Best games: Holiday Gathering

The holiday table is the hardest room in board gaming. You have a nine-year-old and an eighty-year-old, a cousin who plays Twilight Imperium and an uncle who has not played anything since Monopoly, and a window of maybe ninety minutes between dinner and someone falling asleep on the couch. The games that work here share three traits: they teach in under five minutes, they scale to a crowd, and losing does not feel bad.

The safest opener is Codenames ($20, 2 to 8 or more, 15 minutes). Split the room into two teams, one person gives one-word clues, and everyone else argues. It works when half the table is shy because the clue-giver does the thinking and the team does the talking. Just One is its cooperative sibling: the whole table writes a clue for one guesser, matching clues get thrown out, and nobody ever loses alone. For a bigger, louder group, Monikers ($30, 4 to 20) turns the same deck of famous names into charades by the third round and is the game most likely to be requested again next year.

If the family wants a real board game, Ticket to Ride ($50, 2 to 5, 45 to 60 minutes) is still the one to bring. Collect train cards, claim routes across a map, no reading required beyond city names, and the rules fit on one card. Catan is the deeper choice for three or four people who like to trade and argue, but budget the full ninety minutes. Dixit ($35, 3 to 6) is the pick for a table spanning generations: the surreal picture cards reward imagination over experience, so a grandparent can beat a teenager without either of them feeling bad about it.

For chaos, Camel Up: a betting game about a camel race where the dice come out of a cardboard pyramid and the whole table yells at every roll. Wavelength is the game for the couch stage of the evening, where a hidden dial and clues like "how spicy is a jalapeno" produce the arguments families actually enjoy. Telestrations is the drawing game that gets funnier the worse people draw, which at a holiday table is a feature. Horrified is the cooperative option if the kids want everyone on the same side: five monsters, one village, one to five players, and about an hour.

Newer additions that earned a place this year: Flip 7, a push-your-luck card game you can teach mid-deal, and Hot Streak and Cozy Stickerville for the table that wants something light and new. Skip anything with player elimination, anything heavy, and anything that takes longer to set up than a round of Codenames takes to play.