All the Games on Our Shelves

  Connect Four is a classic game of pure strategy, so, of course we need this game on our shelves!  I don't remember when or where we got it; we have no box for it.  I think we found it at a garage sale.  Here David and Anthony are taking each other on -- Anthony, Brianna and family having made the trip up from SoCal to be with us at the Christmas season.  You can tell from the facial expressions pictured here how seriously we take our gaming.  There's really not much to see as far as the game goes, so this won't be a very long post.  Each player has a color of checkers and tries to be the first to get four in a row of his color.  I included the third picture as an action shot!  And I included a fourth in order to have a picture of my granddaughter.  Who knows how old she will be by the time we get through all our games, so this is for my own use in comparison.

 For this milestone post we have The Game of Wolf .  As it says on the box, you want to "choose your pack wisely."  This is basically a two-team trivia game, but the teams can change from round to round.  This game can be played by 4 to 12 players.  To begin, one player is The Wolf, and the player to his left is the reader.  A card consisting of 5 items under the same topic comes up each round, and the first thing the reader does is to state the category.  The Wolf then decides whether to choose a pack member (or two if there are six or more players) or to play as a Lone Wolf.  Once the decision has been made, the 5 items on the card are read out.  All players that are not The Wolf or part of his pack play against The Wolf/Pack.  Both teams write their answers on the boards provided, and then answers are checked to determine the scoring.  Play then proceeds to the next player. Below is an example of  a card - this one having the topic "Company Slogans."

  Just One is a game that was added to our shelves yesterday as a Christmas gift. It is the winner of the 2019 Spiel de Jahres. We are already addicted to it; this is particularly true of David who keeps asking to play it.  I think we've played it 7 times in the last two days (and that's despite other games, a jigsaw puzzle, Christmas dinner, and having two toddlers in the house!).  It's definitely a good party game, but it does only include as many as 7 players.  The picture below is of Caleb explaining the rules for our first go at it.  This was after our Christmas dinner - rather a small party this year, but always good to be with family, whoever can make it!  And with us, games are always involved!  This is a cooperative game, which is something I always appreciate.  Each player takes a turn having the word card in front of him/her.  The playing boards are shaped in a way that functions as an easel, and the player with the card sets it up so that he/she can't

 OK, it's really ridiculous that it's been very nearly 2 months since we played a "NEW" game to count from our shelves.  To be fair, mid-to-late semester is super busy for me and my husband in our particular teaching jobs.  But enough of that!  Trumpet is an AWESOME game, so much so that when I hauled out my camera to record it tonight, everyone was SURE that it was already on the blog; shockingly, it wasn't.  It's a great game - one that we used to play much more frequently, especially with our friends Chuck and Sue, but it's kind of taken a back seat for our family to more recent pure strategy games such as Stone Age , Seven Wonders , Splendor , etc.  I'm honestly not sure whether to classify this as a card game or a board game.  It does have a board, so I guess, technically, it's a board game. But it plays so much like a standard trump card game - like Hearts , Spades , Pinochle , etc. - that it seems like a pure card game, so I'm categ