Games for couples that hold up past the first night

A deck of cards has sat in the same kitchen drawer for two years, still shrink-wrapped from whatever holiday it arrived at. That’s not really about the cards. It’s about how quickly a game turns into one more thing that requires energy neither of you has left by nine o’clock, so it waits for a version of the evening that never quite shows up. The games for couples actually worth reaching for are the ones that ask for less than that.

What follows are five, picked for what they produce rather than how they photograph. Some make you compete outright. One makes competing impossible. A couple that plays only to relax will get less out of this list than a couple willing to occasionally lose, badly, in front of the person who knows them best.

Games for couples who don’t mind losing

Bananagrams works because there’s no team version of it. Both people grab tiles from the same pile and race to build their own word grid first, so any advantage one partner has, a bigger vocabulary, a faster hand, shows up immediately and gets called out. That kind of needling is close to what researchers René Proyer and Kay Brauer found in a study of 211 German-speaking couples, together an average of five years. What they call other-directed playfulness, the good-natured teasing that surfaces during something like a game, tracked with greater relationship engagement and more optimism about where the relationship was headed. The teasing isn’t a side effect of the game. It’s most of the point.

One where nobody can win alone

The Mind hands each player a set of numbered cards with one rule: play them in ascending order as a group, without speaking or signaling. Getting it right depends entirely on both people reading the same silence the same way, which sounds impossible until it works and feels almost eerie when it does. There’s no strategy to argue about afterward, no one who played it wrong. A round either lands or it doesn’t, together. Most game recommendations assume competition is the fun part. This one proves that assumption wrong.

Something neither of you already knows how to play

A board game bought on a whim, one dense enough that the first round gets spent flipping back to the instructions, does something a familiar favorite can’t. In 1993, researchers Reissman, Aron, and Bergen tracked 53 married couples over 10 weeks, assigning some to genuinely exciting, unfamiliar shared activities and others to pleasant, familiar ones. Novelty won. The couples doing something new reported meaningfully higher satisfaction afterward, while a third group with no assigned activity at all saw no real gain. That was the surprising part: time together on its own wasn’t what did the work. Novelty in a long-term relationship tends to run on exactly this: being equally bad at something new, together, builds a kind of closeness that mastery doesn’t.

A version for the night neither of you has energy

A quick card game or a round of dice takes less setup than agreeing on what to watch. That’s the point. On a night when the usual shortlist of things to do at home as a couple all sound like too much effort, a fast round asks for almost nothing and still counts as choosing each other over two separate screens. It works the same way the small rituals that hold a relationship together do: the size of the gesture matters less than the fact that someone made it.

A deck built for a conversation neither of you would start

Question-card decks, the Gottman Institute’s own card deck app among them, exist because most couples run out of new things to ask each other somewhere around year three, or notice the shared life has flattened into pure repetition before either person names it out loud. Proyer and Brauer also found that intellectual playfulness, the kind built on wordplay and imaginative what-if questions, was linked to higher relationship and sexual satisfaction for both partners. A deck like this travels well, too. It works over a video call almost as easily as a kitchen table, which matters for a couple currently living apart.

None of this fixes avoidance. A couple can be genuinely excellent at beating each other at cards and still dodge whatever actually needs airing once the game ends. Games make an easy door, and ease carries its own risk: it’s simple to keep choosing the door and never walk through what’s on the other side of it. Pick one of the five above for tonight anyway. It costs less than most evenings ask for, which is exactly why it tends to get used.