15 Unique Board Games to Train Creative Skills
- Productivity
Zach- 41 minutes read
Looking for something to play? There are board games to boost creativity, well-being, and more. Here are 15 unique board games to train creative skills.
There are board games about nearly everything you can imagine, and with the countless benefits of playing games, you can find something that’s not only fun but also a great way to boost creativity and creative skills. Want to be better at problem-solving? What about collaboration? There’s a board game for that and more.
Each of these board games covers one or more creative skills in a fun and unique way to strengthen your creative mind and support your creative lifestyle.
Creative Benefits of Playing Board Games
- Board games bring people together and can even build and strengthen relationships.
- Board games increase brain functions like memory and cognitive skills.
- They trigger the release of endorphins to boost happiness and help reduce stress.
- They help improve social skills and self-confidence.
- Board games help speed up response time.
Challenge Your Communication and Creative Thinking Skills in a Game About Visual Connections
Concept is a guessing game where players have to guess a concept, such as a word, a name, or a phrase. The players who know the target concept provide hints by marking its attributes and attributes of related concepts on the game board with different-colored markers while other players guess. Giving verbal hints is not allowed.
- Players: 4 - 12
- Ages: 10+
- Playtime: 40 Min
Practice Problem-Solving Through the Beautiful Aesthetics of Mosaics
Azul is an abstract strategy board game where players become artists tasked with creating the most beautiful tiled mosaics.
Compete against your creative friends and family for a high score by claiming tiles and arranging them on the board for points. Easy to learn and infinitely replayable, you can find unique ways to practice problem-solving through colored tiles.
- Players: 2 – 4
- Ages: 8+
- Playtime: 30 – 45 Min
There’s Been a Murder, and It’s up to Your Creative Skills and Collaboration to Solve It
Mysterium is a unique cooperative board game that tells the story of the murder at the Count of Warwick’s manor in 1894. Thirty years later, the mansion is haunted by the ghost of the murdered servant, and it’s up to a group of psychic investigators to solve the mystery.
To play, one player takes on the role of the victim (now a ghost), and the rest of the players are psychics who must work together to solve a murder mystery. Each player investigates a case assigned to them to determine who the actual murderer is. Psychics receive numerous visions from a ghost with clues. Can they determine the weapon, location, and killer, or will a violent criminal pull off the perfect murder?
This problem-solving board game has high variability, so each time you play brings new challenges and twists. There are also expansion packs to add to the challenge and keep the experience fresh.
- Players: 2 – 7
- Ages: 10+
- Playtime: 45 Min
Push Your Creative Thinking to the Limit to Survive Bizarre and Hilarious Scenarios With Friends
3 Things – Improvise Your Best Survival Plan is a unique adult party game of do-or-die creative thinking. In this game, you and 4-8 of your friends are savvy survivors that must think quickly and creatively to select odd objects to help them live through unfortunate and outlandish survival scenarios.
The game includes 80+ scenario cards, 110 survival items, 150 scoring rations, and one whistle for dire situations.
- Players: 4-8
- Ages: Adult
- Playtime: 15+
Create the Perfect Fireworks Show Using Memory and Collaboration
Hanabi — which is the Japanese word for “fireworks”— is a cooperative card game in which players try to create the perfect fireworks show by placing the cards on the table in the right order. Players must act as a team to put the firework show together before they run out of cards.
- Players: 2 – 5
- Ages: 8+
- Playtime: 25 Min
Dungeons & Dragons - Imagination
Get Lost in Your Imagination With Friends as You Harness Many Creative Skills on Epic Adventures of Pen and Paper
Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D, is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game that lets players create their character and use their imagination to role-play in an open-ended world as they embark on epic quests and level up in experience.
Dungeon Masters (also known as the DM) lead players on adventures and play the roles of characters met in the stories not played by players. They are the game’s referee and storyteller. This creative game is about storytelling, imagination, problem-solving, teamwork, and many more creative skills.
Over the years, D&D has continued to grow in popularity, inspiring countless creative video games and other unique role-playing games.
Famous Creatives Who Play D&D
- Stephen Colbert (Comedian)
- Moby (Musician)
- Jon Favreau (Actor and Filmmaker)
- Robin Williams (Comedian)
- John August (Writer)
- Gerard Way (Musician and Writer)
- Dan Harmon (Writer)
- Players: 4–6, +DM
- Ages: 12+
- Playtime: 2-3 Hrs
Challenge Your Mind With Puzzles, Riddles, and More to Escape a Room With Friends and Family
Escape Room: The Game brings the fun and creative challenges of visiting an escape room to your home. With 4 thrilling escape rooms to choose from, you and 3 to 5 people will need teamwork, creativity, and attention to detail to solve the brain-bending riddles and puzzles and escape the room before the 60-minute timer is up.
In addition to 4 escape room adventures, there are also expansion packs and opportunities to continue the challenge and boost your creativity with others.
- Players: 3–5
- Ages: 16+
- Playtime: 60 Min
Transport Yourself Back in Time to the Renaissance to Challenge Your Strategic Decision-Making to Fuel Creativity and Success
Fresco is an artful family game where you buy and mix paints to restore the Renaissance fresco and earn the Bishop’s favor by restoring the ceiling fresco of a great cathedral. Transport yourself back in time to one of the most thriving creative communities in history to make strategic decisions to fuel creativity and success.
With expansions and varying difficulty, this is an easy game to learn and increases complexity as you get better and want more of a creative challenge.
- Players: 2–4
- Ages: 10+
- Playtime: 60 Min
Train Your Memory and Your Singing While Having Fun With Friends and Family
Spontuneous – The Song Game is a creative memory game where players write down several trigger words on their hit list. When it’s your turn, you announce a word from your list and flip the timer. The first player to sing at least 5 words from any song containing the Trigger Word gets to advance on the board.
Fun for the whole creative family, this easy-to-play yet challenging game can help you build new connections in your mind, support play, strengthen relationships, and it can be a great way to express yourself through music, even if you’re not a singer.
- Players: 4–10
- Ages: 13+
- Playtime: 30 Min
How Fast Can You Think in This Challenging Game About Making Connections
SET is a simple but challenging family game where players race to find a set of three. The deck consists of 81 unique cards that vary in shape, shading, number, and color.
Perfect for home, travel, school, and parties, this creative card game promotes fun and brain health that builds cognitive, logical, spatial reasoning skills, and visual perception skills.
- Players: 1-10
- Ages: 8+
- Playtime: 30 Min
Can You Create an Unbreakable Code? Prove You Are a Master of Your Creative Mind About Deductive Reasoning, Logic, and Creative Thinking
Mastermind is a creative strategy game of codemakers vs. codebreakers. Can you deduce your opponent’s code before they guess yours? Can you create an unbreakable code? With more than 2,000 possible combinations, every game is different and challenging and teaches deductive reasoning, logic, and creative thinking.
- Players: 2
- Ages: 8+
- Playtime: 20 Min
Travel Through Time Learning About Historical Creative Minds and Events With Friends and Family
Trekking Through History is an educational and fun board game where you time travel to some of the greatest moments in human history.
Meet famous creative minds and remarkable events as you learn about history, as well as challenge your mind and opponents to check off items on your itinerary for points and earn time crystals so you can bend the space-time continuum on future turns. The player with the most points after three rounds wins.
- Players: 2–4
- Ages: 10+
- Playtime: 30–60 Min
Think Like an Artist as You Explore a Colorful Game of Communication and Creative Thinking
Hues & Cues is a creative communication and deduction game about colors. What hue do you think of when we say “apple”? In this creative board, game players are challenged to make connections to colors based on words. Using one or two words, players must try to get others to guess a specific color hue from over 480 colors.
How creative can you get to help your teammates guess the correct color? Everyone around the table gets a turn to give cues and guess. The winner is the player who has the most points on the outside grayscale scoring track after 1 or 2 rounds.
- Players: 3–10
- Ages: 8+
- Playtime: 30 Min
Challenge Your Artistic and Creative Abilities to Help Other Players Guess the Clue
Telestrations is a party game in which players are prompted to sketch a word dictated by the roll of a die. Each player must sketch a picture for their word before time is up, and then everyone passes their guess to the next player, who must try to draw the word they see, and so on.
- Players: 4 – 8
- Ages: 12+
- Playtime: 30 Min
How Many Connections Can You Make in This Creative Game of Memory, Communication, and Creative Thinking
Codenames is a card game for 4-8 players where two teams take turns competing by having a “spymaster” give one-word clues that can point to multiple words on the board. The other players on the team must attempt to guess their words while avoiding the other team’s words.
- Players: 2 – 8
- Ages: 14+
- Playtime: 15 Min
Zach is an international writer, photographer, filmmaker, martial artist, and creator of Creative Enso, the Zen art of creative living. His goal is to empower and inspire creatives to live healthier, happier, and more creative lifestyles.
