It never fails. When my wife's family gets together for an extended period of time, there is a 100% chance that some or all of us are going to end up playing table games. As I wrote last week, we recently took a trip to the West shore of Lake Huron in Michigan to enjoy some time with each other.
Usually, there is one game that everyone gravitates towards and spends the majority of our time together playing. One year it was a four player game called Blockus. I'm not kidding they had a full on tournament with bracket play and everything. It was pretty intense.
Last year it was the horse game you see in the opening photo (I'll get to that a bit later).
This year, a new contender rose to the top for favorite board game. Before I get to that though, let me go back to the very beginning.
For the almost 15 years that I have been together with 
Believe it or not, this actually happens a lot less than you would think:
Typically, there are kids around, so it is kind of frowned upon to drop the F-Bomb so casually. It happens from time to time though. We actually play what is called the "Mexican Train" variation of dominoes.
I'm not sure if that is politically correct anymore, but that is what we call it.
We generally start from double twelve and work our way down to double zero. Each player has a train they start from the double of that round. There is also a "junk" where you can discard dominoes that don't complete your train (assuming they match).
If you can't play, you have to draw and if you still can't play you have to put a marker on your train allowing other players to play on it.
The first person to use all their dominoes wins the round.
As I have said, it's pretty rare that we make it through a full game of double 12 down to double 0. When you get a large number of people playing, they tend to loose focus and about halfway through, someone gets frustrated enough that they just give up. Which leads to more people deciding they are finished as well.
Despite all of that, we still keep playing time and time again. It's just a classic.
The new favorite this year was the game you see above. It's called Ticket to Ride and I have to be honest, it is a pretty addictive game. While the game really only supports six players, they decided to play with teams several times allowing more players to participate.
Basically, you are drawing cards to try and complete train routes. At the end of the game, the person with the longest train gets points as well as the people who were able to successfully complete routes.
As you might imagine, some routes between cities are harder to complete than other ones, so they are obviously worth more points.
I believe they have other versions of this game, so if you are looking for a European map, you might be able to find it. The game itself isn't cheap though. I think we paid north of $50 USD for this game. I know there is an online version you can play via the Google Play and Apple store if you want to go mobile with it.
If I remember correctly the app is kind of on the expensive side too.
Horse racing is a new game that we started playing last year on our trip. It was introduced to us by my brother in law who discovered it via one of his friends. They took it with them on a trip to Nashville, TN, and they ended up playing this game more often than they spent time on the town.
It's quite addictive and I'd love to get my hands on a board if they weren't so dang expensive. The game clocks in around $100 USD on sites like Amazon, but I think you could easily make the game yourself if you had the proper skills and tools.
I think one day I would like to try.
Besides the game board itself, you also need a deck of cards, a pair of dice and some poker chips. We set the price of chips at $.25 a piece and people usually "buy in" $10 to $20 for each play session.
The horses are lined up at the starting line of the board and the playing cards are dealt out to all the players. Kings, Aces, and Jokers are omitted from the deck.
Once the cards have been dealt, the first person rolls the dice. Whatever number they roll, 2 - 12, that horse will move back a spot and any player who had that corresponding card has to burn it and throw a chip in the bowl.
This happens three more times until four of the horses have been taken out of the running. Each time the number gets rolled for one of the horses that has been removed, the player has to throw a chip into the pot. When one of those horses gets moved to the last slot on the board, then players who roll that number have to donate two chips to the pot.
This is how the pot grows. As you can imagine, if horse #7 gets rolled in the first four rolls, the pot will probably grow pretty large since seven is the most common number to be rolled.
Meanwhile, once those first four horses are eliminated, the remaining seven horses start moving forward depending on what numbers are rolled.
Horses like 2 and 12 (the Queen) have fewer holes to get to the finish line because those numbers are harder to roll. Horses 6, 7, and 8 have the most spots that need to be completed to reach the finish line because those numbers get rolled more frequently.
Not surprisingly, it can get pretty loud when you have couple of horses neck and neck approaching the finish line.
Once a horse crosses, the chips are then divided among the people who were holding that card and you start another round. With the "buy in", people can cash in or out their chips at any given time.
It's not going to make you rich, but if you have a good run you can often come away up a couple of dollars. If you have a bad run... you lose it all.
This game is awesome for large groups as there is virtually no limit on the number of players you can have. Even if every player only got one card, there is still potential for them to have some skin in the game.
What kind of games does your family play when they get together? I'd love to hear about it! Do any of these games look like something you might want to add to your next family gathering? Let's talk about it in the comments!
All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or
