Fun Competition Games for Home

Go Fish

• Go Fish can be played by as many as 10 players of most ages, including young children. Go Fish only requires a standard 52-card deck of cards. Players are dealt five cards, with the rest of the deck scattered face down in the center, the pile being called the pond or pool. Players try to rid themselves of cards by collecting all four of any suit. When the player gets her turn, she can ask another player for all cards of one value; for example, "Give me all your fives." If the other player has them, he has to surrender them. If not, the asking player is told, "Go fish," whereupon she can fish one card from the "pond."

Scrabble

• For more literate-minded homes, Scrabble is well-known, widely-played, easy to understand and educational. If you have no more than four players, all you need is a Scrabble game, a dictionary and a sheet of scrap paper to keep score. Players draw face down wooden tiles with letters on them, and place them on an 18 by 18 grid playing board to make words. The words have to be real words that are in the dictionary. There is a complex scoring system that gives the game a strategic element, and the game is played until all the tiles are used or the players with the last tiles have no other words to spell.

Boggle

• A faster-paced word game that doesn't require the same word mastery or strategy of Scrabble is Boggle. Boggle is a set of 16 dice, each die having a letter on each of its six sides. The dice are contained inside a shaker box with a settling tray. The box is shaken, and the dice are allowed to settle into the tray. Players then have three minutes to write as many words using the 16 letters face-up in the tray. If more than one player uses the same word, that word is thrown out. A point is then awarded for each letter in each legitimate word from the dictionary.

Chinese Checkers

• Chinese checkers can be played by up to six people. It is a board game, with 123 divets arranged as a hexagram, or six-pointed star. The divets hold marbles. Each player begins with 10 uniformly colored marbles, occupying one point of the star -- the home base -- and attempts to move his marbles by turns -- one divet at a time -- to the opposite star point on the board. Players can jump other players, sending their marbles back to the home base.