The best board games to gift and play with the family for the 2025 holiday season

Engadget has been testing and reviewing consumer tech since 2004. Our stories may include affiliate links; if you buy something through a link, we may earn a commission. Read more about how we evaluate products . Engadget The best board games to gift and play with the family for the 2025 holiday season Have some screen-free fun with your loved ones this year. Once upon a time, a "board game" meant Monopoly or Risk . Then several brave souls dared to ask the question: "What if this was fun?" Thirty years later, we're blessed with tabletop games that challenge our minds, immerse us in other worlds and conjure good times with those we love - sometimes all three at once. For your gift-buying needs, we've put together a list of new favorites and returning classics that run the gamuts of genre and weight. If you're ready to push beyond Pictionary , read on. Best board games to gift (and play) this holiday season Two-player games are great. Co-op games are great. What about both!? In Sky Team , two players represent a pilot and co-pilot trying to land a plane - and let me tell you, after a couple of rounds, you'll understand why some people applaud after landing. Each round, you'll both roll four dice and assign them to tasks in the cockpit. You'll need to reduce your speed, deploy landing gear, communicate with the control tower and make sure you have enough coffee. My favorite thing about Sky Team is how quickly you and your partner get into a rhythm: by the end, you'll be silently trusting each other to handle business, just like a real flight crew. There's also a ton of replay value as you work up to increasingly difficult airports, including the final boss of Paro, Bhutan (if you get the chance to go there IRL, just take the bus). $31 at Amazon $33 at Target Formerly The Quacks of Quedlinburg, this game matches accessible rules with a delightful aesthetic. Each player is a charlatan trying to sell miracle cures at a street fair. To mix up their tonics, everyone pulls random ingredients from a bag, with each new additive making the potion more impressive. Take care, though, lest you pull too many of the dreaded "cherry bombs" and the potion explodes in your face! After each round, you get to buy more ingredients that let you cook for longer, while each day's fortune card switches up the rules in an exciting new way. $40 at Amazon This is for that friend that finishes the Wordle in three tries and solves the purple clues first in Connections. League of the Lexicon reminds me a bit of Trivial Pursuit - players or teams take turns asking everyone questions from a double-sided card with answers on the back. Questions come in five categories and cover synonyms, word origins, spelling, definitions, archaic words, grammar, linguistic trivia and more. Two thousand questions are spread over hundreds of cards, and...

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