LEGO board games add another layer of fun to the traditional brick-building experience. Once you’ve created your tiny plastic masterpiece, you’ve also got a fully-functioning tabletop game to challenge your friends and family with. What’s not to love?
The great thing about LEGO is there’s a set to suit every kind of person. All of the games you’ll find below are ideal family board games, but they each have their own unique rules and character. Whether you’re a Pictionary partygoer or a Harry Potter board games hobbyist, there are LEGO board games designed to suit you.
These are the best LEGO board games:
LEGO chess set
Everyone should know how to play chess, and there are several LEGO chess sets that will get players of all ages to sit down for a game of strategy. The iconic chess set is closest to the real game you’d expect to see on chess tables, while the LEGO Kingdoms chess set is one of the most expensive LEGO sets in this category.
For something more whimsical, you could pick up the Pirates Chess set. Or, for fans of the iconic films, there’s even LEGO Harry Potter Hogwarts Wizards chess. We just hope your games are less lethal than the one played by Harry and pals.
LEGO Creationary
LEGO Creationary is the block-building version of Pictionary. Rolling a die gives you one of four categories to build from – buildings, nature, vehicles, or the creatively-named ‘things’. A card then tells you which random item from this category you’ll need to build out of LEGO pieces. Everyone else then races to guess what those little plastic blocks are meant to be.
Putting together LEGO is far more fiddly than drawing a picture, especially when you’re against the clock. This makes for a surprisingly intense, fast-paced game.
LEGO Harry Potter Hogwarts
Like many LEGO board games, LEGO Harry Potter Hogwarts doubles up as a playable game and a buildable set. Once built, this miniature, simplified version of the famous wizard boarding school serves as your game board. Players must travel through Hogwarts’ corridors and passageways to collect their homework. As long as they get back to the common room first, they’ve won the day.
Designed for ages eight and above, this is a kids’ board game that’s light on strategy. It’s also light on detail – while the game says it includes all the key characters from Harry Potter, collectors will actually be able to tell who is who in a bigger, more detailed Hogwarts set.
LEGO Lava Dragon
Another buildable board game is LEGO Lava Dragon. As the name implies, this is a game starring a little LEGO dragon, who sits at the top of a brick mountain. Players compete to be the first person at the top of this mountain, where they’ll need to summon the titular lava dragon.
Players roll a die to move their LEGO person up the mountain, but not everything about LEGO Lava Dragon is so simple. Players add coloured movement tiles to the LEGO die once they’ve moved, and they can then move again any time the die lands on a face with their movement tiles on there. Lava tiles can also be added to the die to block other players’ movement.
Simple and luck-based, this is another great choice for fans of family board games – as long as you don’t mind a little bit of betrayal.
LEGO Heroica
LEGO Heroica is actually a series of board games rather than a single product. These games are dungeon crawlers, which means players must fight their way through a series of brick dungeons with their equipment backpacks and some lucky dice rolls.
Each of the Heroica boxes has a different theme. LEGO Heroica: Fortann is a great place to begin with the series as it takes place in your typical fantasy dungeon.
Other examples include LEGO Heroica: Waldurk, which takes you to a spider-filled forest, and LEGO Heroica: Nathuz, which tasks you with taking on giant bats in a creepy cave. You can even combine your Heroica boxes for more varied gameplay.
Source: Wargamer
