Getting Our Game On

Remember what I said the other day about playing games in Winter?  We put our money where our mouth is and took advantage of the boys' 4-day weekend.  On Tuesday, after most everyone was back to school and work, C and I stayed home with the boys.  We went out for a yummy udon, sushi, curry chicken and tonkatsu lunch, and then headed over to our local toy store to stock up with even more board games.  

The boys are ready to take it to the next level with board games.  When in the mood, they can play a very challenging chess game or engage in Connect Four repeatedly.  But we also wanted to have more strategy games that the whole family can play together.  One of the games we've introduced is Lego's Creationary.  Even though we have about 500 pounds of Legos in the house, the scarcity of pieces in the Creationary game makes it all the more fun to play. The other day we also bought Catan Junior, the kid version of the extremely popular Settlers of Catan.  We've been playing it a lot over our mini-break, so much so that C is sure the boys are ready for the grown-up version.

At the toy store, we bought Settlers of Catan, Slamwich and Sushi Go! after reading great reviews for each of them. These along with the games we already have can keep us going well beyond bedtime. There are several other board games that we plan on introducing to the boys and I'll write about them once we start.  For now, we're busy building castles, dipping nigiri into wasabi, and slamming double deckers.

Some of our old board games I can recommend are almost all of the HABA games (we love The Orchard, Lucky Sock Dip, Secret Code 13 + 4), Hi Ho Cherry-O, and the Picnic Game by eeBoo. Many of these skew younger, of course, as these are games we've been playing for years.  At a young age, we played lots of cooperative games, before moving onto competitive winners and losers.