When the family or friends are all gathered round someone often suggests playing a board game. So, WIckeds, do you enthusiastically haul out a stack of boxes and gleefully suggest a favorite? Or do you feel the smile freeze on your face at the thought of spending an hour rattling dice and moving a piece around a board?
Liz: I LOVE board games! From Monopoly to Clue to Life and beyond, I could – and still do, sometimes – spend hours. We’ve hosted many a game night featuring Cranium, Trivial Pursuit, Boggle, Yahtzee…. I think I’m truly a geek. Scrabble, anyone?
Jessie: I love the art work and the playing pieces of vintage board games. And I adore the look of playing cards of all sorts. I love visiting Board Silly, a beautiful puzzle and board game shop in Old Orchard Beach, ME. But I am pretty picky about which games I like to actually play. I like looking at Monopoly and Risk but I definitely don’t want to play them. I love word games like Balderdash, Scrabble, Up Words and Quip Cubes. I also love Rummy and In a Pickle and Timeline. And of course, I love Clue and 221 B Baker Street.
Edith: I also love board games, or if not a board, a game that comes out of a box 
(except for Risk – hate that game, because somebody is always out to get me). We play a lot of Scrabble around here when my sons are visiting. I love a good game of Fictionary, and all you need is a good dictionary, paper, and pencil. But our favorite game for the past decade is Wise and Otherwise. The cards contain proverbs from around the world, but they’re split in half. One person picks one and reads the beginning, then everyone writes down how they imagine it ends, plus the real ending, and everybody guesses which is the real ending. For example, “There’s an old Chinese saying: Don’t climb a tree…[turn card over] …to look for fish.” Very fun!
Sherry: We don’t play as many games as we used to. In a group I love Trivial Pursuits and Yahtzee. My sister always trounced me at Scrabble when we were little — I’ve never played as an adult. If it is just Bob and I we play Rummikub. But more often we play cards. Usually Rummy with my favorite deck of cards which is scenes of New England — a different picture on every card.
Julie: I love board games. I don’t play them often (and I’ve been told how fabulous Rummikub is), but we’ve had some fun Apples to Apples nights. Triple Yatzee is a must on vacations. I love Scrabble, and old school Trivial Pursuit. And, of course, Clue. What is the game where someone says something, and people vote on whether it is true or not? A group had an epic fight over that one. (Scandal?) We are also big cribbage players in my house.
Barb: Some of my happiest memories are of the vicious Pictionary night games with my parents, brother’s family and my family on the Jersey shore. From childhood, my brother and parents wouldn’t play Clue with me because I always won. When our kids were little, Bill & I used to take our vacations with another couple and every night after all the kids were in bed we’d play Sherlock Holmes–Consulting Detective, a fabulous game with a fabulous board.
Edith: Chiming in again. As a child I was accused (by my big sisters) of cheating at Clue because I peeked at other people’s cards or what they checked off on their clue sheets. But I thought I was just being a good detective! I guess I was preparing even then for writing crime fiction.
Wonderful. My favorite board game is played with the cribbage board!
Definitely Scrabble–my husband and I played Scrabble in the labor room while waiting for our daughter to be born (I beat him). I used to play Backgammon with my grandmother, although now I’ve forgotten the rules. And for a time in college we were obsessed with bridge–we’d play a few hands every time we had four people and a few minutes to kill, like around meals.
Scrabble in the labor room and you won? You are amazing. In college we always had a game of Spades going.
Bridge in college! I forgot about that. Such happy memories.
I love board games. One of our favorites is Finish Lines. There are different categories like Music, TV and Movies, Quotables, etc. One person will read a partial line from the card, and the player whose turn it is has to finish the line. One of my sons likes to finish it wrong just to be funny. Example: “Don’t put all your eggs…” The obvious answer is “in one basket.” His answer: “in one omelette.” Hard to believe the kid’s a research scientist.
I also like Bananagrams.
No surprise to see Clue mentioned around here. I love it also.
Games are a favorite activity in my family. We always play some when we get together. Unfortunately, I don’t have many friends I can get together with for game nights right now, which is a disappointment.
And it’s nice to see Wise and Otherwise and Rummikub being given shout outs. We love those. Not big on Scrabble, and it shows with how badly I lose Words with Friends.
Does anyone remember the games Stop Thief or Trust Me? Those were games I played with a friend growing up, but they were never super popular and were only made for a couple of years.
I forgot to mention Fax Machine. Get a group of at least five. Everybody gets a long sheet of paper cut in half lengthwise. Write down a phrase at the top. Any phrase or sentence. Pass the paper to the left. Illustrate the phrase you just received, then fold the paper so the original phrase doesn’t show and pass to the left. Rinse and repeat. It’s sort of like Telephone except with pictures and words and adults. When you run out of paper, you can move to another sheet or end the game. Each person shares their sheet. It’s very, very laugh producing! And nobody gets to claim they can’t draw.
There’s an actual board game version of that. I played it at Christmas, and it was a riot. Can’t think of the name right now, however.
My favorite board games are/were Backgammon and Scrabble.