8 awesome board games to keep you entertained With the long, Easter weekend stretching in front of us, you’ve probably got some family time ahead of you that can’t all be filled with egg hunts and munching on chocolate.So we asked Mike Didymus of The Boarding Kennel to recommend some games to keep everyone happy. Here’s what he said – we guarantee you’ll like them more than Monopoly…

1. King of Tokyo

Bank holidays are already awash with DIY and the horrors of flat-pack

furniture, so what better way to begin than by turning the tables and

smashing up a city with giant monsters? King of Tokyo lets between two and

five of you do just that. Rolling and re-rolling dice in a Yahtzee style each

turn lets you decide whether to attack, heal, or pick up energy to grow and

evolve your monster with things like wings, poison breath or even a monster

sidekick to help you take down your opponents’ beasts. Quick to learn and

fast to play, there’s enough strategy to keep adults engaged and plenty of

mad dice rolling and fire breathing for children to go crazy over.

2. Survive: Escape from Atlantis

(Mike Didymus/The Boarding Kennel)

The four-day weekend can be a stressful time for families, all cooped up in

the house together for far longer than anyone’s comfortable with. Take out

your frustration with the thrillingly-titled Survive: Escape from Atlantis, which

will let you ram a whale into granny’s boat full of refugees to get her back for

snoring all the way through the final of The Voice. Atlantis is sinking,

naturally, and each turn another part of the island disappears into the ocean

forever, hopefully without one of your tiny survivors on. Ostensibly it’s about

scooping up your people and ferrying them to safety, but really it’s about

working out where your dad’s high-value survivors are and dumping them

into the drink to be eaten by sea serpents. Glorious.

3. Dixit

Come back! It’s not all terror and destruction in board game land. Why don’t

we calm things down by slipping in a quick game of Dixit? Feasts like Easter

have always been associated with storytelling, and Dixit has you working

those narrative neurons by using words, sounds and ill-advised body

movements to describe one of a set of weird, dream-like cards to the other

players. Everyone picks one of their own cards they think matches this the

best, and they all get shuffled together and revealed for the players to guess

which was the storyteller’s. Points for the storyteller if some players guess

your card, but they score nothing if no one or everyone guesses correctly, so

you have to be curious and obtuse – but not too obtuse – to win. It’s a

mesmerising offering with a truckload of gorgeous, other-wordly art, and I

guarantee it’s like nothing you’ve ever played before.

4. Forbidden Island

(Mark Ordonez/Flickr)

Hey, what are you lot doing mucking about on that island! The clue’s in the

name, yeah? Well, you’ll have to all shape up and work together if you want

to get out of this alive. Welcome to the world of co-operative board games,

which pit the team of players against the game itself rather than each other

in the struggle for victory. On Forbidden Island you’ll have to use your

characters’ special abilities to rush around the place, bag four treasures and

have everyone escape in a helicopter before the island sinks. Like Atlantis.

Look, all islands are sinking, it’s global warming right?

5. Pandemic

(Mike Didymus/Boarding Kennel)

If you liked that, you’ll love this. Created by the same designer, Pandemic is

the shining figurehead for modern co-operative board games, and one of the

few outside of Settlers of Catan you’re likely to have spotted in a high street

shop. The game casts the players as scientists, disease experts and various

other clever bods teaming up to stop a string of deadly viruses melting the

world’s population into pools of gloop. Fly your characters to exotic locations,

stamp out virus hotspots and research cures for all four diseases and you’ve

won. Except you’ll probably screw it up. Neglect a patch of virus and you risk

calamitous outbreaks, but spend too much time hoovering them up and

you’ll never get round to the cures before the game ends. Good luck!

6. The Resistance: AvalonEnough of the goody two-shoes team play – it’s time to stab each other in

the back. Not literally! Oh god. While you mop that up let me introduce you

to The Resistance: Avalon, a game which demands you lie to, psychoanalyse

and generally verbally abuse your friends and family in the hunt for a win.

Set in Arthurian England, the game demands each player in turn pick a group

to go on a “quest’” which simply means play a card secretly which says

success or fail. Win three quests and you’re champions! Except some of the

group are Minions of Mordred, and picking just one for a mission can lead to

failure. The best excuse you’ll ever have to look in your loved ones’ eyes and

tell them massive whoppers.

7. Jungle Speed

(Marc Majcher/Flickr)

Oh, The Resistance too cranial for you, huh? All right, let’s work those animal

instincts instead with a spot of Jungle Speed. This is board gaming stripped

right down to basics – essentially a supercharged version of snap, everyone

sits round a small wooden totem flipping cards with almost identical patterns

until a pair comes up, whereupon the first person with a match to grab the

totem gets to make the loser pick up everything played in that round. Except

you’ll screw it up, or forget you’re supposed to be matching colours this

round, or just crash fists with each other and watch the totem spin off and

knock over everyone’s drinks. Arguably improved by hiding the totem under

the table for maximum chaos.

8. Carcassonne

(Peter Krefting/Flickr)

Carcassonne is a German-style tile-laying board game named after the

medieval fortified town in – come on, you’re already eight deep into this,

stay with me. Everyone takes turns pulling tiles out of a bag and placing

them on the table, looking to connect and claim roads, towns and large

expanses of fields with their limited pool of workers. While making pretty

pictures is always nice, the real heart of this game is stitching up everyone

else by shoving roads and town sections in difficult spots, leaving them with

an airy goliath of a settlement they’ll never be able to complete. It’s also got

about a billion expansions, including one with an actual catapult you can fire.

This European titan has been kicking around since the year 2000, and in an

industry where even great games go out of print in a heartbeat that’s

testament to its brilliance and accessibility.

For more board game ideas, check out The Boarding Kennel.