All the Games on Our Shelves

 As you can tell by the condition of the box, Rook is not a game that has languished, forgotten, on our shelves for years.  We average about once a week with this one - typically when we get together with my parents.  This is a game I've played or have seen played all my life.  When I was a child I would stand at the edge of the table watching my dad, my grandpa and my uncles play and desperately wanting to be allowed to join in.  It was often the game that was played at Christmas or Thanksgiving gatherings at my grandparents house.  Below are a number of pictures of shuffling and dealing.  I included as many as I did because, as the gestures and expressions indicate, it is during this time that recent hands or even games from weeks or years ago are recollected and re-hashed.  Below is my first hand for the day - not bad - not sure I'd bid real high on it though, as there are only two cards in the kitty, and I'm likely to be called a pa...

These cute oinkers serves as dice in Pass the Pigs: The Go Hog-Wild Dice Game.  This is a game for 2 or more players.  You roll the pigs and score points depending on how they land.  If the pigs land on their sides (one right, one left) it's called a "pig out," which ends your turn and causes you to lose all points for that turn.  You can choose to pass the turn at any time.  It's often a good idea to pass the turn after a few successful rolls, as it can be emotionally painful to get up to 30 or 35 points and then get a "pig out" and lose those all of those points!  It's also a hard choice to pass the turn, since you can feel like you've got a hot streak going and not want to give that up. The first person to 100 points wins. Within the outer box is this clever, convenient carrying case containing score pads, pigs and pencils.  Here's an action shot during David's turn:  The following roll is called a "mixed combo," ...

 We've had a couple of days away from games, as we've been up in Redding, CA helping our oldest son and his family pack up to move.  This morning we had a few minutes in the hotel room before it was time to head over and pack some more, so David and I decided to play Blink.  This game was the perfect choice for this morning, as it is SO FAST!  We hadn't played it in years and so had to read the rules again.  It is simply a matter of setting out two cards to form the base of the stacks that will be played on, dealing out the entire rest of the deck evenly between the two players, and each player drawing 3 cards from his deck.  Players then play cards on either of the two piles by matching color or number or shape.  As you play cards you replenish your hand up to 3.  The first person who plays all their cards wins. It almost seems to easy to be taken seriously at all, but I realized partway through that though you have to go super fast, some...

Well, this one wasn't on the shelf until yesterday!  With Uncle Dave in town we've been conversing about our shared interest in gaming, and I mentioned how when I was in my early teens I wanted to learn to play Dungeons and Dragons.  Back in the day I didn't know anyone who played.  I did buy a rule book and started constructing my own dungeon on graph paper (still have it!), but that didn't really get me anywhere.  I expressed to him how I wished we had lived closer together at that time so I could have learned from him  .  .  .  then, while he was out and about yesterday, he bought me this game so we could make up for lost time!  How sweet is that?! Since it's a D&D board game, you don't need a Dungeon Master.  The game is basically the DM, and the players are in a cooperative venture to beat it.  He and Jacob and I are playing Adventure 2: "Monster Hunt."  Lots of punching out and setting up was done for our first a...

My son Jacob and I are the ones in the family who particularly enjoy word games, and since he and I were the only ones gaming tonight we reached for Huggermugger.  It's kind of a mash-up of Hangman, Trivial Pursuit, and Balderdash.  It's a game for 2 to 4 players or teams - though we've played with more in the past by simply adding an extra token. There are four categories: definitions (key), spelling (bee), unscramble (soup), and miscellaneous (horseshoes).  For miscellaneous you might be asked to find 12 words using the letters of another word, to find 10 words that rhyme with a given word, to complete a quote, etc. When you land on a numbered spot on the edge of the board, if you answer a question correctly, you get to look under the dial labeled with that number.  The goal of the game is to be the first person to determine the mystery word on the mystery wheel. If you guess wrong, you lose, but if you wait too long before guessing someone else might bea...

 As I was inputting labels for this post I realized that all the games we've played so far begin with S: Splendor, Scribbage, and Sushi Go.  Hmm  .  .  . Well, Uncle Dave is in California this weekend, visiting from Illinois.  He and his family are gamers as well, so it didn't surprise us when we suggested playing this game to hear from him that he'd recently gotten it as a birthday gift. This is a fast-moving, draft-style card game that involves 3 rounds (2 to 5 players).  It took me a while to get used to the names of the cards (wasabi, nigiri, sashimi, etc.), since I don't eat sushi.  I'm eager to introduce my nieces (ages 8 and 10) to this game later this month when I visit them in Virginia.  They love sushi, and they love games, so I think they'll get a kick out of this.

This card game is based on the scoring (of the hand) for Cribbage.  It's a game for 2 to 4 players with one player or team scoring the points in the rows and the other player or team scoring the points in the columns.  It involves a good combination of chance and strategy and also of having to choose  between offense and defense with each card placement. OK, so I said the idea behind this blog was that of playing through all our games.  I guess this post feels a bit like cheating, since more than 5000 games can be played with one deck of cards, therefore this whole blog could be taken up with merely multitudes of games from one deck of cards.  On the other hand, we have dozens of decks of standard playing cards around the house (see below for one such cluster), and therefore to not include any such games would be leaving out much of what constitutes gaming for us.  So I'll take a middle road and only include a handful of favorites.  The two-p...

We'll be going through our games in no particular order.  Spendor just happened to be the first game we played after I decided to take on this journey of playing through all our games.  We were introduced to this game by friends about a year ago and enjoyed it, so we bought a copy for ourselves.  We've played it a dozen or so times, and, although the rules are drop-dead simple, I find myself thinking through a variety of strategies each time.  It's not as varied as some games, and, often, the scores at the end are very close - seems like it always comes down to: "If only I'd had one more turn I could have won!" But we keep coming back to it and finding it a satisfying game to play. We appreciate the production quality.  The tokens/chips (representing jewels and gold) have a good heft to them, and the artwork on the cards and tiles is well done.  The goal is to earn 15 points or more by collecting cards and tiles worth points (which are printed on...

Here is an alphabetical list, with links, of all our games that we have played so far - along with the order in which we played them.  I will update this with each post I put up.  The current OFFICIAL total stands at 140 games counted on our shelves (as of July 25, 2024). 7 Wonders (12) 10 Days in Africa (120) Abalone (128) The a-MAZE-ing Labyrinth (62) Anomia (73) Arabian Nights (33) Avalon  (14) Backgammon (89) Balderdash  (34) Bang! The Dice Game (46) Barenpark (102) Blink  (6) Boggle (48) Bridge (84) Camel Up (61) Can't Stop Express (76) The Captain is Dead (116) Carcassonne (75) Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers (79) Catch Phrase (123) Cathedral (59) Charterstone Legacy Game (112) Chess (52) Choose Your Own Adventure - House of Danger (94) Cities and Knights of Catan (118) Clue (107) Codenames  (38) Codenames: Pictures (108) Colorku (39) Connect Four (101) Cover Your A$$ets (114) Cribbage (19) D...

We've been enjoying and therefore "collecting" games of all sorts for decades.  We enjoy board games, card games, party games, trivia games, classic games, new games, strategy games, games of chance  .  .  .  you name it, we play it! At this point I don't know if we own merely hundreds of games or actually thousands of games.  Being both nostalgic and a pack-rat, I never get rid of games - even if we haven't played them in years.  I've been thinking lately that all these games represent worlds of possibility and that we end up in ruts for months at a time playing the same games over and over.  So, I've decided to play through all our games.  In this way we may rediscover some gems, and, if nothing else, we'll have a catalog of what we have! I've titled this blog All the Games on Our Shelves , but that's not quite right.  It should actually be, All the Games on Our Shelves and in Our Drawers and on Our Counter-tops and in Other Misc...