10 Board Games You Need If You Have A Group of Friends Coming Over

1. Cash and Guns

Players: 4-8
Game Time: 30 min
Age: 10+

Ca$h ‘n Guns helps you relive the best scenes of your favorite gangster movies. The goal is to have more money than anyone else after eight rounds while still being alive.

You will love playing this heist gone right friends gone wrong game as you and a group of friends battle it out taking turns shooting at each other to win the spoils of your latest heist. Don’t be fooled however not everybody’s gun is loaded!

2. Bang (the dice game)

Players: 3-8
Game Time: 15 min
Age: 8+
BANG! The Dice Game keeps the core of the Bang! card game in place. At the start of the game, players each take a role card that secretly places them on a team: the Sheriff and deputies, outlaws, and renegades. The Sheriff and deputies need to kill the outlaws, the outlaws win by killing the Sheriff, and the renegades want to be the last players alive in the game.

Each player also receives a character card which grants him a special power in the game. The Sheriff reveals his role card and takes the first turn of the game. On a turn, a player can roll the five dice up to three times, using the results of the dice to shoot neighbouring players, increase the range of his shots, heal his (or anyone else’s) life points, or put him in range of the Indians, which are represented by nine tokens in the centre of the table. Each time a player rolls an arrow, he takes one of these tokens; when the final token is taken, each player loses one life point for each token he holds, then the tokens are returned to the centre of the table.

3. Roll for it 

Players: 2-8
Game Time: 30 min
Age: 8+
Roll For It! is a casual, family-friendly dice and card game. Each player starts the game with six dice of a single colour, and three target cards are laid face-up on the table. Players take turns doing the following: On a turn, a player rolls all of her dice not already on cards, then places any dice that match the targets on the corresponding cards. (Alternatively, before taking her turn, a player can first choose to reclaim all of her dice from all cards.)

If the player now fulfills the target with her dice – e.g., a pair of 3s, a quartet of 6s, or a specific combination of numbers – she claims the card, takes back her dice (and returns any other dice on the card to their owner), then places a new card on the table. Each card is worth a certain number of points. The first player to earn forty or more points wins!

4. Tsuro

Players: 2-8
Game Time: 15 min
Age: 8+
A beautiful and beautifully simple game of laying a tile before your own token to continue its path on each turn. The goal is to keep your token on the board longer than anyone else’s, but as the board fills up this becomes harder because there are fewer empty spaces left… and another player’s tile may also extend your own path in a direction you’d rather not go. Easy to introduce to new players, Tsuro lasts a mere 15 minutes and actually does work for any number from 2 to 8.

5. Quartz

Players: 3-5
Game Time: 45-60 min
Age: 14+
Dwarves are among the bravest, determined and hard workers creatures you can find. Especially when they are searching for crystals in a new mine.

In Quartz, you belong to a group of dwarves who has just discovered a new mine on their land. Excited by the discovery, you decided to make a bet. Everyone will explore the mine for five days. At the end of each day you will sell in the city, the crystals you extracted during this day. At the end of the fifth day, the dwarf who earned the most money will become the only owner of the mine.

6. Jamaica

Players: 2-6
Game Time: 30-60 min
Age: 13+
After a long career in piracy, Captain Henry Morgan skillfully gets appointed to be Governor of Jamaica, with the explicit order to cleanse the Caribbean of pirates and buccaneers! Instead, he invites all of his former “colleagues” to join him in his retirement, to enjoy the fruits of their looting with impunity. Each year, in remembrance of the “good old days,” Morgan organizes the Great Challenge, a race around the island, and at its end, the Captain with the most gold is declared Grand Winner.

This is a pirate-themed tactical race game with player interaction and side goals (e.g. detouring for treasure). The winner is the player who best balances their position in the race with their success at the side goals.

Add Another Level to this game with the crew expansion and add new combat features.

7. Dead of Winter

Players: 2-5
Game Time: 60-120 min
Age: 13+
There are board games based on The Walking Dead, but none so effectively capture the paranoia-tinged struggle to prevail in a post-zombie-apocalyptic world as Dead Of Winter. On the surface, it’s a straightforward cooperative game, with players taking the roles of survivors who must coordinate their efforts to gather resources, survive and protect their colony during a bitter, zombie-infested winter. But everyone also has a secret agenda to fulfil — one of which may well involve quietly working against the others and bringing about game-losing disaster.

8. King of Tokyo

Players: 2-5
Game Time: 60-120 min
Age: 13+
I want to be a giant kyju monster attacking a huge city. Is that what I just heard you say? Or course it is because who wouldn’t? Play as a giant monster roll some dice and try to gain the most victory points (or kill all your opponents first) as you try to become the king of Tokyo. This fun social crazy hectic game will be a sure hit with your friend just be sure to remove any breakables from the table first.

9. Codenames

Players: 2-8
Game Time: 15 min
Age: 14+
One of the best party games of recent years, this offering from prolific Czech designer Vlaada Chvátil sets two teams against each other to retrieve all their secret agents in the field, with each team nominating a “Spymaster” to provide the clues to their whereabouts. Each agent is represented by a single word, with each Spymaster only allowed to give a one-word clue — one which should avoid any chance of their team accidentally uncovering the other team’s agents — or the game-ending assassin. Genuinely a game for everyone. Even your Uncle Terry will enjoy it.

10. Pandemic

Players: 2-4
Game Time: 60 min
Age: 13+
When Matt Leacock’s global disease-battling game Pandemic was first published no one would have expected a game centred around fighting diseases would be such a hit but 10 years latter, it has popularised cooperative games (where every player either wins or loses together) like no other.

This cooperative game is perfect for those goal oriented team players that you call friends and will make sure nobody’s feeling get hurt (as long as you win) otherwise you will all lose together and isn’t that what it’s all about.