Family Game Night Trivia Quiz

Answer: With a spinner

Each player has a tree on the board, studded with little holes to accommodate plastic fruit. You spin the spinner to find out what happens on your turn. Maybe you can pick between 1 and 4 fruits and put them into your basket; maybe an animal steals some fruit; or maybe you accidentally tip over your basket and lose it all! (Lost fruit goes back on the tree. Don't think about it too hard.)

This luck-based game is a great way to start teaching small kids about board games: taking turns, following instructions, and learning to accept the occasional upended basket.

Answer: Cards

UNO is played with a special deck of cards designed to be more accessible to children. There are four colors - blue, green, yellow, and red - and numbers going 0 to 9 in each color. On your turn, you can match the last card's number or color, or draw a new card if you don't have an available move. Wild cards allow a color change. There are also special instruction cards which allow a player to skip the next player's turn, reverse the direction of play, or make the next player draw cards (which also skips their turn).

The point of the game is to get rid of all your cards first. Don't forget to shout "Uno!" when you're down to a single card - the kids will definitely catch you if you don't give the required warning, and you don't want the two-card penalty.

Answer: Get rid of all of your tiles

Rummikub tiles come in four colors (black, blue, orange, and red). In each color, there are two copies of each of the numbers 1-13, and there are also two jokers represented by smiley faces. Players draw initial hands of random tiles, concealed from their opponents. Tiles are played in groups of at least 3, either a run of consecutive numbers sharing a color, or a set of tiles with the same number and different colors; if a player has no available moves, they must draw a new tile. The round ends when one player runs out of tiles, and the losers take penalties for their remaining tiles before starting the next round.

Grandmother usually has a commanding lead by Round 4.

Answer: Pandemic

Most board games are competitive: players seek advantages against each other, and one player (or one team) is eventually the winner. In a collaborative game like Pandemic, all the players are on the same team, working against a situation engineered into the game.

In Pandemic, the players race around a map of the world, striving to treat and eventually cure four diseases before they spread beyond control. At the end of each turn, the players draw cards to see where the diseases break out next. It's a very effective game mechanic for stoking dread and pressing the players into action.

Answer: She does not have the kind of card Luis asked for.

Players in Go Fish try to collect sets of four cards with matching ranks - for example, the 7 of clubs, the 7 of diamonds, the 7 of hearts, and the 7 of spades. To accumulate such a set, the player would ask an opponent by name: "Do you have any sevens?" If yes, the player collects the sevens; if no, they're told "Go fish!", and they draw a card. Young players, especially, enjoy the mix of matching and demanding.

Answer: They must start with the same letter.

In a round of Scattergories, the players choose one of the lists of themes that come with the game, and each player takes a copy. Somebody rolls a 24-sided die to choose a letter, and then starts the timer. In the time allotted, you then try to write a word or name, starting with the chosen letter, for each category.

For example, if the letter were "C," you might write "cherry" for "Ice cream flavors," "checkbook" for "Things found in a desk," and "Chinook helicopter" for "Vehicles." Watch out, though! If anybody else wrote the same word as you for a category, neither of you gets any points for it.

Answer: Right foot, red!

Twister players try to position hands or feet on circles of a certain color, as dictated by the spinner. The challenge is that you can't move your other hands and feet from their circles until they're called! It doesn't take long for players to get tangled up in each other, or in their own arms and legs. The winner is the last player to fall down.

Answer: Chess

Chess, invented in India more than 1300 years ago, is one of the oldest games still widely played. Two players, each controlling 16 pieces, face each other across an eight-by-eight grid. Each of the six different kinds of pieces has different movement abilities, which the players exploit to dominate the board and capture their opponents' pieces.

It'll take years for the young kids to become truly good at the game, so Granddad doesn't want to waste time training them up!

Answer: Monopoly

Monopoly is a classic board game famous for its ubiquity and its duration - the game can drag on, and on, and on after the excitement of the first, heady rounds. Almost every space on the board corresponds to a piece of real estate, and the first player who lands on a given space has the right to buy the property (if they can come up with the cash, of course). After that, any other player who lands there must pay the owner rent, which goes up if the owner also possesses nearby properties, or has made improvements such as houses and hotels. Properties increase in value as you go around the board, and the Boardwalk - the last property before the "Go" space begins a new round - is famously expensive once it's been developed.

The game ends when only one player has cash on hand, the others having been driven into bankruptcy by rising rents. It's kind of a grim game for a family night, when you think about it.

Answer: Charades

A charades player must get their teammates to correctly guess the person, or the movie or song or television show, written on the clue. Without being able to speak any words, the player acts out meanings of individual words, or syllables, or even rhymes. Everyone thus makes themselves absolutely ridiculous until rescued by a guesser. Charades memories are the gift that keeps on giving!