Back to Family Board Game Playing

It was great last night to get back to some good family board game playing!
All 6 of us sitting around the table, eating caramel brownies, playing a board game, relaxing, and laughing.

Not feeling stressed or anxious about looming decisions like we’ve had the last few weeks was nice. Even though I’ve had a game or two with the boys here and there, we haven’t all sat down together for a board game in a while. And it was super nice to take the time to play together again.

It was Caleb’s turn last night at our Family Home Evening to choose the activity and he chose RoboRally – a board game of robot chaos. We’ll get to a full video review later, but the essence of RoboRally is to get your robot to touch the flag/checkpoints in order before the other players. There are lots of different board configurations with varying elements and numbers of flags to get to which add to a lot of replayability.

But the real fun that adds to the replayability is how crazy it can get on the board as robots roam around. Because players have to pre-program what their robot will do on the turn. Each turn robots will do 5 things in order. Players get a hand of cards and then need to place them in order of how they want their robot to execute these commands. They can be move ahead a number of spaces, turn right, turn left, u-turn, or back up.

Sounds pretty simple – but once all robots start moving, inevitably your plans are going to get messed up.

You may have a straight shot at where you want to go and before you know it, another robot us rammed you and pushed you onto a conveyor belt that will move you off track or shot you with a laser to take damage. And the more robots you get on the board, the more chaos.

You can play RoboRally with up to 8 players – but even with 6, things can get pretty dicey.

We had a great time and Trevor was laughing a ton as mom kept getting caught up in spinning cogs and then being pushed off the board (and losing a life) via a conveyor belt. Good thing mom was laughing about it as well!

It’s a tricky, thinking game (trying to figure out how to get where you want to go with limited cards), but enough chaos to make it lots of fun.

But most importantly, we spent an hour together around the table enjoying each others company!

We highly recommend you do the same with your family!

P.S. And if you’re interested in the decision that has occupied our family discussions over the last few weeks, our oldest son Trevor, wrote about it on his blog and I think he summed it up nicely. Check it out if you’re interested. (Nice to see their perspective.)

The part I like most is reading his conclusion, “God loves His children, but sometimes you have to take a step into the darkness before you come into light again. Sometimes a leap of faith is necessary to jump into His loving arms, and to know that everything is alright, and everything will be alright. And He will always guide you.” All I can say is, “Amen.”