Top 5 Games to Play This Summer

Summer is here! The sun is out, the barbecues are sizzling, the kids are playing… what better way is there to spend these long days with your friends, indoors where it’s nice and cool, with some of the best tabletop games Magic Madhouse has to offer?

If you want to beat the heat and while away the hours before we can exist outside without being reduced to a melted pile of gloop, here are the games you’ll be wanting to pick up.

Based on the smash hit indie video game, Stardew Valley: The Board Game lets you enjoy a peaceful life of farming and friendships. Your goal is simple: bring your grandpa’s old farm back up to scratch, and help out the local community with rebuilding the Community Center.

Fans of the video game will recognise a lot of what’s going on here, from farming, to mining, to meeting and building relationships with the people of the town. This is a lovely, relaxing cooperative game that has low stakes but a delightfully chill atmosphere to keep you heading back out to the farm.

If you want something a bit more intense, and with an entirely different meaning of ‘chill’, why not head to the Antarctic base of The Thing? Based on John Carpenter’s 1982 classic (the best horror movie of all time, might I add), this pits you and your friends against each other as you try and identify which ones among you are The Thing.

This is an anxiety-ridden, snow-covered adventure that puts you right in the frostbitten boots of RJ MacReady. Work together to survive and complete tasks as the humans, or try and sabotage and infect the team before making your escape as The Thing – a shapeshifting alien who can effortlessly disguise itself as one of us. Though you’ll need to rely on each other to win the game, you can’t trust anybody at any time.

Villainous is one of the most underrated tabletop games out there. Each instalment has you fill the role of a Disney villain, who is working not just against the good guys, but also your fellow ne’er-do-wells in order to achieve your goal.

Villainous has had numerous spinoffs over the years, including multiple explains for the classic Disney version, the Marvel-flavoured Infinite Power, and, now, Power the Dark Side. The box contains five of the Galaxy’s most horrible names – General Grievous, Kylo Ren, Asajj Ventress, Moff Gideon, and, of course, Darth Vader himself – as they duke it out for control of the galaxy.

This is more than just a Star Wars-themed clone of the original Villainous. On top of the new characters and their own, unique strategies comes an entire rules overhaul and the introduction of Vehicle cards. Vehicles let you use iconic ships from the franchise, like the Millennium Falcon, for your own, nefarious deeds.

Star Wars Villainous launches on August 31, but is available for preorder now. If you’d like to get a taste for Villainous in advance, you can buy Marvel Villainous, Disney Villainous, and all of their expansions today.

If you’d like your asymmetrical gaming a bit more fantasy-based, Root is an absolute delight. Take control of one of four armies of critters to try and take control of the Great Woodland: the Woodland Alliance work from the shadows, the Eyrie Dynasties want to grab as much territory as possible, The Marquise de Cat hope to nestle control of the wood’s resources, while The Vagabonds… well, the Vagabonds are up to something else, entirely.

If you’d rather something more cooperative, the Riverfolk expansion introduces a new faction, The Mechanical Marquis. This ‘bot-driven’ faction can fit seamlessly into your competitive game, or you can all team up against it in a cooperative throwdown! The Clockwork Expansion builds on this even further by introducing four further automated factions, enabling you to play entirely solo if you’d so prefer.

Tabletop gaming can be a pricy hobby, which makes Kosmos’ Exit games such a breath of fresh air. These single-use games only cost around £10 each, and are fully-fledged escape-room-in-a-boxes that can take hours to complete.

There are so many of them to choose from, whether it be The Abandoned Cabin, the Mysterious Museum, The Forbidden Castle, or even the Lord of the Rings-themed Shadows Over Middle-earth. By working together, your aim is to complete the room as quickly as you can. The puzzles can get pretty tricky too, requiring lateral thinking or even destroying game pieces and the box to proceed.

The presentation of the Exit games is incredible. The contents of the boxes are often themed, and there’s even an app that lets you play suitable atmospheric background sounds to build the experience. These might only be one-use games, but if you’ve got a single afternoon and a group of friends, it can be one of the most memorable experiences you’ll have this summer.