When I opened this review for a game called Hundreds of Horses, I expected to have a good laugh about an awful game. The first two sentences:
It’s like a less-complicated Dixit. And all horses.
However, the author is actually fairly positive! It’s clearly not a “hobby game” and not meant for hobby gamers, but it works and can be fun. What other games fall into this category? I’ll nominate:
- Happy Salmon. What’s more fun than high fiving and running around a table?
- Spot It: Reverse spot the differences. Pure reflex game that can be explained in ten seconds
- Time’s Up!: Describe something, describe it in one word, and charades. Practically always a hit
- Auction games are amazingly good in delivering simplicity and excitement! High, Society, For Sale, You‘re Bluffing!
- Trick taking games are my close 2nd! High replayability and I love the after-talk: The Crew, Claim, Skat are a few examples.
- But sometimes you want to show off and bring more than a card game to the table, that‘s still simple and fun! King of Tokyo, Camel Up, Cascadia come to mind.
The simplest I can think of is Strike. You are throwing dice into a pit and hope for the best. You do have some control in trying to hit other dice to change their value and you have push-your-luck decisions to make. We sometimes use it to decide the first player in the real game.
Zombie Dice and Martian Dice are some other simple dice games I like. And since OP mentioned Spot It I will throw in Spots which is a newer game, I don’t have a physical copy yet but had a lot of fun with it on BGA.
Outside of dice games I like Bandido a lot. If you look at the components you can probably figure out what to do without reading the rules. Works solo or co-op. Another one: Illusion, you are simply comparing which card has more of a given color.
Saboteur is really fun card game. Is simple , has team building gameplay and also betreyal plus a point system.
When I played we where 12 , so a lot of people can play as well.