Happy Thanksgiving Week BATT Family! We hope that you'll be able to find a bit of relaxation this weekend (at least until Rivalry Week kicks off on Saturday). In the spirit of trying to bring people to the table and give you an alternate to playing Rummikub for the nine billionth time, we're giving you a variety of recommendations for games to bring home for the holidays that will get anybody to play!
One final note, we didn't present this list as any kind of ranked list, instead we talked about them in order of release date.
Five more games to take home for the holidays:
1) Sushi Go! - Gamewright
Originally released in 2013 from designer Phil Walker-Harding and plays 2-5. A light drafting game with great art and a clean set of scoring varieties within the cards themselves. Essentially it's a set collection game where you're trying to score as many points as possible across three rounds based on the cards you've drafted. There was a larger version with more modularity, Sushi Go! Party that supports 2-8 players if you want to play with more people. The components for regular Sushi Go! are included should you want to play that way as well. There were some other implementations as well (Sushi Roll, Sushi Go!: Spin Some for Dim Sum) but I think that SG/SGP are the best ones out there. There is also a brand new 10th Anniversary edition available in very limited quantities, but I have seen it at Barnes and Noble so you might still be able to track that one down.
2) Antidote - Bellwether Games
Also released in 2013 from designer Dennis Hoyle, it supports 3-7 players. Antidote plays in the same way that Clue does - you're trying to find the solution before everybody is down to one card in hand. Antidote is a deduction game where on your turn you'll either have everybody pass one card to the left or right, make a direct trade with another player, or have everybody play a card from their hand to the table. There are other modules and variants with the box and the Lab Alliance expansion that honestly we never play with because the base game is strong enough on it's own. Lab Alliance is worth pick up just to expand the player count up to 9 but that's the only reason to own it I think. This game is also one that you can play as co-operatively or selfishly as you want. There technically is scoring but we never use the points and just play to see if we can survive. This has been a favourite for a very long time.
3) Deception: Murder in Hong Kong - Grey Fox Games
Released in 2014 from designer Tobey Ho, Deception plays 4-12 players and is a team based deduction game. A murder has been committed by one of the players around the table and only the murderer and the Forensic Expert know who did it. The Forensic player has to communicate what they know silently and only using 6 prompts that are randomly drawn. Each player will have an array of cards in front of them and the murderer needs to lead the other players astray as the Forensic player tries and gets the others to identify the correct items/player. Each non-Forensic player has exactly one guess before the end of the game to guess a pair of cards to identify the murderer. If you like social deduction and want to lean into that theme, then Deception is an excellent choice. There are a variety of small promo packs that you honestly don't need (a lot more gaming related nonsense). The Undercover Allies expansion is good but honestly unneeded.
4) Just One - Repos Productions
Just one was released in 2018 and was a reimplementation of a 2017 game that Ludovic Roudy designed. Just one added Bruno Sautter to that design team and supports 3-7 players though honestly you can play more than 7 without much issue. Just One is a game that feels like such an obvious game that somehow took til the last ten years to be released. One player (the judge essentially) will blindly pick a numbered word off a card they can't see. The rest of the players will then try and come up with a single word that will allow the Judge to guess the word they picked. The trick is that if any player reveals they wrote the same clue then both (or all in some cases) have to erase their clue and the Judge has to guess with what's left over. There's a scoring system in this one too that we frankly never use beyond trying to get more words correct than not. This one also works incredibly well for remote play. The biggest baffling thing with Just One is that there isn't any kind of expansion deck available for it in English. A couple of very small promo packs exist, but that's about it. Still, it's arguably my all time favourite party game.
5) The Crew: Mission Deep Sea - Kosmos
Released in 2022 from Thomas Sing, Mission Deep Sea is the reimplementation of the 2020 game Search for Planet IX. The Crew plays 2-5 players and I really do pick the specific version of Mission Deep Sea. It's more interesting the way the tricks are determined, uses far less fiddly mechanisms by dropping the tokens, and has just as little theme as the original. The Crew is a co-operative trick taking game and that alone will stun most trick taking players in families. Because the mission book is as simple to use as it is, it's easy to define the path of how to play each night. Or you can simply peel off a few random mission cards and just play it that way. Easy to understand, easy to teach, and a great way to introduce new people to trick taking just as much as it's easy to get lost in for experience trick takers.
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