Coming from a large family has it’s advantages, one of the biggest being the awesome games we were able to play growing up.  I mean, how many kids can play kick ball or baseball without having to recruit the entire neighborhood?

Here’s my personal list of gaming favorites:

6. Mailman:  I really have no idea why we liked this game so much.  We would all just hole up in separate rooms and designate one person to carry letters back and forth between us.  That’s it!  It occupied us for hours at a time.

5. Sneaky-sneakiness:  I don’t know if an actual game was involved in this, but we would sneak around our property all the time.  We would wade through marshes, army crawl in the mud, do awesome summersaults between buildings, and anything else we thought was “sneaky”.

4. Rubber band wars: We would buy a huge bag of rubber bands, flip the couches in the living room over, and go crazy.  The younger ones (yep, that meant me!) had the mission of entering no-man’s land to collect fallen missiles to bring back to our separate strong holds.

3. Snowball fights: We used to play this great hostage version where one team would hole up in a barn or other outbuilding and try to hit everyone on the other team before the hostage was freed.  If the hostage was hit the game ended with both teams losing.  I tried to be the hostage (snowballs hurt!).

2. Lawyer & Wedding: You’ve already heard about that here.

1. RISK:  I know, this is a strange game for young children to enjoy playing, but we did!  We would set the game up on the porch and spend days playing… (insert evil, dramatic video game voice from one of those shoot-em-up death games)…”global domination“.  It was epic.