Games Get Aggressive Around Here
August 29, 2026
Games Get Aggressive Around Here
Warning!
If you walk into my house on any Sunday – or any day when we are all together, be warned! You may encounter some seriously aggressive board and card games.
Scrabble gets to where Dad is searching the dictionary for bingos (8x letters = +50 points, aka bingo) until someone remembers there is supposed to be a time limit.
Boggle is mom’s world, unless there’s a Grandmother around, and then they cancel each other out and it’s anyone’s fair game.
Chess with any kiddo, nice match up. Chess with Louis? We all gave up years ago, he beats you in less than six moves every time.
Backgammon (when we have the pieces) is one of mom’s all time favorites. This isn’t currently in our library.
In Monopoly, it’s survival of the one who brought the little players the most snacks.
Lord of the Rings Risk: don’t play the good guys against Kimberly and Lucas – the ring will never move.
Laud is a mean mancala player and will giggle when he knows you picked up the wrong set of beads.
World Domination (traditional) Risk is the game where married couples fight to the death. Dad always wins.
In Settlers of Cataan, unscrupulous husbands make trades as they please with the excuse of, “we’re married.” This makes for much laughter.
Smarties/Yahtzee with Grandmas gets super and dice roll everywhere.
Any group game (apples to apples, guesstures, trivial pursuit, five things, catch phrase, taco-cat-goat-cheese-pizza) will cause an abundance of riotous laughter, teases, dares, voice impressions, playful threats, movie line recitations, and generational gap widening. Join at your own risk.
Dutch Blitz, a newly beloved card game for us, has finally been learned by eight of us, and the four combatants sitting in that round are enclosed in glass from the first flip to the giddy shout of “Blitz!”
Don’t start a dominoes game with Laud – he understands numbers well. I haven’t tried rummicube with him yet, but he may be good at that too.
Then there are the random ones that get played in spurts for a season or two. If the boys will forget how to break connect four, we will get another of those.
If someone is promising the moon and a date night, they may be trying to buy a monopoly property or get enough brick to make the fourth settlement in Cataan. If there’s thudding dice in box lids and “haha! That’s two of yours!” that’s Risk. If you hear a Sméagol impression and “my precious,” someone stopped the ring. Four players banging palms on the table, a card matched the word. If you played scrabble and boggle at our house and didn’t learn a new archaic English word, try again next time with Becky, Mom, or Grandma.
What games are your favorites? We love trying new ones but tend to revert back to a few core traditional – oh my, and if anyone ever wants to get me the best nostalgic gift ever? Cathedral. It’s a strategy board game where players attempt to build a city around a cathedral and capture the other person’s territory. Like chess but more 3D. Louis and I played it often while dating.
If you ask my kiddos what their favorite family game is, I’m going to say the answer will be a toss up between Scrabble, Monopoly, and Risk. But both Louis and I have been playing the first two all our lives and he introduced my siblings and I into the Risk world within a week of our first date so our kiddos have been playing their whole lives Five of the eight have been playing Settlers of Cataan their whole lives – wow.
As a homeschool teacher, I’m glad to point out the educational parts of each game: Geography & Strategy; Risk. Basic Arithmetic, Percents, Addition, Subtraction, Making Change, Reading; Monopoly. Spelling & Vocabulary, Addition & Multiplication; Scrabble. Spelling & Vocabulary, Addition; Boggle. Strategy, Supply & Demand, Reading; Settlers of Cataan (depending on expansions used, other skills added). Strategy & Counting; Chess, Backgammon, Mancala, Connect Four, Dominoes, Dutch Blitz. Reading, Random memory; Trivial Pursuit.
All board games include social skills like collaboration, learning to be a good sport, enjoy the journey, honorable competition, and respectful disagreement (that last one always seems to happen – sometimes without the “respectful” and thus needs to be learned).
Family time always seems closer for us around a game on a table – entertaining even for those who are not participating!
Have fun with those around you & game on!
Thanks for Reading,
Type at you next time,
~Nancy Tart
