Great Boardgames to Play with your Teens

Teens love boardgames.  I ran a gaming program during Spring Break, and even though I had the Wii out for them, most of the teens preferred to play boardgames.


Apples to Apples
This is one of their favourites, and most teens will happily play it all afternoon long.  It's simple to learn and easy to play. If you haven't played it before, there are two decks of cards: one of nouns, and the other of adjectives.  Someone is the judge and flips an adjective card over.  Everyone else looks at their noun cards and plays the card they think fits the adjective.  The judge decides which noun card is best, and the person who played that card gets a point.  The fun starts when you see what crazy cards people have played, since they often only vaguely fit the adjective, if at all, and it's entirely up to the judge's sense of humour as to which card is the "best."  Play a mini game if you need an ice breaker, or play until you run out of time.


Mad Scientist University
This one works a little bit like Apples to Apples in that it has two decks of cards.  Here there's a Teaching Assistant instead of a judge, a deck of Insane Assignment cards, and a deck of Random Ingredient cards.  Everyone pulls a Unstable Element card, which could be anything from paper clips to garden gnomes, the T.A. flips over the Insane Assignment card (plot world domination!  cure the common cold!), and everyone has 15 seconds to figure out how they're going to complete the assignment with their unstable element.  When the timer stops, everyone lays out their plan for the T.A., who decides who gets the point.  Since this is Mad Scientist University, maniacal laughing, random rule changing by the T.A. and general craziness is encouraged.  Lots of fun to play, and gets the teens thinking creatively.

Gloom
This is the game I usually tell teens about when I'm promoting a gaming program because it's so delightfully twisted.  Each player picks a family (my favourite is the family of demented circus performers), and then tries to kill off the family in as miserable a way as possible.  The more miserable a character is when it dies, the more points you get, so everyone spends the game making their own characters contract small pox or be chased by hordes of ravenous budgies, and making everyone else's characters win the lottery.  It's a fairly complex game, so it's best to play along with the teens the first time.