This Christmas, our oldest son gave my husband the game Do You Really Know Your Family? My husband had given the younger boys huge inflatable mallets. We combined these two gifts to make a pretty good Forced Family Fun activity.
Do You Really Know Your Family? by ASM Games ($19.99) is a trivia and challenge game. One at a time, a family member takes a card from the stack, reads it, determines their answer silently, then reads the question aloud. The first family member to answer the question correctly wins the card. The player who collects 15 cards first wins.
The trivia questions run the gamut from factual to imaginative:
How old am I?
How tall am I?
What calms me down when I am upset?
What is the best gift I have ever received?
If magic was real, what spell would I want to learn first?
If I could speak another language, what would it be?
Sometimes a family member might be stumped by the question posed on their card. In our version of the game, this is where the mallets come in. We decided that it would be permissible for someone to skip a question and get a new card, but that they should be punished by being beat with the mallets as they did so.
To even out the playing field a bit (so Mom doesn’t always automatically win, since she’s probably the only one who can answer questions like “How tall am I?” for everyone in the family.) there are Challenge cards mixed in. These are silly activities that anyone in the family could win. We enjoyed these for keeping things active and mixing it up a bit.
Here’s a sampling of some of the challenges:
Smell the feet of everyone else and rank them from best smelling to worst in order to keep this card (my middle son refused to complete this challenge and received his due punishment of Beating By Mallet).
Everyone must hold a plank position for as long as they can. The last person left gets to keep this card. (After some debate about whether straight-arm or forearm plank is the “real” definition of “plank,” my oldest son won the rights to this card.)
Count to 20 with your eyes closed as everyone else rushes to hide somewhere indoors. After you finish counting, go and find everyone. Last person to be found gets to keep this card. (Let the record show that my youngest won this card by hiding in the basement, since once I found my husband there, I wrongly assumed no one else was down there with him.)
Starting with you, take turns naming a shape. If someone hesitates or repeats a word, they are out. Last person left gets to keep this card.
Overall, we really enjoyed the game. The trivia questions can provide insight into our family members we might not otherwise get, like learning what someone considers the best day of their life so far or what they wish we could do more together as a family.
On the other hand, some of these questions might give us some insight about ourselves. “What do I always complain about?” could be an eye-opener as family members tell us what they hear us grumbling about over and over. A lot of the questions are silly, but even those offer opportunities to know one another better, which is a bonus in my book.
While the inflatable mallet addition is optional (but definitely recommended), this is a great low-key game with zero strategy and minimal intellectual effort required (you might have to think a little for the “name a shape/country/fruit/etc” challenges but that’s about it.). Do You Really Know Your Family? is a great addition to the game closet for Forced Family Fun.