Family Board Games Bucket List

Seat the guests so the nationalities work out; a tile game about a crowded bar.

Move your canoes across a river of moving discs and do not go over the falls.

The version for six-year-olds: shorter routes, six tickets to win, and no points to count.

The German map, with passengers who ride your finished routes to collect the goods sitting in each city.

Everyone moves everyone's spy and nobody admits which one is theirs.

Recreate a photograph with shoelaces, cubes or sticks and let the table guess.

Cable cars over the hills of 1960s San Francisco, collecting tourist attractions along the way.

Expansion 5 adds abbey tiles that plug any hole in the map, mayors whose strength is the pennants in their city, barns that score a field early, and wagons that move on when their feature closes.

Build a town straight through everyone else's outhouses, then vote on the mess.

Place settlements on the terrain your card allows and chase the scoring goals.

Expansion 9, now sold as Sheep & Shepherds: hill tiles sit on top of a second tile and break ties, and a shepherd grows a flock until the wolf comes out of the stack.

Spend carrots to move; the first Spiel des Jahres, and still a clean race game.

Expansion 8 lets a road bridge a field, turns a two-tile city into a castle that cashes in on the next thing scored nearby, and auctions tiles at bazaars.

Expansion 7, and the only one with dexterity in it: a fair tile starts a round where everyone flicks tokens off a small wooden catapult to knock out or steal meeples.

A twelve-game campaign west across nineteenth-century North America, where each session changes the board for the next one.

Haul freight across Europe by lorry, bidding for the contracts nobody else wants.

Move stones up five tracks, each of which you can only ever go one way along.

Buy tiles in four currencies and build a palace with the exact change.

Expansion 6 is the compilation box: The Count of Carcassonne, King & Scout, The River II and The Cult in one package.

Expansion 4, now sold as Towers & Thieves: stack tower segments to take any meeple within reach hostage, then trade the prisoners back.

Cut the wires in the right order, telling your team just enough and no more.

Program your moves along a 3D train, then watch the plan fall apart.

Double-decker buses around 1970s London, and the fastest game in the series to teach.

Find the fairy-tale treasures under the trees and remember where they were.

A world map on one side and the Great Lakes on the other, with ships as well as trains and a harbour bonus for the ports you serve.

A double-sided board: India, where a loop of routes between the same two cities scores a mandala bonus, and the Swiss map for two or three.

Central and southern Africa, where matching terrain cards double the value of the route you claim.

Say what you will do out loud, then decide whether to be brave or cowardly about it.

Fill your zoo with animals from tile trucks without overcrowding a pen.

A huge black-and-white city poster and a stack of crimes to trace through it.