Intro
A board game date night can be a really fun and different way to spend time together. Unlike just sitting and watching a movie passively, playing board games gets you both involved actively. It’s a chance to chat, work together, or even have some friendly competition.
The game itself helps keep the conversation going. Whether you’re discussing what you’re going to do on your turn, who’s winning or in co-op games chatting about strategy, it gives you something to talk about the whole time. There’s no checking phones or getting distracted by other things – it’s just the two of you enjoying the time together.
Not to mention, it’s insanely good value. Once you buy a board game (usually for far less than the cost of a traditional date night), you have it to play forever or even sell or swap for another you’ll enjoy later down the line. Now more than ever, in the subscription-fees dominated market of entertainment as a whole, a one off fee for endless fun is a complete steal.
So What Makes A Good Date Night Game?
Well every couple is different but for us, the following criteria are important:
– Quick Set Up
– Decent Table Presence
– Plays Well At Two Players
– Simple Mechanics The Don’t Take Too Much Brain Power
– Lots Of Fun
The following is a conversation with my wife Stacey about six of the games we’ve been playing on date nights this year.
The Games
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective
Stacey: I like true crime stuff and I like murder mysteries so this fits well with what I like to do anyway. It’s nice playing a cooperative game as well, where you’re on the same team, especially on a date night rather than being against each other.
James: Yeah this is a really fun one. When it works well and you’re both spotting clues and following up on them, you can get into a very satisfying flow with it.
Stacey: Overall it’s very well written but it can feel just a little bit clunky in places. Sometimes you see the solution to a smaller sub-mystery and you realise you would have had to take a very specific path to get that nugget of information to solve it. But for the main mysteries everything is signposted well and there are multiple ways to get to the info needed to solve the crimes.
James: Yeah the hints can be subtle but if you get stuck, you can go back and reread to see if there’s a name that you missed and didn’t scribble down, and there are places you can go to get hints to get you back on track. There are also some typos that can really take you out of the moment but by and large, it’s very enjoyable solving crimes together.
Hitster
Stacey: Hitster’s my favorite game, I could play it all day every day. I like listening to different bits of music and then trying to remember what the tracks are called and who they’re by is very fun.
James: Yeah it’s got some interesting mechanics. It seems very simple at first but there are some interesting things you can do with the Hitster tokens that really increased the amount of fun and the complexity of play, not by so much that it’s not accessible, but just by enough to to keep things a bit more interesting than just “put these songs in order of date”. One downside is once you get through all of the cards, it’d be quite easy to remember all the dates, it could have done with coming with twice as many cards as it comes with. It does come with 308 but we played it to death haha.
Stacey: It could have done but maybe it’s not a game that’s supposed to be played so often that you memorise all the dates. Maybe it’s supposed to be played when you’ve got people round at Christmas and then a few times a year, we just ended up loving it so much that we started playing it most weeks, sometimes a few times a week.
James: True! We got round it though by creating our own custom 606 card expansion by getting some QR codes printed on sticky labels for the card backs. We bought the Summer Party expansion too so in total we’ve got well over 1100 cards. So now it’s a bit more challenging and fun and exciting again, so we worked around that, didn’t we?
Stacey: Definitely. I’m glad we’ve got it.
James: We almost didn’t get it. Do you remember you said “Oh no, don’t get it, we’ve already got sooo many games”?
Stacey: That doesn’t sound like me!
Viticulture
Stacey: The more you play it, the more you like it. I think when you first play it, it feels like there’s a lot going on. It was the first worker placement game I ever played so I had to wrap my head around those mechanics.
James: There is a lot going on for sure. You’ve got to create your wine engine by getting hold of grape vines, planting them, harvesting those plants, and then turning those grapes into wine, then selling them. It’s like a sort of production line, but at the same time, you’re also trying to increase the number of workers you have so that you can improve your efficiency.
Stace: Yeah so you’re spending money training workers and then spending workers to get money and do other things about your vineyard. You can give tours and host visitors who all give you different bonuses when they visit.
James: You can end up with not a lot to do on a turn because the other person’s put workers everywhere that you wanted to go. Having a grande worker that can go on any space at any time is a big help though and makes the game friendlier than some other worker placements, but you only get one per round. It’s very fun and the mechanics match the theme perfectly but although I like it at two players, I do miss the bonuses that you get at higher player counts. We’re currently waiting for a reprint of the Tuscany expansion, which solves this and a couple of other very minor gripes we have with the game, but even just the base game’s really fun to get out for date night.
Stacey: Yes! Especially over a glass of wine. This isn’t a gripe but because there is so little luck in the game and you are a much more strategic player, you always win. If someone is that way inclined and they get the mechanics of the game, that person will always win. We’re very different players but I still really enjoy playing despite knowing that I’m never going to win.
James: I actually think that the more you play it the more you realize that luck does have a larger factor that it seems initially. For example you can start with a Papa card that gives you an extra worker. And then you start the game a whole worker ahead which can snowball your progress so fast, That’s huge. Other things as well, like if the first wine cards you draw are like three white, three red, then you can get early victory points early and passive income coming in. Whereas if all the wine orders you get are like the hardest ones to fulfill and you just don’t have the infrastructure yet, it’s just hopeless. Again, same with plants, you want to draw plants that you can just plant straight away with zero or one structure. And if you don’t get that it’s just really annoying and can put you far behind. But having a good strategy can definitely mitigate those luck factors a lot.
Ticket To Ride
Stacey: I really like placing my trains and spreading out over the map. I love it when you pick up new tickets and you’ve completed or nearly completed one of them.
James: Yeah. There’s nothing more satisfying than picking up three tickets and you’ve already done two of them and you’ve only got two more routes to go to get the third one. In two player, there’s not really that much interaction unless you really go out of your way to block each other’s routes. It’s more like two player side by side solitaire.
Stacey: I like that though, I find 3 player and 5 player a bit competitive sometimes and it’s nice to not get my route blocked every turn.
James: So the version we play is 1901, which is the version of the game leftover from when we finished Ticket To Ride Legacy: Legends Of The West. How do you find all the little extras compared to the original Ticket To Ride and Ticket To Ride: Europe that we’ve played a few times together?
Stacey: I think it really adds a lot of fun stuff like the stocks, the events and the fact you use dollars instead of victory points. But more importantly I really like the routes and the huge map on this one as well.
James: Yeah I agree. This version of Ticket To Ride has ruined the other versions of Ticket To Ride for me a bit. I love the money system and just generally the vibe of it. I like that it’s simple enough for nearly anyone to learn too.
Fungi
Stacey: We play a bit of Fungi sometimes but that’s the newest (to us) one on this list so we’ve only played a couple of times. You walk through the forest, you’re picking up mushrooms, you’re cooking them with butter or cidre.
James: Yeah, so I like the set collection. But it can be very tight, especially when you can’t get any baskets out so you’ve only got a max hand size of eight. It can be really brutal because you’ve got to put down a set of three to free up your hand when you really want to put down say a set of five to use up your cidre. But yeah that’s also quite fun in its own way just how everything falls to sh*t, because it does for both of you.
Stacey: I can see that, yeah, it’s quite funny when everything is going wrong for both of you. It isn’t a pleasant and relaxing game, like it looks like it will be from the box and description. My favorite thing about it is that I like all the different names and the artwork.
James: For me, it’s when you do actually get something that you’ve been waiting for and you score loads of points and your hand clears and you can sort of breathe again. That’s a really nice feeling.
Quacks Of Quedlinburg
James: We like this one don’t we?
Stacey: Yes but it does take a while to set up with all those little cardboard tokens so we don’t get it to the table as often as others on this list.
James: We’ve recently also got The Alchemist expansion to add a bit more replayability. It’s got a unique twist on the gameplay. But even the base game can be different every time you play it if you rotate through different combinations of the spell books.
Stacey: Yeah it’s really fun and it’s easy to learn and when you know what you’re doing games don’t take that long.
James: With The Alchemist, it takes a bit longer but we’re still just learning that one. I like the way you can choose what disease you’re trying to cure but only between 3 of the 8 options, so you can play it lots of times and it’s slightly different each time.
Stacey: I quite like the gambling side. It’s fun when you take a risk and it pulls off or when I’m sensible and stop early and watch you push your luck too far and blow up.
James: Yeah as a stats nerd, I do a bit of mental math “I’ve got 10 tokens left and there’s only one that can blow up my cauldron, so I’ve got a 90% chance to be fine so I’d be stupid not to draw another ingredient.” And then obviously the next draw is the one that kills me every time.
Stacey: Because of how much luck is involved, it’s a game I feel like we both win a lot. It’s pretty even, which is nice.
James: Yeah we have different strategies, I’m a lot more aggressive but this game punishes that as often as it rewards it so we both seem to win about an equal amount.
Final Thoughts
We hope you enjoyed our thoughts on these six games and if you don’t regularly have a date night where you play games together, we hope this has inspired you to give it a try. There are loads of recommendations for games that make good date night games on YouTube, Reddit, etc… so trade overpriced cinema tickets and meals out for victory points and meeples sometime for a cheap and fun night in you can laugh about together for days afterwards.
