8 Board Games Engineered to End Friendships

Board games are sold as togetherness. Families on the box art, everyone smiling, a fire going somewhere off-frame. Then you actually play one, and by hour three your brother-in-law has formed a coalition against you and your partner has stopped making eye contact.

Some of these games cause this by accident. The eight below cause it on purpose, because the designer wanted it that way. Without further ado.

1. Monopoly

The origin story is better than the game. In 1904 Lizzie Magie patented The Landlord’s Game, a teaching tool designed to demonstrate how property monopolies impoverish everyone except the landlord. It had two rule sets, one cooperative and one ruthless, and the whole point was that players would feel how much worse the ruthless version was. Decades later Charles Darrow sold a reworked version to Parker Brothers and became rich, and the anti-landlord parable became the world’s most successful celebration of bankrupting your relatives. Magie reportedly received five hundred dollars. The game works exactly as she intended, which is the problem.

2. Diplomacy

Allan Calhamer published this in 1959 and it contains no dice, no cards and no luck of any kind. Seven players carve up pre-war Europe, and because every attack requires support from someone else, the game is played almost entirely in private conversations held in other rooms. You must make promises. You must break them. There is a documented tradition of friendships ending over this game, and its fans have historically included people who negotiated for actual governments, which explains a lot about the twentieth century.

3. Catan

Klaus Teuber designed it in 1995 while working as a dental technician, and it is genuinely one of the great modern games. It also contains the robber, a piece that lets you shut off another player’s income and steal from their hand, and crucially it requires you to choose a victim in front of everyone. There is no way to place the robber neutrally. Every placement is a statement, and the table will remember it.

4. Twilight Imperium

Six players, a galactic empire each, and a running time that starts at six hours and cheerfully continues past ten. The scale is the weapon. When you have invested an entire Saturday, a betrayal in the final hour does not feel like a game move, it feels like a personal event with legal implications. Veterans schedule it like a wedding, with catering.

5. Secret Hitler and the Hidden Role Family

The mechanic is simple. Most players are on one team, a couple are secretly on the other, and nobody can prove anything. The result is a table of otherwise reasonable adults conducting a trial with no evidence, convicting the wrong person, and then discovering the truth in the worst possible order. Its ancestors are Mafia and Werewolf, its cousins are The Resistance and Avalon, and every version produces the same phenomenon: the quietest person at the table wins, every time, and nobody can work out how.

6. Sheriff of Nottingham

A game entirely about lying to one specific person’s face. Each round one player is the sheriff and inspects the goods you claim to be carrying. You may declare apples and carry contraband. The sheriff may search you, and is punished if wrong. Bribery is an explicit rule. Watching a normally honest friend discover a talent for fluent deception is the whole product, and it changes how you see them.

7. Cosmic Encounter

Every player gets an alien power that breaks a fundamental rule of the game, and the powers were not designed to be balanced against each other. Alliances form and dissolve every single turn by design. First published in 1977, it went on to shape a great deal of modern game design, including a certain trading card game you have heard of. The chaos is intentional. Complaining about the chaos marks you as new.

8. Risk

The elder statesman. Risk ends friendships less through betrayal than through attrition, because its true weapon is duration. Two players end up locked in an unwinnable stalemate over Australia while everyone else quietly ages. The dice will betray you with statistically improbable enthusiasm, and someone at the table will say it is fine, they are having fun, in a voice that says neither of those things.

House Rules for Survival

Three suggestions from bitter experience. Agree the end condition out loud before the first turn, because most arguments are about when the game stops rather than who is winning. Never play Monopoly with the free parking jackpot house rule, which is not in the official rules and adds roughly ninety minutes. And if someone suggests Diplomacy, look carefully at who suggested it. That person has already decided how the evening ends.