Party games for Christmas

With the holidays coming up, The Boar Games team thought it would be a good idea to talk about some of our favourite card games to play during the festive season. Hopefully, after reading this article, you’ll have some ideas for games to play with your friends and family and liven up the household in the next few weeks.

Happy holidays!

Exploding Kittens – Ben Keedwell

Credits: Exploding Kittens/IGBD

If you’re looking for a quirky card game to play with your family this Christmas, then look no further than Exploding Kittens. The premise is simple: each player takes a turn to draw a card from the deck, and if you happen to pick up an ‘Exploding Kitten’ card, you’re out of the game. This may seem straight-forward, but the real complexity comes from the many cards that allow you to skip your turn or force other players to draw instead. From ‘Taco Cat’ cards to ‘Nope’ and ‘Attack’, the game is packed with weird and wonderful cat-themed cards to increase your chances of out-surviving your opponents.

While it’s very easy to pick up, Exploding Kittens excels in its hidden layers of strategy that will keep you coming back to it again and again. And even if you do exhaust the possibilities of the base set, there are a range of expansions that offer all sorts of strange cards from the ‘Catomic Bomb’ to the ‘Curse of the Cat Butt’, each with their own game-changing abilities. Whether it’s from the game’s ridiculous illustrations or competitive nature, you can count on Exploding Kittens to get your family in the purr-fect mood this Christmas.

Taboo – Reece Goodall

Credits: Marmalade Game Studio

Come Christmas time, families come together to exchange gifts, share a meal, and – if you’re anything like my family – play games. We love games in my house all year round, but Christmas is the perfect opportunity to bring the extended family together and share some festive fun. We do quizzes and the inevitable board games that someone will have been gifted, but then it’s time for the old staples – and, with my family, that means a round of Taboo. 

The game is really simple. You’ll be given a card with a word to convey to your teammate, as well as a list of words that you cannot say (so the card may say ‘Christmas’, and you can’t say ‘Santa Claus’, ‘December 25th’, etc.). If your teammate guesses correctly, you get a point, and you move on to the next word. It’s a basic premise, but coupled with a tight time limit and someone from the rival team keeping watch to make sure you don’t accidentally say the words, it gets very tense. You may think of the perfect way to describe your word, or you may fold under pressure – I know I’ve done both. It’s engaging but easy to pick up, and it’s a great addition to any Christmas party.