Top 10 NEW Family Games in 2023

0:00 today I'm going to share with you 10 fantastic family board games now I do a top 10 family board game list every year and of course this year it's different again let me tell you how in 2021 when my channel was new I did the top 10 family board games of all time and featured all the games that I had played up till that point my top favorites in 2022 I made a new video updated using my response to users comments and recommendations from everything I learned since starting my YouTube channel now this year to make it different I'm featuring games that are all brand new so these games came out in 2022 or 2023 but all of them still hold the same three criteria that I've always had from the beginning which is one they must be accessible to people of all ages two they must be engaging for people of all ages and then finally all of the games on this list should be enriching so why don't I go ahead and show you my top 10 family board game list of 2023 whenever I'm choosing games to play with my family I usually favor games that don't take as long to play I find that that works for everyone's attention span but the first two games on this list are the longest to play in terms of duration and I think that that can be good too both of these games have a type of project that players are are working

1:30 towards building and if you can get behind a project then you can kind of get into a game that takes a little bit longer to play so at number 10 my recommendation is the game Creature Comforts now thematically Creature Comforts is all about preparing your home for winter so the objective of the game is to get victory points by building cards in front of your home that represent your Creature Comforts and these cards are paid for by Reon resources that you're going to be gathering during the course of the game when you perform actions using dice worker placement so what I find very interesting about this game is that really it all plays on probabilities at the beginning of each round players are going to roll two of their own family dice they're going to see the result of that roll and use those dice to place and commit to actions that they want to take later in the round then once everyone has made that decision The Village dice are rolled now with the village dice along with their family dice players are going to perform all of their actions but they didn't know what the village dice were going to be when they committed to the actions sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't that's the probability that they're playing but all in all the real appeal of this game is that it is a very tranquil peaceful game there is not very much uh confrence ation with other

3:00 players there is the possibility of stealing like an upgrade or a card that somebody else was eyeing but other than that people are really just playing side by side in a very zen-like way so it's an excellent game especially if your family is one that doesn't really like games with a lot of conflict the game Creature Comforts one thing that stands out about this channel is my consistent use of a metric to compare board games to learn more about how i rate games you can check out this very entertaining video or my personal website which lists a library of games rating according to the system using those affiliate links does support me and this Channel and I want to express special appreciation for those of you supporting me on patreon you are putting the wind in my sales for those of you who are interested in becoming a patron you can find details and benefits in the description don't forget if you have any questions about the rating system to check out that video now let's get back to the top 10 family games number nine is life of the Amazonia which came out in 2023 and plays up to four players now in life of the Amazonia players are going to be building their own uh rainforest and ecosystem so they're going to be placing tiles and then to those tiles they're going to be adding animals that are going to be scoring for different objectives that can vary from game to game the core mechanic of this game is a bag Builder you can use your turn to bu tokens which are going to be going into

4:31 a bag at the beginning of every turn you're going to be drawing tokens from the bag and those tokens are going to be used for paying the costs to either expand and grow your forest or add animals to your Forest then all of the spent tokens get placed back into the bag I don't think you need me to tell you that this game is extraordinary in its Artistry with its highest quality components and colorful attractive animal meeples the video speaks for itself what I can tell you is in terms of gameplay what sets this game apart from other Deck Builder and bag Builders is that as you play the game the costs of expanding your Forest increase the more that you add so you can't just focus on one thing you really need a balanced ecosystem and I think that really plays into the theme I feel like I'm going to win all right number eight is a game that the especially tactile and three-dimensional it's Castles by the Sea and in castles by the Sea characters are assuming that they are citizens in a world that is inspired by The Secret World of arietti so they're all very very small people and they're building their castles in the sand so on your turn you're placing blocks of sand in order to uh satisfy construction requirements for the different buildings that you're playing with now the game comes with several different cards describing the different buildings and

6:02 the different characters that can be added to the board and the effects of each but ultimately your objective is to build as many buildings as you can and keep those buildings standing from the everpresent threats of life on a beach like the giant who's a baby or the dragon that's a kite or the Beast which is a dog so at the beginning of each round players are building then their receiving income for any of their structures that are standing and then they're increasing the threat level of the various threats that can be out in the game and after several rounds of this at the end of the game tally up all of the buildings left standing and the person with the most points or sand dollars wins now if you're familiar with the game Cascadia which came out in 2021 so it doesn't fit into this list but it is a very popular family board game now I personally have not featured it on this channel and my reasons for that I could probably do a separate video It's not that it's terrible but I'll go into that later that's a different story the thing is if you're interested in Cascada if you loved Cascada you'd probably really understand and get behind this game I think this game is even more interesting than cascad and I'll tell you why but the game is called farm club and it plays up to four players now the thing about farm club is that it's only nine turns and

7:36 that's what I really really love about it because what you you you condense a game into something that's really short and you can easily bring it out on the table and teach the rules and play it quickly and I love it when I can do that with a game especially when I'm playing with younger kids anyway in farm club you'll recognize this each turn you're going to be taking an animal and you're going to be taking a objective now you're going to be placing the animal in your farm and the objective is something that you can do for victory points and you'll be tallied up either immediately or at the end of the game so sometimes the animal and the objective work together very nicely and the animal serves the objective's purpose other times the animal and the objective are not related at all sometimes the objective is already on your board and it's like easy points for you you take the objective card and you've already got the points and that's interesting but every time there's a really interesting choice of okay I want I need this animal but it's attached to that objective but on the other hand this objective is better for me but it's with an animal that I don't really need I love that decision making uh but what I like even more is that you can have all of that depth of problem solving in such a condensed game so that's why it's on the list farm club number six is going going to be a harder to find game this game comes from Finland and it's called balloon pop now balloon pop is very

9:08 similar to like an app that you would play on your phone where you're trying to like match three or something you're putting rows of blocks onto a grid they're sliding up to the top because they're balloons and then when they land with balloons that are the same color or they have the same symbol they pop and when they pop they disappear and the ones below them go up and they fill the roope the cool thing about it is the way that you find your balloons is by a little bidding war at the beginning of the round you have uh balloons four balloons come out little sets of four and then players play a card from their hand that has a number on it and that's their bid for those balloons why wouldn't you just play your highest number every single time because the card you play also dictates how you play the four balloons so the highest valued cards the balloons have to be placed either vertically or horizontally and you have no flexibility then midlevel cards you can do it either vertically or horizontally and then finally at the lowest level cards you can place it vertically or horizontally and you can you can pop a few balloons before you place them that way you can kind of reduce the number of balloons on your board and make it a little easier for yourself and the thing is once you play your card you can't pick it up you only play eight rounds of this you've got to playing your cards carefully so the decision making in this I think is wonderful it's a fast game uh only I I wish it played more than four players it

10:40 only plays up to four but what a terrific find balloon pop people often comment asking me to feature more games with a higher player count now Creature Comforts and farm club both play up to five players but for those people with big families this next game game plays an unlimited number of players you could play this game with nine kids and it would definitely work for all ages the game is scribbly gum now I got to feature this for a number of reasons one unlimited player count two it's one of the simplest games as you'll soon find out and three it's produced by Phil Walker Harding who is a brilliant game designer he's the designer of G MOS a game that I have recommended before Baron Park several excellent games and he actually created his own game company this year specializing in family board games so to find more games by phield Walker Harding you can check out the description but as far as scribbly gum is concerned this is my favorite from his new releases this year it is a flip and right game in scribbly gum you are the baby moths that burrow through the bark of the scribbly gum tree tree and give the tree its name so the way the game is played is one player flips over a card that tells everyone what direction they can move in and they can connect any path from one vertex to

12:12 another and consume the food along the way now as the players complete sets of food they're going to get points for that but when they eat any food that gives them a bonus they get to do an extra movement so there can be a lot of fun where you're chaining bonuses together elongating your paths and getting more and more points the game is very simple stripped down to a core mechanic but easy to understand and by giving a piece of paper to every player it is unlimited how many people can play scribbly gum now number four is the game the wandering Towers this is a like roll and move game something that would never be attractive to me but here's what really makes the game interesting on your turn you're playing a card that's going to have two sides of it either Towers or Wizards and you're going to choose which side of the card you want to use now the side of the card it can either give you a specific number that's how far you can move or it could be a dye and you can roll the Dy to move in any case you make your choice you roll your die you take the number you're either moving a tower or a wizard now the objective is to get the Wizards around all the way and land Into The Dark Tower once all of your Wizards are in there you've satisfied one half of your wind condition the other half is moving Towers if you move a tower on top of a wizard another Wiz hopefully an opponent's wizard uh you trap the wizard and you get a potion which is great if

13:44 you can produce all of your potions that's the other half of winning the game but here's the thing the potions have an effect and you can utilize the potion at any time during your turn in order to get an even better turn so the real craftiness of this game is plotting an excellent move and sometimes you don't see the move until you realize that if you use this potion to move this Tower this many spaces over then you can land your Wizard and trap another and like there are just so many cool effects the joy of this game is finding cool moves and yeah there's some dice involved there's a little bit of luck I don't mind it's so much fun and sometimes you're like oh that was an awesome move way to go like it's cool that you figured that out or sometimes you get to celebrate yourself yes I found the best move it was worth it I have so much fun with this game towers are moving Wizards are moving people are getting trapped there's an element of memory in this game because once your wizard is trapped it's up to you to remember where your wizard is and to untrap your wizard you have to move a tower well sometimes you can move a tower that's not the one that was trapping your Wizard and it's like oh shoot I totally forgot I have no idea where my wizard wizard is now and that's kind of fun too it's it's um you know come to think of it I have so much fun playing with my kids this is probably the one game that is best with families I probably would not play this game with a group of adults typically I mean I have so many

15:16 games to play with adults but it is so much fun to play with kids which is why it's still so high on my list the wandering Towers now number three relates to how I feel about the game Santorini if you're familiar with Santorini this is one of my favorite games of all time I absolutely love this game and as a side note the gamees designer Dr Gordon Hamilton is amazing he's a mathematician he's got a math site if you're interested in enriching material for your kids you've got to check out his website and what he's got there I'll put that all in the description but concerning Santorini the only reason I wouldn't put that game on this list aside from the fact that it was came out in 2016 and it's too old is that the game is pure skill there's no luck at all whatsoever so if you're an experienced player you're just going to beat whoever you're playing and if you're playing your kids you're probably going to beat your kids every time you don't sit down with chess and say hey have you ever played chess let me teach you and then just keep winning that's not fun you want to have two people of equal ability okay the other thing about sorini though is that the the thre player variant of Santorini is incredible so what if you could have a game that was like the three player variant of Santorini but had enough element of luck that anybody could play and even your kids could win that is what this game is to me now and it

16:48 doesn't even have to be three player it could be four player it could even be five player the only thing is it's going to be a little hard to find because the game comes from Serbia so make sure you check out the description I don't think you're going to get this one on Amazon necessarily but the game is called heral now in heral all players are trying to place tiles on a grid that satisfy a pattern that was given them at the beginning of the game but the thing is everyone knows what everyone else's objective is their card their objective card is face up and they hold a hand of tiles now what you're trying to do is Place til in such a way that serve your objective and not the other players but here's what's really cool this game is more about defense than offense because if you're playing a four-player game and you play your tile down and you're really close to achieving your objective well by the time it's your turn again there's going to be so many changes to the board forget about it you're not going to be able to achieve your objective based on something that happened four moves earlier so rather than focus on what on what you can do to serve your next turn what you really need to focus on is preventing the next person in turn order from being able to achieve their objective so you're looking at what they can do and you're thinking oh my gosh I have to move this and that and otherwise they're going to win on their next turn so you're moving that and then at the same time your opponent on your right is

18:19 thinking the same thing about you so you're trying to see okay well they you know they tried to block me this way but can I still and you know what happens is somebody wins the game because they realized something that they had not seen until that moment so this the the skill of identifying that pattern and searching for it at on the board when more and more tiles are getting placed by the way placing tiles isn't the only thing you can do you can slide tiles you can uh rotate tiles you can swap tiles excellent brilliant such a cool find I'm so glad that I've got a copy of it uh I will I will I will try to give a reliable link where you can get a copy of it too heraldica number two is up on my list because there is just manifold value in this game there is educational value there is engagement there is a CO this is the only Cooperative game on the list there's this game is so interesting and it doesn't play very long if you like pandemic then I think you would be really interested in the spill in The Spill players are working cooperatively to prevent and clean up an oil spill they're saving Wildlife it has very similar mechanics to pandemic where you can perform four actions on your turn and you can either clean up the oil spill or you can save wildlife and what I think is brilliant is that the propagation of this oil spill is done by dropping dice into a dice tower which

19:49 splits them into four quadrants and then you place them in the sector corresponding to the number I think that's a really cool way to drive the oil spill and then you are obtaining powerful cards uh when you achieve objectives in order to help you accelerate your cleanup it is just an excellent Cooperative game that has some real uh environmental value I mean all of this stuff is is very relatable understandable when I first played it with my kids we watched some video of an oil spill on YouTube so that they could understand what that would look like and then we played the game uh it is it is a shorter game than pandemic in my opinion and uh it's extremely intuitive so way high on my list but only plays up to four though but nevertheless number two The Spill number one is one of my favorite types of games to recommend because it comes as a complete surprise let me tell you how I found it I reached out to inside up games who is the maker of the game Earth Earth by the way is a great game I think it's too text Heavy to be accessible to kids of all ages that's why it's not on the list but in any case I reviewed it it was awesome and I was looking at an upcoming Kickstarter for a game called perch that looked attractive to me and so I reached out to them I asked them about perch I was going to Essen and they said yeah hey thanks for doing the review for Earth why don't you come buy our booth and we'll give you a copy of this game

21:21 and I looked at it and I was like oh yay I'll cover that game sure like I I I wanted to review perch and I was going to cover this game anyway so I came by to look at this game and I read the rules and I was like okay you know this is actually I'll try it this could be good this could be good and then I played it and I was like oh crap this is fun this is so much fun the game is called draft and write records now objections that I would have to this game when I look at it first it's a game about music board games about music just seem like it's such it seems like such a lame name theme right number two it's essentially a a roll and right I mean it's it's a draft and right but roll and right drafting right same idea you're writing on a pad of paper games like this I feel are a dime of dozen it's just they all have the same sensation for me what is a new Rolland Wright going to offer that's any different wasn't excited about that either played the game and man it struck a chord H pun intended for me here's what it's about the game you are building and managing a band so it's a draft and right game you are taking a card from your hand and passing to the player on your left or your right it alternates every round so the card that you pick is going to let you mark something on your band sheet now there's Cally three four

22:53 types of cards you've got the crew cards You' got the acid cards you've got the agenda cards and then you've got uh Scandal cards which are really cards that you don't want so essentially there's three kinds of cards that you do want now the asset cards and the agenda cards kind of like not thrilling what you're doing there agendas you're trying to complete rows or columns or diagonals and you get bonuses when you do that I'll talk about what bonuses do in a minute you got the agendas same kind of thing you're getting the bonus between any two assets that you mark on this part of the board more on bonuses and then finally you've got crew which is going to be your lead singer your musicians your producers Etc now the cool thing is the way the bonuses work on the crew because crew have different colors now thematically the colors represent things like tonality and Tempo and or Rhythm and stuff but the colors when two members of your crew are side by side and they share the same color they create a Harmony and the harmony gets marked at the bottom of your band sheet and the harmonies will unlock more bonuses now all of these bonuses do things like they Advance you on your tour or they they give you new album releases or singles or they give you money which you can use to grow your band or your crew or go to new

24:23 destinations on your tour or add new assets or agendas right now if you're listening to this you're like it sounds all lame it just sounds like you're marking one thing in order to Mark something else and blah blah blah but what's so satisfying is the structure of it all the colors the colors and the harmonies this game has the feeling of organizing things and putting things together you get to have chained effects which gives you one thing which gives you another thing and that unlocks something else which gives you one more piece over here there's so much that you get to do it is a very very very active active game and it just feels busy and fun and engaging and cool and you get excited about it and it's it's relatively isolated play I will say that but the people that I've played it with they get so caught up in the fun of organizing the band the artwork in this game is actually really set it apart because I think a lot of rolling writes because you're writing they don't get very fancy with the graphics but because you've got cards in here you kind of get you know enthused by the card art which I think is very well done also I've got to say the fact that there is a imprint of a record on the game box and on the cards is an attention to detail that I thoroughly appreciate it takes a little bit more time to explain the rules I I've played other rle in wrs that are a little simpler but this one has been fully engaging now I have recommended

25:54 other rolling rights flipping rights before in fact on this list I have uh scribbly gum so big difference here scribbly gum is extremely simple unlimited players uh drafting right records more complicated still good for kids but more complicated and plays up to six players so if you've got a little bit you know older kids I think this one would be preferable between the two as long as you've got less than six people in your family that is my number one recommendation but I hope you don't put too much stock into these numbers all of these games are good whether it's number 10 number one my whole purpose is to give you some excellent recommendations so that you can find a game that is great for your family so I hope you found this video helpful to that end thank you for watching and I will see you on my next video and look for the top 10 of 2024 which I'll be doing next year all right take care next time bye-bye