BalderdashI must say that this is one of my all time favorite party games, ever!  Balderdash is the “classic bluffing game” and who doesn’t love to bluff on occasion?!  I remember playing this game with my siblings and my oldest brother’s answers would always make me crack up so hard &ndash

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Yet another no-cost (or little cost; you’ll need paper, and a printer if you your writing skills resemble a second grader’s) game that everyone’s sure to have fun with is a scavenger hunt. Sure, you could go with the normal scavenger hunt, with a list of things people have to find (remote control, pine cone, tube of Preparation H). You could even give it a twist by making it into a grid where people can “bingo” their finds to win.

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It's summer time, it's hot, and you've got to entertain the troops kids. Making ice cream in a Ziploc^TM bag is fun and easy. I used make ice cream this way fairly often when I lived in a graduate dorm and didn't have a freezer. Later I discovered I could tame the ravenous hordes entertain little kids by making ice cream as a group activity at kid's parties.

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Who Am I?Not everyone has the money to fork out for the various games-in-a-box on the market. When you’re planning a party, there’s food, music, booze, vomit cleaner, and loads of other things to pay for—why spend more money on games?

Not to mention, people tend to forget “the seventeenth time we played Scene It at Dave’s house.” By offering a unique game that your friends have never heard of, you’re more likely to create lasting memories (at least for the ones who are sober). You may even end up at so-and-so’s house sometime and find that nobody wants to play the Jenga she’s got on the table; they want to play one of the games they learned at your party!

Here is a fun, basically free game you can play (it does require things you have on hand at home).

Who Am I?

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The remake of Battlestar Galactica has proven to be one of the most popular sci-fi shows on television and it has attracted a huge audience. Much of the draw surrounds the mystery over who the hidden cylons amongst the humans actually are. If you’ve ever wished you could be a part of the action then you might want to check out Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game. It recreates some of the subterfuge and action of the show and is a lot of fun.

This is an engrossing game with a choice of 10 characters. The action is set during the first series so the aim is for the humans to reach Kobol. In order to do this they need to make a series of FTL jumps and they have to pass eight worlds before they can reach their target. Each player is dealt a loyalty card at the beginning of the game and it tells them whether they are really human or are in fact a cylon agent. Another set of cards is dealt out again at the halfway stage.

If you are human the object is to protect the Galactica and reach Kobol.

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Cluedo which is also known simply as Clue in the US is a classic game. It is the quintessential murder mystery set in a mansion with a cast of colourful characters. Players must deduce who the murderer was by collecting information in a process of elimination. The game spawned a franchise and there have been various spin offs and computer game versions as well as television shows and even a movie.

The game itself draws on a rich tradition of murder mystery tales from writers like Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. These stories often start with a dead body being discovered and the detective, whether Miss Marple or Sherlock Holmes, has to interview the suspects and deduce the guilty party. The game takes this simple premise and asks the player to work out who murdered the victim, where they did it and what weapon they used.

Cluedo was devised by a man named Anthony E. Pratt. He was a part time clown and a solicitor’s clerk in his day job and his game was first published by Waddingtons in 1949.

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Risk is a great board game, a battle for world domination which challenges you to defeat your opponents and win offensive and defensive campaigns. It is a strategic game and you have to take risks in order to dominate, spread yourself too thin however and the balance of power can quickly swing the other way.

It was actually invented by a French film director called Albert Lamorisse in 1957 and released in France under the name The Conquest of the World. It was later produced by the Parker Brothers and became one of their bestselling titles across the globe. It was the first war-game to meet with tremendous financial success.

I used to play this as a kid against my dad and granddad and to say they schooled me is an under statement. It would not be uncommon for me to be in a hopelessly losing situation within a few turns of the game starting and then consigned to the sidelines as the two of them battled ferociously for bragging rights.

The game is played on a board divided into six continents and forty-two territories in all.

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Monopoly has been banned from our household after I developed the knack of constantly winning. My wife absolutely hates the game and I’m sure it is not just the fact that I always bankrupt her, I think the general worship of capitalist principles also put her off. In any case Monopoly is a classic party game and when I was growing up we played regularly. As an adult the appeal began to wear off and the endless new versions did nothing for my enjoyment.

Over the years I have been given a multitude of new versions of Monopoly as gifts. The first one was the Edinburgh edition, then it was the Star Wars edition and finally worst of the all the Make Your Own Opoly edition which had blank cards for you to fill in. The horse has been well and truly flogged to oblivion and since each version is merely a crude artistic makeover and the game remains exactly the same there seems little point in playing another version.

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Cranium is a great fun party game provided the participants aren’t too shy because it requires a lot of performance from the players and challenges you to show off various skills. It is a board game which is essentially like a combination of elements from lots of other popular board games. It was billed as a game for your whole brain because it combines challenges in four categories.

Players divide into teams and you need at least four players making two teams of two to play. You roll a dice to move on the board with the aim of reaching the center first and you have to take cards each turn which challenge you to perform an activity. The cards are divided into four packs with different types of tasks. The categories are Creative Cat (artistic), Data Head (knowledge), Word Worm (language) and Star Performer (performance).

The Creative Cat category has three types of challenges, drawing with your eyes closed, sculpting from putty and drawing clues which team mates must guess.

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