Whether it be video, board, card, etc., what are your favorite games to play with large groups of friends?
You can’t go wrong with classics like Smash Bros., Mario Party, and Jackbox. I also enjoy a good game of Codenames. What are some of your suggestions?
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
Note: can’t play this with my wife. She has gotten me killed many, many times.
Man once you get into complex wires I don’t care who you are, that diagram is confusing as hell. Memorizing morse code a long time ago was a great bonus to the later levels though.
Complex wires isn’t that bad once you learn how to account for the parts of the diagram that are deliberately confusing, but they’re a lot harder if you only have one person with the manual. If you have 2+ people with the manual, one can get to work solving complex wires while the other helps the defuser with other modules.
Playing in a team is definitely the best. Flying through modules once everyone is coordinated is super fun.
This game is an amazing VR experience, even with people that never play video games otherwise.
This game is so good. I’ve also heard it’s been used in team building exercises because it requires effective communication between users with different levels of information access.
Scrabble but with swears and inappropriate words only
Ooh I would play this but with added rule that made-up words are allowed as long as they sound dirty
@StarManta @bermuda I worry that speech may devolve into something like the plumbus ’How. it’s Made’ video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYyL2g79DQg
Honestly I think it would be funny seeing people come up with nonsense words and then justify it. Maybe it only counts if everybody at the table agrees it should be a word
Scrabble: Urban Dictionary Edition sounds like a fun time.
Everyone should know Duck Game. Duck Game is great.
It’s kind of a 2d sidescroller where you fight each other as ducks with different weapons from pistols to grenades, sledgehammers and laser guns. You can wear hats, there’s tons of content and even more made by the community and it’s very easy to pick up. Supports up to four people, works great on a TV with controllers and is a ton of fun.
Also, there’s a quack button and you’re obligated to quack as much as possible.
And it’s usually really cheap on steam.
For board games, I’m a huge fan of:
- Dominion
- Love Letter
- Bohnanza
- Clank
For video games, my friends and I love:
- Ultimate Chicken Horse
- Risk (PS4/5 version)
- Mario Party
- Gang Beasts
Codenames is a great one, I’m also a fan of Articulate plus we recently(ish) played a game of “Pictionary Air” which was a whole load of fun.
Cards Against Humanity is always a classic. Just played Medium recently and that was a lot of fun. Also the old game of Pit can be a blast with friends.
If you enjoy Cards Against Humanity but get bored of it quickly because it’s just, you know, a bunch of random offensive stuff on cards, I recommend the game “Dick”. It’s exactly the same, but all of the answer cards are direct quotations from the Great American Novel: Moby-Dick. The quotes are… intense. But not random, because they all come from a seminal work of literature!
Wii sports lol
If you want glitchy so bad it’s good : wii party games
For video games I really love Crawl and if you’re playing with people who are less into games Lovers In a Dangerous Spacetime is super cute and very cooperative. Both are local play only, so you’ll need to be in the same room or use some Hamachi tricks to get it going online. Both are 4 player max. Secret Hitler is also a favorite card game in my friend group, but it really needs 8 people (max 10 players) to get interesting so it can be hard to get a game going.
For board games, I’m a big fan of Wavelength, Decrypto, and No Thanks!, along with Codenames.
Wavelength is a game where you try to get your teammates to guess a position on a spectrum, like “cold” to “hot” by giving them a clue, like “ice” or “the surface of the sun”. Decrypto is a lot like Codenames, but you’re also trying to disguise your clues from the other team. No Thanks! is a light, quick game which centers around pushing your luck as much as possible.
Some great suggestions here already (HT Wavelength, KTaNE, Love Letter, Codenames, and Mascarade), but Cockroach Poker is one of my favorites. It’s extremely simple: 64 cards, 8 sets of 8 different “vermin”. Distribute cards as evenly as possible across the group and pick someone to start. First player takes a card from their hand, slides it face-down to another player, and declares that it’s a certain critter in the game (E.g. “This is a rat.”) The other player can do one of two things:
- Accept the card: Say whether the first player was telling the truth or lying about what’s on the card, then reveal. If the receiver was right, the giver takes the card back and puts it face up in front of themself. If they were wrong, the receiver puts the card face up in front of themself instead.
- Peek at the card, then slide it to another player (who can’t have seen the card yet) and make a claim about what it is, which may or not be what the last person said it was. Then repeat this decision with the new giver and receiver. If only one player remaining hasn’t seen the card, they have to accept and make a guess.
The first player to get 4 of a kind loses, and everyone else wins. It’s always a smash hit when we play, provided you have 4+ people.
Also a big fan of Meow! The cult of cat, which is basically Mao boiled down to just the rules, which change from game to game since the rules are printed on the cards and are only active if they’re in play.
Some ones I’ve had a lot of fun with recently:
-Herd Mentality, where everyone tries to guess what the most popular answer to a question is
-Loaded Questions, where everyone answers a question and someone has to figure out who put what answer (both of these are really great for getting to know people better)
-Monikers, great for a larger group, a mix between taboo and charades. Super super fun.
-Mind the Gap. Great for mixed age groups like families. It’s like trivial pursuit but you have to answer questions from different time periods.
Mascarade, a board game. It’s a game of hidden indentities, where everyone can lie to try to get all the money and win the game. I’ve had A LOT of fun playing with as much as 10 people. The game can be played between 2 and 13 players, but less than 4 I think it’s not that worth.
This is always a hit when we pull it out. Such a fun game
Lately we just grind AirConsole. The musuc guessing game is pretty fun drunk with a bunch of people
Decrypto!
Sushi party is a lot of fun. Easy to set up, learn and reconfigure.