Did you know the average family has 1.8 kids? What do you do with the extra .8?

Thanksgiving and the winter holidays are upon us. Even if you normally play with 2 or 3 players, you’ll probably want to accommodate more family in your games!

After geeking out a little bit about the change in how the kilogram is defined, we get around to our topic: games that support five players, and do it well. [Skip to the five player games]

 

Last week, we released our holiday gift guide.

What We’ve Been Playing

Fidelitas – this is a medievally-inspired card game from Green Couch Games. Complete secret goals by playing characters to various locations and moving them around the city. Each character has their own special powers as well, so it makes you work your brain. “The Rube Goldberg machine of game mechanics.”

Untold – Anitra and Asher sat down and created a world called “Inventor City”. The scaffolding offered by Untold helped them to tell an interesting story (well, interesting for a seven-year-old), and they’re hoping to revisit it soon.

Catch! – from Peaceable Kingdom. We’re really enjoying this elegantly simple co-op. Expect a SNAP review this week.

Knot Dice (our review) – Didn’t play quite as much of this as we’d like; Anitra shares a true confession.

Mice & Mystics – from Plaid Hat Games. We love (or want to love) this role-playing / combat game. We’ve been playing it every once in a while for the past two years. The mechanics still feel a little too heavy for our kids, and the games tend to run long.

Fight for Olympus (our review) – a fantastically balanced two-player game. Every card can be used in multiple ways with wildly different effects. Asher tried it and did OK but it was just a little too complex.

Rocky Road A La Mode – Another game with multi-functional cards, also from Green Couch Games. We tried this for the first time with Asher. It’s super-cute and we can’t wait to play again.

Adventure Land – not a typical HABA game. We picked this one up on a whim at Barnes & Noble a while ago, and finally tried it this past week (twice!). Each person gets 8-10 adventurer meeples. Every turn, you can move a meeple as far as you want, but only “east” and “south”, never backtracking. Pick up different types of randomly placed tokens, fight monsters, and accumulate points (depending on the scenario). When you run out of “swords” and “companions”, the game ends.

Zitternix – a favorite dexterity game from HABA.

And now for a quick digression… Hamilton!

Andrew’s mom loves entering contests, and entered a contest on LuckySeat.com… She won the right to buy two tickets to Hamilton for $10 each! Anitra got to go with “mom” and they had a great time.

What Andrew played while Anitra was gone:

Century: Golem Edition – because we love it.

Beyond Baker Street – 2-4 detectives cooperate to solve a crime faster than Sherlock Holmes. “A cross between Hanabi and Spy Club.” While holding your hand outwards, play cards to solve 3 aspects of the crime. Sherlock Holmes gets closer to solving the crime every time you share information about someone’s cards. But there’s also a special discard pile called &...