Family Game Night Mini Round-Up: New Years Eve Edition

We stopped going out on New Years Eve a long time ago when we decided to have children. Now, our NYE is spent at home hanging out with the kiddos, playing games, watching movies, and eating pizza and junk food all night (or at least until they fall asleep). To be honest, I wouldn't have it any other way and we are always looking for new games to play every year. Which is why we were pretty stoked about these two new games from Breaking Games.

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It's no mystery that we love games in our house. The whole thing stems from when I was a child and we use to have family game nights once a month. I loved the tradition so much that I wanted to do the same thing when I had a family of my own. So here we are. The thing is, I think we may be a little over run with board games, and I'm not even slightly kidding. As I did our annual Snerdy Home Purge, I emptied our huge walk-in closet to do a deep cleaning, and discovered that we had more games that I originally thought. I took a photo of them all stacked.

Well, I'll be honest, this isn't even all of them. My son has a gigantic stack in his room and so does my daughter. This is just what was in our walk-in closet and doesn't even include most of our various card games and puzzles (hahaha, yeah those are plentiful as well). 

I told you we loved games! 

So, when it comes to games, sometimes we prefer card games because they take up the least amount of room and don't take as long to set up or put away. 

The first of the two Breaking Games titles we have for our NYE Family Game Night is this adorably colorful game called Sparkle*Kitty. 

This is an all ages and all genders game. You are trying to save a princess from a tower, and as far as visuals go, the illustrations kind of remind me of cartoons like Steven Universe or Star vs. The Forces of Evil. 

You all should know by now that I will look for literally any way to make something educational. Yes, I'm THAT mom. So looking at it from that perspective, I can see that this would be a great game for early readers when it comes to sight words! One thing to note is that there seems to be a ton of cards in this game. You really only need to use all 4 colored decks if you are having upwards of 6-8 players. For fewer players you only need to use the green deck. So it's adaptable based on your group size. 

To play the game, you have to cast word spells out loud by combining words from the cards in your hand and the cards on the spell book pile. You win by getting rid of your cards, clearing the tower cards, and rescuing your princess. 

And for the record, Princess Bookworm and Princess Metal are my favorite Princesses. 

Game of Phones just happens to be my new obsession as far as card games goes. It's family friendly, so anyone can play. Basically, I describe it to people as a scavenger hunt with your phone. And there's already an expansion pack for it, so I can imagine more are probably in the works to add hours of fun to your game nights. 

While this is a family friendly game, I can see where you could still turn this into a drinking game or a not so family friendly game if you wanted. For instance, the card asking you to take a before and after pic? That one would be way more fun if you were drinking. Imagine a "before being drunk" pic and an "after one too many drinks" pic. The cards in the starter pack are pretty tame, though so no need to worry about going through the deck and taking out anything not appropriate for the whole family. I can say that I imagine at some point there may be an adults only expansion, or at least, I would hope so because that could get really fun. The expansion pack elaborates on just finding photos, and extends it to videos and even drawings. And teens absolutely love this game. They enjoy being on their devices, while you also get to spend time together. It's like this magical loophole in parenthood for bonding with your device happy teenager and have you both having fun while doing it! 

Both of these games (and more) are available at https://breakinggames.com