Best Boardgames 2009
In 2008, the sale of boardgames jumped 23.5% to $808 million. This may sound odd, considering that we’re in a recession and all, but it seems that Americans are cluing into the fact that a Scrabble board game costs a third of the price of a new video game and can provide just as much entertainment, and more social entertainment to boot! Video game sales have been growing too, but only by about 7% each year. Given their higher cost, they’re bringing in $12.4 billion annually. Families operating on tight budgets are realizing that now is a great time to set their sights on affordable family fun with some classic board games. Here are some selections for the “Best Games of 2009.”
Writers on the site www.about.com recently weighed in on some of their favorite party boardgames and family games of the year. Scene It is a new game that teenagers particularly love that works with a DVD player, where opponents have to guess which movie different scenes are from and shout out answers to movie trivia. There are also variations like Disney Scene It, Seinfeld Scene It and Harry Potter Scene It for the devout fans. Quiddler is a fun word game that works well at teaching kids their language skills. Similarly, Scattergories is a great game for wordsmiths, where players roll an alphabet die and fill out a list based on that letter (like “Sports Teams that start with S,” “School Items that start with S,” or “Foods that start with S.”) Cranium is an amazingly fun game that combines Pictionary drawing, Trivial Pursuit trivia, Charades and sculpting all in one. Them Versus Us is a fun game for households with two guys and two girls, since it’s a battle of the sexes game.
The 2009 American International Toy Fair in New York City introduced some great new boardgames this year. Pants on Fire (3 or more players, ages 10+) is a fun story-telling game, where a player writes brief stories about each of the three topics revealed. For example, a “bad date” or a “first job,” and the other players have to guess if the story is “true or false.” Another fun boardgame, Pressure Point (3 to 8 players, ages 10+) has players racing against the clock to give answers down a list of questions as quickly as possible, while other players bet on the number of correct answers they think the player will give. Masters of Venice (2 to 5 players, ages 10+) uses games strategy where players must act as 15th century Italian merchants trading spices, silks, gems, iron and grain, while playing alternate characters like thieves, harbor masters and gondoliers. Time’s Up: Title Recall (4 to 8 players, ages 12+) is a fun party game that asks players to guess the famous person associated with famous books, movies, songs and albums. A new 10th anniversary edition of Time’s Up has also been released this year.
According to www.squidoo.com writers, the best of the 2009 boardgames is Cranium, a new hot-selling game with a number of expansion packs and subsequent editions. There are four card decks with a typical Cranium game; one that has you sketching or sculpting with clay; one that has you humming, whistling, impersonating a famous person or playing charades; one that acts like a trivia board game; and one that has you unscrambling words, spelling words backwards, guessing definitions and filling in the blanks. Other top games of the year include Scattergories (a word game), Monopoly Deluxe (classic board game), Malarky (a bluffing game), Wise & Otherwise (word game), Pictionary (drawing game), 25 Words or Less: People, Places, Things (word game), If… Questions For The Game of Life (party game) and Loaded Questions (party game).
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