One of my favourite things to do is play board games. I’m often that person during a casual family night that will get halfway through dinner, wait for a moment of quiet to look around the table and say ‘so who’s up for a game of Scrabble?’
Keep reading to learn about some of my favourites, old and new. You may find something that you like!
Articulate – I first played this while away on a family holiday to Yorkshire, so I have insanely fond, warm cottage memories associated with this one. This one of those games in which you have to navigate your way around a board, picking up cards and (much like in Taboo) describe the word on the card without actually saying what it is within a time limit. Cue a lot of frantic gesturing for ‘you’re close but not quite!’. There are a few extra rules and challenges along the way, including the finish line. Think reaching the end first makes you the winner? Think again. To win you have to win a task that’s open to all teams… and they have the chance to pull you back a few spaces!
Dingbats – This is another one I’d never heard of before meeting my fiancé and his family, but I’m obsessed with it and I definitely don’t play it as much as I want to. Imagine the gameshow, Catchphrase, but without the animations. Anyone who knows me knows I love (or hate? It’s a conflicted relationship) puns, and this game is based around solving graphical puns.
Cluedo – I played this for the first time last Christmas when it was gifted to me, and it’s the most fun I’ve had in a long time. For some strange unknown reason, I was nervous to play it because I thought it literally involved dressing up like the characters and wandering around the house looking for a hidden plastic weapon, but it’s much better than that. Well, in my opinion, anyway. The game is a process of elimination, interrogating your competitors and working out who committed the murder (and how) based on who has an alibi.
Mr and Mrs – I bought this a year ago when I was gifted a WHSmith voucher. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I absolutely didn’t need to spend this on any more stationary, so I decided to spend it on a game. We play this with every single couple that visits our home, because it’s such a fun game. I find it amusing seeing how intensely competitive some of our couple friends get trying to out-couple Stephen and I. Couples sit back to back while the other team reads out ‘more likely to’ statements, and the couple have to hold up their blue, or pink paddle depending on who they think the statement is more true of. However, the game is also about the couple being in sync with each other, so it can be quite comical when they both think that the other is messier, for example. You have to think about how your partner would answer a question, even if you think (or know) that they’re wrong.
Monopoly – I’m probably the only person in my family who enjoys this game, so it’s quite rare that I manage to hoodwink any takers into playing it with me. We all know the time consuming, table flipping game that is Monopoly, so I won’t explain it, but if you’re a friend of mine reading this who enjoys it – please let me know so I can actually play it!
Scrabble – One of the more classic board games, that as an English Teacher, I thoroughly love. The game basically involves trying to make the highest scoring words in order to win the most points. There’re always some arguments about whether ‘kwyjibo’ is actually a word or not, especially when it happens to take up the last remaining triple word score tile. That just adds to the fun if you ask me.
Bananagrams – This is very similar to Scrabble, except that instead of all players adding their words to the communal board, they add words to their own individual grids. Play begins with the ‘BUNCH’ which is all 144 tiles - which I must mention are shiny and smooth and so cool – face down and then depending on number of players, each person takes their number of starting tiles. To start, any player yells ‘SPLIT’ which means that players can begin racing to use all of their tiles to make words in a comprehensible grid, similar to the layout of a Scrabble board. Whenever a player places their last letter on to their grid, they yell ‘PEEL’ and every player, including the one yelling ‘PEEL’ takes another tile from the remaining BUNCH. At any point in the game, players can yell ‘DUMP’ and exchange an unwanted letter of theirs for 3 letters from the BUNCH. When the BUNCH has less tiles remaining than the number of players, the first person to use all of their letters in a connected word grid yells ‘BANANAS’ to announce that they think they have won. This then sets them up for a grid inspection from the rest of the group, allowing them the chance to call them a ‘ROTTEN BANANA’ if they have misspelt words, or abbreviations, etc. If they pass the inspection, they are declared ‘TOP BANANA’ and the game is over. It’s glorious.
Fluxx – This is an honourable mention to my absolute favourite card game because I take it everywhere I go at the moment. I found out about this game via an Instagram post of Author, Sex Educator and Youtuber, Hannah Witton, as she actually used a variation of the game as part of her proposal to her fiancé, Dan. This game is so super interesting because the goal of the game constantly changes throughout game play. It starts with the simple rule of draw a card from the pack and play a card from your hand. Depending on the card you play, a variety of factors can change. This could be the goal, the number of cards that must be drawn or played on each turn, or can quite literally twist the rules of the game. It’s utter chaos, as the rules are in a constant state of flux, and the main question is: Can you achieve World Peace before someone changes the goal to Bread and Chocolate?
Are any of these games going on your wishlist?
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