Another fun series of games that I discovered through my research was the Hasbro "Rivals Editions." In this series, Hasbro took one of its classics and boiled it down to a two-player, mano y mano showdown. I was interested in how you could boil some of these games down to two players, for sure. So, first up, Monopoly! Grab your biggest rival and let’s battle it out over Monopoly: Rivals Edition!

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You know me. I love to give credit where credit is due. While reading the book, Who’s in the Game? by Terri Tolles Patkin, I came across an interesting variant to Operation; Operation: Brain Surgery. I immediately had to look into this. Operation debuted in 1968. It hasn’t really changed in the past 30+ years, other than the “funatomy” parts. No new gameplay was offered until 2002 with the debut of Brain Surgery. Since then, it has had a few other variants on the brand: Pet Scan, Botched Operation, & most recently Junior.

Anyway, I went on Board Game Geek and looked into this weird sounding Operation Brain Surgery, and you should, too. It is Cavity Sam’s head, just his head. You are a brain surgeon trying to find head themed funatomy parts like Train of Thought, Bright Idea, Cat’s Got Your Tongue, etc. And to find them, well, you put your hand into his head. Dig around using only feel in search of the correct new funatomy parts. I am sure this is 100% medically accurate.

So, gather your fellow medical buffs, and let’s dig into Sam’s head in Operation Brain Surgery.

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In 2010, Hasbro released five games in this U-Build series. I was only familiar with the Monopoly version, so I was excited to try U-Build Mouse Trap, a variant of the 1963 staple.

U-Build Mouse Trap arrived, procured from eBay, and the kids and I sat down that evening to play it. I had done very little research into it because I wanted to go into it with no expectations. We opened the box to discover it was filled with a lot of building blocks similar to, but not, Lego. We sat around the table, and set to work building the game and playing it. Let’s see how it went.

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