Excellent board games online shopping? Just One is an open-structured game, in which everyone tries to help a single person guess a word or phrase by writing their own unique clues on personal whiteboards. If you’re looking for something a little more cutthroat for a family game night, Codenames is a great alternative to Just One. It’s been around for years, and for a good reason: essentially, partners try to give single-word clues to get each other to guess random-but-related words, in a race to see which team can win first.

Catan whisks us back in time to the age of explorers; faced with an uninhabited island, players have to settle it before their opponents do. And because everyone’s fighting to civilize the same frontier, clever manoeuvring is the order of the day. That makes this 1995 favorite one of the best classic board games on offer. Your first battleground is deciding where to put down roots. As well as the landscape varying from game to game, the resources you’ll need to build with are driven by probability – each player rolls dice at the start of their turn to see who gets a payout, and some locations are more likely to yield results than others. That means you’ll need to think hard about which areas you claim. Foresight and intuition are definitely rewarded. Good communication is important too. You won’t have access to everything you need right away, so trading with rivals is essential if you want to get ahead. That leaves players with a fun balancing act to navigate. Even though swapping resources gets you what you need, it also nudges opponents closer to their goals. Read more info at Board Games Store.

We like to say that Cosmic Encounter is the board game equivalent of Mario Kart – practice will make you better at it, but just enough wild stuff happens in each game that a beginner always has a chance of winning, which makes it great for both first-time players and veterans. The basic rules are pretty simple: every turn, a player is randomly matched with another player (an ‘encounter’), and the two must either fight (using numbered cards from their hands) or negotiate. They can invite other players to ally with them in the fight, in exchange for rewards. The idea is to be the first to have five colonies on other players’ planets, either by winning battles or negotiating well. It’s a very easy set of rules to learn. The wrinkle is that every player has a unique alien power that totally breaks those rules. One alien actually wins battles if it loses them. One alien gets to take other players’ discarded battle cards, becoming more powerful the more others use their best cards. One can just invite itself into others’ encounters as an ally even if they don’t want it, raking up the rewards. Another actually wins the whole game if it loses all of its ships, meaning no one can tell whether you’re going to try to win or intentionally lose any given battle.

A new twist on a classic game, Monopoly Cheater’s Edition actually encourages players to see what they can get away with. Get caught and you’ll get cuffed! Get teammates to say the guess word without saying the forbidden words. Oops! Say a forbidden word and you get the squeaker! Be the first to answer the Who, What, and Where Am I questions, and move closer to being the ultimate Smart Ass! Catan is an award-winning civilization-building board game that challenges players to harvest and trade resources. Beware of this game – it’s easy to get addicted! Find additional information at https://www.shirotoys.com/.