Day Zero Project: Have A Regular Board Game Night

We’ve got quite a collection of board games in our cupboard upstairs. I’ve always enjoyed playing board games. It used to be a huge part of my Sunday afternoons growing up; lunch would be cleared off the table and Monopoly or Go For Broke or something else and we’d play until I grew bored and wandered off.


We tend to get the board games out when we have a power cut. And we’ve not had one of those for a while. They tend to come around in the winter months when the weather starts getting bad.

When I set this target I had intended that we make time to play a board game about once a week, but that proved to be a bit impractical. I changed it to ‘regularly’ instead and I’ve been a bit flexible about how regularly regular is.

Image from Sir Collectalot.

I’m always on the look out for new board games. Some of our favourites have come from charity shops. One of my favourites cost us a whole 50p and came from a little shop in Tighnabruich. It’s a Sherlock Holmes game, perfect for my major Sherlock Holmes fan of a husband. It comes with a book full of clues and cards with crimes on to solve. You have to travel round the board and visit different places to gather evidence, then read the corresponding clue in the book. Sometimes the clues are red herrings and others will help you, but you have to figure them out first (some of them are a wee bit dated, making reference to things like East Germany).

When I was younger I always loved going to a friend’s house because she had The Game of Life. I was thrilled to find that in a charity shop and insisted that we had to get it. It came with everything we needed except the instruction book, but we were able to find them online. I had great fun introducing Mr Click to that one. We usually wind up playing it sitting in bed on a Saturday morning.

Then there’s Operation. I asked Santa for it several times around the age of seven but he didn’t come through for me until I was nineteen. It’s one of those games that’s better if you’ve got more than two people to play it, so unless Tara develops opposable thumbs we’re going to have to wait until we’ve got at least one other person to play it properly.

Do you have any favourite board games?