Board Game Weekend

Saturday was a pretty rainy day, so we canceled Luke's first baseball practice and instead spent the weekend playing board games. We played Cranium, Zooreka, Junior Scrabble, and one of my all-time favorites from the archives, Facts in Five.

Facts in Five dates back to 1967 and was originally purchased by my parents in the early seventies. It's a great old trivia game, and still in very good condition. Simply put, you draw five cards to see what categories of trivia you will be guessing, like geographic names, historical monuments, names of authors/poets, kinds of animals, etc., and then you randomly pick five letters, and the guesses you put down have to begin with those letters. The game is timed by an old fashioned hand-blown glass timer. (Made in West Germany! How quaint.)

It was always one of my favorite games as a youth, and I particularly remember the amazement on my parents faces when asked to provide a movie title beginning with the letter 'A', I wrote, 'Apocalypse Now.' I was nine years old.

So, I broke the game out for the boys, and we had a very good time. I like the fact that it quizzes them on various trivia facts, but it also challenges them on multiplication and addition when it comes time for scoring. The boys now know their squares tables up to five. (1, 4, 9, 16, 25).

Here are the scorecards from our first couple games together. It was pretty fun, and I feel like the boys got a little education out of it as well.