FAMILY GAME NIGHT FUN

Create fun, long lasting memories on your next family game night. We all have the typical video games, board games, and card games. Those have been a lot of fun throughout the years, but it’s time to think outside the box and add something a little different to the mix, for our household as the kids are getting a little older, and we wanted to share some great game ideas that we have found to be a lot of fun for our family. Our family likes a good adventure. Whether it’s out in the great outdoors on a road trip or a camping adventure, or if we just sit back and watch an adventure movie, we are always up for a good challenge or adventure. So when we started looking for new games to add to our family game nights, we started looking into the subscription box type games.

Escape Room & Mystery Games

When looking at the subscription type games we found that the ones we like the best are the Escape Room and Mystery Games. Cratejoy (click the image below to browse their entertainment box options) has a nice selection of high quality games that your family will enjoy. We will go through a few of our favorites below.

The Deadbolt Mystery Society Monthly Box Games

With the Deadbolt Mystery Society monthly box, you can solve the mysteries alone, with your partner for some Date Night fun, or with your family and friends. Parental discretion is advised as some little players under 13 may find them a little scary because these are murder mysteries. But, not in my house, all the kids enjoy the fun we have when we get the new box each month and plan our next family game night. These games are interactive, with online components that bring each story to life. This feature does require a QR code reader on a smartphone, tablet or laptop and internet access, which is usually included on the smartphone already, or a quick download from an app store to get you setup for use. One thing we really like about these monthly subscriptions, is that each box is it’s own complete mystery. You don’t have to purchase or wait for other boxes in subsequent months to solve the mystery. Each month is it’s own unique new mystery to solve. These games do not have a time component, you can stop and start them again, whenever you have time to play. You can start and stop each mystery at any point in the game, and pick it back up when you are ready. These games are fun for the entire family, and make the perfect choice for family game night, or a date night with your sweetheart.

Escape the Crate: Escape Room Adventure Game

With the Escape the Crate Adventure Games you can bring the fun riddles and puzzles that you would experience as part of an escape room experience in to your living room, RV, or in camp. Each box is full of puzzles, mysteries, and adventures the whole family will enjoy. These games can be challenging, and they do design them for ages ten and up. However, our seven year old looks forward for each new box to arrive. These games are great for the whole family, or your group of friends. Bring the excitement and fun of an escape room to your living room all for the average cost of just one ticket at an in person escape room. You can play these games by yourself, or with groups up to six. Our group has 8, and we have a blast. Each box comes filled with envelopes, glossy papers, and which neat and interesting props that are actually used in the game. Even the box itself is part of the game because the illustrations inside become the game board for your adventure! There are codes that you enter on their website to get access to both audio and visual elements that are part of the game. Each of the puzzles fit the them of that months box, and the websites brings it all together to come to life. Each game is a complete game, so you don’t have to wait for the next box or boxes in future months to solve it, or get the whole story. This is the part I like the most. I like the complete mystery games more than the multiple month ones. These games take two to three hours to finnish for most groups, which is perfect for a family game night, or an activity to do in camp, in a motel room if your traveling, or in your RV. Each game is divided into chapters, which lets you take time for a break, or break it up at the perfect moment for a few game nights to complete the game. These games, for the subscription option, come once every two months.

Poker Games for Family Game Night

A good card game is great for a family game night. There are lots of fun card games that you can learn and teach the whole family. It’s extra fun to rotate the dealer, and the dealer gets to pick the game. There are a few things that can make a poker game for fun for everyone, so let’s talk about a few of our favorites. Poker games are great for family game night at home, and are the perfect game for a night of camping after dinner. They can also be fun when you are traveling in your RV, or at a motel. 1) First step, a poker games instructions book from Amazon to tell you all about how to play over a hundred different types of poker games. What worked best for us was to read through and talk about several different ones as we went through the week, preparing for a family game night on the weekend. We cheat a little and get out a deck of cards and play a couple of hands of each one to see if we like them. The ones we like we can remember to play on our game night. 2) An automatic card shuffler helped us get through suffling the cards better. It kind of slows down the game a little when someone really struggles to shuffle the deck properly, and has to repeat it too many times. They get frustrated too. Plus these automatic card shufflers are fun, my family really loves ours. The kids do still practice shuffling by hand too (when they aren’t dealing), becasue they do want to perfect it for later. 3) The kids really benefited from the poker hands ranking cards to show you what each poker hand is, and how they rank, so they can easily tell if they have a good hand that may win. 4) Poker chips are a must. They add to the excitement, and it’s almost like betting with money. Of coarse, if your playing with friends, you can have a buy in for those chips to add another level of excitement to winning when you get to take home some extra cash. Ours is just a friendly fun game though with no cash, as we are playing for family game night with teens, pre-teens, and our adult kids too.

Family Board Games

As our kids grow older, and become young adults, one of them has moved a few towns away and another one is about to start working in another state in the coming months. We wanted to find a board game that can be played in our living room that would be fun, but could also include a way for our kids that can’t be at our house to participate in our weekly family game nights. We found that and more with Outsmarted. This board game is a trivia game, but it doesn’t include those boring cards that everyone has to read. You can view the questions on your smartphone, tablet, laptop, and you can also stream it to your TV. What an amazing idea, and this makes this game so much more fun than the old school games like trivia pursuit and others. But that’s not all. Once you setup the game, you can also send anyone in the world a short code that if they also install the application on their device, they can play the game remotely and be a part of your family game night as well. This is so perfect for our family. Our kids range from Age 7 to Age 21, and this game lets you select each players age, so the questions they will be asked will be more geared to their age group. This way they can enjoy the game as much as we do. There are a lot of built in categories, and there are two upgraded product versions that include even more categories. There are so many questions in the game that they say you will never see the same question twice. So you will never get bored with this game. Plus, with the click of a button you can buy new categories, or category packs, at very cheap prices to continue to expand the game as well. They even have holiday packs for cool themes for questions around the holidays. We love this game! Buy Outsmarted Today on Amazon! About The Author Mike Mendenhall is the the founder of Mendenhall Outdoors. This website is an extension of the Mendenhall family’s lifestyle and passion for the great outdoors. Everything that they learn, and experience, along the way that they find may be valuable to our website visitors is on the site for you to enjoy. We highlight products and services that you might find interesting. We frequently receive free products from manufacturers to test. This does not drive our decision as to whether or not a product is featured or recommended. If you click a link on this page, then go on to make a purchase, we might receive a commission – at no extra cost to you, and does not impact the purchase price of any products that you may purchase. The Best Family Game Night Fun Experience Awaits!