All the Games on Our Shelves

Whew!  Fifty games from our shelves so far!  Karuba is awesome, and so it's a good one to serve as a milestone game.  Caleb gave it to me last year for Christmas, and we have played it quite a bit since then.  I like the story factor of this game - explorers making their way through the jungle to lost pyramid temples to find treasure and artifacts.  It's got good toy value too, as you get to pick up crystal and gold tokens as you journey rather than just keeping track of points abstractly.  To begin the game you place explorers on coastal tiles and temples on jungle tiles.  You then use tiles to build a path through the jungle to get your explorers to their temple (blue explorer to blue temple, yellow to yellow, etc.).  The first player to get an explorer of a given color to a pyramid temple of that color finds the move valuable artifact of that color; the second person whose explorer makes it to the pyramid temple of that color gets the second most valuable artifact, and

Qwitch is a very different game from what we generally play.  It a little bit like playing Fast   Uno , but it's much harder on the brain.  Even though the play is hard on the brain, the rules are easy to understand.  It's not a game you can play while having a conversation because it's a game of quick reflexes.  The entire deck of cards (except one - which will be the card that starts face-up in the middle of the table) are dealt out to the players, but the players pick up only 5 of their cards to look at; the rest remain face-down on a pile in front of them.  All cards have both a letter and a number on them.  The numbers run from 1 to 8, and the letters run from A to H.  There are also rule cards (which have red backs), which tell you what the relationship has to be between the card you lay and the card in the middle that you lay it on.  The rule cards are +, -, and =.  Say, for instance, the + rule is out, then if the card in the middle has B and 5 on it, you could

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 once within a wor

 I continue to feel like I'm cheating on my posts recently, because we keep adding new games to our shelves.  I'm not trying to inflate the numbers; it's just that 4 of us have summer birthdays, and so this is the time that we attain new games, and then, of course, we want to play them right away.  I think after this post we'd better play a couple of old games in a row or something!  This game, Deception - Murder in Hong Kong , was Caleb's gift to Jacob for his Golden Birthday yesterday.  Four of us played tonight, and all of us really liked it.  It's like a combination of Clue , Bang ,  Avalon , and Mysterium .  But even though it seems to me to combine elements of those games, it doesn't feel derivative in any way. The goal of this game is to determine who the murderer is, what the weapon is, and what the clue is - unless, of course, you are the murderer, in which case the goal of this game is to not be found out!  Each player is dealt a character ca

 We already had the game Bang! on our shelves, and it's one most of our family members are familiar with.  On our recent trip to Michigan Joan and Dale graciously gifted us with Bang! The Dice Game .  I hear their girls play it and like it better than the original because it goes faster.  So, anyway, this game is now on our shelves - thanks Joan and Dale!  It has most of the same elements of the original, including secret identities and the same win conditions (which are different for each type of character).  It had been a long time since I played the original, since I am not quite the fan of hidden identity games as my boys are.  I'm not good at lying, nor am I good at reading the clues to try to figure out whose who among the rest of the players.  We played it just the one time, and I was pretty tired, so I need to give it another chance soon. Above is pictured of some of the elements - character and role cards, Indian arrows, dice (showing range of gun shots), bull

The idea of a lost Island of Atlantis has intrigued me since childhood, so a game about surviving the catastrophe that sunk Atlantis was sure to appeal to me.  Thankfully it's not just an intriguing idea but also a very playable game.  The board is different each time you play because the terrain tiles (beach, forest and mountain) are set out randomly.  It also plays quite differently depending on whether you have 2 or 3 or 4 players.  My sense is that there's a pretty equal balance between luck and strategy, but with the use of decent strategy providing an edge in the game. Players take turns placing their explorer tokens on terrain tiles.  Each explorer token has a point value on the bottom, and at the end of the game your score is the total number of points on all of your explorer tokens that you were able to get to safety.  After explorer tokens are placed, players taken turns placing boats to help get their explorers to safety.  As play progresses the island gradua

 This post is dedicated to Andrew and Erin who were married tonight!  In true family fashion they included board games and card games at their reception.   Here we are playing Dutch with Andy and Erin cards!  Bananagrams are (is?) SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS!  And here we have Cover Your Assets .   Fast Scrabble !  Dominoes of some sort  .  .  .  Skull King  No, we don't just play board games and card games.  We play OUTDOOR games too!  And there might have been some dancing :-) Congratulations Andrew and Erin!  I'm sure you don't need reminding, but, as they say, the family that plays together stays together! :-)

 This has been a favorite in our family for something like 25 years.  We used to play it more often than we do now - partly because we've gotten so many new games since that time, and partly because even favorites can get overdone.  We played it Wednesday night with David's family, and we almost always play it when our friends, the Easthams, come over.  It works particularly well for "large" groups (6 to 10 or so).  The game is very basic, and you can play it without thinking much about it at all, or you can take it to a higher level and get reasonably strategic with it.  The directions say it's for ages 8+, but it would have worked well for my kids to have been playing this at age 5 or so.  The game consists of cards numbered 1 through 12.  There is one 1, two 2s, three 3s, etc., all the way up to twelve 12s.  There are also two jokers that are basically wild cards.  The goal is to get rid of all your cards first, but play continues until all players have em

 As you know if you've been reading this blog, I'm not counting all the card games we play with a standard deck - only our top 5 or 10 total (which seems fair since we have hundreds of decks of cards on our shelves).  Dutch  has recently become one of those favorite games.  Unlike Pedro or Scribbage , this is not one that we've been playing for years and years.  This is a game our son Jacob taught us about a year ago after having learned it while on a missions trip to Thailand.  We hear the kids he worked with in Thailand are absolute rock stars at this game.  It took me quite a few hands to pick up some good strategy. Each player is dealt 4 cards to begin with.  These cards are set out in front of you, and you may look at two of them.  The goal is to have the lowest point total at the end of the game.  On your turn you draw a card, and you may replace one of the face-down cards with the card you have drawn - discarding the card you've replaced.  You may draw f