SHOPTALK : Games Aplenty for Adults Who Have Put Away Childish Things : Parents can fill leisure time with such old favorites as Yahtzee and Scrabble, or new challenges--Song Burst and Balderdash.

Ahhhhhhhh .

That was the collective exhale of thousands of Ventura County parents who have sent their children back to school. No more kids lying around the house all day. No more reminding them nonstop to do chores when the beach and video arcades were more persuasive. No more driving them back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.

That leaves a pretty sizable gap in the day for some parental leisure-time activities. You can go to the beach. You can hang out at the arcades.

Or you can play games.

It may sound childish. But in case you haven’t noticed, there are lots of games on the market aimed at adults (some are for children too, but we won’t tell them if you don’t).

Being it’s your leisure time we’re interested in, we tried to save you some last week by doing game scouting. We went to John T’s shop at the Buenaventura Mall, Kay-Bee toy store at the Oxnard Esplanade, Target in Oxnard, Toys-R-Us in Ventura and Sav-On drug store in Ventura.

We began with the old, time-honored game of Yahtzee. The basic version of the Milton-Bradley game went for $7.99 at John T’s, $8.99 at Kay-Bee, $4.99 at Target and $5.99 at Toys-R-Us. Another classic, the basic Scrabble, went for $10.99 at Kay-Bee (down from $13.99), $9.99 at Target and Toys-R-Us, and $13.99 at Sav-On.

Among the games we found kind of neat was one called Song Burst, in which players are given part of a line from a song and are asked to complete it (for example, “She wore an itsy . . . “). At Toys-R-Us, a country-Western version was $21.99, and the ‘70s-’80s version was $22.99; at Kay-Bee, the ‘50s-’60s version went for $12.97 (slashed from $29.99), and at John T’s, the country-Western was $33.99.

Another popular game is Balderdash--in which players try to bluff each other when guessing definitions of uncommon words. It went for $29.99 at Kay-Bee, $19.99 at Target and $32.99 at John T’s. And no, we’re not bluffing about the price differences.

A game that really caught our eye was one called Bottle Topps. Why? Because it’s sort of an anti-Pog game. Instead of slamming bottle caps down, players try to stack them up. The idea is to pile as many wooden bottle caps as possible on top of a sleek wooden bottle. The Parker Brothers game went for $24.99 at John T’s, $14.99 at Target and $16.99 at Toys-R-Us.

Other games we found intriguing included Jenga, the Milton-Bradley game in which players pull blocks out of a stack without making the stack collapse. It went for $19.99 at Kay-Bee, $14.39 at Target, $14.99 at Toys-R-Us, $19.99 at John T’s and $17.99 at Sav-On. The game Bandu, kind of like Jenga in that you stack sculpted blocks and try not to let them fall, was $9.99 (down from $27.99) at Kay-Bee, $21.99 at Toys-R-Us, and $26.99 at John T’s.

Speaking of John T’s, what we liked best about the place was that, though generally priced somewhat higher than the others, it has some obscure, truly adult items in stock, such as Mah Jong ($35.99).

John T’s also had a game called “Over the Hill,” for $15.99. It supposedly “keeps the mind in shape while the body goes.” The idea of the game is to come up with more words in a given category than your opponent does.

Now, parents, if you do go shopping for yourself, just remember that you have to be back in time to pick your child up from school.