When you’re stuck inside with your family this holiday, what better way to spend time than playing a game that stretches and reinforces those blood bonds? Here are the games that get our staff through the holidays.
Plastic Car, Real Pain
After Christmas dinner, the pressure is on to pick which path you want to take in the Game of Life. Sitting criss-cross apple-sauce on the carpet, on edge and waiting to see if your recent spin will land you in purgatory or a wealthy future — nothing beats the feeling. It’s like gambling at a young age and hoping for a miracle, that you’ll have the best roll to defeat siblings and cousins.
The Game of Life tells a tale as old as time: even though we’re all blood relatives, we’re not afraid to shed some blood when the banker starts dealing out the money. Everyone grabs at the middle of the board, yelling to claim the color of their designated car all at once. If the mission of yanking it away fails, you’re already starting off on the wrong foot.
In my family, as we’ve gotten older, we have become more aggressive with grabbing at the pieces, because we’ve realized that it will affect our futures. That car is the one element that sticks with us throughout our lives until retirement — which definitely is not the most realistic with how modern cars are built — and will carry our children in it to the end of the board with us. It will help move along our education, career and wealth, making pit stops of tragedy along the way.
And as the snow trickles down outside and the fire crackles in the woodstove, the chosen banker tends to look away from the chaos. They don’t care who gets what, as long as they’re able to steal away some of the cash when no one’s looking. In the end, we know they’ll somehow always win.
So what’s the point of playing?
Well, I guess that’s just the Game of Life.
-Jessica Johnson
Dictator for Life
I’ve always had a sweet spot for card games, President specifically. With a standard deck of playing cards, you gather three other people and deal cards until the deck is finished. The player to the dealer’s left starts, playing any card face-up. The game continues clockwise, with each player having to play a card of higher value to beat the previous player’s play. Whoever empties their hand first wins, becoming the “president” and putting a law into effect. The player left with the highest number of cards is given the title of “scum,” usually having laws directed at them.
The law can be anything, relating to the game or having to do with something a player says or does. For example, I loved making whoever played a two do 10 push-ups. My friends would always love to make laws relating to saying a specific phrase, which usually resulted in the perpetrator picking up the last trick and putting it into their hand.
I’ll put laws into effect that make it near impossible for me to lose. I’m ruthless, making the game seem more like a dictatorship than a presidency. Or maybe they’re not so different? But let’s keep politics and playtime separate.
-Adam Blanchard
I Still Want to Catch Them All
My family is not small — my mom has six siblings, most of whom have kids of their own now, and we all coalesce into my Oma’s house every holiday season. One of our shared interests is board games. Everyone plays a little differently, leading often to disagreements and occasionally table flipping.
We keep a diverse range of games around, especially because of how many people and tastes have to be accounted for. However, for me and my dorkiest cousins, we always sequester away to a side room to play a childhood favorite, Pokemon Master Trainer.
It’s total nostalgia fuel for me, and I’m not ashamed to admit it’s a game that probably doesn’t appeal to most. You roll a die, you get a Pokemon token, roll again to catch, and occasionally you get to battle with your iconic, Japanese monsters.
Now that we’re all of age, the goal is to make up the most interesting drinking rules rather than become the Kanto Champion.
-Michael Purtell
You’re “Garbage” Against Me
I love me some “Garbage.” Google the rules if needed, but essentially it is the baseball of card games — long and tedious perhaps, but also exciting and challenging to the sophisticated eye. My family dreads playing because of how many hours it may take, but at least it gets everyone off their phone. I think they just don’t like to lose to me.
-Sydney Blake
Feeling Tiled?
Rummikub has quietly become my favorite board game. Maybe that makes me sound old, because it’s the type of board game you would probably find in your grandparent’s house. But it’s also one of the few activities that actually gets my family to sit down together.
Rummikub is not just mindlessly sliding a piece around a board or rolling a dice like other board games. You have to think ahead, decide whether to hold onto a tile or play it, figure out how to shift other people’s plays to benefit yourself, and constantly map out your next move.
Things start out peaceful, but they never stay that way for long. We get competitive fast. In the rare moments that my mom or stepdad pulls off a victory, it turns into a full celebration that they relentlessly rub in my face until we play again.
-Yasmine Alregabi
The Gateway Game
Every holiday there is one game that brings the family together and then tears it apart. Friendships, kinships — none of it matters when UNO Show ’em No Mercy shows up.
The game starts friendly until the power-up cards get played: the draw-10s, the hand swaps. After that, war has officially begun.
One thing about my family is that we don’t follow the rules. Everyone starts to stack up on plus-4 and plus-2 cards until someone has over 50 cards in their hand. Usually after you hit 25 cards you’re out, but we never cared for that. We’d sit on the cards and throw them across the room or hide them in our pants, because it really did get that serious. One time, we had one round that lasted until 6 a.m. My sister and I both refused to back down. Many players threw their cards and dropped out, but we were all having the time of our lives.
-Kamiko Chamble
Money Talks
Monopoly, the game of all games. A game that understands true American values like no other: Whoever makes the most money, wins. You may hear some people say that Monopoly is “too long” and “not worth the time.” Those people lack structure and commitment in their lives. They will never understand the rush of squeezing every last dollar from your competition, bleeding them dry slowly until they succumb to the vastness of your growing empire.
I dominate the board in many ways. I’ve never once been predictable and I’ve never once been beaten. It doesn’t matter if you have a monopoly on the dark blues, if I already run the corners. Your get out of jail free card means nothing, when you step right out on my block of hotels and houses. I’m a true captain of industry. Even when you think I’m going down I’ll draw a chance and the banks right there to bail me out, and I always have a deal to make.
At the end of the day, it takes a particular type of person to not just survive in monopoly, but to thrive in it. You need to be able to cut throats and stab backs. You need to be able to eat your young. Can you do that?
-Evan Rando
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