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Every page on the National Games Week guide
All the pages on the site in one place, grouped by what you came to do: plan the week, find a place to play, read about the first years or learn who writes the guide.
All pages, grouped
Plan the week
- HomeDates, planner and the week at a glance.
- When is it?The dates for any year, worked out from Thanksgiving.
- Host a game nightThe plan, step by step, with two printables.
- Types of gamesNine kinds of games and the table each one suits.
- Thanksgiving gamesGames for twelve cousins and one grandpa.
- Family game nightBoard games for kids, sorted by age.
Places to play
The first weeks
Plan the week
Start with the dates: the week runs from the Sunday before Thanksgiving to the Saturday after, which in 2026 means November 22 to 28. From there, the hosting guide walks through a game night from the invitation to the last round, and the genre guide sorts tabletop games into nine kinds so you can match the games to the people coming. Two pages narrow it down further: one for the Thanksgiving table itself, with printable place cards, and one for family evenings, organized by children's ages.
Short on time? The home page has the condensed version: a countdown, the dates for the next few years, ideas for five kinds of tables and a planner that suggests games by the number of players. If your group mixes ages or experience, read the genre guide next: it names games of each kind from the 2005 list and says which tables they suit.
Places to play
Not every game night happens in a living room. The classroom page covers games in lessons and how to start a club that meets after school. Libraries get their own guide, built around the fact that November is also International Games Month in many branches. Game stores have a day-by-day plan for Thanksgiving week, from demo tables to a Saturday tournament. The page on why people play gathers the plain reasons teachers, parents and older players give for sitting down to a game.
Each of these pages stands on its own, so a librarian can skip the classroom advice and a store owner can skip the family evenings. The basics about game length and table size come up in each, adapted to the room.
The first weeks, 2004 to 2007
National Games Week started in 2004 and was run for a few years by a Colorado games publisher. The history page follows it from launch to the company's closure in 2007. Two pages cover single years: the 2005 Top 100, shown as a list of the games people played that year, and a page on the 2006 week that explains why a third list never appeared.
Both are worth a look before a game night. Several of the 2005 favorites are still on store shelves, so the list doubles as a starting point for a mixed group. The history page also traces the library game days that began in 2007 and became International Games Month, which still fills November calendars in many towns.
About the guide
Three short pages explain how the site works. About covers where facts come from, how the dates are calculated and where the illustrations come from. Contact gives the single email address for corrections and tips. The privacy policy sets out what little is recorded when you visit: no cookies, no analytics, only server logs. A broken link or a date that looks wrong anywhere on the site can be reported through the contact page.
FAQ
Questions people ask
What is the quickest way to find the 2026 dates?
Open the dates page from the menu or from the first group on this page. It shows Sunday, November 22 to Saturday, November 28, 2026, explains the Thanksgiving rule behind those dates and lists the week for the years ahead, so a game night or school event can be planned well in advance.
Where are the printable sheets?
The printables sit inside the pages they belong to rather than on pages of their own. The invitation and score sheet are in the hosting guide, the place cards are on the Thanksgiving games page and the club sign-up sheet is on the classroom page. Each one has its own print button and fits on a single sheet of paper.
Which page explains the original National Games Week?
The history page. It covers the first week in November 2004, the member numbers published after it, the 2005 Top 100, the 2006 week and the closure of the original organizer in 2007, then follows the library events that grew into International Games Month. The 2005 list and the 2006 page add detail for those two years.
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