by Justin Bell

Whenever someone tells me they are bringing hobby games home to play with their family for the holidays, I always laugh; disappointment equals pain. Ain’t no way you are getting Wingspan in front of your grandparents; even if you are lucky enough to get Harmonies in front of your two distant cousins and that aunt who you love catching up with, working through even a moderate hobby game rule set can be a drag. (Why does it take 90 minutes to teach your uncle Catan? Because he’s never played a modern board game, that’s why.)

I’ll post another article about this as we approach the holidays, in part because, like many of you, I love making this mistake every year. “Justin, you write about board games; why don’t you bring some of those really interesting games to Thanksgiving this year?” someone will say. Even though I know there is no way we are getting Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon, or even something lighter like Rebel Princess: Deluxe Edition, to the table, I relent and throw a half-dozen games into the bag in the hopes that, finally, this is the year I come up aces and somehow trick adults into a game of Recall after putting three pounds of turkey and two pounds of apple pie (with the ice cream!) into my gut.

For the traditional holiday season, I am silly enough every year to give it a try. But for a summertime beach week, tabling games from my collection is much more reliable. That’s because beaches equal party games, and all of us have something worth a shot even with the family members who supposedly never play games. The mood is right, eventually everyone needs a break from the hot summer sunshine, and someone has to take on the role of Chief Keep the Kids Off the Tablets Officer.

Usually, that someone is me.



Every year, I tell my wife’s family that my worst week of the year to do a beach trip is the week right after Gen Con. I’ve just taken 3-4 days of vacation from my day job, and the thing I am most excited to do is to table a dozen of the treasures I just picked up in Indy. And, like clockwork, my wife’s family elects the annual beach vacation week to start the Saturday of Gen Con weekend, a week full of early mornings, screaming children, and humidity out the wazoo.

I’m not a beach guy. (I AM an Ibiza guy and a South Beach guy, but I don’t go to those places for the beaches.) I do love kids, but as I get older, I’m finding that I love older children much more than younger ones; see “screaming”, above. But these kids offer opportunity, and the general vibes associated with beach vacations work in my favor when I can bring a bucket of hot-off-the-press party games to the beach.

My wife’s family is great about slinging party games to the beach as well, so we had 20 or so party games lying around, waiting to be tapped. Cranium? A game I haven’t seen in years, but I’m more than happy to sit through. Connect Four? Not a party game, but it IS a family game, so my son and I took a double dip into the Connect Four pool one afternoon. Werewords? Sure! At the beach, I’m a surprisingly open-minded individual, and I’ll play any version of 20 Questions if it helps to keep the kids engaged.

This year, I threw four Gen Con pickups into the bag: Size Wise, the new GameHead release designed by Scott Brady; Dino Racer, an Underdog release designed by Marceline Leiman; Trickarus, a design by Bajir Cannon now available through Smirk & Dagger; and, Jibber Jabble, an Allplay release designed by Cassie Sikes.

To ensure the Gen Con batch was visible, I situated the games near the pile of other party games hauled to the beach by the in-laws, but on a shelf just above and off to the left of where the other family games were displayed. Curiosity didn’t kill any cats, but it did lead to questions almost as soon as I put the Gen Con batch out on the table.

“What are those?” said an inquisitive 11-year-old.

“Some new games I brought back from a show last week. I haven’t tried most of these yet, but we’ll see if there’s time to break some out.”

“I’ll play any of them,” she said. I took her up on that offer with a play of Size Wise, a play that featured seven willing family members on the afternoon of my departure.

Size Wise offers an interesting premise. A deck featuring cards with six items per card is placed, face down, in the middle of the table. The card backs have numbers ranging from 1-6, so when a card is flipped face-up, the face-down card just revealed from the top of the deck is the number that “selects” which item is in play for the current round.

Each player has a string, with a ring at the end that can be slid up and down to adjust for size. When a word is selected, each player must secretly decide the length of the item and measure out that distance on their personal string. Once everyone is happy with their choice, strings are revealed then the rings are hung from a wooden stick, and the players who stray farthest from the group average—so, the shortest section of string, and the longest—lose a wisdom token from their personal pool of 5-8 tokens distributed before play begins, based on player count.

When one player runs out of wisdom tokens, the player(s) with the most leftover tokens wins.

On paper, this sounded pretty vanilla, but I like Scott’s other designs and I love the font on the Size Wise cover. That was enough for me to swing by the GameHead booth to grab a review copy. But the magic of the game surfaced almost immediately during this play, as children ranging from my nine-year-old to this 51-year-old howled at the ridiculous things I was suddenly having to size up.

How big is a plate? If you can imagine the size of a normal dinner plate, it's not too rough, maybe 8-10 inches, right? But everyone has a different image in their mind of what a plate looks like. Later, we had to guesstimate the size of a hubcap. Easy for someone who drives a car everyday. But what if you are a kid, and you don’t know what a hubcap is?

The “pièce de résistance” in our play of Size Wise came when the autoselector forced us to guess the size of an alligator’s mouth. I’m still laughing at the range of guesses we threw out for the mouth. How big is the alligator? Is the alligator’s mouth closed? How wide is the alligator opening its mouth? The range of string length from that example was enough for the group to decide that they loved the game.

As a player, nothing beats the moment when someone finishes a game then immediately reaches for their cell phone to take a picture of the proceedings or search the online shopping sites to buy themselves a copy. I’m pretty sure at least one person at the table already has a copy of Size Wise en route to their home address.



I pushed to get Dino Racer to the table—after a successful demo in Indy then a play with my review group the next day, I thought Dino Racer was a perfect fit for the beach—but while we were waiting to start dinner one night, Jibber Jabble got the call instead.

Jibber Jabble is a word game. Yes, Jibber Jabble is a word game in a sea of comparable choices; for my money, the hobby word game space is so crowded that it is the almost literal definition of “a dime a dozen.” But, Allplay (a company that has come a long way from just making board game tables and accessories) has been on a tear, and each time I walked by the Allplay booth during Gen Con, Cassie’s demo table was usually packed with people keen on learning the game from the designer herself.

My demo of Jibber Jabble on the show’s last day was only so-so, and a three-player game of it with my review crew was similarly lukewarm. But those two plays featured lower player counts, so I did a run with six folks from the family while standing outside the kitchen at the beach rental.

Talk about turning that frown upside down.

Jibber Jabble takes place over six rounds. Word cards are broken into three sections, with six words in total appearing on each card. The words scale in difficulty from top to bottom. The active player, in a manner used in games such as Just One, flips a word card face-up so that only their teammates can see the words. The team selects one of the six answer words for this turn, then the player to the left of the active player starts spelling a clue that the team hopes to use as one of three clue words the active player can use to guess the answer word on the card.

The trick is that players have to find a way to get themselves onto the same wavelength when it comes to the clue word. The person who starts spelling a word has a good sense of the direction they want to go in…but then, the first clue giver has to hope others pick up what they are putting down, if you catch my drift.

Let’s say the answer word for this turn is “statue.” A group of Americans might start by saying the letter L. That’s what I did when it was my chance to start off a new clue; it helped that we were playing in America. Luckily, the other players in the circle picked up the scent right away, and when we finished spelling the clue word “liberty”, someone said STOP after saying the letter Y, giving the active player a handsome clue that would hopefully point them towards “statue.”

But one player went in a different direction for the next clue. With an air of confidence that broke almost as soon as he began spelling, he said the letter B. The player to the left of the confident one looked at them, confused. B? What word that starts with B might be related to statue?

Jibber Jabble makes things fun at this point, because a player could say “Jibber” and continue to offer a letter that, they hope, still keeps things on track as the team tries to spell an appropriate clue word. The player could just pivot instead; maybe they don’t know what B word the first player wanted to use, but they could come up with something else that fits instead, related to “statue” but maybe not what the original clue giver had in mind. Or, they could just say “jabble”, a tell that they have no idea where the initial clue giver was trying to go, followed by a STOP command to just throw the active clue into the dumpster.

And “jabble” is exactly what we did. On the strength of “liberty”, the active player did suss out the answer word of “statue” in the end. But then we went back to the scene of the crime. Hey, confident guy, what were you thinking when you said B?

“I can’t believe you guys didn’t pick up what I was trying to do there,” he said. “The Statue of Liberty is made of bronze, so I was going for ‘bronze.’”

“The Statue of Liberty is made of copper!” one person shouted. “COPPER!!!”

Those of us who had cell phones immediately went in for the fact check…and, according to the interwebs, copper is indeed the correct answer, at least in relation to the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. But this exchange, and my entire play of Jibber Jabble, was the reason why I recommend giving the game a look. At higher player counts, groups are bound to get some of these words wrong or have some sequences blow up in the team’s face…and it was moments like these that made me happy I got to see the game in its best light.

Party games need party-sized audiences to work well, and Jibber Jabble fits the bill.

Other party games hit the table during the week, and of the 20-game pile, we probably hit a dozen of them over the course of seven days. When we wrapped up the play of Size Wise, some family members called out the fact that we need to have more beach days where we break out party games old and new.

It’s always fun to contribute when the family is looking for ways to steer kids away from screens a few times each day. Gen Con always provides. Now I just have to figure out how I will convince myself to NOT bring some of the games on the SPIEL Essen 2026 Preview to turkey dinner this fall. Don’t worry…I’m sure I will blow it again this year!