Family Games: 3 Party Games

Christmas is rapidly approaching, and if you're like me, you love to share the gift of gaming with your friends and family. Apart from light, gateway games to gift, I find party games to be a good present for your friends and family who are unfamiliar with games that aren't Monopoly or Sorry. Today, I would like to tell you about 3 light games that are good for the family or light gamer.

Sixes is game six of the E-G-G series. The game is designed for 2+ players, age 6+. It takes approximately 25 minutes to play and retails for $12. The game feels a lot like Scattegories, with the major difference being that you don't have to use the same letter for each answer you write down. It plays quickly with little to no learning curve, and kids can play this as well as adults. You are not trying to come up with the best answer, just the ones that will match or not match (depending on the round) your opponents. Therefore, you really are playing your group. I found the game to be a nice little filler that was perfect to play after holiday dinner with the whole family, and will add it to my rotation of games to play with non-gamers.

I was a big nerd growing up. Okay, let's be honest. I am still a big nerd. I love words and wordplay and always have. I played many games of Scrabble with family and friends. I also did a lot of word searches, crosswords, and Mad Libs. For those of you who don't remember, Mad Libs was a story that had a lot of blanks on it. One person would ask you for a noun, adjective, verb, etc. and fill in the blanks for you. Once all the blanks were filled in, they would hand you your filled-in paper to read your hilarious and nonsensical story. Looney Labs has recently published Mad Libs: The Game. It is designed for 3-8 players, takes about 20 minutes to play, and retails for $20.

Depending on how many people you play with, the length of game play will vary. If only a few people play, it's easy for someone to quickly get three points. If more people join in, it could take a little while longer. With 42 Sentence cards and 200 Word cards, there is also some degree of replay value in this game, as you will never get the exact same combination of cards in your hand to match the sentence card. With that being said, this game screams for an expansion of more cards, which seems easy enough to accomplish, if this game takes off. That being said, I think this game could have been better designed. Half the fun of Mad Libs is you never know what kind of sentence you are going to end up making. I would have made the Sentence cards double-sided. On one side, it tells you what types of blanks you need to fill in, and then after everyone picks their word cards, you flip the Sentence card over and people reveal their sentences. This game is fun for kids and family gatherings, but it could have been better.

Imagine is a game for 3-8 players, ages 12+. It takes approximately 30 minutes to play and retails for $15. I really wanted to like this game. The transparent cards with images on them to make more images is a very clever idea. However, I felt the images on the cards were much too specific. Instead of generic lines and shapes, you are given very specific images like umbrellas, cars, trees, etc. I will be the first to admit that I am not creative in the least, so I thought maybe the game just didn't resonate with me. However, I let my wife (who oozes creativity) try the game without giving her my thoughts on it first, and she too found the images much too specific and hampering. My son is unfortunately too little to play this game as it is intended to be played, otherwise I would share his opinion as well. If you can find this game on sale and have some kids 8-12, give it a try with them. If you, just want the transparent cards for re-purposing into something else, you might also want to get this game. Otherwise, I didn't really enjoy a game that I really wanted to enjoy.

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See all the Favorite Games for Family Game Nights reviews here.

Copyright 2016 Stuart Dunn