H offers everything from elegant abstracts to family favourites.
Every game below is listed with the details that actually decide whether it suits your table: player count, playing time, the age it works from, and who designed it.
Board Games Starting With H at a Glance
| Game | Players | Time | Age | Designer & year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hive | 2 | 20 min | 8+ | John Yianni, 2001 |
| Hanabi | 2-5 | 25 min | 8+ | Antoine Bauza, 2010 |
| Hues and Cues | 3-10 | 30 min | 8+ | Scott Brady, 2020 |
| Hey, That’s My Fish! | 2-4 | 20 min | 8+ | Gunter Cornett and Alvydas Jakeliunas |
| Hungry Hungry Hippos | 2-4 | 5-15 min | 4+ | Milton Bradley, 1978 |
| Horrified | 1-5 | 60 min | 10+ | Prospero Hall, 2019 |
| Hedbanz | 2-6 | 20 min | 7+ | — |
Hive
2 players · 20 min · Age 8+ · John Yianni, 2001
An abstract with no board at all: bakelite tiles are placed directly on the table and the playing area grows and shifts as the game proceeds. Each insect moves differently – the grasshopper jumps, the beetle climbs on top of other pieces – and the goal is to surround the opponent’s queen. The one-hive rule, which forbids any move that splits the swarm, is what turns it from a novelty into a genuinely deep game.
Hanabi
2-5 players · 25 min · Age 8+ · Antoine Bauza, 2010
You hold your cards facing outward, so everyone can see your hand except you, and the table cooperates to play fireworks in ascending order. Communication is restricted to a limited supply of clue tokens, each pointing out all cards of one colour or one number. It won the Spiel des Jahres in 2013 – unusually for a cooperative card game – and it has become a standard test problem in AI research.
Hues and Cues
3-10 players · 30 min · Age 8+ · Scott Brady, 2020
A player gives a one-word clue for a specific square on a grid of 480 colour gradients, then a two-word clue, while everyone else guesses. Arguments about whether a colour is teal or cyan are the entire product. It is a party game with genuinely no reading, no maths and no barrier for an eight-year-old at the table.
Hey, That’s My Fish!
2-4 players · 20 min · Age 8+ · Gunter Cornett and Alvydas Jakeliunas
Penguins move in straight lines across an ice floe, removing the tile they leave behind, so the board disappears as you play. The skill is in cutting the ice to strand opponents in small regions while keeping a large one for yourself. It is a sharp little abstract disguised as a children’s game.
Hungry Hungry Hippos
2-4 players · 5-15 min · Age 4+ · Milton Bradley, 1978
Four players hammer levers to make plastic hippos lunge at marbles. There is no turn order, no strategy and no reading required – it is pure simultaneous reflex, and it is loud. For pre-schoolers it is a genuinely good first game, because there is nothing to understand and no waiting.
Horrified
1-5 players · 60 min · Age 10+ · Prospero Hall, 2019
A cooperative game in which players defend a village from the classic Universal monsters – Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon – each of which is defeated by its own distinct method. You choose how many monsters to face, which makes the difficulty genuinely adjustable rather than nominally so. It is one of the best-regarded licensed games of recent years and teaches in about ten minutes.
Hedbanz
2-6 players · 20 min · Age 7+
Each player wears a headband holding a card they cannot see, and asks yes-or-no questions to work out what they are. It is the parlour game Twenty Questions given a plastic headband and a timer. The physical comedy of a table of people wearing cards does more work than the game design does.
