Super Size Saturday: Games!

De'Etta, over at Choosing Joy, hosts a Super Size Saturday meme. Each week features a topic relevant to large families. This weeks topic is Games!
Here are a few of the games I remember enjoying growing up:

Outdoors: A favorite outdoor game of my family's was the Creative Scavenger Hunt, originally inspired by Gordon Korman's book "I Want to Go Home!". This game is adaptable to different group sizes, and age really doesn't matter. It can be played inside the house, in a yard, park, or forest. We would divide up into teams of two or more, with a list of items to find. The list of items should be as creative as possible. Examples might include A Lion's Mane, A Small Planet, A King's Crown, A Volcanoe, and Dinosaur Bone... The goal was to find or make something to fit the item description--with extra points awarded for creativity (a dandelion might be called a Lion's Mane, etc.).

Indoors: One family favorite that could be played by anyone who could write was Balderdash! If you're not familiar with this game, players take turns reading a word from a card (typically really unusual words that no-one is the group is likely to know). Every player then writes their own definition to go with this word (or writes the real definition if they know it). All the definitions are then read (including the actual definition) and everyone has a turn to guess the correct definition. Points are awarded for guessing the true definition or for other people guessing the one you made up. It might be fun to do this with a foreign language--make up your own word cards, and see what zany definitions you can come up with.

In the Car: Our family criss-crossed the United States and Europe many times. We often played variations of "The Animal Game", in which players accumulate points for spotting certain animals on their side of the car (with modifications when not many animals were present--in Holland we counted Windmills!). And then of course there was The Alphabet Game--see who could find all the letters of the Alphabet first. When one person spotted a letter first someone else could not use that same letter (i.e. if we're both trying to find "x" and I see it on an exit sign, you have to find yours somewhere else). Hey, anything can be fun when you're stuck in the car!