My top five board games right now

I run a board game night, so this list isn’t theoretical. Every game here has been through the gauntlet: real humans around my table, some competitive, some three drinks in, all of them happy to tell me when a game is boring. These are the five that keep coming back out of the closet.

Here’s the current top five, in order.

1. Sky Team

Two players, fully cooperative, and you’re landing a plane together without being allowed to talk. You place dice in silence to work the throttle, flaps, gear, and brakes, and the whole game lives or dies on reading what the other person is about to do. It’s tense in a way almost no other game manages, and it packs down to the size of a paperback.

2. Telestrations

The drawing-plus-telephone game. You sketch a word, pass it on, the next person guesses what you drew, the next person draws their guess, and by the end the message has mutated into beautiful nonsense. This is the one I reach for when the group gets big and loud. Nobody has to be good at drawing. It’s better if they aren’t.

3. Poetry for Neanderthals

You get your teammates to guess a word or phrase using only single-syllable words, and the second you slip and say something with two syllables, you get bonked with an inflatable club. That’s the whole game. It is deeply stupid and I mean that as the highest compliment.

4. Blood Rage

The most “real board game” on the list. Vikings, area control, and a world that is literally ending, so dying in battle is often the smart play rather than the sad one. It takes a little longer to teach than the rest, but once the table gets it, the table gets it.

5. Munchkin

The gateway to chaos. Kick down doors, kill monsters, level up, and knife your friends right as they reach for the win. Everyone who plays games has an opinion about Munchkin. Mine is that it still absolutely works, as long as you go in knowing it wants you to be a little bit of a villain.

Honorable mention: Punderdome

The game that nobody else at my table likes. Just me. You draw two prompts, get ninety seconds to smash them into one groan-worthy pun, and a judge picks a winner. Everyone else treats it as cruel and unusual. I think it’s the best kind of dumb. I keep bringing it back out, they keep hoping we play something else, and I remain undeterred. A man needs a hill to die on, and mine is made entirely of puns.