Our family loves playing board games! We especially enjoy cooperative ones like Pandemic or The Fairy Game, though this year we didn’t play any pandemic. We had enough pandemic in real life.

As we looked back over our photos from the last year I thought that I’d share some of the board games we’ve played. It also shows how much the girls have grown! And how rarely we were able to get together with people. Hopefully next year we’ll be able to play board games with more of our friends here in Cambodia.

Photosynthesis has been one of our new favorites this year but we play it ‘wrong’ by making it a cooperative ‘let’s grow a forest together’ experience rather than the intended ‘my tree dominates this forest’ competition. We have also love Ticket to Ride First Journey and its the first competitive game that Catherine won ‘for real’. The girls go all in when it comes to Ticket to Ride but their take on competition is usually trying to get to the Mermaid and Cat cities. As Charlotte is learning to read, we tried out Scrabble Junior and learned that Catherine recognizes more letters than we knew! There was a brief period when COVID-19 restrictions relaxed and there was no community transmission – that’s when I was able to visit local churches and even got in some games of Dutch Blitz at Phnom Penh Mennonite. We also don’t seem to have any photos of us playing Tea Dragons Society, another of Charlotte’s favorites, but I’ll work on that in the coming year.

A few of the games that I brought from the United States when we moved here are still sitting there waiting for us. Some highlights that are sat waiting to be played this year are Pandemic: Rising Tides, Terraforming Mars, and Heart of Crown (think Dominion but with cute princesses trying to become Queen). Don’t feel too bad for them. I’m sure that they’ll get plenty of use later. I tried to bring a staggered selection of games that the girls would grow into over our five years here.