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?
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.
Jackbox games are my favorites because there’s something for any group
Sushi party is a lot of fun. Easy to set up, learn and reconfigure.
Scrabble but with swears and inappropriate words only
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.
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
