It’s All Family Games Until…

We did a whole lot of nothing during spring break this year, what with the pandemic and not being able to leave the house. I kind of hit a wall on the whole “cruise ship activities director” role that homeschooling thrust on me, and spent the week watching Chinese TV while the kids played video games. But we did have one day of organized family fun, and it was entirely at the initiative of the kids.

The Origins of Family Game Day

As I said, this project was entirely the kids’ project. I’m not much of a game person, and the day we did this I had been up four hours in the middle of the night with insomnia, but even with those handicaps, it was a lot of fun. One of my teen’s friends had a Family Olympics, and it inspired her to do something similar. So, over the course of the break, my teen and her little sister put together a program for a whole day of family activities on Saturday.

The Program

Of course, weekends are kind of meaningless when you’re self-employed. I and my husband both had work to do. So we didn’t actually play games all day. But we started after breakfast, worked until lunch, then alternated games, work, and meals for the rest of the day. They even made us lunch – tea sandwiches and hummus-dipped vegetables.

The girls did a great job of choosing activities. Most of us could tolerate most of the activities – they mostly avoided anything that any of us actively hates. By the same token, over the course of the day, everyone in the family had a turn at something they excelled at, so everyone was guaranteed to win at something.

The Games

Scrabble

We started out with a rousing post-breakfast game of Scrabble. It was a very strategic choice. Scrabble is one of the few games I kind of enjoy. Playing right after breakfast meant I could sip coffee and nibble orange rolls while we played. Plus I won by nearly 50 points. This experience got me, the most reluctant participant, on board for the rest of the day.

We all really enjoyed the Scrabble game, so we played again after dinner (now with margaritas instead of coffee for the adults). This time, my husband played “requiem” with the Q on a triple points square early in the game, thus guaranteeing the win before most of us had taken our third turn.

Heads Up

This is a cell phone game that combines charades with trivial pursuit. You can play as a family or on teams. We played as a family and didn’t really keep score. First you pick a category, then the person who is “it” puts the phone up to their forehead where everyone else can see the screen. A word pops up for a set amount of time (20 seconds maybe) and the person holding the phone has to guess it. Their teammates can use physical or verbal hints, but cannot say the actual word. It’s surprisingly fun, especially when you pick categories where the words are obvious to some family members but not others (for example tv shows, where the grownups get all the old ones and the kids get all the current ones and neither group can believe the other has never heard of _____). None of us was very good at it but we all had fun.

Video Games

I play video games, but mostly RPGs or casual cell phone games where you connect three or collect things. But we had to play this awful “cooking” game that depended on teamwork. Everyone else knew how to play and even though the controls were simple, I didn’t even know what we were supposed to do. Plus, they’d say things like “Put the tomato on the plate.” And I’d be like, “That’s supposed to be a tomato?” and “I don’t see any plates, where are they?”

We also played Mario Kart, which everyone else loves. I can’t actually tell that anything I do with the control is related to the actions of my character on the screen, but whatever.

The final straw was one of those dancing games. The music was so god-fucking awful I just couldn’t even. Even knowing that it was just a silly way to get exercise, the “dances” were so cringy I even with just my own family in my own basement I was embarrassed to watch, let alone get off the couch and join in. I played one round just waving the hand with the controller around and got third place.

Everyone else had fun though.

Drawing Style

This game was inspired by an episode of Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun, one of the funniest anime I’ve ever watched. There is one scene in that show where a manga artist and two of his assistants give each other drawing challenges. For each challenge, the artist’s picture looks like manga, the new assistant looks like a European fine arts sketch, and the screentone guy draws a stick figure. My teen made up a bunch of prompts. We each had two minutes to draw something, then we voted on the best one. Everyone had a couple of good ideas, but this game was a clear gimme for my youngest daughter.

Exquisite Corpse

The final game in the evening was a variation on Exquisite Corpse. My kids didn’t know that, though. They called it One Word Story. Rather than passing a paper around blind, which would have dragged down the pacing, we assigned a scribe. Then we went around the table verbally adding one word at a time to the story. Here was our first story:

Once their feet are tangled then his butt felt tingles. However, his sidekick spat against his lap. Surprisingly, Johnathon disliked spittle and his acrobatic horses in tandem morning period due to yellow peacock.

The kids were dissatisfied with such extreme surrealism and wanted to start over, this time trying for a more coherent story. Unfortunately, one of us was not very cooperative.

Octopus are very smart. Therefore we should make hats not out of peacocks. Peacocks hate hats because hats have feathers which are despised by whales. Whales’ archenemy is hamsters. Hamsters eat people, everyone. Because they suck. Marrow is delicious and forthwith napkins contain cyanide sprinkles. Radiation causes octopus pigmentation. This sucks marrow from the skull of their enemies. The hamsters know animal rules ululation.

That was more fun, so we tried one more before bed.

Cats love pats but hate snuggles unless death is awaiting. So fish makes feelings of remorse. They kill algae but eat frogs which contain your DNA and sprinkles which gives slimy skin diabetes. Therefore…