Games Games Games!!

we just discovered Loaded Questions. SO FUN in a big group.
We also like Apples to Apples, Phase 10, Cranium, Monopoly.

My daughter likes Connect 4 (only good for two people) She also likes Jenga. We were given Clue Jr by her teacher Christmas 2007 that she really likes as well.

Apples to Apples is really fun one for a group
Blockus is fun for 2-4 players
True Colors is fun for Couples

Good luck!

Blokus - It's similar to Tetris but on a game board. It's an always changing strategic game that we LOVE to play. The side benefit is that it sharpens the thinking & reasoning skills of the players (especially the children) on some level.

Ned's Head. The younger boys (and maybe girls too) love it! It allows them to reach inside Ned's Head and pulling out some nasty (plastic) things like a used Q-tip, Ned's lost lunch, etc.... They have to pick a card and pull out that object. Supposed to enhance sensory and fine motor skills.

A very fun game to play as a family or as a group with teams is Cranium. It's easy to find in any stores.

Some maybe a little bit harder to find and for older kids or teens:

Ticket to Ride
Settlers of Catan
Puerto Rico
Traders of Genoa
Agricola

These are great board games you can find online or if you have a specialized gaming store near home (like Game Chest for instance).

Apples to Apples is a great family game! It's simple, but can provoke some good discussions. There's the regular Apples to Apples, and an Apples to Apples Jr. edition.

During a family get together we played a game called "Apples to Apples", It's so fun. Parents, Grandparents and children had a lot of fun with many laughs. It's good for children maybe 8 and older.It's an instant favorite.

how old are your kids?

for older kids (1st grade & up) I really like cranium jr.

my neice loves to play "pretty pretty princess" you move your priness around the board and collect jewelry that you get to wear at the same time. she especially likes to play with her grandpa and dad, thinks it is funny to see them wear jewelry. though it gets a little old after the 2nd or 3rd round.

I hate candyland and chutes & ladders.. they are really annoying, and C&L can go on and on and on... but kids always love them.

we also like to play "sorry", but most smaller kids have a hard time playing fairly without getting too upset when they get bumped back off the board.

also, if you have older kids they have about a million versions of trivial pursuit..

oh and I haven't played myself, but my sister got the disney version of "scene it" for my 5 y.o. neice for christmas... its all the animated movies which my neice has seen 400 times, she really enjoys it. she is still learning how to play games (doesn't like that fact that she can't win all the time).. but it has been fun and my sister likes it much better than candyland.

My brother just bought a new game called "Bohnanza" and it's a lot of fun, we've played it at practically every holiday party we've been to this year. You can get it in the mall at "Games People Play" or "Funfinity". Also, we love to play Ticket To Ride. Scattergories is one of my favorite group games, and Guesstures. They're a little older. I hope those help! If I think of anymore, I'll reply again, I LOVE getting together and playing games.

I think Settlers of Catan is our family favorite. We will go for spells where we play it every single night. We also like Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, Dutch Blitz (very fast card game with a special deck).
We also play a game called Empire when we have people over to our house. It isn't a board game though. It is so much fun! One person is the scribe, and everyone else tells him their name for the game (real, fictional or totally made up name). The scribe adds two names to the list as extra names to make it a bit more tricky. Then the scribe reads the list of names in random order two times. Then picks someone to go first. That person picks someone and tries to guess who he is (Joe, are you Mickey Mouse?). If he gets it wrong then "Joe" gets to have a turn guessing someone in the room. If Joe is right, then the person he guessed joins his empire. They will then work together to guess someone else. You get to keep going until you miss. (Joe would tell everyone in his empire who he is in the game-whispered so that nobody else can hear.) Eventually, you have two empires competing to guess who the other is. It is great fun, and usually you have a couple of names that nobody can remember. We have heard from pretty much everyone who has played with us that they have played it many times with their guests at their home. Feel free to email me if you want more info about this game. Oh, one more thing, we have even 5 year olds play this game with us. Although they aren't quite as quick on it, they can play.
Blessings,
Tonya

If you live on the north end of town, you should visit:
http://www.karliquin.net/GameKnightWiki
It is owned by a couple with kids; they can help you.

~S

We love Spy Alley, Ticket to Ride, and Zooloretto (won game of the year in Germany).

Last Word and Imaginiff are our current favorites.

We just love the games "Harvest Time" and "Max" from the Family Pastimes company. You can order them online and I love them because the company's philosophy is "Play together, not against each other." They offer several excellent strategy games where the object is to win together, not alone. They encourage lots of discussion and cooperation. "Max" is a simple game about keeping little animals safe from a prowling cat. No reading is needed, just the ability to count how many spaces to move, but it's so interesting. It only takes about 10 minutes and even my husband and I will play it after the kids are in bed.
Harvest Time is also awesome and there are a couple different ways to play, depending on the ages of the people involved. Everyone is trying to harvest their gardens before the snow comes; if you finish your garden, you're not done, because you still need to help the other players with their gardens. And there are no useless turns, because if the card you draw says you should harvest a tomato but you're done with your own, you can harvest someone else's tomato to help them. It's a great work-together strategy game.
"Dr. Hedgehog" is another excellent cooperative board game. children work together to help the hedgehog bring apples and pears to his sick friends. I found it at www.novanaturals.com.
www.oompa.com has a lot of great haba brand games. they are ezpensive but beautiful and unique.
Family Pastimes also makes a game called "Princess" about a smart little girl working to help her kingdom and some for older children called "Snow Storm" and one about a city-wide power outage--I can't think of the name. You can find them at www.blueberryforest.com, or Google Family Pastimes games.
Have fun!

Aggravation, Pass the Pigs, and Phase 10 are some of our favorites. We also like the DVD Movie Trivia games (Disney version is good if you are playing with kids)

S., 26, mom of Tyrrone, 1

Curses, Taboo, Mad Gab, Last Word, Cranium, Gestures are our favorites.

We just started playing Sequence. It is a board/card game where you try to make 5 in a row on the board with the cards that you get. My 8 year old loves it and it is fun for adults too.

Try Cranium! It's a great game for the adults and older kids. I think they have different versions for the younger kiddos too. It's a blast and you learn a lot at the same time :)

Boxers or Briefs is the funnest! It is kind of like apples to apples! Great for adults and good for kids that are reading! All our friends and their kids always ask us to bring that game!!

We love strategy games. Try "Swashbuckled." Its fairly new by a small company but is tons of fun. Theres a little bit of a learning curve, but its easy to learn as you go. Basic premise is that its a pirate game... pirate and mechants are trying to safely deliver cargo to different world ports. Its really fun. The website is funathomegames.com or if you're in Utah you can probably find it at the BYU Bookstore or Deseret Book.

When our family gets together and plays games, we LOVE Aggravation. It is so much fun, and usually more fun the more people you have playing it. It's great for kids too. Easy to understand and play. Also, my husband and I like to play Yatzee and Rummy-o. My aunt and uncle got a game for Christmas called Whits and Waggers that was fun, and we also like to play Taboo. Happy Gaming!!

uno and aggrevation
card games are always fun too

Apples to Apples is a great game, definitely one of my favorites!

Balloon Lagoon - it's fun for kids and adults!

I'm not sure how old your kids are but a game we really enjoy playing is Cranium. We like it because it has a little of everything i.e. drawing, acting, molding clay etc...so a little something for everyone. Another game we recently played was Apples to Apples. It didn't sound too fun at first but after playing it was a blast. But these games your kids probably have to be a little older. Scategories is also a favorite. Good luck and have fun.

Well, there are so many! :) I guess it depends on what age group you're looking for and how many people. There are a couple of board games that my family really loves. Settlers of Cattan is one, but there are some people that don't like it becaue of strategy involved. Ticket to Ride is another game that we've just gotten in the last year and love. It's not difficult, but enjoyable. You can only play 5 people with that though. Our family has more than one game now so that we can get a couple of games going. As for some card games, we recently discovered a game called Ruckus. My 8-13 yr old nieces and nephews especially love that one. "Pit" is a lot of fun for lots of people. Catch Phrase, Mad Gab, Phase 10, Blockus... That's all I can think of at the moment.

We play FARKEL every time we go to my dad's house (literally!) It's a dice game that is super easy to play, fast and a ton of fun! You can find it online, I bought my set at Amazon.com. It's kind of like yatzee but different. You roll 6 dice and a 1 is 100 points, 5 is 50. Other things like 3-of-a-kind, 3 pairs, 4 or 5-of-a-kind, etc are worth so many points. You can keep rolling the dice until you either have a high score you want to keep, or you bust - not gaining any more points. Once all 6 dice are rolled you can roll them all again and keep adding onto your score. We play a little different than the rules: once you have a score of 500+ points, any round after that you can roll on what the person before you had and add onto their score (this makes it really exciting!) It's a great game!

Also like: Banagrams (or you can use scrabble tiles - it's like speed scrabble but you build your own words and count up points after all tiles are used.)

Phase 10 - card game, Upwords, Seadlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride (both board games), Rummikub, Curses,

Crack the Case is awesome! Great for road trips. It's like a solve the mystery type game. I love it. Probably have to look online for it. I found it at a Salvation Army type place used.

Hope you find good stuff!

Apples to Apples is hilarious to play in groups. If you are including children then get the junior version...it is still just as fun for adults.
Take care,
B.

We just played a new game on Christmas that I loved so much that, when I found all stores were sold out, I went to Amazon and bought it. It was only $10 too! It's called "Doodle Dice". It was a lot of fun and my two older childre, 9 and 7, enjoyed it very much.
Loved your question! I enjoyed reading everyones responses and will also check out some of those other games!

My kids really like Clue ( they are 9 and 12). Uno is good too.

Cranium, LIFE, Monopoly, Scene It (lots of different editions), Catch Phrase.

I vote for UNO and for Twister!! Uno - even little kids can play with minimal help. And Twister - how fun is it to watch everyone tie themselves in knots?? Those were my fav as a kid - and now as an adult, too.

We just got one for Christmas called The Game Of Things, it had a Target logo on it so I think it was from there. We played it once with my husbands family and laughed the whole time. It is definitely for adults and although we kept it "PG" it could easily become "R" rated, I don't think I would play it with my brothers!:)
We also got Battleship and Mancala that both of my girls have played at school and like but they are only 2 person games.
As a family we play Monkeys on the Bed, and Hi Ho Cherry Oh, but I have young ones, I'm not sure if that's what your looking for.
One of my all time favorites is Cranium. Because it's a little of everything, it never gets old.
I also like Settlers of Catan.
I hope this helps.
Have fun!

CURSES is really fun, but you usually have to buy it online. Not good for little kids, they need to be able to read... but it's a laugh and great for teenagers and adults!

Apples to Apples. It's my families favorite!

We received Apples to Apples for Christmas. It is a very fun game and comes in a children's version also. We sure had a great time playing it and the laughter was non-stop.

Uno is our favorite family game - it's portable and they only need to know how to read numbers 0-9 and colors. We've been playing it together since the youngest was 3 1/2.

My daughter got Pictureka for Christmas, it is a blast! Fun for up to four players. Also I have heard and am looking for Pictionary man.

We just got a game called Loaded Questions and it is very fun! You need between 4-8 players, more than 8 gets pretty hard as we found out at Thanksgiving. We bought it at Target. Another game that my family loves playing is Trouble. Our 7 yr old got it for Christmas and we have played it almost every day, even my 16 yr old daughter likes playing it with us. Have fun!

Apples to Apples is our Favorite!

We like playing "red light -green light" in the car. We try to guess how many red or green lights there are going to be between our house and our destination or vice versa. We figure out how many lights we go trough then each make a guess. Its also good for teaching simple math.

These are all one that we have loved playing.

RoboRally - somewhat complicated to learn, but a lot of fun.
Spy Trackdown - a new one for us, but we enjoy it.
The Totally Insane Card Game - Great with a large group
Apples to Apples - The junior edition is great, too.
Settlers of Catan
Ticket to Ride