Keep Thanksgiving on track this year with these family-perfect multiplayer games

The holidays are a minefield, but these great multiplayer games can keep Thanksgiving safe this year.

By Bee Wertheimer  |  November 25, 2025 | 9:00am
HeaderImage (clockwise from top left): Lego Party (Fictions), Ultimate Chicken Horse (Clever Endeavour Games), Super Mario Party Jamboree (Nintendo), UFO 50 (Mossmouth), Towerfall (Maddy Makes Games). Mobile Image: Worms W.M.D. (Team17).
Games Features Thanksgiving
Keep Thanksgiving on track this year with these family-perfect multiplayer games

Thanksgiving is all about appreciating the good things in your life, including (hopefully) the people you spend your Thanksgiving with. But family gatherings can be a tricky thing, riddled with politically-charged conversational landmines and vexing questions about your nonexistent five-year plan. If social lubricant is in order this holiday season, or if you and your loved ones are simply all caught up to speed and looking for something fun and fresh to do together, booting up a party game may be just the right thing.

Since not all of our friends and family are wizened game masters, for the holiday season I’ve compiled a list of party games that are relatively straightforward and easy to jump into. Will Grandma be down to play Mario Party? Probably not, but at the very least you should be able to rope your cousins into some quality gaming time. 

First off, consider any of the Jackbox Party Pack installments. There probably isn’t an easier title to get non-gamers to participate in; once you’ve got Jackbox loaded up on a screen big enough for everyone to see, players can join the lobby straight from their phones, no controllers needed. 

Each Jackbox installment offers a collection of five games to choose from, mostly for between two and eight players. The games are straightforward and socially oriented, designed to spark conversation and earn chuckles. They’re a classic at this point, and playable on pretty much every piece of gaming hardware made in the past 20 years, as well as PC and Apple TV.

I mentioned Mario Party earlier, and truthfully, any of the many versions made over the years will do. The beautiful thing about party games is that it almost doesn’t matter what exactly you’re playing—party games are simply, but crucially, the backdrop of your gathering. They provide pacing, something to focus on when the conversation dries up, and, of course, a source of good-natured competition.

Serving up to four players, Mario Party is a virtual board game with a range of quick-and-easy competitive minigames peppered throughout. The only downside is Mario Party games are obviously limited to the Nintendo ecosystem, which is bad news if your cousins don’t have a Switch and you didn’t think to bring yours. But hey, if grandma still has that old Wii laying around, perhaps there’s already a party there waiting to get started?

Challenger approaching! Mario might still be the champ of board game parties, but this year brought us Lego Party, a game show-themed title very much in the spirit of Mario Party. A crucial difference, though: It’s not limited to Nintendo consoles. Sure, you can’t play as Rosalina, but this is also true for the majority of Mario Party games, so…

If you find that your brain is being turned to goo from too many hours spent circling a digital game board or coming up with crowd-pleasing quips, the remainder of this list are lesser known games that, yes, require more focus, but are also more interesting and rewarding for it.

Ultimate Chicken Horse is a competitive platformer where one to four players not only race to reach the finish line in one piece (though you still earn points if you manage to get there post-mortem) but also modify the map at the start of each round. You can choose from a handful of objects to place, on a first-come-first-serve basis, including things like spikes, insta-kill jack-in-the-box boxing, cannons (that can launch you straight into spikes), flaming tennis ball launchers, jetpacks, and much more. The idea is to create a platforming challenge that isn’t so difficult it’s impossible for you to master, but would be a very rough time for your opponents, so that you come out on top. It’s a wacky, immensely engaging game that I can’t recommend enough.

All of UFO 50 is fantastic—it was our game of the year in 2024—and you really can’t go wrong with any of the 25 two-player games in the collection, but Party House is something special. It’s a deckbuilder where instead of cards, you have an assortment of oddball party guests, each with their own stats and effects, and your goal is to throw the ultimate house party by accruing Pop points. In the two-player mode, players take turns throwing parties until a winner comes out on top. Party House is super easy to jump into, and there are different decks of party guests to keep things fresh upon replay. Honorable mention: if you’ve got UFO 50 loaded up, dust off Bushido Ball and Quibble Race as well. You can find them all as part of UFO 50 on the PC and Switch.

Next, I need you to take my hand, look past the Newgrounds art, and follow me on this journey. Worms W.M.D. is a 2D tactics game where you play as a worm at war. It is great.

Worms W.M.D. belongs to a larger series of Worms games, but this is the one I’ve personally played and can vouch for the most. In it you are a slow and tiny worm in a fast, gigantic world, with an enormous arsenal at your disposal—including, but certainly not limited to, missiles, rockets, guns, bombs, and exploding sheep. Littered throughout the map are vehicles like helicopters and tanks you can co-opt and aim at your enemies. Much like war, Worms W.M.D. is an arduous thing, taking place over many, many rounds of turn-based combat. The inventory can be overwhelming at first, and there’s an entire crafting system I’ve literally never engaged with, but the core of the game is deeply silly and fun. It supports up to four players, and can be played on PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC, and mobile.

Probably the most experimental game on this list, Mosa Lina is a co-op platformer where each player is given two random abilities to beat a level, and everyone needs to get to the portal at the end for it to be considered a success (no lounging around in a bubble while your partner does all the work, like in New Super Mario Bros. Wii). Your combination of items isn’t a guaranteed solution to the level; in this game, there are no right answers, and it’s impossible to avoid failure. It’s up to you to play around with your abilities, fudge the physics system a little bit, and work together to get both of you through the portal. Since failure is so inevitable and each solution is uniquely your own, success is incredibly sweet. 

Last but not least, consider falling into my very favorite party game? From the creator of Celeste, Towerfall is a 2D platform battler with three action buttons. That’s it. 

In Towerfall you’re equipped with a bow, a dash ability, and a jump. You can kill people by slinging a single arrow at ‘em or by jumping on their head, with items like shields and different arrow types scattered throughout the arena. The result is a tight, fast-paced battle where players score points based on how many lives they’ve taken, with points lost for accidental self-explosion (a common occurrence). Towerfall plays with up to six, including a singleplayer campaign, and is always the crowning event of the night. You can play it on the PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and PC, although the real sickos will always remember it as an Ouya exclusive.

 
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