Family Games

My family and my previous neighbors celebrated 20 years of friendship this year; this may or may not be common, I don't know.  Our friendship has gotten stronger as the years have passed by.  They are really an extension of my family and I love each and every one of them. 

We usually get together twice a year as a family (and times throughout the year but not all 23 of us at once).  In the last few years we started to play games at night after dinner...I believe it all started one year with charades, then we branched out and played Mexican Train, Left Center Right, the newlywed game, balderdash and a few others.  Two Decembers ago I made up Family Feud, which was a lot of fun.  The families played against each other to see which family could score the highest.   I did  a lot of 'research' to put this game together, as in I watched A LOT of family feud, I also sent around a survey for people to fill out.  I probably made close to 80 rounds - not knowing how many we'd go through if we were having a great time.  I wrote all the answers on a large piece of paper and then covered them so I could pull it off to revel the answer & points when someone guessed correctly.  The families LOVED it.  Each selected a team mate to come to the podium - I read the question and they had to buzz in - whoever buzzed in said their answer - if it made it on the board they got to play or pass.   Some of the questions and/or responses were hysterical.

This past December someone else made up a Minute To Win It game, which was hysterical.  Again the teams were broken down by family and each family had to select a person to compete against someone else to complete the task.  Many of the items we did were from the show.

This past weekend as we celebrated our 20th anniversary, we were at the beach.  Most of the time we just sit there and talk, play in the sand or go into the water...all typical beach-like things.  This year we added an activity - a beach scavenger hunt.  We split everyone into 5 teams and sent them off looking for items to collect or to take pictures of and we had until the next morning.  This ended up being fantastic I think a lot of the people enjoyed it because we had to do things that we might not have, thus getting everyone involved as well as provided some fantastic photos.  Add to that the level of competition...it wasn't by family - we were smart to really change it up - so at times it got intense, especially when it came to scoring at the end.

Here are some examples of the items we needed to find:

the list

me as a mermaid

 

my team's items (we lost)



the winning team's items

In the evening we celebrated with a 5 minute slide show of some of the great times we've had and also a coffee table book filled with lots of pictures.  Then we played Family Jeopardy.  I sent out a questionnaire for all family members to fill out and then I made 6 categories for each Jeopardy round filled with trivia questions about each person.  I wasn't sure the best way to execute it, so I set it up as a PowerPoint presentation with each slide representing a different question, then I needed a key to find the slide number for the category/amount the contestants selected.  The questions weren't just "which person's fear is X" but instead there were clues within the question to help solve it; it took a lot of research, but I thought it was worth it.  We hooked the computer up and projected it onto the wall so everyone could see.  Everyone appeared to like it and we all learned a lot about each other...even within our own families!  Even Final Jeopardy was a success.