T is for Tournament

 Spring 2020... My son moves home from college because of the pandemic, so I've got 3 of my 4 children living at home again. We own so many board games, but no one ever wants to play them, so I devise a plan--the Game Tournament Bracket. I put most of our games into a competition bracket. The exceptions were games for only one or two people, like chess or cribbage. Here were the first competitions:

Clue Harry Potter vs. Parcheesi                        Scattergories vs. Uno

Yahtzee vs. Pandemic                                        Triominoes vs. Speak Out

Scrabble vs. Just One                                        Risk vs. Curses

Killer Bunnies vs. Tensies                                Bananagrams vs. the "Bee" game

Boggle vs. Catchphrase                                    Forbidden Island vs. Trivial Pursuit

Blokus vs. Slamwich                                        Exploding Kittens vs. Monopoly Deal

Telestrations vs. Things                                    Loot vs. Codename

Unusual Suspects vs. Decrypto                        Cribbage vs. Minigames

It worked! Almost everyone came to play (my youngest daughter didn't often join us, sadly). Strange things happened in this round. I had paired some of our favorite games together, and so some of the best games didn't advance, and I paired a couple of the games no one liked together, and so some unpopular games did advance. I bought Monopoly Deal because I knew we wouldn't make it through a whole game of Monopoly, and it quickly became a favorite. I never could convince anyone to sit through Things, and so it forfeited. Decrypto belongs to my older son's girlfriend, and it took the place of Spontuneous.

Round 2!:

Parcheesi vs. Uno                                                Yahtzee vs. Triominoes

Just One! vs. Risk                                                Tensies vs. the "Bee"  game

Catchphrase vs. Forbidden Island                        Blokus vs. Monopoly Deal

Telestrations vs. Codename                                Decrypto vs. minigames

Now really strange things began to happen. 

Everyone was annoyed that Risk had advanced, and they were sad that Loot hadn't made it, so we cut Risk and put Loot in its place (aren't you glad basketball brackets don't work like this!?). A similar thing happened with Catchphrase and Forbidden Island, because Blokus somehow won that one. It turns out that one of the key things my family likes in a game is that it is fast. Practically none of the longer lasting games made it through this cut:

Round 3: 

Parcheesi vs. Triominoes                                    Tensies vs. the "Bee"game

Blokus vs. Monopoly Deal                                Codename vs. Minigames

This was super surprising to me, because very few of my favorite games made it to this point. By this point, everyone was tired of games, and we took a very long break before finally making it to the next roung.

Round 4:

Triominoes vs. Tensies                                        Monopoly Deal vs. Codename

At this point, I couldn't get them back to play one more game...so round 5 was made by voting without playing. 

Round 5: 

Triominoes vs. Codename

And the winner is:

Codename (we have the pictures version).

 It was a bit of a shallow victory though, since no one wanted to play it. Hahaha

On the other hand, my son got into Settlers of Catan, and we played that quite a bit for a while, before ultimately losing interest. We've played quite a bit of cribbage, and my youngest son is pretty obsessed with chess atm. My older son bought another game called Love Letters, and we play that every now and then. We borrowed Quirkle from my classroom, since we aren't allowed to play games during the pandemic, and that one is fun. And we always enjoy a good game of rummy. And darnit, if I was in charge of the world.

Bananagrams would have won, not been beat out in the first contest!

Bananagrams....winner in my heart.