Need game advice

[dichroic]

I was just going to ask Maria, but figured other people may have good advice too. We’ll probably be spending New Years Eve with Ted’s parents and one grandfather (possibly two of them, though I doubt it). I need recommendations for a game that would be fun to play with four or five people of a wide age range (40s-90s, in this case; it doesn’t have to be child friendly). We have Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary, a company version of Monopoly and a few others. Just a few parameters:

Trivial Pursuit is out. None of these people will play it with me!
Scrabble, Boggle and any other word games requiring good spelling are out. At least two people present are *not* word people, though they may be willing to play the sort of game where you just have to think of words starting with a given letter.
Bridge is out – we have one expert and four people who don’t know how to play.
We’d all probably prefer something with fairly simple rules.

We were all togeher for New Years Eve two years ago; Pictionary worked fairly well, but the work-Monopoly was a total failure – it was too *much* like work at our company and Ted and I couldn’t stand it.

Any ideas?

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

Comments

[legionseagle]

Texas Hold'Em. Poker is surprisingly easy to learn, a set of proper chips is cheap to buy and the element of chance will keep the expert bridge player at least closer to parity with the other players. You can get print outs of the value of hands which helps with the rules problem.

[wordweaverlynn]

Apples to Apples. One of the best and funniest games ever invented. Also, I love Pigmania, but it has been renamed Pass the Pigs. It's still silly and fun.

[apis_mellifera]

Agree completely on Apples to Apples. It is hilarious and a lot of fun.