We play a lot of games around our house, and having little or no attention span among us, it behooves us to try and come up with new - and hopefully exciting - ones all the time. One new one that we started playing last week was inspired by an actual computer game that we tested out, but it can be just as fun at home in reality. It's a crayon game, and all you need is a large sheet of paper and a crayon or two.
As a side note, the reason we use a crayon and not a pen, pencil, or marker is nothing all that deep; crayons just look cooler.
Basically, what we do is draw a small round object - let's call it "The Ball" - and try and get it to hit a certain spot on the paper, abstractly and "visually", inside our heads, using levers, pullies, and things we draw dropping from the sky. All the rules of Nature apply in this game, meaning we can't "pretend" that a magical square can rise up from the ground. Having said that, if we want to DRAW the ground, that's O.K.
It really gets the problem-solving side of our brains to come out, as we have to actually "prove" that x pully will force the ball to move to y position, based on science.
When we're done drawing our "maps" as we call them, someone else has to test it out, and we can be very critical, but that adds to the excitement.
And they make for great artwork on the walls and great conversation-starting items!