I’ve always had a fondness for trivia games. It’s not just because I’ve loved Jeopardy! ever since I figured out how to form an answer as a question; it’s also because trivia games are the only games—aside from cards and dice—that my mother enjoys playing. Every time I was in the hospital, Trivial Pursuit was her game of choice when she came to stay with me.

You could definitely play Trivial Pursuit at your party; there are plenty of variations out there to get your guests interested. But there are plenty of other trivia games, too, such as…

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Hooray! January 3 is J.R.R. Tolkien Day! We celebrate the life and works of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien on this day because it also happens to be his birthday. If you’re not already getting excited about the prospective ways to celebrate, you are either A. not a fan or B. comatose. Just in case you need some ideas for your own Middle Earth party, here are a few:

Dress in costume. What fun would a Middle Earth party be without costumes? Encourage couples to come as book couples, or make a few Elf ears and felt shawls to don people with as they walk through the door.

Decorate with your favorite scene. I’ve always wanted to live in the Shire myself, but if you want to try and make your pad into a Rivendell replica, go for it. This could be pretty hard to do, however, so you might just want to hang up LOTR posters and memorabilia if you’ve got it around.

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For one reason or another, Internet culture has latched onto the stories of author H.P. Lovecraft as a source of cultural humor, specifically his end-all monster, Cthulu. This modern upswing in interest in Lovecraft's iconic horror stories has resulted in a number of fun bits of entertainment ephemera. One of the most extensive is a board game called Arkham Horror, a cooperative adventure in which a series of strange characters have to race against time and battle an army of horrible monsters to stop an ancient nightmare from rising in the modern world.

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If you happen to be an employee of ArmorGroup, the private security company contracted to guard the U.S. embassay in Kabul, you like to play party games at Camp Sullivan, half-naked around a bonfire where fellow employees stand around urinate on themselves and each other for fun. What's more, you like to take vodka shots out of the other guards' buttcracks, and engage in sexually perverse hazing activities, humiliating and subjecting new recruits to these bizarre games, whether they want to be included, or not.

ArmorGroup's party games are now being closely examined by the State Department, Congress and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Secretary Clinton received a letter detailing the misconduct and abuses of Afghan nationals by the security personnel of ArmorGroup from Danielle Brian, Executive Director of Project on Government Oversight.

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While there's nothing quite like some friendly competition around the table, sometimes it's better for everyone to be on the same team for a while. Instead of being player vs. player, it's players vs. rules, a gaming situation in which the only way to win is to communicate with your friends. One of the best co-op board games out today is a relatively new title called Pandemic.

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We’ve don some nearly-free drinking games, getting-to-know-you games, and basic obnoxious games. Now it’s time to get dirty with some bodily-contact games!

Okay, so we won’t really be getting that dirty; you’ll get to keep your clothes on, after all. But if you want to take your party up a notch and make everybody giggle, here are some drink-free games that are bound to get you cracking up.

The Sucking Face Game: Take a post-it note (or something similar) and line up everybody boy-girl-boy-girl (or randomly to make it interesting!). The first person has to suck the post-it note, open-mouthed, to his or her face, and pass it to the next person using only both their mouths!

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When you have a group of people who don’t know each other assembled for an event—a birthday party, a family reunion, your uncle Larry’s bris—things can seem rather awkward at first. Nobody knows each other, people are wondering if they can legally ask someone out—or do so without crossing bloodlines—and it’s like a seventh-grade dance.

You don’t want to resort to name tags because, let’s face it, they don’t help because when you look down at Barbara’s name you think she thinks you’re looking at her boobs. And maybe you are—and why shouldn’t you be? There’s a big sign with her name on them! How can you not stare at that?

There are easier ways of making people get to know one another. Here are some free (or nearly-so) games geared at doing the thing Julie Andrews was so good at doing—getting to know you.

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I've written a lot already about tabletop games, both of the board and roleplaying varieties, but I'm still something of a newcomer to the scene. As such, I struggle with a lot of elements that long-time players have taken for granted. I didn't start playing these games until my mid-20's, so I don't have any nostalgia factor for any of these systems and settings. Rather, I mostly just take each game at face value. No matter what I've played, there seems to be an issue with balancing the fictional "flavor" of the games and the systems by which they are played.

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Last week I wrote about White Wolf's World of Darkness line of roleplaying games, so I thought I would take the opportunity to talk about one of their simpler properties, a board game called Prince of the City. Released in 2006 as a less involved supplement to the RPG Vampire: The Requiem, this board game is relatively easy to grasp for first-timers but has a lot of room for strategy in the case of long-time players.

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The game development company White Wolf has created some of the most popular and, in every sense of the word, successful role playing games in history. Beginning with Vampire: The Masquerade in 1991, White Wolf has taken the business into a new standard for atmospheric storytelling and streamlined mechanics. In 2003, the company decided to reboot their World of Darkness brand in an attempt to clean up a complex but extremely messy field. So, how do the two versions of the WoD compare?

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