Crash course in the popular board games ALEXANDRIA: After a long day on the beach, the most traditional thing to do in a summerhouse is have lunch and sit down and play cards. There are, however, a variety of educational and recreational games families and friends can play together. Scrabble is my favorite word game and is a time honored family classic. To play it you need the board, chips with letters on them, a pencil and paper for the score and a dictionary next to you. Up to four players can take part. Each player randomly draws seven tiles at a time and uses them to create words. The tiles have points on them so the player must try to create more words with more points. There are bonus squares on the board that double or triple letters or whole words. When all the tiles are done the first person who finishes the tiles with them gets the remaining players tile points added to his/her points. The winner is the one with the most points. This game teaches new vocabulary and spelling. Luckily it is available in Egypt in Arabic and English. The game can keep you occupied from one to three hours and it opens up a whole new world of words. You can make the game even more challenging by creating restrictive theme: limiting the words to geographical locations, things you can find around a house or equipment you use in the summer. Make sure, however, that you choose a challenge that is possible. If you are looking for more complications in word games opt for Boggle. To play it, you need a Boggle board, pen and paper and a timer. The boggle board has dice shaped tiles with letters on the side. You shake the die in the boggle board with the round cover on letting the die to settle in the different slots. Then spread the board out and the letters are spread next to each other. The object of the game is to form as many words as you can with the letters. The catch is the letters of the word have to be touching each other on the board in any way. After the time is up, the players cross out common words. The player with the most words gets some points and the bigger the words the more the points. If you want to test how nice or how mean your friends are suggest playing Sorry!. The popular and fun board game consists of a board, four blue, four yellow, four red and four green pins and cards. Up to four players can play this game. On the board there are four start stations of four different colors, one on each side, and four home stations. The object of the game is to move all your pins from start to home by drawing a card each turn. The cards tell you what to do. The trick is to try not to make too many enemies by pumping too many opponents back to start, because an opponent can get the Sorry! Card and pump you back to start. The first one to get all four pins home wins. A classic board game, Battleship features two players each with the mission to destroy the other s fleet, using the wining strategy. The game is played on four square grids, and each player gets two. The grid is divided into squares, each identified by a letter and a number. Before the game starts you arrange each player arranges your ships, either vertically or horizontally, on one grid. On the same grid you record the shots done by your opponent. On the other grid, you record your shots. In yet another game based on strategizing, players get to conquer the world. In Risk, each player gets a mission, either to conquer the world or a part of it or beat a certain opponent. To win you must attack any territory you gain and defend to keep your opponents away. The game board is basically a map of the six continents divided into 42 territories. Each player battles with the others to win territories by launching daring attacks on opponents while defending their territory and moving across the continents. The game set includes the board, dice, Risk cards and six sets of miniature armies. A game that works on artistic talents is Pictionary. Although it s originally a board game, you don t have to buy the game in order to play. Instead, you can use a couple of drawing pads, pencil and paper and have a neutral person playing controlling a timer. Split into two teams and have the neutral player think up items, movies, book titles and anything that can be drawn. Have the player write these words or phrases on small pieces of paper then put them in a hat. With two teams each team gets a turn. A player in the team picks a paper and must draw what is on that piece of paper for the rest of the team members to guess what it is. The guesses and the pictures that come out are hilarious and end up creating an evening of fun and laughter for the whole family to enjoy.
