Games to play at Christmas and other times with the adult family

I love board games! Some of my favorites are; Ticket to Ride, Risk and Settlers of Catan if you like something a bit more complicated. Jungle Speed if you like something easy to learn and loud!

Rummikub is our favourite.

Ticket to ride is great. Unstable Unicorns and Organ attack are a great time too - for all ages

It's a bit of a faff to sort but every Christmas we play a very silly game where I put 20 small items in 20 socks, tie and number them and people have to guess what's inside each sock. Winner, obviously, has the most correct guesses. Even the teenagers love it and the smallest children join in. This year nobody guessed the stock cube. And no, I didn't have 20 socks when we started but they're cheap to buy and will last plenty of Christmasses.

Charades is always fun, and for all ages.Monopoly and Scrabble and cards.

We play Call My Bluff. Just to remind you, this involves two teams, each is presented with an obscure word which they have to define and only one definition is the real one. Opposing team has to try and guess which is the real one.

This involves pre-preparation - finding the words etc. and giving out however many pieces of paper as there are team members. They all have the word written on them, but only one also includes the definition. The person who has the definition has to pretend to cogitate and write a definition just like his/her fellow team members or it becomes blindingly obvious which is the real one.

The person who has researched the words clearly cannot be on a team; but what my OH and I used to do was to each do some words and be on different teams.

It can be totally hysterical - my OH's definitions always made mention of nubile maidens which caused much hilarity, mainly to see how he could manipulate a definition to include them.

Involves some preparation, but definitely worth it. Just google obscure English words and you will find plenty.

With grown ups,balderdash, taboo

I'm toying with buying Azul. Anyone played it who would recommend it, please?

My family are very competitive and enjoy games which are challenging. We played Chaser which is based on the TV programme which I have never seen, but it didn’t matter,
I still won! We were in 4 teams of 2, and my son in law chose me as his partner as he said I was the cleverest. The others were out to prove him wrong of course. My granddaughter was a superb quizmaster.

When my DH first came to stay with out family we tried playing Call My Bluff. He was by no means at a disadvantage not speaking much English - on the contrary: as a teacher of Latin and having learnt Greek at school, guessing obscure words was a doddle for him!

And Alizarin's game with the socks sounds a brilliant way of using up that box of odd socks that the washing machine has produced over the years.

I don’t know if anyone saw Jo Brands water game?
We played that this year……..hilarious!
Pass the bomb was another hit.
Cards against humanity we’ve played bu5 not this year.
Anyone played secret Hitler?