Games for People Who Claim They Hate Game Night

Skull is a bluffing game where everyone lays cards face down and dares each other to flip a run without turning up the one skull that ends it. There's no board, no scoreboard math, just you squinting at your friends like a 1970s detective who's had enough of everyone's nonsense. It teaches in a minute and ruins friendships in about five.

No Thanks! is a card game where numbers get flipped one at a time and you either scoop up the card, which counts as points against you or toss a chip in to make the next sucker deal with it. Everybody's trying to lose, so you'll watch a grown adult guard three chips like a raccoon guarding a sandwich rather than eat a measly 18. Then the card you spent four chips dodging loops back and lands on you anyway.

Telestrations is the drawing version of telephone, where you sketch a word, pass your pad and the next person guesses what your sketch was, then draws their guess, and on it goes. By the third pass your innocent "birthday cake" has mutated into "burning building" and nobody can pinpoint where it went wrong. The genius is that being terrible at drawing makes it even better, so the person who hasn't held a marker since grade four can easily come out as the MVP.

Just One is a cooperative game where everyone writes a one-word clue to help a teammate guess a mystery word, but any matching clues get crossed out first. Suddenly you're second-guessing the obvious clue and reaching for something clever, which is exactly how "fruit" becomes "potassium." You're all on the same team, which means when it goes wrong there's no one to blame but the collective genius of the room.

Codenames splits you into two teams staring at a grid of 25 random words, and each team's clue-giver has to link their agents' words with a single one-word hint. The whole game is one person building an elaborate mental bridge and watching their teammates set it on fire. Nothing tests a friendship like giving the clue "milk" and watching someone's brain get from "cow" to confidently picking "France."

Blokus hands each player 21 Tetris-looking pieces, and everyone races to cram as many as they can onto a shared grid. The one catch is that your pieces can only touch at the corners, so the board slowly ends up becoming an intense game of chicken. Most squares on the board takes it and nothing reveals a person's true competitive nature like being left with a fistful of little plastic pieces.

Sushi Go! is a fast-moving card game where you pick one dish from your hand, pass the rest and keep drafting until you've built the best little meal at the table. The catch is that everything scores differently, so you're chasing dumplings while shamelessly snaking the last tempura before the person beside you can grab it.

Ticket to Ride is a game about collecting colored cards and using them to lay claim to train routes across a map, connecting cities to complete secret destinations in your hand. The route you've been eyeing all game can vanish the second an opponent drops their trains on it first, so about 20 minutes expect to see a person who has never once thought about railroads slam the table over a lost connection to Denver.

Azul is a game where you draft gorgeous ceramic tiles from the middle of the table, then arrange them in rows to fill a colorful pattern for points. You can only grab one color at a time and have to take every matching tile in the pile, so you constantly end up with more than you can use and eat a penalty for the leftovers. Watch as once polite adults start hoarding colors they don't even need out of pure spite.

Exploding Kittens is a card game where you take turns drawing from the deck, praying you don't flip the kitten that blows you out of the round. Your whole hand is a pile of increasingly absurd cards that let you peek, skip, shuffle or shove the danger onto the sucker next to you. It's loud, it's delightfully dumb and it turns the innocent question "whose turn is it" into a full-blown act of aggression as the deck shrinks.