The Best Game Night Snacks To Keep Your Cards And Board Pieces Clean

Board gaming, while always popular, rose to prominence in the past 15 years as a fun gathering for people of all ages. However, game nights tend to go hand in hand with constant snacking and crumbs, sauce, and grease from treats brought by well-meaning friends can permanently stain boards and game pieces ­— and make them stink. Other than just taking care not to touch the cards with sticky hands, be sure to serve snacks that partygoers can handle without causing a mess.

A simple solution is to serve crudités. Yes, carrots and celery may not seem very exciting, but given that a typical gaming menu consists of chips, chips, and more chips, your body needs to ingest something healthier. If serving with dip, give your guests individual cups to avoid someone potentially reaching over the game board and dripping ranch dressing all over.

Speaking of individual bowls, consider making a dry snack mix served to each guest with their own bowl. This could be a blending of sweet and salty akin to trail mix — after all, M&Ms melt in your mouth, not in your hand. Unbuttered popcorn, hard pretzels, raisins, and dry roasted nuts are all tasty and clean additions to the mix.

For a more composed meal, a sushi tray can be an innovative choice. Many sushi rolls come cooked, so there are options for those averse to raw fish. A light seafood nibble (with soy sauce in personal dipping cups, naturally) helps your guests fill up in a healthier manner, plus eating with chopsticks ensures that gamers' hands won't get dirty.

The best hack for keeping your game boards clean is to make snacking its own separate diversion. Some treats now build an experience into eating it, like the infamous Jelly Belly Bean Boozled jelly beans. For those unfamiliar, these candies look innocent, but Bean Boozled has gross flavors hiding in those beans. Many Bean Boozled boxes have a built-in spinner; spin the wheel, eat a bean of the color the spinner lands on, and hope you get a tasty flavor. Will it be peach or barf? Birthday cake or dirty dishwater? Jelly Belly updates the "bad" flavors regularly, so even if you've played before, you could be in for a nasty surprise.

For the cleanest snacking and gaming experience, how about a board game you can eat? Australian game designer Jenn Sandercock invented a series of games that use pieces you cook and then consume. Her manual, The Edible Games Cookbook, provides blueprints and recipes to make games such as a snakes and ladders variant called Veggieland alongside The Order of the Oven Mitt which is about knights (but is really about eating as many cookies as possible). If you'd rather not cook up a whole board game, chocolate one-use games have been popular recently. The advantage to playing a milk chocolate version of Candy Land (instead of just thinking about candy), is you're rewarded with real candy!