For my two special days a year (my birthday and Father's Day) all I care about is spending time together as a family. I don't want gifts. I don't want special food. I just want fun! And it is a perfect excuse to get my kids to put down their phones and engage with some old fashioned family fun. (Actually I'm pretty lucky and they still do prioritize fun with us over their phones... but it usually for a short time. On my days, I get the whole day!)
Today that fun took the form of board games, card games and an escape room. We started off with my favorite (and my wife and daughter's least favorite) game Dropmix! I wrote about this game many years ago and I am still blown away by the amazing technology it uses. Basically each player has a deck of music cards with colors on them. You try to control the five colored game slots on the board by playing your cards in an appropriate space. Well what fun is that! Well these cards are read by the board and cause the music to change when you put a card down. Certain cards control the vocals, drums, keyboards, and guitar. The beats per minute also change according to what card you play. The game perfectly mixes elements from all the different songs on the cards and plays it through your phone. My favorite combo today was the vocals of Its Tricky by RUNDMC, the keyboards from Final Countdown, Drums from Take ME Out, and I forgot what the guitar was. But it was awesome! We played three games of that so everyone could be partnered with everyone else. Even though my wife and daughter pretend to roll their eyes, we always have fun.
We then went to a local Escape Room and solved it in about 45 minutes. Although we have done about twenty Escape Rooms, this was probably the fastest we have solved one. My favorite thing about these is that we are forced to work as a team and we always walk out with shared memories of me trying to do something dumb like turn over a couch.
When we returned home we played an old but a goodie... Cranium! My family is a mix of creative and logical people so this game is perfect. If you haven't played it, it is a game where you try to get your partner to guess something. It might be charades, drawing, sculpting with clay, humming. There are also opportunities to solve word puzzles or to answer trivia questions. It is a great game that we all enjoy.
We capped it off with a game of Dungeon Mayhem. This is a VERY simple Dungeons and Dragons card game that involves drawing a card, playing a card, doing what it says, and either attacking an opponent, healing or defending yourself. There are also some special powers that are fun. This is one where there are no teams so it is just a family battle royal and we love it!
I have to cut this short because we are going to end the night watching Onward.
Anybody else have to celebrate late?
