Freshers Board Game Survival Guide

My Fresher’s Week at University was a disaster. On my first day of Uni I accidentally spilled a box of nachos all over myself right in the busying area of the campus. I was sat, alone, desperately trying to mop up the mess with pages torn out of my notebook – stains I was still finding at the end of the first year.

If you want to avoid being like me, a great thing to take to Fresher’s is a few party games. Simply to explain, quick to set up, and not requiring too much brainpower, they could be the difference between you starting your Uni life having fun with new friends and being me, the Nacho Boy.

Incohearent is a game all about talking absolute nonsense. Each card has a short, gobblydygook phrase on one side that almost sounds like the answer on the back, and it’s up to your friends to read the phrase aloud and try and guess. For instance, “for wren shuck his sing” becomes “French kissing”, while “thirds teeth or stay” would be “thirsty Thursday”.

It sounds simple, but it’s a surprisingly effective icebreaker. Especially after a few Fresher’s drinks when everyone’s a bit slurry already, trying to make sense of what your new mates are trying to say can be a chaotic, hilarious time. While the base game includes three categories – party, pop-culture, and kinky, the expansions can help tailor it even further in the direction you’re more comfortable with.

Want a less edgy experience to ease the shier players in? The Family Edition cuts out the kinky questions and limits the pop culture references to those a younger player would get. If you’d rather go the other end and be a bit more salacious to kickstart your Uni life, the NSFW expansion adds 180 naughty cards to the base game.

Quick! You’ve got 30 seconds to survive! What three objects do you grab, and how will they help you through your ordeal?

Everybody loves to hypothesise over how they’d deal with zombies, or what they’d do if a nuke dropped, or even if aliens invaded. 3 Things is a game all about packing up your plans, thinking on your feet, and trying to convince your friends that you’d totally be the one to pull you all through a crisis.

Part of the beauty of 3 Things is that you’re not just picking the best objects to survive, you’re being made to put yourself out there and really sell your plan to the judge. Maybe you panicked and are now stuck trying to survive a sinking ship with a screwdriver, rubber duck, and a pair of underpants. But with some quick-thinking and the gift of the gab, you could still secure your victory with a clever plan involving puncturing the duck with a hole and using it to pump up the underpants into a makeshift floatation device!

Leaving home for University can be terrifying, but sometimes all you need is the comfort of a Disney movie. Disney Colourbrain can help bring your fellow Disney fans out of their shells and help you bond over your favourite childhood movies… or it could devolve into feisty debates over what colour Mickey Mouse’s shoes are (yellow, by the way).

Each question has you search your brain to remember the colour of various things from across Disney movies. What colour is Boo’s door in Monster’s Inc? What about the Chehire cat? Of course, some questions are more obscure than others, and some may even require multiple colours to be pitched at the same time.

An interesting twist to the game is that you aren’t scored on what you know, but on what your opponents don’t know. So it doesn’t matter if your fellow Freshers aren’t massive Disney boffins! As long as others also don’t know, they’ll get points and stay in the game.

By the way, as an unabashed Disney adult, Boo’s door was pink with flowers on it.

This one might seem like a weird subject matter to whip out during Fresher’s Week – “Hey, let’s play a game where you escape from the Plague in 1350s Bristol” probably won’t be the best way to sell it. But if your friends are history buffs, want something a bit grittier, or respond well to “it’s basically Among Us”, then you’re golden.

Bristol 1350 is a game of social deduction. Your first goal is to be on the first cart to leave the city, but that’s not all. You also need to identify who among you is infected. After all, sharing a card with someone with the Black Death probably isn’t the best way to survive.

For such a small game, the packaging for it is gorgeous. An old-fashioned book contains all the game pieces, and suitably gothic instructions and dice are stored in a lush bag. It’s also not a game you need to spend too long explaining; 10 minutes to catch everyone up to speed is all you need to get the ball rolling. If Disney Colourbrains was too bright and bubbly for you, maybe this is the right level of edge, drama, and mistrust you need to bond with your new mates?

Sometimes you don’t want to talk. Maybe you’re shy, maybe you’re sloshed, maybe it’s Fresher’s Week and it’s actually a bit of both. Either way, A game Of Cat & Mouth is a perfect way to break the ice with a fast-paced, physical game to get everyone jumping and shouting.

The goal is simple: fire more balls onto the other side of the table than your opponent. Load the balls up in the magnetic paw, and try to flick them through the rainbow space cat’s gaping maw of a mouth – the player with the fewest balls on their side at the end of the game wins.

Perfect to play just one-on-one, or as part of a wider party with teams going at it, it’s by far the easiest game to describe on this list. If someone knows Hungry Hungry Hippos or Pinball, they’ll understand A Game Of Cat & Mouth. Colourful, fast, and silly, it’s the quintessential party game to take with you to Fresher’s Week.