Our Favorite Family Board Games

Family game night in our house has a built-in challenge: the ages span from barely-reading to nearly-a-tween, plus a couple of grown-ups and Grandma when she is over. A game that bores the big kids or baffles the younger ones dies on the table within one round, and we have a closet of half-played boxes to prove it.

CATAN turned out to be the one that actually holds the room. The 6th Edition is easy enough that we can teach a new player in a few minutes, but deep enough that nobody is just going through the motions — there is real strategy in where you settle and what you trade. Within one game it had the whole crew leaning over the board, negotiating and trash-talking over sheep and wood, which is exactly the kind of loud, connected chaos we want on a Friday night.

We weighed it against a stack of simpler kids’ games, but those tend to bore the older ones fast, and against heavier strategy games that would lose the little ones entirely. CATAN sits right in the sweet spot where the 8-year-old and our oldest can both scheme and win. The pieces are sturdy enough to survive being dumped and re-sorted a hundred times, and it plays differently every session, so it does not get stale. For thirty dollars it has bought us more genuine face-to-face family time than almost anything else in the house.