Family Game Night And How To Survive It

Are your family serious gamers? Do you love nothing more than to dig out the board games, book a bowling alley or find your deck of cards and play game after game, night after night? If your Friday night is more charades than champagne, you’ve probably had your fair share of chaos. Turn them into Family Game Nights.

Gaming nights can be fun, but they can get a little crazy too. There is a knack to getting it right. If you find your family squabbles after just a few rounds or the word ‘Monopoly’ cannot be mentioned around the dinner table, you’re going to have to learn to get through it with a few handy survival tips and tricks.

Step 1: Choose The Game for your Family Game Night

You might all have your game of choice but choose wisely. If that ‘M’ word really can’t be mentioned anymore, you might need to find a game that encourages a little competition but doesn't start an outright war. Competitive cornhole boards, rounds of chess or even old faithful charades could be the game for you. However, you choose, make sure that each person in the family get’s to take their turn each game night. It’s an easy way to keep the peace, week after week.

Step 2: Pick Your Teams

Once you’ve got your game sorted, it’s time to pick your team. If you have a big family, you might want to draw straws each week. That way, it will be entirely at random. Or, if there’s only two, three or four of you, then you can quite easily mix the teams up week after week. Try to keeps sides fair. If one person is great at a game, see if you can get someone on their team that might struggle. They say all's fair in love and war, but that’s not always the case on game night.

Step 3: Get A Game Plan

Now that your team is sorted, you’re going to want to get your game plan ironed out. If you’re playing something sports-centered, this is going to be important. If your game is based on knockout rounds, do your best players go first, or do you save them for last, if it’s a mind-based game that you’re playing, you might not be able to do this as well. But, a loose plan could help you in keeping everything calm and collected at game night.

Step 4: Take A Break

You’re going to want to make sure you schedule some relevant breaks for game night. If you play for hours on end, you could all get tired and grouchy, or in some cases, frustrations might build. A fun way to encourage breaks and make them just as enjoyable for your avid players as the games are is to lay out tasty snacks. You can find cool recipes online that you can even tie in with your game theme that week. If you’re out of the house at a bowling alley or batting cage, you could even arrange to go out to dinner after a few rounds to make sure everyone refuels.

Step 5: Play Fair

If you have an active or adventurous family, you might find that things get a little crazy on game night. It’s all the more important to try and keep things fair if you ever want to carry on your beloved traditional without a weekly hitch. As well as balancing out the teams and letting everyone have their say, you could also sway the wins a little, by having an adult on each team where possible. After all, we all want to keep our kids happy.