Build up your gaming library!!!

Well, it’s that time of year again, time for Thanksgiving and Black Friday, the two busiest days of my life. One day I spent cooking and eating the greatest food on Earth, then I have a midday nap and I get ready to stand out in the cold so that I can get amazing shopping deals. This year, I am playing to head straight for the board game aisle. Though, I have figure out a way to even get more off on my Black Friday sales. My master plan this year is to get gift certificates that at a discount on sites like citydeals or others and then use them for payment on my items. This is what I call a double bonus, a genius move on my part! Also, I get the feeling I will have one of the best game library on my block.

Ticket To Ride

Christmas is just around the corner! Board games are a great way to spend quality time with the fam.... Ticket To Ride is a great game for the family. It is a cross-country train adventure game. Players collect train cards that enable them to claim railway routes connecting cities throughout North America. Great game for players 8 and up.

A fun, unique family activity!!!

So I have been searching around for unique ideas/games for my family to do the next time we have a night together. A friend of mine referred me to this article about a mystery letterbox game, give it a try before you judge. My family did this and loved it, so I thought I would share it with you.

Idea For a Family Activity - Find a Mystery Letterbox

By Kelly Richbell

A mystery letterbox is a great activity that is done outside and is fun for all ages. This makes it a great family fun activity. Not only does it let you be out in the fresh air, but it also exercises your mind by trying to solve a puzzle.

If you aren't familiar with letterboxing, it's a hobby of sorts. It started on the moors of England and now has spread to the U.S. and other parts of the world.

Basically, a letterbox is a container you find outside somewhere. A common place to hide them is in parks on trails.

What's inside this mysterious container? Simply this: a log book, a rubber stamp, and usually an ink pad. Yup, that's it.

What you're really doing is collecting stamps. The stamp in the box usually represents it. So a box along the trail to Mt. Washington would probably be a picture of Mt. Washington. Most of these stamps are hand-carved by whomever hid the box, so they are pretty intricate and unusual.

When you're ready to set out to find one of these boxes, the first thing you do is lookup and print out clues that can be found on a website. Then off you go. You bring with you your own logbook and your own "signature stamp" that represents you. This stamp can also be hand-carved.

When the box is located, you take the stamp from the box and stamp it into your personal logbook. Over time you collect hundreds and even thousands of stamps. But you also stamp your personal signature stamp into the book that lives in the box. This shows that you've been there. It's lots of fun to look over the comments from all the people who have found that particular box.

So what makes a mystery letterbox different from a regular one? Well, for ordinary boxes, the "clues" are really directions. They tell you exactly where to go to find the box. For instance, the clue might say "Take the skyline trail, at the first fork go left, in 10 steps look behind the 3-trunked tree on your right."

But a mystery box requires more of you in order to find it. These boxes are little puzzles that have to be figured out. So for this reason, they are great if you want to give your kids a challenge. And there's nothing more satisfying than finding a letterbox you had to solve a clue for.

Here's an example. My husband and I are big Harry Potter fans. One letterbox on Cape Cod was hidden the day one of the Harry books came out. The clue consisted of instructions based on something from the series.

One step said to find the pond named after Colin Creevy's brother. Then count the number of words into the first book when it first mentioned where Mr. Dursley works and do certain calculations on that number, etc.

When we found the box, the stamp inside was a hand-carved image of Hagrid with Hedwig sitting on his shoulder.

So as you can see, finding a mystery letterbox can be lots of fun for the entire family. To locate mystery letterboxes, go to one of the following websites:

letterboxing.org:

• Click on Search for Boxes.
• Select your state.
• For the city, put a question mark.
• Click on Search boxes.

atlasquest.com:

• Under Letterboxes in the top menu, select Simple Search.
• In the box titled Area Search, check "Include only mysteries."
• Select your state.
• Click on Search.

Kelly Richbell loves to look for letterboxes with her dogs. She also recently discovered Reuge music boxes. These are really high-quality and expensive gifts. Her website http://www.reugemusicboxes.nethas more information about them. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kelly_Richbell