i can’t believe it but i’ve never heard of some of these games! loved monopoly and yahtzee and still love scrabble.

Never heard of Millie Bourne, but I love that you played a game with kilometers.
TP – we played this in Uni like you played Rummy, but we played Rummy as well. We (family) still get the TP cards out and read the questions at get togethers.
I preferred Life and Payday to Monopoly, if we are talking board games. And Monopoly is a bored game to me.
I’ve never been a Scrabble fan, but we had Numble, which is similar, but with numbers!
I remember playing lots of solitaire games, one that you played with 2 decks.

Nothing can get my sister and I laughing like remembering a kid’s board game called Sour Grapes that was memorable played one night with our cousins. Hysterics ensued.
That was fun remembering games we played.

Mille Bourne! I loved that game, even though my mother used to purposely mispronounce the cards’ names and it drove me nuts …

From childhood…

1. Balderdash – What could be more fun than random vocabulary words you’ve likely never heard before? Making up crazy definitions for them and hoping people think your nonsense is real. I was disappointed when I bought my own copy and found they had expanded it from words only to a bunch of categories, such as dates and movie titles and bought an original version off ebay.

2. Pictionary You get to draw, and convey meaning solely through art. You don’t have to draw well, nor fast even though there is a time limit, you just have to draw in a way that connects with your audience.

3. Clue Keeping track of all the various people, places, and murder weapons until you can guess with certainty who done it, while getting to use secret passageways!

4. Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? A computer game that had you flying all over the world, looking up clues in a world atlas, learning flags for different countries, and other random facts. Wouldn’t work as well today, with all information just a Google away.

5. Trouble I can’t really remember much about this game, except that the die used was inside a bubble that you pressed and caused it to fling around like those fake vacuums they sell for kids to play with. Fun just for the mechanic of pressing that bubble and rolling the die.

6. Pathfinder A two-player game in which you build a maze and hide a gold treasure in it. Your opponent navigates blindly, and you tell him when he’s hit a wall, so he can map our your maze as he goes.

7. Chaos Like checkers, but the pieces are cups with colors in them. They are placed upside down so you move them without being able to see which are yours. You might end up accidentally moving your opponents pieces and won’t know until you get to the opposite side of the board and turn it over. We had this game in our camper, so it is associated with the beach and other camping trips.

8 Role Playing From make-believe to Dungeons and Dragons (which I didn’t get to play as much as I would have liked) this was a was to combine storytellings and acting and escapism. We played House with the neighbors, and Animals (which would get us labeled as Furrys today) and made up adventures for our GI Joes and Playmobile people and made our Hot Wheels fly with their doors opened as if they were wings. My stuffed animals still protect me from the monsters in the closet and under the bed.

9. Lucasfims Adventure Games I’m lumping them all together, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, the Maniac Mansion series, Indiana Jones – solving puzzles on the computer in games where the story was what mattered, not some deadly survival nonsense like arcade games.

10. Rubic’s Race A race to slide tiles to match the pattern randomly generated by multicolored dice in a Boggle-like container. Mostly, I only liked this game because I spent a lot of time playing it alone, and got very good at it.

@amanda: Some of these were a bit obscure.

@raidergirl3: I don’t know that I ever played Payday, but Life was okay. And I’ve never heard of Numble or Sour Grapes!

@Bridget: Hooray! I knew someone else would know it!

@GK: How in the world do we have so few games in common? Clearly you came upon your love of obscure board games early!

Partly I wanted to pick things you had not mentioned, but there are also several games on your list I’ve played and don’t like.

Trivial Pursuit – sports category is a complete waste on me. History not my strong suit either… I never enjoyed the pressure of people expecting me to do well because they think I’m the smart one only to let them down and feel stupid.

Monopoly – played this tons, and it has always been dull. Games that end were rare enough, and of those, most were because someone got sick of playing and actively worked at losing. Bleh.

Scrabble – I like making words, but am not good or fast at it. It’s excruciating to wait for your turn to come around again only to find that all the words you had planned out are impossible thanks to the words played by the guy before you. Then embarrassing to take forever looking for a new move to make. Playing interesting words was always more fun than trying for points. Not playing for points is a passtime that few can appreciate.

Hey, not true about Shelley and Mike. My family played Mille Bourne, too!

I also enjoyed playing Rook, Rummy, Simon, Trivial Pursuit, Labyrinth, Pictionary, Boggle, Clue, Yar’s Revenge, Centipede, and many, many others. It’s a shame it’s so hard to get adults to play games, because there’s nothing I like more than a good game.

@GK: That’s fair. I only play Trivial Pursuit with smart people, so I expect we all know many things, but not all of them. Interestingly, though, the last time I played, Michael and I won with a question about the Super Bowl.

@Karen: I don’t think we’ve ever played Mille Bourne together. I didn’t know! And I totally associate Boggle with you and your mom.