Whew! Our new homeschool year is back in full force, including gameschooling every day. I had to adjust my expectations of how many games I could play over the summer. My goal was to keep up the #abookandagameaday challenge, but with other summer activities like gardening, swimming and playing (including thrifting) with my daughter and her boys, my grandbabies, I had to scale back. I was doing well if I could do either a book or a game a day. I finally convinced myself it was OK to wait until after Labor Day to be super consistent with a picture book and a game a day. I also found some great games while thrifting, which will be the topic of a separate post. OK here goes for all the fun games we played in September and so far in October.

I played this one for a game night with friends. Then blessedly, I got to play it again, this time with my family during a mountain cabin weekend family retreat. I just love this game! It is so simple yet satisfying. In this game, you are trying to get one of the players to say a word, but each of the other players can only give a one-word clue. Get it? That’s why it’s called “Just One.” Unless you are playing a three-person game, then you can give two separate one-word clues. That way the player who is the guesser for that round has four clues. If any of your teammates write down the same word, that word is thrown out. This encourages each player to think “outside the box” when coming up with a clue. I played this with my mom and dad. My mom and I were supposed to get my dad to guess “series.” The obvious clues are “world” and “baseball” right? But I figured my mom would think of those. So I thought hard and came up with “ordinal” and “episode” and my mom wrote “TV” and “books.” It was so fun to see my dad think about and guess the right answer of “series.” This is a co-operative game where you as a team see if you can guess 13 out of 13 correct.

Say Anything is a great getting to know you game. It’s best played with people you already know. Players take turn being the judge and reading a question. Then the other players supply the answers. The judge votes on his or her favorite answer. Then everyone else has to guess what the judge picked. It calls for creative thinking. I love it.

Next we have Moods, one of my new favorites. Go here to read the story behind how I got it. If you play with people who are willing to let go of their self-consciousness and practice their acting skills, you will have some laugh out loud moments. If you play with people who don’t want to act, don’t bother with the game, move on to something else.

This year at my homeschool co-operative school (commonwealth) I have been asked to teach two groups: boys ages 8-11, and then boys and girls ages 6-7. My co-mentor brought Apples to Apples one week to play with the 6-7 group. I initially thought they were too young, but I played the game with three little girls, who seemed to enjoy it. I think it’s because they are all advanced readers. Next time I want to bring the Jr. edition and see if they like it even more.

We had my sis-in-law, her husband and her son over for game night. While my son and his cousin played Catan, the adults played the games above and below. Fun, fun, fun! I just love all of these. It’s just so interesting to see if you can figure out what other people are thinking, in Druthers and Truth Be Told. You can read about Druthers here. Then Linq is a fun word association game. You have to have at least 4 people to play. It’s kind of like Chameleon, but with just a pair of words, the “link” hence the name, Linq. Why people have to reinvent the spelling of words to get a game to sell, I don’t know.

Bits and Bytes teaches basic logic as an introduction to learning coding. I’m excited to play it with my grandson when he comes to visit next.

This is my new favorite game. It’s called Welcome To. We borrowed a copy of it from the public library. (Yes, my library has games, how sweet it is! It’s like they thought of me!) I love playing it so much, now I am going to get our own copy. In this game, you get to be a subdivision developer. You win by getting the most points, which comes from building parks, building homes with pools, building groups of homes (estates) with fences around them, and planning the order of the house numbers wisely. It’s like Quixx with a purpose. See my winning paper game below, where I scored 102 points! I like Quixx OK but this one is so much more fun. It has the “press your luck aspect” of Quixx with putting numbers in a sequence has but more variety and meaning.

On days when my son wants to get our “game a day” session over with quickly, because he “has so much stuff to do,” he will grab the above game. It has the same mechanics of the original Ticket to Ride, but uses taxi cars instead of train cars and goes A LOT quicker. He always beats me! I hate the rule that when someone has only two taxi cars left, then each player gets only one more turn. So last time I convinced him to drop the rule. I wanted to finish my last route and needed two more turns, not one. Yep, I totally believe that one can negotiate rules and change them if everyone playing agrees.

Last but not least is this game published in the early 80s I picked up while thrifting. It’s nothing to rave about. Just a typical roll and move trivia game, involving questions about geography, animals, and survival skills. I just may ditch the board and put the cards on my dining room shelf for going over with my kiddos while we eat. I have a bunch of collection of cards now that we rotate through during mealtime. Occasionally we play an actual tabletop game during mealtime, which you can read about here.

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