Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Bernie's best games of the year. Five funnest games for 2006. The Major FUN Award goes to games and people that bring people fun, and to any organization managing to make the world more fun, through its own person contributions, and through the products it has managed to bring to the market. Major FUN especially likes games that: * make people laugh * are original, flexible, easy to adapt * are well-made, durable, easily stored * are easy to understand and teach The Five Most Major Fun party games for 2006 are: Wits and Wagers combines trivia with betting to create a unique party game - one that can involve anywhere from 3 to 21 players in an evening or half-hour worth of relatively painless trivia questions and sometimes near-painful strategizing. Knowbody Knows, for example, exactly how many hours Tom Hanks sleeps in a week. Probably not even Mr. Hanks knows that. So, OK, so you don't know. You can still guess. Because, see, it's only a guess, and, as the designers of the game are so ready to remind us, Knowbody, actually, Knows. Quelf is a silly game. For those of us who are mature enough to appreciate silliness as an art form, it is both a bench- and a watermark of wackiness. If you find yourself unwilling to, for example, "suck your thumb in silence and start rolling the dice. When you roll a '3,' shout, 'Get off my land!' in your best chipmunk voice," mayhap Quelf is not exactly your kind of game. GiftTRAP is a party game about giving each other gifts. The better you are at giving people the things they really want, the better you do at the game. How do you like that for a party game premise? giving each other presents. Well, we loved it! Luck of the Draw is described as "a game for the artistically challenged." And I am happy to tell you that this turns out to be a remarkably accurate description of the very people who will have the most fun playing it: the people who don't like games that make them draw. from Deep Fun [Bernie DeKoven, funsmith] 9:11:52 AM    comment []