Our family has always been a fan of board games. Growing up, I played a lot of classics, like Monopoly, Clue, and Scrabble. My husband’s family exposed me to the world of modern board gaming through Catan and Villainous, and a mutual friend of ours shared Carcassonne.
When the pandemic hit, we found ourselves unexpectedly homeschooling my first-grade stepson through the end of first grade and all of second. Curriculum design wasn’t new to me, but through the wonderful world of Pinterest, I discovered gameschooling. Gameschooling was a massive blessing for our family, and allowed Monkey (stepson) to learn through play rather than screen time and worksheets. We invested in games specifically meant for education, like Sum Swamp and Ecosystem, but also in games that met Monkey’s interests, like Organ Attack (anatomy), Engineering Ants, Robot Turtles (coding), and Minecraft Builders & Biomes.
Game nights became huge for us, both educationally and for fun, and I learned that the entire family loved board games! Throughout the pandemic, our collection grew from maybe 15-20 games to nearly 250.
Narrowing it down to three games was pretty difficult, but these three games are games I find myself returning to time and time again.
I originally bought this with my mother-in-law in mind. Not only is she a board game fan, but she’s big into knitting. We played this one and were both incredibly impressed! I love the yarn and the wooden bowls. Additionally, I geek out every time we play over the nerdy projects to complete, like House Scarves, Dragons, and Snugglesaurus. This one makes it to our table at least once a month!
This game surprised me by being not at all what I expected. I avoided this one previously without much interest because the name seemed silly. However, when the most recent KS came out, I decided to see if someone local had a copy for me to borrow. One play and I fell in love. I discovered the polyomino mechanic is one of my favorites. I love the many different ways to win and that this is competitive but not in a take that way. I will gladly play this one any time anyone asks!
I purchased Dice Throne second hand for a huge discount thinking it would be a nice break from Monkey’s obsession with Dungeon Mayhem. Little did I know, this would become a family and friend favorite. Dice Throne is probably the most popular game we own and it sees table time multiple times per week. I’m not a huge take that fan, which is pretty much the entire purpose of Dice Throne. I’ll play because everyone enjoys it and I love family time, but when I found DTA, which turns Dice Throne cooperative instead of competitive, I had to invest. This dungeon crawler doesn’t see as much table time simply because of the play time, but it’s such a huge hit every time we play.
And those are some of my favorites! I started my Instagram to gain more exposure to games that our family would love and to share my love of gaming with the gaming community. Thanks for joining our journey!
What a lovely post! The enjoyment you get out of spending time together as a family whilst playing games really comes through. And now I’m off to look up some of those gameschooling games you listed!