Ift in a friendship game

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news gamespot. Epic also detailed what it's looking for in player-created Party Worlds: Party Worlds should not be threatening. Party Worlds should have a high focus on self-expression through emotes, sprays, outfit changes, or other mechanics.

Party Worlds should encourage social interaction, giving people a way to make new friends or team up with existing friends in new ways.

PlayStation 4. The game is lightning quick at around 30 minutes, and also features a simplified mode for kids as young as six. Codenames is a social deduction game that manages to be immensely accessible and provide a brain-teasing challenge.

Twenty five codeword cards, each with a single noun, are laid out in a five-by-five grid representing secret agents in the field. Players are divided into a red and blue team, and each team gets a leader called a spymaster. To win the game, spymasters need the rest of their team members to correctly identify their secret agents, but the only way they can communicate to them is by giving one word clues and a number indicating how many cards that clue applies to.

What makes the game tricky is that it creates a minefield of other cards that could spell disaster. The game also benefits from multiple expansions and reskins, which you can mix and match together when you play. But this version of Descent is particularly unique in that it requires a companion app to play. But it also opens up multiple other ways to interact with the game.

There are interstitial narrative sequences with voice acting, a crafting system, and the ability to interact with the environment in unique and unusual ways.

Best of all, the game scales well from a solo experience to an ongoing campaign with up to three friends. But the mechanics are what truly make this game spectacular. Instead, players use cards to manage both attacks and movement on a tactical grid. A lighter version of the game is available at retail.

Titled Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion , it also functions as an expansion to the base game for those who have already finished their campaign. Hive is one of those charmingly simple board games with no set up, approachable rules, and satisfyingly hefty bits. Each tile represents a kind of insect or spider each with a distinct role. No board and no elaborate setup means all you need to play Hive is a clear, relatively level space. Kingdomino Origins is a tile-placement game for players where they gather together similar kinds of terrain.

You score points based on how many contiguous tiles of the same type you have inside your territory. This newest version — the sequel to the original Kingdomino and the follow-up Queendomino — adds a few more wrinkles to the equation, including volcanoes that spit fire and characters you can draft to help you score points. The difficulty scales well depending on your audience, and Origins effectively includes these previous versions of the game.

Immediately after playing Kingdomino the first time, I ran out and bought my own set. Then, just a few days later, I bought a second set for a friend.

Dexterity games are a niche kind of board game that has been growing in popularity over the past few years, but nothing has been quite as successful as Klask. Klask plays like a mash-up of the classic Canadian folk game Crokinole and air hockey, and thankfully it takes up far less space in your home than either one of those other games. Players sit on either side of a small wooden playing surface raised up about six or eight inches off the table.

Below that raised surface they hold onto a magnet that controls a striker on the top of the board. Play starts with the youngest player kicking off, attempting to sink the marble-sized plastic puck into the opposing goal with their striker. But there are other magnets on the board as well, called biscuits.

Get too close to a biscuit and it leaps off the playing surface and gets stuck to your striker. Play is fast and furious, but requires a deft hand. Move too quickly and your striker will become dislodged, which will also give your opponent a point.

Rounds go quickly, meaning that the game is perfect for large groups — especially in a bracketed tournament format. Be sure to pick up a kit of spare parts to keep the action moving when something goes flying off the table, and if it really clicks with your group consider the four-player version as well.

Machi Koro 2 , the sequel to the award-winning Machi Koro , uses this basic building block to create entire cities on the table. Then you roll a single six-sided die. On a roll of one, two, or three either your wheat field or your bakery turns a small profit, giving you more money to build out your city.

Or will you double down on one kind of industry in the hope of a hefty payday later on? You can play on Mac or iOS, if you've already downloaded the app, though new players will be out of luck for the foreseeable future. The system sorts pools of players into a complexity hierarchy and defaults to the highest tier—so all your PC friends can't queue for a game with mobile players and destroy them, for example—but if you want to bring your friend on an iPhone into a game on PlayStation, you can.

Fortnite developer Epic also owns and operates the Unreal Engine and a huge library of developer tools including the Epic Online Services platform.

These tools let developers add similar crossplay functionality to their own games. We mention it here because you'll see it pop up again. If you want to play games across gaming consoles or devices, you might end up with an Epic account eventually. Microsoft-owned Mojang's Minecraft is an odd paradox of crossplay. Players can join the same servers even as they play on different platforms, but they have to be using the same version.

If you've been playing Minecraft since it came out, you may still be on the Java Edition , which can be played across Windows, Mac, and Linux devices. Find us on. The Oregon Trail. Disney Magic Kingdoms. Dragon Mania Legends. Minion Rush. March Of Empires. War Planet Online: Global Conquest. Asphalt 9: Legends. Gangstar Vegas. Asphalt 8: Airborne.