Sallie Draper

My family LOVES games …

• Logic games
• Board games
• Card games
• Video games
• Classic games
• Yard games
• Hide and seek games (a.k.a. Geocaching)
• Imagination games

You name it, and we’ll play it!  So brewing in the back of my mind for some time has been a post about some of our very favorites. My only challenge was narrowing the list of games down to our favorite 5.  So, without further ado, here are our current favorites:

1. Uno Attack – A brainless bombardment of cards that continually proves this game is nothing but luck!  Everyone enjoys watching other players press the button and potentially add to their collection of cards.
   
2. My Ship Sails – A quick and easy card game for lots of players.  The goal is to pass cards to your neighbor while building up your hand of seven cards all in the same suit.  Detailed rules are posted here.
3. Hand and Foot – Another card game, this one a lot longer and more complex.  Back in the 90s when our friends Joanne and Brent Nemmers introduced us to this game, we played it non-stop. So much so that we created a “Hall of Fame” web site to keep track of our scores and a little bit of boasting as well. It’s so fun to see this site has survived the years.  You have to grin at our early web design skills. Check out the Rules page and try your hand at one of our all time favorites.
   
4. Bananagrams – Our friend Stephanie Arndt introduced us to this build-your-own crossword game a few years back, and it is great fun for our entire family.  The younger children focus on building words and only connect them when it’s convenient, while us old folks have to always connect ours. Stanley likes to play his own Latin-only version.  And all of these variations are played at the same time, each at a comparable pace with the others.
   
5. (Imaginary) Apples to Apples – We have the Junior version of this fun group game. The idea is that one person lays down a adjective card (i.e., scary, patriotic, etc.) and everyone else must play their best-fit noun card to complement the adjective.  It’s always fun to see what kind of crazy cards people will play to go along with the given word.  And while the card game is amazingly fun, our family has devised our own creative twist using just our imaginations.  This is a favorite around the dinner table.  One person thinks of an adjective and everyone else thinks of a creative noun to go along with it.  No cards required and giggles galore guaranteed!
   

So there you have it, 5 amazing games.  If you haven’t played them with your family, you should!  And if you’ve played all of those already, here are a couple of more ideas for you (cause I just can’t stop at 5).

• Sumoku – Brand new to us as of last weekend is Sumoku.  I had read about this several months ago but couldn’t find it in any stores.  Last week I was happy to see it in the game section of Barnes & Noble, and I wasted no time grabbing a set.  It is similar to Bananagrams, but with colored number tiles.  The goal is to layout connected rows and columns of numbers (with no repeating colors in any of the rows or columns) that add up to numbers evenly divisible by a “key” number such as 3 or 5 or 10.  There are tons of variations to the game so you can play alone, against others with and without score keeping, in teams, and even solving online puzzles.  Very fun and challenging for our mathematical brain cells!
  
• The 3-Letter-Word to Creative Phrase Game – I’m not sure of the origin of this game, but it doesn’t require anything at all to play except creative thinking.  We often play it while traveling.  One person thinks of a three (or sometimes four) letter word such as “pig” and everyone uses those three letters as the beginning letters in a three word phrase.  We strive for creative phrases that have some sort of meaning (sometimes this is a stretch).  For example “pink iguanas giggle” and “patchy ice glaze” would be two phrases for the word “pig”.  There are no winners or losers, just admiration for wordsmiths.