I grew up in a board game age. From Game of the Generals to Millionaire's Game to Snakes and Ladders. I have to say my favorite of them all is Monopoly.

Monopoly is like the Pringles of all chips, the Michael Jordan of all basketball players, the 8800 of all Nokia phones, the Ferrari of all cars. Simply put, Monopoly is the board game above all board games.

I used to have an original Monopoly game, the British edition, which I bought in Hong Kong in 1994. And then one day I found out that it was missing from my game board rack. It appears that Mom cleaned up the rack and she was not sure if she kept it--kept it as in hide it that we could no longer find it--or threw it or gave it away.

I found new games to make me forget my lost Monopoly. Peter, Leah, and myself have a new board game craze now. It's called Up-Words. It's like your usual Scrabble but the only difference is that you can sort of change the words by replacing the tiles as long as you keep at least one tile from the original word unchanged.

When Julien came home from the States, she told us she brought this nice board game called Cranium. I've heard of this board game and it costs more than 3000 pesos here in Manila. She said it's like an all-in-one game where there is Pictionary, charades, trivia, etc. It sounds fun to play so I told Julien we should try playing it before she heads back to the States on Monday.

We finally got the chance to play the game last night.


Players should be pairs so I teamed up with Julien and Peter teamed up with Leah.


The game was really cool. It has trivia questions, cameo, word games, sculpture charades, cloodle, and a lot more. It caters to aspiring actors, artists, data hounds, or wordsmiths. I'm not going to explain how it is played because it sounds confusing the way I describe it.

This is Peter and Leah with a Factoid question about some US President (I think).


Peter, isip na isip ka ha.

This is me and Julien with a Word Worm question where we needed to arrange the scrambled letters properly as desrcibed by the given category. The unscrambling part wasn't as easy as Text Twist.


Time was running out, hence my OA reaction.


We lost to Leah and Peter by two blocks. We shall play again tomorrow and hopefully George, Anna, and Raffy can also come over to play with us. We will soon be called Craniacs.

For more info on Cranium, you can visit their site by clicking this.