There are some tiny tin-box style games, often not very deep but maybe there is something out there worth traveling around with?
Love Letter
I recently travelled with the following small games and can recommend them.
Sprawlopolis - Lovely co-op city builder with 18 cards, much more replayable than you’d think.
Fugitive - A great cat and mouse/hidden movement game with numbered cards. Either flee as the fugitive or hunt as the marshal.
Air land and Sea - A tactical game with the added wrinkle of choosing when/if to withdraw.
Monopoly Deal - A classic, fast, fun, ruthless. Monopoly as it should be.
Hive Pocket - Chess like, strategic, tactile and can be played pretty much anywhere.
Stew - A simple bluffing card game of creating a stew together and working out when the best time is to eat the stew, if at all.
Hope this helps!
I haven’t seen “Wizard” mentioned yet. It’s a staple among german outdoor tourists.
Also “Witches” which is somewhat similar. Both are great games!
Our family usually packs Sushi Go and No Thanks when traveling
Hive is a great travel game! It’s small (so therefore easy to transport) and just requires any flat surface to play on. It’s a turn based game where your objective is to place tiles (which have different bugs on them) to surround your opponents Queen whilst also defending your own Queen from being surrounded. It has a surprisingly deep level of strategy involved for such a simple game.
This is somewhat hypothetical because I don’t travel that often so I haven’t actually traveled with all of these. But this is what I’d pack:
- Next Station: London: great roll & write with a nice compact flap box. Works for solo.
- Sea Salt & Paper: one of our current favorites, small box, easy to teach
- Scout: ditto
- Orchard: My small comfort solo
- Some Buttonshy games. Maybe some Pack O Game ones too.
Easy to teach can be an important consideration in case you find some new people to play with.
Sprawlopolis is very light weight and offers a lot of replayability.
We have laminated (I believe that is the english word) clever, qwixx, knaster and knister so that we can bring 1 set of dice and play those all.
We really like regicide, which is just 1 pack of cards.
Lastly you have some (card)games with a small footprint, such as The Crew, or Cahoots, or Pickomino.
Just brought:
- Silver & Gold
- Village Pillage
- Mint Works
- Star Realms
- Bananagram
Mint works has been on my wishlist for a long time. I do have Mint Delivery and also Mint Imperium but I do like worker placement games :)
Star Fluxx
@dpunked I really like Mijnlieff - abstract with small footprint that plays quickly. Friend of mine came up with a perfect travel game that fits in a wallet - Mesozoic Mayhem.
@dpunked Palm Island!
Deep Sea Adventure
7 wonders duel.
The city (London, NY, Sf etc) based ticket to ride games are great. You can play in about 20 mins. I’ve played it in airports and poolside at the air bnb. I’m actually traveling with it this weekend lol
Railroad Ink is a roll-and-write game in a tiny box (or multiple tiny boxes of different colors) and scales well from just one to six players.
