Pop Culture Care Package, Pt. 4
Board Game Bonanza!
Hello, Dames Nationals!! It’s Dame Margaret here with today’s installment of our pop culture care package, this one with an eye to the many of you tasked with entertaining children who you thought would be in school. And so I am recommending: BOARD GAMES!
Now, I know what you guys are thinking. You’re remembering interminable games of Monopoly that all ended like this:
And you’re thinking “That is the LAST thing I want to do with my kids.” I understand your trauma. I validate your concerns. But the world of board games is much bigger now than it was when we were kids. People have thought extensively about the aspects of games that make one flip over the board in a fury and have developed new, excellent games that address the flaws of the ones we were stuck with before. To guide us through this brave new world, I turned to my friend Jonathan, who’s created a business in Boston called Board Game Empire that runs private, public, and even speed-dating focused board game parties, to get some expert recommendations for games that both you and your kids can enjoy as a family.
For convenience’s sake, I am linking to Amazon, but if you’re in a city, you should check and see if there are any game stores in your area, and whether they’re providing curbside pickup during the pandemic. Prime delivery is a godsend, but so are your community’s small businesses. If you have the chance to support them, you should.
Without further ado, here are Jonathan’s recommendations. I have played all of these games and can vouch for two things: (1) they are really easy to learn even if no one in the group has ever played the game before and (2) they are super, super fun. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
Wits and Wagers: The way Jonathan likes to describe this one is “it’s trivia meets gambling.” While Trivial Pursuit has a way of making even trivia fiend like myself feel stupid, Wits and Wagers is based on the assumption that no one will know the answer to the questions. You’re presented with a question like “How old was oldest reported woman when she died?” and everyone puts in the best guess they can. Then all the guesses are revealed and everyone has a chance to place a bet on which one they think is closest without going over. You still get the real fun of Trivial Pursuit— learning the answers to trivial questions!!— but neither you nor your kids need to feel like a dunce because you didn’t know the answers to begin with.
Junk Art: In Jonathan’s pithy words, this game is like Jenga for the 21st century. The premise of the game is that you and your competitors are all artists tasked with building an installation with the junk you find in a junkyard, here represented by an array of differently sized and shaped pieces of brightly colored plastic. Depending on which city you’re building your installation in, you’ll have different goals to reach. Sometimes you want to build the tallest structure, sometimes you need to build your structure fastest. It’s really easy to learn this game and the variation in game modes means it stays fresh and interesting much longer than other similar games will. It’s pricey, but it’s worth every penny. The game recommends 8 and up, but I have played this game with kids as young as 5 and had fun.
Code Names and Code Names: Pictures: These are two of my favorite games on the market— I am thinking about buying a copy of Code Names right now so that we’ll have one to play with in my household. In both, you have a grid of either words (Code Names classic) or images (Code Names: Pictures) and you need to guide your teammates to pick the right ones as quickly as possible using single word hints. So if, as I once did, you want your teammates to guess “clay”, “giant”, and “Czech”, you might use the hint Golem to tie together all three words. Of course, if no one on your team KNOWS what a golem is, you might be sunk. For younger kids, I think pictures work even better. But people of any age can make good guessers and, once started, I think you’ll find this game really addictive.
Just One: Last but not least, I am including one collaborative game in case your family, like mine, can take competitive ones a little too seriously. Just One is a bit like reverse Taboo— where in Taboo, you’re tasked with making your teammates guess a word without using any forbidden terminology, in Just One, one person is unaware of the word each turn and everyone else must collectively create one-word hints that they hope, when put together, will guide the person to guess the secret word. The catch is that if any two people put forth the same word, their hints are taken out of consideration. So, if you need to make someone guess the word Ford, and two people both write down “Gerald” as a hint, neither hint will be visible. This is one where a diversity of ages is a huge help because different reference points makes for less repetition in clues. And it’s another game where, once you get the hang of it, you will want to play again and again.
These are just a few of the great games Jonathan has introduced me to, and just a few of the games he thought would make great family games. If you’re interested in more recommendations, feel free to @ both me and Jonathan at @PlayBGEmpire, or DM him on Instagram under the same handle. We would feel honored to talk even more about this shared passion of ours.
Happy gaming and stay safe out there, Darling Dames Nationals!
XO/M.