You don’t really need to have a huge vocabulary to win – you just need to be quick.  You get 1 point for 3-4 letter words and more for longer words.  So if you come up with zillion 3-letter words, you can beat the person who found only a couple of crazy long ones.  And I must admit, my favorite part (besides winning) is when you get to the end of the round it’s really satisfying to see how many great words you have that no one else found.

I like Boggle so much that in the past I’ve been known to have paper, pencils and a mini dictionary crammed into the Boggle box so I could take it with me on trips.  But the bad thing was, the old Boggle game was designed so if you put the clear plastic cover on top of the dice tray, it wouldn’t fit in the box.  Annoying right?  Then Hasbro fixed that problem by giving the lid a new odd shape, but the dice didn’t shake as well in that one (and it felt kind of cheap) so I didn’t even bother purchasing it.  Well now they’ve completely redesigned the dice holder and it’s a very cool travel-friendly solution.  You twist it to shake the dice, then twist back to lock them in place.  So now, with the absence of a removable lid, you don’t have to worry about losing one of the dice.  And then to make it an all-in-one game, it’s got a timer built in.  Now all you have to do is hunt down some pencils and paper and you’re ready to roll!

Boggle’s been around since 1972 although it failed and was relaunched in 1976 after some revisions – including the addition of a shaker.  It was invented by Alan Turoff and as a fun bit of trivia the longest words that can be made are 17 letters long because the Q and U are on the same tile.  They are: inconsequentially, quadricentennials, and sesquicentennials.  Personally, I’ve never been able to get any of them.

Boggle Stats:
~ $15 at Wal-Mart, Target, Toys ‘R Us and pretty much everywhere that sells games
2 or More Players
~5 Minutes per round (including scoring) so it’s up to you
Ages 8 and up

Thankfully, it’s not just me; I think my entire family has a weakness for dice games. Every one of us has at least one well-loved copy of Yahtzee and if you asked, I’d say we probably all have a copy tucked away in our cars “in case of an emergency.” I’m not kidding. Two winters ago, I was riding through the middle of nowhere Wisconsin in a blizzard with my father heading to my aunt’s 50th birthday party when we slid off the road. As we waited for the tow truck to arrive, I climbed into the back of his van to fish out Yahtzee. We played about ten games before the tow truck arrived. Unfortunately, I lost almost all of them, which seems totally unfair since he was the one who drove us off the road. Guess luck had to roll his way at some point!

Yahtzee is really a well-loved classic and if you haven’t played in a while, it’s worth another look. There were tons of similar poker-dice style games that are probably quite a bit older than Yahtzee, like Yacht and Cheerio. But Yahtzee showed up on store shelves in the mid-1950s and beat out other similar dice games like Kismet to become probably the best-known dice game of all time. And since the mid-1970s it’s been a strong dice-game brand with more than ten line line extensions, although classic Yahtzee is still my favorite.

As a note to parents, Yahtzee is a great way to teach your kids math (adding & multiplying) and probability. Take the time to let them add up their dice, and explain why they’d have better odds rolling for one thing over the other. Unfortunately they may start beating you, but it’s still a heck of a lot more fun than insisting they do math workbooks.

Yahtzee stats:

• $10 and up at all major retailers
• 2 or more players
• ~5-30 minutes (Depends on how quick the players are)
• Ages 8 and up