February is that joyous month when you want to spend as little time outside as humanly possible. On the bright side, however, this means you get an entire month to stay indoors! Go to that hot yoga class, start “Grey’s Anatomy” for the twelfth time and of course, break out some classic board games. These are the games that will bring back blissful nostalgia, and perhaps some minor PTSD flashbacks to when your brother threw the Monopoly race car token at your face. How many have you played?
Playing Chutes & Ladders is just like going up a ladder and down a slide IRL -- at first, you can't get over the thrill. But after three or four times, you're over it. The next time you spend a cold Saturday indoors, leave this one out.
Is it just me, or was this came stressful? An obnoxious buzzer just because you dinged some guy's exterior funny bone? Hard pass. The only reason Operation isn’t in last place is because I like to think it's what inspired some current doctors to dedicate their lives to medicine.
On a lighthearted note, Guess Who? is a fun guessing game that is easy to beat. On a more serious note, there is hardly any multi-cultural representation going on here. The original game was made up of mostly white people divided in very gender-stereotyped ways.
Any grown adult will laugh hysterically and then weep inconsolably when they see how “life” works in this game. The pros? Fun spinner, cool houses. The cons? I don't want a pink or a blue peg, and I doubt that having children will magically give me $50,000 later in life.
Sorry’s not bad, except for one thing: the bumping. Siblings around the world will shudder at the thought of being bumped and hearing “sorrryyyyyyy” in the most snarky way imaginable. This game is the opposite of saying sorry, but sometimes, it feels good to be bad.
The sound of the popper going off might make me twitch a little bit, but this was some classic fun. Just enough strategy involved to challenge the youngsters, but just enough luck to make it so a 4-year-old can beat you and laugh in your face about it.
Clue was a dope game, as long as everything went according to plan and you had more than two players. Mystery, murder by candlestick -- in a library of all places? It's like an Agatha Christie novel IRL.
Battleship was fabulous because it required a lot of strategy, even if that strategy actually meant very little. But you can’t place everything in the same quadrant...can you? They seem like they’d play it in the corner...or would they put it in the center? Get Battleship out again ASAP, and throw some adult beverages in there while you’re at it.
Yahtzee is stressful, and a lot of luck is involved, but it's a fairly quick game that you can play whenever and wherever. It should be a standard in everyone's game lineup.
Scrabble is my personal favorite, although I recognize this game is not for everyone. Like a fine wine, it gets better with age.
Monopoly is the OG, without question. Everyone knows how to play, and while the pro-capitalist mantras are a bit unsettling, it's too much fun to set aside. It takes far too long to play, but the victory (and silent treatments) that follow are totally worth it.