This is one of the best deals for games at Target that I’ve seen in ages:

Monopoly Deal (card game) and Bop It for $1.00; that’s Bop It for $14 ($5 manufacturers coupon and a $3 Target coupon) with the free (Hasbro purchases over $10) Monopoly card game (and also using a $5 off Monopoly manufacturers coupon). Need 3 coupons total.
or
Connect 4 and Monopoly Deal (card game) for $2.00! That’s Connect 4 for $14 ($4 manufacturers coupon and a $3 Target coupon) with the free (Hasbro purchases over $10) Monopoly card game (using a $5 off Monopoly manufacturers coupon). Need 3 coupons total.

So in essence, they’re paying you $5 to take the free Monopoly Deal card game (which is rated 5 stars at Amazon).

Here’s a link to the coupons over at SlickDeals.net. Just so you know, you actually print these coupons come from Coupons.com and Target.com so they are legit and if you’ve never used either coupon site, they will want to install some kind of coupon printer application (for your Macintosh or Windows PC).

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So I really like playing dominoes and I don’t mean standing them all up on end and knocking them all down. Playing dominoes is like playing card games: you’ve got a bunch of “bones” instead of “cards” and an infinite number of games that can be played with the cards bones. Dominoes come in different sizes: double sixes (this would make the highest domino have a 6 at both ends), double nines, double twelves and double fifteens, think of them as playing a game with multiple decks of cards. Using double nines is my favorite for about 2-4 people and double twelves for 4 or more; double fifteens just have too many dots on them to look at. Oh, and I like the dominoes with the dots with different colors; it helps in avoiding mistakes after too many hours of play.

And of course with all games everyone has their variations; in Euchre you’ve got ‘Ace, no face’ and you get a re-deal (if they play that way) and if no one picks trump do you ‘screw the dealer’ (make them pick a suit) or re-deal? And many people play Monopoly with their own rules, such as: put utility payments on Free Parking and whomever lands on it, wins the the cash. Dominoes is no different everyone plays every game slightly different.

One of the games I like is “Mexican Train” (which I’m sure has racist origins with it’s name), the nice thing about it is that it’s easy to teach, there is no math (except at the end of a round) and you’re really just (strategically) matching your dominoes from end to end. Here’s a good set of Mexican Train Dominoes instructions with some additional directions. It’s really too complicated to explain here which is why I provided a link to the instructions. Many sets are sold as Mexican Train sets but they just include a “train station” for the starting block and little train pieces as markers, we just use the starting block as the train station and pennies for markers.

About halfway through we realized we that we forgot the mexican train part! That plus the few other parts we goofed up made me think that maybe we made up a new game?!?

So I checked out the rules, trying to remember the parts we forgot and saw some different rules:

• “In this first turn only, the player may play as many dominoes as they wish, so long as they form a valid train”, I’ve never seen anyone play it that way, we’ve always taken turns putting one down at a time per turn.
• “If any player is unable to start their train – having no domino that matches the centre double – they do not draw from the boneyard”, don’t think we’ve ever done it that way either! Always make them draw one.
• We also play that you have to announce when you are down to your last domino, if you don’t by the time the next player picks up and someone calls you on it, you pick up another piece (I don’t know if I learned it that way or accidentally transferred the rule from a different domino game).

There were some other differences too, but some seemed to be tied into the earlier differences. But as long as you all play by the same rules, I guess it really doesn’t matter.

There is another domino game game we play that I like (and don’t know the name) where you don’t score unless you add up all the ends of the pieces of the board and it’s a multiple of five, this one is a lot more confusing.

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Just a quick tip on winning: The easy way to remember which pieces are the winning game pieces for this year’s Monopoly game is they are the last piece alphabetically in their set; except in the case of Boardwalk (which is the major winning game piece).

Be sure to keep me in mind if you use this tip to win the big bucks ;)

I believe this is the same system they’ve used in the previous five years (possibly longer).

My problem with this is remembering the other pieces in the sequence to know if it’s the last one alphabetically…

Water Works – $50 – Odds 1 in 639,000
Mediterranean Avenue – $100 – Odds 1 in 5,701,000
Short Line Railroad – $500 – Odds 1 in 311,389,700
Vermont Avenue – $1,000 – Odds 1 in 106,921,400
Virginia Avenue – $2,000 – Odds 1 in 106,921,400
Tennessee Avenue – $5,000 – Odds 1 in 307,947,900
Kentucky Avenue – $10,000 – Odds 1 in 307,947,900
Ventnor Avenue – $25,000 – Odds 1 in 769,869,600
Pennsylvania Avenue – $50,000 – Odds 1 in 769,869,600
Golden Avenue – $100,000 – Odds 1 in 178,065,100
Boardwalk – $1,000,000 – Odds 1 in 591,287,650

Pretty slim odds, even for the low-end prizes.

* FYI – This is what I found out from looking around on-line and is the system I’m using. I don’t have any connection with the official game/rules.

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So we played WhirlyBall again yesterday!!! I love playing this game. If you haven’t seen me mention WhirlyBall before, it’s kinda like basket ball but with a whiffle ball/scoop and you’re driving a bumper car!

We were at WhirlyBall West in West Bloomfield, MI. I didn’t have any problems the few other times I played but I knew I was going to have a few bruises this time and sure enough the two spots where I knew I got bumped while bouncing around the car are looking pretty colorful.

There’s a video on the web site that gives a sample of what a game is like. It makes the game seem pretty slow where it seems quite busy the whole time you play…

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While not actually a board, my favorite is actually Dominoes, which (if you’ve never played) is like playing cards, they’re a million games you can play with one set. As actual board games go Scrabble is probably my favorite regular old board game.

It’s trivia, has a board and requires a DVD player: Scene It? It’s the best trivia game out there, games are fast and it’s easy to learn.

From Tuesday’s Tales via The Daily Meme.

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So this is a new twist on Air Hockey. It’s a blank table, with a camera above it and a projector above it. You just move your hand and it “assumes” you have paddle in it to hit the “puck” (which is really just a projection). The calculations are done and it bounces the ball back to the other side of the ice…

My take: So this could project a multiple of games on a table that had other uses. Plus you could have a “mirror flap/door” at a 45 degree angle to control if the projector projects down to a table or across to a wall (for movies/TV). Now that’s an entertainment room.

It’s from Playmotion but I can’t find anything on their site about it.

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