Family game night has a reputation problem. Mention it to a teenager and you'll get a look that suggests you've proposed something deeply uncool. The fix isn't to lower your expectations — it's to pick activities that are genuinely engaging for everyone at the table, not just the adults humoring the kids or the kids tolerating the grown-ups. These three ideas work because they don't talk down to anyone.
1. Solve a Murder Mystery Case File Together
If your family has ever binged a true crime podcast or gotten sucked into a documentary about an unsolved case, a murder mystery case file is essentially that experience made interactive — and it's one of the rare activities that lands equally well with teenagers and adults.
Here's how it works: companies like Print Mysteries assemble boxes of physical evidence tied to a fictional cold case. Inside you'll find crime scene photographs, police interview transcripts, handwritten letters from suspects, maps, timelines, and physical props like evidence bags and official-looking documents. The family's job is to lay everything out, work through the clues, and collectively figure out who committed the crime.
What makes it particularly well-suited to a mixed-age family group is that it plays to different strengths. Teens who are good at pattern recognition and lateral thinking often shine here — there's no "adult knowledge" advantage that makes the game feel stacked. A fifteen-year-old who notices a detail buried in a suspect's letter that everyone else missed is a genuine hero of the evening, and that kind of moment builds real engagement. Meanwhile, adults tend to anchor the timeline and connect the larger narrative threads. Everyone contributes something, and the collaboration feels earned rather than forced.
The other thing teenagers tend to respond to is being taken seriously. A murder mystery case file doesn't feel like a "family activity" designed to be wholesome — it feels like an actual investigation. The physical evidence is realistic, the cases are often dark enough to be genuinely interesting, and the mystery doesn't condescend. That tone matters more than people realize when you're trying to get a sixteen-year-old enthusiastically off their phone.
Most case files run two to four hours, which is the right length for a game night — substantial enough to feel like an event, not so long that anyone's energy flags. For families who want to make it a recurring tradition, subscription series like Hunt A Killer unfold across multiple monthly boxes, giving everyone a reason to keep coming back to the table.
How to set it up: Clear the dining room table, order everyone's favorite takeout, and assign someone the role of evidence organizer (a natural job for a detail-oriented teen). The investment is low — most boxes run $25 to $35 — and the payoff in genuine family engagement is high.
2. Play a Cooperative Board Game
The best family game nights aren't always the most competitive ones. Cooperative board games — where everyone plays together against the game itself — sidestep the frustration and sore-loser dynamics that can derail a competitive night, and they tend to produce better conversation along the way.
A few titles that genuinely work for mixed-age groups:
Pandemic is the classic entry point — your team plays disease control specialists trying to stop global outbreaks before time runs out. It's tense, strategic, and collaborative without being complicated to learn. Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert (both from the same designer) are slightly lighter and faster, good for families with teens on the younger end of the range. The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine is a cooperative trick-taking card game that's deceptively clever and scales beautifully to the number of players.
For families willing to invest in something more ambitious, Arkham Horror: The Card Game delivers a narrative, story-driven experience that unfolds across multiple sessions — closer to a role-playing game than a traditional board game, and enormously satisfying for groups that want depth.
The cooperative format is worth emphasizing because it changes the social dynamic of the night. Instead of someone winning and someone stewing, the whole family either succeeds or fails together — which tends to produce a lot more laughing and a lot less tension.
3. Host a Trivia Night with Custom Categories
Generic trivia boxes often end up with someone dominating every round because they happened to absorb a lot of 1970s pop culture, which isn't fun for anyone else. The solution is to build a custom trivia night that deliberately mixes categories everyone at the table has a real shot at.
Split into two teams (teens vs. adults is the obvious move, though mixing ages can be more interesting) and build rounds around categories that require different kinds of knowledge: a pop culture round where recent releases favor the teens, a history or geography round where adults have the edge, a music round where you play clips and everyone guesses, and a wild card round of bizarre facts where it's genuinely anyone's game.
Free trivia question databases are easy to find online, or you can use an app like Kahoot to run a polished, phone-based version. The custom element is what makes it feel invested rather than generic — and it signals to everyone that someone put actual thought into making the night work for the whole group, which goes a long way.
The common thread in all three of these is respect: for everyone's intelligence, for everyone's time, and for the idea that a family game night should actually be fun rather than just obligatory. Get that right and the phones stay in pockets on their own.