8 Games to Amp Up Your Holiday Gatherings

If you find yourself feeling cooped up as the weather gets colder, and you appreciate books like The Pun Also Rises and Tequila Mockingbird, get yourself ready for the ultimate pun showdown with Punderdome. This fantastically fun card game from father-daughter duo Fred and Jo Firestone is a great way to curl up with loved ones—nothing warms a room like bad dad jokes and hearty guffaws. In the spirit of Apples to Apples and Cards Against Humanity, the aim of this group game is to make the worst jokes possible: the punnier the better!

Get ready for the ultimate girls’ night with a hilarious card game from the creator of the original Nasty Woman T-shirt. You can never have enough feminists on your side when it comes to fighting the patriarchy. In The Nasty Woman Game, you take turns drawing cards, following the politically charged, pop culture-laden prompts, and strategizing your next patriarchy-smashing move, all while building a girl squad of the nastiest women of today and yesterday. Get the “You’re Trumped” Card and you’re out of the game, loser—unless you can trade in a Nasty Woman Card to save you. The last player standing is the nastiest of them all.

What happens when you mix one part Scrabble, one part Uno, and one family party/book club/wine night? You get a word nerd’s ultimate fantasy. Made to be played by small groups, Rewordable is a great way to unplug and spend time with friends, no matter where you may find yourselves. The package is compact and gameplay is simple, making it easy to tote around and teach new friends wherever you go.

From the inaugural space race of Vostok vs. Mercury to the International Space Station, this set of playing cards celebrate Earth’s history of intergalactic travel. Each face-card features historical space suits, vessels, missions, and more. A booklet of rules for classic card games is designed to look like a space shuttle flight manual. To complete the galactic evening, pair with it Pop Chart Lab’s 500-piece companion puzzle, which celebrates every crewed space mission since 1961 and includes a full-color reference poster. If you’ve already read First Man, watched Ryan Gosling blast into space, and are gearing up for next year’s golden anniversary of the moon landing, this is the set for you.

Think you’ve got your jigsaw puzzle game on lock? Think again! The Getty Museum in Los Angeles used three geometric floor mosaics from Ancient Rome to create the most dizzyingly intricate jigsaw puzzle. To help puzzlers with this 500-piece mind-bender, the puzzle comes with a full-size poster version of the mosaic image. Work alongside the poster, and you’ll be done in no time. Or maybe it’ll take a lot of brain power and all hands on deck. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Fireflies, lava, and tacos are just a few of the totally awesome things in Wee Society’s vibrant matching game for kiddos. Looking for ways to expand a toddler’s vocabulary? Or teaching moments to elicit a giggle or two? This matching game, made up of 19 pairs of awesome things, is perfect for working a tot’s memory and building word recognition beyond the traditional cat, dog, and truck. The 20th pair is blank, so young players can draw and label their own awesome duo. Whether you’re a parent, grandparent, or super-cool aunt or uncle, this game is a surefire way to charm the little ones in your life.

If you were offered a Brain Pill that made you feel 10 percent more intelligent, but also made you seem 20 percent less intelligent to everyone else, would you take it? Suppose you wake up inhabiting Bruce Springsteen’s body and you’re scheduled to perform a concert that night, but your musical ability doesn’t match The Boss’s. What do you do? Interested in hearing how your mom would answer these questions? Your partner? Your bestie? Grandma?! Get your hands on a box of Chuck Klosterman’s HYPERtheticals, and you’ll be thinking about these wild what-ifs for days.