All the Games on Our Shelves

  Yesterday morning I was doing some cleaning in the game room, and I saw this game on the shelf and thought rather sadly, "Well, it's going to be LONG time before that game ever gets played again!"  It's a party game that we usually play with a large group, and given the current pandemic that's not something that's going to be happening any time soon!  Later that evening I suggested we play Upwords (since I don't have any games starting with a U on this blog yet).  David suggested Karuba ("that jungle game").  Others were suggested, and then someone said, "Why don't we play Catch Phrase ?  I bet we can do that with four people."  I couldn't believe it.  We hadn't played this in months - probably not for well over a year - and I'd been thinking just that morning that we wouldn't be playing it any time soon.  You can tell by the condition of the box that it has been pulled off the shelf and played a lot in the past.

  I just finished playing this game, Dead of Winter , for the first time. I've got so much adrenaline flowing through me that I'm not sure if I can write well about it right now.  Actually, I think I'd need to play it a few more times before I was able do a good job of describing the game with any sort of fulness, so for now I'm just going to introduce it and share a few pictures.  I'd seen Jacob and Caleb play this in the past, and, for as into gaming as I am, this just looked a little more complicated than was I was interested in taking on.  They (and Tim) invited me to play tonight, and I said "yes," and I'm so glad I did.  It's a lot of fun, and it's a mostly cooperative game.  I say "mostly cooperative" because it is possible for players to have a role of a betrayer and also because while there is a main objective/win condition, each player also has their own personal win condition.  As we played, I became aware that there were l

  Thanks to Caleb we have a new game on our shelves.  Caleb, whose "love language" is "the giving and receiving of gifts" ignored David's Christmas list and bought him this game that was absolutely a perfect fit!  Those of you who know David know that you can hardly speak for 5 minutes in his presence without him making a pun out of something that was said.  We had such a ridiculous amount of fun playing this game that most of us commented on not having laughed that hard in a very long time.  I certainly can't remember the last time I laughed like that; my abdomen was still hurting the next day from how hard and how long I was laughing!  This game is very much like Apples to Apples but with a significant twist, rather than just tossing cards face-down to another player who has the "descriptor" card, players first make a change to the card they are going to submit - in this game called the "punnable cards."  Also, ALL players have a descr

In the game 10 Days in Africa , the goal is to be the first person to create a viable ten-day journey through multiple countries on the African continent.  There is some strategy involved, but there's also quite a bit of luck - as in luck of the draw with cards.  As a family we're typically more into games of deep strategy or games of trivia or party games (which could be either goofy or strategic).  This game seems more "staid" or "middle of the road;"  I'm not sure how to term it.  It's quite pleasant to play, and it works especially well if you are with friends that you want to carry on a conversation with while playing.  It's pretty low key.  It sure helps you learn your African geography, though, and that's a plus! To begin the game, each player places cards at random on the 10 day slots on the wooden strip in front of them.  Cards are of 3 types: country, plane, jeep.   After placing these 10 random cards, players take turns drawing a c

  Amazing - the game designers have put the "escape room" experience into a board game!  I really enjoyed this - solving all the riddles and puzzles in order to try to escape the forbidden castle.  I felt that there was good variety in the puzzles and that we really needed the team effort in order to figure everything out.  As I say so often, I love cooperative games.  One of my sons was less impressed with this one, feeling that some of the puzzles were rather contrived or a bit clunky.  So I guess for our family the verdict is out.  Something that was a bummer for me is that this is a one-off.  Once you play it, you can never play it again, both because you've figured out all the riddles and also because you've had to destroy some of the items (cards, instruction manual, etc.) in order to do so!  Honestly, I think it was a great game, and I did enjoy it very much, but I really like games that are re-playable over and over, and I don't like waste.  Recently there

  Cities and Knights of Catan is an expansion to Settlers of Catan .  It's been on our shelves for a LONG time (probably as long ago as 1998 when it first came out), but it's also been a long time since we played it; it's probably been over a decade at this point.  Normally if we're going in this "direction," we just grab the original Catan off the shelf.  I do remember playing this one quite a bit, though, in the early days, especially with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law Tony and Stacey.  I think this expansion is a very nice addition to the original game, but over the years David has tended to get more and more tired of extra complication, which is probably part of why we haven't played this in a long time.  Of course we have lots of other options of games to play too, so it's not JUST that.  Among the things this expansion adds are knights (and I've always been one for chivalry, so I'm all about that!) and barbarians and walled cities.

  Mysterium is a game we had played quite a while ago, having borrowed it from my brother.  It's one that intrigued us, and so it eventually ended up on our shelves as well.  We've had it for a while now, and David and the boys played it earlier in the semester, but I was too busy to join in.  I finally got my chance and am also finally getting a chance to post.  I'm not sure how best to describe this game.  In some sense it's a bit like a séance (though I know describing it that way will put some people off).  It feels to me like a combination of Clue , Dixit , and Deception .  It's a cooperative game in which players are trying to solve a murder.  It's the ghost of the murder victim who is giving clues to the other players, but he can only do so through images.  The images are pictured on cards, and I find the artwork to be gorgeous, evocative, and dreamlike. The ghost cannot speak, so the players trying to solve his murder have to do their best to interpret

  This game came to our shelves via Jacob's last birthday, four months ago!  Yes, I'm going to continue to grouse a bit about the busyness of this semester!  I did take 2 days fully off over the 4-day Thanksgiving holiday, and gaming commenced!  This is a cooperative game, and I am a fan of cooperative games.  I like to work together with my family members rather than against them.  I'm eager to play this game a second time (Christmas break?) now that I have an idea of what the elements are.  Despite being intrepid gamers, we went with a pretty easy setting for our first game, and we won quite easily.  I think we will ratchet it up a notch or two (or more) next time we play.   Here we are getting it out of the box for the first time and taking a good look at the board. Basically the idea is that we are crew members of a besieged ship, and we are dealing with hostile aliens in the ship, damage to our shields, hostile alien ships attacking from the outside, and computer syste