Games to keep in RV
Looking for recommendations of games you like to play and keep in your RV. Ones that are good for all ages from about 8 to adults.
Forum Discussion
What games do the particular individuals like to play? You can do a lot with a deck of 52 playing cards. There are hundreds of games that work for various age levels.
Remembering from age about 8 to adult, my cousin kept us busy with Crazy Eights and Gin Rummy, and when we got older my grandmother would have us playing Canasta all night, two or three decks. Before we were old enough for Crazy Eights, we could play War until ready to fall asleep.
From about 10-12, we were ready for Poker, some of us for Pinochle (uses a different deck of cards, but you can put it together with 1 or 2 partial standard decks) or Hearts. With a scoreboard, Cribbage works for two.
Uno (rummy with tiles) and SkipBo (War with a special deck) are commercialized variations of old card games.
Board games? Checkers and Chinese Checkers can start as early as age eight, but it might be a few years too early for Chess or Chinese Chess. Chase games like Sorry and Chutes and Ladders work at an early age, and there are hundreds of commercial variations, each with its own copyright or patent. Scrabble works well for people on a similar educational level, not so well for a wide age range.
I find that trivia games and knowledge games do not work well for a large range of ages, too much disparity in experience generation to generation.
Tile games? Any age can play dominoes, or the more simple Mexican Train, if you can get the group to agree on the rules. MahJong is a bit more difficult to stretch across a range of experience levels. RummiCube turns rummy into a tile game.
Outdoors, horse shoes, ring toss, and bean-bag toss games work for age 8 to adult if you keep size of the course within the throwing range of the weakest players. We used to have a lot of fun with lawn darts, before someone decided they were too dangerous and outlawed the sale.
Ping Pong and Badminton start working around age 8, and keep working past age 80, although people in the middle tend to do better, having developed their skills and not yet lost their agility. Tennis, squash, handball, although learnable while very young and playable into old age, tend to more favor teens to middle age over those one the age fringes.
It depends very much on your collection of players. I've been carrying around Chess and Chinese Checkers for more than 10 years, but our group of older people nobody has ever wanted to play those, nor any board game. It is more of a RummiCube, SkipBo, Mexican Train crowd, adverse to any game played with a deck of 52.
But generally, if you are talking about indoor "quiet time" games, they would be the same games you play at home, when you turn off the TV and the Internet and the family plays games together.
Remembering from age about 8 to adult, my cousin kept us busy with Crazy Eights and Gin Rummy, and when we got older my grandmother would have us playing Canasta all night, two or three decks. Before we were old enough for Crazy Eights, we could play War until ready to fall asleep.
From about 10-12, we were ready for Poker, some of us for Pinochle (uses a different deck of cards, but you can put it together with 1 or 2 partial standard decks) or Hearts. With a scoreboard, Cribbage works for two.
Uno (rummy with tiles) and SkipBo (War with a special deck) are commercialized variations of old card games.
Board games? Checkers and Chinese Checkers can start as early as age eight, but it might be a few years too early for Chess or Chinese Chess. Chase games like Sorry and Chutes and Ladders work at an early age, and there are hundreds of commercial variations, each with its own copyright or patent. Scrabble works well for people on a similar educational level, not so well for a wide age range.
I find that trivia games and knowledge games do not work well for a large range of ages, too much disparity in experience generation to generation.
Tile games? Any age can play dominoes, or the more simple Mexican Train, if you can get the group to agree on the rules. MahJong is a bit more difficult to stretch across a range of experience levels. RummiCube turns rummy into a tile game.
Outdoors, horse shoes, ring toss, and bean-bag toss games work for age 8 to adult if you keep size of the course within the throwing range of the weakest players. We used to have a lot of fun with lawn darts, before someone decided they were too dangerous and outlawed the sale.
Ping Pong and Badminton start working around age 8, and keep working past age 80, although people in the middle tend to do better, having developed their skills and not yet lost their agility. Tennis, squash, handball, although learnable while very young and playable into old age, tend to more favor teens to middle age over those one the age fringes.
It depends very much on your collection of players. I've been carrying around Chess and Chinese Checkers for more than 10 years, but our group of older people nobody has ever wanted to play those, nor any board game. It is more of a RummiCube, SkipBo, Mexican Train crowd, adverse to any game played with a deck of 52.
But generally, if you are talking about indoor "quiet time" games, they would be the same games you play at home, when you turn off the TV and the Internet and the family plays games together.
