<p>Card game: Quiddler</p>
<p>Dominoes: Chicken foot</p>
<p>Sort of board game (they do make a board version, but we like the other version better): Catch Phrase</p>
<p>Can’t Stop. It’s a game that’s a mix of a little strategy, a little gambling, and luck. Difficult to describe succintly, though not difficult to play. My kids have been playing it since they were around 8 or so. Kids and adults can play on equal footing. There are winners, though.</p>
<p>Howabout a card game?
[Fluxx</a> Card Game - Looney Labs](<a href=“http://www.wunderland.com/LooneyLabs/Fluxx/]Fluxx”>Fluxx | Looney Labs)</p>
<p>Our favorite is Rumikub. (It is a tile game & not very new, sorry)
My H is not a big fan of playing games, but this one he enjoys. It is for 2 - 4 players, but when we have a larger group, we just make teams.</p>
<p>[Rummikub</a> - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rummikub]Rummikub”>Rummikub - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>There’s a new TrivialPursuit-with-a-strategy-twist game out: BezzerWizzer. I just picked it up. Has anyone tried it? Hoping it’s not too complicated.</p>
<p>AllNew - I hadn’t heard of BezzerWizzer, but I’ve ordered it now for our family to play over the holidays. Thanks!</p>
<p>Can’t Stop is a great game, I’ve never met anyone who’s heard of it before. We used it to introduce a fourth grade class to probability.</p>
<p>Fluxx is fun, because the fun is more in the playing than the actual winning.</p>
<p>We LOOOVE Can’t Stop. For a long time it was out of print, so about 16 years ago we made our own board. To show how nerdy the Fang family is, within hours of first playing Can’t Stop (and remember, this was many years ago) Mr. Fang had produced an Excel spreadsheet showing the probabilities of rolling each possible number.</p>
<p>Settlers of Catan is the best. It’s the game we return to, over and over. It’s like Monopoly, only without the long drawn out ending where you know someone is going to win but they haven’t yet. Do the rest of you play with futures? We normally play with three people, so our house rule is to randomly choose two hexes to have been nuked. No one can build roads or settlements on the two nuked hexes.</p>
<p>If you like Settlers and Ticket to Ride, you might also like Pandemic. Unlike many of our favorite cut-throat family games, Pandemic is cooperative; all the players are trying to frantically save the world from four pandemic diseases, the red East Asian disease, the black West Asian disease, the yellow South American disease and the blue North American/European disease. We have nicknamed them, respectively, SARS, Ebola, yellow fever and the sniffles. It’s a sad night when we lose because of epidemic sniffles.</p>
<p>TransAmerica is a good light party game for groups. Lost Cities is a quick two-person game; the first time you play it, you’re mostly just frustrated, but by the third time you’re addicted.</p>
<p>Mr. Fang and Fang Jr. like Race for the Galaxy, for which they were playtesters.</p>
<p>I don’t understand ** Left, Center, Right**. There don’t seem to be any decisions to make.</p>
<p>Curse you, Cardinal Fang, you and your game recommendations are going to ruin my careful efforts to not spend needlessly. Gah!
;)</p>
<p>I’m addicted to Settlers of Catan :)</p>
<p>
Speaking of old games, when we bought “Life” for the kids, I was very disappointed to find out you could no longer sell your kids and wind up at the Poor Farm at the end, like in the version I played when I was a kid. :D</p>
<p>We like a variant of Monopoly called “Spaceopoly”, where you by and sell the planets and moons of the solar system, instead of Atlantic City. The game play is a bit different, too.</p>
<p>Wise and Otherwise is another good more-the-merrier party game. One player reads off an incomplete saying from somewhere around the world, and everyone else has to write down a completion. Then the first player reads out, in random order, all the players’ completions and the real completion, and everybody votes on which is the real one.</p>
<p>So: There’s an old Norwegian saying, I expect the wolf when…</p>
<p>the wind blows cold?
I hear the landlord knocking?
the howls come nearer?
our bellies are empty?
I see his ears?</p>
<p>There’s an old Belgian saying, It isn’t in a coal sack that one finds…</p>
<p>coal?
sugar?
whisky?
love?
white flour?
the cat?
the cure for the common cold?
diamonds?</p>
<p>Lots of laughing, lots of interaction. Even more fun when some of the players can read off the answers in thick, appropriate accents.</p>
<p>Try it yourself. There’s an old Zambian saying, When they tell you you are drunk…</p>
<p>^Fantastic party game.</p>
<p>Although, our completions tend to be a bit more bizarre than those above.</p>
<p>I think most of our favorites have been named already. We especially love to play games with the extended family over the holidays. We also play a lot of games when we travel with D2 to horseshows as you are always waiting around.</p>
<p>Our favorites are:</p>
<p>Mexican train dominoes
Taboo
Boogle
Scatagories (spelling?)
LCR (we also play with $1 bills or quarters with little kids)
Apples to Apples</p>
<p>Well I’ve now ordered several of the wonderful suggestions. Can’t wait to try them! I’ll do a second round in December (that W and O/W sounds fascinating, although I shudder to think of what it’d devolve into at my highly male-centric house). For the first time in 7-8 years we’ll be home for Christmas this year. Kids are sad not to be skiing but are excited about getting a Christmas tree (and presents!) again. Mom’s excited about. . . more board games!!</p>
<p>LOL Cardinal Fang - I could probably dig up our Can’t Stop spreadsheet somewhere too! At some point we were trying to figure out whether it really was a winning strategy to go for 2’s and 6’s as it seemed to me. I couldn’t figure out how to calculate the chances, and sent an e-mail off to my husband’s roommate who had been a math major - he had an answer for me in about half an hour.</p>
<p>Maybe someone knows a game I played once that I thought was good, but it isn’t Ticket to Ride. It involved collecting cards to go across country (or maybe the world?) and I think involved using different types of transportation.</p>
<p>Any H.P. Lovecraft fans? My son recently introduced our family to the Arkham Horror board game. In the words of Wikipedia:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Arkham Horror is a great game. It plays like a less complicated and obviously much shorter version of an RPG.</p>
<p>It is not actually much longer than many other Eurogames and similar games, but all of them are far more intense and time-consuming than most American games.</p>
<p>I just ordered Smart Ass from Amazon; the reviews looked good…does anyone know of it here?</p>