I haven’t blogged Chickpea’s favorite games for a while! I blogged about good word games back in December 2021 (two years ago!) and math games in April 2022. A lot has changed since then! When Chickpea started school at age 6.5 she suddenly had much less interest in games. I think perhaps she had enough intellectual stimulation at school and at home she needed more rest and alone time. But over the last couple of months she suddenly started regularly asking us to play games again. We still play many of our old games but here are some of the new games we’ve been enjoying lately.
Word games:
- Spelling Bee, Connections, and Wordle (all online games from New York Times). Chickpea is loving all three and wants to play them every day lately. We don’t always have time, but she usually plays at least one. Spelling bee and Wordle are particularly great for spelling practice, and connections is particularly great for vocabulary.
- Wise and Otherwise. This game is often Chickpea’s number one choice, but we rarely have enough people around to play it. You can technically play with four people, but IMO you really need at least five people, and six is better.
- Boggle (5×5 version). We let Chickpea write 3+ letter words at first, but now we’ve moved her up to four or more letters. Adults have to find words with 5+ words.
- Taboo. We also have Poetry for Neanderthals, which is similar, but for some reason Chickpea doesn’t like it much. I love it and find it much more fun than Taboo.
- Times Up Title Edition. This game is hard for Chickpea since she doesn’t know most of the titles, but she still enjoys it.
Strategy games:
- Galaxy Trucker. One of DD’s postdocs introduced us to this game and Chickpea loved it. I find it quite challenging and stressful, since it relies on a lot of fast spatial reasoning. But it’s definitely interesting! If we play all three rounds this game takes quite a while.
- Clue. We have decided that Clue with 2 people is boring, but with 3 or more people it’s quite fun. The main challenge is figuring out how to record the incomplete information you get after each guess as well as the info about what you have already revealed to others. There’s still a bit too much luck for my taste, but the recording challenge is definitely interesting for Chickpea. I would like to find a similar but slightly more complex game.
- Settlers of Catan. Chickpea loves this game. We’ve played it a lot lately. I get the appeal, but I don’t like that your performance is so dependent on your initial placement of settlements. If you choose poorly early on there is no hope and you just keep playing knowing there’s no way to come back. It also takes a long time.
- Sankt Petersburg. I don’t know where we got this game. I think we’ve had it for many years, but never played it. It’s a German game so I’m guessing someone gifted it to us. We pulled it out recently and quite enjoyed it. It’s a simple (card-drafting / tableau-building) small engine building game where you are trying to balance rubles (money/purchasing power) with victory points. The object is to make sure you can afford more and more as the game progresses but quickly turn money into victory by mid-game. It strikes a good balance between having simple rules and offering interesting decisions, and I think it’s interesting that if you no one buys cards to clear the board then you don’t get to see new cards in later rounds. This game takes us quite a while to play.
- Wingspan. We checked this out of the library and boy was it hard to understand from the German instructions. There are many intricate rules! Chickpea loved it, but I wasn’t a huge fan. DD wouldn’t even play it. After watching us he said he didn’t like that there is almost no interaction between players.
- Bunny Kingdom. This is a charming slightly mathy light drafting game with very cute little bunny figurines.
- Camel Up. This is another one we first checked out of the library. It feels very different than many other games we played. There’s luck but the set of possibilities is small enough you can calculate probabilities pretty accurately, which allows you to make pretty well-reasoned guesses.
Other games:
- Qwixx. An oldie but Chickpea still enjoys it.
- Top Trump Elements. There aren’t nearly enough elements in the deck, but I like that it gives Chickpea an introduction to some chemistry / the periodic table, and it’s pretty quick.
- The World Game. An oldie but everyone still loves it.
Other old games we’ve played once or twice recently: Farkle, Set, Prime Climb, Proof, Sushi Go, Genius Square, Blokus, Ecosystem, Sumoku.
Pretentious Mama 