A guide to the best new family board games this holiday season

Tired of your family extorting you in Monopoly or schooling you at chess over the holidays? Read on, fellow tabletop traveler. We’ve got you covered with some board games simple enough to interest kids and deep enough to hook adults.

Elegant, surreal, and very, very French, Dixit comes in numerous compatible varieties — from its original flavor to its most recent Disneyfied version. On each turn, a rotating ‘storyteller’ player will announce a clue and pick one of the six sumptuously illustrated cards in their hand, playing it face-down in front of them. Everyone else will pick one of their own that fits the clue, then each card gets shuffled and displayed.

Here’s the catch: The storyteller only gets points if some, but not all or none, of the other players correctly identify their card. Their clues shouldn’t be so obscure that no one will choose their card, but not so obvious that everyone will. The resulting mind games level the playing field; children are just as likely to win Dixit as wizened grown-ups. It’s wonderfully frictionless and fun, but if you’re after more complex games that use similar mechanics, look into Detective Club and Mysterium.

Yes, I know the title is long and awkward. I’m also aware that once you know the rules you could easily crib a version with your own multicolor pens and paper. But do send some of your hard-earned cash to the brilliant minds at Oink Games, who invented such a perfectly portable and artful social deduction game.

In rounds that last five to 15 minutes, you’ll divvy up differently-colored markers to as many as 10 players. A judge will announce a general category (like ‘Monsters’), then secretly write a specific term within the category on small dry-erase boards (like ‘Cthulhu’), which they’ll randomize and pass face-down to each player — except one board won’t have the word everyone else got, instead it’ll just say something like “Fake.” This “Fake Artist” won’t know what the group is collectively trying to sketch and will have to blend in.

Taking turns drawing lines until each player has drawn two, players will then vote on who they think was faking it the whole time. If they guess correctly, the faker can still win by naming the object everyone was trying to illustrate — which means that the other players need to draw clearly enough to allay suspicion, without making it obvious to the imposter.

Artistic ability, therefore, isn’t required for A Fake Artist Goes to New York — in fact, it could even be a hindrance! And if you’re craving more devious drawing games after checking it out, try Pictomania or Monsdrawsity.

In Stomp the Plank, you’ll try to keep your little plastic elephant from careening off cardboard platforms magnetized to the back of the game box. Each turn, you’ll flip cards from a deck one at a time until one of three things happen:

Stomp the Plank thereby sprinkles push-your-luck enticements over an intuitive physics game. Players young and old can weigh the risks just about as well as they’ll weigh the elephant figures and wooden chips, but that doesn’t mean they won’t fall prey to hubris. When your pachyderm pirate takes the plunge, you can’t help but smile as much as you might sigh — it’s that delightful.

If you want more dexterity games, try Kabuto Sumo, Klask, or even the Canadian classic Crokinole. And if you hunger for more general recommendations, check out our board game piece from earlier this year!