My game of the week is Just One by Repos. This game is soooo simple, yet soooo fun! We played it with my parents last fall at a family vacation in the mountains. I’ve played it with other different groups too and it’s always a hit. You will enjoy it if you love word games! My parents love word games so I figured they would have a great time with it. They did! Instead of involving spelling words like in Bananagrams (my mom’s favorite game) or Scrabble, Just One involves definitions of words and synonyms.

The components are simple: a stack of cards, a set of different colored dry erase pens (I love that the pens have erasers on the caps! So smart! Then the eraser is always right there and you don’t have to hunt for a tissue or rag or an eraser across the table) and then a set of little easels. The easels double as a holder for the cards as well as a place to write on.

This is a co-operative game. You as a team are trying to get each person, when it’s that person’s turn, to guess a word based on your teammates’ clues in one guess. You choose the word randomly by picking a number from 1-6. The other teammates look at the card, without you looking, and pick the word based on its numbered row on the card. Each teammate gets to write down “just one” word as a clue. If people write down duplicate clues, then those words are cancelled out. Then the guesser has fewer clues to go by. Here is a video that explains more.

It’s just so fun to see what words you can think of that you are guessing other people won’t think of. For example, when we played with my parents, my dad picked the word “series” randomly. I didn’t want to say “baseball” because I figured someone else would say that, as in the world series. So I wrote down “episodes” and my mom wrote down something else, I can’t remember, and my dad took a few minutes but figured it out. It’s just so satisfying when that happens. I love, love this game. I highly recommend it! It’s for ages 8 and up. It’s a great gameschooling game that counts towards building language arts skills. It also builds teamwork and creative thinking.

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