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'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 fa...

  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...

  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....

  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...