Best Board Games, Family Board Games, Outdoor Board Games
14 Best Board Games to Play Outdoors
With summer approaching or already here, depending on which hemisphere you’re on, many of you will be thinking of spending more time outdoors.
Picnics, camping trips and the beach are great places to play some board games with friends. To be a great outdoor board game, it’s got to be something small, durable, and have great game play to keep everyone entertained. There’s lots of great options.
The board games on this list are rated based on suitability for playing them outdoors, as well as their rating and user reviews.
14 Best Board Games to Play Outdoors
1. Aztack Board Game – Blue Orange
Take a step back in time to the Aztec world and build that temple. No, it doesn’t have to be perfect, but there are a few rules you may wish to follow if you want to beat your opponent. It’s not difficult, but then again you will have to use a few strategies and think if you want to lay claim to a pyramid win in Aztack. A great strategy board game the whole family can enjoy.
2. Bongo! – Heidelberger Spieleverlag
In this turbulent dice-safari through Africa, the winner is the one who looks quickly but carefully and is the first to call the name of the correct animal! The bamboo dice tell how many animals we have to look out for. There’s a trophy for correctly calling out animals. But players who call out incorrectly are mercilessly punished!
3. Can’t Stop – Gryphon Games
In Can’t Stop, players roll four standard dice, which they’ll divide into two pairs. This entitles them to move their markers up the corresponding tracks numbered 2 through 12 on a stop-signed shaped board. If you get your marker to the top first, you can claim that column, and the first player to claim three columns wins the game. Durable enough to play outdoors, fun enough to keep everyone entertained.
4. Carcassonne Board Game – Z-Man Games
This board game can be quickly explained to new players and get them to understand (For more games like this, check Best Board Games: 5 Easy To Set up and Understand Board Games) what’s going on right at the start. They won’t be master strategists, but they’ll be able to play and not feel like they’re making bad decisions now that will doom them in the mid/late game.
5. Time’s Up – Deluxe Board Game – R & R Games
It is a fun party game which is also suitable for the outdoors. Players take turns trying to get their partners to guess famous titles of songs, movies, fine art, etc. The first round, pretty much anything goes. You can say whatever you think will get your partner to guess correctly, as long as you don’t say any words on the card.
6. Cosmic Wimpout Dice Board Game – Play & Joy
In this game that consists of five dice and nothing else, play proceeds by rolling the five Cosmic Wimpout cubes and get points for each 5, 10, or Flash (triplet) that you roll. You can accumulate points towards the Winning Total by ending your turn or risking it all, because if you roll and don’t score, you lose all the points for that turn and the next player goes. It’s a lot of fun with only five dice; very portable, making it the ideal travel board game.
7. Dominoes – Trademark Games
A classic board game, great for playing outdoors and in large groups, Dominoes is durable, fun, and portable.
8. GO Board Game Set
This convenient large sized Go game set that allows you to play comfortably, yet it is still portable enough to slip into a backpack. The magnetic stones ensure you won’t have to worry about an ‘accidental’ bump shifting all your pieces and messing up your game when you are clearly winning.
9. Hive – The Original Board Game – Gen42 Games
Hive is an excellent board game. It can be learned in just a few minutes and the matches are very quick. Unlike many other strategy board games, playing is fun from the beginning.
The game will remind you in many ways of chess in terms of its strategy. There are, however, important differences. The rules for placement of the game pieces are very straightforward. There are only a few types of pieces, and the biggest difference between chess and Hive is that most of the game pieces will ever move once they’re played.
10. Jungle Smart – FoxMind
The first player to find the correct set of commands that will instruct the animals to move from their starting position to the target position wins. Each command corresponds to a specific movement and as all players play simultaneously, everyone has to figure out in its head the solution, until someone say it loud.
11. Qwirkle Board Game – MindWare
This board game uses tiles in a manner similar to dominoes, with placement suggestive of Scrabble with its possibilities of blocking or making way, and like Set, it demands recognition of patterns and colors.
12. Rumis – Educational Insights
This game is an instant classic board game. It feels like a combination of Chess and Tetris. It is equally fun with 2, 3, or 4 players and the games don’t take too long to complete. Despite having no element of chance, each game seems to turn out quite differently.
13. Werewolves – Asmodee
The premise of this board game is as follows. A large group of people all play the residents of a medieval village. There are werewolves among you, and every night the werewolves kill another villager. During the day, the villagers must try and figure out who the werewolves are.
14. Zombie Dice – SJG
Zombies rarely speak, but when they do, they typically only have one word in their vocabulary. Saying it like they do (“BraAAaAaaAaains”) had us giggling throughout the games. Each player gets a turn with the dice but what a player does with his turn is more exciting for everyone else to watch. The dice have brains, footprints, and gunshot bursts on them, making things very interesting. As a fun dice board game, and the quality of the pieces, this is great for the outdoors.
