With Christmas, only a few days away here is our gift to your our list of the best Christmas Themed Board Games that can add that festive spirit to your Christmas day

12 Days

This game uses the “12 Days of Christmas” song as a motif. Over twelve rounds, players try to re-gift unpopular cards while keeping cards that are strong enough to win the day, while also keeping a careful eye for bonus scoring at the end of the game. Each round a new holiday card is up for grabs, with the cards ranked from 1 to 12 and being worth 1-12 points. In a round, a player:

  1. Gifts a present to the player to his left,
  2. Opens presents and tries to win the day with the best present, and
  3. Buys a new gift to refill his hand.

After twelve rounds, players score points for each holiday card they’ve collected. In addition, whoever holds the most gift cards for each rank scores as many points as that rank, with all tied players scoring in the event of a tie. Whoever has the most points wins.

12 Days has quite a lot of depth to it in terms of strategy, even though it appears (and still plays) fairly simply. This game works well for those of you with family members who want to strategise and really think about the type of moves they want to play, without it being a super-heavy strategy laden game. You can even show them how to play the game, as 12 Days featured on Tabletop with Qwirkle during it’s the second season. Incidentally, Qwirkle is another brilliant game with just the right amount of strategy to it for the holiday season!

This game is for 3 to 5 players ages 8+ and takes around 15 minutes to play.

Letters to Santa

Letters to Santa is the Christmas themed version of Love Letter. If you want all of your Christmas wishes made true by Santa, you’ll need to make sure your letter gets to him. The closer you get the letter to Santa, the more likely you are to win… but watch out for the wily Krampus, out to dash your yuletide dreams!

For gamers familiar with Love Letter you should have no trouble playing this Christmas themed version. It’s easy to play but very clever, anyone could learn to play this game in a short period of time. With two cards to play each turn, your choices are always clear, making it a great game to play with people that tend to get analysis paralysis!

This game is for 2 to 4 players aged 10+ and takes around 20 minutes to play.

Munchkin – Christmas Pack

Munchkin Christmas Lite is a Christmas themed pack to add to your version of munchkin to give it that holiday spirit. The game is very simple to play. Go down into the dungeon and kick in a door. Kill everything you meet. Backstab your friends and steal their stuff. Grab the treasure and run. It’s that simple… provided the monsters don’t kill you first! The first player to Level 10 wins.

Munchkin in all its iterations is such a delight, particularly as it’s a way to introduce people to roleplaying without actually roleplaying. The artwork is gorgeous and hilarious and sure to have your family in stitches while you play. It’s a little more intense than the games we’ve featured here so far, as it requires players to get their heads around the idea of having a “character” with a race or class, and their gear giving them bonuses to attack, defend or level up. It also takes a bit longer to play, so it’s best to teach this one earlier in the day before the food-comas start.

This game is for 3 to 6 players ages 10+ and takes around 1 to 2 hours to play.

Have a great Christmas Everybody and hope you enjoy this festive list 🙂

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