12 games to scratch your travel itch during lockdown

While we're not travelling we've rounded up twelve of our favourite travel-themed games - for all ages and abilities, for every device and none, many free to play and every single one a chance to reminisce about your last trip, brag to your family how well-travelled you were until last year or just teach the kids that there's a great big world still out there waiting to be explored.

After all, with travel still firmly closed, the best substitute we may be able to hope for while cooped up inside for the winter is a travel show, another read of The Beach...or a great travel game.

(And we've tried to stay away from the obvious choices to select some less famous games - so we don't even mention that the original Monopoly is set in London and technically sort of travel-related until right at the end.) Have a look and see if there's any you recognise.

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The French walled city of Carcassonne in classic board-game style

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5. The Magic Door

Smart speaker game	1 player at a time, age 5+	Free to play

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Just say "Alexa, open the magic door"

While you can't travel the world, smart speakers are yet another way of at least pretending to explore. The Magic Door is one of the best and most popular of the smart speaker adventure games. Mainly for the kids, it's a straight fantasy adventure with wizards and princesses. It's free, it keeps inquiring minds busy in a way you can hear from the next room and while there's no out-and-about to go, it's a virtul out-and-about that'll keep the family amused.

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6. Sushi Go

Board game (about fish)	2-5 players, age 7+	£12.99 on Amazon

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Buy from Amazon

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7. Where's Wally? (and spin-offs)

Book	Readers can collaborate, age 5+	£5.57 on Bookshop.org

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Buy on Bookshop.org

The famous and original book series in which Wally is lost in a sea of people somewhere in the world and the reader is called upon to find him. The renaming of Wally as Waldo for the North American market causes occasional confusion, but he gets by perfectly well as Hetty in Sri Lanka, Jura in Croatia and Hugo in Sweden too.

The books are suitable for almost any age - the publisher says 6+, three-year-olds often love them and a censorious school in Long Island once banned the whole series in the 1990s because of a woman bathing topless in one of the drawings, so make your own judgement.

One public-spirited citizen even went so far as to photoshop Wally out of the images. Don't print these out and give them to a curious family member without warning them though, that would just be cruel

The "Where's Wally" phenemonon has even lent itself to a series of spin-off satires in which the reader is asked to find contemporary political figures hiding variously around the UK or the US - see below for examples "Where's Boris?", "Where's Dom?" and "Where's Trump?". These are probably intended for older readers, though we can confirm from experiment that they'll keep an inquiring ten-year-old busy for hours.

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8. Ubi

Board game	2-5 players, age 7+ (but really suited to adults)	About a tenner on eBay

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Buy on eBay

The boardgame equivalent of GeoGuesser, Ubi is a vintage board game from the people behind classic Trivial Pursuit. Based on a world map, players are given clues and must identify the (tiny) segment of the map the clue is pointing to.

It's worth repeating "tiny segment" because a good game of Ubi can take hours, even for the seasoned world-traveller - trying to find the Memphis Shell where Elvis first played or Boudicca's last battle can test the sharpest cartographical skills. But if you're up for a real challenge and learning a bit about the world (specifically the world up to the mid-1980s, when the game was published) Ubi is proper test of your world knowledge.

Ubi is out of print, but there's ample copies on eBay and second-hand sites.

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9. Minecraft

You can play Minecraft on practically any device	Multplayer world, 7+ official PEGI rating	From $6.99 on mobile, varies by platform

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Link to the game website

Not just for the kids - though they do seem to love it in here - Minecraft has seen people collaborate to create everything from the Taj Mahal to a working computer inside the game that runs Doom or, for at least ten years, even a version of Minecraft, inside Minecraft. The people who take ths place seriously are pretty creative and they get big things built out of the virtual blocks that make up the creative format of the Minecraft world.

There's also a survival mode, which is more straight video-game fare of surviving the night as zombies try to murder you. And the game/world offers plenty of opportunity for virtual exploring - it's quasi-infinite, though that hasn't stopped one record-holder (Guiness-certified no less) from walking 20% of the way to the edge of the map, a feat that it's estimated will take him another thirty years to complete. So if your feet are really, really itchy, maybe you can join him in his quest.

A video guide to the wonders of Minecraft, by DigitalSpy

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10. Ticket to Ride

Board game	2-5 players, 6+ or 8+	£32.95 new

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Buy from Puzzles and Games

Relive the golden age of rail travel in this delightful range of games that sees you and your rival rail entrepreneurs collecting sets of cards and building rail lines across the world. With a map for almost everywhere in the world and a host of variants, you'll be transported away for the hour or so's play time. Just don't fall out with your friends and family when they steal your prime route.

One of the many variants of Ticket to Ride, "rails and sails"

Creative Commons license credit "JIP", Wikimedia Commons

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11. No Man's Sky

All the main games consoles	1 player or multiplayer, 7+ official PEGI rating	£40 on Steam for PC; other platforms vary

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Buy it from Steam

If merely earthbound adventure can no longer satisfy those itchy feet, No Man's Sky is simply the vastest, most ambitious space exploration game ever created. A multi-player game so large that it's an event to encounter even signs of another player, the game has a linear plot if you want it but the non-linear universe beyond that is theoretically infinite, so you're free to explore and discover world after world.

We nicked their promo video off their website, but since we're promoting their game for free we bet their lawyers will be nice about it

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12. Now Boarding

Board games	2-5 players, age 10+	Ships from the US for about £40

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Order from the US

Finally, if it's not the actual holiday you're missing but the faff and hassle (or mystique and anticipation, according to taste) of the airport or getting on and off the plane itself...even that's been captured for you in board-game form.

Experience the thrill of loading planes full of passengers and preparing for takeoff in this clever new real time cooperative boardgame. You must deliver all the passengers to their destinations before they get too angry — and new passengers are constantly arriving! It's a tense and exciting experience as you and your friends race to beat the game.

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