What does a lunchtime game need?
At the last place I worked I was lucky enough to have a one-hour lunch break, food readily available, and friends ready to play with. But even in such ideal conditions not every game is suitable for lunchtime gaming. First we’ll look at what our favourite lunchtime games had in common, and what drove us to play and replay certain games whilst others fell to the wayside.
The game must work at a variety of player counts - You don’t know who is going to show up and ask to join in, and you don’t want to have to turn people away if you can help it.
The rules teach must be short and succinct - Obviously there is work you can do as the teacher to prep for this, but lunchtimes start with waiting for people to show up. If you’re playing something new, once everyone has finally arrived you’ve got 2-5 minutes to go over the rules before you play.
Average playtime needs to be in the 30-40 minute mark - More so than at other times, people are willing to lock in at the end of a lunchbreak to finish just in time, but on average the game needs to be short enough that you can chatter each side of the game before having to get back to work
Repeated rounds are a bonus - Some games have a natural 3-acts structure, and the repetition helps embed within a single lunchtime how the game is played. Alternatively, if the game has repeated rounds until a player has reached a score cap, you can always play a little loose, call it early if time constraints require, or squeeze in an extra round if you finish unexpectedly fast.
Minor replayability tweaks can do a lot of heavy lifting - If we can still play a game everyone knows, only one small rule or playing piece is different this time, that can do a lot to extend the life of a game without feeling like you’re learning a whole new game every session.
Physical size matters - The smaller the better for flexibility - no-one wants to be lugging big boxes of game back and forth between home and the office. Additionally, the size of the playing area also matters, as there is often less space available to play.
Simple options, strategic choices - The more readable a game state is, the quicker you can get into the actual action. Card games with lots of text are likely to be poor choices as so much time will be spent reading the cards, whereas cards that fit a simple iconography or standard tropes like cards in suits can be read quickly. I want to spend less time working out what my options are, and more deciding which of my options to take.
Honourable mention - Kariba
Kariba is going to edge in here as one of my simplest recommendations. It has a lot going for it with a very easy to explain game that plays in repeated rounds coming in a small box.
Animals come to the watering hole by each player playing some amount of cards from their hand, all depicting the same animal (i.e. bearing the same number).
3 of the same animal at the watering hole are enough to scare off the next smallest animal round the hole, so as soon as a 3rd giraffe arrives, as they are numbered 4, they would scare away all the 3s (zebras) if there are any, the 2s (meerkats) only if there aren’t any 3s, and finally they would scare away 1s (mice) only if there were no 3s and no 2s. If there were no zebra, meerkats or mice, nothing would be scared away.
The one exception to this “Scare away the next lowest” rule is those mice down at number 1. With no-one lower than a 1 in the game, you’d think that nobody finds the mice scary. But the number 8? The big boss top-of-the-food-chain mighty beast that shouldn’t be scared of anything? It’s the elephant. And every knows that elephants are scared of mice!
Scaring away animals scores 1 point per animal, playing through the deck constitutes a round, and accumulating your score over 3 rounds decides the winner. It’s a lovely little game but it is a very light touch, and suffers from having no variation to keep players interested for too long, and will probably have you finished and back to work earlier than you’d like. However, it still gets my honourable mention, especially if you’re very time-starved at lunch.
5 - Faraway
An example offering in a 4-player game of Faraway
Drafting games have a warm cozy place in my heart. Faraway isn’t exactly a drafting game, and isn’t exactly an auction game, and isn’t exactly an engine building game, but it does have elements of each.
Each turn you’re going to be presented with 1 more cards than you have players in the game. Based on what you see, you’re going to all simultaneously pick a card from your hand.
The card you play is working about as many jobs as Miss Rabbit in Peppa Pig - it’s going to be added to your tableau which might give you a quest to complete to score points, or resources to count towards those quests, or special abilities like clues to help you find better Sanctuary cards. The cards are also numbered, with the lowest played card giving you first pick at the offering to refill your hand - but playing a card higher than the one you last played gets you some bonus sanctuary card which also works toward your engine.
The game only takes 8 rounds to play, so that’s 8 cycles of play a card, play a Sanctuary if you earned one, and draft your new card. It’s good that the game plays out in few rounds because otherwise the combination of engine cards could get messy - as it is the scoring phase is already a substantial part of your table time. However, it’s dead simple to play once and then immediately play again, only this time, you understand a little more about the cards in front of you and how your opponents value them, a critical piece of interaction.
4 - The Resistance (or Avalon)
The only thing that matters in The Resistance… whose side are you on?
To be fair, most “social deduction” games could go here, but before moving to the Isle of Wight, with a different group of friends, we fell into a pattern of playing The Resistance a lot. It does tick a lot of lunch boxes:
The game is already split into multiple rounds, as it takes 3 to 5 missions to determine the winning team, and each mission team might have to get through up to 5 votes to succeed.
5 to 10 players can play.
A lot of the game is played without anything in your hands, meaning sandwiches and coffees don’t get in the way at all.
You can sort of choose how active to be in the discussions, unless of course someone directly brings you into the conversation, accusing you of being a spy and forcing you to put your sandwich down to deal with these unfounded claims.
The game gets better with repeated plays as people learn strategies to use and how to counter how other people like to play. On the plus side, you get to know your work colleagues a whole lot better! On the other hand, your work colleagues get to know you a whole lot better… including how and when you lie!
There is some variability in the game with some special power cards, but we never played with these. We didn’t feel we needed them, as the variability in this game comes from which team you are on, who you’re with, and what they did last time that you swore you’d never let them get away with again.
Avalon is a further developed version of The Resistance, with some additional player roles that help to balance to power level of the 2 sides, but IMO any version you can find to play is great.
3 - Eight Minute Empire: Legends
Eight Minute Empire: Legends packs a lot of tight decision making into a small play area.
Eight minute Empire: Legends is a great example of a very lunchable game that doesn’t involve holding a fistful of cards.
Whilst I doubt that the game is playable in 8 minutes it’s certainly playable in 30, so with some rules teach this is an ideal length and well worth your time playing.
Secretly I am recommending 3 games here. Eight Minute Empire: Legends is my choice here, but it was a redevelopment of the original Eight Minute Empire and that still holds water. Legends was then developed still further into a bigger boxed game - Six Sojourns.
All of these games have an attractive set of qualities that make them play well in a lunchtime. They compress a neat area control game with a drafting mechanism, packing strategic choice into some easily understandable options. Legends brings more replayability with the modular board an several mini ‘expansion’ modules that just tweak one small thing about the game, whilst Six Sojourns cranks that up to 11 with different boards and much more varied modular additions - but it pays a price by coming in a physically larger box. Make no mistake, Six Sojourns is the better game, I just think that if you’re only targeting lunch breaks with a particular purchase, and you’re able to find a copy of Legends, it might physically fit you a little better.
Regardless, what gives this series of games its life and soul is the entanglement of the 2 things each card gives you. Cards can give you special powers or set collection bonuses, but they also give you deployments and moves on the world map, and you have a limited number of coins with which to access the top end of the market.
The card on the left is free, the others cost 1, 1, 2, 2 and 3 respectively.
Take the above choice that you could be faced with at the beginning of the game. The Ancient Sage is currently free, gives extra points for collecting Ancient cards (and counts itself!) and there’s already an Ancient Phoenix in the market to pair it with as my second pick. However, that valuation completely ignores the area control game, and perhaps the play is to go directly for the Dire Dragon, which allows me to get armies on the board and immediately develop flight so with future moves I could more easily conquer islands that would otherwise be out of reach.
2 - Panda Spin
I already wrote a separate review of Panda Spin by Carl Chudyk as it was, by some margin, my most played lunchtime game of 2025. You can read the previous review to find out why I love the game, but in a nutshell it’s great for lunchtimes because:
The game naturally comes packed into several rounds, as you play to 15 points…
…but you can be loose with that point limit to add an extra round or stop early if you need to.
If you’re at 5 players all suits are in play, but at 4 or 3 players you will have different suits in play, giving you that minor but important variation that keeps you on your toes.
The Mandate from Heaven expansion can add extra replayability if desired.
Your hand is easily readable, and the rules are relatively simple to grok, but the depth of strategic choices in how to play your hand keeps plays interesting and gives you stories to tell your co-workers once you get back to your desk.
1 - <takes big breath> The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Trick Taking Game
Or TLotR:TFotRTTG for short, of course. Why does this game get my number one spot, despite demonstrable evidence that I played Panda Spin more? Because it’s got all the features I want from a lunchtime game (except a max 4-player count), but in a glorious campaign package. That’s both the reason I loved it more than Panda Spin, and why I ultimately played it less.
Setup for Chapter 1. I have the One Ring, so I must play Frodo, but there’s danger. Bilbo need to win 3 tricks, and if I’m not careful, I might win too many with my 8s…
I loved it more, because the feeling of a game growing with you is pretty much unbeatable. As you get better at the game, it increases in difficulty and scope, with each mission providing not necessarily harder challenges, but varied ones, so whilst you’re playing with familiar mechanics, you’re also trying to fit what you know into a newly shaped box.
But, ultimately I played it less, because once the campaign was done, we didn’t have much of a reason to return to the game. Yes, the game does include rules for “The Road Goes Ever On” which allows many of the characters to return in randomised scenarios, but for me that type of game never quite lives up to the excitement of the initial campaign. The road goes ever on, but my ultimate destination is elsewhere.
Still, this game takes my number one spot for this list for the sheer enjoyability of the experience that it gave me. It may have had a finite shelf life and I did move on from it, but my gaming stories are richer for having experienced this campaign and I wouldn’t swap that for anything.
Now the Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers Trick Taking Game exists, and despite not having played it, I have every reason to believe it would be every bit as enjoyable as the first instalment.
Did you know Solo board games also exist?
Lunchtime games were a thing when I worked in an office, but now my office is my home and my home is empty at lunchtime. It being my home, I have many entertainment opportunities available - Netflix, my PS5, doing something at my desk that’s not work related - but sometimes you just want a break from any kind of screen, and the weather is not looking great for a walk.
How about a boardgame that you can play alone? Now I’m far from a solo gaming aficionado, but I am at the beginning of that journey. As such, I have only 2 recommendations so far: Vantage and For Northwood! (a solo trick-taking game) by Wil Su. I love the latter so much that I already wrote a whole review of it, but the choose-your-own-adventure game Vantage deserves its own review and will be coming in the near future. I’m looking for more solo play recommendation though, so if you have any please send them in!
If you enjoyed this newsletter, we’d appreciate it if you would forward it to a friend. If you are that friend, welcome! You can subscribe to Curious Lynx Games here. Did we miss your favourite lunchtime boardgame? Let us know at [email protected]!
Games mentioned in this article
The Resistance (and Avalon)
Eight Minute Empire (and Legends, and Six Sojourns)
As solo recommendations: For Northwood! and Vantage