Here's a board game I'll pass on
Dec. 26—The holidays and onset of winter send many families to the closet to pull out favorite board games. Most people probably have several more games and puzzles to choose from than they did a couple of years ago.
During the heat of the pandemic last year, sales of games and puzzles soared as people looked for more things to do at home.
Scrabble is a mainstay at our house, but we do the cheating version because, quite frankly, following the rules and still enjoying Scrabble is only for those with strong anagramming, vocabulary, organizational and mathematical skills.
If Rose or I challenge the spelling of a play and it turns out to really be a word, there's no penalty to the challenger in our house. And there's no little plastic sand timer used for each turn. That's because we take all the time we need to look up potential words in the Scrabble dictionary or in the printouts of bizarre Scrabble words we found online.
"Xed" and "xyst" are acceptable words — at least if you find a website that says they are.
It's reassuring, amid all the digital noise in our life that board games continue to sell like crazy. Those of us who grew up on the traditional board games — from Candy Land to Risk — still tend to see them as the go-to games. But a big chunk of today's board games are role-play games such as Dungeons & Dragons and Lord of the Rings.
Still, when we pull out some of the old standards like Uno or Sorry, the grandkids still enjoy them the same as we did years ago.
One we never pull out is Monopoly.
Monopoly is always on the list of most popular games ever, but there's a huge caveat. Almost everyone has owned a Monopoly game at some point, but it takes so freaking long to play that virtually no one wants to actually play it.
A couple of years ago Hasbro came out with a Monopoly game called Monopoly Longest Game Ever.
The name should justifiably alarm you.
There are way more properties to land on in the game, more money available, and to win you have to own all of the properties on the board.
The record for the longest Monopoly Longest Game Ever lasted for 70 straight days.
There are always new games coming out and most of them are duds — warmed-over versions of other games or complicated rules that suck out the fun. But there are also gems.
Catan, which came out in the '90s, is one of the top games in the world. Players take on the roles of settlers, each attempting to build and develop holdings while trading and acquiring resources. It's easy to learn for people of any age and doesn't take forever to play.
I know we're all weary of COVID, so you maybe won't want to hear there is a game called Pandemic.
It came out five years ago, before our pandemic, but its premise is eerily understandable for all of us going through COVID.
The board is a map of the world, with four terrible diseases running rampant simultaneously and it's up to the players to work together and cure the world.
I'd like to add a couple of new games to our collection, but I think maybe it will be something like Rummikub or Trouble — I'm just not in the mood for sitting down with the grandkids and playing Pandemic.
Tim Krohn can be contacted at tkrohn@mankatofreepress.com or 507-344-6383.
