best board games to play outside

Modern board games can be huge, huge cases that make you wish you had a bigger table. They can be multi-season games with all the narrative flair and complexity of a year-long tabletop role-playing campaign. They can be so delicate, so delicate that the brush of a clean shirt sleeve will destroy hours of painstaking work. But not all board games are like this. In fact, some are so small that you can put them in your shirt pocket and forget they’re even there.

Thanks to the incredible variety of modern board games, summer vacation doesn’t have to mean taking a break from rolling the dice with your friends. Here are five games that travel very well—including one that you can play safely on the beach or even by the pool.

deep sea adventure

Japanese design studio Oink Games makes products that are unreasonably attractive. deep sea adventure A small box game about getting treasure from the bottom of the sea. It’s family friendly, colorful, and easy to teach. But what’s important here is that it’s not going to blow up when you put it on the table.

Players build paths using tiles, moving their colorful wooden maples back and forth from treasure to their submarine. There are no weak cards to worry about losing or spoiling, and bits will stand out from the grass, making it difficult to leave pieces behind after your play. And the small box will easily fit into a backpack, beach bag or glove compartment.

the sadness

Whenever I think of a strong and durable card game, I think of the sadness, That’s because every card inside its tiny box is made of transparent plastic. And it’s this transparency that makes the game so much fun to play: cards stacked one on top of another, adding, subtracting, or otherwise changing characters in the game. It’s a wonderful mix of form and function, and even if all the pieces fall straight into the gutter, you can still pop them off and live to play another day.

love letter

love letter The poster child for Microgame is – it tells a compelling mechanical story with just 16 (2-4 players) or 32 (5-8 players) cards.

Originally designed by Seiji Kanai and released in 2012, love letter It rose to prominence in the United States with an edition published by AEG, which was packaged in a trademark red felt bag with “Love Letter” embroidered on it. It has since been adapted for several different licenses, including, most recently, Star Wars. No matter which version you buy, love letterThe exceptional risk-and-cut-based gameplay is sure to delight.

Micromacro: Crime City

Micromacro: Crime City is an award winning mystery game that mixes where is waldo? With a true-crime novel, and it does so with virtually no moving pieces.

If you can lay a poster flat on a surface, or stick it to a wall, you can play this hidden pictures game with your friends. Just don’t think of it as a traditional board game that needs to be played competitively in a set amount of time. Instead, treat micromacro Just as you would a traditional jigsaw puzzle – something meant as a downtime activity for anyone sitting at the table who needs a break.

tsuro

Finally, there is tsuro, a tile-laying game with light strategy elements. Designed by Tom McMurchie, the game’s name comes from the Japanese word for “root”. In the game, players use their tiles to move their tokens from one side of the board to the other. Along the way, the paths will always change and intersect. The only way to win is to keep calm, roll with the punches, and just keep going.

This is another game that has no weak cards to worry about, and is so heavy with components that they won’t fly. But it also just looks great on the table. Bring it to the park and even the chess players making the camp will want to know what you’re doing.