Board games are made to bring friends and family together. There is nothing better than bringing together a group of people close to you while having fun.
But there is a simple truth: life is a competition and winning just feels so good.
Here are the board games that are meant to play for fun but due to their competitive nature, you tend to betray, exploit, and deceive your closest friends for personal victory. So before playing these games, proceed carefully and take it easy.
7.) Monopoly
Most of us can agree that Monopoly is difficult to finish and it’s an incredibly tense and frustrating game.
Playing Monopoly sounds very grown-up. You spend the game buying and selling properties, building houses and hotels, and paying your electric bill. But all this adulting triggers our innate selfishness that the most level-headed player acts like a total child.
Even if the average game time is about three hours… you have plenty of time to breed contempt every time you pay the rent. And you can have the best or safest strategy in the world, but none of that means anything if you happen to draw a card that needs all your money or gets you sent to jail. Monopoly justice is blind, swift, and vicious.
But it all pays off when you can force your dearest friends into heartbreaking bankruptcy. It isn’t the nicest move, but hey, that’s capitalism at its finest.
6.) Settlers of Catan
This game has started just few years ago and it quickly became so popular. Catan is a fictional country, and your ships have discovered an island, but you aren’t the only discoverer. Your friends, have also landed there, and the race to claim the island is a cutthroat one.
You will be competing for its natural resources, necessary alliances are formed and politics are necessary to win this game.
The real challenge of the game is settling on the island without totally destroying your friends who is blocking your access to all the waters? But if you can make it to those 10 Victory Points without killing anyone? Bragging never felt so good.
You might not be invited back to game night, but the bragging rights will keep you warm during the lonely evenings that will inevitably follow.
5.) Phase 10
Created by Matell, Phase 10 is a game mostly enjoyed while drinking. Each of your friends will compete against each other to complete 10 varied phases of card combinations.
Each phase is specific to each hand dealt, meaning you MUST complete the current phase before someone else “goes out” in order to go on to the next phase. Sounds pretty easygoing, right?
Just wait until you get stuck on the same phase for six rounds in a row, or when you finally get a perfect run and that one friend thinks it’s hilarious to use all of their skip cards on you. Tension gets infuriatingly high.
4.) Cranium
Cranium requires a team to play, and teamwork brings people together, right? Wrong. Teamwork means that when your partner totally fails at their Cloodle (Cranium’s version of Pictionary) and their drawing of a dog looks more like a stupid duck, your patience will be tested.
You need to get your fellow teammates to guess clues in a variety of ways (sculpting clues out of clay, drawing the clues, humming the clues, acting them out, etc). Being stuck on a team with a bad player is true will truly make your blood boil.
Have you ever had to hum a song that is SO CLEAR to you (“Happy Birthday,” let’s say), and your idiot teammate whose job it is to guess the song before the time runs out just keeps tragically mishearing it and guessing “My heart will go on?” over and over again?
It is one of the worst things a person can go through. You’re humming away the most perfect “Happy Birthday” son and Tricia? keep on mistakenly guessing it is a Celine Dion Song!
3.) Twister
Twister, the game that ties you up in knots, is a childhood favorite. As adults, however, it can get a little weird. It always sounds like a really funny idea to play at a party, but in reality, it’s just awkward.
Games bring people closer together, but Twister REALLY brings people closer together. Too close. Too close and too warm. You may never see your friends the same way again after seeing them from those angles.
The early innocence of “Right Hand: Green” gets thrown away when what you’re really dealing with as an adult is “Right Hand: Green, which happens to be right between the legs of your coworker that you once kissed at a company Christmas party, and you haven’t talked about it since but it has DEFINITELY been awkward, and now you’re both sweating and your thigh is like, on her butt? You should not have played this game.” Our prediction is that the next spin will send you right to the HR Department.
2.) Fluxx
Fluxx is a complete thrash. You will always get furious playing this game, as the rules keep on changing.
It starts out simple enough: Draw one card, Play one card.
As the game progresses, however, the rules change, get warped, and will expect some twists. This is one of the rare games that turns you against the game itself instead of the players (Hard to understand right?.)
You may be two cards away from achieving the goal of world peace until your significant other plays their card and decides the new (and completely unattainable for you) goal is to rocket to the moon.
