Small games

Not qite that light, but our family has always loved the card game “Set.” It’s based on pattern recognition, doesn’t requite math or counting cards, and even young kids can quickly become embarrassingly efficient. I’ve seen the “smartest guy in the room” reduced to eating humble pie by a few games of Set.

We usually bring a deck cards.  We often play Charades.  Outside, we play rock darts: make two targets about 20 feet apart.  Make concentic circles and asign values to the rings.  Stand near to opposite target and pitch stones to the far target. complie score.

<p style=”text-align: left;”>A few that I have played, enjoyed , and packs small, especially when taken out of the box and repackaged into a ziplock:</p>
Zombie Dice

Bang! The Dice Game

Coup

Age of War

Typically don’t bring any games these days. In the past a small deck are cards, often poker with m&ms as the chips. Our kids love pass the pigs.

Jon: So Horseshoes, with found stuff?  No carried weight!

Paul: Set is a great multi-generational game.  Adults have no particular advantage and it favors certain brain wiring differently than most games.  I introduce it with a 1/3 deck (patterns and colors, but not shades) to teach the rules to my math students.  I find the full deck to be a bit mind-warping in a not-bad way.

Speaking of multi-generational (and for non-native English speakers), when back at home, you can handicap Scrabble by giving more tiles to the less adept players.  Mom and Dad each play with the regulation 7 tiles in their rack, but older brother gets 8, younger sis 10 and the foreign au pair 12.  It creates a visible and public acknowledgement of their growing linguistics when their handicap is reduced.

More of a backpacking thing but I have a bunch of thin aluminum washers spray painted black and white so that my kid and I could play Pente (a Go variant) on a board drawn in sharpie on a CCF mat. The washers live on a piece of 1.5mm line with a mitten hook.

My son and my dog used to play Uno on short trips.