Tis the season

Ah, Christmas. Wait, what’s that? It’s only Thanksgiving? Well would someone please tell the stores so that they can stop playing that stupid Paul McCartney song?

Okay, so Thanksgiving. It might as well be Christmas because if your family was like mine growing up then you usually combined both holidays into one. My family was somewhat spread out so traveling two months in a row wasn’t the easiest thing to do, so every year we swapped between making Thanksgiving and Christmas the actual holiday. We’d all gather at the grandma and grandpa’s house and spend a day playing with toys, watching football, eating a lot of food and then playing games…and this was way before video games.

Actually, that’s a lie. I had my Nintendo and I usually took it with me to my grandparents because they lived out in the country and there wasn’t much else to do. But during the holidays the video games took a back seat because playing table top games with my cousins and family was far more enjoyable. It didn’t happen but once a year so you had to take advantage of having people around. Plus, with parents and even grandparents on hand it was the one time when we could all do something fun together. I’ll attribute these times as to why I love games so much…they really are the one thing everyone could enjoy, regardless what generation they were from.

But the real challenge every Thanksgiving evening was the debate over which game to play. Everybody had their favorite, I’m sure, and I did too but it really didn’t matter as long as we were all playing. Of course, then we had to all refresh ourselves on the rules, set up cards and boards, and just spend way too much time getting started. Some of the games were simple, others required a pencil a paper just to figure stuff out, but they were all fun and able to keep my family interested…which was somewhat of a chore in the first place.

So this holiday season, whether it be Thanksgiving, Christmas, or the popular Thankschristmas, don’t forget to turn off the television and put away the Wiimotes for some good old fashioned table top fun. Here are some games that are guaranteed to get your family laughing together.

Monopoly

The ultimate family game if for no other reason that up to eight people can play at the same time. We all know that Monopoly can last a long time, but when you’re playing with more than even four people the game speeds up quite a bit. Money is flying all over the place…houses are being placed and railroads are being bought up left and right. And if you played like my cousin, you bought everything you landed on and conned the rest of the family out of their money with fast-talking trades. One year we had to go dig through my LEGO bricks so he could build enough hotels and houses.

Just don't let grandma be the banker...she's shifty.

Rummy

Nothing beats a good card game. Board games are great but they often have a lot of parts and a lot of rules that just end up making things confusing. Card games like Rummy are hard to screw up but are just as fun. My grandparents taught me rummy and my grandmother would whoop up every year when we all played. You might be more into the euchre or hearts but the next time you have a few aunts and uncles hanging around, start up a quick game of rummy and you’ll probably learn something about them you didn’t know before.

Rummikub

So you think rummy as a card game is too easy? Try Rummikub and your mind will ache, partly just from reading the rules. At its core, Rummikub is the rummy card game just played with tiles instead. Each player tries to be the first to unload all their tiles by creating matching sequences and like-numbers. That might not sound like much but then throw in the part where you can rearrange the tiles on the table in any way you want and you’ll quickly find yourself spending way too long trying to get rid of more than just one tile. Rummikub is a spacial learner’s paradise with a healthy dose of number patterns. It might take a few rounds to get the hang of it but once you do you’ll want to play all night.

Rummikub. It will challenge your brain, your mind and your head.

Uno

A card game for the ages. And when I say Uno I mean straight up Uno. Not the fancy Attack Uno or Uno Dice or Uno Slam or any other of the bastard Uno games that have come out in past several years. Just tried and true Uno. All you need is a table with a person in every seat, no batteries required. Just like rummy, Uno is understood by everyone but I’ve found that Uno brings out the swearing a little more than rummy so beware.

Reverse!? And then a skip?! C'mon, man!

Pictionary

This was my personal favorite game to play during the holidays, but only because I loved to draw (and still do) so I thought I had a distinct advantage. However, I quickly realized that my skill at drawing Richard Nixon didn’t matter much when my teammates still couldn’t guess the answer, leaving it obvious for the opposing team. This is another game that will bring out the best vocabulary in people…and not just swearing but the things people would guess is hilarious. The laughs per minute when playing Pictionary is also off the charts, so make sure you have plenty of paper and pencils.

Cards and dice can save your holiday

In a time when everyone in your family has a smartphone and video games, it’s easy to forget how much fun “simple” games can be. I also know it’s tempting to just play the electronic versions of some of these games (even I can acknowledge the marvelousness that is Monopoly where you don’t have to make change) but playing these games at the table where they belong isn’t so much about the game itself but the people you’re playing with.

The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is quite possibly the only time you’ll meet with extended family all year, so why not try to enjoy their company and have some fun? You don’t have to talk about your job, or school or your problems elsewhere in the world. You just need to have fun…and that’s easier than you might think, I don’t care how old you are.

Waterworks, still fun after almost 40 years.

Plumbing has never been more fun

When it comes to card games, I’m pretty bad. I’m not very good at rummy, poker, euchre or even Uno, for that matter. Board games were always more my style, but Waterworks was an exception to the rule. Released in 1972, well before I was born, Waterworks was a game I always remember having in the house and wanting to play. Waterworks is a very visual game and I think that’s why I liked it so much. It was a card game that didn’t rely on knowing number patterns or scoring points.

If you’ve ever played the Pipe Dream style video games, like the one from the NES days, then you’ll be able to jump right into Waterworks. The goal of Waterworks is to connect your water faucet to your water spout. That sounds simple enough but you can’t just start laying down pipe willy-nilly, you have to carefully match card orientation from start to finish to keep your water flow uninterrupted. Again, this might sound like an easy challenge but standing in your way are lots of leaky pipes and unexpected turns…all thanks to your opponent.

Those darn lead pipes! Use a wrench to keep the water flowing.

Competitive pipe laying

Waterworks supports up to four players, although I’ve only ever played with two, but even then it’s a mad dash to lay down your own pipe while finding the best time to screw over your opponent. In Waterworks every person can play their cards in on any other players’ plumbing. You draw your random pipe card and then decide if you want to discard it, use it to get yourself closer to the victory, or use it to throw off your opponent. However, you’re not limited to just giving your opponent bad cards, you can apply a strategy if you want.

Along with “good” pipe cards that carry water ever closer to the end, there are also “bad” pipe cards that show leaky pipes. You can give a leaky pipe card to your opponent at any time – assuming it matches card orientation – and your opponent can’t win unless they repair the leak. You can repair a bad pipe by simply laying down a non-leaky pipe card on top, which may take time, or you can take the easy way out and spend one of your wrench tokens to instantly make a repair. Of course, you only have a few wrenches and once they’re gone, they’re gone, so you want to use them judiciously. You can also confuse your opponent by adding non-leaky pipes to their plumbing. This might not sound like much in the way of punishment but consider that your pipe card may divert your opponent’s plumbing in a way that didn’t expect…or in a way in which they have no matching cards in their hand, which means they’ll have to draw cards and waste time until they get one. If you really want to mess with your friend, just lay down a T pipe and watch them scramble to find a cap.

To win at Waterworks you must first have at least 15 pipe cards between the start and finish. Once that requirement is met you win, assuming you don’t have any leaky pipes or open ends. Like real plumbing, your pipe paths have to make sense and they can’t be left open. Fifteen cards might not sound like much of a requirement but when you consider you have to match card orientation and that you’re at the mercy of random card pulls, you’ll find that most game sessions require far more than the 15 card minimum. A game of Waterworks goes pretty fast too, maybe 15-20 minutes at most, even for an “intense” game. But if there’s one thing Waterworks does well it’s that it makes you want to play again and again. You may only intend to take a 20 minute break to play cards, but you’ll soon find yourself wasting an hour trying to best your friend at quick draw plumbing.

When was the last time you saw a drain in your throw away pile?

Plumbing in style

I mentioned that gimmicks in games are a typical sign that a game isn’t quite as fun as its bells and whistles may suggest. Waterworks is a good example of how to balance gimmick with gameplay. The pipe cards in Waterworks are modeled after real pipes, both galvanized and copper, whereas a modern version would probably be all cartoony and childish. The draw and throw away pile is in the shape of an old bathtub that comes complete with a drain! And the wrench tokens you use to make quick pipe repairs are incredibly detailed and they’re even metal, another thing you probably wouldn’t see in a modern card game. The wrenches were always my favorite part of the game, mostly because they looked real and were brass. It also didn’t hurt that they were the perfect size for my GI Joe action figures, which makes it even more surprising that these little wrenches survived my childhood.

When you look at the whole game, the entire design and presentation of Waterworks is a real gem. Everything from the logo down to the instruction booklet are all wonderfully designed and follow the style of the time. I don’t recall the last time I saw a card game manual with varying typefaces and tons of pictures to explain how to play. Like I said, Waterworks is a very visual game and that’s even true when you’re learning how to play, and that’s pretty rare (and awesome). As a bonus you’ll also get a box that features a wonderfully 1970s family enjoying the game…although it appears like they’re enjoying it in their underground lair. And is it just me, or does the mom remind you of the mother from The Wonder Years?

If this happy family doesn't make you smile, you're a robot.

Four decades of plumbing fun

Waterworks was probably a gimmick game in when it came out almost 40 years ago. I don’t know how popular it was or how long it lasted before it fell off store shelves, but I think Waterworks is a game that deserves a little revival. I have to say that an 40th anniversary edition would be pretty sweet! I’d like to see a Super Waterworks that has a double-sized deck and requires you lay down twice as many pipes before you can win. I want to see my plumbing snake all over the room so I can wallow in my own pipe-laying glory…or maybe that is just a pipe dream.

Brian is a freelance writer that blogs, tweets, plays with Hot Wheels and even co-hosts a weekly podcast.

The game of Life as I knew it...Art Linkletter approved.

The sweet Life

Like many of the games I had growing up, Life was another garage sale find my mother picked out, and surprisingly enough, the game was complete. I remember it being a huge box and when I got home discovered an equally massive game board…but this was no normal game board. Whereas Monopoly just had some simple, ordered squares on it, Life had mountains and buildings and a giant spinner! It was like the Wheel of Fortune was in my living room, only smaller. Better yet, every player drove a car, which means I wasn’t always arguing about being the car like I did when I played Monopoly. The board was a lot of fun, even though it looked like it was designed by Stevie Wonder, and the cars were cool, but better than all of that was the money.

The game of Life introduced me to denominations of cash I could never have imagined. I thought I was rolling big time with a $500 bill in Monopoly, but now I had $50,000 and $100,000 bills at my disposal, each with some old guys’ pictures on them. This was a step up from Uncle Pennybags…it felt more legit. Life felt like an adult game. It didn’t hurt that Life also had a few extras like promissory notes, fire insurance and life insurance, and you could even play the stock market. There was a lot going on and keeping track of everything was quite a chore for any child, but I liked that challenge. I liked that it demanded a little more responsibility…and I also learned what the heck a promissory note was.

Thankfully some things never change

Predicting the future

One thing I couldn’t have predicted was just how much the game of Life follows what the average person’s real life was really about. You start out pretty much poor and then go to college, then get married, then acquire some kids and then experience a bunch of random events that could pay off the first time and then bankrupt you the next time, eventually all leading you to a life of riches or (usually) a trip to the poor house with nothing more to show for it than a good story. Say what you want, but the game of Life lived up to its name. Life introduced me to the importance of insurance and showed me the stock market is always a gamble. It also showed me you never want to have more than two children and apparently you can buy yourself a nice yacht for a mere $36,000…not bad.

Of course, my whole experience with Life is based on the 1960s release of the game, which featured a whole-hearted endorsement by Art Linkletter on the box. To this day I couldn’t really tell you who Art Linkletter was or why his endorsement on Life made a difference, but every time I hear his name I just think of this game. Nonetheless, this version of the game felt and looked just like the time period. Even though I was playing the game in the 1980s, I knew it was older than that and that was part of the fun. I always liked learning about the history of the game and I loved thinking about my parents playing this same game when they were young. It felt special knowing we all have stories and memories about the same game.

I'm surprised they didn't increase the number of children you could have.

Life comes to an end

Unfortunately, like many of my toys and games, Life lost its attraction and became cannibalized for other purposes. In this case, that cause was Monopoly. I find it ironic that Life served as a replacement for Monopoly only to have Life be eaten alive by a Monopoly addiction later in life. My friends and I would play some hardcore Monopoly to the point where we needed more cash, houses and hotels. LEGObricks served as super hotels while the $20,000 and $50,000 bills from Life ultimately served as Monopoly money. You’ve never seen a free parking pot until you’ve seen a few $100,000 bills in it, each with Art Linkletter’s face on it. Thanks to Monopoly, my yard sale game of Life was slowly dismantled and eventually got so out of whack and missing parts that it was unplayable. I think my game of Life eventually ended up in the trash, although every now and then I find a random auto insurance policy in a box of old toys.

Life ain’t what it used to be

A few years ago while my wife and I were wandering the aisles of Target looking for something to do, we decided to buy the game of Life and relive a bit of our youth. Of course, what we found on the store shelf was not the big 1960s version I grew up with. No, this was an updated version with cartoon characters and smiling families all over the place. I was not amused and not impressed, but I was in for even more of a shock when we started to play with a few new rules and changes.

If only real pay days put 50s in my pocket.

It had been a while since I had played that original game of Life so my memory was a bit fuzzy, but as we played through the new version I started to notice quite a few differences that just kind of confused me. This modern game of Life introduced career cards and salary cards, as well as “Life” tokens that are redeemed at the end of the game for some extra money points. Apparently just meandering through the twists and turns of Life earning and spending money wasn’t enough. The career cards tie directly to the salary you command and help you quickly feel depressed about your luck before you even earn your first Pay Day. There’s nothing worse than seeing your friend get $80,000 being an athlete while you’re stuck with $30,000 as an artist. I feel like the original game of Life kept things a little more fair, at least to the point where your luck was limited to what square you landed on. However, the one way these new careers lend themselves to being a better game is that some “pay” squares on the board are tied directly to a career, so you’re not always paying the bank. If you land on a square that makes you buy a painting, your money goes to the player that is the artist rather than the bank. I admit that’s kind of fun, but only if you have more than two players, which in my case, isn’t that often.

Even though the new game of Life adds a few rules and concepts to the game, it’s entirely playable, but there’s one area where they just dropped the ball entirely – the design. Not unlike the card game Mille Bornes, the 1960s version of Life had a very simple and stylish design. It wasn’t adorned with a bunch of eye candy and it focused on what was important. The game board today is almost over done with cartoons and photos but even that I can forgive. What I can’t forgive is the complete un-design of the money. Life used to have some stylish bills that made you feel like you were playing with more than just fake money. The old Life money had very ornate designs with etched pictures of people and all the frills a real dollar bill has. This new game of Life dumped all that in favor of a more traditional Monopoly-like design that is little more than a color and a number and it no longer feels important. It doesn’t make you want to hold it and not let it go…it’s just, bad. On top of that, apparently they also felt things like fire insurance and promissory notes were too complicated. They dropped fire and life insurance entirely from the game and now we just have a basic “bank loan” rather than a beautiful, red IOU note. They even replaced the car tokens with an SUV. No longer can you take your family of six out on the town in your big, green Cadillac. Sorry, you’re stuck with the Durango.

Changes in car tokens, money designs and careers are one thing but when you change the end of the game you’re just asking for trouble. If you look hard enough at the game of Life you’ll notice that now you can’t really lose. Sure, one player will have more money than all the others but you can no longer end up in the “Poor Farm” as you could before. You’ll either go to the prominent “Millionaire Acres” or the less-classy “Countryside Acres,” which sounds more like assisted living. Either way, you never end up in a place that sounds too bad, which really isn’t how life always turns out is it?

Only one word can describe that money - boring.

A life to enjoy

Despite all this poo-pooing, the updated game of Life is still fun. It’s the same core game that I played when I was little, with just a few extras. However, it’s unfortunate that many of the additions don’t seem to add much to the game. Changes like these always make me wonder why Milton Bradley thought they were needed. I understand that Art Linkletter might not carry the same weight now that he did in 1962 but did the game really need a major overhaul? Lets just say that the modern version of the game of Life in my closet now doesn’t get played all that much, and I don’t think it’s just because I’m 20 years older. Although, I don’t care how old you are, throwing down a couple hundred grand on the board still feels good.

I joined Google+ a couple weeks ago with the other 20 million people and it’s a nice change from Facebook. I feels like a chance to start over with the people you follow and take interest in. My circle of people is extremely small but even with less than 20 people, one of them posted a photo that really brought back some happy memories. They posted a picture of a card from the Mille Bornes card game.

Lots of cards, lots of fun with Mille Bornes.

Going the distance

Like most of my childhood games, my mother got Mille Bornes at a garage sale. I’m not sure why she bought it. If I had to guess it was because it is a game about cars and, well, I like cars…and it was only 50 cents so you really can’t lose. As was done with many games during those years, we made up our own rules and it was a lot of fun. It was a game we played often, especially because I couldn’t convince my parents to play Monopoly with me all that often. However, as I would learn later in life, Mille Bornes is a pretty complicated game. There are a lot of rules and conditions that dictate when certain cards can be played, not to mention scoring in the game requires a decoder ring and a math degree. There is quite a bit of strategy involved in order to avoid car accidents and red lights while also laying down distance cards that earn you points. It’s a game that is easy to start and addicting in attempts to master.

Mille Bornes is not only a team game that can bring out the best and worst in people, it’s also a card game that is beautiful to look at. As my friend on Google+ captioned in the photo, the cards are a “great balance of style & substance,” and I couldn’t agree more. When I was young it really didn’t matter to me, all I knew is that there were cards with cars on them and some crazy foreign words I didn’t understand (but I did learn a little French), though as a I started a career in design and art, the Mille Bornes cards really stood out and still hold up after more than 50 years in production.

Simple and elegant. Playing card design you rarely see.

The lost art of playing card design

My copy of Mille Bornes is from 1966 and the mod style of the time is alive and well…and awesome. Every card has a great illustration on it symbolizing whatever it is the card does, and then both English and French text. Being a game about driving, you of course have your cards featuring cars, accidents, spare tires and the likes, but the most enjoyable aspect of the cards are the actual scoring cards. The object of the game is to be the first team to reach a thousand miles, so you have numbered cards that total up for your distance. The cards range from 25 to 200 miles (points) and each one has an animal associated with it. For example, the 25 card has a snail and the 200 has a swallow. All the animals make sense except for one, the butterfly, which is seen on the 75 mile card. Between the snail and the butterly is the 50 mile card, which has a duck on it. I’m not a zoologist, but I’d bet you a duck can outrun a butterfly…just saying.

Regardless of how well the animals match up with their corresponding speed cards, they are all perfect examples of how to use icons to convey a purpose while also being a lot of fun to play with. All the cards are printed with a limited color palette which only adds to their charm. Even when I was a kid I knew this game was old and the images on the cards were dated, but that didn’t make the game any less fun. Just because they weren’t shiny and new or embosed with holograms didn’t make me less interested in the game. The game is fun no matter what the cards look like and that’s a real testament to just how good this game is. Some things don’t need to change to continue to be fun and interesting, they just need to be experienced.

More flavors than Baskin-Robbins

Original games are still fun.

I look at a Monopoly, Risk, Uno and a long list of other games from my youth and they’ve all changed. In some cases it’s just cosmetic, as you’ll see with all the licensed versions of Monopoly, but in other cases they’ve reinvented or changed the game entirely. Monopoly is not without its derivatives and I’m sure each one is fun, but what’s wrong with just plain Monopoly? And don’t even get me started on the game of Life because that board game has done a complete 180 since the 1970s version I played (and loved) as a kid and now it’s just not as much fun. They dumbed it down a bit too much.

Okay, before anyone points it out in the comments, yes, I know that even my beloved Mille Bornes went through a brief period of reinventing. The game play didn’t change but they updated the card style with more “realistic” pictures and you know what, they didn’t help the game at all. The elegance of the original deck was lost in attempts to cater to a new generation of players that they seemed to assume couldn’t understand what a card with a snail on it meant. Instead all they got was a game that looked cheap. If you need any proof that the redesign of Mille Bornes was a bad idea, just look for the game on shelves today and guess what you’ll find? The original card designs. I can’t think of a better example of simple being better than this.

Don’t forget your roots

Of course, also on toy store shelves these days are “classic” versions of already classic games. Next to Star Wars Monopoly is a limited edition, all-wood version of the game, complete with collector’s box. It is nice to have these tried and true games in more of an original and elegant form, but I fear these wonderful games in their original state are being missed by generations upon generations of children and adults. I often wonder if kids playing Monopoly Crazy Cash or U Build have or ever will play the original game? Games like Mille Bornes and others are a lot of fun as-is and have been for decades. I’m not saying variations on these games shouldn’t exist, but let’s not forget about these original games. We can enjoy them with our kids and families because they are still a lot of fun and stand on their own quite nicely…plus, if you look in the right places, you can still pick them up for less than a dollar.

A classic game with a “Marvelous” twist. Get it?!

Boy does this bring back the memories. The original Chutes and Ladders has got to be one of the first board games I’ve ever played. Now, as I look back on it, a good 18+ years older, it begs a question: What kind of impact could a simple game like this possibly have that keeps it going for so long with so little changed to the actual game? Is it deep like Monopoly? No. Just spin the spinner and move your token. Does it require the development of any mental skill like Blokus? No. As long as you can count, you’re set. Is it addictive or appeal to a wide audience like Tetris, Yahtzee, or Connect 4? No, it doesn’t really do that either. Yet despite all this, or even because of it, I believe that Chutes and Ladders is the absolute perfect game for young children in their developing years.

The original Chutes and Ladders, as I remember it, casts you in the role of one of four everyday neighborhood kids who are in a race with each other on a 10×10 square grid that counts from one to a hundred, and the first one to reach the 100 spot wins. Why are they racing? No idea. How far does each square represent? Who knows? But as the race begins, we soon learn that Chutes and Ladders becomes less about the destination and more about what happens in between. If a player lands their character on a space that depicts a child performing a good deed like a chore or a selfless act, their character gets to climb a ladder, skipping ahead up the board to where it displays a reward for such behavior. If, however, their character lands on a space representing a reckless or naughty act, they must slide down the chute back down the board as punishment.

That’s right kids. If you save a cat from a tree, not only will you have a new loving pet, you will move up 56 blocks, whatever that means.

One of the reasons I feel this is the perfect game for preschool-aged children is the same reason why an older demographic might find it empty and downright boring. It is a game that relies completely and utterly 100% on chance. Don’t get me wrong, there are dozens of games in which your odds of wining are strictly swayed by the roll of the dice, or the spin of a spinner, or the turn of a card, but even games like Monopoly, Life, or Sorry require some semblance of a strategy and have complex rules that require attention. With Chutes and Ladders, it is completely unnecessary. All you can do is spin the spinner and hope for the best. This makes it perfect for children because it means that while playing it, they have just as much a chance at winning the game as their older, smarter parents. As kids, they deserve to play something where everyone has an even chance of winning, no matter how much experience you may or may not have. It teaches them to play fair.

Speaking of teaching, I believe there is another valuable lesson to be learned with this game. MB Games was very careful in how they crafted this game. The four character tokens you play as in the game are the same kids represented on the board performing the good/bad deeds that cause them to go up and down the board. Yet it’s also very careful not to be biased, as it shows all of them doing both good and bad deeds evenly. What this is trying to show us is that everyone is capable of good and bad. Ideally, Chutes and Ladders wants to teach kids a moral: In a perfect society, everyone starts their life off at the same place. As you go through life, you will be rewarded for your nobility and punished for your recklessness. Yet no matter how good or bad you are, how far you really succeed in life will still require some faith and a lot of luck. Yeah, it’s a cheesy kids’ moral, but it’s a moral for kids nonetheless.

Another great thing about this game? It’s versatile. There are so many ways to design this game. You can find so many versions of this game now in all kinds of franchises that really benefit the moral up and down system. There is a Chutes and Ladders edition with Sesame Street, Dora the Explorer, and even for Toy Story 3. The Marvel Super Hero Squad edition I saw in stores had eight playable Marvel heroes: Spider Man, Wolverine, Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Silver Surfer, and…the Phoenix? (Seriously, that’s the female character they choose to use? Why not Storm? Or Rogue?) Anyway, the board cleverly depicted the heroes doing the good deeds up the ladder, while having the villain characters like Venom, Dr. Doom, and Magneto performing the evil deeds down the chutes. Oh and let’s not forget the infamous “Snakes and Ladders” knock off.

What? What is this? This isn’t fun.

Okay, now to be fair, “Snakes and Ladders” was actually the original title of the game when it was first manifested in Ancient India. Back then, it was a game Hindu practitioners showed children to teach them about their moral beliefs and to seek the “ladder to salvation” and avoid vices. Using snakes in that game made sense, as they each represented one of twelve sins of Hindu culture that would inevitably lead a man’s rebirth in a lower life form.

So technically, “Snakes and Ladders” taught kids in India almost the exact same lesson hundreds of years ago that “Chutes and Ladders” continues to subconsciously teach kids around the world today. The biggest difference really is that it takes the whole religious element out of the game and replaces it with common do’s and do-not’s all human beings can relate to.

And that is why I think that Chutes and Ladders is a wonderful part of American culture that deserves to be remembered. It’s the game every kid wants to play. Easy to learn, colorful, and fair.

Just remember kids. Whatever you do, don’t play Eels and Escalators with Spongebob. He gets way too into it.

Want to find more board games? Have a look at these:

-Because Sometimes Death Can Be Entertaining: A 13 Dead End Drive Retrospective

-Forget-Me-Nots: The TMNT Pizza Power Board Game

-Victory Never Tasted So Sweet: A Candy Land Retrospective

Anyway, let’s talk about Pictionary while we’re here. Sound good? Good.

Anyone feel like playing with me?

Pictionary’s history isn’t anything incredibly exciting. It was developed by Robert Angel and published by Seattle Games Inc in 1985. That’s pretty much the whole story there. But like so many other games, Pictionary doesn’t need an elaborate backstory or an origin story as convoluted as, oh, let’s say Tetris (another day). Pictionary is a simple concept and it comes from humble beginnings. So let’s get into the rules!

The rules are equally as simplistic as any other game you could play. Players break off into teams and go around the game board, landing on various squares color-coded to the categories of what they’ll be drawing: Yellow for Person/Place/Animal, Blue for Object, Orange for Action, Green for Difficult (difficult is a thing, apparently), and Red for All Play, an instance where, as you may have guessed, everyone plays. Some versions have a Purple square that lets you pick what you’d like to do, but I’m not talking about these fancy editions or anything; I just want to draw already!

Okay, so as you get your card, let’s say you landed on a Yellow space, you’ll have to attempt to draw the word in the yellow for your team. Let’s also just say that the word is “Crocodile.” You have approximately one minute to draw something that makes them guess the word is “crocodile” without using letters or numbers or speaking. So really, it’s like charades for artists. I seriously can’t make the game sound more elaborate than that. It’s just that simple.

So how to you plan strategies for such an event? Assuming your family loves you enough to actually play Pictionary with you, they’ll probably also know who among them can draw and who can’t. Stacking a team with only artists is a good way to win, but not a fun way to draw unless you add more rules like “No Drawing Faces” or “No Right-Angles.” Then we learn who the real artists in the family are!

Letting the DVD draw for you is cheating!

As I’d mentioned a while ago in How To Beat Your Friends In Board Games, a perfectly great strategy is to have a shorthand code for just about every instance. Let’s say you get the word “Dollhouse.” Perhaps you and your partner already know that if you draw just the roof part (^), it means “House,” and a simple stick figure with round hands means “Doll.” You can draw a dollhouse far faster and have your partner know exactly what you’re attempting to draw, pretty much every time. This way takes a lot of clever planning beforehand, plus it sort of breaks the fun of the game, but if you want to win every time, there’s your strategy.

And that’s essentially everything there is to say about Pictionary. You can find a version in just about every department store or online at all the usual places. Me, I’m still hoping to convince my family to play sometime. Maybe someday they’ll love me enough.

Want more on board games? Check these articles out:

-Think While you Have Fun!: Yahtzee

-Starving For Entertainment: Hungry Hungry Hippos

-Like Capture The Flag With Bombs: A Stratego Retrospective

Of course you may have also come to another problem. Only immediately after completing my review did I realize that there are several different versions of the game now available. To make sure no one gets confused during their search for the perfect gift, I’m here to give a run down of all the spin-off’s that the Classic Blokus has inspired since its release.

This Retrospective will act as a sequel to The Classic Blokus Retrospective. If you have not yet read that one, please do so.

Blokus Duo

In which the two colors of the rainbow NOT in Classic Blokus take center stage.

Also known as “Travel Blokus”, Blokus Duo is a more personal, head-to-head take on the game. The basic rules are very similar to Blokus: Both players alternate turns placing their pieces on the board, advancing by touching the corners of their pervious pieces, until there is no more space for either of them to advance. Player with the most squares covered in their color at the end wins.

There are two main differences. First, to accommodate 2 players instead of 4, the board is smaller and has less space, shrinking from a 20×20 square grid to 14×14. Second, instead of starting at opposite corners as one familiar with the original might assume, Blokus Duo has two specifically marked squares near the center of the board in which both orange and purple players must place their beginning pieces. This is good, because it enforces confrontation right away without a lot of chance to play it safe or build up a defense. Unlike two players who would just start at opposite corners nowhere near each other, it’s less likely to become a stale mate.

Personally, Blokus Duo is a grey area for me. While on one hand, I understand it’s easier to find one friend to play with than three, and that it’s also travel size and can be taken anywhere, both of which make it more accessible. Yet at the same time, it’s like playing a one-on-one game of Super Smash Bros: while it may be compelling and competitive for hard core players, half the appeal is gone when the fun and chaos of four people fighting amongst each other all at once isn’t there.

Blokus Trigon

Don’t be fooled. It’s just as easy to learn as the rest.

The most unique thing about Blokus Trigon is how it looks. Instead of a Square grid, the board is a Hexagon-shaped triangle grid that looks more similar to Chinese checkers, and the pieces you play with look like shattered pieces of the triforce. That’s all that’s really different.

The game starts exactly like Blokus Duo with four players each starting on one of four designated marked spaces near the center, and then for the rest of the game it plays exactly like Classic Blokus. While I will not deny that this is a unique way to change the game up, I can’t help but thinking why they didn’t take advantage of the concept and change it up a little more. They could have easily made the board slightly bigger and turned Blokus Trigon into a 6-player game. Yeah that would make it even more difficult to get a full game started, but seeing as the board was already a hexagon, wouldn’t that have made more sense? Maybe the game would be too chaotic then? If it aint broke, don’t fix it I guess.

Blokus 3D

Okay, now even I’m a little confused.

Imagine Blokus Classic is Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES. Blokus Duo would be Super Mario Bros on Gameboy (a shorter simplified version that can be played on the go), Blokus Trigon would be Super Mario World for the SNES (an almost completely identical game, just with different graphics), then Blokus 3D would be Super Mario 64. What I mean by this is that Blokus 3D, of all the iterations, feels the most like its own unique game.

The rules take a little longer to explain, yet are still simple enough to figure out once you’ve played through it. In all the previous games, the main objective was to place as much of your colored pieces on the board as possible, whereas in 3D, the main objective is to place as much of your colored pieces on the board that are visible from the top view of the structure. This is done by using a set of three-dimensional pieces that, this time, must advance while staying in contact with their respected color. The players predetermine what structure they will be building up to prior to beginning the game. Choices include either a tower, wall, staircase, or pyramid. Once all players have placed as much of their pieces possible within the compound of their structure, they count how many pieces of their color are visible from the top, minus any pieces they didn’t play. Player with the most points wins.

So there you have it. Four ways to experience the strategy game that, with your help, can define the future of strategy games, and I mean future quite literally. Seriously, even when you look at Blokus and see its square battleship-esque grid and polygonal shaped pieces with their bright see-through colors, it aspires a very futuristic almost sci-fi image. Imagine that fifty years in the future, myself and every other old person will gather around a park to play Blokus while reminiscing about the good old days when video games had controllers, Elijah Wood had an acting career, and America didn’t get bought out by China.

Want more articles on board games? Check these out:

-All Out War: A Risk Retrospective

-Victory Never Tasted So Sweet: A Candy Land Retrospective

-A Retrospective on Trivial Pursuit the Board Game

Think Risk, except replace dice and chance with Tetris pieces and actual strategy.

Blokus falls in the ‘simple to learn yet challenging to master’ category of board games. You can easily figure out everything by watching one play through, but here’s the run down: Each player chooses a color and takes a set of 21 pieces made of all variations of 1-5 squares. Players take turns placing pieces on the 20×20 square grid, each starting from the corner of their color.

Each new piece you place must touch one of your other pieces, but only at the corners. Pieces of the same color cannot be in contact along the sides. However, there are no restrictions to how your pieces touch other colors.

Your goal is to cover as much of the board with your pieces as possible, while blocking your opponents from expanding their own territory. The game ends when all players are blocked from laying down any more of their pieces. The player with the most squares placed on the grid (or easier to tally, the player with the least number of squares left unplaced) wins.

These are all the shapes you have to work with. Rule of Thumb: Start with the 5-square pieces early.

The game plays with 2 to 4 players. With 2, both players take two colors each and alternate between them. Unfortunately games played one-on-one can very easily be turned into stalemates. With 3, each player takes one color and alternates every turn playing for the remaining color. This is sort of interesting, but, to be honest with ourselves, the only real way to play is when you have 4 solid players. Half the challenge and fun of this game is having to micromanage between offensive and defensive approaches to 3 opponents at the same time.

What’s also nice about Blokus is that no matter how good you may get at it, the game never seems unfair or crippling to newcomers. In fact, get too good and all three players will easily single you out as a threat and start gunning toward you first. While it is fun to make alliances and pick out threats, toward the end of the game, all deals will be off as everyone will be scrambling for whatever little space is left.

In college, the name of this game was eventually changed to “Blok-Gus.”

In my opinion, Blokus is the ideal party game, and I’m probably not alone in this, seeing the several awards it has won since it’s creation, including the National Competition Winner by Mensa, the High HQ Society. It is the perfect combination of being very easy to pick up and learn how to play, while also making the players think. It doesn’t suck time or become monotonous like Monopoly or Sorry, and has incredible replay value. It’s also the perfect gift for that special strategist in your life, or anyone for that matter. Find it at your local retail toy section, or check it out online at their official sight. www.blokus.com.

Want more good family games? Check these articles out for tips:

-“Ain’t” Is Not a Word: A Scrabble Guide For The Lazy

-Mario: A Retrospective Part 7 (On Mario Party)

-How To Beat Your Friends In Board Games

-I Am Scattegories And You Can Too: A Scattegories Retrospective

Remember this game? Well you should.

Spy Web is a game I’d best describe as Battleship meets Guess Who? in as much as you try to outsmart your opponent via clever placement of your pieces and determining through simple questions how they’ve placed their pieces. Confused yet? I’ll get into the details, just hold on.

Researching Spy Web was a bit of a tricky task since the first thing that pops up in Google for “Spy Web” is naturally anti-spyware software. Also, don’t do a Google image-search for Spy Web, unless you have your preferences set to filter inappropriate content, because you will get a few pages full of very, VERY adult images. Even Wikipedia, my go-to for research, doesn’t list Spy Web as a thing. Dang, is this game really that obscure?

So the premise of Spy Web pits two factions of spies against each other, one with names based off sea creatures such as “Beluga” and “Manta,” and the other with names based off birds such as “Buzzard” and “Osprey.” Each side has nine spies to place in a 3-by-3 board very similar to the way you place ships in Battleship, i.e. hidden from the other player. The first player to accurately determine the other player’s spy arrangement wins the round.

Also, I love the colors here. Doesn't it look spy-like?

The way this is determined is through asking three questions: “Who is [character name] pointing at/looking at/listening to?” You know this because every character tile is either pointing in some direction, looking in some direction, or listening in some direction, sometimes all three at once.

For example, you could ask “Who is Buzzard pointing at?” and you might get an answer like “Buzzard is pointing at Vulture.” You’d then have to use this knowledge to determine where to start placing your enemy’s character tiles. Oh, and in case you were curious, unlike real spy tactics, lying is totally uncalled for here, otherwise the game doesn’t work.

Snazzy characters. Why didn't Guess Who? have spy gadgets in it?

The concept is fairly simple, I admit, but something about it resonated with me as a kid. I became mildly obsessed with creating the perfect, “uncrackable” combination of spies by looking for formations that resulted in a spy not being looked at, pointed to, or listened to by any other characters, or better yet, making it so that no spies connected to any other spies on the board. It’s set up so you can’t really do this, but it ‘s fun to try.

Adding the spy theme to the game really sold me as a kid. It could easily be a sort of board game version of “telephone” whereas the nine characters are just kids set up on the grid, but that would have been sort of lame. Spies are cool, and unlike zombies, they haven’t overstayed their welcome. I highly recommend giving Spy Web a look, though good luck sifting through the other “Spy Webs” in Google. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Apparently spies really don’t like to be found.

Want more about board games? Check these out:

-Apples to Apples, Dust to Dust: An Apples to Apples Retrospective

-Game Cards Do Not Actually Talk: A Guess Who? Retrospective

-Just Don’t Panic: A Retrospective on Catch Phrase

Origins and Comparisons

The official game began as an activity aboard a Canadian couple’s yacht in 1954 (dubbed “the yacht game” and later amended to Yahtzee). They soon asked their friend Edwin Lowe (a toy enterpriser) to make some sets of the game that they could use as gifts. Lowe agreed, in exchange for the rights to the game. By 1956, Yahtzee was being marketed as a thinking-man’s dice game.

With such a simple concept, aren't you a little frustrated you didn't think of it first?

Yahtzee bears many resemblances to “Generala” and “Yacht,” dice games from different areas of the world. A consistently popular game for families, Yahtzee was owned by Lowe until Milton Bradley bought his company. Currently, Hasbro owns the game, and estimates 50 million sets sold each year.

So Many Dice

Ironically for me and my recent article, the concept of Yahtzee came from a type of “dice poker” game, and consists of five dice and a scorecard. Players attempt to roll a three-of-a-kind, four-of-a-kind, full house, straight, or a yahtzee (all five dice are the same amount) in order to score higher. The poker-themed combinations are recorded on the lower part of the scorecard, while the higher portion scores you on the sum of the dice. Sorry, no bluffing. That’s called Liar’s Dice.

And this is a wholesome game; there's no room for liars.

The best part of Yahtzee for mathematicians is the probabilities and score possibilities that come from the five dice, three-roll setup. The maximum score is 375, but if the players are using Yahtzee bonuses it can be as high as 1575 points. The lowest theoretical score is 5, but that would require some special strategies of the player.

Since every turn in Yahtzee is three rolls, the probability of a yahtzee (five of a kind) in one turn is 1 in 22 attempts. When thinking about specific yahtzees (like five 2’s), that extrapolates to 1 in 75.

My History with Yahtzee

As a small child, I had no idea such a game existed. I called it the Mickey game, because my family’s set was a Disney collector’s set with Mickey Mouse in his sorcerer getup all over it. In fact, the dice had Mickey in the sorcerer hat instead of 5’s. I didn’t really know the rules until later.

Math was never, and shall never, be my strong suit. But I do remember learning my multiplication tables on the dice from a Yahtzee set. First we would play a fun game, then my father would ask what 5 times 5 was. I initially answered, “It’s a yahtzee. I win!” But I got better.

Even ol' Spud Head seems to know the value of Yahtzee.

It was later still that I applied my mad Yahtzee skills to a casino table. Yep, that family-friendly game taught me the initial concepts of poker, as well as how to calculate the probabilities of craps. Essentially, craps is just Yahtzee with an unnecessarily complicated betting system.

Value of the Game

With all the substandard board games out there today (“Twilight Scene-It” anybody?), I still take comfort in two particular classics: Scrabble and Yahtzee. One teaches vocabulary and spelling, while the other is an entire class on statistical math.

Yahtzee is a game that kids will find fun because of the dice, but as they get older it will become more fun because they are thinking, and Lowe originally marketed Yahtzee as the “Fun Game that Makes Thinking Fun!”

Maybe Lowe should have played more Scrabble. Yahtzee sets go for $10 to $20 depending on the vender and the version. Look for my personal favorite, Elvis Yahtzee, and the elegant Super Mario Yahtzee.

Want some more about classic games? Check out these articles:

-“Ain’t” Is Not a Word: A Scrabble Guide For The Lazy

-Like Capture The Flag With Bombs: A Stratego Retrospective

-Computers Must Be Stopped: A Short Chess Retrospective

I suppose I would. Poker is a lost skill. People my age spent twenty years learning exactly how to manipulate Tetris blocks, where the best place to shoot a zombie is (the head), and the insanely complicated rules of the Pokemon card game. Those same people never learned how to play poker in any form. If you are one, please follow my drift here; “Poker Face” is not just a pop song.

First lesson: This is usually a good hand to have.

The Different Games

Poker comes in many different variations. The simple Five Card Draw is what video poker is usually based on, and it is the easiest to learn. Start with that if you know little to nothing. We’re talking five cards for each player, and you try to create the best combination of cards. Don’t like the cards you were dealt? No biggie. You get one chance to draw new cards and discard lame ones. Simple, eh?

The more complicated games include Seven Card Stud. In this one, you get seven cards, and some are hidden from your opponents, while others are exposed. This is a much better game to play if you want to bluff, or play the player instead of the cards, but we’ll talk about that later.

I’m a personal fan of “Indian” Poker, which includes a card on each player’s forehead that they never see. The most popular game these days is, of course, Texas Hold ’Em. This game should be played by experienced poker players. It is the same concept as Five Card Draw, except you get two cards, and the rest of your hand is selected from a group of community cards on the table. The drawback to this game is that it is only interesting with a high amount of betting.

If you take the time, poker becomes so simple even classically painted dogs can play it.

Strategies

There are several things that a poker player needs in his or her arsenal in order to do well and enjoy the game. The first big thing is learning how to bluff. A bluff is not an outright lie or announcement of, “I have a really good hand and you will lose.” This does nothing but ruin the game. A skilled bluffer artfully and deliberately bets in a way that keeps others guessing. It is all about perceived risk.

This brings up a big discussion among card players: playing the cards vs. playing the other player. If you play poker, you can either strategize based on the cards in your hand, or you can play based on what the other players may have. The most skilled players can win a hand regardless of the cards because they can read other people and con them. Beginners should stick to playing the cards, however, because it helps teach them the fundamentals of the game, and it pays off about half the time.

If a player is a math genius (unlike me), they have a bit of an advantage. Factoring in the variety of cards in a deck, the number of hands, and the probability of what the next card will be, some Hold ‘Em players can predict what cards their opponents are holding. This is known in some circles as playing the odds, and it is risky. But knowing that there is a 34% chance of getting a flush versus your opponent’s 22% chance of getting the six-card that he wants may help your game.

Some things in life are just simple joys. Poker is one of those things.

The Purity

This is why poker is such a beautiful game. No one can claim electronic interference, or bugs in the system. It is a pure game of skill and luck combined for an extreme dose of entertainment. They say that the adrenaline highs and sorrowful lows of winning and losing at poker are more intense than cocaine…and they are less disgusting, illegal, and dangerous as well.

All a poker game requires is a table, a deck of cards, and some participants. It is the cheapest game system out there. Learn the lost skill now!

Want more articles on party games? Check these out:

-I Am Scattegories And You Can Too

-How To Beat Your Friends In Board Games

-Game Cards Do Not Actually Talk: A Guess Who? Retrospective

Making puzzles is so cash, yo.

You may not know this by looking at me but I love me some puzzles. I’m talking literal puzzles here by the way, not like word puzzles or mind puzzles or something. Physical “connect one piece to another” puzzles usually sprawled over a foldout card table for a month or more. Why do I love puzzles? Because they’re so simple, yet they’ve done a lot over the years to throw some curve balls my way. Want to hear more? Of course, because what else are we gonna talk about? E3? I don’t think so!

Puzzle Me This

When I was a kid I had the usual handful of wooden puzzles that all kids typically owned. While I certainly had the obligatory wood puzzle with basic shapes like a car or a house, I had a few that were a little cooler. My grandma had dinosaur wooden puzzles that where actually huge chunks of wood that fit together to make the shape of a brontosaurus or something. Those were extremely cool, and I keep looking and seeing companies like Melissa & Doug doing the same sort of thing. Then again, they seem to love wooden toys, so it only makes sense.

Okay, maybe my grandma's puzzles weren't this cool.

I found myself always checking garage sales for puzzles once I became a little older, constantly searching for the next coolest puzzle ever. While I found a few Ninja Turtle puzzles, some of the cooler simple puzzles I found were G.I. Joe puzzles that interconnected. There were four puzzles with like two or three hundred pieces each and though each was contained to its specific picture, the four puzzles connected together to form one giant puzzle. Sadly I only found three of the four, but the effect was still very cool to me.

My parents had a great many advanced puzzles in their closet that would make it out every so often for a family puzzle session. These were extremely difficult puzzles with pictures such as a piece of hay in a stack of needles, a pile of fun-sized candy bars, or just a puzzle that’s front picture was purposefully designed to mislead you as to what the actual picture was. There were also the occasional 3D puzzle, but those were a one-time build before just setting them on a shelf or something.

Everyone tries the 3D globe puzzle at some point in their life or another.

Probably the most epic day of things related to puzzles occurred when my father and I were at a mall and happened upon an all-puzzle store with a guy standing behind the counter that had to be the Grand Puzzle Master. Naturally, he looked like he hated his life. What made this better were the three Puzzle Geeks challenging him with asinine puzzle-related questions. One walked up asking if they had any puzzles without edge pieces, to which the Grand Puzzle Master said they had a selection in the back corner. The next geek tried his luck with the question, “Do you have any puzzles with extra pieces thrown in to trick the puzzler?” Obviously they did, and they were on the shelf behind the geeks. The last guy thought he had him with the ultimate, “Do you have any blank puzzles?” The Grand Puzzle Master reached below the counter and pulled out a blank puzzle box. The Puzzle Geeks were defeated and the Grand Puzzle Master sighed his sad little sigh.

Still, none of these could possibly compare with the massive floor puzzles I found one day at a hobby shop. Did you know you can get a puzzle with 18,000 pieces in it? I don’t know why you’d want it, but you can get it from Ravensburger, and if that isn’t even enough, there’s a 24,000-piece puzzle as well. That’s ridiculous.

Behold the behemoth of puzzles. I kind of want this now.

That’s all I can say about puzzles for the moment though, mostly because I don’t currently have any. I wish I did, but sadly there is no space in my apartment to make a puzzle. Some day, but not today. In the mean time, what about you? Are you a puzzle fan? Or do you just hate puzzles? Let me know with a comment. I dare you to challenge the Grand Puzzle Master.

This counts for my daily fruit intake, right?

For a while in high school I had friends that became obsessed with the game Apples to Apples. It was the only game anyone would bring to parties anymore and the only game people would specifically ask for at said parties. In fact, people would plan parties around playing this game. So for me, I was hesitant to enjoy this game, assuming it was a fad. But was it? It still sells well to this very day. Let’s learn more.

Rules and Context

Apples to Apples came out in the significant year of 1999, famous for being the year everyone wanted to party like it was. It also managed to win a number of awards, such as Party Game of the Year and Mensa’s Mensa Select award. What did this mean to me in high school? Still not enough. I’d have to learn how this game was played first.

Apples to Apples is played with a group of 4-to-however many people all sitting in a circle. Each player is dealt seven red apple cards that have nouns, noun phrases, or gerunds written on them. No, don’t ask me, an English major, what a gerund is because I can’t tell you. You have to be in a special club to know what it means, probably called Mensa. The important thing to note is that these red apple cards will say something like “Rome,” “Bill Clinton,” or “Horseshoes.” One player designated the judge of that round draws a green apple card that has an adjective written on it like “Ridiculous” or “Amazing.” Players look through their red apple cards, pick one that they think best represents the adjective, and anonymously submit their card to the judge.

These are what the cards look like in case you weren't familiar with what cards look like.

Then comes the real fun. The judge reads all the red cards aloud and then decides whose card best fits the adjective. Now, the game can go in two ways here. Either the player picks the one that literally does match closest with no nonsense, also known as the “boring way to play,” or they correctly choose the most interesting card based on other players’ reactions of laughter. One of our personal best when playing was “Helen Keller” for “Lazy.” Politically correct? Nope. Hilarious? Absolutely.

There are tons of variations to this game by the way. Common variations include the judge selecting a red card at random and then seeing how ridiculous it is, awarding the point to the least likely red card, or having to judge from the point of view of someone else like Zack Effron or Barack Obama. I think all of these ways, the official way included, are boring. How do I play the game? I play it like Scattergories.

I learned this variation from my wife and her family. Instead of playing normally, everyone selects their red card and holds onto it, reading aloud their own choice and then making a case for why it is clearly the best. I find this way of playing to be far more entertaining because it places the importance of the humor on everyone in the round rather than just the judge and pretty much ensures that even if you have a dull judge for the round everyone is guaranteed a great show.

With both the official rules and my family’s variation, the most important aspect of play is not the actual box but rather the people you’re playing with. If you are playing in a group of people you either don’t know or aren’t completely comfortable with, everyone is more likely to play it safe and not take greater risks for the sake of comedy. And of course, there is the risk that there is that one boring person in your group that just can’t think of something really funny to submit for their turn. They are unfortunate, but this isn’t the game for them. They should go sit in the corner until everyone else is done having fun. But remember, it’s just a game. With that in mind, it’s only $17 on Amazon.

A simple concept sometimes goes a long way.

I’m a fan of good party games. You’ve caught on to this already being the intellectual readers that you are. I’m ready to talk about yet another fantastic game to break out when friends and family come to visit. Time for Catch Phrase.

You ever played Catch Phrase before? I’d be shocked if you hadn’t, since Catch Phrase is a fairly popular game among the masses as it’s simple to grasp, fun to play, and can require zero set-up if you have the electronic edition, as I’m about to recommend. If you choose to buy Catch Phrase, I recommend getting the electronic version (see, what did I just say?). Either way though, you’ll find yourself having a lot of fun, but there are a few catches (oh puns!). I’ll get into those later. For now, rule time.

How To Play The Fair Way

The rules are brutally simple: Teams are designated, usually no more than two, and the game starts once someone sets the timer from “Safe” to “OMG I Lost!” The first player grabs either the word disc (in the non-electronic version), or the whole Catch Phrase game (in the electronic version), and sees a word/phrase. This is the word he needs to get his teammates to guess. He’s allowed to use anything to get his teammates to say the word, including gestures and impressions and such, though using any part of the word is forbidden (no saying “It contains peanuts” if the word is “Peanut Butter”), as well as giving the first letter of the word, the number of syllables, or a word that rhymes with the word. I mean, come on, you have to have some challenge to the game, right?

Once the player gets his team to figure out the word without cheating, he passes it to a player on the other team where they are tasked with figuring out a new word. Play continues like this until the timer runs out and someone throws the Catch Phrase disc in terrified surprise. Whichever team isn’t holding the disc when the timer goes off gets a point. You can play to whatever you like, but 10 seems to be a fairly standard number even though I’d recommend taking the less-conformist path and playing ‘til 17, just because.

When playing Catch Phrase, you have got to remain cool and collected, otherwise you’ll look like a goober and no one will like you. Or maybe you’ll just flub through your turn and cost your team a point, but the important thing is that you look cool to other people, so take a deep breath and picture everyone in their underwear if that sort of things helps you to relax. If that doesn’t work, you might as well get down to your underpants to relieve the tension.

Don’t Lose Your Cool

If you aren’t remaining cool and collected, you’ll have a hard time getting your brain to think of the perfect connection to help your team guess that your ramblings are actually pointing them toward saying “Richard Nixon.” If you happen to be a teammate guessing, you have an equally important job to manage since you need to be synced up perfectly with the guy trying to get you to say the Catch Phrase. Do not, and I repeat DO NOT keep guessing the same thing if it was incorrect. It doesn’t matter how much you THINK the other player meant to be saying “Rutabaga,” it matters that he was actually trying to say “Jimmy Stewart.” You’ve got to keep calm as well, and in fact, you’ve got to be the one insuring that your teammate holding the Catch Phrase disc is relaxed, so throw in a joke here and there and generally be encouraging.

Chances are you're probably more familiar with this version, of which I recommend.

Now we get to the seedier part of my article here: Cheating, also known as Advanced Strategies, though some will probably call you on cheating unless you have the quick comeback of, “No YOUR face is dumb.” No one can recover from that one.

Childish insults aside, you need to be synced up with your teammates on a level deeper than I may have implied earlier. You guys need to basically have a mind-meld, otherwise you’ll have to rely on pure skill, and who has time to attain that in today’s age? You have got to know the exact thing that gets your teammates to guess the proper word or phrase. If your friends have an inside joke about Jell-O pudding and the word happens to get brought up, bust out your inside joke. Your group will instantly know what to guess, plus the connection adds to team morale and that in turn makes everyone play better while simultaneously making the other team wish they were as good of friends as you guys are. If you have more time than you need, go through the game with your friends and develop code words for each word or phrase so you already know that if “Circus Tent” shows up your first clue is to say “Elephant Surprise.” Is this cheating? That’s for the other team to decide.

So as I also mentioned, there’s some hiccups in playing the game to it’s fullest, and they come as a result of the people you’re playing with. I’ve been attacking this article from the angle that the people playing are all close friend, but in the very likely situation that you are forced to play the game with unknowns for one reason or another, you may find yourself and the others in dangerous risk of losing. Why? Because someone who’s afraid to take risks in front of strangers is going to have a very tough time when they’re up to bat. They stumble over words more, they can’t think of connections with phrases, and they spend too much time bypassing words or phrases they don’t think they can do, ultimately resulting in the timer flipping out from the awkwardness.

I can’t quite do much to advise in these situations as I typically have no problem making a fool of myself, but I’m not everyone. Public speaking can be straight up horrifying for some people and the only advice I can give is to, once again, take a deep breath and try to relax. Besides, it’s just a game. What’s the worst that could happen, other than people thinking you’re a goober? I rest my case.

A deceptively conservative box. What could the contents include?

I’ll be downright honest here and let you in on a little secret: Before I got The Game Of Things for Christmas I had never heard of it before. Does that make me a bad person? Probably not. What it did manage to do is make me feel kind of stupid since there’s a pretty decent game here for parties with the right group of people. Let’s get into this review then.

Playing With Things

So how do you play this game? It’s actually rather simple. You’ll need at least four players (though I can see it working with a few as three, but honestly you want half a dozen or more, preferably). Everyone gets a slip of paper and someone reads a card that contains a thing, such as “Things you wouldn’t want to do in a cemetery” or “Things that annoy you.”

The players then scribble their response and pass them to the reader who in turn waits for all the slips to come in before reading them aloud, saying that the responses for “Things not to do in a hospital” are “Smoke,” “Hold up,” “Have an operation,” or “Look for dates.” It doesn’t matter the answer or how true it is because the next part is where the actual game comes into play.

The person to the left of the reader is the first to guess. They may say that “Chris said ‘Look for dates’ in a hospital,” and the reader would either confirm or deny this. If the person was right, they get a point and get to go again. However, Chris (that’d be me for this example) is out for the rest of that turn since he made it too simple for people to guess his answer. Play continues until all the slips are guessed, though you aren’t allowed to guess the reader’s answer since they don’t get a chance to get points in that round anyway. And basically that’s the game. Copy/paste, lather-rinse-repeat.

It’s a Party Game for a Reason

This is where I’m saying that more people are better. If you have a group of four playing, one person is automatically excluded from getting points that round since they are the reader. The person to their left has all the advantages in the world as long as they know the rest of the players really well. But even if they do, they can only get a total of two points that round since they can’t guess the reader’s response and it’d be counter-productive to guess their own. I played with a group of five people and the final score after ten rounds was ten to nine to eight to six to one. I…I had the one point for the following reason: I played the game like Scattergories and that’s a mistake.

This is all you need to get a night of deception going.

See, you don’t want to play this one like you would a lot of creative games where the most creative answers are the best. That actually works against you since you’ll give yourself away every time as it becomes pretty obvious who among your group is most likely to think of hilarious responses and who is most likely to be your father and trick everyone into believing down and out lies. Yeah, he won the game, but only because he cheated like every game he ever plays (except TrueQuest, because you can’t lie about history).

What you want to do is play things very conservatively, assuming you’re the only usual goofball in your group. If you have a whole band of off-the-wallers then you’re fine to make up the most random responses you can think of, but otherwise you’ll have to hold yourself back to vanilla answers to questions like “Things not to do while driving,” a question that could be something so awesome as “Juggle penguins” but should probably be “Put on make-up.” See? Boring. But that’s the trade-off you make when you want to win.

Overall The Game of Things is a good game. You’ll find a lot of fun in this wooden box, but to play it right you either have to have a whole group of rowdy creative types or a group of people that don’t exactly think outside the box.

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing having a non-out-of-the-boxers group, I’m just saying it’s required to play The Game of Things and not instantly lose because you’re the one person throwing waterfowl into every response you can.