Game Time!

I got this idea from my friend Jessica and our family has been loving it the past few months.

It started this summer. We’ve always loved games and usually play at least one game a week. But Jessica gave us the idea to do a game centerpiece. She took out a few games each week and left them in the middle of a table in their house. Then whenever someone wanted to play, it was ready to go. So we did the same. We don’t have too many games but it was a good rotation. We found out that we didn’t know the actual rules to some of the games.

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Here are some we got photos of this past summer:

*Monopoly Express

Monopoly Express is an older game that we got from my (Joyce’s) parents’ house and it is part of a set that includes another old game called Hi Jack! If you like Monopoly but don’t like how long it takes to play or don’t want to put a time limit on it, you can get *Monopoly Deal Card Game which is a similar game. *Monopoly Express is available on Amazon but only through third-party sellers and it’s not the exact one that we have.

The Chipmunks

The Chipmunks game looks like a super old game and besides it coming from Norm’s parents’ house, we don’t know anything else about it. It is super fun if you’re looking for a quick break but not wanting to be competitive. It’s a great game for kids to learn about times of the day. You could probably make your own version with other characters or people in your family.

*Mancala

I bought this game for just $3 from the buy/sell group I facilitate and it has been worth more than the $3 I spent. I’m not sure if it was popular before but I actually didn’t learn how to play this until college. *Classic Mancala Game is another game you can probably just make yourself from a few items but we like this foldable wooden tray/board.

*The Oregon Trail

This game brings back so many memories of the old Oregon Trail game on the Apple IIe computers in elementary school in the 1980s. There are many different versions of the card game but *The Oregon Trail: Hunt for Food Card Game – Based On The Classic Computer Game by Pressman is the one we own. It’s more or less a collaboration game. While you work together, players can lose if they end up with an illness/drowning/lost card.

*Taboo

The original Taboo was a favorite of ours when we got together in big groups for game night. I think we got this from a House Party package and it’s just as fun because words! 🙂 It’s interesting to see how one player will sometimes use shared experiences to get teammates to guess the word. Any version of Taboo is fun but we have *Taboo Buzzd Game.

Checkers

This is another game we got from the buy/sell group! It doesn’t quite come with enough pieces but we do have some checker pieces from another game set that we could use to play. If we were to buy a checker game, I think we would get this *7-in-1 combo game set that comes with other games as well.

We don’t have that much surface space since we don’t have a dining table. We eat at a small kitchen table that is only big enough for whatever food we’re eating right in front of each of us. So we don’t keep the games spread out. E usually chooses a few games on Sunday and they go into a shoebox on an extra table that we use during school time to teach/learn the lesson.

Then we decided to start a puzzle during Labor Day weekend since another heatwave came and air quality was not great. This is the biggest one that we’ve done together and it was much more challenging than we thought…mostly because we were stubborn and didn’t look at how the actual scene looked after we took the pieces out of the book. This is not a puzzle we would have chosen but we are helping someone declutter. We finally finished after 20+ days. It is cleared and life can move on.

We do like actual board games too but we usually play those at my parents’ or our friends’ houses. *The Ladybug Game is one of the best for kids…a great first board game besides Candyland. *Game of Life and *Pictionary are two board games we enjoy though you could play Pictionary without the board too. *Boggle and *Uno are two other non-board game game we like. And of course, *a good deck of cards can mean hours of fun!!

What Games Do Our Friends Like?

That’s a great question! We asked our friends what their favorite games are and here’s what they had to say!

What were your favorite games growing up? What are your favorite games now?

*Note: This post may contain affiliate links, which means we’ll receive a tiny percentage if you make a purchase through our link at no extra cost to you. We received one or more items for review. Read our disclosure policy here.