Featured list
Most popular party games
The games groups reach for at a party — Codenames, Pictionary, Taboo, Cards Against Humanity and more — ranked from sales, reviews, surveys and how often people look them up.
50 games · from 20 sources
A game not on the site yet gets added when people ask for it. Vote on the request board — and send it to friends: every account gets ten votes.
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| Status | Details | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Codenames | 2015 | On the site | |
| 2 | Pictionary | 1985 | On the site | |
| 3 | Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza | 2018 | On the site | |
| 4 | Cards Against HumanityRequested — vote to add it | 2011 | Not on the site yet | |
| 5 | CraniumRequested — vote to add it | 1998 | Not on the site yet | |
| 6 | Apples to Apples | 1999 | On the site | |
| 7 | Spot It! (Dobble) | 2009 | On the site | |
| 8 | TwisterRequested — vote to add it | 1966 | Not on the site yet | |
| 9 | Wavelength | 2019 | On the site | |
| 10 | BalderdashRequested — vote to add it | 1984 | Not on the site yet | |
| 11 | Spoons | 1911 | On the site | |
| 12 | What Do You Meme?Requested — vote to add it | 2016 | Not on the site yet | |
| 13 | Hues and Cues | 2020 | On the site | |
| 14 | TappleRequested — vote to add it | — | Not on the site yet | |
| 15 | Exploding KittensRequested — vote to add it | 2015 | Not on the site yet | |
| 16 | Telestrations | 2009 | On the site | |
| 17 | The ChameleonRequested — vote to add it | 2017 | Not on the site yet | |
| 18 | CoyoteRequested — vote to add it | — | Not on the site yet | |
| 19 | Scattergories | 1988 | On the site | |
| 20 | Werewolf | 1997 | On the site | |
| 21 | Dixit | 2008 | On the site | |
| 22 | KempsRequested — vote to add it | — | Not on the site yet | |
| 23 | Horrible TherapistRequested — vote to add it | — | Not on the site yet | |
| 24 | Secret HitlerRequested — vote to add it | — | Not on the site yet |
How we built this
This list measures popularity — how many people buy, review, know and play a game — not which games critics rate highest. It blends four kinds of evidence. Sales: bestseller charts (Target's best-selling games) and published sales figures count fully. Reviews: how many people have reviewed a game on BoardGameGeek counts fully. We count the reviews, not the scores — a score says how much a game's fans like it, not how many people play it. Awareness: popularity surveys count fully, and twelve months of Wikipedia pageviews — how many people look a game up — count one and a half times. Published lists: editors' lists of popular classics count a little over half, and lists that rank by quality count only a fifth. Amazon's sales and review counts would belong here too, but Amazon doesn't allow its pages to be read automatically, so they aren't included. On a ranked list a game earns more for a higher place; a measured signal is scaled so the most-viewed game in the genre earns the full amount. The list is ranked purely by that score. Every listed game has at least one real, dated signal — nothing is added on a guess — and the lower places are often held up by measurements alone, such as pageviews or review counts, so they are the less certain ones. A game with no Wikipedia article earns nothing from pageviews, which holds back a few popular games. Party games are played for laughs in a group; one played with cards can appear here and on the card list. Our own judgement comes in only through those weights and through which genre each game belongs to.
Sources read September 29, 2026. Titles and positions are facts we compiled; the descriptions and the order are our own.
- Target Board Games, sorted Best selling (pages 1-2)Target · live, accessed 2026-09-29 · counts ×1
Retailer sales-rank ordering of in-stock board game listings; position reflects Target's recent sales, localized to a store (server request showed store_id 3991).
- Target Card Games, sorted Best selling (pages 1-2)Target · live, accessed 2026-09-29 · counts ×1
Retailer sales-rank ordering of card game listings, store-localized.
- Target Adult Games, sorted Best selling (page 1)Target · live, accessed 2026-09-29 · counts ×1
Retailer sales-rank ordering, store-localized; the category mixes party games with non-game items.
- Lifetime sales figures stated in individual Wikipedia game articlesWikipedia · live articles, accessed 2026-09-29 · counts ×1
Our compilation: one sales figure per article, taken from the article text; figures are 'as of' different years and come from publisher or press claims. Ranked here by the figures given (largest first).
- Spot It! (Dobble): lifetime sales as announcedasmodee.co.uk · boxes, Asmodee UK 2023-09-21 · counts ×1
A lifetime sales figure stated by the publisher or press. Self-reported.
- Codenames: lifetime sales as announcedexpats.cz · Expats.cz 2025-06-01 · counts ×1
A lifetime sales figure stated by the publisher or press. Self-reported.
- Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza: lifetime sales as announcedprnewswire.com · publisher press release 2026-05-19 · counts ×1
A lifetime sales figure stated by the publisher or press. Self-reported.
- Target: Party Games, best-selling sort (page 1)Target · live, accessed 2026-09-29 · counts ×1
Retailer sales-rank ordering of the party games category. Page positions are kept; plush, playing-card decks and games not among our candidates are skipped.
- What Americans think about board games (33 games played)YouGov · 2026-06-10 · counts ×1
Online YouGov panel poll of 1,131 US adult citizens, May 6-10 2026, weighted; respondents rated how often they had played each listed game.
- How Americans feel about 30 card gamesYouGov · 2023-06-08 · counts ×1
Online YouGov panel poll of 1,000 US adult citizens, May 10-12 2023; list built from an earlier open-ended favourite-card-game question.
- Most played board games (played last year, in real life)Troy Press / Researchscape International (Jeffrey Henning) · 2025-10-18 · counts ×1
Researchscape online newsmaker survey of 1,059 US adults, Jan 3-5 2025, weighted on 10 demographics; game list drawn from top open-ended answers. Full 22-game table published in the chronology post; headline post at https://troypress.com/most-played-board-games-and-card-games/.
- Most played card games (played last year, in real life) - highlightsTroy Press / Researchscape International (Jeffrey Henning) · 2025-01-18 · counts ×1
Same Researchscape survey of 1,059 US adults, Jan 3-5 2025; the article names the top three and the widely played dedicated-deck games only.
- The Cult of the Old: Board Game PurchasesTroy Press / Researchscape International · 2018-06-30 · counts ×1
Researchscape online quota-sampled survey of 2,000 US adults 18-80, June 22-24 2018; open-ended list of games purchased. 'Playing cards' (13) and 'Poker set' (8) omitted as equipment rather than a single game.
- Board games: Monopoly, Scrabble named US favoritesAYTM · 2015-04-12 · counts ×1
AYTM online consumer panel survey published around Scrabble's anniversary; sample size and wording not given in the post.
- Game Night: Most Popular Board Game in Each StateBand Pass Design (also reported by Mental Floss) · 2025-07-24 · counts ×1
Retailer blog study mapping each state's most popular board game, understood to be search-interest based; methodology not stated on the page. Noisy (includes Dungeons & Dragons and Mall Madness).
- The Best-Selling Board Games of All Time, RankedFUN.com · undated page, read 2026-09-29 · counts ×0.6
Retailer compilation of commonly cited sales figures, ordered by the retailer (not strictly by the numbers).
- 30 Classic Board Games Everyone Should OwnReader's Digest · 2026-02-16 (updated) · counts ×0.6
Magazine editors' curated list of classics.
- Bicycle Cards - How to Play, featured rulesBicycle Cards (Cartamundi / US Playing Card Co.) · undated page, read 2026-09-29 · counts ×0.6
Order of the 'Featured rules' tiles on the playing-card maker's rules page; 'Texas Hold'em Poker' tile folded into 'poker'.
- English Wikipedia pageviews, 12 monthsWikimedia Foundation (Pageviews API) · 2025-09 to 2026-08, human traffic (agent=user) · counts ×1.5
How many times people opened the game's English Wikipedia article over the last 12 full months. A measure of how many people look a game up, not of how good it is.
- BoardGameGeek — number of user ratingsBoardGameGeek (daily public snapshot of BGG's rankings) · snapshot of 2026-09-29 · counts ×1
How many BoardGameGeek members have rated the game — a count of hobbyists who have played it, used here as a popularity signal. The rating itself is not used.