Family Game Night

{This is another post moved over from the old site.}

Stock Xchng/ wikedcurly

We used to have a family movie night every weekend. My favorite part of it was making themed snacks to go along with whatever movie we were watching. Jill would usually get creative and take over the kitchen, relegating me to sous chef. Anyway, we stopped watching movie so frequently and started doing family game nights on some weekends. I didn't want to give up the fun themed snacks, however, so I searched and found game-night-themed snacks that Jill and I could make! Here are some great ideas I found:

Chocolate domino cookies from Country Living

Jenga cheese and crackers from The Party Planning Professor

Scrabble cookies from When Adobo Met Feijoada

You can also serve fruit kabobs, popcorn, smores, veggies & dip, celery with peanut butter, and snack mix.

My kids vary greatly in age, so it can be difficult to find games that we all enjoy playing together. But they exist if everyone is a bit flexible and gets in the spirit of family game night. Good picks are classics, like Clue/Clue Jr, Sorry, Boggle, Hungry Hippo, Yahtzee/Yahtzee Jr, Scrabble/Scrabble Jr, Monopoly/Monopoly Jr, Kerplunk, Parcheesi, Operation, Chutes & Ladders, Candyland, Trouble, and Go Fish. The older kids sometimes balk at playing younger games, but family game night is an excellant opportunity to learn cooperation, patience, tact, getting along, and good sportsmanship. I am trying to let the kids alternate between choosing games so that everyone gets a chance to play what they would really like to play. Although we haven't tried them yet, I hear that good games for whole-family fun are: Cranium Family Fun, Hoopla, Captain Bones Gold, and Whonu. We just bought Sequence, and this is a game that everyone truly enjoys. We also were given "Racko", which is a card game that we also all enjoy. Little Bill needs a bit of oversight from time to time to keep him on track, but he enjoys playing it with us all.

If you have varying skill levels and want to break into sub-groups, good games for a pair to play are Battleship, Othello, Mastermind, Connect Four, and card games.

Happy Playing!