Better versions of family board games

Many popular family board games are old and tired, but you don’t need to play them.

With Christmas and the holidays coming up, we know it’s time to spend with family. Quite often this means board and card games. Be honest: do you really want another round of Ludo or (shudder) Monopoly? You’re in luck, because we’ve compiled a list for you (in no particular order) of those old and tired board games, and given you something bright and shiny and better to replace them with. And with the holidays coming up, and with gifts needed, what could be better than using your old games as Yule Log Fuel and bringing these gems to the table instead?

1. Snakes and ladders–replace with literally anything (or Mole Rats in Space, AKA Space Escape)

Seriously, folks: Snakes and Ladders barely fits the definition of a game. You could literally leave the dice to spin and pieces to move and the game ends up exactly the same regardless. There’s no player agency. So let me introduce you to Mole Rats in Space, AKA Space Escape, a clever retake on a tired game. In this game, you play as a team of intrepid mole rat astronauts, and wouldn’t you just know it, snakes have invaded your ship (Samuel L. Jackson was unavailable for comment). You have to make your way to the centre of the ship to escape, avoid the snakes and hopefully lob them out the chutes into the cold clutches of space. The problem is that you can suffer the same fate, and if you get bitten by a snake twice, it’s game over for you.

What makes this game a lot more fun is the elevated strategy it brings. Kids can pick up on the ideas just as fast as with regular old Snakes and Ladders, but actually feel like they can control the outcome a little. Plus, when the game is brought to you for the three-hundredth time, it is at least a bit of fun to play as an adult.

2. Ludo–replace with Camel Up

At its heart, Ludo (or Pachisi as it’s known in other regions) is a racing game. Get all your little men from the start to the end in as few dice moves as possible. There’s a little more player agency here than with Snakes and Ladders (i.e. you get to choose which of your four pieces to move), but the same fault remains. Camel Up (especially the second edition) puts a very fun twist on the old racing game and sees you placing bets on the camel races instead. While you have very little direct control over the camels themselves, you do control which camel you place your bets on, and the game hinges on the fact that the camels can stack up. The camel that is considered to be winning? That’s the camel at the top. The dice control which camels move and how many spaces they move, but the stacking mechanism is what makes for the most delightful chaos you’ve ever seen. And like before, it’s great with adults, and handles up to eight players.

3. Clue–replace with Mysterium

Although the whodunnit type of game can be a lot of fun, Clue (or Cluedo) adds tedium to the mix by having players trudge wearily around this huge mansion as they gather the necessary clues to figure out who the murderer was. (Hint: it was the butler. It’s always the butler.) While recent versions of this game have improved the formula somewhat, there’s a far better take on this type of game: Mysterium, which sees players taking on the roles of psychic mediums (media?) as they try to figure out a murder. The ‘victim’ is also a player, who plays as the ghost of the deceased. This player also has imperfect information at hand, and over the course of three rounds they must use pictures to communicate with the other players to try and inform them who the murderer is (and what killed them, and where). As the rounds progress, the victim recalls more and more about the event, but must still communicate using the picture cards provided. It makes for a great, atmospheric game as the players slowly figure out what happened to the poor victim.

4. Monopoly–replace with Catan

Monopoly really comes into its own as a trading game, but that fantastic aspect of it is belittled by … well, just about everything else about Monopoly. Despite the several thousand versions of Monopoly that abound, with themed sets on just about every intellectual property you can think of from My Little Pony to Fortnite, you can very easily replace it with a far superior trading game: Settlers of Catan (or just Catan as it’s known these days).

In fact, Catan checks off just about everything on the list of what makes Monopoly…well, Monopoly. Dice rolling? Check. Trading? Check. Stealing people’s stuff? Check. Buying buildings and upgrading them? Check. Themed intellectual property sets? Check. Passing Go and collecting 200 cash? Well … maybe not everything, because then we’d just end up with Monopoly again, and we don’t want that.

Catan sees players attempting to build settlements on the titular island, constructing roads between settlements, and trading resources to be able to do both these actions. Unlike Monopoly, which attempts to be a “last one standing” game where the players who were booted out go play something else such as Ludo, Catan has everyone in it until the end. And that’s more than enough reason to play this instead. The only downside is that you’ll need an expansion pack to play this game with five or six players.

5. Pictionary–replace with Telestrations

The best part of Pictionary was trying to figure out whether your teammate had drawn a guitar or a duck. Or was that Elvis? Telestrations is a beautiful, chaotic take on “broken telephone” mixed with Pictionary where players are each given a word to draw in their flip-books. The pages are flipped, and the books passed to the next player, who must attempt to figure out what the word was from the (hopefully poorly-drawn) image. The books are passed on again for the next player to draw what the previous player had written, and so on until the books return to their starting owners. Then, one by one people show what their word was, and how you get from “guitar” to “disco party on Mars”.

6. Risk–replace with Kemet

If you need a decent combination of plastic armies and domination, you could do better than Risk and get a copy of Kemet or Kemet: Blood and Sand instead. Think of it as a superior game set in ancient Egypt where the mythological creatures have come to life to terrorize their opponents. Instead of using dice to determine movement, Kemet uses an action selection player mat to gather prayer points that you then spend to move armies, recruit warriors and monsters, and hopefully prove that you’re the next Prince of Egypt. The beautiful miniatures in this game really give the game that sense of presence. Combat, too, is improved by exchanging the dice in Risk for a deck of cards, giving you far more control over the fighting. The best part of switching out Risk for Kemet is that, unlike Risk, Kemet’s players are all in it to the end, so you don’t have players going off to games of Ludo with the booted out Monopoly players in the background.

7. Chess–replace with Hive

Make no mistake, there is a very good reason that chess has remained one of the most played two-player board games in the world for over one and a half thousand years. However, the skill inequality levels between players and time commitment needed to play chess make it difficult to get people to the chess board if you just want to play something in less than 15 minutes with minimal set up time. Hive is a brilliantly conceived two-player game that feels a lot like chess, but with insects. There’s also no board, so whichever surface you have to play on is your play area. You could literally take Hive to the beach and play it on the sand. It’s nothing if not versatile.

The different Hive insects have variable moves and powers, much like chess pieces, and the aim of the game is similar: to “check” the opponent’s queen bee, which in this case means surrounding her with pieces. The strategic brilliance of Hive comes out after just a few plays, and you can introduce the pieces and concepts slowly enough for players to get comfortable with one set of insects before adding the next lot. The travel version of Hive is almost perpetually in my bag and ready to haul out whenever there’s a spare moment with friends, so you really have no excuse.

8. Scrabble–replace with Letter Jam

While Scrabble is definitely a lot of strategic fun, you’re often at the mercy of the player with the largest vocabulary. Or the biggest bluffer. And that is usually when the fights break out. Although Letter Jam is less suited to two players than Scrabble, it absolutely works better for larger groups, accommodating up to six players.

Letter Jam is another cooperative game set up over a series of rounds where every player can see every other player’s letters except their own. Players will take turns making words from the other player’s letters, and assign letter orders to those players. Remember that you can’t see your own letters, so you have to try and figure out from the other player’s letters what yours might be. So if letters two through five have been assigned to H,A,I, and R, and there’s a “1” in front of you, you can be fairly sure that you have a “C” before you. It’s harder than it sounds, trust me, but it scratches that itch of word games combined with the deductive reasoning from Clue. And of course, no one has to skulk off to join the Ludo game in the corner. (That’s also the last you’ll hear of the ill-fated Ludo game, I promise.)

9. Bridge–replace with The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine

The best bit about Bridge, or any team-based trick-taking game really, is the fact that you have to work with your partner to intuit what they’re holding to be able to win the card rounds. It’s very much the opposite of Letter Jam. The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine takes the entire concept of working as a team to new heights, and offers a collection of story-based missions set around a crew of astronauts attempting to reach Planet Nine. You have to work together with limited communication, and while the first few rounds are deceptively easy–how hard can it be to ensure that a single player wins a very specific card?–later rounds see your team needing to get certain cards to certain players in a specified order, or taking away your ability to communicate. It gets terrifyingly difficult later on, but the teamwork reward is well worth the effort.

10. Jenga–replace with Rhino Hero Super Battle

Dexterity games such as Jenga have never really lost their appeal, and you can almost always expect the resultant “wa-heey!” as the tower inevitably tips over in a loud, messy bundle of blocks. In the same sort of vein, but adding an extra level of competitiveness to the game, we have Rhino Hero Super Battle. The wooden bricks are traded out for cardboard walls and floors, and each player must use one of the floor cards in their hand to place it, however precariously, atop a wall card as stated by the floor. Players then place their hero on the floor as required, but two players can never occupy the same level at the same time, and so must battle it out to determine who stays and who has to move down a floor. A medal is then given to the player with a hero on the top floor, and the winner is either the player holding the medal when someone makes the entire rickety ensemble fall over, or the collective group of players who are not holding the medal when the medal-holder tips the tower. It’s amazing fun, and was created ostensibly for kids, but holds up well as an adult’s game too, especially if there have been a few too many cups of eggnog going around.

And that is a list of ten replacements for old board games that we’re sure you are all thoroughly sick of playing. Do you agree with the list? Disagree with the replacements? Have any other suggested replacements? Leave a comment or get hold of us and let us know.