Holiday Games - What Do You Like to Play with Casuals?

[Retreater]

This New Years we had a small group of folks in my in-laws' cabin, and it was raining the whole time. The discussion came up to play a board game. As it turned out, I'd brought along my homemade version of classic Hero Quest (with miniatures lifted from other games, board drawn out on gaming paper, cards made from printed PDFs). The family all loved it and we spent several hours playing that, taking me back to 1990 or whatever. It was a great time.
Then my father-in-law told me about a game he played when he was younger - which we figured out was Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival (the basis for OD&D's wilderness travel rules).
Do you have any good stories about introducing your hobby to casual players, family members, etc. How do you like to bring up gaming to them?

 

[billd91]

With my wife's family, it's rat-bastardly games of Uno. Seriously. Lots of profanity and bird flipping, even from the young kids.
At our usual NYE party, Cards Against Humanity comes up a lot among teens and adults. So does The Great Dalmuti.

 

[R_J_K75]

We used to play 221B Baker Street on Christmas in the 80s but havent in years. Pretty fun game similar to Clue but more involved based on Sherlock Holmes cases made for the game. Looks like there were quite a few iterations and its still available online.

 

[pogre]

Dragoon, Clank!, Werewolf, and Kingdoms (old tile game) are the popular choices around here when our non-gaming friends are around. We also play a lot of simple dice games like right-left-center and Qwixx.

 

[ccs]

My cousin got me the JAWS boardgame this year for Christmas. (yes, they made a boardgame based on the 1st movie)
So after desert Christmas evening we played that.
Out in the car I also had Waterdeep (resource management/worker placement), Horrified (defeat the Universal Monsters before they kill you/too many villagers), and Pandemic (find the cures! wipe out the 4 diseases). So we played those as well.

Waterdeep was at the edge of the complexity for the evening/group. Pandemic, though it's a great game, was too "now" for them. Everyone seemed to like Horrified though. Horrified also has figures & a pretty cool looking board....
That we played ANY type of game other than Wii Mario Kart or Wii Golf this year was surprising & IMO an improvement.

Oh, and someone got a cheap '80s Pop/Rock Music Trivia card set in their stocking. We decided to write our answers down & play every man for themselves. Boy was that a lopsided game. There were 100 multiple choice questions. My brother & I, being the original MTV generation, missed 6 questions between us. We were writing answers before ever hearing the choices. My Aunt & Uncle being 15-20 years older got about 50%. My cousins & their spouses, being 10-15 years younger....

 

[zarionofarabel]

I recently introduced my family to Ticket To Ride. It was an instant hit and has become a normal family night thing. We also started playing Uno and Skip-Bo on nights when the younger kid needs to go to bed early. It's fun family activities and a nice break from everyone sitting around not talking and staring at our electronic devices.

 

[cbwjm]

I have a group of semi-regular board gamers that I play the pandemic legacy with. Just started season 0 on new years eve to learn the new mechanics, along with a game of ticket to ride Europe.

Been a while due to this whole pandemic thing, but we used to frequent boardgames cafes and bars to try out something new or, more likely due to complicated rules, play something that we have played previously.

 

[Richards]

Over Christmas, we introduced my oldest son (now 36) to a couple of the board games my younger son (now 34) and I had made years earlier in his absence for my nephew (now 14, much younger when we made the games): the Skylanders board game and its sequel, the Skylanders Trap Team board game. (My nephew was quite the Skylanders fan.) The first is a race around eight floating islands to gather together a Skylanders team made up of one member from each of the original eight elements, while the other involves capturing bad guys and using their powers to help capture other bad guys, with the winner being the one with the most points (each bad guy has a numerical component, 1, 2, or 3 depending upon how tough they are, with Kaos - the only one not associated with an element - being the only bad guy worth 4 points).

Johnathan