The Best Board Games for Winter 2025
By Alex J. Coyne @ Gifts for Card Players
There are some people who love the winter season, and some people who would call it their least favourite time of the year. However, we figure that it’s best to make both these types of people play board and tabletop around this time of year – who cares what the weather looks like when you’re actively engaged in a competition or friendly battle?
There are many snow and winter-themed tabletop games to choose from. Adults and teens can enjoy games like the Polar Express Christmas Train Mystery, but there are also games for everyone like Yule Never Guess or Christmas-themed Monopoly.
The bonus is that, if you’re stumped for what to gift to someone on your list, a board game is always a hit! Plus you don’t have to rely on delivery timelines. Just pop out to your local game shop, they’ll be happy to see you.
Games embracing the winter theme don’t even have to be kept only for winter. Titles like Dead of Winter and Snowcrest can be fun at any point in the year – they’re not just for Christmas-time games!
Ready to wrap up against the winter weather for a Challenge Accepted?
Here’s our look at some of the best winter-themed board and tabletop games for 2025.
Polar Express Christmas Train Mystery
From Masters of Mystery
The Polar Express Christmas Train Mystery is the perfect game for teens and adults who’ve played their way through Clue (Cluedo!) too many times already and want something new. The game requires some preparation, and it’s perfect for a planned party over a quick impromptu round.
This snippet from the game’s introduction reveals: “You have been specially selected to come with us on our maiden Christmas-themed trip due to your festive sounding name.”
How could you not love this game right from the start?
The Polar Express Christmas Train Mystery comes with a booklet for the mystery party host, “detective audio files,” character booklets, evidence books – and costume suggestions for guests who want to embrace the full theme.
Yule Never Guess
Yule Never Guess is a Yuletide and Christmas-themed trivia game, which comes with 110 unique cards to test players on their holiday knowledge.
It’s meant to be played in quick rounds, and each card has a QR Code so that the app can keep score in real-time – it’s a rare, nice touch to the game that means nobody has to fight to keep score!
The description doesn’t mess around either: “This isn’t your mom’s Christmas trivia game.”
If you want casual fun and quick rounds (or if you’re looking for a game that’s about fun and knowledge rather than pure strategy), Yule Never Guess might be the right game for the table.
Arctic Race
From GameStorm Studio
Arctic Race isn’t Christmas-themed at all, but sure fits into the category of a winter-themed tabletop game. The description says that it’s “a game of tactical racing in polar surroundings.”
This can be a great game for any point in the year, but feels particularly appropriate during the winter season. Players make their way around the arctic tabletop (via sled-dogs), and wager on teams that are drawn at random via the cards – which, of course, other players cannot see.
Sure, there’s a bit of a learning curve here, but many reviews for the game have called it totally worthwhile.
Here’s a look at Arctic Race from YouTube if you want to know more about what this game has to offer:
Christmas-Themed Monopoly
There are more versions of Monopoly than there are seasons (or days!) in the year.
Many of the Monopoly games you can buy are unofficial ones, though some are still part of the official Monopoly franchise – and of course, there’s a Christmas-themed version of Monopoly that’s sometimes referred to as Christmas-opoly.
Rules aren’t a surprise if you’ve ever played the standard version. Like all alternate versions of Monopoly, there are subtle changes around the board that alters the theme – including, in this case, typically Christmas-themed locations.
Let’s admit that there are some pretty weird varieties of Monopoly out there. If you want something standard and fun around the holidays, this is a good one to start with.
We’ve included an amazon link to a full page of Christmas themed and holiday monopoly games. Ho ho ho!
Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game
The Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game is themed around winter, though avoids most of the holiday theme – and this one is best played by teens and adults, and contains some horror themes that isn’t suitable for younger players.
The Dead of Winter is called a “meta-cooperative psychological survival game.”
It was created by Jonathan Gilmour and Isaac Vega. Simply, this game is perfect if you’re a fan of any survival horror games or series – including Silent Hill, Resident Evil or the Arkham tabletop series.
Will you and your companions survive the winter?
Play Dead of Winter and you’ll surely find out.
The YouTube channel Watch It Played has a 27-minute long playthrough if you’d like to check out the game’s finer details beforehand:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6la-2F6EtyM
Dice Throne: Santa vs Krampus
Santa vs Krampus is a 2 to 6 player combat game, featuring battle against two traditional Christmas mascots. It’s a game that the whole family can play, and anyone can quickly get used to the rules of rolling accompanied with the rules sheet.
Krampus is a traditional holiday figure, however, known for stealing (and possibly also eating) the naughty children.
Santa Claus, well, he’s the one usually tasked with giving gifts and falling through chimneys – but might also give you weird gifts if you’ve made his own list of naughty people at the end of the year.
The game is wonderfully creative, and you’re going to enjoy this if you want something ideal for quick and casual games.
A brief warning for parents and guardians: while this game is family-friendly, it’s totally unrelated to the horror movie Krampus – that is not an appropriate holiday film for children, though the game is fine for everyone!
Switch, Steal, Unwrap
Switch, Steal, Unwrap is either the greatest idea ever for a Christmas get-together, or might be the worst!
Anyone can play this, but the question is whether everyone might want to play this… You could have a lot of fun, but only if you’ve warned players that this is the idea for the night – and it allows everyone to buy specific gifts for this purpose.
Played with traditional dice (okay, played with traditional die) this game allows players to let the dice decide who switches gifts, steals a gift from another player, or gets to unwrap a gift.
If you’d like to play this, you might want to do this with lower-value gifts (e.g. candy bars) and not with grandmother’s very expensive gift of a new and improved vacuum cleaner.
In the words of Forrest Gump, “You never know what you’re gonna get.”
If you can convince your guests that this game sounds like fun, you can play with this printable sheet from PlayPartyPlan.com.
Winter by Devir Games
Winter is a game that’s described simply as being “an abstract game for 2 players ages 8 and up.”
Games are short (10 minutes) and its description also says that good decisions are everything if you want to win. Thematically, the game is friendly for all ages, though might take some explanation for younger players.
In this game, “…two players compete to be player with the most chips of their color on the lake at the end of the game” This is one of those games that sounds easy to win, but turns out to be much more challenging once you’ve sat down and played a few rounds.
Even though rounds are quick-paced, it has enough replay value to keep you glued for a while.
Hint: don’t wager money.
Snowcrest
Snowcrest is a card game where players must, according to its description, lead a monastery to enlightenment. Familiar to players of games like Dungeons & Dragons, the game’s classes include priests, farmers and laborers.
Snowcrest is the realm where the game takes place – of course, where you can imagine covered in perpetual snow.
This review by Dale Yu at The Opinionated Games calls it “a fun game with a bit of resource management combined with a touch of deck building/tableau building.”
You can also find a very detailed 25-minute review of Snowcrest on YouTube thanks to The Dice Tower.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MigH67RM6Oc
Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist Board Game
From Noble Knight
Robert Workman summarizes it pretty well in this Medium piece called, “Yes, Die Hard Arcade is a Christmas Game.”
There’s a lot of debate, and almost every year, about whether Die Hard is considered a Christmas movie or not. Some say yes, some say no and many people might say that this is the first time they’ve ever heard of this tradition!
BoardGameGeek forum even has a discussion about why Die Hard is actually a Christmas-themed movie… And why it goes with the board game even though there’s no holiday theme to it whatsoever.
Many movie-goers consider it traditional to watch the Die Hard movies around this time of the year. Similarly, many gamers dig out their copies of Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza and others around Christmas.
What should you do as a board gamer? Tabletop players can find copies of the Die Hard: Nakatomi Heist board game… If you’re going to insist that Die Hard is the perfect holiday franchise!
Here’s a YouTube review of the game, also by The Dice Tower:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzDze_r1Lfc
What’s your choice for the perfect winter or Christmas themed board game?
