Wits & Wagers is a Major Fun award-winning game – a Keeper, in fact. So now we have Wits & Wagers Family, which, as you might correctly conclude, is a somewhat less complex version, designed to appeal to the whole family. Except for kids that are below the age of…what? 10? 8? 6? 4?

Use your make-believe, wipe-offable marker to write your hypothetical guess on your imaginary write-on, wipe-offable Answer Board. Then collect everyone’s similarly imaginary Answer Boards and organize them from low to high (or high to low). Ready to vote?  Great. Place one or two of your pretend “Meeples” (wooden, people-shaped playing pieces) of your choice – the larger one on your best guess, the smaller on your next best.

The manufacturers suggest 8 as the youngest age. Did you write down the correct answer? Give yourself 1 point. Did you imagine yourself putting your Meeple on the correct answer? Your big Meeple? Give yourself 2 more points. Your smaller Meeple, one more point. Actually if you guessed 8 or lower you’d be OK, as long as no one got closer to the right answer than you. And, since there are two right answers, you could have Meepled 4 and still get the point(s).

Mark the circles on the fantasized score board to show everyone’s score. Ready for the next question?

That’s pretty much it, Wits & Wagers Family game-wise. You get 300 questions on 150, cute little narrow cards; 5 small markers, 5 different colored wooden Meeples (10 altogether – one large, one smaller), 5 Answer Boards, a scoreboard, and a clearly written and illustrated set of instructions which, even if you haven’t played the original game, you’ll be able to figure out in a paucity of minutes.

By the way, there are TWO correct answers to the minimal age question. According to the manufacturer, the answer is 8. According to us, 4. Of course our 4-year-old is a genius, and he had his genius mother to help him. He didn’t have any trouble guessing, since all you have to do is write a number, and, later, pick a number. Being correct was another question altogether – and if you’re 4, it doesn’t matter so much anyway. As long as you get to play.

Wits & Wagers Family is significantly fun. Major, even, fun-wise. It’s easy to learn, each round takes well under the expected attention span for even the youngest player. The scoring is quick and easy to remember. You can play as teams and it’s just as much fun as if everyone has their own Meeples. Most of the questions (e.g. “What percent of men have color blindness?) are obscure enough to encourage educated or totally misinformed guessing. Some (“How many teaspoons are in a tablespoon?”) are well within the range of common adult knowledge, but even then the game works, because you’re allowed to have the same answer as someone else and get all the recognition you so rightly deserve, and sometimes we adults have a strong need to be right.

Designed by Dominic Crapuchettes, with gently compelling art by Jacoby O’Connor and Shawn Wilson, funwise, Wits & Wagers Family is, like I said, just plain Major!

Creationary is the first LEGO party game. It’s not like any other LEGO Game, yet it’s the best way to discover what LEGO Games are all about.

First of all, it’s great fun. It’s very easy to learn (especially if you know how to play Pictionary). It’s invites play (especially if you know LEGOs). And it’s completely open-ended. You can pretty much change everything about the game.

During our “Tasting” of the game, we were fortunate to have one player who had never really played with LEGOs. Fortunate, because it helped us appreciate how fundamentally fun the whole concept of LEGO Games can be – fun for people who love LEGOs, fun for people who don’t know anything about LEGOs.

First of all, you get the LEGO Dice. Actually, it’s a single die, but they call it “dice” anyway. The thing about the LEGO dice is that the faces are all replaceable. You can change them, and, in this way, change the game. Which is why you also get a couple extra LEGO Dice faces. You also get a lot of LEGO pieces. Most of them are the standard kind you’d expect to find in almost any set of LEGO bricks. Some are wonderfully non-standard, inviting invention. You also get 2 LEGO figures – a minifigure and a microfigure. The microfigure is too small to have moving parts, but not too small to feature that characteristically wonderfully playful, sometimes somewhat sinister expression. And then there’s a deck of cards. Three decks, actually, of different difficulty level. Each card shows four different pictures of four different categories of things that can be built: nature, vehicles, things, buildings.

When it’s your turn to do the building (as a single player, a couple or team), you throw the die to determine the category, and pick whatever level of difficulty you want to go for. It doesn’t matter what level you choose – if you’re playing for score you still only get one point if your creation is guessed correctly.

This is something you only find in LEGO Games and maybe among a few enlightened physical educators – the idea that people might actually choose to do something more challenging, not because they get more points for it, but simply because it is more fun.

The rules describe four different ways to play: one person builds and everyone else guesses, one person guesses and as many of four people build, two teams play simultaneously – each with one builder, and race to be the first to identify the object being built; and finally everybody plays as one team, racing against the clock – one player building, everyone guessing, seeing how many items they can identify before the time (whatever time they decide on) has elapsed.

We, of course, invented our own variations. Mine was not only to allow unlimited guesses and unmeasured time, but also to allow the builder to accompany her creation with sound effects, gestures, facial expressions, and full-body dramatizations, as needed. This not only made the game much easier for the LEGO-challenged, but also much funnier for everyone.

In addition to all 341 pieces, you get a sorting tray, which, given the intensity of having to build something as quickly as possible, proves to be a most constructive tool for the construction constructor. Of course, in the process of carting the game to someone else’s house everything falls out of the tray. But sorting is always fun, sort of, and a great way to start the next game. And, should you happen across any spare LEGO bricks from abandoned LEGO kits, you can give them a new and even more playworthy life as part of your Creationary collection.

Creationary was designed by LEGO Game designer, and initial conceptualizer of the whole, shall we say, concept of LEGO Games: Cephas Howard.

For more background about this post, please see LEGO Games – an Introduction

You get 300 “Advice Cards,” 100 “Plan Cards,” 8 wooden pawns that look remarkably like pinless push pins, a die, and a board (that serves mostly for scoring – I guess you could call it a “scoring board”), and a set of rules. There’s a track around the edges of the board that goes from Start, and then after 44 spaces, Finish. The track looks like a cork board. Which makes the pawns look like push pins stuck into a cork board. Which is fun.

But, of course, the really fun part doesn’t come until you start playing the game.

Let’s start with a Plan. Which, in this game, begins with a Plan Card, which is, in fact, a To Do List. Each To Do List has three different To Do’s. For example:

1. Build a tree house.
2. Get a tattoo
3. Tightope walk between two buildings.

Then you, the Planner, throw the die, which determines what kind of advice you’re looking for: the best advice, the worst advice, the kind of advice your grandma might give you, or the kind of advice you’d expect to get from a kid. The two other sides of the die are for something else.

Everybody has 6 cards, drawn from random from the many, many Advice Cards. Advice? Like:

• Learn the law
• Cover your mouth
• Call an attorney
• Take a large bag
• Take lots of cash
• Study architecture

The Planner selects which of the three To Dos she wants to, uh, do. Like “Get a tattoo.” And the die tells everybody that she’s looking for the kind of advice her grandmother would give. Which card would you select?

So you select that card. And everyone else (there can be up to 8 players) selects one of theirs. Then everyone gives you their advice – which is always fun. You look at the cards. You put them in order, from, according to your lights and the dictates of the die, best to worst (or worst to best, depending). There are 5 scoring positions in the middle of the board. You place each card, in order, starting at the top (which is worth 5 points), and ending at the 1-point-worth position. Players whose card was chosen move accordingly, one space for each point. And then it’s someone else’s turn to be Planner.

The players who got to give advice all replenish their hands. And the next person gets to be Planner.

Sounds Like a Plan turns out to be everything you’d want to see in a Major Fun party game. It’s easy to learn. It takes maybe a half hour to play. And you spend most of the time laughing. As you can see, the cards are very cleverly written – the Advice cards easily as clever as the Plan cards. The die works brilliantly to keep the game unpredictable and fun. There are two other sides of the die: one is “Wild” which allows the Planner to select whatever kind of advice she wants to get; the other is called “Psychic.” When that turns up, the players have to guess which of the three To Do’s on the Plan Card the Planner would most likely select, and then come up with the most appropriate Plan for that To Do. OK. So there’s a certain element of luck there. In fact, there are certain elements of luck everywhere in the game – what side of the die turns up, what Advice Cards you get, what Plan Card is selected. All of which prove to provide exactly enough luck to keep anyone from taking anything about the game too seriously.

It’s most definitely the kind of game you can play with anyone of 2-digit age. It’s clearly as much fun to play it with your family as it is with a bunch of friends. And the fun is most clearly Major.

Designed by Colleen McCarthy-Evans and Joyce Johnson with art by Lisa Goldstein, Sounds Like a Plan turns out to be yet another Major Fun game from Gamewright.