Family Friendly Christmas Board Games

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…Or at least it was until Nana Sarah started sharing her political views and your dad had one too many whiskeys. So what better way to keep the Christmas spirit alive (and hopefully all relationships intact) than with some lovely family friendly board games!

Catch The Moon

Sometimes you need that type of game that visually pulls people in. We can all be a bit lethargic after the Christmas Dinner and Catch the moon would be the perfect appetizer before you bring out the bigger games. A wonderfully simple Dexterity game, you and your family will be tasked with rolling dice and stacking oddly shaped ladders on your clouds. Make any ladders fall or touch the cloud and you’ll be picking up a raindrop token. Three raindrops end the game and whoever has the least amount of tokens wins. It is as simple as that! This beautiful production plays all the way up to 6 players and is easy enough that any of your family can pick it up. An excellent starter!

Poetry For Neanderthals

Have a large extended family? Need something that can get them all involved? Poetry for Neanderthals is the one for you. In the same vein of Pictionary or articulate this team based game will get one of you trying to describe either a word or phrase whilst only using (and certainly not the words on the cards themselves) one-syllable words. If you mess up you’ll be bonked on the head with the inflatable No! Club (take that Nana) and lose some points. Neanderthals is great as mechanically its not too far away from games most older generations no whilst bringing a new twist to get the younger ones involved. Oh and the winning team will be reciting some of Groks words of Love & Sad and if it’s not up to scratch...Well the losing team will certainly have fun bashing the winners with that club!

Mascarade

Let’s pull out something a little trickier for these family friendly games. Mascarade is a hidden role game, where players are attempting to gain 13 coins by claiming the powers of their character. The trick though is that whilst everyone sees what you start with, these cards will be moved around and swapped over throughout the game. You can either check your character, claim a character ability or gain a measly one coin. This becomes a delightful game of calling out your family whilst desperately trying to remember who you were (or how much you can make others believe you ARE that character.) it’s a wonderful card game that plays well with all ages (you can make it a little easier on the younger ones or have them team up with an adult) & is up there as a top-tier large player count game.

Wavelength

Get ready to jump back into game show tomfoolery with the exquisite number known as wavelength! Straight off the bat, go and download the app. It’s free, everyone can get involved and if it turns out it's your jam then get this beautiful, slick production and stick in front of your family members as they ‘ohh’ & ‘ahh’ when you spin the dial.

It’s super simple: one player spins the centrepiece to see where on the scale the player needs their team members to guess. They will be given two dichotomous extremes (Hot or Cold, Good or Bad etc) and then give a clue as to where on the scale the team members need to guess. The other team can pick up a bonus point by guessing if the left or right of the main team's guess is closer to the centre.

This super-easy party game allows everyone to get involved and really makes you feel like you're part of a TV show. An amazing Christmas day game!

3 Wise Words

Big Potato games have done an incredible job of creating easy to pick up party games and I want to shine a light on one that doesn’t get the spotlight it deserves. First of all, this game is small enough to whack in a coat pocket so perfect to bring over for some boxing day shenanigans. You & your family will be getting yourselves into teams of two where one person will be given a word for their partner to guess by giving three words to lead them too it! Simple enough right? Only you can’t go too obvious or the other teams will steal your points! This is a delightfully quick & easy game that is easy enough for all to pick up and everyone (including yourself) will either go to obvious or niche and have the room laughing. This is the perfect type of game that can get everyone in the mood and a great stocking-filler.

That concludes our list of family friendly board games. Is there any we missed? Let us know your thoughts and tag us on social media @zatugames.