Let’s be honest; if you enjoy 1. drinking alcohol in a pub or bar; 2. playing board games; and 3. doing both of those things at the same time; your options for doing so have become vastly better in recent years. Even if your town is one of the few on earth that hasn’t yet sprouted a board game bar, these days you can rock up to a normie watering hole with a couple of games and settle in for a six hour session without even getting funny looks.
Consequently, in the same period we’ve been blessed with a panoply of new, rules light, short play, small box games that are short on depth, complexity, and moving parts, but long on convenience, speed, and merriment. Legendary pocket rockets Scout and Skull are in our all-time list of the best board games with good reason, and I’ll defend them unto death.
But, after snapping up a review copy of the slimmed down, retuned Las Vegas from Ravensburger at Gen Con 2026, I think this might just unseat Scout from my pub night survival kit – for a while at least. That’s not because it’s ‘better’, either for my personal tastes or in any objective sense.
Las Vegas, only slightly amended from its original 2016 formula, doesn’t deliver anything anywhere near as clever or innovative as Scout’s deliciously brain-tickling, double-layered tactical wrangle. To state the obvious, it’s not as portable either; tabletop games don’t get much more convenient than a hardy little orange box the size of a bar of soap.
No, Las Vegas is coming with me to the pub because its virtues – limited though they may turn out to be in terms of replay appeal – are almost perfectly aligned with my criteria for a game played in one’s cups. In my view, a good bar board game needs to:
- Be very quick and easy to set up, re-rack, and pack away.
- Have both a short overall play time, and very quick turns, to keep up momentum.
- Be pretty to look at, but have zero design elements or in-game information you can’t learn from a single, rapid, possibly blurry glance in poor lighting.
- Have simply designed, hardwearing components that can withstand spills and knocks.
- Have an extremely limited decision space – both to keep things moving, and to stay entertaining amid conversation, noise, distractions, and, er, declining cognitive ability.
- AND MOST IMPORTANTLY: contain just enough potential for tactical decision making that you always feel invested and impactful – but not so much that you ever have to think very hard about anything.
To be clear, loads of games that don’t meet those criteria can be great fun played at the bar while imbibing. Some of the best gaming times I’ve ever had while drinking were incredibly long, slow, silly games of Scrabble. And of course there’s nothing quite like a few hands of Poker when everyone’s capacity to remember probabilities or read facial expressions is dropping by 20% every half hour.
But when it comes to what I’d call proper, board game board games – modern, boxed releases that came out this side of the fall of the Berlin Wall – the above formula is what I’ve found works best for me. And honestly, Las Vegas fits the bill handsomely.
If you never played the 2016 original, I’ll skip straight to summarizing the new 2026 version – partly because I never played the original, but mostly because the new one is incredibly similar and, from what I can tell, a better match for my criteria than its predecessor. Don’t worry, this won’t take long.
There are six cardboard mats on the table, each with a designated number from one to six, themed after non-specific Vegas casinos. Two prize banknotes are laid next to each casino, with values from $10,000 to $100,000.
Each player gets their own colored set of six small D6 dice, and one bigger D6, adorably called the ‘biggie’ die. Each turn, you roll all the dice you have, then choose one group of matching rolls (all the ones, all the fours, etc.) and place them on the casino matching that number.
Once everyone’s rolled and placed all their dice, whoever has most dice on each casino wins the larger of its two cash prizes, and second place gets the smaller one. Your ‘biggie’, of course, counts for two dice. If any number of players are tied, they all lose, and whoever has the most dice after them wins the big money. After three rounds (or however many you want, honestly), the person with the most cash wins.
Immediately, you’ve got an unapologetically high-randomness formula here. Any strategy you adopt has to contend not only with your dice rolls, but all your opponents’ rolls too. More often than not (especially at higher player counts) someone else will get a bum roll where their choice is to achieve nothing at all, or blow their dice on forcing a tie, just to rob you of a win. Schadenfreude is ever present.
Thing is, it’s also got those magical balancing ingredients of momentum and simplicity. High randomness frequently creates situations that screw over some players and reward others – but you never feel truly shafted, because you never had to invest much brainpower to begin with. And in any case, by the time you’ve started feeling salty, the Aleae have already been iactae again, and someone else is in the firing line.
For me, the dinky, untaxing little decisions you get to make here are exactly the right level of brainwork for a pub session after work. It’s mostly just whether to spend a multi-dice combo in one go, hoping to secure a larger payday, or drop them piecemeal into several casinos, reserving more dice to re-roll and increasing your chances of snagging multiple second prize wins.
Beyond that, it’s mostly just chance and banter. If your plan works out, great! If it works out because the late game dice fell just so, nudging your rival out of a big hundred-bag win, even though they dropped five dice there and you just one, even great-er!
If not – if, this time, you were the one nudged out of a payout by lady luck or your mother in law’s vindictive whim, for example – well, not to worry. The next round will almost certainly be different, and in any case the banknotes have humourous dice-faced cartoon characters on them, not US presidents. Fundamentally, it’s a pretty dumb game – but it’s just the right kind of dumb to go perfectly with intoxicating beverages. Plus, rolling dice is always fun forever (even if your father-in-law loses one on the floor every freaking time). Can recommend.
A disclaimer here before I go: as with anything Wargamer publishes on the intersection between tabletop gaming and drinking liquor, we’re honor bound to acknowledge that combo isn’t for everyone. Not every board gamer likes to drink, and even those that do often prefer to keep the two pleasures separate. Gods know, if your thing is noggin-tangling Euros or six-hour Twilight Imperium marathons, imbibing brain-altering chemicals is unlikely to fit neatly with your hobby experience (although if it does, you know, you do you!)
But for me, just as there’s a joy in intrepidly seeking (and then staying within) my body’s alcohol limits, there’s a parallel pleasure in finding the board games that are precisely the right counterpart to the cognitive level I’m at once optimum buzz has been achieved. Rare is the game that’s just as fun for me – or even more so – after three pints of room temperature British ale as it was beforehand. While Las Vegas continues acing that very specific assignment, I shall salute it.
I’m always on the hunt for something even easier, stupider, and just as fun, to play while I dull my existential dread, though – so if you have a better pub game, come join the free Wargamer Discord community and let me know! Alcohol isn’t served there, but good vibes run free.
Source: Wargamer
