, you can do just that. You’ll start the game with a handful of construction project cards, such as markets, stables, and fountains. At the beginning of each round, you’ll receive one of the eight role cards that will determine what your power is for your upcoming turn. For example, if you’re the architect, you can build two cards. If you’re the merchant, you gain more gold. And if you’re the warlord, you can burn your opponent’s cities to the ground. Since the role cards switch around so much, there’s plenty of table talk and negotiation. The game supports up to eight players and usually doesn’t take longer than an hour.
3. Monikers
In Monikers, the goal is to get your friends and family to guess the famous name of their card without actually saying that name. In the first round, you can say pretty much whatever you want, but by the end, you’ll need to act everything out instead. The charades-like gameplay is a ton of fun and guarantees that everyone will get a chance to laugh at each other. Up to sixteen people can play together at once; there are hundreds of cards, and the rules are simple. As a result, it’s a great board game when you’re hosting a big group.
4. Mysterium
Mysterium is a cooperative deduction board game that begins with a killer premise. There’s a ghost in the old manor house up on the hill, and you and your team of psychics must interpret the spectral clues it’s sending from the beyond in order to uncover the details of its murder. The clues that the ghost is sending, however, don’t have any words. Instead, they’re strange, dreamlike images with blurred details and mismatched colors. Each player must guess the correct culprit, location, and weapon relative to the clues they receive before the sun rises at the end of the seventh turn.
5. Sushi Go Party!
In Sushi Go Party, your goal is to assemble the world’s most delicious Japanese meal. To do this, you’ll need a good mix of appetizer, entree, and dessert cards that utilize as many combos and set bonuses as possible. Dumpling cards, for example, get exponentially more valuable with each one of them that you pick up. Maki are great, but only if you have more of them than everyone else. Tofu gives you a lot of points, but only when you have exactly two of them. Since there’s a card drafting mechanic, you’ll also need to pay close attention to what your opponents are ordering off the menu in order to win.
6. Wavelength
A game of Wavelength begins with players dividing into two teams and selecting one of the team members to be the psychic. The psychic starts by looking at the position of a hidden needle on a circular spectrum and then draws a binary card. These cards have complete opposites listed on them, such as “hot and cold” or “dictatorship and democracy.” The psychic then tries to guide his team members toward the hidden needle’s location using only words that fit within the binary. In every round, there are sure to be a few goofy guesses and laugh-out-loud moments. A dozen players can join at once, and you can easily stop and start playing whenever you feel like it.
7. Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: The Baker Street Irregulars
If you’re hosting a murder mystery or Victorian-themed dinner party, then there’s nothing quite as thematically engaging as a round of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. To begin the game, simply lay out the included map of 1800s London, pick one of the mystery booklets in the box, and find the period-accurate newspaper that matches it. The players work together to follow leads, question suspects and hopefully decipher who the culprit is before Sherlock does. You can visit any location on the map in any order in pursuit of answers, and there are plenty of materials to carefully examine while you search for clues. The Baker Street Irregulars kit comes with ten different cases against which you can test your mettle.
8. Telestrations
Looking for a party board game that’s insanely funny? Telestrations might be just the ticket. Between four and eight people can join, and games typically only last a half hour. Players begin each round by sketching out a randomly drawn word. Then, they pass their drawing to the player beside them. That player then guesses what the drawing is and sends their guess along to the next player, who has to draw that guess. It’s essentially a mash-up of telephone and Pictionary that somehow ends up being more entertaining than both. To make the game more adult (and arguably even funnier), try Telestrations After Dark instead.
9. Blood on the Clocktower
Blood on the Clocktower is nothing short of the ultimate social deduction party game. Demons haunt the town of Ravenswood Bluff and murder the villagers by night. If you’re a villager, you need to identify which players are secretly servants of evil and get the majority of players to vote for their execution. If you’re a demon, you’ll need to convince everyone of your innocence and stay alive as long as possible. Eliminated players come back as ghosts, and anyone who comes in late can join the game as a traveler. You’ll likely need multiple rooms to play since there will be tons of secret discussions and hidden council meetings.
10. Hitster
Hitster is an easy party game that’s all about listening to popular songs and guessing when they came out. When you have a guess, you’ll take the card for that particular song and try to place it within your team’s music timeline. The timeline contains all the songs that you’d already claimed, organized by year. However, the years listed on the cards don’t actually matter when you’re guessing since the goal is actually to figure out where the current track belongs relative to the timeline’s other songs. If you guess incorrectly, your opponents can try and steal the card. Singing along with the music is technically optional but always guarantees a good time.
