At home we have a small but respectable collection of board games that we cycle through. Catan is great for a lazy Sunday afternoon. Dominion is as simple or complex as you want to make it. Magic Maze is a quiet yet frustrating game of communicating without speaking.

Many of these games come in overly large boxes. Look at Dominion, the cards it uses could be shrunk down to the size of three decks of cards. Yahtzee could just be the sheets, pencils, and some dice. Even if they did come in manageable sizes we wouldn’t be able to justify the room one of them would take up in our already stuffed backpacks.

Our solution to this is that we’re doing our best to learn card games. This will help reduce our pack size but still keep up the fun size.

You begin with aces. The first player would say “One Ace” to put down one card or “Two Aces” and place two cards face down, all the way up to four. These cards could be Aces or not. The next player would place 2s and then the next would place 3s. It continues counting up as you rotate through players until you get to Kings and then you start again at Aces.

If you don’t have the proper card when it is your turn you can Cheat. You do this by placing the wrong cards down in any amount. For instance if I don’t have any 5s but I have three 3s I could boldly announce “Three fives” and place my 3s down.

Cheat- Uses a standard deck of cards (no jokers) and three or more players. The point of the game is to get rid of all your cards first. You lay cards face down in a pile without showing the other players

The one rule you can’t break is that you can’t put down mixed number cards when you cheat.

Now here is the fun part. If you place down cards and you are Cheating another player can call “Cheat”. If you are indeed Cheating you have to pick up ALL the cards! If you aren’t cheating THEY have to pick up all the cards. This leads to some fun bluffing, exaggeration, and lots of giggles.

Other games we are playing include Crazy Eights. I would describe it as Uno with a deck of cards. The eights are wild and change the suit. If you don’t have a card to put down you pickup from the deck until you do. We’ve also played Hearts with the kids but it is limited to four players and we are five.

If you have any card games you think we should try leave us a comment and we’ll investigate.