[Ad- gifted product]Â When it comes to board games, we play a large range of them! Every other Monday, Amelia, Robin, Dann and I have some shakes and play some board games at our local Geek Retreat while Kai goes off to the gym. This sort of after school activity is one that everyone really looks forward too, especially when it comes to hanging out as a family together. This week, our board game was What’s the Best Thing? which is a compact party game that works better if you really know the people you are playing with.
The game itself is easy in concept, but a little hard to explain. You and everyone else you are playing with, is essentially ranking things – but nobody knows what number each other has. So, everyone is given a random face down number card. They can only look at their number card. There is a bank of different subjects at the top of your table. On your turn, you will choose a category card and then list an item in that category that you think fits your ranking. For example, if you got sea creatures and knew the other players thought jelly fish were really cool – and you wanted to rank it int he top of the ranking, you could say jelly fish. The ranking is in Top Ten order, so number one is the highest and number ten is the lowest.
This sort of ranking (and keeping everyone on the same number ranking) is something we really struggled with. We did think that What’s the Best Thing? would do well with a board that said Best #1 and Worst at the bottom, just to keep everyone on the same page. After you have selected your subject and said the answer you have, everyone else gets to decide if it’s the best or the worst or where it would fit in a ranking, and it moves to the next player. This continues until you have ranked the number of items dependent on the number of players that you have.
As we are a family, What’s the Best Thing? was a lot of fun. Some of us picked specific items we knew the others would know how we felt about, and so would rank them accordingly! It was interesting to hear what Robin and Amelia came up with – turns out she likes Old Town Road (the song) far more than we thought! It’s a great ice breaker and the game can really wrap up whenever, which is always fun.