Dabble

I was a little leery of playing this game (I think I only played it once before, about thirteen years ago, and it did not end well that time) but it turned out to be fun. It's kind of a cross between Boggle and Scrabble. (Why do so many of my favorite games involve words or spelling??) Everyone gets 20 random letter tiles, and the aim is to use them all to make 5 words that you place on a special display rack. You've got to have one two-letter word, one three-letter word, one four . . . you get the idea. 

We didn't play with all the details in the rules (counting points, etc). We just started with a trial run (not using a timer, which meant it ended up going on for too long), then three timed rounds (stopping a round at five minutes is a much better system)--and we each won one! Although before the end, we discovered that Finn had cheated when he won. (There are a few blank tiles that can be used as any letter, and we thought he had drawn one of these, when in reality he had just turned a lettered tile back-to-front so that it looked blank and fit with the word he wanted to make.) But really--not that I want to encourage my son to be a cheater--I think that made the game more memorable. And it was quite a (slyly) clever idea!

I would not mind Dabbling on a semi-regular basis.