Board games without hand-held cards or dice

October 5, 2019 8:19 PM

A group of us (ranging between 4-8 people) have started having a regular, casual, drop-in board game session some Fridays after work. I’m looking for games which can be played without holding cards, or rolling dice— there are some fine motor skill restrictions which rules out games like Exploding Kittens or Sushi Go. We’ve had fun with Code Names, and I’d like to mix it up with more in that space.

I’d love suggestions for games which lean heavily on using powers of speech, deduction, or reason, which don’t require (much of) looking at cards for privileged information.

Dixit and Spyfall are examples of games that I think might work. Looking forward to hearing any other recommendations!

posted by roshy to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (24 answers total)

Azul
posted by mhaw at 8:40 PM on October 5, 2019

Would Taboo be good for this? Also, try SET if you haven't played it.

Dixit requires that you have a hand of cards and choose one to submit, though you could have a modified / extra role who only votes and doesn't put in a card.
posted by Lady Li at 8:51 PM on October 5, 2019

Wits and wagers is really fun and balances abilities well across the group playing.

Telestrations if people are able to draw (and actually bad drawing is part of the fun)

Seconding Set. It’s a card game but the cards are placed down; you can just have a designated dealer.
posted by some chick at 8:52 PM on October 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

Pandemic is a cooperative game that uses some cards, but you can all have your hands laid out on the table for everyone to see. There is a lot of discussion and strategizing involved. No dice, but there are some fiddly small pieces. If at least one person can handle executing the moves, it might work. There are less-fiddly cooperative games like Forbidden Island as well.

Nthing Set, which is a pattern matching game where everyone plays off the same tableau of cards.
posted by expialidocious at 8:58 PM on October 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

I really enjoy Qwirkle for this. There are tiles but they do not need to be held in hands most of the time (i.e. they sit on their ends and you can look at them) and are fairly chunky so can be moved around pretty well. There is a "Lay these on the board" aspect but there's no timed or competitive part of that. You can take a look and see if it would work within your restrictions. It's mostly about making patterns with a lot of creativity in determining what is going to make the most points. You can also play in teams if that's better. You don't say how old everyone is but a thing about Qwirkle is that older people and younger people can grasp the game play and there's no language in it (similar to Dixit).

I'm also a fan of other tile/path games like Tsuro. There is some tile placement but most of it is just figuring out where to play a tile. No time pressure.

Keep in mind that if anyone in the group is smart phone enabled there are a number of accessible dice apps that can be used if a game happens to have dice but otherwise can meet all your criteria.
posted by jessamyn at 9:03 PM on October 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

I played Ricochet Robots for the first time at work yesterday. I'm not much of a boardgamer but I thought that it was a neat concept well executed and made for a pretty fun group game. It's not very wordy but may meet your other criteria. No dice or cards. I think this review sums it up pretty well:

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/6848/user-review
posted by klenwell at 9:54 PM on October 5, 2019

I like five minute dungeon, and you can just modify the rules to accommodate card movement
posted by tilde at 10:17 PM on October 5, 2019

Hive is amazing and can be played anywhere, including the floor, grass, and sand.
posted by sindark at 10:24 PM on October 5, 2019

How about Sherlock?

You all learn about a case and then make deductions to solve it and ask questions. Motor skills involved are possibly picking up sheets of paper to read them or looking through leaflets.
posted by pazazygeek at 10:43 PM on October 5, 2019

Whenever it’s dice you’re trying to avoid, maybe there’s a dice rolling app that they’d have an easier time with?
posted by backwards guitar at 2:44 AM on October 6, 2019

Scrabble?
posted by amtho at 3:52 AM on October 6, 2019

There are playing card holders if the issue is holding a hand of cards/ if dealing one out one at a time (untimed, at one's leisure) is OK (which, since you mention Dixit, I'm guessing might be the case? )

The Trogdor game is silly, collaborative, and is played with open hands (at least it was when I played it).

Hanabi is fun and brain teaser-y- there's an edition with probably-easier-to-manipulate tiles but it's hard to find. But the edition with cards would also work very well with card holders.

Concept is a word guessing game. If you like Dixit and Codenames, it'll be right up your alley. There are cards to draw with the words and tokens to put down on the board but both could be handled by an assistant/ teammate.
posted by damayanti at 4:33 AM on October 6, 2019

This isn't a direct answer to your question, but we had similar issues in our gaming group and this was resolved with a card holder.
posted by Karaage at 4:37 AM on October 6, 2019

Mysterium is like a cooperative version of Dixit where one player is a ghost who can only communicate to the other players using cards with eerie and surreal illustrations on them, and the other players are a "seance" and have to interpret what the ghost is trying to say with the cards in order to uncover the mystery of the ghost's death.
posted by J.K. Seazer at 5:03 AM on October 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

I have a similar sized game group and quickly learned that there is a vast universe of games designed for up to five players, and a much smaller set of games (categorized as "party games") that work for six players and up. All of my recommendations here are in the six players and up/party games genre:

My group really enjoys Codenames and we've found that Codenames Pictures is just as fun.

Decrypto has some similar dynamics as Codenames: two teams, each team sees a set of cards in a card holder, trying to decrypt the other teams cards.

You mentioned Spyfall - that works well and involves more talking, as it has a "hidden traitor" mechanic. Another game like Spyfall that involves cards (but minimal manipulation) is Ultimate Werewolf.

Funemployed involves cards, but only three per player and you don't have to do anything once they are selected other than concoct a story. One player is a hiring manager and the other players are each interviewing for a job; the cards represent oddball skills and backgrounds. Also in the "improvisational story telling" category is Someone Has Died (disclosure: I haven't played this one).

Finally, if you want to research a game, Board Game Geek is a good source. They also do some tagging/categorizing if you want to look for "same but different" games that use the same mechanics as something the group already likes.
posted by kovacs at 6:27 AM on October 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Cash N Guns, just have the Godfather distribute the money.
posted by DarlingBri at 6:30 AM on October 6, 2019

Keep talking and nobody explodes is computer based but only one player uses the computer and the rest have to give them instructions based on a printed manual. If the people with fine motor challenges can flip pages it would would well.
posted by lollusc at 9:29 AM on October 6, 2019

Superfight has each team turn over a couple of cards describing their super powers, then everyone argues about who wins. Can get really loud, but lots of fun.
posted by buildmyworld at 11:41 AM on October 6, 2019

Snake Oil is a game where you're a grifter trying to sell useless items to a specific customer. Players take turns as grifters, who make up pitches for the ridiculous items, and as customers, who choose which one is the most convincing. It's very much a party game, but fun and engaging. Cards are used to come up with roles and such, but just need to be read once.
posted by codacorolla at 12:07 PM on October 6, 2019

Depending on the mobility accommodations you're looking for, No Thanks! might not be a bad bet. It's a push your luck game where players are taking cards from a deck with face value of 1 to 35, and are trying to get the lowest face value score. You have a pile of chips that let you bypass taking a card, but you must pay a chip to pass. Runs of cards also downgrade to their lowest value, so if you have 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 in front of you then your score would be fifteen - 5 to 8 would count simply as 5, and 10 would count for its full value. Chips are also assigned a negative one point value, so in the above example if you had 4 chips in front of you at the end of the game you'd have a combined score of 11. Cards are not held as a hand, and simply placed in front of players. Chips might be somewhat fiddly, but players could place them generally in the middle instead of directly on the card, or you could have someone volunteer to be the 'dealer' and handle chip movement around the table. Likewise, you could use anything at all for the chips, so you could scale up to chunkier and more easily manipulated objects. Plays in about 15 minutes, and it's been a hit with everyone I've ever introduced it to.

If you're looking for something a little meatier, then Puzzle Strike is a game that replicates the Puzzle Fighter games. It's very much a classic deck builder, but instead of using cards it uses tokens in a bag, which is a really novel way to replicate the randomness of a deck of cards, but without cards themselves. My feeling is that this would be a much easier object to manipulate than a card, and there's no need to hold a hand of them. This might be only 2P though (I've never played it with more) so you may have to look into if there's a 3 or 4 player variant if you want to seat more.
posted by codacorolla at 12:29 PM on October 6, 2019

My mom and her friends play Mah Jongg, which I know it totally an old ladies game. But one of her friends only has use of one arm so she didn't want to play games with cards. But they've figured out that they can take the tile racks they use for Mah Jongg and she can set up her cards on that so they stand up and she can see them, but she gets to keep her good hand free. Depending on the level of motor skill limitations, a set up like that could help.

Also, the recommendation above for Pandemic could work well. There are cards, but they just sit on the table in front of you for everyone to see. And while there are some small game pieces, it's easy enough to have the other players manage those.
posted by thejanna at 6:15 AM on October 7, 2019

If you like Codenames, you'll likely also enjoy Just One. The game has cards, but you don't hold them. You put one card in a stand in front of you, pick a number from 1-5 to choose a word you cannot see but the other players can, and then they each write down a one-word clue to the word you picked. They compare and eliminate duplicates, and then you guess. After that, the guesser role passes to the next player.
posted by fings at 9:05 AM on October 7, 2019

Oh, and I should add it's a co-operative game, you're trying to get the most right/highest score you can on 13 cards.
posted by fings at 9:07 AM on October 7, 2019

I love the game Ra, which has neither cards nor dice, though it does involve drawing large cardboard tiles out of a bag, Scrabble-style. It is an ancient Egypt-themed bidding game.

Scotland Yard is a classic deduction game. One person is a criminal on the run trying to elude the other players. The criminal has to privately keep track of their movements, but the other players just have to bring their deductive powers to bear. Each player has a pile of cardboard transit "tickets" but there is no hand of cards or dice.

Seconding the recommendation for Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective or its modern-day counterpart Detective. They both involve deciding what action you want to take as a group and then looking up the result in a book, or in Detective's case, an app/deck of cards. Only one person needs to do the look-up and there is no need for dice or for most of the players to handle cards.
posted by zeusianfog at 1:27 PM on October 7, 2019 [1 favorite]