Just finished playing Rummikub with my wife.
This ain't no sexual acrobatics but a good old board game.
In fact in the last couple of years we have re-discovered fun in playing board games, especially those that we can play with our kids. There's usually plenty of laugh and a good portion of excitement, but you can also learn a lot about other people watching them play.
Top three games at the moment: Rummikub, Scotland Yard, Ramses II.
Do you still play board games ? What's "in" in your countries ?
If you don't know what is wrong with me
Then you don't know what you've missed
I don't know what's "in" right now, but my wife and I used to play marathon Scrabble games. I usually lost, as I like to play a wide open, high-scoring style, while she gives no quarter and likes to scratch out points, then pounce when I leave the slightest opening.
I also enjoy pinochle, but that's not a board game.
My son and I have been playing a fair amount of chess lately, which is hilarious as I cannot think more than a move ahead. But as he is 6 we are decently matched... for the moment.
We also like Trouble and Pachisi, and while I was in London two weeks ago I got us a board game based on the BBC TV series Walking With Dinosaurs, which we are just eating up, as we loved and memorized the DVDs.
I'm gonna dumb it way down here and admit the Swung clan enjoys a mean game of Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, but particularly a scrappy game of Trouble.
We don't actually own Candyland anymore since #2 son peed on it....
I love Trivial Pursuit, but very few people will play with me.
I like this game called Encore!, where you draw cards that have words on them and then you have to think of songs with those words. (Hey, I never said I made up my game...) However, no one will play with me anymore.
Also Boggle.
And there's this game called Hoopla, where everyone wins, which is awfully Quaker. You have a hand of cards with pictures on them, of Slinky, or Harrison Ford, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Then you spin a needle, and you have to try to make people guess your chosen card in the manner chosen by the needle. The choices are: drawing it, acting it out, using a list of alliterative words to describe it (for Woodstock I said, "boobs, bud, bohemians, beats") or something else, which I forget. Anyway, everyone wins.
mood swung wrote:
I love Trivial Pursuit, but very few people will play with me.
No will play with the man of the house here, either. You guys should get together and beat each other to a bloody pulp; it would do him good to be taken down a peg. He's also insufferably great at Scrabble, so you could try that, too.
Little Girl loves Boggle, which I can dig.
Little Boy loves endless rounds of Hi-Ho Cherry-O, about which I am less enthusiastic, but it's so much fun to see him get so excited about it.
Don'tget Mousetrap unless you are a qualified engineer!! Littlun enjoys the junior versions of scrabble and monopoly and also a game called Guess Who?
Have enjoyed spates of adult game playing over the years but currently going through a barren spell. Here's some we enjoy:
Scrabble
Triv
Yahtzee
Risk (abandoned now as this usually ends in a real fight)
London Game
Cribbage
Probe
so lacklustre wrote:Don'tget Mousetrap unless you are a qualified engineer!! Littlun enjoys the junior versions of scrabble and monopoly and also a game called Guess Who?
Have enjoyed spates of adult game playing over the years but currently going through a barren spell. Here's some we enjoy:
Scrabble
Triv
Yahtzee
Risk (abandoned now as this usually ends in a real fight)
London Game
Cribbage
Probe
Great to see that my family are not the only one to enjoy a real punch-up after (or during) Risk. Someone always feels that they are being ganged up on. I bought the computer version , but it's just too easy.
Yahtzee is totally addictive. I have a small hand-held computerised version that I bring with me to Cait's horseriding lesson. I've also found myself playing it on traffic jams. Should come with a health warning.
Whenever my family gets together, we play both Liar's Dice and Wise & Otherwise. The latter is a *great* board game, and we always end up hysterical. It's similar to Balderdash (the dictionary game) except that you finish a phrase instead of define a word. So the card will say something like "The band stops playing when...", or "Go to bed hungry...", or the fun ones "It's easy to mount..." - and you have to finish the phrase, turn them in, and everyone votes for what they think is real. It's silly but great.
And if I remember right, the <i>real</i> ones for the examples are: "The band stops playing when they have to pee"
"Go to bed hungry, and dream of pancakes."
"It's easy to mount a donkey."
My mother still gets a different board game every Christmas, it's like some weird family tradition here. We had one one year that included a little toy piano you had to play a tune on for the other players to guess. It was shite.
We used to play trivia in college and you had to drink when you missed. If you spilled your pie you had to drink one whole beer for each piece that was missing. Short games
My wife and I tried to play Pictionary on seperate teams once. We gave the game away that night to save our marriage. True story.
I'm a big board game nut, my favourite of which is Swedish game Rappakalja (a Finnish word for bullshit I believe). Does anyone know its English name?
Four players or more. First dealer draws card with weird word (ie. "meconium") and then writes down the enclosed correct desciption of that word (in this case "first feces of a baby" which of course isn't in the game but I read in a Spinal Tap interview) on a piece of paper. Other players write down what they think the word means, then dealer reads them aloud, and the players guess which one is right. You get points for knowing the answer (very rare) or if someone's chosen your made up definition. Then the next person is dealer, etc.
Often hilarious results if the players are literate enough (which is why I don't get to play it very often).
Of course you can add your own rules to it as well, like getting extra points if someone chooses the definition you've pulled straight from Monty Python. (I last scored with "tungsten carbide drills used in coalmining") I'm sure an Elvis quote bonus would work as well if there's an English version.
but a good old board game.
<-- means I had a laugh.
