What it is: An imagining game where players talk out loud, describing a dream cabin or house.
Best for: A small group of players. It’s ideal for playing on long car rides.
What you need: Nothing. It’s just a talking game.
How to play: My husband introduced me to this game. He said he and his family played in on car rides often. (He’s the oldest of six boys, and they took a lot of road trips.) The game starts with everyone agreeing to build an imaginary cabin. Then each player takes a turn and adds a feature to the cabin. My husband said these usually included things like these:
- Rooms full of bunk beds
- Soda machines around the house
- A movie theater in the basement with an all-you-can-eat popcorn machine
- Observatories
- Underground pools
- Slides or firemen poles leading to lower levels
- A big beautiful bay window right outside the dining area (This was the type of addition my mother-in-law would make, as opposed to the brothers, if you can’t guess.)
Kind of along the same lines as the dream homes my sisters and I would draw as kids. The features can include things inside the cabin, the structure of the cabin, and the surrounding landscape.
My husband did say that sometimes the game tended to break down, as arguments might erupt about placement or functionality of features (e.g., “You can’t put a giant trampoline that catapults into the lake! I already added the boat dock there!”). My husband said this often led to an alternate version of the game where, instead of everyone building onto one collective cabin, each person has their own. Players then still take turns adding on features, but this time to their own personal cabin. Maybe everyone can still be neighbors, at least. 😉
Variations: Instead of a cabin, you can build anything in your mind: Dream home, hotel, mansion, space station, house boat, luxury train, submersible ship, AirBnB house, underwater home, castle, amusement park, a lunar base, tree house, campsite, beach house, airplane, cruise ship…your imagination’s the limit!
My sisters and I also did a similar activity growing up where we would draw our dream houses. I think it’s kind of neat that when my husband was ten years old growing up in Colorado, describing the indoor slides his dream cabin would have, I was ten years old in Texas, decorating my dream house with indoor slides, too. 🙂