What hobbies have been passed down from your family?

 My family, including my extended family, plays games all the time. We get together as a huge group (~20 people) at least 3 times a year for thanksgiving, white elephant (our Hanukkah/Christmas gathering that happens in January and includes a very entertaining white elephant gift exchange), and summer vacation. I always love these gatherings, all of my cousins are at least seven years older than me but we still have a lot of fun. One of the most important parts of these gatherings is the games. 

Be it card games, board games, jack box games, word games, or other random group games we are always playing something. There’s often three different games happening at once but we also do games with the entire 20 or so people and those are the most fun. 

Telestrations is a staple. It involves two boxes of the game so we have enough white boards and markers for everyone and it always ends in the strangest ways. The game starts with everyone picking a word from the box of cards the game provides. Then each person draws a picture of that word on the first page of the whiteboard flipbook. Everyone then passes their book to the right, and in the book you receive you have to guess the word based only on the previous drawing. Then you pass the book to the right again and that person has to draw your word. And on and on it goes until you reach the last page of the book. At that point you all have to stand up and give (or in reality throw) the book back to the person who started with it. If you haven’t played before it’s important to note the stranger the ending the more fun it is. One of the most iconic endings in that game was when bumper sticker turned into dragon fart and no one’s really sure how. 

Now when it comes to card games you might think it’s impossible to have 20 people play all at once but we manage, though I will admit it’s a bit of a challenge. There’s always at least one giant cribbage game in which most people can’t even keep track of what team they're on, but then there’s also games like euchre which have very limited numbers of people that can play. 

In the case of small games like euchre we create a bracket and everyone splits into groups to play games until one team is crowned the winner. I made it to the semi-finals on summer vacation this year but ended up losing by one point. It’s not a family gathering if there isn’t at least one deck of cards and three obscure board games.

I can’t imagine not playing a ton of games but it’s become very apparent to me, through various interactions with people, that playing a ton of games isn’t actually that common. If I’m ever trying to find people to play cards with, whether it’s friends, classmates, or family friends, I’ve learned to always ask people if they know how to play trick based games. There’s two main reasons for this, one because they almost always say no and if you haven't played trick based games before it’s difficult to learn, and two, it cancels out a lot of game options that would otherwise be at the top of my suggestion list. 

I would offer to teach people how to play trick based games but I’ve grown up playing them so I don’t know how to explain it well. When I first started playing these games I was very bad at them because it takes time to figure out all the different pieces of the game that you have to pay attention to. 

I will always play games because of my family and hopefully I can also convince everyone else to see how fun they are.