For most of us, the best thing to do during the rainy season is to stay at home, make ourselves coffee or hot chocolate, watch our favorite movie, and sleep in our beds. Our day is already solved.

However, there are moments when boredom slowly strikes and we just get frustrated because we don’t know what to do after feeling sick of doing our usual routines.

This is probably the reason why board games exist in the first place: to catch our attention and help us get rid of boredom, aside from entertaining us and improving our mental skills.

If you’re someone who gets bored a lot during rainy days, here are five board games that you can enjoy with your family and friends at home!

1. Game of the Generals

Filipino inventor Ronnie Pasola Jr. created the Game of the Generals in 1967, modeling it after a war but loosely inspired by the classic board game Chess. The Game of the Generals is a Filipino two-player board game.

With 21 game pieces, or “soldiers,” named after the ranks in the Philippine Army, the main objective of the game is to eliminate the opponent’s flag or get one’s own flag to the end of the opponent’s territory to win.

In the gameplay, the players must move alternately, moving only one piece at a time, and they eliminate the opponent’s soldiers by making a “challenge,” which happens when a soldier moves into the same square occupied by the opposing soldier.

The elimination of the soldiers is based on their rankings, and the opponent’s forces are kept hidden from view; hence, players should come up with a good strategy to outwit their enemy when they play this game.

2. Dixit

Invented by French doctor Jean-Louis Roubira in 2008, Dixit is an educational multiplayer board game for young and old alike that aims to make their imaginations run wild.

The game is centered on storytelling, where a chosen “storyteller” is given the chance in each round to make up a story based on his cards, which he can tell through a narrative sentence, poem, or song for the other players to guess and vote for.

The players’ standing on the board will depend on their scores, whether they found the storyteller’s image or not, and will determine who’s the winner when the game ends.

There are other versions of the game, such as Dixit: Odyssey and Dixit: Jinx, which will certainly enhance one’s creativity.

3. Sungka

Sungka is a mancala game that Filipinos probably grew up with, originating a thousand years ago in Africa.

The board consists of fourteen “houses” in the middle and two “heads” at the far ends, where the players own seven houses and one head each, where they could store their “shells.”
The two players start at the same time by choosing which house to start with, taking the shells from it, and putting one each on the following houses that they will pass over until the shells run out.

If the player’s shells run out by the time it reaches his head, he can start taking shells again from any of his seven houses and continue the game. If the shells run out by the time they reach any of the opponent’s houses, he must wait for his turn after the opponent runs out of shells.

4. Word Factory

Distributed in the Philippines many years ago, Word Factory is the Filipino version of the game Boggle that aims to enhance the mental capacity of each player.

In a span of three minutes, the players must list as many words as they can with a minimum of four letters that could be formed from the 25-letter cubes on the board.

When the timer runs out, each player takes turns reading the words on his list. When the word appears on more than one player’s list, the word must be crossed out, resulting in zero points.

Whatever words are left in every player’s list after everyone’s turn is finished will be counted, and the player with the highest score wins.

With its small and portable look, Word Factory is considered the mini version of the classic board game Scrabble, minus the scoring system.

5. Battleship

Hasbro produces Battleship, a war-themed board game set in naval territories where the players attempt to guess the location of their opponent’s warships and launch attacks against them.

Each player hides their five ships on the “ocean” as they take turns firing shots to attempt to hit their opponent’s ships by calling out a grid coordinate, a letter, and a number, which are indicated on the board.

The Battleship board contains two grids: the lower grid, where the player could place and hide the location of his ship, and the upper grid, where the player could place his pegs to keep track of his fired shots toward the opponent, whether it’s a miss (red peg) or a hit (white peg).

The first player to sink all five of their opponent’s ships is the winner of the game.

Ranging from simple storytelling to conceptualizing strategies and tactics, these board games will surely improve your mental thinking as they entertain you at the same time. What board game do you want to try from the list?