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Work can be a drag but at least you get 30 minutes in your day to pull yourself away from it all and relax. Yes, I am talking about that precious lunchbreak. Recently, I have been using my lunchbreak as a time to unwind, team build with colleagues and do something I absolutely love – play boardgames. And so, this feature was born! If you are looking to revamp your lunchbreak the Zatu bloggers, have you covered. These are the best games to play whether you're working from home, hanging with your work bestie or appealing to the masses.
Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game by Rob Wright
The problem with lunchtimes is that they seem to get shorter and shorter as time goes by. It doesn’t help that the phrase ‘lunch hour’ has been replaced by the phrase ‘lunch time’ because… well, who gets an hour anymore? So, if you want something meaty yet quick to set up and play… yeah, a deck builder should do it.
And what better than the surprisingly brilliant Star Wars deck builder (look, I know ‘licensed game’ isn’t a dirty word anymore, but it is unusual to get a licensed game that isn’t a reskin, regardless of how good the reskin is)? A two-player game where one person plays the Empire and the other plays the Rebel-s(cum), it does have an air of Star Realms about it, but it has a ‘force’ mechanic which gives cards different abilities if ‘the force is with you’, and faction specific cards that can be purchased by you for your deck but knocked out by your opponent for instant rewards. The idea of the game is to knock out your opponent’s base worlds, and this number can be adjusted according to time. Also, it lends the game additional balance as, when a new world comes into play, it will have a one-off bonus or continuous effect that gives the losing player an edge.
Based around the Star Wars-era running from Rogue One to Return of the Jedi, there are a lot of familiar faces in here and you can pull off some really thematic moments – like the time I got to play Han, Chewie, Luke AND the Millennium Falcon all in one turn. Naturally, my opponent was obliterated. Yeah, it also lends itself to plenty of ‘until next week, you scruffy nerf-herder’.
Shobu by Lee Underwood
I spend a lot of time fretting over which game to introduce to new players. And I don’t know why I bother because nine out of ten times it’ll be Ticket to Ride. But Ticket takes time, to play and to learn, and in the cut-throat crucible of the modern office, that’s just not gonna fly. And besides, I’m scared I’ll lose one of my little coloured trains. The real secret to snaring newbies in the workplace is finding a game that feels familiar enough to be welcoming but is different enough to pique the interests of passers-by. Stand up Shobu, that’s your cue.
Shobu is a 2-player, abstract game that looks like it has been around for centuries (Spoiler: it hasn’t). With four simple wooden boards, black and white pebbles and a length of rope, Shobu is the perfect “quick to learn, a lifetime to master” game to stimulate the competitive instincts of your work colleagues. It’s easy to set up, with the rules explanation taking about 5 minutes if you are a slow talker. And its monochrome aesthetic means it will feel comfortingly familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of Othello or Draughts. It’s also fairly sturdy so a spilled cup of coffee is not going to result in a ruined game or hurt feelings.
As with all great abstract games, Shobu is addictive, deceptively simple and fiendish. The first game is likely to be humiliatingly short against an experienced player but will demand a second. And then probably best out of five. It’s certainly not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s short enough that most people will at least be tempted to give it a go and for that reason alone I recommend Shobu to pretty much everyone.
Rustling Leaves by FavouriteFoe
I barely have time to inhale a sandwich at 1pm. But when I do have a few minutes spare, one of my go-to lunchtime games is Rustling Leaves published by KOSMOS.
Rustling Leaves is a lovely, quick, quiet little roll and write. Played solo or with others (multiplayer solitaire), the rules are easy. And like a crisp autumn morning, Rustling Leaves has a layer of push- your-luck, spatial crunchiness.
It’s actually 4 games in 1 covering spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Each season is its own puzzle with unique scoring objectives, and you can play them all or just dip in and out to suit!
Using two custom dice, players simultaneously draw an enclosure on their sheet corresponding to the dimensions shown on the die faces (e.g. 2 x 3 or 1 x 4). The clever bit is that you can only score one icon type in that enclosure. And, as each icon has specific rules about when and how it produces points, each option makes you think. Some are independent, whereas others need (or need to avoid!) fellow creatures or features to score!
As your sheet fills up, your options become limited. You can manipulate a specific die once per game. But if you can’t go, or don’t want to draw a specific enclosure, you’ll suffer a -3 point penalty!
A really nice touch is that you get to decide when you want to stop playing. If the risks are becoming too great, you can bank what you’ve got and tap out until end game scoring. You can’t add anything else but you won’t risk losing any points either. The game finishes when everybody has passed or can no longer draw any enclosures.
Rustling Leaves is a lovely little game that I’d gladly sacrifice sandwich time for!
The Opolis Games by Nick Welford
I often take my lunchbreak at my desk, meaning I need a small footprint solo game that can play in 10-15 minutes. Enter Sprawlopolis, Argopolis and new to the block Naturopolis. To call these different games is a bit of a stretch as they are all based on the same core mechanism with a few minor tweaks.
The hook and cleverness come from the double-sided cards that make up the 18-card deck. On the one side you have the four different terrain blocks and usually a road and some other features. The card is split into quarters and when you place a card you can play next to other cards or covering over existing blocks.
On the other side of the card is a unique scoring condition. To start the game, you will draw three random cards and lay them out scoring side up. This will give you the scoring conditions for the game. Each one will have a number on, and you add these together to get your target score. As well as scoring the three cards, each terrain scores one point for each block in its largest connected run.
Roads are the kicker though. Roads are bad. Scoring 1 or 2 negative points depending on which version you are playing. Because you are only laying out 15 cards each game it’s perfect fodder for your office desk.
Although at work I play it solo you can play the games co-op too, which can help or hinder depending on your friends! It’s small, portable, fun and challenging. I highly recommend picking at least one of these games!
Final Girl by Luke Pickles
Often, during my workday, I get a hankering to play a game of some description. But it’s been a good few years since I’ve had a regular game buddy at work. And since the pandemic, my work has predominantly been at home so if I’m wanting a game, I need something solo. Enter a solo only game that I’ve recently discovered – Final Girl.
In Final Girl, you take on the role of the last woman standing in a horror film scene of some description – a mental hospital, a summer camp, ancient burial grounds, you know that sort. Your goal is simple, kill the bad guy before they kill you. However, it’s not going to be easy, what with the inevitable dice luck going against you, and the pure evil that is the Terror deck, which changes up the action of the villain every turn. They could be attacking bystanders, gunning for you, or just causing new characters to enter the battlefield, making life a lot harder for you.
Final Girl is a fantastic solo game that you can have set up during your morning tea break and then quickly play during your lunchbreak and still have time to eat a sandwich. You might even get to play twice if things really don’t go your way. I love that you can just play with any of the different sets, smash up the heroes, villains and locations however you want and just have a blast. Perfect for a quick game at lunchbreak.
Trash Pandas by David Ireland
Trash Pandas by Gamewright Games is my lunchbreak game of choice. For those that enjoy a little gamble by pushing their luck, this will be a game you enjoy.
The game is for 2-4 people. It consists of 54 cards, 6 wooden tokens and 1 custom die, that is all. The die is 6 sided and each face of the die resembles a wooden token, hence 6 tokens. You and your fellow players take on the role of a racoon (a trash panda) and must grab as much rubbish as possible, trying to get the highest score.
All players are dealt a starting hand; however, this varies pending who plays first. Play consists of rolling the dice and selecting the corresponding token that matches what has been rolled. Each token represents an action to play after you’ve finished rolling. It is up to each player how many times they roll the die and how many actions they go for. You get to play each action after rolling.
However, roll an action that you have already rolled, and your turn is scrapped and play passes on.
Get all 6 actions and earn a big bonus for the achievement.
The brilliance of this game is that you have no idea how well or badly your opponents are doing as you cannot see any scores. You only see a deck of cards getting progressively bigger as play happens. This creates added jeopardy when it comes to gambling on the die. When the last card is drawn the
game ends and the final count begins. With that definite end point you are looking at 20-30 minutes to see the game out.
We’ve had a lot of fun and laughter playing this one on a break and I’m sure you also will.
Star Realms by Andy Broomhead
For some good lunchbreak gaming, you need something quick and portable that also allows you time to reign supreme over the galaxy. Or at least two of those three.
Fortunately, Star Realms offers all of that in a great two-player experience that comes in a pretty small box that will give you ample time left over to finish a sandwich. This is a firm favourite in our house. Deck building is probably one of our favourite game mechanisms and Star Realms gives you that in one of the purest forms I’ve experienced in any game, other than Dominion.
You start with 10 cards, split between a few meagre space credits and a fledgling astronomical armada. Playing your hand of five cards allows you to balance a mix of cashing in credits for upgraded ships and bases against dealing out damage to your opponent.
The added layer is that ships come from one of four factions, each with a specialty of sorts. The blue Trade Federation generally help preserve your health and allow for some defence whilst the green Blobs bring some destructive firepower to the table. The yellow Star Empire allow you to draw and discard cards, cycling your deck more quickly, and the red Machine Cult allows you to permanently scrap less effective cards, making your deck leaner and meaner.
Specialising across one or two factions gives you some great combos to play, but having a more generalised approach might just give you the mix you need to conquer the realm. The basic game can be a 10–15-minute affair once you’re used to playing – perfect for a lunchtime interlude, whilst add on promo packs and mini expansions can give a good twist on a great game!
Bandido by Ross Coulbeck
Bandido is a solo or co-operative game where you have to stop Bandido escaping from prison! You thought he was safely behind bars, but when you weren’t looking, he snuck down a secret passage and into some tunnels. What you need to do is explore these tunnels and make sure they are all blocked off so he can’t get away.
The game begins by placing the Bandido card (5 route side face up) then dealing 3 cards to each player, which show different tunnel layouts. Each player’s turn, they place a tunnel card, so it touches another card, and their tunnels connect. You cannot place a card if one of its tunnel exits connects to a blocked part of another card. All tunnels must connect. From there it is a question of working together (without showing each other your cards) to block off all the exits. This can be done with certain cards that have dead-ends, or by looping tunnels back on themselves. It’s a game of highs and lows, immensely satisfying when you close off two routes at once with a clever loop, and frustrating where the only card you can play will turn one open route into three. Enjoyable to play though and easy to do in a small space of time either on your own or with up to 3 friends/colleagues.
If after a while you feel like you’ve mastered the game (much harder than it initially appears) you can flip the original Bandido starter card over, and the opposite side has 6 open routes on it for an extra challenge.
Marvel Remix by Dan Street-Phillips
As a freelancer I don’t have a regular lunchbreak or a regular group of people to spend a lunchtime with. This has made me envy those who have. However, over the last few months I have been working on a job with the same group of people and the first thing I wanted to do was to start a gaming club. I thought this would be a great opportunity to help people bond and also switch off from the stresses of the morning. I tried a lot of games, Just One, So Clover, Diamant to name a few but one really caught the imagination of the group, Marvel Remix.
Based on the modern classic that is Fantasy Realms, Remix is a simple game of take a card and play a card. You begin the game with seven cards in your hand, six remix cards and one villain. Every card belongs to a certain suit, whether a location, a hero, ally or villain with the only condition that you must end the game with at least one villain and at least one hero or ally. On your turn you can draw a card from a shared discard row or from the deck and then you must play a card to the shared discard row. Once the row reaches a total of ten cards then the game ends immediately. I love this tension! You might want to draw a card, blind, from the deck but then that will speed up the game, not giving you the time you need to strengthen your hand. You see you score by combining your cards together, often blanking cards if their needs are not satisfied. This is such a quick and addictive game and even if the theme doesn’t grab you, the puzzle surely will!
Splendor by Pete Bartlam
What to play in your too short lunchbreak when you’re short of both time and space – and possibly players? What about a game with no board but 12 cards laid out, a pile of gems, only 3 rules, plays in 30 minutes and scales from 2-4. Ladies and gentlefolk, I give you Splendor!
Splendor is a card-collecting and engine-building game. Renaissance Merchants trading gems and gaining favour with nobles. It provides a quick to learn and easy to set up basis for playing multiple times much like you may with a round of Whist.
Its 90 Development cards come in 3 levels to be laid out in 3 rows of 4, increasing in value. Alongside are piles of gems in 5 colours. Players take Gems and use them to pay for Development cards. Each of these also depicts a bonus gem and at higher levels victory points. A Development card thus gained will chip in its’ bonus gem to aid further purchases. Collect enough bonuses and you are entitled to a visit from a noble for a further 3 victory points. The game ends when one player hits or exceeds 15 victory points.
It’s a slow burner which starts with Gem collection and buying the lowest level Development cards. Then it grows as you build your bonuses enabling the acquisition of higher and higher cards. Suddenly a host of glittering prizes are within your grasp whilst Nobles queue to visit.
I recently taught this game to my U3A Board Games Group, and we played through 3 games during our afternoon break. Most will get through a game of Splendor on a lunchbreak but as I am retired, time wasn’t too much of an issue.
Hanamikoji by Victor Rios Fabia
Find your partner in crime and enjoy a quick visit to one of Kyoto’s most famous streets during your lunchbreak! Hanamikoji is a 2-player game that plays in about 15 minutes, where you try to influence 7 respected Geishas in your favour. The game is straightforward: to win, a player needs to earn the majority of the Geishas’ favour by the end of a round.
Each round, you will draw a card and choose one of the 4 single-use actions: save a card, discard two cards secretly, let your opponent pick one out of three and keep the other two, or let your opponent pick a pair and keep the other. After both players take their 4 turns, whoever has the most cards of a given Geisha earns their favour. Simple, elegant, and mind-blowing!
In the deck, there are cards of each Geisha equal to their charm value, ranging from 2 to 5. There is no single strategy to win. You can go for the highest Geisha’s and try and reach 11 first or win the lowest Geisha’s and try and get 4 on side for the win. Every action is weighted; do you give your opponent the option to pick a double-two or a double-five, or burn an action pairing one of each?
Hand management, reading your opponent’s moves and even a little bit of bluffing are essential to win. A small box with 21 cards, 15 tokens, 7 Geishas’ portraits equal a lot of strategy and fun. That’s Hanamikoji, and I am pretty sure that a single match won’t be enough.
Point Salad by Matt Thomasson
Point Salad is not just an end of night filler, it’s a great lunchbreak treat to enjoy with your work colleagues/friends/family. This wonderful, small box filler is ideal to slip in your bag and crack out over a sandwich and a bag of crisps.
What is it about Point Salad that makes it a good option for lunchbreak gaming? In Point Salad you will be drafting vegetable/salad cards from a central display. Alternatively, players can draft scoring cards (which are the reverse of the vegetable cards) and will build up different ways of scoring as the game progresses.
Point Salad is a quick playing game and very accessible with minimal rules overhead. It also scales well from 2 to 6 players making it a very sociable game. The imagery is bright and colourful. This small box of cards is ideal to play during a lunch when you have a 20-30 minutes spare. Irrespective of who you are playing with, gamers and non-gamers alike can be up and running within minutes. Despite being a fairly straightforward game there is a fair amount to consider. What are the optimum cards for your scoring goals? What cards do your opponents need and can you freeze them out of certain vegetables? You also have the option to flip one of your scoring cards to a vegetable card if it is not working out for you.
I have had a lot of success in the past introducing this game to people. It has always gone down well and stands up to repeated plays. More often than not it has been played back to back, multiple times in a row. Point Salad just hits that perfect spot of rules complexity vs game length vs decision making that makes it my go to game for lunchtime.
Grove by Seb Hawden
I do, quite often, like to have a little ‘me’ time at lunch while at work. Most of the time I play with the board game cult I seem to be accruing in the office but now and again I do have a smidge of time to do some solo gaming. I don’t do a lot of gaming alone but Grove, a 9-card solitaire game by Mark Tuck, is perfect for these short lunch breaks where I fancy a little thinky game or two.
In a similar vein to games by ButtonShy and the previous game in this series, Orchard, you have a small number of components, and a very light ruleset but a massive decision space to get stuck into. In my opinion, this is the perfect combination for a dinner-time shindig. In Grove, you are designing a fruitful grove and must lay cards on top of each other growing fruit trees and fulfilling certain tasks to maximize your score.
In its tiny box, you get 18 cards, a set of very colourful dice and a few tokens. It’s portable and looks lush on the table. Firstly, you split the cards into 2 piles and choose one to play. From the other pile, you choose 2 cards to be your bonus objectives. These cards are cleverly designed with the Grove segments on one side and a bonus scoring objective on the other. This makes every game unique and also, with the deck being 18 cards, Grove cries out for 2 games to be played back-to-back.
Your turns in Grove are simple, lay a card from the two in your hand into your play area then draw a new one. You have to match fruit trees in order to grow more fruit, you use the brightly coloured dice to signify the value of each fruit tree, which is very quaint. This is the main way to score big points and there are a few other little rules here and there but all in all, it’s a very light whimsical game that is perfect for lunch breaks. Right, I’m off to pick some juicy summer fruit, later gamers!
Noggin by Sophie Jones
My lunchbreak usually consist of an audiobook and a walk around the park or eating lunch at my desk. After this routine for almost 8 months, I decided it was time to mix things up and introduce my colleagues to the wonderful world of gaming.
30 minutes isn’t a long time to teach non gamers a long list of rules. I also needed to cater for a large audience. But what game to pick? Easy, it had to be Noggin! Noggin is a quick-thinking card game where players place letter cards down on the table. Every now and then, a special card will be drawn and cover one of the letters. Using the remaining letters, players must shout out words which meet the conditions of the special card. For example, if the ‘neither letter’ card is drawn, players must say a word which does not include the 2 letters which are face up on the table. The fastest player to answer wins the card. At the end of the game, the player with the most cards win. Once players get used to the core mechanics, additional rules can be added which means players have to give up cards or can steal the from others.
This game is thinky, fast and hilarious! The abundance of answers keeps this game fun, and you will find yourself giggling as someone shouts hairy bananas across the room. It’s a great way to introduce your office to gaming and break the monotony of clock watching.
There you have it! It’s time to ditch your sandwiches, salads or packet of crisps and pull out a board game this lunchbreak.