13 best family board games for hours of fun, from cult classics to new releases

If you’re partial to a TV quiz show you’ll love Outsmarted, which is played on a physical board but links up with an app. Apart from installing and activating the app, there’s no lengthy setup – roll the physical or digital dice, move your character on the board, and select a corresponding quiz question on the screen. The aim is to eventually land on and correctly answer ring questions, a bit like getting a cheese in Trivial Pursuit.

We cast our phones to the TV so that everyone could see the questions, and there were 10,000 of them across 10 categories. You can also buy expansion categories covering everything from Game of Thrones to famous logos, starting from a very reasonable £1.99.

Each player’s age category is set before the game starts, so kids get given appropriate questions vs teens and adults. And because questions are constantly updated, topical events popped up – a huge difference to similar games we tested, where references quickly dated.

We used one device between the four of us, but you can link up to six devices and play with remote players using the virtual board. We love this game’s capacity to be expanded, the fact it works just as well with two players as it does with teams and the always-up-to-date questions. A great all-rounder for families, especially extended ones.

If you don’t have the time or patience to read through pages of rules before you start, and there are only four of you playing, try Blokus. Each player takes 21 blocks in their chosen colour. The

aim is to get as many of your blocks on the board as possible before the game ends – when someone else runs out, or nobody can find a space to lay theirs.

There are only a couple of rules and a bit of strategy – our testers enjoyed blocking other players – but nothing too taxing. With some adapting this one can also be played with two or three players, although we found it definitely works best with an even four.

If you’re after a much more traditional board game that will take all evening to play, Catan is an excellent option. Games take at least an hour – but in our case, several.

Players take on the role of settlers and the idea is to build settlements and cities to score Victory Points and eventually win the game. To do so, players trade resources – so you can help and hinder fellow players depending on which resources you’re prepared to part with, setting the ‘price’ according to how desperate they are for what you’ve got in your hand.

Although it never feels boring or easy because of the level of strategy involved, you can buy expansion packs to switch things up – we loved the Seafarers expansion pack (£49.99), which allows you to branch out into the water.

A complete departure from Catan, Herd Mentality is the one to pull out at parties. Granted, it’s part card game and part board game, but we enjoyed it so much that it deserved a place on our list.

The aim is simple – the whole group is asked a question, and the idea is to write down the same answers as your friends. So far, so Family Fortunes. But in this game you win cows if you’re in the majority, or the squishy pink cow if you’re not – which you’ll want to palm off on another player ASAP if you want to win.

This game generates lots of laughter and works better with a big group, so it’s ideal if there are too many of you for a serious sit-down game.

There are chess sets, and then there’s the Harry Potter Final Challenge chess set from The Noble Collection. A recreation of the supersized version featured at the end of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, this ornate die-cast zinc board measures up to 50x50cm, with intricately detailed, oversized solid resin pieces.

It certainly made an impression on our testers from the moment they opened the box – the whole thing is as theatrical as you’d hope from the price, and the sheer extravagance of the set made for a very special experience when playing. It’s not small, and we found we either had to play it on the rug – it’s raised off the floor by legs – or on the kitchen table rather than the coffee table. But it would make an impressive gift for any Harry Potter fan or serious collector.

Our younger, Lego-loving testers were particularly keen to try this new game from Asmodee. Monkey Palace is a jungle-themed game for two to four players where you work together to build staircases out of Lego bricks, while also working on your own to earn the most Banana Points and win the game – so it’s both collaborative and competitive.

It took us a little while to read through the rules, but it’s relatively simple once you start playing and there are a couple of cards you can add in to make things more interesting once you’ve got the hang of it. We liked that there are four different ground maps – which you lay at the start and build on – and the final creation is different each time.

Scrabble has been sold in the UK since the 1950s and has since become a household name. So, the news that Mattel was to launch a new collaborative version of the crossword game in 2024 was met with mixed reviews from die-hard fans.

Scrabble Together is now on the underside of the original game, and instead of scoring points for creating words, you work together to win goal cards – each of which comes with a challenge. Complete 20 goal cards and you win the game – together – or fail to complete them and you all lose.

We had an equal mix of testers who preferred the new vs the old game, but ultimately you’re now getting two games for the price of one – which is definitely no bad thing.

There’s a little bit of setting up and rule-reading involved with Ticket to Ride, but it becomes infinitely easier when you’ve played it once, so it’s worth persevering with. It’s for ages 8+ and our 10-year-old tester actually won the game on the first go.

The game itself reminded us of Catan, in that everyone is working towards building their own route across the board – this time with trains. The longer the routes you build, the more points you earn, and adding in Destination Tickets – where you try to build a route that connects two cities – ramps things up a notch. We played ours with limited-edition deluxe train sets released to mark the game’s 20th anniversary, and they’d make a nice gift for someone who already owns the game.

This game from The Mystery Agency is great if you fancy hosting a game night with a twist. Open the outer box and you’ll find an escape-room-style mystery to solve before your time runs out, with clues and puzzles to solve, evidence to collate and online hints available if you’re stumped.

We won’t give too much away or we’ll spoil the fun, but all our testers got stuck in and really enjoyed the level of detail involved with this game. The only downside is that once you’ve solved it, it’s not the kind of game you can play again – although the board game within the game is re-playable. On the plus side, you can repack it and pass on the fun to a friend.

Alias isn’t new – the word explanation game was invented decades ago in Finland and has been popular there since the 1990s, which is about when it sprang onto the scene in the UK. But it’s one of those games that doesn’t really date, and it’s just as fun to play as ever.

To play, take a card with words on it, and explain those words to your partner or team without actually saying them. The more words guessed correctly by your team, the further you move your piece on the board. You’ll need two teams of two as a minimum, but it works well with big family groups – just expect plenty of shouting.

When it comes to educational board games, our younger testers tended to instantly dismiss anything that looked like an extension of school. 13 Beavers, however, turned out to be unexpectedly and unintentionally educational – and looks absolutely nothing like a maths-based game.

It’s essentially a fun version of higher or lower, where you use equal parts probability and luck to guess what the next card drawn from the pile will be. Get it right and your beaver is one step closer to paradise – get it wrong and you’ll go backwards on the board. While it’s not strictly a kids’ game, our 10 and 12-year-old testers particularly liked the bright cartoony graphics and asked to play this one again.

We really liked the magical, whimsical theme of this deckbuilding game from Ravensburger – everything from the theme to the gameplay was quite different to anything else we tested, and the detailed illustrations on the cards went down well with everyone.

The main element of the game involves building a deck of cards, which you use to earn leaves and buy more cards to help you move magical dewdrops off the board. This is one of very few games we found that you can play solo, and we love that it includes four double-sided game boards to keep things interesting.

Think you know your Aretha Franklin from your Ariana Grande? Hitster is the ultimate game for musically-inclined families who love to prove their pop culture prowess. If you reckon you’d ace the BBC’s Hit List, this one’s for you.

Great for two players up to ten, each pack contains 308 music cards with Spotify QR codes that can be scanned using your phone. You don’t need a Spotify Premium account, though. A snippet of a track begins playing every time you scan, and you’ll work alone or co-operatively to guess the year it came out.

You then place the card in your timeline by deciding if the song came before or after another card in play. If you flip the card over and get the year right, you get to keep the card. The winner is the one with the most cards at the end of the round. Great fun, and if you’re a serious music aficionado, you can make it even harder by having to guess the artist and song name.