Our Favorite Family Games for After Dinner

 

Dinner isn’t all about food.  At it’s best, dinner is about family and spending time with the people you love and who love you.

When our kids were little, they used to rush off to play as soon as they finished eating.  But now that they’ve grown, sometimes we stretch out the dinner hour with some game playing.  Now that cooler weather is here and the days are getting shorter, we find that we’re doing more game playing.

So, I thought I’d share some of our favorites with you!  One of the great things about all the games I’m sharing today is that they don’t take long to play.  You can spend just 15 minutes or 45 minutes or longer if you’ve got time.  It’s nice to know there are games that will fit your schedule, even when that means a just a small amount of time.

Killer UNO

We love Killer Uno!  It takes the game of UNO to a whole new level.  It’s fast paced and crazy fun.

Basically, you’re playing regular UNO, but with another set of rules added in:

• You can play out of turn.
• You can play more than one card at once, as long as it’s the same card (for example, you can put down three Draw 4 cards at once!)
• You can defend Draw 4 cards and Draw 2 cards that have been played on you by playing a Skip or Reverse of the color that’s been called or another Draw 4 or Draw 2 in a matching color.  This passes the pick-up requirement to the next person.
• If you play a 7, you can trade cards with another player.
• If you play a 0, everyone passes their cards to the left.

It’s so much fun!  We don’t keep score, but you can.  This game is more fun with more people.  Just add in extra decks of UNO cards, 1 deck for every 4 people.

Spot It

Spot It is another fast paced game.  It can get loud pretty fast too!  I like this one, because it’s fun for a lot of ages.  The idea is to call out the matching picture on two cards.  Every card has at least one picture in common with every other card in the deck.  Can you spot the similarity in the set above?

There are several easy variations of this game and there are a lot of different themes you can buy, if you want something other than the original. It’s fun with just two people or with a table full of folks.

Farkle

 

Farkle is a fun game with a silly name.  It’s easy to play and moves a little slower than the previous games I’ve mentioned.  It’s actually possible to carry on a conversation while playing Farkle.

The goal is to see who can reach 10,000 points first.  There are just a few easy rules.   You get up to 4 rolls when it’s your turn.  But to stay in play and keep your points, you have to roll a 1 or a 5.  If not, you farkle and lose the points.  Every turn is a bit of a gamble, which is fun.

Dutch Blitz

 

Dutch Blitz is a 4 person game that moves fast.  There is a version with regular playing cards though called Nerts, and that one can be played with a lot of people.  You just use one deck of cards per person.  Or you could buy this 2-pack or 3-pack version of Dutch Blitz and have plenty of cards for everyone.  (I may be putting my order in for that soon!)

The goal of Dutch Blitz is to work through your wood pile and be the first to blitz, or go out.  Play moves quickly, but it’s easy to get the hang of.  You can keep score, but we tend to just take each hand as its own game and skip the score keeping.

Love Thy Neighbor and Kemps

 

 

Love Thy Neighbor

Love Thy Neighbor is actually called Oh Hell.  We changed the name to make it family friendly!  Apparently, it goes by lots of other names too, like “Get Fred”.  I like that name.  We’ve also called it “New Guy Loses”.  Do you have a different name for this game?

I’m not even going to try explaining the rules, but here’s a page that does. We add a card each hand until we get to 7 and then come back down again to 1 card.  The instructions I just linked to have you continue to go up until you don’t have enough cards to go around.  Either way works.

Kemps

Kemps is a game that will get you laughing!  You have to have an even number of people for this one.  Partners are chosen and each set of partners has to come up with a secret  signal.  Four cards are dealt to each player, and four more dealt face-up on the table.  The goal is to pick up cards from the table, discarding those you don’t need, in order to get all four cards in your hand the same (four 5’s, or four Queens etc).  Once you do that, you have to signal your partner and get them to call Kemps, without alerting the other players that you’ve done it.  Getting the right hand of cards is pretty easy, but getting your signal across to your partner can be hilarious!

We play a lot, of card games!  Euchre, Shanghai Rummy, Hearts and more.  I’d love to know what some of your favorites are!

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links to Amazon.