by Matt Bird

Created on: June 08, 2009

Just about every board game out there is fun for the whole family. If they weren't they'd lose all appeal, as board games are typically made to be enjoyed by multiple people at a time - and those people usually compose a family. Your game is probably a failure if a family doesn't enjoy it.

But there are some games which manage to stand out amongst the rest, and most of them are all-time classics. Here's a list of a few of the best. Chances are good you've played most, if not all, of these games.

Monopoly: The all-time classic. Monopoly lasts just long enough to keep people engaged without lasting so long that you'll get antsy - that is, unless one indomitable player just refuses to go down, and skips merrily between the hotels while holding on to $5 and Waterworks. Monopoly is good for giving your kids a grounding in economics, whether they go into real estate or not.

Clue: An excellent exercise in deductive reasoning. Clue is one of those few games that can take a subject as grisly as murder and not only make it classy, but fun at the same time. As a kid I was much more interested in playing around with the little weapons, so I can safely say that I got into the spirit of the game if not the spirit of the rules. Great for developing process of elimination type reasoning, though admittedly most real life murders won't be accompanied by handy cards.

Sorry!: As fun as Sorry! is, there are few games out there that will breed hatred between players, so young brothers and sisters might not want to play together. The slides are wickedly evil: I remember getting into a near fist fight with my brother because he kept sending my pawns back to the Start space with the slides. Aggravation to the extreme, it was.

Risk: Risk is an excellent family board game, but only if your family has nothing to do for a very, very long time. I used to play with my father and brother all the time, and our games regularly stretched past the three four mark (although one of us usually got knocked off pretty early, so that lucky guy wandered off to do something else while the other two super powers slugged it out - after a while I started wishing I'd been killed first).

Checkers: Seemingly a simplified version of chess, Checkers is great because the games move quickly. You can set up family tournaments with multiple boards (they don't exactly cost a lot) and go to town with one another to see who the overall winner is.

Scrabble: I still play Scrabble with my parents. Not your typical board game, but it requires a great deal of skill to get anywhere against good players. Make sure you have an official Scrabble dictionary on hand, as well - just using a normal dictionary will yield some truly bizarre and dumb words. (Which I regularly took advantage of. According to ours, Aa, Ae, Ao and Ee and Qat - great for getting rid of that Q - are all words.)

There are dozens of variations on each game, but these, these are all the classics that made life worth living as a kid. Forget your video games for a while, these family fun factories will keep you and your children hopping for hours.

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