10 Posts to Get To Know Us.... and a Contest!

The Big 1-0-0!

This is our 100th blog post! We've got a list of links AND our first contest, with several prizes!!! To celebrate that we're still going, and (in my opinion) getting better at this blogging thing all the time, we thought we'd provide a short list of a few slightly obscure posts that we think really capture what we're about. If you're a new reader, these links will help you get to know us a little, and if you're a returning reader these might be a few you missed along the way.This isn't a "best of" list, just a smattering of posts we enjoyed writing and think captures our personality and varied interests. Enjoy!


10 Posts to Get To Know Us



1. The 4th Generation This is a post about Angie and her family of multi-generational game players, and how Katie and Jack are 4th generation (!!!) video game players.

2. Our First Guest: Uncle Rob We're excited to share personal stories about gaming, and in this post Angie's Uncle Rob shares his favorite game. This post is written as a letter from Rob to his great niece Katie, and has some insights about how our family uses games to strengthen the bonds between us. 

3.  Say Anything Family Our families review of Say Anything Family, a great party game to play together and get to know your people even better. We have had so much fun with this game!

4. Playing with Trains: Railways of the World Card Game Our first experience with games from the train genre, and we stumbled into a really great game with a lot of depth and replayability!

5. Playing with Steam Randy takes a look at the Steampunk genre, and describes some games inspired by it. By the way, Steampunk stuff is really cool!

6. Review of Stick In this April 1st review, Randy shows off his sense of humor with a fun post about a classic kids toy. 

7. Mastermind One of the reasons we started this blog is because Katie (then 4 years old, now 6!) had decided she wanted to share her opinions on games with people "on the internet or facebook or something". Her reviews are very authentic glimpses into her experiences growing up as a gamer, and they're pretty cute. Here's her take on a classic children's game.

8. Castaways of Deadman's Bay Once in a while Katie comes up with stuff that just cracks us up! Here's a review of a pirate themed game she really enjoys! I especially love her unique rating system for games. :)

9. Cool Night, Warm Glow Julian just officially joined the Growing Up Gamers crew recently as a contributor, but he's long been a source of inspiration for us and a longtime gaming buddy. When we were first getting started with this blog, we ran a series of parallel posts on similar topics, and this is one example of his style and take on games from his previous blog.

10.  5 Signs Your Kids Might Be Growing Up Gamers We're pretty sure our kids are well on their way to an "acceptable" level of geekery and gamer-ness, are yours??? (And yes, we'll be loving and accepting EVEN IF they don't end up as gamers, we're just enjoying the experiences together now!)



And Now For the Contest!

To celebrate our 100th post, we're giving away some games, and planning some other fun surprises! You may have noticed we have a new background and site layout. Our brilliant webmaster Chrissy from Muse of the Morning created this look for us by taking a picture of a bunch of games we like to play, and we thought it would be fun to play our own I-Spy game with our readers! Enter our contest and get a chance to win a copy of one of the games shown below or another fun prize!

We're DEFINITELY giving away the following:

  Crappy Birthday from Northstar Games

 Carnival from Dice Hate Me Games

   Eleminis from SmileyPop

...and we're cooking up some other ideas, so check back as the contest continues!!! All you need to do is send us an email listing as many of the games as you can spot in our background image. To make sure it's fair with different browsers and such, here is a full size version of our background so you can see the full image on both sides:

Take a peek and see how many games you can spot (look carefully!) and recognize, and then send us a list of your finds at growingupgamers@gmail.com The person who identifies the most correctly will their choice from the games offered! If more than one person gets the most, we'll randomly decide from all the top entries for the Grand Prize (1st choice of game), and enter the remaining entries into our additional prize drawings. Just for entering you'll have a chance to win some other fun prizes, which may range from brand-new games to a gently used game off our game shelf to whatever other cool ideas and surprises we can come up with before the contest ends. This contest will run for the next 2 weeks, and we'll announce winners and prizes on April 15th!

We'd like to give a special thanks to Game Salute and Northstar Games for providing prizes for this contest! If any other publishers out there want to throw in some extra games to our prize pool, drop us a line ;)




Parting Thought: 

YOU, the readers, are really great. As I put together this list I looked back through our old posts and reread a lot of the awesome comments we've received from readers since we started this blog. We've had amazing of support and enthusiasm from you all, and it's encouraged us to keep doing it and try to continue to build up our blog and offer new insights and content all the time. Here's a link to a video Katie made to thank our readers after her Settlers of Catan review was read by over 1000 people in the first day, and I think it pretty much sums up how we feel every time we get excited responses from our readers. We all just love that you're here and keep coming back! Happy gaming!