Everyone knows the big names — Codenames is on every list, Pictionary's been in every house since the '80s, and Cards Against Humanity needs no introduction. Those are all great, and we sell plenty of them. But the shelf behind them is where the genuinely interesting stuff lives: games that never got the mainstream push but earn a permanent spot in the rotation the moment someone actually plays them. Here are five worth knowing about.
1. Hues and Cues
Give someone a one-word clue. Watch four people confidently point at four completely different shades of green. Hues and Cues hands you a board of 480 colours and asks you to get your team to land on your exact one using nothing but a word or two — which sounds simple until you realise how differently everyone actually sees colour. Say "sky" and someone will point at navy. Say "ripe banana" and the guesses scatter from custard to mustard.
It scales all the way up to a table of ten, plays fast, and turns into an argument almost immediately — in the best way. If you've heard the name floating around lately, this is why.
2. Decrypto
A team codebreaking game where you're sending clues your own teammates can decode, while the opposing team tries to crack the same code from the outside. It's tense in a way most party games aren't — every clue you give makes your team's job easier and the other team's job easier too, so the smartest play is often the most restrained one.
It's genuinely earned its reputation as one of the highest-rated party games on BoardGameGeek, and this is the 5th Anniversary Edition, with 440 fresh keyword cards to keep it from ever feeling repetitive.
Decrypto (5th Anniversary Edition) →
3. Fake Artist Goes to New York
A tiny box that consistently gets the biggest reaction of anything on our shelf. Everyone at the table knows what they're drawing except one player — the fake artist — who has to bluff their way through a shared drawing one stroke at a time, hoping nobody clocks that they're winging it.
Draw too well and you give yourself away. Draw too vaguely and you look exactly as lost as you are. It's a five-minute setup that reliably ends in genuine laughter, and it fits in a coat pocket.
Fake Artist Goes to New York →
4. We're Doomed
The premise says it all: the world ends in ten minutes, and there's one seat left on the rocket. Everyone's technically cooperating — nobody actually is. It's a full negotiation game disguised as a party game, where the entire experience is the conversation: the deals, the alliances, and the increasingly transparent lies about who's actually helping who.
Scales up to ten players and runs about half an hour, which is exactly long enough for at least one genuine betrayal.
5. Wilmot's Warehouse
The strangest premise on this list, and somehow the one that works best. You and your team run a warehouse, sorting abstract little symbol tiles into some kind of order — "put it with the round ones," "that's not round, it's a wheel, that goes with transport" — then flip them face down and never look at them again. Whatever story you told each other while sorting is the only index the warehouse has.
Then comes the ending: a five-minute scramble to match every tile to a stack of customer orders, purely from memory, which is the exact moment you find out whether your team's system was actually a system. Adapted from the video game of the same name, and it's translated far better than you'd expect.
Come Find Your Next Favourite
Every one of these is sitting on our shelves right now, and every one of them plays completely differently to the last — colour arguments, codebreaking, bluffing, negotiation, collective memory. If your group has exhausted the obvious picks, this is where to look next. Come have a play in-store; we'll happily walk you through any of the five above.
We believe the best moments happen around a table, and some of the best ones come from games nobody at the table has heard of yet.