After a quick tour, we pulled out a classic from Kathleen's collection, Rack-O. Your have 10 cards, and you want to get all your cards in order, but the only way to change the order is to replace them with cards from the deck. Very simple mechanics, too simple for us these days, but I can see how it worked well as a kids and family game. There are some 10 Days in ... games based on the Rack-O system that also teach geography, which I'll have to remember to pick up when we have kids someday.
Matt showed up just as we finished, so we moved on to the party game 25 Words or Less. It combines Name that Tune and Password, where you bid against the other team as to how many words you need to have your teammates guess all six keywords on the card. This game was inordinately hard, but we got better as it went along, eventually all merging into one team near the end when it was obvious Laura and I were not going to pull things off. The most fun was the bidding, not knowing whether to give in or try to push the other team lower. I think this game would work well with many more people instead of the five we had.
Our big game of the night was Trias, the Triassic dinosaur game. It's always fun to see the board divide into continents, and the competition for majorities on these continents can get fierce. Dinos were dunked in the water and rescued until the meteor hit, making for a great final game.
