Hello again! And Happy New Year!
We hope you had a happy holiday and are enjoying the end of the Christmas season. We spent so much needed time with family, relaxing, putting together puzzles, cooking delicious meals, and of course playing games.
This was our first year in our new home and it felt so wonderful to spend this time together enjoying our family traditions and making new memories in this space.
We’re excited to begin this new year and share all of the wonderful games and activities that bring us closer together as a family and hope that they can bring yours closer as well.
Games are always a staple activity in our house and this Christmas season saw lots played. We decided to only play what we wanted to — nothing off the “to be reviewed shelf” if it felt like a chore. Just what we and our children genuinely wanted to play. That meant while we had some new games see the table for the first time, we also welcomed back many old favorites and goodness it felt great!
Here are few of the things we played while we were on break:
1. For Sale
This classic game was so fun to get back to the table after a much too long hiatus. Honestly, I had forgotten just how excellent this game was. In For Sale you are trying to purchase and flip properties for a profit. Everyone has the same amount of money to begin with and must use it to bid on and purchase homes. Each home has a value attached to it from 1-30 with some homes removed so you aren’t sure exactly which homes will be available.
Homes you acquire in the first round you must then sell in the second round. In this round a selection of value cards are revealed and players must select from their hand of property cards which home they want to sell. Everyone reveals at once with the highest home selling for the highest value. It’s such a fun economic game where you get all the fun of bidding, auctioning, and pushing your luck as you try to flip your homes to victory.
It’s fast, easy to teach, and a great fit for all player experience levels. For Sale is one I won’t ever remove from our collection.
2. Zoom in Barcelona
The kids continually chose to play Zoom in Barcelona. This was a 2021 release that has you zooming all over Barcelona to take pictures of landmarks for a photo contest. Players manage their hand as they move all around the board trying to get close enough to landmarks to take a photo. You can move right up to it to snap a pic, or you can use your zoom cards to snap a picture from further away. It’s simple point-to-point movement that is great for the whole family.
As a photographer I can’t help but love the theme and the kids really enjoy it too. It’s an understated game — it won’t ever get rowdy or raucous. It most often found itself on the table in the mornings as everyone was lazily going about the breakfast routine or before bed as we were winding down.
3. Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig
We hosted our family for a few days and with a larger group, we brought out this gem of a game. Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig continues to be one of my very favorite non-party games for larger groups.
I have a full review of the game here (where I basically gush all over it.) It is a semi-cooperative competitive castle building game where you’ll build two castles, one with the player on your left, and another with the player on your right by drafting room tiles, each with various point scoring potentials, to try and build two high scoring castles. The player with the highest score from their lowest scoring castle is the winner. An excellent game I truly cannot recommend highly enough.
4. Wingspan
The beautiful game of Wingspan also fluttered its way back to the table for a few games. After many years, I still consider wingspan one of my favorite games and have only continued to love it more with the expansions we’ve added to it over the years. The Oceania expansion was the highlight in the game I was able to play with my sister. The addition of the nectar resource and the simply spectacular birds of the region make it a highlight.
Our neoprene mats were also a highlight. Since purchasing Wingspan in 2019 we’ve added four mats to our game. These make the play experience so much more enjoyable as they lay completely flat and make it so easy to pick up and move cards around compared to the standard folding cardboard mats. If you play Wingspan a lot, I definitely recommend them. They make an excellent gift, too.
Wingspan Review
Oceania Review
5. Bellum Magica
Another game that the kids enjoyed towards the end of our break was Bellum Magica! This game combines the Machi Koro/Space base mechanic where a die is rolled whose result activates an area of your player board. Players will use the resources they collect from these results to recruit powerful cards to add to their player board so that future die results become even more beneficial to them.
Along with resources players earn attack points to use to defeat cards for resources or treasure chests or to attack fellow players to steal a treasure chest they’ve collected. The first player to achieve 10 chests ends the game while the player with the highest value from their chest is the winner.
This is another new release that we find to be a great fit for our family. Players have to make strategic decisions to recruit cards that give them a well balanced player board so that each die result allows them to do something helpful. It plays relatively quickly and is one we’re excited to explore a bit more and most likely review fully here on the blog later!
6. Ethnos
We were finally able to get this fantasy themed strategy game to the table! In Ethnos you’ll work to gain control of regions of a map to earn glory. Each game there are a number of tribes (giants, halflings, dwarves etc) you will work to collect to place your player tokens on the board. Each player begins the game with one card and on their turn will either recruit another card from a selection of face up cards, or play cards from their hand in front of them to place a token on the board.
We loved how straightforward Ethnos was — It was so easy to pick up and fit our group of six with both brand new and experienced players excellently. It plays out in three ages and players can see how everyone is stacking up, quite literally, as you stack your tokens on top of each other to show how much influence you have on the board. Each tribe also has special abilities players can use when played so they can increase their influence and position in the game.
Ethnos has been sitting on our shelf unplayed for a while and that a mistake! This is a classic case of a game whose box design and art style doesn’t do the game within justice. It’s one you’ll probably glance right over on the shelf, we sure did even when we brought it home! It’s another excellent choice for a larger group (plays 2-6) that wants a non-party game that fits a wide range of player experience levels.
7. Puzzles
While not technically a game, puzzles feel board game adjacent to me so I’m putting it here! For the better part of our break you could find a puzzle spread out on the table with members of the family sitting down for a bit to work together. It has been a while since we’ve put together a real puzzle with 500+ pieces so this was a really enjoyable leisure activity to do together. I loved that it kept the kids busy when they woke up before the rest of the house. They would just wake up and get to work on the puzzle from the day before. Maybe puzzles are the missing key to my getting a few extra minutes of sleep?
Either way, we enjoyed it so much that we picked up one of the Magic Puzzles that we’ve been eyeing for a while. We can’t wait to work on it as a family soon!
8. Mini-Golf
Every year we love to spend the Christmas holiday doing lots of fun experiences together and prioritize that over extravagant gifts. For the second year in a row, mini-golfing was a hit with everyone. We took a trip up to Kissimmee for the Congo River Golf experience and we all had a blast. Experiences over Things.
In addition to the above, we also enjoyed some games of Schotten Totten, Pan Am, Pitchcar, and a slew of other games our kids chose that escape the memory now. While we’re sad that the holiday break has come to a close, we’re so excited to jump back into the routine of normal every day life and share all the fun of what we’re playing with you along the way! We’ll be back here soon with a 2021 year round up (like we did last year!) going over what our game stats looked like, which games we played the most and what we’re looking forward to in 2022!
