M spans the most famous board game in the world and some of the hobby’s best.
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 M at a Glance
| Game | Players | Time | Age | Designer & year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monopoly | 2-8 | 60-180 min | 8+ | Parker Brothers, 1935 |
| Mancala | 2 | 10-30 min | 6+ | — |
| Mastermind | 2 | 15-20 min | 8+ | Mordecai Meirowitz, 1970 |
| Mysterium | 2-7 | 42 min | 10+ | Oleksandr Nevskiy and Oleg Sidorenko, 2015 |
| Mice and Mystics | 1-4 | 60-90 min | 7+ | Jerry Hawthorne, 2012 |
| Mouse Trap | 2-4 | 20-30 min | 6+ | Ideal Toy Company, 1963 |
| Munchkin | 3-6 | 60-120 min | 10+ | Steve Jackson, 2001 |
| Mexican Train | 2-8 | 30-60 min | 8+ | — |
Monopoly
2-8 players · 60-180 min · Age 8+ · Parker Brothers, 1935
The best-selling property-trading game in history, published in more than a hundred countries and dozens of languages. Its origin is more interesting than the game: it descends from The Landlord’s Game, patented by Elizabeth Magie in 1904 as a critique of land monopolies, designed to demonstrate that rent-seeking impoverishes everybody. Most household games run long because of a near-universal house rule – money on Free Parking – that is not in the official rules and removes the cash drain that ends the game.
Mancala
2 players · 10-30 min · Age 6+
Not one game but a family of hundreds, played across Africa, the Middle East and Asia for well over a thousand years, in which players sow seeds one by one around a row of pits and capture by landing in the right place. The version sold in Western toy shops is usually Kalah, a two-row commercial variant from the 1940s. Serious play centres on games like Oware and Bao, which reward deep counting and are governed by national federations.
Mastermind
2 players · 15-20 min · Age 8+ · Mordecai Meirowitz, 1970
One player hides a code of four coloured pegs; the other guesses, and after each guess receives only the number of exact matches and near matches. Any code can be cracked in five guesses or fewer with optimal play, a result Donald Knuth published in 1977. It is a clean, fast introduction to deductive reasoning and still one of the best two-player games you can leave on a coffee table.
Mysterium
2-7 players · 42 min · Age 10+ · Oleksandr Nevskiy and Oleg Sidorenko, 2015
One player is a ghost who cannot speak and must communicate a suspect, location and weapon to the other players using only large, dreamlike illustrated vision cards. Everyone else is a psychic trying to interpret those images, and the whole table wins or loses together. It is Dixit’s visual language applied to a cooperative deduction game, and the ghost’s silent frustration is most of the fun.
Mice and Mystics
1-4 players · 60-90 min · Age 7+ · Jerry Hawthorne, 2012
A king’s court is overthrown and the heroes are transformed into mice, which makes an ordinary castle into a hazardous landscape of cats, roaches and drain pipes. Each chapter is read aloud from a storybook, so it plays like a bedtime story with dice, and the campaign carries progress from chapter to chapter. It is one of the few dungeon-crawlers genuinely pitched at families with younger children.
Mouse Trap
2-4 players · 20-30 min · Age 6+ · Ideal Toy Company, 1963
Players build an elaborate Rube Goldberg contraption across the board during play, then try to trap each other’s mice by setting it off. As a game it is thin – the racing element is almost incidental – but as an object it is a landmark of 1960s toy engineering. Most people who remember it fondly remember building and triggering the trap rather than winning.
Munchkin
3-6 players · 60-120 min · Age 10+ · Steve Jackson, 2001
A card game that parodies dungeon crawling: kick down the door, fight the monster, grab the loot, and stab your friends in the back when they are one level from winning. Its humour and its cheerful hostility are the point, and it has spawned dozens of themed editions from Cthulhu to Star Munchkin. Be warned that games can stall near the end, because everyone is incentivised to gang up on whoever is ahead.
Mexican Train
2-8 players · 30-60 min · Age 8+
A domino game, usually played with a double-twelve set, in which each player builds a personal train of dominoes from a central hub while a communal Mexican Train stays open to everyone. Failing to play forces you to draw and leaves your train open for others to dump on. It scales comfortably to large groups, which is why it is a fixture of family holidays and community centres.
