Covid-safe board games

Post date: 2020-10-23 10:35:26

What board games are (or are readily modified to be) as safe as possible in the plague times?

So: board gamer here, missing my hobby in a era of social distancing. The household here is three people (two folks in their fifties and one in her twenties) and our bubble includes a nearby parent (mid-seventies). As well, in an effort to keep a local business afloat, I have made two or three trips over the last few months to a local games café which observes some very tight protocols to game with a few of my usual group. In the Before Times, we might get together once a week or so; now it's been once every month or two. These players are all pretty dedicated to not getting sick as well, so the chance of communicability is low but not zero. Between these two circles, there are two or three people who have pre-existing conditions that mean Covid-19 could be pretty serious.

For what its worth, the family group is not dedicated gamers and their tastes run to breezy abstract things like Azul and Splendor; the folks at the café gatherings are up for some slightly deeper dives like Terraforming Mars or Firefly.

After a game with the family group last night (Scattergories, with us spaced out around the living room and one person rolling the die and flipping the timer, while each of us writes their answers down in their own space), I got a request this morning for other games where there is minimal physical interaction, so we are not all touching the same dice and cards and tokens and such. I looked a couple of previous posts about board games in the current era, but nothing seemed to quite address this.

So: any thoughts for games that either are suitable for those who for whatever reason want to have minimal contact with what other players are touching? I'm looking more for the family/party games side of it: off the top of my head Codewords might well work, with one player detailed to place the cards in the middle as required. It also occurred to me that Balderdash might be suitable as well, with each player with their own die for rolling and the handwritten answers handed to the dasher supplanted with text messages.

Bonus if these work well for four players, which seems to be the usual population around the table

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