In a Pickle

Last Friday we had Family Game Night.  We love family game night.  We go through phases where we faithfully do it every Friday.  Then, we get busy, and Mom & Dad are too tired and cranky to put up with Bookworm's meltdowns when she loses and Popcorn's frequent chair abandonment in the middle of her turn to do cartwheels...

But this Friday we were all in great humors and in peaceful harmony, so we decided to trash the family harmony and play games.  We started out with our standard, Sorry.  We play Sorry every time and every single time certain family members are poor winners and somebody else is a sore loser.  The person playing these roles varies from one time to the next...

Y'know.  Just to keep it all fresh.

This past Friday Popcorn drug out her game In a Pickle.  She got it for Christmas, and for some strange reason we have not played it since last January.

Here's the premise of the game.  Each player has five cards, with nouns listed on them.  There are four cards in the middle of the play area.  You play your cards either directly above or below an item to make it where the items are progressively bigger...

For example, I had an atom, so I put that above the skeleton.  Popcorn put a chicken below the skeleton, and then the next item could be a barn...so an atom is in a skeleton, which is in a chicken that lives in the barn.

Once a card has four cards in it, like the above example, it becomes a "pickle round."  In this round, you can only play larger items on the final object, like a barn could be in France, which is in the Universe...The round goes around the table one time, with the person who played the fourth object (like the barn) getting an extra turn.

Is this making any sense?

Well, the hilarity of the game is how creatively our family can think.  My husband becomes very frustrated.  Popcorn asked what a scandal was and promptly played it below an earthquake...Which Bookworm then said was all in "thoughts."  We laughed uproariously at this...

However Studmuffin was not happy that I said everything could fit in a dictionary...Even a universe, so then the dictionary could fit in a library, which could fit in a parking lot...

See what I mean?  The game is really fun.  The best part is when a player challenges your thought process and you say "well, France could fit in the river, because it's the Mississippi River, and all of that water can totally cover France."  Or when Popcorn threw down the noun "reflection" and stoutly proclaimed that a canyon could absolutely be in a reflection of the water...Or when I declared that a forest was in the headlights of my car.  No, not the entire forest, but certainly the headlights were shining and there was the forest, dead ahead in them!

These statements made the girls and I laugh hysterically while Studmuffin got very frustrated with our crazy thinking.

There is no point to this post.  I just wanted to share our fun with you...

And perhaps give you a good idea for an inexpensive, yet very fun Christmas gift!  Or, perhaps you need a ten dollar birthday gift for your next child's party...

Now you've got one! 

What special things do you do as a family?  What memories are you making with your family?  Do you have a favorite family activity? 

Do you have any great family games that we may not have discovered?  Please share.  We all exchange games as our family gifts, so we could use some new ideas!