Christmas Games and Pastimes
This evening I'll be driving south to the Santa Cruz area to spend the rest of Christmas week with my family. Since it's cold and wet and muddy outside, one thing we're sure to do a lot of as a family over the next few days is play games. Board games. Word games. Video games. Party games. We -- especially my two brothers (aged 10 and 20) -- love them all. A few of my favorites in each category:
Board games:
The Settlers of Catan -- 'Settlers' is a fun and positively addicting strategy game for 3 to 4 players aged 10 and up. Each game takes about 40 minutes to an hour. Amazon's description: "The board consists of 19 terrain hexes surrounded by the ocean. Each type of terrain produces a different type of resource: brick, wool, ore, grain or lumber. There's also a desert hex that produces no resources. As the game progresses, players use resources to build roads along the edges of these hexes and settlements or cities on the intersections where three hexes meet. Each player begins the game with two settlements and two roads.
"Each player's roll of the dice causes certain hexes to produce resources, which you collect if you have a settlement on one of them. On your turn, you'll use various combinations of the resources you've acquired to build new roads and settlements, upgrade settlements to cities, or purchase development cards. The ability to trade resources with other players adds a new level of strategy and ensures that the game includes lots of interaction between players. You can also trade without worrying about other players using an unfavorable maritime trade rate. Elements including a robber piece that lets you steal from other players and a variety of development cards add intrigue to the game.
The objective of The Settlers of Catan is to be the first one who collects 10 victory points."
Word Games:
Boggle -- I prefer Boggle to Scrabble because it's quick with each round only lasting 2 minutes, and because it's purely a word game (I tend to get schooled in Scrabble because I'm terrible at the numeric strategy involved). I also especially like it because in my immediate family, I always win.
Video Games:
Guitar Hero (Wii) -- I'm no video game aficionado, but I love Guitar Hero which provides me with the sensation of being an "expert" guitarist. The guitar hero suite of games is pretty extensive these days, but my favorites are Guitar Hero World Tour and Guitar Hero 5.
Party Games:
Fishbowl -- This is a new favorite of the Ellis family and is a good game for 4 to 12 (or more) players. It requires nothing more than a few sheets of paper and pens. When my family plays, each person has four little pieces of paper on which we scrawl a famous person, place, historical event, and thing. Then everyone folds up their pieces of paper and places them in a bowl. In pairs of two, we play three rounds: 1) Taboo; 2) Charades; 3) Password. Each turn is 30 seconds long. Players are advised to pay close attention to every word so that they can memorize the items on the cards since round two is significantly harder than round one and round three is the hardest.
On team one's first turn, one partner picks a word out of the bowl and describes the item on the paper using other words and sentences to describe it (e.g. If the word is "wall," you could say "Tear down this ____"). Team one goes through as many cards as possible in their 30 seconds and gets that number of points. Subsequent teams take turns, and round one is continued until all of the cards in the bowl are exhausted.
When all of the cards are exhausted, they are returned to the bowl for the beginning of round two. In round two, players aim to get their partner to guess the word on the card by acting it out using no words or sounds whatsoever. This is where the element of memorization comes in handy. Once again in intervals of 30 seconds, this round is completed when all of the cards have been exhausted.
Round three is the most difficult because partners may only use a single word to describe the item on the card. In my family, we don't allow players to 'pass', so if you choose a bad clue and your partner is stumped, you've wasted your turn. The team with the most points at the end of round 3 wins.
The Ellis family is always in search of new games to play at Christmastime. What are some of your favorites?
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Dec '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
Your family is from Santa Cruz? You're from Santa Cruz? You're conservative???!!!
How in the heck did that happen?
The Funeral Guy (Proud father of beloved daughter, UC Santa Cruz Class of '11)
Oct '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
Every now and again a family from my church invites us over for a game night. You wouldn't believe but we actually played a game of Monopoly that was exciting, chaotic, and boisterous. What you do is modify the rules so that anyone can make side deals with anyone else at any time rather than waiting for your turn. I think we looked like a bunch of traders on the floor of the NYSE. Every time someone came close to getting kicked out of the game a bailout would be made (w/o any gov't backing or involvement). The rule about not collecting rent after everyone at the table has had a turn becomes an important factor. At one point their dad was pointing at a piece on his property asking "whose is this?" while everyone was busy with their side deals, ignoring him. Merry Christmas.
May '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
I'd heartily recommend Bohnanza to anyone who enjoys games that involve bartering. Each player has a phase of their turn where they can trade cards with other players, with the goal being to use your limited "field" space to plant matching beans in order to earn the most money. Yes, it's a game about trading beans... but it's a lot of fun for anywhere from 3 - 7 people!
Fishbowl sounds very similar to Time's Up, a fun party game which plays out about the same but uses pre-made cards.
Carcassonne supposedly has a lot in common with Settlers of Catan (which I've not played). In Carcassonne the "map" is actually a set of tiles, which players draw from randomly throughout the game to build the playing surface. The goal is essentially to horn in on your friends' resources, which makes things competitive and usually a lot of fun.
Dec '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
Cranium. My three daughters and I love it. (My wife does not, so next week when the oldest daughter is not with us, we will probably have to skip it.)
My kids like Apples to Apples.
Clue seems popular too.
(And Funeral Guy: my oldest is UC Santa Cruz Class of '10.)
Aug '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
Bohnanza is a very strong offering and quite fun.
Dominion, Agricola, Puerto Rico, and Smallworld are also enjoyable distractions.
If you like "cooperative games," Pandemic, Lord of the Rings (The Reiner Knizia one), and Forbidden Island are fun.
The Mystery Rummy series of games is also quite fun. As is Wits and Wagers.
As someone who owns over 700 games, I can say that you won't go wrong with any of those -- or any of the games recommended so far either. Apples to Apples is grand.
May '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
Oooh, like that time I tried to introduce Diplomacy to the gang (the favorite of the Best and Brightest, but too labor-intensive even now, I think).
Golly, most of my favorites involve handing over money, and they don't really work without that, even when I was in Summer Camp (ie, rehab), the guards weren't entirely satisfied with the "bragging rights" claim as to why we were moving chips around.
Monopoply and Risk are classics, though both suffer from car movement over a long time (oddly, Monopoly, unlike Risk, can be reduced to a mathematical strategery).
I'd recommend Yahtzee or Pigmania (which is funnier). Can't play Jenga.
Aug '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
Blatant self-promotion! Blatant self-promotion! If you're looking for a videogame you can play on your computer with the family, and if you're a fan of a certain series of '80s popcorn movies, allow me to point you toward the game that my coworkers are currently scrambling to release by tomorrow. Go to Telltalegames.com and download "Back to the Future - The Game."
Telltale makes "Adventure games"...sort of like "choose your own adventure" movies. Our games are about picking paths and solving puzzles rather than shooting things, which makes them great for playing as a group.
"Back to the Future" picks up where the movies left off. It's a brand-new story...but we got Christopher Lloyd to reprise the role of Doc Brown! No Michael J. Fox, alas, but the kid who does his voice is positively uncanny. I co-wrote the game, and our team has done an incredible job animating it and putting it together.
End of self-promotion.
Aug '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
<em>Diplomacy</em> should be played with an understanding that its subtitle is, "How to alienate friends and break up families." It is a great game, but can be quite contentious. I would recommend the game during the summer months and recommend sticking to lighter fare during the holiday season.
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
Can't figure out how I managed to reach my present advanced age without ever having heard of either "Settlers of Catan" or "Boggle." But kids--even my kids--can only watch so many movies. ("Tron" has received universally bad reviews from the dozen or so teens who have been through the house today, btw.) So I'll be picking up "Catan" and "Boggle" both.
Muchisimas gracias.
Jul '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
Diplomacy is all right. If you have several hours I'd recommend Axis & Allies for a group of 3-5.
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=ah/aa/welcome
I haven't played Stratego since I was a kid, but I remember it fondly. I'd bet a round-robin tourney (it's a two player game in the style of checkers) would be really fun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratego
May '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
Diplomacy is the ultimate, assuming you have seven reallllllllly commited-to-win players. And how often does that occur? But then, it becomes high drama. Not that the moves are complicated, but the negotiations take a toll. I heartily second all of Paleo's recommendations.
May '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
I can vouch for Catan, Carcassonne, Boggle and Stratego. All good games.
Hotels is a a good streamlined version of Monopoly... a game that doesn't take half a day to get through. If you're into wheeling and dealing, Trump might be better (my brother's friend loved it so much that he invented words for it... "T-rumptious!").
Balderdash is a great game if you have a lot of intellectuals around. It's the game I imagine the Berlinskis playing. You draw cards with rare words. Then everybody invents their own definitions for the word. Points are won by guessing the correct definitions and fooling others into believing your own invented definitions.
TriBond is a quick and simple game that's accessible to kids and fun for adults.Carcassonne is, too, by the way (a lot of room for strategy, but luck counts).
Some other boardgames worth looking into are Scattergories, Mad Gab and Catch-Phrase. My family's a bunch of boardgame fanatics, if you can't tell.
And I highly recommend Liar's Dice. You might recognize it as the dice game the pirates play in the second Pirates of the Caribbean film.
Jul '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
My family was all so drunk by Christmas Eve that they didn't have the fine motor skills for board games, so we went in for stuff like head-butting, mud-wrestling and dwarf-tossing.
Aug '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
If you can find a copy of <i>Acquire</i>, your lives will be much enriched.
If you are looking for games for two, I cannot recommend <i>Command and Colors: Ancients</i>, <i>Memoir '44</i>, or <i>Battle Cry</i> highly enough. These games all use the same underlying mechanics with tweaks to make them fit their respective time periods. The system is quick enough -- and easy enough -- for the novice war gamer, but sophisticated enough for those of us who subscribe to <i>Strategy and Tactics</i>.
I was remiss in failing to mention <i>Tales of the Arabian Nights</i> earlier. It is published by Z-Man games and combines storytelling and board gaming in a very interesting way.
May '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
Acquire! Y'know there are stores (well, one) that sell these things in our local mall. I blame you, Nathaniel.
May '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
There's a Ravensburger game called Scotland Yard that we play, it's hard to find in stores but you can snag it off Amazon. It involves one player/criminal who secretly moves around a London board using different modes of transportation. The other players/detectives try to track him down, and every five or so turns he has to reveal what station he's at.
We play Boggle too, sometimes in teams to even out the scores (adding points or pooling words). We also play Mexican train dominoes, Skip-Bo, and Rack-O, usually in combination. Electronically, the DDR pads have been known to come out.
Apples to Apples has been politically disastrous at extended family gatherings. When combined with alcohol, it's a night ender. CatchPhrase works out a lot better.
Edited on Dec 22, 2010 at 11:16amMay '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
We have two favorite parlour games:
The Name Game: Everyone writes a name on a slip of paper (famous, infamous, known to all, known only to the writer -- it doesn't matter). One person (preferably an adult) then reads the names aloud once only.
Players then try to guess who entered which name. If someone guesses your name unsuccessfully, it is then your turn to ask someone else. If you are successful in guessing a name, that person joins your team and you share information. Winner is last person guessed. All ages can play and there is a remarkable amount of strategy involved: aka Would Grandpa really choose "Justin Bieber?"
Who Am I?: In the second game the player leaves the room and then the group picks a well-known (famous person, family member, beloeved schoolteacher, etc.) identity for the player. When the player returns, members of the group each suggest in turn an item for an imaginary suitcase this person would take on a trip. The game can be made difficult or easy but can be very funny and again entertaining for all ages.
Cheers!
Aug '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
I remember a game called the Pit that I played on a really long bus ride with a bunch of other college girls once. Good, clean fun, and you get to yell and gesticulate.
Taboo is fun.
My sib and I invented Scavenging Scrabble, which is different from Scrabble in two ways: first, you don't keep track of stuff like triple word scores (this was an accidental development, actually); second (and this is where "scavenging" comes in), any time you can remove a tile from the board and replace it with a tile from your hand that still leaves real words behind, you may do so. It's a way to swap out letters from your hand:
For example, if you have MATURE and MOSES joined at the M on the board, and you want that M and have an N in your hand, you can replace the M with your N, so that the board now reads NATURE and NOSES. Then you can make your move using the M you took.
Fictionary and Pictionary are fun. As is an updated version of Consequences. I also love Mad Libs. These games are not so much competitive as for laughs.
Nov '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
Regardless of the quality of the game, you are my new hero for the day.
I won't be able to get it tomorrow (turns out you need money to buy things), but depending on how lucrative the holiday is for me, I'm planning on getting it. Will it be on Steam too?
Who would've thought, a righter-thinking game designer type. I guess, as usual, it's the more progressive types that voice their opinions in magazine interviews.
May '10
Re: Christmas Games and Pastimes
Not a fan of Catan (at least not the actual original game...I like some of the spinoffs, like a card game they did and a 2 player board game that takes place in space), but I heartily second and third Aaron's recommendation of Carcassonne, which is a game for the ages and a blast.
Also has excellent iPhone and iPad versions.
I've brought on holiday a new and hot board game called Castle Ravenloft, but after an epic unboxing haven't actually played it yet. It has a distinction of being an entirely cooperative game for up to five players; cooperative games are a nice change of pace.