Mum, I'm board...

...a.k.a - Mum, can we play a game?

Wombat Girl is going through some kind of weird teenage growing pains or something - her brain seems to be craving stimulation. Before Christmas, she basically played Set non-stop for a month. Every couple of minutes we'd hear "Set!".  She preferred someone else (usually me, as I'm the only other person in the family who enjoys it) to play with her, but if that (ie: me) was unavailable, she played by herself. "Set!"

You can imagine my joy at Christmas, when the Defying Gravity family scored not one, not two, but THREE new board games!!

First up was the Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries (an Australian series of novels, set in the 1920s and made into a visually sumptuous TV series) Cluedo. We love a bit of Cluedo (known as Clue in North America), but I do struggle to ever win - mostly because Hubby and Wombat Girl don't miss a trick and me and Video Boy struggle to hold all that info in our heads (even with the little bits of useless paper they give you to keep track of what you know). Deduction is not my strong point - add in a few glasses of champagne, and I think I'm destined never to win a round.

Next was the curiously titled Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot. It is possibly a good thing I hadn't started on the champagne when we played this for the first time! It involves, cards, dodecahedron dice, top run, bottom run, cabbage, water, collecting and "killing" bunnies. But once you get the gist of it, it's actually a really fun game for older kids and adults. A sense of humour is compulsory (don't play with a hangover!) and best of all, it has about a billion expansion packs, to keep the fun (and the gift options) going for years!

Finally, we are finally on the Carcassonne bandwagon. The idea of it is a tile-laying game, where you place your "meeples" on various parts of a French landscape. World domination is your target! One of the great things I like about this game is that is actually works best with 2 players, which is handy when your daughter wanders around aimlessly all day asking if anyone would like to play a game with her. It came with a river expansion pack, but also has a billionty other expansions to add to it. Score!

This wasn't planned, but in one of the fancy-pants,expensive, colour co-ordinated Christmas crackers was a mini pack of cards (because, yanno, the 20 or so packs we do already own weren't good enough). Wombat Girl has swapped Set for Solitaire. I wandered into our bedroom to find her playing Solitaire on the iPad AGAIN!!

And if all else fails, there is the ubiquitous UNO, because Grandma knows the rules of that one (or pretends she doesn't so she can win!).

Did you get any board games for Christmas?

Kill any Bunnies lately?

How many packs of playing cards do you own?