Games for the family gathering

[rlbeaver]

So, my family plays traditional board games, monopoly, jenga, etc. I thought, this holiday season, I would introduce them to some of the odd games out, like Groo, Illuminati, Robo Rally...

So, what games would you introduce to your family on the holiday season?

[Andrew Hackard]

I'm looking forward to trying Cineplexity with my family next week. Kill Dr. Lucky. My family loves card games such as bridge and Uno, so Spooks is a favorite. I may go pick up one or more of the Z-Man "Monster Movie" card games; I played those at PAX and loved them.

We also tend to go in for trivia games, and one I found recently that offers chances for everyone to shine is Smart A$$, from University Games. If your group includes small children, you may shy away from it, but there's nothing overtly risque about the game -- it even has a cartoon of a burro on the cover.

I may even give Mega Monopoly a tryout, although I may not get any takers.

But if I had to pick one and only one family-friendly game, it would be Apples To Apples. That is probably the perfect group game, especially if no one's being particularly cut-throat about it. I've played with immediate family and with groups of relative strangers a dozen strong, and I've never and I mean NEVER had a bad time with it.

[xlyce]

Games I would introduce?
Werewolf, nothing needed but a deck of cards and it is interactive and fast.
Ingenious, easy to teach and easy to play
Formula Motor Racing, see above, but it has cars!
Ticket to Ride, easy rummy style game.

[PK]

I got my (very whitebread) mother to play King's Blood last xistmas and she absolutely fell in love with it. This holiday season, I introduced her to Greedquest, which she was a bit more lukewarm towards.

[RevBob]

My mother absolutely loves GreedQuest, and earlier tonight she was raving about it to the mother of a friend of hers. GQ really passes my "family friendly" test thanks to empirical observation; I can bring it to the table and play with my mother, my cousin and his wife, and my "nephew" (his son, age 12), and we all have fun. Dino Hunt and Spooks also pass that test, and actually most of the Looney Labs stuff I have does, now that I think about it. Fluxx, Treehouse, Aquarius...all good family games.

[Mental_Myopia]

My family often plays "Kings in the Corner" and "Sequence" when we get together. We also play "Mexican Train Dominoes" quite often. I'm going to shop around and try to pick up "The Farm Game" for them, as that title is super fun!

[Axegrrl]

We successfully introduced Ticket To Ride to my bro and his 12-year-old daughter. (I say successfully, since my bro asked if we could play it again the next day, and his daughter joined in again -- and both of them did better in the second game.)

[CaseMajor]

"Cranium" is probably the greatest party/parlor/family gathering game ever created.

Why?

Because it is essentially a combination of several of the best party/parlor/family gathering games in History: Trivial Pursuit, Charades, Pictionary, etc.

Playing it with my relatives during the holiday season has become a bit of a tradition in my family in recent years.

[C. J. Burke]

Too Christmas gift games that played well on New Year's Day:

Smarty Party -- which is similar in ways to Outburst, but you're not on teams, and you hope to be the smarty pants of the round (it comes with smarty pants)
and
Smart Ass -- which reads like the 20 Questions game we had, except it has fewer hints and the object is that the first person to shout out the answer gets to move. However, you only have one guess. So if you wait one more clue just to verify to yourself that you have the right answer, someone else may grab it.

The interesting thing about both of these games (this may be good or bad) is that *everybody* is involved in every round, unlike, say, a game of Trivial Pursuit where the only people who have to be paying attention are the person reading the card, the person answering the question and maybe the person who goes next so the game keeps moving along.

This can be a drawback if anyone has to run off for a second a bunch of times or if you might continually get interrupted because someone is needed. It did break my son's habit of playing his Gameboy while playing a board game.

[Andrew Hackard]

Originally Posted by C. J. Burke

Smart Ass -- which reads like the 20 Questions game we had, except it has fewer hints and the object is that the first person to shout out the answer gets to move. However, you only have one guess. So if you wait one more clue just to verify to yourself that you have the right answer, someone else may grab it.

The interesting thing ... (this may be good or bad) is that *everybody* is involved in every round,

That's a very good point, and something I should have mentioned above. There's no "down time."

The other thing we did as a handicap was rule that my nine-year-old nephew was NOT barred from a question for giving a wrong answer. He kept jumping the gun and getting frustrated, and that seemed a decent way to keep him interested without unbalancing the game. His adult partner (my mother) didn't have the same leniency, though, and a couple of times she blurted out a wrong answer too soon and he'd hit her arm (gently) and say "I knew that, Grandma!" It was cute.