Sometimes long breaks between game nights are unavoidable. Maybe you had a busy summer, or it was the holidays, or a global pandemic struck and for everyone’s safety you had to stay in your home for a year and a half. You know, the usual sort of things.
Eventually, you make room in your schedule (or you were all vaccinated against aforementioned deadly virus and experts advised that it was safe again in your area to meet), and finally your group is getting together for a much-awaited game night. You set the date, except by now its been so long and no one can agree on a game and you also haven’t seen each other in forever so you want to ask about their dog and their garden and their new breadmaking hobby and before you know it the night has passed and you’ve hardly made progress on your usual heavy Euro.
To save you the disappointment of failing to finish a heavy game or missing out on some much-needed catching up, here are some games to help you reconnect with your buddies after a long break between game nights.
Re-imagined Classics: Vamp on the Batwalk and Dinosaur Tea Party
OK – we’re cheating by combining two games into one entry. They aren’t even by the same designers or publishers, and technically one is marketed for kids. BUT they both are re-creations of classic games that are classics for a reason: they’re fun and light and really force your group to interact again. No getting lost in a silent strategy spiral here!
Vamp on the Batwalk is a modernized version of a trick-taking game that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It has fun characters and interesting mechanics with a lot of player interaction. This game reverses the usual hand of cards – you know everyone else’s cards, but can’t see your own (think Hanabi). You can do some math and weigh your odds, but you ultimately have to rely on a bit of luck. We were able to chat and catch up for most of the game, and it was a great lead-in to heavier games later in the night.
Dinosaur Tea Party is Guess Who for modern dinosaur lovers. Technically this is marketed as a family game great for young kids (the largest demographic of dinosaur enthusiasts) but you don’t need kiddos to enjoy this game. It has a few different modes you can add in to make it more challenging (ex. someone always lies). While the suggestion to always use silly voices is probably meant to be for kids, alcohol or just the excitement of seeing your buddies again could help even your most reserved friend take a stab at how they think a highbrow dinosaur might sound at a classy tea party. If you need a warm-up or warm-down to ease into intense games or just want to reconnect with your pals with a relaxing game, this is a fun one.
Cubitos
Alright, so this one is getting a bit more competitive. Cubitos combines dice drafting with press-your-luck decisions that could end with your head in your hands and your friends laughing evilly at your awful roll.
Throw in a racing mechanism and this game can be downright stressful in the best sort of way. In Cubitos, players race around their tracks, building up a pool of dice that let them do special actions or add up to buy more dice. Each round they roll a subset of their dice pool and hope for feet to move their player, actions to do cool stuff, or money to buy more specialized dice.
Cubitos is incredibly re-playable. It comes with many different race tracks and each color dice is assigned a different power from game to game.
What makes this game great for starting game night up again is its versatility – do you feel like actually thinking and strategizing your win? You can definitely do that through taking advantage of combining powers, planning which die to roll in any given turn, and weighing your odds when you “push it” to try and get more actions or movement.
OR, you can have a chill, fun time catching up with some of your favorite humans. Cubitos has fun artwork, cool theme, and is light enough that some side conversations won’t throw off the game too much. It’s not quite as interactive as others on this list, but the fun factor certainly makes it a great re-entry into game night.
Dominion (And Expansions)
So Dominion is on most conceivable types of lists (including some of ours) for a reason – it’s a classic game that never goes out of style. It strikes a similar balance to Cubitos: depending on your mood you can take it a bit more seriously and ramp up the competitiveness, or you can lay back and just see how much you can combo in a single turn.
Dominion is a deck building game for 2-4 players vying to become the most prosperous monarch in all the land. Players play action cards giving them special effects or bonuses and then use coin cards to purchase new, more powerful cards. Actions can be chained together to generate more actions, get additional cards, or get additional money.
Dominion has to make this list for us because we literally just played this as the first game in over a year with some very good friends we haven’t seen because of the pandemic! It was great to catch up over an old favorite.
Isle of Cats
We did need to put at least one “thinky” game on this list, and that’s Isle of Cats. Still pretty light in the wide world of games, Isle of Cats is a card drafting, polyomino game where players rescue cats from a soon-to-be invaded island. The cats are all sprawled in odd shapes that must fit into the grid of your boat in specific ways. Players also have cards that help them collect more cats, get most fish (cats demand a lot of fish), and set goals for end-game scoring.
Isle of Cats is also one of the more potentially combative games on this list – you can definitely screw your friends over by taking a cat they very obviously need. If you haven’t played games with your friends in a while, this is a great, lighthearted way to remind yourself which of your friends and family are cutthroat backstabbers (no, Sarah is not at all bitter that Emily took the last freaking purple cat).
Modern Art
We couldn’t have a list of re-get to know your game group without a game that really tests your understanding of their psyche. And nothing has you over-analyzing every facial twitch your friends have like an auction game.
Modern Art has been around for ages (it’s nearly as old as Emily), but it’s relatively new to us, and is easily our favorite auction game. It has all the usual rules of trying to get the best deals by spending the least amount of money, with a few unique twists on the auction mechanism. You also are never certain that any painting you purchase is going to be worth anything, so a few bad decisions (or bad luck) can be the game equivalent of flushing money down the drain.
Nothing helps you re-establish your game group after a long break like intense, prolonged eye contact as you try and figure out if your pal is going to outbid you. That, and hearing their opinions on the incredible artwork (all by real artists), will launch you all back to your gaming glory days.