It’s that special time of year. When families gather together and in peace and harmony. Sometimes for a week or more. It’s a lot of time together. And something that can make that time together stay peaceful and harmonious is a nice activity. So don’t just think of this as just a list of tabletop games to check off your gift list. Think of it as an investment in your sanity for the holiday season.

Modern Classics:

These games have all stood the test of time, they’re all suitable for new players, and they’re all suitable for many kids, not just adults.

Ticket to Ride: I you asked me to pick one single “gateway” game – a game to teach to someone new to the board gaming hobby, this would be it. Players compete to build train routes across the United States, scoring points for longer routes and for connecting the cities listed on their secret route cards. On each turn, a player either picks up a couple of colorful cards, or plays cards to place their train pieces on a stretch of track that matches the color of the cards. These straightforward turns make learning easy and keep the game moving, while still allowing players to start plotting ahead once they’ve got the hang of things. The perfect entry point for “Euro” style games.

• Players: 2 to 5
• Time: 45 minutes
• Ages: 8+
• Price: $45-$50

Carcassonne: Carcassonne is a tile-laying game that starts with an almost blank slate and then builds up as players take turns placing a tile on the board in an effort to claim and score the features on the tiles. Players will attempt to enclose cities, build lengthy roads, and surround monasteries, as each feature scores in its own way. Players draw and place one tile a turn. The available placement options give enough choice, while the availability of only one tile a turn keeps things moving (you will notice that this is a common refrain for the classics

• Players: 2 to 5
• Time: 45 minutes
• Ages: 8+
• Price: $30-$35

Splendor: Splendor is a pure engine-building game where players start out with only the limited resource generation provided by the rules, then use those resources to improve their position, which is then better and generating resources, and then eventually those become victory points and someone wins. In Splendor, players will either take a few gems, or they will spend their gems to purchase one of the available cards. Each card will provide a permanent gem to use on the purchase of every future card. Early on, players will tend to buy cheaper cards, then graduate to more expensive cards that also generate increasing amounts of victory points.

• Players: 2 to 4
• Time: 30 minutes
• Ages: 10+
• Price: $35-$40

Dominion: The original deck-building game, Dominion created a genre that has become so extensive and beloved that it almost (but doesn’t quite) deserve its own section later in this guide. In a deck-building game, each player starts the game with a deck of a small number of very basic cards. Over the course of the game, the players purchase more powerful cards, which are shuffled into the deck. Between newly-added cards, and potentially removing existing cards, the deck produces more powerful hands on average, thus enabling the purchase of better cards, and so on. If that sounds like an engine-building game, please give yourself a cookie. It’s just an engine that’s built around the inherent randomization of a deck of cards.

• Players: 2 to 5
• Time: 45 minutes
• Ages: 8+
• Price: $25-$45

But There Are More Than Five of Us:

All of the games above are great. But none of them play more than 5 players. And even the ones that do play more than 4 players probably play best at 3 or 4 players. One of the limiting factors with a lot of board and card games is the time between player turns. If you have a lot of players, and you want everyone to play the same game together, that’s where teams and/or simultaneous action comes in.

7 Wonders: While most of the modern classics are fairly stripped down versions of their genre, 7 Wonders is not the most straightforward card drafting game. That would be Sushi Go (if you want a stocking stuffer) or Sushi Go Party (if you want to play with a lot of people). But 7 Wonders is the classic of the genre. Playing through three ‘ages’ of civilization, players start with a hand of seven cards, pick one, play it, and pass the rest to the next player. All of this happens simultaneously – everyone picks their first card, then everyone does the second, and so on. Players only ever directly compare what they are doing with the players on their immediate left and right, eliminating the need for everyone to keep track of six more players. Players use the cards they build to generate economic advantage, military strength, scientific learning, or raw culture (victory points).

• Players: 3 to 7
• Time: 30 minutes
• Ages: 10+
• Price: $35-$50

Codenames: Codenames has become the pinnacle party/word game in recent years. It’s spun off a bunch of variants – pictures instead of words, two-player, licensed properties (Disney, Marvel, Harry Potter) – but the original is still the best place to start. In Codenames, the players split into two teams, with one player on each team serving as a clue-giver and the rest of the team making guesses. The two teams are playing over a field of 25 cards/words. Each word belongs to one team, is neutral, or is the dreaded assassin (an auto-loss if picked). The clue-givers attempt to get their teammates to guess the correct cards by giving one-word clues, along with a number suggesting how many cards are being hinted at. It’s generally quite easy to give a dead-on clue for just one card. But that’s unlikely to win. And it becomes challenging to give clues for just the right set of cards, and pretty hilarious what linguistic contortions the rest of the team goes through trying to figure out those clues. For the latter reason, while Codenames is good with only 4, it shines brightest at 6+.

• Players: 4 to 8
• Time: 15-30 minutes
• Ages: 14 and up
• Price: $15-20

But There Are Kids Who Are Younger Than Eight:

There’s arguably only one word you need to know when it comes to younger kids and designer board games: HABA. They specialize in making great games just for kids, and both of the selections here come from HABA. Kids games play faster, don’t require long-term planning, and don’t require reading. The classics often involve an element of dexterity, because that can keep kids and adults interested, and that’s true of both of these.

Animal Upon Animal: Animal Upon Animal starts with a crocodile. Then it quickly becomes a contorted pile of snakes, monkeys, sheep, and birds as players attempt to grow the animal stack without knocking it down. On each turn, the player rolls a die, which will instruct them to add one animal, add two, have another player add one, let another player pick which one they are going to add or (if very lucky) get to place a new animal directly on the ground, thus expanding the base of the pile. Kids will love attempting to place animals, as well as the animals themselves, which are colorfully painted wooden pieces.

• Players: 2 to 4
• Time: 15 minutes
• Ages: 4+
• Price: $20-$25

Rhino Hero: While Animal Upon Animal involves stacking cute wooden critters, Rhino Hero involves stacking cards upon cards upon cards. A tower is built with alternating wall and ceiling/floor cards, with later walls bent to match the shapes outlined on the floor below. The biggest risk to the tower comes from the Rhino Hero, who will sometimes need to be moved up to the highest level, thus risking an imminent collapse.

• Players: 2 to 5
• Time: 15 minutes
• Ages: 5+
• Price: $15

But There Are Only Two Of Us:

Perhaps you spend your holidays in smaller groups. Or perhaps you just need to take a little time to step away from the hordes that have descended on your holiday season. These games are great when you want some one-on-one time.

Lost Cities: Like many options in the two-player category, Lost Cities is an abstract game, with large, numbered, colorful cards representing efforts to explore five different lost cities. On each turn, the players access a new card and have to decide whether to play onto one of their expeditions or discard the card to the center, where the opponent might snatch it. This isn’t an easy decision, because starting an expedition and then not getting very far loses points, while skipping numbers on an existing expedition cuts off the ability to play the cards in between, thus reducing potential points. I would give you some strategy tips, but I can never, ever beat my wife at this.

• Time: 30 minutes
• Ages: 10+
• Price $10-$20

Patchwork: Quilting is an uncommon theme in games, but Patchwork is ultimately almost as abstract as Lost Cities. Each player has a board on which they must ‘sew’ patches from a communal selection. When a player takes a turn, they can move ahead a variable number of ‘patches’ on the track, but this subtracts from a finite pool of time being expended. In crafting the quilt, players must balance cost, time, ‘button’ income, and the need to avoid too many empty spaces on their quilt.

• Time: 30 minutes
• Ages: 10+
• Price: $20-$30

Cooperative Games:

Games have traditionally been seen as competitive events, but there are a lot of great games from recent years that are cooperative games where all of the players work together against the game, winning or losing together. These games often benefit greatly from strong story elements.

Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger: Crafted in the style of a classic Choose Your Own Adventure book, right down to the font on the cards, House of Danger uses cards in place of a book to take the players on a psychedelic adventure. Unlike a Choose Your Own Adventure book, there are skill checks and the occasional ability to retrace your steps.

• Players: 1+
• Time: 60 minutes
• Ages: 8+
• Price: $20-$25

Exit: The Abandoned Cabin: A board game version of an escape room isn’t going to match the experience of an actual escape room, but then it costs a lot more than $15 for a group to go to an actual escape room. This has resulted in several lines of games that recreate the puzzle-solving experience of an escape room. My personal favorite of these is the “Exit” line, and the best of those is The Abandoned Cabin. Players will have to read closely, look carefully, and think outside the box to avoid their doom in the time allotted.

• Players: 1+
• Time: 60+ minutes
• Ages: 12+
• Price $10-$15

Mansions of Madness (Second Edition): I can’t let the cooperative category go by without mentioning one of my favorite games of all time, Mansions of Madness. This game of Lovecraftian horror has the players investigating mysterious happenings in Prohibition-era New England. This second edition of the game is fully cooperative because the role of villain has been taken on by an app (the app, which is free, is required to play the game, and can also be run off of a computer), which says which tiles and monsters to place, and provides flavorful text describing the results of the investigators’ interactions with their environment.

• Players: 1-5
• Time: 120-180 minutes (depending on scenario; a couple are shorter or longer)
• Ages: 12+
• Price: $90-$100

Betrayal Legacy: Betrayal at House of the Hill tells a single story of a group entering a mysterious mansion and exploring until something goes horribly wrong, turning one member against the group. OK, you got me, not ultimately a cooperative game. But it fits so well thematically with Mansions of Madness. Betrayal Legacy is a “legacy” style presentation of that experience. A campaign game is one where multiple plays of the same game are connected into something broader. A legacy game is a campaign game where the game permanently changes based on the actions taken. For example, in Betrayal Legacy the multiple games represent centuries of exploration of the house by successive generations of the same families (each player is a family), and during the game some items will be marked as ‘heirlooms’ of a particular family, granting bonuses in later games when the same player uses that item. If you want to try a legacy game without the spooky theme, another option is Charterstone, a village-building game.

• Players: 3-5
• Time: 45-90 minutes (per game)
• Ages: 12+
• Price: $60-$75

Euro Games:

The term “Euro” style games refers to games that generally do not involve player elimination, primarily involve interaction through seizing opportunities, and are typically higher on long-term strategy than they are on randomness.

Coimbra: Coimbra is the most recent evolution of dice placement mechanics, where a pool of dice are rolled, and then players select from the dice available, assign them, and then reap benefits based on the number showing or other characteristics of the die. The dice-drafting in Coimbra cares about number and color, and results in manipulation of position on various tracks. And there are some victory points earned in there somewhere, or else how would you know what sort of manipulation you want?

• Players: 2 to 4
• Time: 90 minutes
• Ages: 14+
• Price: $50-$70

Lords of Waterdeep: This guide would be a poorer selection of tabletop games if it didn’t include at least one straightforward worker placement game. Worker placement is another ‘core’ game mechanic. Each player has several ‘workers’ and then take turns placing those workers on the spots available on the board to produce various effects. Mots commonly, each spot can only be occupied by one worker, so that action can only be taken once per round. Lords of Waterdeep implements that mechanic with a Dungeons & Dragons theme. The resources generated by the actions are fighters, rogues, wizards, and clerics, and victory points are earned by sending those heroes on adventures.

• Players: 2 to 5
• Time: 60-120 minutes
• Ages: 10+
• Price: $30-$50

Roleplaying Games/Dungeons & Dragons:

Many tabletop game guides are board (and card) game guides. But there’s more to the tabletop gaming scene than that, and there has been a big resurgence of roleplaying games in recent years, spear-headed by the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons, released in 2014. If the target of your gift is new to D&D, that means the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set is a good place to start, providing pre-generated characters, dice, and a first adventure. And it’s available for only $12 (MSRP $20).

If you’re buying for someone who is already into Dungeons & Dragons, it can be a little harder, because they will surely already have the core books they need, and you probably won’t know what supplements they already have. In that case, you can go a couple of ways. First, if they also like Magic: the Gathering, there’s the just-released Guildmasters’ Guide to Ravnica, which is a D&D campaign setting and player option book that uses the most popular Magic: the Gathering plane as the location (the world-city of Ravnica).

Second, while it isn’t technically a game book, there’s also the recently-released Dungeons & Dragons – Art & Arcana: A Visual History, which is a stunning 440-page journey from the first days of Dungeons & Dragons to the present. If the Starter Set is for someone who doesn’t have any D&D, then Art & Arcana is for someone who has everything D&D. And if you’re looking to prep the next generation for D&D, there’s The ABCs of D&D and The 123s of D&D, which are a charming pair of kids books.

Stocking Stuffers:

Last, but not least, there are the games you can hang from the mantle – cheap, small, and oh-so-stuffable.

Love Letter: The forerunner of a years-long boom of micro-games, Love Letter is a tiny game of deduction in which players try to get their love letter to the Princess – either my having the highest-valued card at the end of a round, or by eliminating all of the other players first. Each round takes perhaps a minute, and this version of the game can easily be carried in a pocket.

• Players: 2-4
• Time: 10 minutes
• Age: 8+
• Price: $10

For Sale: One of the oldest games on this list, For Sale is split into two distinct phases. In the first phase, players big to obtain cards (properties). In the second phase, players sell those properties. But the different ways the cards are grouped in both the purchase and sale phases means that there’s always a significant element of estimation and evaluation in deciding how much to bit on what and when.

• Players: 3 to 6
• Time: 20 minutes
• Ages: 8+
• Price: $15

Happy holidays! And remember – Never Stop Gaming.