playing games

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I'm on holiday with my family right now (which is why my post is a day late). We're on the Isle of Wight, which is a lovely place to be, except for this April, when it's blowing freezing cold winds and scattering snow everywhere.

All of this means that we're staying indoors a lot, playing games. My six-year-old son and my husband have a tournament going on with a car racing game on the iPad; they spend hours talking about it, what cars they've earned, which ones they want, how they're going to improve them. I get motion sickness just from doing one lap, so I'm exempt from this particular game, but my son has devised this other game in which he gives me ten toy cars, keeping about thirty for himself, and I have to choose which ones are best for particular tasks and races. Then he does the races himself, and he always wins. My job is to complain about this.

Every night since we've been here, we've retired to the pub in the evening for food and for the latest bouts in our long-running Uno game, which my son is currently winning. We don't let him win—that would be unheard of in our family, we're all far too competitive for that—he's just very good at Uno.

This afternoon we went ten-pin bowling (I won, twice, naturally, because I'm American) and then we tried to have a walk on the seafront but it was so cold we found another pub, which had Monopoly, and played that for a couple of hours, over crisps and a pint.

Aside from the 'what if' game I play with myself all the time, I don't often play proper games. It's something I tend to save for holidays or for the rare evening when we have time between dinner, homework and bedtime. My parents play bridge socially; I used to play Dungeons and Dragons socially, but I haven't done that for years. Sometimes I feel that I should make more time for playing games.

At the lake where we spend our summers, there's a weekly cribbage tournament up at the general store, and that's something that sums up what I like about playing games: it brings people together. Even if you spend the whole evening talking about nothing except the cards, you still feel as if you know these people better afterwards.

What are your favourite games? What do you like about them?