Surprise! It’s MY turn to do a gaming post. Bet you thought I didn’t like playing video games just because Ben has written about most of them so far, huh? 

Well, think again! I may be s-u-p-e-r slow at completing video games these days (hi, other moms of littles), but I still love me a good Breath of the Wild lynel fight when I’m feeling stressed. 

Ben and I have spent a lot of time playing video games together over the years, and while he definitely blazes through our one-player games way faster than I do, we’ve had our share of great multiplayer video game nights. We like Super Smash Brothers, Mario Kart, and Mario Party, of course, but sometimes those are more fun to play when you have a group (i.e., more than two tired parents + a toddler who has not yet graduated from the inoperable “special” GameCube controller). But there are some games that we’ve found are really fun date night games.

Valentine’s Day is coming up, and what better way to spend it with your significant other than by trying out some Switch games? We all know you aren’t going out to a fancy restaurant. Might as well make some Valentine’s treats and settle in for some geeky quality time together. If you don’t like video games but your spouse does, give them a try just this once. You may find out that it’s a new interest you can enjoy together!

For Cooperative Couples

Overcooked! 2

Make sure you have something to eat on hand when you play Overcooked! 2, because it will make you hungry (or maybe that’s just me). The goal of this game is to prepare and serve as many food orders as you can within a time limit. You and your partner each control a little chef and work together to chop ingredients, cook meals, and wash dishes in kitchens that become more and more inconveniently designed with each level (including things like conveyor belts, ravines, teleportation portals, and an airship that plummets out of the sky). It’s an addicting and challenging game, and we love figuring out how to beat new, seemingly-impossible-to-complete levels after Geekling is in bed for the night.

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime

Probably the only game on this list that has anything romantic about it. You and your partner must work together to beat the forces of Anti-Love and rescue kidnapped space bunnies by blowing up aliens and deflecting missiles from your spaceship. The controls are a little funky to figure out at first, especially when you are only playing with two people, but after a while we hit a rhythm that let us only die some of the time instead of all of the time. It has lots of cool graphics and fun music, and we’ve had a lot of fun playing it together.

Snipperclips

When we first bought our Switch, we decided to try Snipperclips, mostly so that we would have something to play until our copy of Breath of the Wild was delivered. Based on the artwork and the trailer, we thought it would be a cute little game where we could enjoy solving cute little puzzles together with our cute little paper people.

We were wrong. This game will test your relationship like nothing else will. It’s a co-op game, but if you don’t have good communication skills from the beginning, you’ll just end up super mad at the other person for not reading your mind. 

Each player controls a little paper person, and you have to rotate and cut each other (not as violent as it sounds) into shapes to complete puzzles. Sometimes the puzzle is working together to create a shape. Sometimes it’s cutting your partner into a shape that allows them to interact with something in the level. It was a lot more challenging than we thought it would be, especially when we were still getting used to the Switch controls, but this made it so much more rewarding when we’d successfully complete a puzzle. And, yes, it was SUPER cute.

There’s also a competitive mode where you can play basketball (I was terrible, Ben was great), and a battle mode where you have to cut each other up until the other person is just a pile of paper scraps. Both of these had us laughing hysterically as we each tried frantically to win. It’s a simple little game, but it’s still one of our favorites.

Also, the background music is guaranteed to be stuck in your head for at least a month afterwards.

Untitled Goose Game

I think most people play this one as a single-player game. The objective is to control a goose whose sole purpose in life seems to be to harass the residents of a quaint little British village. However, you can add a second player/goose for double the mean pranks. Together, you and your partner will wreak havoc on your unfortunate victims.

Untitled Goose Game is really short, and we were able to beat it after just a couple of hours of playtime. There were a couple of things that got annoying about playing with two geese—mostly that if they got too far apart, there’d be a pull on each one, which made it hard to control them in puzzles where we needed them to be a little farther from one another. There were also times where it was pretty clear that the puzzle had been designed with one goose in mind, so the other didn’t really have anything to do. However, for the most part it just had us cracking up together as we figured out new ways to torment the NPCs.

For Competitive Couples

Ultimate Chicken Horse

This is a build-your-own-platforming game, where you get to play as a variety of cute farm animals. Each round begins by allowing you to pick and place either a platform to help you (and your opponents) jump across, or a trap that will hopefully kill your opponents (but not you) as you race each other to the finish. The goal is generally to make the course difficult enough that your opponents can’t get across, but not so difficult that you can’t get across. Unless you’re me and usually die from incompetence anyway, in which case you just do your best to sabotage everyone else. (Black holes are my specialty.) 

It’s a fun game to play with a group, but it’s also one we’ve enjoyed playing by ourselves. There are bomb items that will let you destroy traps if the course has gotten too difficult to traverse, but when Ben and I are playing alone, we sometimes set a rule that we can’t destroy any traps, making for an interesting (and often impossible) challenge that usually ends with lots of laughter, even if neither of us ends up winning.

Puyo Puyo Tetris

Puyo Puyo Tetris combines the classic gameplay of Tetris and the cute bobbles of Puyo Puyo into one competitive hullabaloo. There are lots of flashing lights and yelling at the other players for somehow figuring out the puzzles before you can, which adds cement blocks to your screen. You can choose whether you want to play either Puyo Puyo or Tetris , and there are a variety of competitive modes. I think there’s a story mode for this one too, but we mostly ignore it in favor of the party modes. It’s a great game to play a few rounds of if you’re short on time.

Arms

Arms is one of those Nintendo games that people have sort of heard of (more now that Min Min is in Smash Ultimate), but I think it’s kind of a sleeper property. It’s a simple fighting game akin to Wii boxing, but with some pretty neat twists. You play as these people with super strong slinky arms, get in the ring, and punch each other’s lights out.

There are several different characters to play as, and each has a unique ability or gimmick. To add some complexity, you can swap out your spring-loaded arms for different combinations (some have elemental qualities, some explode on impact, some bounce instead of flying straight, etc.). It’s a lot of fun to customize and find the right combination.

Arms is a great game, but I will add one small caveat: Because the gameplay takes some getting used to, it’s very possible for one of you to get significantly better than the other very quickly. And if you’re always whooping up on your spouse so quickly that they cannot properly practice, it’s not as much fun. So, if you’re generally a better gamer than your spouse, do him a favor and go easy for a few rounds. 😉

What are your favorite games to play with your significant other, video or otherwise? Let us know in the comments below!

If you’re looking for more ideas for date nights in, check out our article with 6 at-home date night ideas!