All the Games on Our Shelves

I'm posting lots of pictures of this game since it gets no respect at my house - and also not much respect on the reviews on Board Game Geek - and I think this game deserves some respect!  The "project" of this blog is to count the games on our shelves (because I really am curious about how many games we own) and, normally, to do so by posting when we PLAY a game from our shelves (posting only once - only the first time we play a game since I began this blog in April 2018).  Well, since I don't think anyone will play this game with me ever, EVER again I am going to go ahead and post about it now because it is on our shelves despite having pretty much 0 probability of ever being played again here in our family group.  I love this game, but it might be because I love trivia enough to have once been a contestant on Jeopardy!.  I bought this game 5 or 6 years ago after I had been at a gathering of some colleagues who are gamers.  Kathleen mentioned this game as a favorite

Now that Jacob and Caleb have moved out, David and I have to search our memory-banks to remember which games we own that are two-player games.  Rack-O is one I'm sure we haven't played in well over a decade.  It's a game for 2 to 4 players.  His family had this game while he was growing up, and when he and I were dating it was a game we would play when we spent time with his family.  I think we bought our copy early-on in our marriage, as the instruction booklet has our wedding year as the copyright date.  It had been so long since we played that though we remembered that the goal was to put the cards in the racks in order from lowest to highest we didn't remember how to start or if we played with fewer cards if there were only two players and how the scoring went and so on.  It was easy enough to figure out.  It's a very basic game, but it's one of those games where you can talk while you play, and sometimes that's what we want. Here was my first deal.  I

  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.  Differences are

  Normally we would play Say Anything with friends rather than as a small family group.  It's a game similar to Apples-to-Apples or Puns of Anarchy in which players "turn in" responses to another player for "judging."  In this game, the players whose turn it is to "judge" takes a card from the top of the deck and chooses one of the five possible questions.  The other players then write a response that they think will best resonate with the reader.  For instance, the second question on the card below is "What's the best Tom Hanks movie?"  As a writer you don't write what YOU think is the best Tom Hanks movie, you write what you think the reader considers to be the best Tom Hanks movie.  Once all the responses are turned in, the reader selects his favorite response (using the disk to indicate the selected response and setting the disk face down on the table).  The other players then use their two tokens to vote on which response they