Games to play while you’re home for the holidays
The holidays are about being with family, but that doesn’t mean you can’t play games while you’re home with them. Mobile games are the perfect things to take with you as you travel to wherever you’re going, as they’re experiences you can always have with you and bust out at a moment’s notice.
In honor of the upcoming break, I’ve put together a list of the top four games I plan on bringing with me on my travels. All of these picks have their particular use cases, but all can be played in just about any situation, even if you are going somewhere that doesn’t have a good data or wifi connection.
Out of the Loop
Out of the Loop is a great little party game for 3-9 players with a really simple concept. Everyone playing is clued into a particular keyword based on a category (e.g. animal, household item, etc.), but one player is left quite literally out of the loop. Then, players are prompted to ask each other specific questions and the person who doesn’t know what the word is has to hope they aren’t found out.
This game is a great pick for holiday gaming if you want to get your whole family involved. The instructions for every step of the game are clearly written out on every screen, and the concept is so simple that everyone immediately gets how to play.
Spaceteam
If you’re looking for something a little more complicated, but still social, you might want to try Spaceteam (that is, if you haven’t already). This game feels like it’s been out forever, but everyone seems to forget that it’s one of the greatest multiplayer mobile games ever conceived.
In Spaceteam, 2-8 players all act as crew members on a Star Trek-like ship with your phone emulating each players’ personal control station. As your journey inevitably starts going south, you might get a message stating that you need to engage the Eigenthrottle, only to see that your control panel doesn’t have one. So you call out to your crew mates to do the command. At the same time though, everyone else is receiving similar messages to yell out to you or other players, so everyone needs to work together to sort out what needs to get done when so that you can try to survive in space for as long as possible. It’s great.
Lords of Waterdeep
This might be a bit more of a niche pick, but Lords of Waterdeep is definitely going to travel with me this holiday season. The reason for this is because it’s simply a great board game with a lot of replayability.
What’s more is that Lords of Waterdeep, though it sounds pretty intense, isn’t actually a hugely complicated game. You play as a secret lord that controls the goings on of the city of Waterdeep, and your goal is to exert your will on the city through the use of agents. These agents are simply game pieces that you place on spots of the board to collect items that you can then turn in for points. Although I’d probably prefer to play the physical version of Lords of Waterdeep, having a digital version is handy in case I want to play a solo game against AI or pass and play with up to five other players without having to deal with a bunch of little cards and game pieces.
Twinfold
For my final pick, I wanted to select something that you might want to fire up when you’re tired of talking to people or just want to spend as little as two minutes or hours playing over the holidays. Out of every mobile game that’s come out in recent memory, there’s no game that fits this description quite as well as Twinfold does.
Twinfold is a turn-based dungeon-crawler that’s also kind of a spin on Threes!. It’s turn-based, simple, but really rewarding if you sink lots of time into it. This makes it a perfect game to play for any amount of time, and also something you can jump out of instantly if the demands of the holidays require it. Twinfold is the ultimate mobile game to play solo this holiday season.