All the Games on Our Shelves

  Tis the season!  More posts are going up because more gaming is going on, and I imagine many will continue to be "bonus" posts, in other words posts about games that are not on OUR shelves.  This is a new game of my brother's, and the boys brought it to our house today.   They'd had a good time playing it recently and wanted to share it with us.  I have to agree that it is fun.  My take on it is that it's the hardest word game ever combined with the easiest Dungeons & Dragons campaign ever.  Actually, the game isn't hard at all, what is hard is trying to come up with effective words as "traps" for the other team and trying to guess your team's word while avoiding their traps.  OK, that probably makes no sense.  I think I'm having a hard time writing simply because I just finished playing and so have spent a lot of time describing a word while trying to imagine (and not say) words the other team might think I will say while trying t...

  I've said this of a couple of games I've posted about recently, but I REALLY cannot believe that in the nearly three years that I've been blogging our games that we hadn't played UpWords !  It feels like we play it all the time, but I guess as I get older time goes faster?  I played today with my two youngest sons, both of whom over the years have become formidable word-game players.  They're actually just here visiting as they have recently both moved out.  This new empty-nesting situation (especially in the midst of a pandemic) is going to make finding opportunity for gaming even more challenging.  But, we got to game today, so that's good.  I don't know if I can label this game a classic, but I think it's close.  I would call Scrabble a classic.  This game has been around since the 1980s (I think), so it has stood the test of time, and it is a lot like Scrabble in that players are building words by placing letter tiles on a grid. ...

Probe is a game David and I picked up decades ago at either a thrift shop or a garage sale.  It's a game David had played in childhood, and it's something that we always have fun with as a family.  Mostly we end up joking with each other or giving each other a hard time about what words we've chosen.  In years past I would get razzed about, supposedly, choosing words that other people didn't know, but that hasn't happened in quite a while, and I feel my boys have given me a very serious run for my money in recent years.  In fact, I lost spectacularly tonight!  In case you're not familiar with it, it's pretty much a fancied-up version of the pencil-and-paper-game of hangman.  Here you use cards to spell out your words, and there is also a stack of "instruction" cards in the center of the table.  Each player draws one of these cards from the central stack at the beginning of their turn and follows the directions, which might be "Reveal a blan...

  Wise and Otherwise is a word game which is similar to Balderdash and Literati in that players try to make up creative, compelling responses to try to get others to vote for theirs and in which each player is trying to guess the correct response.  In this game, rather than working with definitions of words, players are finishing old sayings/aphorisms from other countries.  David and I played with Jacob, Ocean and Caleb just before Caleb left for the airport to fly back for the final semester of his senior year in college.  It was a good, fun way to end our holiday time together.  Players take turns being the one to choose the beginning of a saying from the card that the other players need to try to finish.  The board itself has a mix and match of beginnings and endings of sayings, each of which makes use of the number of the space that it is on.  Ocean had the brown pawn and dashed to an early lead.  She and David ended up tying in ...

Literati is a game that goes way back for us.  David found it at a garage sale not long after we moved to California (so 1989 or 1990-ish).   Literari  is a word game in which you make up definitions for words or guess the name of the author of a quote.  It is similar to Balderdash , but it is less varied in its categories - more word-focused and also more difficult.  We used to play it frequently with our friends Chuck and Sue, and I remember some very late nights and lots of laughter from those days!  I can still remember some of the definitions that were made up on those evenings nearly 30 years ago now!  We hadn't played it for years, probably because Balderdash is easier and more varied, which makes it the game of this sort that we normally play with guests.  Yesterday I asked Ocean, Jacob and Caleb if they would play this oldie-but-goodie with me, and they agreed.  Jacob (white/grey pawn) took an early lead, which isn't sur...

With all the brand new games I've been posting about, I figured it was time to pull an "oldie but a goodie" from our shelves to play today.  Boggle is a game that's been around for what seems like forever - which I think the condition of this box testifies to!  Like Life , it's another of the games I always wanted as a kid but never had during childhood.  Early in our marriage David and I came across this set at a thrift store and bought it.  Check out the price written on the box lid in black crayon: 49 cents!  Boggle is a game of finding words.  It consists of 16 dice with letters on each face and a 4x4 grid in which the dice sit.  There's a lid that allows you to shake up the dice and let them fall back into the places.  Players then race against a timer to find as many words as they can in this grid.  Words must be constructed of adjacent letters (adjacency can be diagonal as well as orthogonal), but a die cannot be used more than...

 I've been waiting for a game night with friends to pull out Balderdash -- much more fun with more people -- too easy with just four of us!  Last night we had a total of 8 people here; there weren't enough of the pawns that came with the game, so we grabbed other little figures, a hippo, a frog, a warrior, etc.  I've labeled this as a "Word Game," and it is a game of making up definitions, but it is also a game of coming up with descriptions of movies based on title, short bios of people based only on the name, etc.  The full list of categories is under the picture of the game-board below. There is a box of cards that lists one each of the 5 categories in the game.  Players take turns being the card reader; the rest of the players make up definitions or descriptions and then pass those to the reader.  When all definitions or descriptions are read out, all players select the one that sounds correct to them.  Points are awarded based on how many vot...