It's All Just Games and Fun

Amy and I took a post-Christmas shopping trip to Jonesboro, Arkansas, to spend a little leftover Christmas money (I know, right?!). One of the stores at the mall features calendars, jigsaw puzzles, and party games, and everything on hand was 50 percent off, so I bought three new party games. We love games in the Sanders house, and we also belong to a church group that has game night once a month, so the new additions will come in handy.

My new purchases were a six-in-one Party Charades game, a category matching game called "Tension," which is similar to the eighties game "Outburst," and a crazy party game called "Furt," which would take an entire blog entry to explain. Suffice to say the kids and I test-drove "Furt" Monday night, and it got the seal of approval from everyone.

This led me to think about what my top ten board games of all time list would be. I eliminated some of the more obvious choices like Monopoly (too vicious), Clue (boring), Scrabble (super-boring), and Risk (takes too long). My top ten is based on a combination of fun, challenging, and entertaining. Feel free to list some of your own favorites in the comments here or on Facebook.
 
10. Pente
A mainstay of college dorm study breaks at Mizzou, this simple game is similar to "Go," which experts say is the oldest human game in existence. The goal is simple: get five stones in a row or capture five pairs of stones from your opponent. We wasted hours of time that we should have been studying playing this game instead.


9. Mouse Trap
There's not a single one of you who grew up in the 1970s who didn't have this game. It was less of a game and more of an excuse to build the Rube Goldberg contraption that fell on the plastic mouse game piece. If your friends or siblings weren't around to play, you could just build it yourself.


8. Catan
A more recent addition, this deceptively simple game requires you to gather resources in order to build roads, settlements, and cities faster than your opponents, but you also can trade and collaborate with them to reach your goal. Since this game was featured on the 100th episode of "The Big Bang Theory," I can't play this game without thinking, "I have wood; I need sheep. Who has sheep for my wood?"


7. Taboo
One of the great 1980s-era party games, this game required you to get your team to guess a word on a card, but there were also five "taboo" words that you couldn't say to describe the word. For example, if the word was "hamburger," you couldn't use the words "beef, patty, bun, pickles, drive-thru" as part of your description. Just to make it more fun, your opponent, sitting next to you, had a buzzer to buzz you if you used a taboo word. Great game for making enemies out of friends.


6. Sorry!
The world's best game for torturing siblings, especially younger ones. Game play is remedial: you just flip a card and move the right number of spaces, but when you land on another player's space, you got to send them back to "Start"...and right into the grip of rage and insanity! Mwaa-haa-haa-haa!!!


5. Trivial Pursuit
The last time my family played this game with me, it was all of them (seven or eight people) against me by myself. Guess who won? To this day, this game is forbidden at family gatherings.


4. Pictionary
Drawing games have become a common activity in many other party games, such as "Cranium" (probably 11 or 12 on an expanded list for me) and my new "Furt" purchase, so it's easy to forget the perfection of the original. I prefer to play on twin whiteboards like Burt Reynolds' "Win, Lose, or Draw" game show, but the principle is still the same.


3. Dominion
A strategic card game set in a medieval kingdom, this game was introduced to me in the aforementioned church game group, and I was hooked from the beginning. The brilliant part is that you can mix and match the card groupings each time you play, making the game different every time. You have to think in terms of both short-term gains as well as long-term strategy. I could play this game in a 72-hour marathon without hesitation.


2. Dark Tower
A birthday present in 1981 (my 13th), this condensed take on "Dungeons & Dragons" featured board play spaces with an electronic tower in the middle of the game that acted as the digital dungeon master, determining the outcome of battles, haggling for goods, and final victory. Good luck finding a working version of this game; if you can even find it on eBay, prices start around $300. Why no one has updated this game today is a mystery to me.


1. Catchphrase
The party game of choice both in our house and among most of our friends, Catchphrase combines the skill of "Password"—the game gives you a word in a simple LED readout, and you have to get your team to guess the word without using any part of it—with the random frustration of "Hot Potato." The game has a beeping timer, and if your team is caught with the device when the timer goes off, the other team gets a point. We almost always play Men vs. Women, and as the years have gone by, the fun hasn't diminished one little bit.