As our kids have gotten older, one of our joys has been to reflect on some of our experiences together at home during our common family game nights playing board games. These are a few of our favorites related to travel. We have even brought a couple of these on our actual road trips to play in the evenings or on a rainy day.
A few of these are recommended for ages 10+. We have been playing all of them for over a year, and some of them for about 3 years, and our youngest just recently turned 9. Sometimes he needed a little extra help, but he has been a solid competitor for quite a while and has certainly beat us all a number of times. If your family is used to playing games, your younger children can probably pick these up pretty well too. It just may take a little longer or a bit more help when you first start playing.
Trekking The National Parks – Some of our favorite road trip memories are visiting the different national parks around our country. The unique gameplay in Trekking, allows multiple ways to earn points as you navigate the map of 63 of our national parks. One of the actions you earn points with is “claiming” a park card. These cards have facts that teach or remind you about these parks as you go along. The imagery on the cards is beautiful as well.
Trekking the World – Very similar gameplay concepts to Trekking the National Parks, but with a broader view of the globe. An interesting new wrinkle to the gameplay is the introduction of airports into the gameboard, so you can quickly move around the board in somewhat unexpected ways. This keeps everybody on an even footing as they try to navigate the world and collect points.
Trekking through History – You might be sensing a theme here! We love supporting Underdog Games as a family-run business. Treking through History is another fantastic board game of theirs. We have enjoyed learning more about the world and history through playing the game. It includes the hallmark of other Underdog games which feature beautiful illustrations, accessible information, and interesting gameplay.
Ticket to Ride – This is a fun train-based board game that has multiple iterations and versions. We have enjoyed playing a number of them, but our most-played one is still the original (this one.) Build your train lines to connect cities across the United States and beat your competitors to destinations! It’s certainly helped us all improve our geography. We enjoy the ability to expand easily with different boards. We know this is a hit in other countries as well. On a recent trip to the Dolomites in Italy, on one rainy morning, the front desk worker at our guest house if we wanted to play ‘the train game’. Sure enough, he brought out a version of Ticket to Ride and we were able to dive right in.
Planet – This is an interesting board game as there is no actual board, but everyone gets their own hand-held “planet.” We really enjoy the focus on animals and habitats. We are still mastering it and having fun improving our strategies. While the above games are our more common go-to games, this is a nice one for when we want to switch it up a bit again.
We love playing games as a family and have many other board games and card games that we could do a post about. We wanted to keep this post focused more on travel-related games. Reach out in the comments if you’d like to find out some of our other recommendations, or hopefully, we’ll write up another post and we can link to it here. We also are always looking for new games to try, so we’d love to hear what your favorites are if you’d be so kind as to share them in the comments. Thanks and have fun!
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