Family Games

28 chunky wooden dominoes in a sturdy wooden box with a sliding lid.

Storage box measures about 33 x 20 x 2.5 cm

Age suitability: 3 years +

BJ157

Race through the maze to recover your treasure. The only snag is that the walls keep moving. as your competitors try to retrieve theirs.  At the start of each go, you move one section of the board one space which may help or hinder.

A game that first came out over thirty years ago and since then has given rise to over 60 different derivatives.

Each game takes 20 - 30 minutes.

2-4 players

Age suitability: 7 - adult.

The fast-dealing property trading games that has probably caused more family rows than any other game.  This is the classic British version set in London, from Old Kent Road to Mayfair.

Move round the board buying and selling properties, building houses and hotels whilst trying to avoid bankruptcy.  Sometimes it's cheaper just to go to Jail.

2-6 players

Age suitability: 8+

 Play the centuries-old strategy game on this wooden board.

Comes with 48 colourful acrylic 'stones'.

Two-player game for people of almost all ages (not suitable for the under 3 year-olds - small bits - choking hazard).

34007

Here's a board game with a difference.  There's no board.  Instead the players create their own planet, by sticking desert, mountain, ice, water or forest tiles on a magnetic dodecahedron, an ingenious feature of the game.  You do this in a way that creates the most suitable habitats for animals.  So for example penguins would need a large area of ice next to water whereas an arctic wolf would need ice but not water.  Each game lasts about half an hour.

2-4 players

Age suitability: 8+ 

Here's an excellent review from Tom Vasel of the Dice Tower on Youtube:

and a video from the game designers:

Jungle Speed is a fast and furious, somewhat chaotic, game of observation and then of lightning reflexes, so that rules me out.

It is a matching game, a bit like snap, but, instead of calling out snap when two cards match, you have to be the first to grab the Totem (the yellow rubber cylinder thing) that sits in the middle of the table.

The cards are divided equally amongst the players (the more, the merrier).  On each card is a symbol in a variety of colours.  Some symbols are quite different, others are deceptively alike. Players place their cards in a pile face down in front of them.  One by one, each player flips over the top card and, as they accumulate, gradually makes a discard pile in front of him.  When one player flips over a card whose symbol matches the shape of the symbol on the top card of another player's discard pile, both players make a lunge for the Totem.  The winner then smugly hands over his discard cards to the loser who puts both these and his own discard cards face down under his cards.  Grabbing the Totem mistakenly results in you getting everybody's discard cards. The winner of the game is the first to get rid of all their cards.  Each game takes about 20 minutes.

To complicate the game further, there are several special cards.  One of these special cards for example changes the rules so that you have to match the colour of symbols rather than the shape. A different special card requires every player to lunge simultaneously for the Totem.  A third one requires everybody to flip over a card at he same time on the count of three.

2 - 8 players

Age suitability: 6 +

Here's an excellent Youtube video from Skip the Rules (NB the Totem has since been changed from wood to rubber):

 

Here's a board game with a difference.  There's no board.  Instead the players create their own planet, by sticking desert, mountain, ice, water or forest tiles on a magnetic dodecahedron, an ingenious feature of the game.  You do this in a way that creates the most suitable habitats for animals.  So for example penguins would need a large area of ice next to water whereas an arctic wolf would need ice but not water.  Each game lasts about half an hour.

2-4 players

Age suitability: 8+

Here's an excellent review from Tom Vasel of the Dice Tower on Youtube:

and a video from the game designers:

 Photosynthesis comes in a gorgeous box and the components, the trees and the board, are excellent too.  Luckily it's also a great game.

The idea is too plant, grow and eventually to harvest trees making the most of the available light at the same time as throwing your neighbour's trees into shadow.  The complication though is that the sun gradually moves round the table, altering what's in the light and what's in the shadows.

Each game takes about an hour.

2-4 players

 Age suitability: 8+

Here's a video from the game designers:

A matching game - Pick a card and try to choose a tail to match up with your unicorn's head.  If you succeed, you can move your unicorn one square across the rainbow towards that pot of gold.

A game for 2 to 4 players.

Age suitability: 3 - 5 years

This game was 'Game of the Year' in 2017.  Superficially it is quite simple.  Everybody starts with a castle, around which you build your kingdom.  Then you choose your dominoes.  On these are pictured the type of lands you will have in your kingdom.  So you might have a domino with a square of forest at one end and water at the other, or another with meadow at both ends. After you have chosen each domino, you lay it around the castle and, like in dominoes, you can only put a farmland domino next to another farmland and so on. At each step your kingdom gets bigger.  The aim though is to build as big an area of each type of land as you can within your kingdom.  So you score more points if you have a block of five squares of farmland together than you would if those five squares were split. Once you have all placed your dominoes, that's the end of the game and you have to total the points.

Each round takes about 15 minutes.

2 - 4 players

Age suitability: 8 +