Some of these games take hours (for younger people) to fully learn how to play! I tell my kids "I did not go to college to prepare for this game!" And there are some newer games that are quite simple. A very simple and fun "card slap game" is the taco cat goat cheese pizza card game - it goes fast and there is a lot of laughter!.

 

No doubt, some of the rules are crazy complex. Night of the Living Dead was like 12 pages and then still had a couple “trainer” scenarios.

Ticket to Ride, on the other hand, can be taught in about 5 minutes, with the last 4 of those minutes being taught as you’re playing.

It all has trade offs on what you’re looking for. The crazy thing is that most of the boutique games list the designer’s name prominently on the front of the box. The designers have fan bases, and people rate them on the quality, balance, and clarity of their rules. They have almost director-like followings.

I haven’t heard of goat cheese pizza, but I’ll look it up. We like to have a mix of simple, fast, and more complex, cerebral games.

 

My daughter, wife, and I like the old board games, and getting together for some good card playing also. We try to include my MIL when she is over.

 

My favorite family game of all time is Aggravation. I think the store bought version is four players, but the only components are a set of four marbles for each player, a six-sided die, and the board. My grandad made everyone in the family a board for at least eight, but as many as twelve, out of scraps of Formica countertop, and marbles he raided out of my grandmother’s inexplicably enormous collection of marbles.

Every family gathering eventually breaks down into a game of team Aggravation- men vs. women, elders vs. kids, whatever- with plenty of crap talking.

 

Fun and educational for all ages!

 

Some of the old games are great fun.
Like who can resist a game of naked Twister.

 

Some of the old games are great fun.
Like who can resist a game of naked Twister.

If I were to describe what I look like naked, everyone would be attempting to gouge out their mind's eye.

Kind of a cross between the Blob from the Steve McQueen movie and a beached whale, replete with a harpoon with Captain Ahab hanging from it.

 

The first game I played with our daughter as a teenager was "Lie Cheat & Steal."
Yes, it is just as the name implies.
She is still shocked (but laughs about it), to this day, that a father would encourage playing something like that.

 

Nice games @GunMonkeyIntl but I want to know what's in the casserole dish?

 

My wife has some succulent cuttings started in little pots. Is that what you’re talking about?

i don’t know what they are, specifically. Just some cuttings off my grandma’s collection that have been making the rounds and spreading all around the Midwest and southeast; wherever she has progeny.

 

Board game family here. We have Ticket to Ride, we used to play that a LOT. I'd been looking at Pandemic but got voted down, maybe at some point they'll let me do it.

On our best seller list:

Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert are fun cooperative games that everyone enjoys (we have a couple of people here who go for the kill with games if they can, so daughter especially likes cooperative games like these).

Small World is really fun, but we gave it to one of the kids when he was in college and it hasn't come back for a visit in a long time. Reminding me that I might want to get my own copy.

Carcassonne and the Catan series are always our go-to games whenever everyone is home, though. Carcassonne is the overall favorite of the daughter as it's not quite as cutthroat and strategic as Catan can be, but is still a little competitive and very engaging. When she doesn't feel like playing, the rest of us tend to gravitate toward Catan.

The replay value is pretty high on these as the boards change every game. We often add or take away expansions, depending on whether we just want a simple, quick game or a more complicated, strategic experience.

Anyway, I think those are our all-around top games that we can get everyone to play. When the boys can behave themselves.

 

Board game family here. We have Ticket to Ride, we used to play that a LOT. I'd been looking at Pandemic but got voted down, maybe at some point they'll let me do it.

On our best seller list:

Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert are fun cooperative games that everyone enjoys (we have a couple of people here who go for the kill with games if they can, so daughter especially likes cooperative games like these).

View attachment 106519 View attachment 106520


Small World is really fun, but we gave it to one of the kids when he was in college and it hasn't come back for a visit in a long time. Reminding me that I might want to get my own copy.

View attachment 106521

Carcassonne and the Catan series are always our go-to games whenever everyone is home, though. Carcassonne is the overall favorite of the daughter as it's not quite as cutthroat and strategic as Catan can be, but is still a little competitive and very engaging. When she doesn't feel like playing, the rest of us tend to gravitate toward Catan.
View attachment 106517 View attachment 106518

The replay value is pretty high on these as the boards change every game. We often add or take away expansions, depending on whether we just want a simple, quick game or a more complicated, strategic experience.

Anyway, I think those are our all-around top games that we can get everyone to play. When the boys can behave themselves.

Those are some of the most highly rated of the new-Gen games. I have played Catan, and would really like to get us a copy, but 90% of our playing is just the two of us and it’s hard to justify adding ones that could really only come out the few times we play with friends.

I have two Kickstarter pledges in right now, but they won’t ship until the fall or winter.

One is basically a game-rule based version of the He-Man toys. It has miniatures for all the toys, even Castle Grayskull, and it’s playing out He-Man skirmishes with actual rules. Dorky, I know, but I couldn’t resist, and it’ll probably never be available outside of the Kickstarter.

The other one is called Final Girl. I got to play it when I was shopping for my wife’s Christmas presents, with the store’s test-drive copy, but the first printing sold out so fast that you couldn’t buy it anywhere. It’s basically a game system where the actual games are like VHS cassettes of classic horror movies, and you play as the “final girl” trying not to die. You can mix and match the scenes with the bad guys, so you could eventually play Jason in Space, or Alien at Summer Camp.

It’s technically a single player game, but a group can easily play it together like they’re watching a horror movie together and deciding what the protagonist does. When I played it in the store, the store owner and even a couple customers got caught up in it.

 

Ticket to Ride I've played. I'm glad people still play these games! I was playing Solitaire with cards on the table the other day and can't remember the last time I saw someone doing that like my grandfather did.

 

The farm boss here is such a wise person. I had to start feeding hay in late October, usually it is December or late November before I have to do that. She started dumping jigsaw puzzles out on the dining room table and claiming it was not going to be easy to solve them.

It has worked to a degree.....

The best part of this is, it looks like I am done with the hay thing...A late fall drought sucks worse than a mid-summer drought does.

 

The farm boss here is such a wise person. I had to start feeding hay in late October, usually it is December or late November before I have to do that. She started dumping jigsaw puzzles out on the dining room table and claiming it was not going to be easy to solve them.

It has worked to a degree.....

The best part of this is, it looks like I am done with the hay thing...A late fall drought sucks worse than a mid-summer drought does.

It’s hard to beat a good puzzle. We have a bunch, but it’s hard to bring ourselves to tearing it down once it’s finished. I suppose, once the lights finally do go out, we’ll probably break them up and have them to do again.

 

My son bought me Redshirts for my birthday one year. We played a couple times. The rules are a bit vague and have since been rewritten, a couple times. It's a good game for Star Trek fans. He has another really fun game called King of Tokyo. That one is easy to learn.

We have a good collection of games. We used to play a lot of them when the kids were little. Uno and Chinese Checkers were our favorites.

 

We're just boring old Scrabble players. Our game set is 30+ years old and we've never lost a tile or had to replace one. The letter bag did wear out however and the wife sewed a new one out of an old robe.

 

My son likes Catan so much, he thought we would like it and bought it for us to play while he visited.
OMG, I zoned out while he was explaining the rules and actually thought he was pulling our leg at one point during play. We gave it a good try though Haha.

 

My son likes Catan so much, he thought we would like it and bought it for us to play while he visited.
OMG, I zoned out while he was explaining the rules and actually thought he was pulling our leg at one point during play. We gave it a good try though Haha.

Catan can get pretty complicated and it definitely takes some time to learn how to play (and more time to learn how to play WELL, I'm still working on that part!).

The other game I mentioned, Carcassonne, is sort of similar to Catan in that you're trying to gain ownership over parts of the map, but it is much less complicated as to why you need those parts of the map and what to do with them once you have them. Less rules to remember, faster paced, requires some strategy but not to the point that people will be agonizing over their turns forever or forget why they needed it in the first place.

I mean, if you all are still looking for something to play

 

Not much for board games, we are pretty much RPG , card (Rummy, Euchre, etc) or dice (or pigs in case of Pigmania) games. Ther kids HATE trivia games, because they know I'll win

 

I thought my grandparents were the only ones who owned Pigmania! My sister bought it for them and we played it occasionally. I looked for it years later but never could find it.

 

Rummikub is the popular family game of strategy and luck! Players try to be the first to play all of the tiles in their rack by placing them in runs and groups, ...
Guess not modern, but easy to learn.

 

Haven't played a board game in years, maybe decades. I used to be forced into pictionary at my wife's family gatherings.

I prefer video games if I want to play something.

I do have fond memories of Risk though, and Mastermind. I'm old school.

 

My daughter Annie and her guy Eli have maybe 30 board games. We have played four person Settlers of Catan with them. I wouldn’t say we had fun exactly, but I could see how you could get into a game like that.

I used to play a lot of chess but my wife doesn’t like it. For the 30 years of our marriage our mainstay has been Scrabble. We never get tired of it. When my mom died in 2020 I inherited the Scrabble set I played on as a kid, so now we have a spare. Both sets have all the tiles and the boards are in good shape so we should be good for the duration.

 

My "bored" game ... How High Can I Go ...

 

It's a damn shame @GunMonkeyIntl was run off.

 

Did he get run off or just
leave?

 

The wife an I do Wordplay. I hate on line games but this one greases the gears. We play it each weekend. We do well.

 

It's great to hear about your family's board game traditions. Settlers of Catan can definitely be a hit or miss depending on the group, but it's cool you gave it a shot! Chess and Scrabble seem like timeless classics though—I love that you have such a strong connection to Scrabble, especially with the sentimental value of your mom's set.

Thanks for the reply. I have lots of happy board game memories, and board games were formative for me early in life. My friends and I played Risk and Stratego in high school. I liked the strategy aspects of those games. Later I had a friend who played backgammon for money - he was a bit of a hustler - and he beat me so badly and consistently I never want to see another backgammon board as long as I live!

What games do you remember playing early in life, and do you still play them?

 

When did all those advertisements get put in? At least 5 posts were edited to include advertisements.