I spent the weekend at the beach with my family—two action-filled days of reading books on a couch and posting pictures of other peoples' dogs on Twitter. (I also got a haircut at the Perfect Look in Tillamook, which in retrospect was an incredibly questionable decision.) To fulfill our quality time quota we played a lot of an awesome board game called Tie One On, which I like because it is a word game and because it is not Apples to Apples. (Apples to Apples is less a game than an excuse to drink heavily while trying to manipulate the people around you, and who needs a set of cards for THAT.) So: Tie One On. Thumbs up.

Players have 45 seconds to get their partner to say 7 linked words. Words are linked in one of four ways: shared word (BOX OFFICE, THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX), rhyming, linked phonemes (cen-TER, TER-MITE, MIGHT-y Mouse), and word association (SHEET, MUSIC, JAZZ). Partnerships change each turn, so everyone partners up with everyone else over the course of the game.