Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Super Circles

Super Circles is another easy-to-learn, quick (and I mean quick) card game from Out of the Box (in this instance, a lovely metal box) that will challenge the speed, spatial and color perception skills of 2 to 4 players, pretty much extremely.

Each of the 73 cards shows 4 concentric rings, each of a different color. The rings are numbered (to guide the mind as well as the eye), but the game has nothing to do with numbers and everything to do with your ability to perceive which of the 4 rings on any given card matches the same ring on another.

The game begins with the distribution of the cards. The first card is turned over and placed in the center of the table, face-up, starting the target pile (the cards looking everso graphically target-like). The rest of the cards are distributed evenly, face down, between the players, forming their play pile. At a signal from the dealer, players begin to draw cards from their deck, competing to be the first to find a card whose ring matches the corresponding ring on the card on the top of the target pile. At each turn, players must match a ring that is different than the last ring matched. If the first player matches, for example, the second ring of the current target card, players then compete to match the first, third or fourth ring of the new card.

The first player to run out of all but one cards wins the game.

The visual challenge, combined with the need for speed, can easily become so intense that, from time to time, your mind just refuses to keep up. This feels better than it sounds - like a shiatsu massage for your perceptual skills.

Super Circles is an elegant, challenging little card game, demanding brief spurts of very intense focus. Designed by Maureen Hiron and Ron and Caron Bodkin, with art by John Kovalic and Cathleen Quinn-Kinney, it turns out to provide a unique challenge, one that will prove as engaging to a seven-year-old (no arithmetic, no spelling, no knowledge required other than color and the numbers 1-4) as to a parent or grandparent of renown visual acuity and acknowledged color-discrimination skills.

It is difficult to avoid comparing Super Circles to 7 ate 9 - another Major Fun Award-winning card game, also from Out of the Box, also designed by Maureen Hiron. The only significant difference between the two games is the part of the brain they tease into action. 7 ate 9 plays with numbers, so it leans left on the brainscape. Super Circles plays with colors, so it feels more rightwards leaning. For this reason, Super Circles can be played successfully by slightly younger children. But by no measure can we say that one game is better or more fun than the other. Though we might not play both of them in the same game session, our family games collection would certainly be richer for having both of these games.

Labels: Family Games

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Monday, December 07, 2009

7 ate 9

7 ate 9 may be the traditional explanation for 6's profound fear of 7, but it most definitely doesn't explain why it is such a fun family game. The responsibility for this welcome transformation lies squarely on the shoulders of designer Maureen Hiron, the art of Cathleen Quinn-Kinney and John Kovalic, and the acumen of the once again inspiringly playful folk of Out of the Box.

7 ate 9 is a card game of speed and calculation, similar to Spit, but significantly more excruciating - in a good way. A very good way.

Two to four players begin the game by taking the top card from the shuffled deck, placing it face-up in the center, and then distributing the rest of the deck evenly between players. Since there are 73 cards, after the first card is played on the table, the rest divide into satisfyingly even piles whether you're playing with 2, 3 or 4 players.

The cards are numbered from 1-10. In addition (or subtraction), each card also has a number, from 1-3, in the corner. That number is added or subtracted, at the player's discretion, from the main number, which determines what number card can be played next. So, if the top card is a 7 and the small number is a 2, the next card can be either a 5 (7-2) or a 9 (7+2).

The cards are also color-coded, to help direct your attention to the added (or subtracted) value - all plus-or-minus 1 cards being green, plus-or-minus 2 cards blue, plus-or-minus 3, red.

No turns are taken. Players simply draw cards from their face down pile, one at a time, if they can play a card, they announce the number and place it on top of the center pile, if not, they draw another card until they have found a playable card or someone else has. In the latter event, they must now look for a new match. The first player to get rid of all but one of her cards wins.

So it's like Spit - players playing simultaneously, as quickly as possible, trying everso assiduously to be the first to find the next playable card. And yet, it's not quite Spit. Not with there only being one pile, and the challenge of having to add or subtract in order to calculate what card is actually the next match. And then, say, you throw a 9, with a plus or minus, say, 2. Well, if you subtract 2, it's simple enough - you can match it with a 7. But if you don't have a 7, and you're fast enough, you can add the 2, which, arithmetically, would make 11, which is patently absurd since the highest card is a 10. If not for the "round the corner" rule, by which you can legitimately play a 1 (which, in a circular sequence, would be the next card). Similarly, if a 2, for example, is played, a 2 with a plus-or-minus 3, shall we say, you can play either a 4 or a 9. This logical bit of round-the-cornerness is wonderfully exasperating, making you have to think generally when you are least ready to.

Yes, yes, people will tell you that it's an educational game because it uses numbers and arithmetical operations, and yes, children who are weak in these particular skills will most definitely find themselves hovering on the other side of exasperation. But no matter how good you are with numbers, and how mature and experienced you are in the ways of life and games, you can easily find yourself succumbing to the speed and flexibility of an 8-year-old opponent. Yes, there is a modicum of luck involved - just the modicum needed to keep hope alive, keep the game fun, and make you want to play again and again.

Labels: Family Games

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Monday, November 16, 2009

PitchCar

PitchCar is a puck-flicking, car-racing game of skill and cunning for people as young as six and as old as can still walk around a table. It can get as tense as the Indy 500 without ever getting too serious to laugh about. It can be played as a race against everybody or a race between teams, as a polite game of luck and skill or a cutthroat game of strategic blocking and violent crashing. And there are at least as many ways to build it as there are to play.

The building part is wonderfully easy, though it just as easily can become a studied, exacting, and creative exploration. The tracks fit together with ease, like large jig-saw pieces. Grooves on the sides of the tracks easily accommodate flexible plastic rails. The basic set consists of 16 pieces of track: ten curving and six straight, 16 "safety barriers" - lengths of plastic railing, and eight cars (wooden pucks), each of a different color. There is also a sticker sheet used to decorate the pucks and create the start/finish line. This is enough for you to create ten different "circuits," each a serious twelve-feet long. The "cars" are propelled by any appropriate finger-flick - though some may prefer a finger push or slide.

With a little imagination, and the select incorporation of pieces of cardboard, Popsicle sticks and other household miscellany, many different kinds of tracks can be build. And, if you can find any loose checker pieces or bottle caps, you can significantly expand the fleet. If you need a little more than your collective imagination has to offer, we'd strongly recommend that you consider the additional purchase of, say, PitchCar Extension 1.

Designed by Jean du Poël, PitchCar is what people call an "heirloom game" - a term frequently used to describe a game, the purchase of which approaches a serious investment, and the promise of which is generation-spanning. It is easy enough to build and play to prove of interest to most first-graders, yet it can just as easily be made complex and challenging enough to be taken quite seriously by the mature gamer.

The designer also suggests two variations. One, called "The Pursuit," is played by two players or two teams of players. One team starts ahead, the other tries to catch up. Another variant, "The Trash Variation," players can try to knock each others' cars off the track (in the standard game, you would lose a turn). These two variations hint at another dimension of the game that can be readily explored, namely, the rules. What if we played in teams of two, one player always trying to position their puck to block other players? What if we played in two different teams, started at the starting line, but each team driving in the opposite direction? How about if we each had two moves per turn? What would happen, wondered a few of our Tasters, if we had fashioned special sticks for puck propulsion. Could we become yet even more skilled, our control even that much more precise, the distance covered in a single turn even that much greater?

At a games party, PitchCar offers a welcome balance to the more serious and sedentary strategic entertainments. At the dining room table, it provides a rewarding after dinner, after homework opportunity for the whole family to relax and celebrate each other. Competitive without meaning anything important about anyone. Cooperation without becoming tedious. An invitation to experimentation and creativity. An opportunity for genuine, good-natured fun. Fun of just the right, as it were, pitch. Major FUN, that is.

Labels: Dexterity, Family Games, Kids Games, Party Games

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Thursday, November 12, 2009

The Caravan Game

The HABA Caravan Game looks like a game for kids. Don't get me wrong, it really is a game that kids will play, and enjoy. The cards and thick, folding board with funny illustrations by Gabriela Silveira, the cute little wooden camel playing pieces (which are easier to play with when they're lying down)...all appeal to people who think of themselves as kids. But the game proves to be deep, engaging, and challenging enough to attract serious consideration from those who think of themselves as adults.

Each of up to four players gets a set of 12 cards. The cards are the same for every player. You shuffle your cards, place your them, face-down, in a stack in front of you, and then draw three of them for your hand. From then on, you play one from your hand, discard, and select a new card from your pile.

Seven of the cards show either one, two, three, or four palm trees. These are the Oasen-Karten. Oops, excuse me, I was reading the German rules. Oasis cards. These cards tell you how many spaces you can move a camel forward. Three of the cards are cartes de mirage. O, silly I, those are the French rules. Mirage cards. Each of the three depict one, two or three palm trees, shimmering in a mirage-like manner. These cards let you move any one of your opponent's camels backwards the corresponding number of board spots (not literally squares, but they function the same way). Then there's one Cameleer card, which allows you to move any one of your camels one board spot in front of the lead camel - anyone's lead camel. Unless, of course, that camel has already reached the oasis. Finally, and most interestingly, there's the carta della tempesta di sabbia (or, as the English say, "the Sandstorm Card"). When this is played, everyone must pick up all 12 of their cards, shuffle them, deal themselves three, and continue the trek.

Since everyone has the same cards, you can, more or less, predict (depending on how good your memory is) what your opponent/s might play. Since you always have three cards to choose from, you can delay using your more powerful cards for a more strategically significant moment. If you can save the Sandstorm card for just the right moment, you can get what will hopefully prove a better hand, and prevent your opponent/s from using theirs.

Hajo Bücken has designed a fascinating little game. It can be learned very quickly, and played in as few as ten minutes. One rule that significantly speeds up the game - when you're counting how many spots you can move, you don't count the camel-occupied spots. So, if there are, say, three camels in a row in front of you, and you play your one-palm Oasis card, you get, in one move, to move your camel 4 spots closer to the oasis. This is so much fun that we recommend that when you have only two players, you use two sets of camels each.

Finally, there's getting to the oasis. There are only six oasis spots. The furthest forward is worth four points, the two behind that three points, and the three behind those, two points. Once your camel reaches any of those spots, it can no longer move. Probably because it just doesn't want to. I mean, after that long hot trek across the mirage-filled desert, getting to all that cool water and delicious dates.... Which means that, strategically, and perhaps metaphorically speaking, it's not always so good to be the first camel to reach the oasis. Especially when you take into account the jumping-over-camel-occupied spots rule.

Fun of a surprisingly major kind for a surprisingly wide range of ages and abilities.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Thinking Games

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Tuesday, November 10, 2009

24/7

24/7 is an easy-to-learn game of strategy and chance for 2-4 players.

There are 4 sets of 40 tiles, numbered from 1 to 10. The tiles look a little like dominoes, a little like playing cards. There's a folding board with a 7x7 grid. Each player fills her tile-holder with tiles drawn randomly from a bag. After one tile is placed anywhere on the board, players take turns adding adjacent tiles, diagonally, horizontally or vertically.

The object of the game is to place a tile so that it, along with tiles already played, creates diagonals, horizontals or verticals of:

• a sum (of 7 or 24)
  
• a run (a sequence of 3 or more numbers in, uh, sequential order)
  
• or a set (of 3 or 4 of the same number)

At first, the scoring for each is a little difficult to remember (sum of 7=20, run of 3=30, run of 4=40, sum of 24=40, run of 5=50, set of 3=50, run of 6=60, set of 4=60, bonus=60). A quick referral to a page from the thoughtfully-provided score pad resolves that issue quite nicely. You get the 60-point bonus if, on the same move, you get the sum of 7 on one line and the sum of 24 on another. You also get a bonus if you are able to use 7 tiles in creating the sum of 24. Forgive me. I said "points." The recommended term is "minutes." Even though minutes are actually points, it does give you the feeling that you're, so to speak, "playing for time" - which, clearly, is the theme of the game.

There are a few other rules of note. Every, so to speak, "time" you create a 24 you place one of those red, jewel-like stones on the empty spaces on either end of the 24 line. This helps fill the board a little more quickly, remind players not to create a sum greater than 24 (which one must never, never do), and explains why that bag of gem-like splendor is included in the game. In addition to all these scoring considerations, there are "double time" spaces on the board (indicated by hour glasses), which, when occupied, double the value of the score for that play, and add further complexity to your strategic contemplations.

There is always an element of chance (you have no control over what tiles you are given to play with), and an equal invitation to engage in much stratego-arithmetico thinking. The balance between the two is finely tuned, and combines just enough tension to keep the game engaging, with just enough sheer luck to keep you from taking it too seriously. Hence, it is close to the perfect family game.

There are several variations to explore - just enough to encourage you to create your own. Some educators and parents will find themselves embracing the game because of the arithmetic calculations involved, but we found the strategic considerations far more interesting and challenging.

Designed by Carey Grayson, the game is actually quite easy to learn. The whole game can be played in half-an-hour or less, so it will fit nicely with the attention spans of most casual game players. For a family whose kids enjoy games like Scrabble and rummy, 24/7 will quickly become a favorite. The tiles lovely to the touch, the wooden racks flawlessly functional. Because you can place a starting tile anywhere on the board, every game is different enough to engage your curiosity and challenge your reasoning. Fun whenever you have time (as it were) to play together, and I predict you will want to find the time (so to speak) to play this game!

Labels: Family Games, Thinking Games

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Friday, October 16, 2009

Le Pass Trappe

Le Passe Trappe is a fast, somewhat furious, slightly noisy, significantly fun action game for two.

Note the elastic band on either end of the well-made, wood-framed board. Now cast your conceptual glance to the small, slightly-larger-than-a-puck opening in the center. Add to this the observation that there are 10 pucks. That's pretty much all you need to understand how the game is played.

The two players each start out with 5 pucks apiece. They shake hands and then, simultaneously, use their elastic bands to try to shoot all the pucks that are on their side through the opening and on to the other player's side of the board. The first player to clear her side of the board is the winner.

That's the basic game. There's a 45-second sand-timer, pegs and scoring holes on either side of the board for those wishing to explore more formal, tournament-like versions, or perhaps even solitaire (can you get all 10 checkers through to the other side before the timer runs out). The basic game is most definitely fun. In fact, one could easily say that it is Major FUN. During the three or maybe five minutes of play, you are totally absorbed - the noise, the speed, the challenge all combine to keep you engrossed. You can play again and again, and get very competitive about the whole game, without even needing to keep score. When there are a bunch of people who want to play, you can make it the rule that the winner gets to play someone new. In the mean time, the rest of the players can spend their relatively short wait cheering and jeering with equally passionate intensity.

Designed by Jean-Marie Albert, Le Passe Trappe is available in three different sizes. We Tasted the mid-size, because that's the way we are. But they all play alike and are sure to prove a good investment, for kids, for the family, at a games night or party, at a neighborhood event or sleep-over.

Labels: Dexterity, Family Games, Kids Games

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Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Tumblin' Dice

When Randy Nash first developed Tumblin' Dice, he did what any game inventor would do - especially one who created a game that people really loved - he started his own company. Recently, the older/wiser Mr. Nash licensed his game to Fred Distribution - a company with a genuinely deep appreciation for really good games. And they honored his concept, and made it a little more attractive, and just as well-made, and just as much fun.

The game is called Tumblin' Dice, which is exactly what it was called when we first gave it our highest award - the Keeper. I am happy to say, this renewed version is at least as much of a Keeper as it was then.

Think of it shuffleboard with dice. You'd be wrong, but you'd understand almost all you needed to know in order to start playing. There are four sets of dice, each a different colors (and lovely colors they are). Each set has four dice. Players take turns flick/slide/rolling their dice, starting on the top level, aiming towards one of the three platforms on the lowest levels. If your die reaches the third level, you get exactly as many points as are on the top of the die. If your die reaches the fourth level, you get twice as many points; the fifth level, three times as many, and if you reach the lowest level, you multiply the face of the die by four.

Since players are taking turns, there's a good chance that someone will knock your high-scoring die off the board. So the game can get quite competitive. There's a lot of opportunity to develop skill. But there's enough chance (despite my desire to maintain the illusion, I don't think it's really possible to determine what face of the die will show up at the end of a roll) to keep things interesting, even for the poor-of-aim.

The turns are very short, and a whole round can take only a few minutes. So everyone stays involved even when there are four players. And as soon as one round is over, and all the points are scored, people are ready and eager to play again. It's a perfect family game. For children who are still learning to add and multiply, it even has some educational value - not enough to spoil the fun, just enough to make their parents willing to let them play, too. If the multiplication is too hard, instead of multiplying you can just add extra points for dice that reach the scoring levels. Because of the skill required, and the competitiveness, adults can get intensely engaged. Because of the luck factor, anyone who can flick/slide/roll a die has a reasonable chance of winning. And, if you have some perverse need to make it even more challenging, you can try removing some or all of the pegs on the bottom two levels. I tried. I put them back.

Tumbln' dice is a big game. Some assembly is required. But it's easy and takes maybe 90 seconds the first time. And just as easily disassembled and snuggled back into its box, in maybe 45. Of course, somebody who hasn't played it yet will probably come over shortly after you've finally put it away, and you'll find yourself gleefully putting it back together again.

Tumblin' Dice is an investment in long-lasting, generation-spanning fun. The payoff is Major FUN.

Labels: Dexterity, Family Games, Keeper, Senior-Worthy, Tops for 2009

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Thursday, October 08, 2009

For Sale

Stefan Dorra's auction game For Sale is another surprisingly engaging game from Fred Distribution. You get a set of 30, well-illustrated Property Cards (by artist Alvin Madden), another set of 30 Currency Cards, and a collection of 72 thick, cardboard coins, worth either one- or two-thousand conceptual dollars.

Before we go into detail about the design and mechanics of the game, allow me to leap to a conclusion: This is a remarkable little game - easy to learn, sweetly short (maybe 15 minutes), engaging from beginning to end, bringing people (3-6 players, ages 8 and up) closely together, almost always surprising, almost always making people laugh. Play it between games, play it to open or cap a game session, play it after dinner, play it before bed. Play it once. Play it again and again all evening long. Play it with strangers or friends or family, even. And it's still fun.

Aside from the elegance of the execution and cleverness of the design, what makes this game so successful is the interaction between players. It's all about learning each other: trying to predict what other people will do while remaining inscrutably unpredictable. Like a friendly game of poker, only friendlier, lighter-of-heart, and without any consequences other than fun, and getting to know each other a little better, and surprising each other a little more often.

The game is played in two phases. In the first phase, Property Cards are dealt out (3-6, depending on the number of players), face-up. Players then take turns, bidding for the card of the highest value, unless, of course, they are so taken by the clever illustrations that they start bidding for the property that looks the most fun (ooh, a tree house!). Which may be counterproductive in terms of things like winning, but fun's fun, and who can put a value on that?

The bidding process is unique and very efficient. After the first player makes her bid, the next either bids higher or passes. If you pass, you get the lowest-value Property Card. If you've already bid, take back half your bid (rounded down), and give the rest to the bank. If you continue, you must increase the bid. When all but one player have passed, that player gets the property of his choice and gives all his bid to the bank. This phase continues until all the Property Cards have been sold. If you're too enthusiastic of a bidder, you'll probably run out of coins before all the Property Cards are used up. Not to worry. You may not get the properties you want, but you'll still get something.

Once all the Property Cards are sold, the "real" part of the game begins. Now, players use the values of their Property Cards to bid for Currency Cards, whose value ranges from zero to $15,000. Here, the bidding process is a bit more familiar. Again, as many Currency Cards as there are players are dealt face-up on to the table. All players select one of their Property Cards, place it face-down on the table, and then simultaneously reveal their bid. The player whose Property Card has the highest gets the first choice of Currency Cards. The next highest gets the next choice, etc. Property Cards that were bid are returned to the bank and the next group of Currency Cards is revealed. This continues until all Property Cards have been used. Players then add up the value of all their Currency Cards and any remaining money coins. The player with the highest score wins.

It pays to conserve, it pays to observe, it pays to remember what cards have already been played, it pays to remember how risky or conservative people tend to be. It pays to play. Not in money, maybe. But in fun, most definitely. Major FUN.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games

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Monday, October 05, 2009

Worm up!

There's something gently lovable about Worm up! O, it's fun, all right. Major FUN, in actual fact. But it's funny, too. And so spare in its design that it's what you might call endearing.

The colorful little game box contains 5 sets (each in a different color) of 7 wooden hemispheres. These are used to make worms - take a set, put the hemispheres, hemi-side down, in a column, and there you have it, your basic worm.

Then there are 4 black cylinders. Also wooden. And some cardboard pieces. Thick, durable cardboard to be sure. One of these pieces serves as the finish line, and two of the cylinders fit on either end of it. The other two cylinders are placed about 2-feet away to create the starting line. The other cardboard pieces are also in 5 sets. Each set consists of 5 rectangular tokens, numbered 4, 5, 6, and 7, and one with an X on it.

Once the goal and starting line are set up, players line-up their worms. Each of the 3 to 5 players selects one of the cardboard tokens, places that token face-down on the table, and turns their tokens over simultaneously. Players who have chosen the same number token don't get to move their worms. The others move their worms, one segment at a time, starting from the last segment, and sliding that segment to the head of the worm, the player who chose the lowest number going first. The X token allows you to either move your worm (any number that hasn't been already chosen) or move the goal (which takes on evermore strategic significance as the game progresses). To move the goal, you put your finger on one of the cylinders (anchoring it), and then, with your finger on the other cylinder, rotate the goal as far as you want to.

You can move your worm in any manner you wish, positioning pieces so as to make it twist and turn to block your opponents, as long as each worm piece is placed adjacent to the piece most recently moved to the head of the worm. Even though you're just sliding these little wooden half-domes from the back to the font of the line, as the game progresses, the worms seem to move in a wonderfully wriggly, worm-like fashion. Because the pieces are so simple, the illusion is that much more powerful.

And of course trying to predict what tile the other players might choose so you can choose differently is endlessly surprising, turn after turn.

The game takes maybe 10 minutes to play, though we had to play it twice before we felt that the game was over, and then had to have a quite serious discussion about why we should really be playing it at least one more time. It's good for families whose kids are a precocious 7 or older. It's good for kids. It's a good game to play between more serious games. Gentle fun. A happy little diversion.

If I were Alex Randolph, the designer of the game, I would consider it a minor masterwork. And I would take equal delight in the production quality. The packaging is very spare - very little space is wasted. The rules are brief and easy to learn.

There's a quote by Randolph on the side of the box. I think it explains much about why his game is as fun, and as elegant as it is:

"Somehow," he writes, "I feel that boardgames are the beginning of everything truly human, and so, ultimately, of the highest human endeavors, especially those which I find most precious, because they have no purpose outside themselves. They are, themselves, their purpose. Poetry, art, music, story telling, pure mathematics, pure science, philosophy...all are spiritual luxuries. Luxuries are things that delight us, that we long to possess, but that we can very well do without. They are not practical. They are not needed for our survival. And board games? Board games are luxuries, too, of course, albeit minor and marginal, but in the sense of non-utility, perhaps the purest."

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Tops for 2009

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Thursday, September 24, 2009

Consensus Junior Edition

Consensus Junior is the third and newest addition to the award-winning Consensus collection. As the name implies, this one's for the kids.

The game follows the same, award-winning design as the other two versions. There's a large, colorful board, a deck of 200 noun cards, a deck of 75 adjective cards, a deck of voting cards (8 sets of cards, each with a unique border color, numbering 1-10) and a collection of 8 colored pawns, one for each of the sets of voting cards. The board has numbered spaces for 10 noun cards, a space for the adjective card, and a scoring track. The noun cards are drawn and placed face-up, one in each of the numbered spaces on the board. An adjective card is turned over. Players select the one noun they think most closely fits the adjective, place their vote face down on the table, and then take turns revealing their selection. The answer receiving the greatest number of votes is deemed the winning answer and the players who chose the winning answer move ahead one space. In a case where there is no clear majority, no one scores. Hence the name, Consensus.

The key to the difference between the Junior Edition and the other editions of Consensus is the content of the noun and adjective cards. Given, for example, the following randomly selected noun cards:

• Bee Hive
• Bed Bug
• My Daddy
• Nemo
• World Peace
  

Which would you vote for if the adjective were (also a random sample):

• Rare
• Adorable
• Unforgettable
  

If the adjective were "rare," which do you think is, um, rarest: your daddy, world peace, Nemo? Which the most adorable? Which the most self-evidently unforgettable?

Even as the mature person you most obviously are, you'd still have a somewhat clear and more or less patently obvious choice, regardless of which adjective was chosen. And, with an "opponent" of the unabashed certainty of an eight-year-old, you know there will be strong opinions about everything. This is what makes the Junior Edition so appealing: everyone counts, everyone in the family finds themselves personally invited, everyone has an opinion, everyone feels equally entitled, equally correct, and, with the Junior edition, pretty much equally informed. How many family games can you say that about?

Labels: Family Games

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Sunday, September 13, 2009

Circle Out

It is a distinct pleasure to introduce you to a new card game called "Circle Out." Distinct, because it's unique, a pleasure because its most definitely fun. The closest approximation I can come up with is the Major FUN Award-winning card game Set.

Like Set, Circle Out engages both logical and perceptual skills. It's called Circle Out because the object of the game is to find sequences of cards that can be connected, color to color, the first color matching the last in the sequence, making a circular chain. The longer the chain, the higher the score value (if score is what you're keeping).

The game begins by laying out 12-16 cards. The first player to find a circular chain (using each color only once per circle), takes the cards from the array, places them in front of her, and then replaces those cards with the same number of cards from the deck. The game continues until the deck, or the players, are exhausted. If you need more graphic clarity, watch this demonstration of the game.

Joseph Lytle, the designer of Circle Out, has a deep appreciation for math and fun. In one of his Youtube videos, called "Splitting the Deck/Circle Out as a Mathematical Curiosity," he gives us a taste of the some of the more hidden properties of the deck. For more background, here's Mr. Lytle expostulating on the inspiration for the game, which, oddly enough, has to do with a meditation on economics.

Lytle describes another variation of the game, which, in turn, helps us realize that the game is elegant enough to invite yet more variations - always a sign of a game that will prove high in replay value.

Recommended for 2-4 players, ages 8 and up, Circle Out can engage the entire family. Prepare to be surprised by who will prove better at the game. The skills required have little to do with education or maturity, which explains a lot about why Circle Out has earned a Major FUN Award.

Labels: Family Games

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Thursday, September 10, 2009

Run Wild

It's a card game. It's a well-made card game, with exceptionally colorful cards in a convenient card-size tin. It's a card game for 2-4 players of any age, as long as they're old enough to know the difference between sequences of the same color and groups of the same number.

It's Run Wild, a tense, heads-down card game, where everybody plays simultaneously and the first person to play all the cards in their hand wins.

Lay down your sets and runs of three or four. Once a set or run is played, it belongs to everybody. You can add your cards to any set or run on the table. You can use cards from any set or run on the table (as long as there are at least three cards remaining). And there are wild cards, O yes, indeed there are wild cards. Lovely, colorfully wild, wild cards. Cards of two kinds of wildness: one of which can be used, as you would expect, in place of any card. The other, as you might not expect, a "draw-three" card, making the other players add three more cards to their hand - resulting in what some may see as sweet revenge, and others as just desserts.

There are 72 cards in the deck. The deck is divided equally between all players, and placed in a face-down pile. Each player draws the top eight cards. At a mutually agreed upon signal, everyone starts laying down their sets and runs. If you have no cards to lay down, you can pick from the cards that remain in your portion of the deck. This is really not a thing you want to do, because it means that you have more cards that you'll have to get rid of. So you focus, with somewhat passionate intensity, on what everyone else has played. If you are trying to be exceptionally strategic, you might try to hold off on laying out any new sets or runs, because every new set or run is someone else's new opportunity. On the other hand, the longer you hold on to your cards, the less likely it is that you will win the round.

At the end of the round, you are penalized five points for each card still in your hand, and ten points for each wild card. Hence the added incentive to get rid of your cards mingles somewhat acidly with the strategic value of waiting for the right moment to give that draw-three card to someone who is just about to go out. Ah, so sweet the desserts. Yet, wait one a minute too long, and O the bitterness and remorse of it all.

Designed by Brad Carter, Run Wild is not frantic like the two-player solitaire game of Spit or Speed. It's a light-hearted game that will probably make you laugh, but it will also challenge you, pretty much entirely. Its rules are not only easy to understand, but also inviting to tinker with. For example, should the game prove too challenging for some players, all you need to do to level the playing field is give the player who won the last round an additional card or two when she starts the next, or play in teams, or see if you can get everyone to go out at the same time. Even untinkered-with, it's worthy of your most determinedly playful consideration.

Labels: Family Games

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Friday, August 28, 2009

Connect 4x4

If you've ever played Connect Four, you'll immediately understand the attraction of playing with three or four players. With two players, you've got strategy. With three or four, you've got politics. Sometimes, you just have to cooperate with the very people you are competing against, just to keep someone else from winning. Such is the nature of playing with more than two.

And it's prettier - having four colors instead of two. Colored rings, even.

But that's just part of what makes this game so worthy of our collective consideration. The other part is the channels that accommodate the ex-checker rings. They're double-wide, double-sided. Which means that two rings fit where only one ring used to. And you win regardless of whether your ring is in the front or back of a channel - as long as there are four-in-a-row of your color.

There are also two "blocker" pieces for each color. Double-wide themselves, they fit into both sides of a channel. The blockers are powerful pieces, which is why you only have two of them, which is why you have to conserve them, which is what makes the game all the more inviting for people who like to ponder.

The strategic implications of all this are profound and subtle. Profound enough to make you have to rethink pretty-much everything you know about how to win Connect Four, subtle enough to make the game challenging enough to attract an adult audience, and perhaps too challenging for younger children. But, like Connect Four, the mechanics of dropping checkers into different columns, of being able to empty the entire board by moving the retaining wall on the bottom are still very much present, and at least fascinating enough to keep the toy-value of the game as playworthy as the game itself.

Hasbro has been full of gleeful surprises of late. Though they've been releasing new versions of their licensed products for a while, they have taken great efforts, in most cases, to make sure that the new releases are also new games - different enough from their predecessors to be worthy of serious consideration. Elegant enough to be easy to learn and to invite players to develop their own variations. Fun enough to sustain many hours of thought-provoking, deeply engaging play.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Thinking Games

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Monday, August 24, 2009

Ring-o Flamingo

Ring-O Flamingo, a.k.a. "The Frantic Fling-a-Ring Game," is, as advertised, a game that is at least as much about ring-flinging as it is about being frantic.

Each player gets one of 4 plastic "lifeboats" each of a different color, each containing a set of 12 flat, flexible, plastic, lifesaver-like rings of a matching color. The rings are placed, one at a time, edgewise in a slot in the front of the lifeboat. To fling the ring, you aim your lifeboat, slot a ring, bend the ring towards you just exactly as much as you think necessary and then release it.

Your goal, should you be goal-oriented, is for your ring to land, quoit-like, around any of the 7 plastic flamingos (yes, plastic flamingos), and not around either of the two plastic alligators.

The flamingos and alligators fit into slots in the thick game board. Turned 90-degrees, they stand firmly enough to resist and staunchly deflect any inaccurately flung rings. The board is thick enough to withstand repeated reassembly.

Ringing an alligator is a bad thing to do and makes you lose two points. You get 2 points for each of your rings that is first to ring a flamingo, and one point for each of your subsequent flamingo-ringing ring.

Since everyone plays simultaneously, mastering the "frantic" part of this "Frantic Fling-a-Ring" game is as crucial to success as good aim. Since being the first to ring a particular flamingo gets you twice as many points, the need for speed is clearly established. And, of course, the faster you fling, the less accurate you become. The tension makes the game even more challenging, and instructive.

On the other hand, ring-flinging is so much fun that it almost doesn't matter whether you manage to get a ring around anything. It's as amusing just to fling the rings at each other, or to see how far or how high you can fling them. Which is what makes the game as alluring to a three-year-old as to your seriously competitive eleven-teen. You can try to fling rings into the box lid or against the wall (extra points for "leaners"). And for those families fortunate enough to have playful parents, it's a great invitation to share some moments of controlled and victimless mayhem.

Designed by Haim Shafir, Yakov Kaufman, and Yoav Ziv, the game works wondrously well. All the parts of the game reinforce the fantasy: the lifesaver rings, the ring-storing and flinging boats, the brightly colored and humorously rendered flamingos. The ring-flingers can be repositioned anywhere around the board to increase aim and accuracy. The rings themselves are exactly as springy as they need to be to flip and fly. And there is just enough luck to keep anyone from getting overbearingly good at the game. Hence the Majorness of the FUN.

Ring-O Flamingo is exciting and alluring enough to be played and replayed by everyone in the family. There are a lot of rings (48 of them). Hence, parents would be especially wise to include in their rendition of basic game rules the tradition of after-game ring-gathering.

Labels: Dexterity, Family Games, Keeper, Kids Games

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Thursday, August 06, 2009

Travel Litterbug

If you were a Jack-in-the-Box who wanted to be game, Litter Bugs is what you'd be.

You'd be just as surprising, suspenseful, and almost as frightening, as a good jack-in-the box, but unpredictably and instead of getting cranked, people would take turns pressing your buttons, never knowing which one of eight was going to make you pop, having one less choice with each passing of the trash can.

You might not be a toy trash can, per se. Or a trash can with such an evil, oddly smirking face, as illustrated. But if you were a toy trash can with a toy trash cad lid, attached, beneath which a large, very fly-looking plastic fly lies ready..
to.......
pop-up.

To play the surprisingly one-piece Travel Litter Bugs game, one of you presses down on the plastic fly - all the way down until the fly, well, clicks. Close the lid. Randomly select any randomly selected button. Push it down. Give the trash can to one of your partner/opponents. Let them push down any of the other still unpushed-down buttons. And so on and so on, button-by-button, until there are, for example, only two buttons left and it's your turn and you still can never tell which is going to release the fly, which, just as you press the other button, suddenly pops straight up, forcefully flipping open the toy lid in satisfyingly complete surprise.

You can play with it by yourself, with you friends, you can play with it as a toy, you can play it to decide who goes first. (Rocky and I were play/working on a puzzle together, using the toy as a kind of victory timer. Every time one of us would get a piece in, we'd get/have to press a different button.)

Travel Litterbugs is an elegant, well-designed toy/game, for children of any persuasion. As decisive as a game of Rock/Scissors/Paper, fun as a jack-in-the-box, and about as long to play. Major FUN!

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, library, Toys

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Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Quixo

Quixo Classic is well-made, well-conceived strategic game for 2 or 4 players, which, because it is related to tic-tac-toe, is easy enough for a 6-year-old to play, and, because of its use of the mechanics of sliding block puzzles, is subtle enough to challenge a 66-year-old. Well, 67, actually, but who's counting?

The game consists of 25, 1-inch wooden cubes, bevel edged, lovingly smoothed, warmly wooden cubes, which are packed in a cloth bag, and nestle comfortably in a wooden tray. Four sides of the cubes are left blank. You'll find an X pyrographed on one of the other sides, and, opposite that, similarly pyrographed, an O.

At the beginning of the game, all the cubes are placed on the board, on to any of their 4 blank sides, forming a 5x5 array. Only the cubes on the periphery are available for play.

The object of the game is to be the first player or team to get 5 of your symbols (an X or an 0) in a straight line. To do this, you pick any blank block on the edge of the board, remove it, and then slide the row or column of blocks so as to create a new blank space on one of the edges of the board. You then place the block you selected into that space, positioning it so that your symbol is showing.

The game continues in that manner, players or teams alternating turns, until someone gets 5 of their symbols in the proverbial row. Because each move results in moving part or all of a row or column, blocks are getting continually repositioned - and within there lies the rub, as well as the tickle. You have to see much further ahead, consider a copious complexity of cubic combinations in order to get your symbols (and not your opponent's) to line up in the appropriate array of your aspirations.

Designed by Thierry Chapeau, Quixo Classic is one in a series of similarly well-made games by the French game publisher Gigamic, available in the US from our much-appreciated Fundex. Easy to learn, as fun for kids as adults, well-made, played in 15 minutes or less, often surprising - as they all-too-rarely say amongst Major Fun Game Tasters, this one's a Keeper!

Labels: Family Games, Keeper, Kids Games, Thinking Games

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Monday, July 20, 2009

Quoridor Kid - as fun as it looks

Whatever you can say about Mirko Marchesi's Quoridor, you can also say about Mirko Marchesi's Quoridor Kid.

Except that Quoridor Kid is cuter. And takes less time to play. And the board is 7x7 instead of 9x9. And there are 16 instead of 20 fences.

They play the same. They offer the same exercise in strategic maze-making. One is cute and short. The other is larger, darker, more brooding, more adult. But no matter which you are playing, Quoridor or the Kid, as child or adult, it's the same fun and fascination.

Which is rather remarkable, come to think of it, that a kid's version of an adult game should prove as maturely playworthy as the adult version. Which makes this version a special gift to parents. Because here's a game in a version that will appeal to your child as it will to to you. Your child will be especially sensitive to the fun of it - to the fantasy, the remarkably skillful humor of the mouse-in-maze metaphor - and consequently, they might laugh more often than you will.

It is a challenging game. You begin on the edges of a 7x7 grid. You, as a mouse whose nose is the same color as a piece of wooden cheese placed on the opposite side of the board. You take turns moving your mouse, horizontally or vertically, one space at a time. Your goal and purpose, as in much of life, is to get to your cheese first. You do that by moving forward, or by placing fences between your opponent and her cheese. Moving and fencing, the board begins to look like a maze, and the strategic depth is equally amazing.

All that metaphorically-appropriate mouse-and-cheese cuteness aside, getting to your cheese first is something you can take seriously, beyond metaphor. And as a parent, it is a special thrill when, as you inevitably will, you lose a game to your own child - fair and square. You won't have to say things like "well, then, you're the second winner," or make just the mistake that will "accidentally" give your child the victory. Because playing Quoridor, Kid or not, can get as challenging to the grown-up as it can to the child - and still look fun!

Which is what makes the Fun of Quoridor Kid so Major. What else would you call kind of fun can you get from a game that requires deep, logical thinking, that looks and plays as inviting to adults as it is to kids, as it is to kids without adults?

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Thinking Games

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Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Ninety-Nine or Bust

There are some times very good reasons for repackaging a traditional game. 99 is one such traditional game, and the people who brought us Pocket Farkel are just the people to demonstrate how good those reasons can be.

Though the traditional game of 99 can be played with a standard deck of cards, the publishers of Ninety-Nine or Bust have taken a extra step, creating a unique set of cards that supports all the standard rules of the game without changing any of the elements that make the game as fun as it is.

In the traditional game players take turns adding a card to a discard pile. And I really mean "add." Whenever a card is played, it's numerical value is added to the total. The only rule is that the total can't exceed 99.

There are certain cards that have special functions, which, of course, is what keeps the game interesting. Aces count as a 1 or as 11. Fours reverse the direction of play without adding anything to the total. Nines also don't anything. Tens increase or decrease the total value of the pile by ten. And kings reset the value of the deck to 99.

In Ninety Nine or Bust there are still 52 cards. And the object is still not to exceed 99. The cards are numbered from 1-10. There are no 9s. There are only four special cards: "subtract 10," "stays the same," "reverse direction," and "99." Because their functions are actually written on the cards, the game is much easier to learn. There's also a little less to think about, fewer choices to make. And the special cards don't look at all like normal playing cards, so the game itself seems special, which it is.

There's a wonderful balance between chance and the illusion of choice. There aren't any winning strategies. But it feels like there are. You get to make other people lose. But again, only if you're lucky and they're not. The odds are unpredictable enough so that, even if you lose three games in a row, you can still win. And even if you do win, it's not really because of anything you are or did or should have done. Just like losing isn't. It all adds up, as they say, to a perfect little party game - an invitation to easy going fun, for 2 to 8 players, for 10 minutes or maybe an hour.

Labels: Family Games

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Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Funny Business - funny in deed

The people at Gamewright call their Funny Business game "The Hilarious Game of Mismatched Mergers." And by golly, they're right!

Funny Business is a family game that engaged our particular family, ranging in age from just 12 to significantly 67, in verifiable moments of hilarious, helpless laughter.

You get a deck of very big "Business Cards." These are not your traditional business cards, they're cards that identify kinds of business - like "Bakery" and "Barber Shop" - 200 different businesses. Each card also has a list of 20 words associated with that business - like bread and doughnut and bangs and curls. Everybody gets a write-on-wipe-off naming card, a voting wheel, a marker (with write-on-wipe-offing eraser), and until the timer runs out to write down what you might call a, for example, Barber Shop and Bakery. You know, like Snips 'n Crumpets, and The Coiffed Bagel, and maybe Feed and Groom.

When time's up, one player reads all the answers on their naming cards. The cards, by the way, each have a different color border which in turn correspond to one of the colors on the voting wheel, all of which add to the ease and the fun of voting.

You get 2 points if you get the most votes, and 1 point if you vote for the winner.

If you tie - somehow two or more players become so attuned to each other and the underlying silliness of the game that they all write the same thing - both players get points if they get voted for, and if they vote for the winner. The fact that such ties occur a testimony to the kind of closeness this silly game engenders. We played all 6 rounds, and by the 3rd or 4th we started having ties, and by the 5th or 6th, we were still having ties.

A lot of the laughter is at yourself - in a very fun sort of way. From time to time you amaze yourself at your cleverness, or your ability to think of a name that's too, shall we say, personal to share, while simultaneously nothing short of genius. We kept score. But by the last round we were too tired from laughing to care who won.

The older folk spent the most time laughing. For the 12-year-old, much of the hilarious subtlety seemed other.

Designed by Jack Degnan for Gamewright, Funny Business proves to be a Major FUN party-like game, for friends or families of up to 8 players whose kids are in their teens or beyond.

Labels: Family Games, Keeper, Party Games

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Sunday, July 05, 2009

Monopoly Deal

Before I go into too much detail, let me tell you this: Hasbro's Monopoly Deal is fun. It's a card game that gives you that Monopoly feeling. You build monopolies and even put houses and hotels on them, and pay for them, in the millions of dollars - all with a deck of cards.

But it's faster, and shorter, and easier, and at least just as much fun. But a different, shall we say, "flavor" of Monopoly-making-like-fun. Because it's shorter and easier and faster, you don't have time to get really invested in the game, you don't even have to spend time setting it up. And because Monopoly Deal still gives you a lot of the kind of fun of the board game, you take it more lightly. Playing Monopoly Deal is more about fun than winning, more about that Monopoly-kind of, taking-someone-elses's property-kind of fun in particular, which makes it such a Major FUN family game, par, pretty much excellence.

The rules are simple and clear enough to keep it a good game, good enough to withstand the inevitable creation of many a monopoly-like "house rules" version for many a different age group and be often even more fun. "Quick Start" rule cards handily summarize everything you need to know to play the game. In addition to the Quick Start cards there are Property cards, Money cards, Action Cards, Property Wildcards, and Rent cards - giving your Monopoly Deal deck a nice fat total of 110 cards.

The Money cards are numbered in the millions - 1 Million, 2 Million, 3, 4, 10 Million - just to give the game a more realistically modern financial scale. Action cards include the "Sly Deal" which allows you to steal any property that has not been completed (making property-completion an even more valuable goal) from another player, whereas the Deal Breaker let's you steal completed properties. The Forced Deal lets you swap any of your less desirable properties with the hugely more desirable properties of your chosen opponent. There's a Pass Go card, of course, which lets you take 2 extra cards from the draw pile. And on and on - a wonderful complexity of luck and strategic potential, explaned in detail on each card.

Easy to learn. Fifteen, maybe 20 minutes to play a round - just short enough to make you want to play again and again. Simple enough for children of gin-playing age. Complex enough for adults of gin-drinking age. All in all a remarkably effective and significantly fun translation of a very long, often agozingly complex family board game into a comparatively brief, frequently delightful, easy to learn family card game.

Labels: Family Games, Tops for 2009

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Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Pocket Farkel

The name of the game is Farkel. You could easily confuse it with Farkle, which wouldn't be a major mistake. In fact, you could just as easily confuse it with 10000, 5000, Buzzball, Greed, Hot Dice, Oh Crap, Squelch, Wimp Out, Zilch, or Zonk. And you'd be perfectly entitled, insofar as they are each and all names for basically the same game - a dice game, played with six dice, that is most definitely not Yahtzee.

However, the subject of this review is not Farkel, but Pocket Farkel, as a matter of fact. (One of my very favorite game names, that I find myself obliged to repeat in rapid succession many times each time I open the game box).

Speaking of boxes, that's perhaps the key to what makes Pocket Farkel so fun-worthy. It's a handy little box, with the dice fitting snugly into their little foam niches, and the scoring rules (which are difficult to remember for the novice Farkeler) so clearly printed on the inside of the lid. And, as you would assume, it fits tidily into your pocket. Yes, all you really need are six dice. But the package here is the product. Its elegance, its accessibility all invite play, making the game into something unique.

The rules of Pocket Farkel are slightly different than those of your regular Farkle - simpler, more scoring possibilities, more engaging. On your turn, you first roll all six dice. You then set aside any of dice that score (see the ever-so handy scoring combination chart on the box lid), and then you roll the rest of the dice. But you have to have to score to go on. If you don't score, you Farkel. And to Farkel is to lose all those conceptually hard-earned points you thought you were getting for that round. As in, "O, Farkel!" Which is another way of saying, no matter how disappointed you get, you just can't take it seriously.

And so the game goes, people scoring. People Farkeling. There's laughing. There's muttering. And then there's more laughing. For a family with kids who can keep score - and not care too much about it - it's something you might want to take with you everywhere.

The Pocket Farkel people make an astounding variety of Farkel sets - there's Pirate Farkel and Froggy Farkel and Moose Farkel, Bear Farkel and Equine Farkel and Gator Farkel. There's Glow-in-the-Dark Farkel and Full Contact Farkel, Fat Free Lo Carb Farkel, and no matter what they're called, they're all Farkel. The dice might look different, but the game's the same. Enticing. Engaging. Major FUN.

Labels: Family Games

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Bananagrams - a crossword tile game you can play everywhere with anyone

Bananagrams is a word game that uses letter tiles - 144 unusally finger-friendly, bakelite letter tiles. It will remind you of other letter-tile word games, many other letter-tile word games, until you actually read the rules (which are simple enough to summarize on the 1x2-inch tag that is attached to the banana-like zippable package).

Basically, you draw a bunch of tiles and try to assemble all of them into a crossword array. If you succeed, you draw more. That's about it, basically-wise. The full rules are a bit more complex. Players all get the same number of letter tiles, the exact number depending on the how many are playing. They race to assemble all their letters into a crossword. As soon as one player succeeds, she calls "peel," at which time every player has to take a another letter tile. And so it goes, on and on, until almost all the letter tiles are used up. Naturally, the first player to have used all her tiles shouts "bananas" (if she still has the presence of mind to remember), and wins the game.

Everything about Bananagrams is Major FUN, the quality of the tiles, the portability and storability, the adaptability and flexibility. Because the game is so simple to explain, it is also simple to change - to adapt to different skill levels, different environments and time constraints. Read, for example, Lance Hampton's exemplary story of how he plays Bananagrams with his kids. We're working on variations for teams, and maybe even cooperative versions.

The Nathanson family, Bannanagram designers, comment:

"Obsessed by all the word games that could be found, we all hankered after something a bit more fluid than the classics we all love and wanted a game that the family could play together – ALL ages at the same time. We sought something portable, that we could take with us on our various travels and simple enough (with no superfluous pieces or packaging) that we could play in restaurants while waiting for our food. We love that one hand can be played in as little as five minutes, but as it’s so addictive, it’s often hard to put away!"

If you like playing with words, it's very likely that you'll be taking a banana-case full of Bananagrams with you everywhere.

Labels: Family Games, Keeper, Tops for 2009, Word Games

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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Yamslam - like Yahtzee, but not Yahtzee at all

No, it's not Yahtzee. On the other hand, yes, it's a lot like Yahtzee. You roll five dice. You get three rolls during which you can re-roll all or any of the dice. You want to get maybe two pairs, or even better, three-of-a-kind, or better yet a small straight, and then there's a flush, which you can't get in that other game, which is better yet, and then there's a full house, and four-of-a-kind, or even better a full house, and your large straight, and, of course, your all-dice-of-the-same-number Yamslam, which makes you yell "Yamslam," take any chip you want, and an extra turn. And what all of this Yahtzee-likeness does is make Yamslam easier to learn. But, no, it's not Yahtzee.

There are chips, for example, which you don't get in that other game - four for each of the possible winning combinations. Each chip is worth more points, depending on probabilities. When you succeed, you collect a chip, making scoring for that particular combination one chip less likely. When there are no chips, that combination can no longer score. Then there's the possibility that you might gather one or more of each of the seven kinds of chip, for which you score more points, or that you might get six out of the seven, or all of a particular kind of chip, or take the last remaining chip - in which case you score yet more.

And then there's the "flush" possibility. The odd numbers on the dice are one color, the even another. You score a flush (if you want it) when all the dice are the same color.

Put all these together and you have something that is clearly not Yahtzee. Fewer combinations, a faster game, more possibilities for scoring, all stored in a metal tin that contains the game with efficiency and grace. Place the chips in their well-marked holders, leave the dice on the pleasingly-cushioned felt-lined bottom, close the lid, and no matter how hard you shake the set, everything stays in place. Forget the rules? All the score possibilities are conveniently described on the perimeter of the box.

Designed by Thierry Denoual (who also designed the Gobblet games), Yamslam is a gift of light-hearted, undemanding fun for anyone in the family who is old enough to add. And then there are variations to try, including at least one for those times when you just need to be by yourself.

Yahtzee? Most definitely not. Fun? Majorly!

Labels: Family Games

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Thursday, June 18, 2009

Stixx

Stixx is a strategy game. It's lovely to look at. Easy to understand. And yet, surprisingly subtle.

There are six different colors of Stixx (the game pieces). There are seven of each. To set up the game, players place the Stixx randomly (trying to keep the colors as far apart as possible) in the 42 grooves around the board. There's an extra Stixx. It's gray. It's used as a marker, replacing the Stixx that has just been collected, and indicating which Stixx are now collectable (those that are adjacent to either point of the marker).

Before the game begins, each player draws from a collection of six "hidden color tokens." This identifies the color of the Stixx the players are trying to collect. The object is to collect more of your Stixx than anybody has been able to collect of theirs.

There are many levels contemplation-worthy strategic complexities. Whenever you pick up a Stixx you determine which Stixx the next player can select from. If you're ahead, and you can isolate the grey Stixx so it's not touching any pieces, the game is over, and you win. If you try to collect too many Stixx of your color, your opponents will be able to guess what color you're trying to collect, and either keep you from collecting more, or take those colored Stixx themselves, just for spite.

Having to keep your goal secret while trying keep others from achieving theirs is an aspect of the game that adds greatly to the depth and humor of it all. If it gets too much for you, you can guess someone's color - forcing them to reveal it to everyone and, if you're correct, winning you two extra moves. If the possibility of taking those two extra moves becomes strategically attractive to you, and no one has yet guessed your color, you can reveal your secret color.

 Stixx is easy enough to understand, and has a short enough playing-time, to meet the attention span of your average, gifted seven-year-old. It's also deep and intriguing enough to engage the serious-minded adult. And it often makes you laugh. Which is another way of saying Stixx is Major FUN.

Designed by Odet L' Homer and published by Goliath Games, Stixx can be played by two to six players, and, as good as it is, it seems to be just as good (if not better) when more than two want to play. Stixx is nicely packaged, very easy to store. It has a lot of colorful, irreplaceable plastic parts - 49 of them. But rest easy, wise Stixx-owner, Goliath will replace your losses for free.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Thinking Games

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Chicken Cha Cha Cha

Chicken Cha Cha Cha is kids' game that is even more fun as a family game and at least as fun at a grown-up games party.

Short-term memory is an important aspect of this game. Which is part of what makes it such a good family game. Considering whose memory is shorter term, it's very likely that they'll have at least as good a chance at winning as you.

The real fun of the game, however, comes from chasing each other around a board of thick, cardboard, egg-shape tiles. There are four wooden chickens (two are supposed to be roosters, but that's where the game begins to get abstract). Each of these chickens have appropriately located places where one can put tail feathers - wooden sticks topped by egg-shaped balls, each corresponding to a chicken color.

Then there are the thick, cardboard, octagonal tiles which are placed face-down, and surrounded by the egg track. The images on these tiles correspond to images on the eggs.

You place your wooden chicken with its one wooden tail feather anywhere on the egg track. When it's your turn, you first have to find the octagonal tile that matches the egg tile in front of your chicken. If you are correct, you move your chicken to that tile, and go again, trying to guess which octagon matches the egg tile that is now in front of you. You can play in teams, even - which makes it more fun, and more likely that your collective recollection might be good enough to find which octagon matches which egg tile.

If you get immediately behind someone else's chicken, and it's still your turn, you can, if you can identify the octagon tile that matches the egg tile that is in front of the opponent's chicken, jump over that chicken, and get his or her proverbial tail feather.

The first chicken with all four tail feathers wins.

Chicken chasing is great fun. It's as fun as playing tag or duck-duck-goose. And, as the game progresses, you remember (especially if you're young enough) more and more of the octagonal tiles, so you can run (or, as the game designers would want you to think of it, "cha cha") further and further. So the chase speeds up. And the tension increases. And sometimes you get so excited you forget where anything is. And sometimes you remember everything. And then you win.

Designed by Klaus Zoch, and graced by the endearing art of Doris Matthäus, Chicken Cha Cha Cha is a remarkably versatile, and engaging game, for a surprisingly wide range of ages. It's one of a relatively few games that kids can play as well as their parents can, that appeals to teens as much as pre-schoolers, that could find as much welcome in a games party for grown-ups as with the kids in the family room on a rainy afternoon.

Because the game is so elegant (there are really very rules) and so easily learned, it is also easily varied. If the game is too hard for some players, you can turn all the tiles over periodically for review. If it takes too long, you can have the chickens cha cha in opposite directions so they encounter each other more frequently. Since you make the board, you can always make it smaller, eliminating some eggs and their corresponding octagons as needed. You can even, if you're playing with people of my memory strengths, you might also consider increasing the number of guesses a player can make when octagon-hunting.

Chicken Cha Cha Cha - available in the US from Rio Grande Games. Not complex. Not profound. Most definitely Major FUN.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games

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Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Gulo Golo

First of all, just saying "Gulo Gulo" is fun. Especially if you're a kid. In addition, there are the six little, kid-appealing, bear-like playing pieces. And the funny illustrations on the 23 thick, octagonal tiles you use to make the board. And the 22 colorful (five colors) wooden eggs with the wooden bowl you put the eggs into and the wacky "alarm pole" that you stick into the egg pile. And the velvet drawstring for eggs and bowl storage. All in all, everything looking like fun.

Then there's getting the game ready, which is also kind of fun. There's no board. Instead, you make a track out of all those lovely octagons (first you have to find the Gulo Junior tile, and set it aside). This is also kind of fun because there are at least four different edges you can use in connecting the octagons. And you put them face down, which makes you wonder what color they'll be when you turn them over. And just before you finish the track, you take the last four tiles, add the Gulo Junior tile, shuffle them, and place them face down as the last space on the track leading up to the wooden bowl nest. And either now or sometime before, you also put all the eggs into the nest, and stick the alarm pole deep into the eggs so it's as close to standing straight up as you can make it (this itself is challenging, and especially fun in retrospect).

Then there's the game. You start at one end of the track (the stack of 5 track pieces and the nest are at the other end). You turn over the first tile. That tile has a color. You "steal" the egg of the same color from the nest. Did you set off the egg alarm (make the pole fall)? No? Good. Now you can move your Gulo on to that tile. The next player can either steal an egg of the same color, or turn over the next tile, and try to steal the egg of that color. As the game continues, the players who are still closest to the start have the most choices - since they can move to any tile that has already been turned over and is the same color as the tile they are already on. Some of the eggs are smaller. They are harder to remove (especially for those of us who are fat-of-finger). Some of the eggs are larger. They are easier to remove, but also are more likely to cause the pole to fall. The player who reaches the last tile without triggering the egg alarm draws tiles from the tile pile. If she draws any tile but the Gulo Junior, she has to remove another egg. If she manages to free the Gulo Junior, she has to steal the purple egg. And if she manages to do that, without, and the alarm pole is still in the nest, she wins.

Recall the observation about the fat-of-finger. Compare the finger width of a 5-year-old to that of a 30-year-old. That explains why Gulo Gulo is such an excellent family game - it is one of the few children's games in which adults are actually at a disadvantage - just enough of a disadvantage to make playing with a 5-year-old a meaningful challenge.

Brought to the US by Rio Grande Games, Gulo Gulo was designed by Hans Raggan, Jürgen P. Grunau and Wolfgang Kramer (with noteworthy art by Victor Boden). Gulo Gulo has lasting play value, especially for families with children between the ages of 3 and 7. The design keeps everyone involved. Because of the increasing number of tiles that get exposed during the game, players who are behind have a good chance to leap forward, while players who are furthest ahead and set off the egg alarm have to move all the way back to the nearest tile of the same color. The game is easy enough to learn, at least to start. And the rest of the rules become clearer as the game progresses. And if not, don't worry. The mechanics of the game are fun enough and strong enough to keep the game fun, even if you don't use all of the rules. And if the game still proves too challenging, there's a set of easier rules for younger children. And for those adults who are terminally thick of finger, consider asking your kids for help.

Labels: Dexterity, Family Games, Kids Games

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Monday, June 08, 2009

Tylz engages your spatial, perceptual and strategic skills - and it's fun, too

Tylz, as a passerby noted, looks like some kind of Scrabble® game played with colors instead of letters. There are racks to hold your tiles and a large, lovely, unfolding board, with special double-scoring squares marked with stars, even.

But, my friends, Scrabble it is most definitely not. You could compare it to dominoes, if your dominoes had colors instead of numbers, and were made of three instead of two squares, and were all L-shaped.

It turns out that Tylz is a unique board game combining strategic, perceptual and spatial skills with a welcome balance of fun-inducing luck. One to four players (yes, there is a solitaire version) score points by laying down tiles whose edges match in color to at least one of a growing configuration of tiles, or to a space on the board. The more edges matched, the more points you get. And, if you match more three or more edges, you get an extra turn.

Tylz pieces are magnetic, and adhere lovingly to the large board. The game comes with 80 tiles, no two of which are alike. Well, they are all the same shape (an "L" made of three contiguous squares), but every tile has a unique combination of colored squares. This makes you want to consider the strategic implications of each of the three tiles on your rack. Should you play your all blue (or black or red or yellow or green) piece or hold on to it? Should you throw all your tiles back into the pot, and replenish your hand with three new, and hopefully more playable tiles?

And then there are those profoundly moving moments when you approach something close to an ecstasy of scoring - matching three edges, picking a new tiles, getting another turn, matching three more, picking another new tiles, getting another turn, and, what, matching four?!

Designed by Andy and Elliot Daniel and published by their own company, Enginuity Games, Tylz is Major FUN - fascinating, flexible, adaptable. The rules are brief and easy to learn. There are rules for a shorter game, rules for a more challenging game - and suggestions for modifying them so that younger and older players can all be fairly and fully engaged. And there's even a solitaire version.

The colors are so vivid, the shapes so interesting, the board so large and attractively magnetic that the game can be enjoyed by children as young as 5 and adults who are even older than I am.

Labels: Family Games, Keeper, Kids Games, Puzzles, Thinking Games

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Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Qwirkle Cubes - an elegant game of strategic roll-playing

Setting aside the fact that Qwirkle (the tile version) has won the Major Fun Keeper Award, and resisting any attempt to compare Mindware's Qwirkle (the tile version) to Mindware's Qwirkle Cubes (the dice version), let us proceed as if there were no precedent, and treat Qwirkle Cubes for the unique game it really is. O, sure, we could compare. We could even contrast. But we shall set these temptations aside, for the nonce, at least.

Qwirkle Cubes comes in a Qwirkle Cubes box that is cleverly cube-like. Open the cleverly cube-like box and you find a sturdy cloth drawstring bag, under which are packaged 90 wooden cubes. You release the cubes from their plastic wrappedness, allowing them to cascade onto the table and make a pleasingly muted woodish sound. You fondle them, because they, in their lovingly polished one-inch, wooden, dice-like way, almost beg you to do so. You roll them, observing how each die has a different shape on each face, all of the same color. And, further, how there are six different colors of dice. And then you place all 90 of these smoothly finished colorful cubes into the bag, as instructed.

You are now ready to play. So you, and another, or perhaps 2 or 3 others, take turns extracting 6 dice from the bag. You place those dice in front of you. Perhaps you give them one more roll, just to celebrate the randomness of it all. And so the game begins.

You all look at your dice. Do you notice perhaps a pattern? Are some of your dice of the same color, and each of those dice showing a different shape? Are more of your dice all showing the same shape, and each a different color? Whoever has the longest of either of the aforementioned goes first.

From then on, you take turns, adding to the grid in crossword-fashion, gathering points for the number of dice you place, and for any adjacent rows or columns of dice you add your dice to, garnering yet 6 more points should you complete a row or column of same-color, different shape symbols. One might be tempted to compare it to something a game of rummy played Scrabble®-fashion. Ah, so simple, so easy to learn, and yet, so rife with strategic significance and tactical titillation.

Before you take your turn, you may, if you so desire, re-roll any or all of your dice. And herein lies the wrinkle of conceptual delight that, dare we compare, is new, even to those who play Qwirkle (the tile game). You see, everyone can see what everyone has. Unlike that other Qwirkle game to which we are not referring, there is nothing hidden. But that very openness is thought-provoking, to say the least. Now that you can see the other players' hands, you have everso much more to analyze. And, in being able to re-roll your dice, you find yourself with the yet further thought-provoking opportunity to see what fate has so far hidden from you. A decision to make. A risk to take. True, you can do nothing about the color of the symbols. But equally true, with the re-rolling option, you might be able to change the shape. So you ponder, and roll, and combine, and add to the ever-unfolding matrix (which is conveniently less table-top-consuming than the matrix that ever-unfolds when playing Qwirkle (the tile game).

The more you play, the deeper your appreciation for the strategic implications of playing with dice, and the clearer it becomes to you that Qwirkle Cubes (the dice game) really can't be compared to Qwirkle (the tile game), even though the colors and shapes and rules for matching and the designer (Susan McKinley Ross) are the same. If you already own one, you will probably want the other, not because it's better or more portable or cuter, but because it's unique, and it's uniquely fun. The symmetry of both versions (6 colors, 6 shapes), the visual, conceptual puzzles they both present make both games endlessly fascinating. The dice really make a difference. And so do the tiles. If you own neither, you should consider buying either. Or both. For kids (probably at least 8 years old). For adults. For families. Maybe 10 minutes to learn. Maybe 30 minutes to play. Fun that makes you think. Fun that even, from time to time, makes you laugh. Fun, most satisfyingly Major FUN.

In fact, we find the FUN so Major that we have come to play more for the glory than the score. Just making some spectacular play, using all the dice on one turn, completing a row and adding on to two or even three more all at the same time - is so wonderfully satisfying that winning, dare I say it, seems almost besides the point.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Thinking Games

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Thursday, May 28, 2009

Captain Clueless - navigate your way to fun

Gather enough people so you can have 2 teams - at least 4, maybe 8. Kids, parents, friends, whoever feels like playing something that's a little like a team version of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, and maybe a little more like a team version of the Major FUN-award-winning Par Out Golf.

Let Team Two start for a change. They select one player. That player picks a Port Card, looks for where that port is on the board - a humorously drawn of a navigator's map of the Caribbean - checks one last time where it is relative to his team's home port, and then puts his blindfold on. Somebody from her team puts a marker in her hand, puts the point of the marker on the home port, while somebody else from the other team starts the 45 second timer, announcing the beginning of the turn with the proverbial "bon voyage." Her team can give her only one-word clues, how many clues depending on the destination number. The first port of call can get up to 5 clues, each subsequent port, one clue less, and the final voyage back to the home port has to be made with only 2 clues. According to the rules, if you are "able to draw a clear route and land your marker in the anchor icon of your chosen port of call, remove your blindfold and marvel at your achievement."

Designed by Ted Cheatham and published by Gamewright Games, Captain Clueless turns out to be Major FUN - for kids (as young as 8), for families (younger kids can do the drawing while the rest of the family helps with the directions), with anybody in a playful, party-like mood. You can easily change some of the rules to keep everyone in play - increasing the number of clue words per turn, opting to play without the timer, allowing only nautical-like clues (hard a-port!). Though it's possible to play the game with just two players, the teamplay aspect of the experience is what really distinguishes this game from anything you've ever played before. It's not Pin the Tail on the Donkey. You're not trying to succeed all by yourself. The other players aren't trying to confuse you or make things harder for you. You're being supported by your team. You're the Captain, and though you might be "clueless" you are most definitely not "crewless."

The board is large and fun to look at. It is finished so that it is very easy to erase. The markers are full-size, and, since you're not allowed to have any part of your body touch the board while you're sailing, help to keep the right distance from the board. The sailing fantasy reinforces the "adventure" feel of the game, conveying the tone as well as concept, adding humor, clarity, and an invitation to practice, or make up your own sailing jargon. It's very easy to learn, the rules are very clearly written (on one, thoughtfully laminated page), and it most definitely makes people laugh.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Party Games

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Kayak Chaos - play your cards, shoot the rapids, grow the river, watch out for boulders and whirlpools and cunning competitors

You're racing your kayak down-river. Maybe up-river. Well, not really a kayak. More like a brightly-colored wooden playing piece that looks a little like an iron with a knob in the middle. On the other hand, it's enough kayak-like to give you that kayak-racing feeling. And it's not actually a river, you know, but a brightly colored, pleasantly thick, nicely textured piece of cardboard showing something like a rocky river bottom divided into 5 different-colored lanes. One of 8 pleasantly thick river pieces, now that we're counting. Some of them have boulders in some of the lanes. Others have rapids. Rapids good. Boulders bad.

And then there's a deck of 54 action cards - also nicely textured, but sufficiently shufflable and dealable and hand-holdable. And, as advertised, it's in these very action cards where the action takes place - cards that let you move forward or sideways or reposition the river cards, even. Each of up to 4 players is dealt a hand of 5 action cards. On your turn, you get to play as many as 3 cards. Having this choice accounts for much of the fun, significantly enhancing the strategic depth of the game.

The cards are clearly illustrated and color-coded. There are single and double "paddle" cards that allow you to go forward or backwards one or two spaces. There are single and double "swerve" cards which allow you to swerve into an adjacent lane - one or two spaces, in either direction. "Weather Shift" cards allow you to shift any river card so that one lane becomes unplayable (preferably the lane your opponents are on). "Kayak Tipping" cards allow you to rotate a river card. "Whirlpool" cards let you exchange the positions of any two adjacent river cards. And Life Ring cards can prevent another player from playing any of the cards that affect the river cards.

The strategic value of each type of cards encourages players to think hard about what to play and what to keep for another turn. The choice between moving your kayak closer to the goal, or changing the course of the river to keep your opponents from reaching theirs, adds greatly to the tension and the fun of the game.

The name of the game is Kayak Chaos, but the game is only somewhat chaotic. Just chaotic enough to give you hope that you may actually win, but strategically deep enough to make you feel that you can overcome whatever obstacles the river, your opponents, and plain dumb luck send your way.

Designed by SDR Games and published by Simply Fun, Kayak Chaos turns out to be an original and compelling little game. Because of the different kinds of Action Cards and the nature of the river, it takes a little longer to learn (maybe 15 minutes), but it's a game just short enough (maybe 20 minutes) for even your short-attention-spanning computer-playing kids to want to play again and again. With just enough balance between luck and skill to engage kids over 8, and their families, Kayak Chaos proves to be absorbing, glee-evoking, and, from time-to-time, Major FUN.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games

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Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Letter Roll® - a word game for just about everybody

It's a word game. It's a party game. It's a family game. It's even a kid's game. It's Letter Roll® - easy to learn, short, intense rounds (lasting one or two minutes each); easily adapted to different skill levels and play preferences, taking some of the best elements from some of the best word games (a little bit of Boggle, a little bit of Major FUN Keeper-award-winning PDQ).

Your Letter Roll® box contains seven, hefty, 20-sided (go ahead, count them) dice in three different colors. Two sand-timers (your orange one-minute and your blue two-minute timer), four commodious worksheet pads and four full-sized, sharpened pencils. The different colors of the dice identify the level of difficulty (letter frequency) each die introduces. The two white dice display frequently-used letters, the three blue dice less frequently-used letters, and the two orange dice the infrequently-used, and hence, the most challenging.

When it's your turn to roll, you select any four of the dice. This gives you some control over the level of challenge. Choose only blue and orange dice, and you have an extremely challenging round. Choose only white and blue dice for a refreshingly less challenging round. Just to keep power where it most comfortably belongs, an other player gets to eliminate one of your chosen dice, so that ultimately it's not totally your fault if the round turns out to be too easy or too challenging.

Once the final selection is revealed, the roller announces the letters rolled, and players race to write down as many unique words as they can think of that use all three letters. As long as each word uses all the letters, it doesn't matter what order the letters are in. (Having the roller announce the letters, by the way, is another welcome, controversy-avoiding touch - as determining which face of the 20-sided dice are actually showing can prove somewhat of a challenge.) Players race to write as many words as they can think of, knowing that at the end of the round they will only score for words that no other player has chosen. When the time is mercifully up, players take turns reading their lists while the rest of the players draw lines through any of the words on their list that get called out. This results in much, somewhat good-natured, but clearly mournful moaning as scoring potential gets graphically reduced. When all lists have been read, players announce and record their scores, getting one point for each unique word remaining on their lists. This encourages originality, cleverness and obscurity, all comfortably confused by a strong element of pure chance.

To further refine the intensity of the game, players can select either timer, the one- or two-minute sand timer, to be used during the duration of the game. The one-minute timer not only shortens the playing time, it also makes the search somewhat less excruciating. The less time you have to think, the easier it is for you to forgive your lexicographic lapses.

Designed by Tushar Gheewala, the challenge presented by Letter Roll is so wonderfully flexible that it can be played by kids as young as 7 or 8 (just reduce the number of dice) or by adults in the prime of their linguistic abilities (increase the number of dice, increase the number of letters required for each word). By allowing each player to determine which dice to be used, players can further refine the challenge as each round of the game is played. It's a great 2-player game, and, with only slight modification of the rules, you can have as many as 20 players happily engaged (team play takes the game to an hilarity-inducing level of collaboration and chaos). As with just about every game published by Out of the Box, the components are designed for years of play, the box for easy storage, the rules for clarity and durability.

Let those good times roll again. Letter Roll® is Major FUN.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Party Games, Word Games

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Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Wordquest - probably the most fun you can have with word search puzzles

What would you call a word search game that is not just a puzzle, but a deeply engaging, and often laugh-provoking contest for 2-4 players? How about if it were not played with paper and pencil at all, but on a board - a very cleverly designed board that reveals the words you are searching for one at a time, and the first person who can find that word must be the first to squeeze a very silly noise maker, and only then can use her own contact-lens-like plastic chips to cover each letter in that word, every letter being connected in a straight line exactly as you would expect in a word search puzzle? And, to top it all off, what if, when the line in which that word was found crosses a word that another player had already created, that player's chips were removed from the board, and, should that result in another word that is already claimed to suddenly become incomplete, those chips as well were to be removed? So that you can never really tell who is winning, even though you might be 40 chips ahead of everyone else, until the very end of the game?

You'd call it two things. You'd call it Wordquest, because that's the name of the game. And the other thing you'd call it would be Major FUN, because it's exactly the kind of game the Major FUN award was designed for.

Like almost every game published by Goliath, every aspect of the game is designed for ease of use and long-lasting fun. Each of the 20, differently-themed word search puzzles is printed on a large, laminated disc. The disc is mounted on a round base. A transparent grid provides concave receptacles for the transparent, concave, playing chips. Because the chips and the receptacles are both concave, it is extremely easy to use a finger tip to place and remove them during play. A mounting ring fits on top of the grid and covers all the target words. Rotating the ring reveals each word to be found. Zip-lock baggies are provided for the chips, and four pits surround the playing area so that the chips are easily accessible during play. At the end of the game, everything fits back in the box with ease.

Being able to remove words that the opponents have already scored is probably one of the most compelling of all the clever mechanics that have gone into making Wordquest as fun as it is. Though there is no strategy involved in playing the game, when you successfully cross words with another player you get the same sense of smug superiority as you would if your victory were actually justified.

And then there's that squeaky, exclamation-mark-like thing that you use to announce that you've been the first to find a word. It makes such a perfectly silly sound that it's almost hard to take it seriously, even if you're the one who didn't find the word.

Younger children who are old enough to successfully solve word search puzzles might have difficulty with the small chips and the competitive aspect of the game. We'd recommend it to families with kids who are old enough to appreciate both. And, of course, to anyone who likes the visual and conceptual challenge of word search puzzles. Even if you don't like word search puzzles.

Labels: Family Games, Word Games

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Thursday, May 21, 2009

Carcassonne - a friendly game of strategic connections

Carcassonne is what you'd call a "friendly game." O, it's competitive, all right. You are most definitely trying to get the most points - prevent others, if you can, from getting theirs. But there's a background of actual cooperation, of genuine, supportive togetherness, which, as much as all the cleverness of the design, the intricacies of strategic implications, the loveliness of illustration, makes this game Major FUN.

It's connecting game, played with tiles. You take turns picking from the proverbial tile pile, and placing your tile next to another tile already on the table. You have to connect roads to roads and cities to cities and fields to fields, hoping to complete and occupy entire walled cities, roadways and, as near as possible, fields. Fields are very big.

Parts of roads and cities and farms and maybe other things are all found on tiles. Land tiles. 72 of them. Thick cardboard, lovingly illustrated squares, each showing parts of maybe a road, maybe a walled city (looking, uncoincidentally, like the French city of Carcassonne), maybe an entire cloister, all, in all likelihood, including part of a farm.

I say "land tiles" because in the basic set you also get the river expansion, which manifests itself as a collection of 12 river tiles. Not land tiles at all. And in other expansion sets, like:

• Traders & Builders
• The Tower
• The River II
• The Princess & The Dragon
• The Count
• The City
• The Castle
• King & Scout
• Inns & Cathedrals
• Hunters & Gatherers

and, most recently,

• Catapults

you get more tiles and more rules and more interesting wrinkles.

When you pick a tile, you are encouraged to ask other players for advice. As more and more tiles get placed, advice can become increasingly helpful. Though you don't actually have to accept the advice, and some advice may be not as well-intended as the advisor claims, this sets the tone of the game, and helps differentiate it from the majority of strategy games.

Once you place a tile, you may also elect to place one of your 7 "followers" (wooden, people-like playing pieces) on that piece, claiming your aim to complete something, depending on where you place the piece (on a farm, a city, a road, a cloister). You don't score, of course, until your follower is on a completed cloister, city, or road. In the process of striving for completion (a consummation devoutly to be wished), it is possible that you might have to share victory with some other player who has also played a follower on a connected, but non-adjacent tile. This is not such a bad thing, this sharing, because your points are in no way diminished by the sharing. You get the points. And so does your erstwhile colleague. So it's not what you'd call "zero-sum" nor is it even "everybody-gets-some-of-the-sum." It's something else. It's an everybody gets the whole, undivided sum. Which makes cooperating almost rewarding, and certainly not so bad.

The farms are especially interesting. They never get really completed. And they don't get scored until the game is over. But when they do get scored, they can get a surprisingly large score, because farms also get surprisingly large as the game evolves. On the other hand, when you complete a city or a road or a cloister during the game, you get your follower back to lay claim to something else. But since farms are never actually completed, you don't get your follower back, ever.

Wrinkle after wrinkle, strategic implication upon strategic implication makes this game interesting, challenging, involving to the very end. And the cooperative, and point-sharing aspects of the game keep it friendly, as in something you are actually playing together.

Designed by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede, Carcassonne is a great game for 2 players, and can be enjoyed by as many as 5. If you don't get into the particulars, you can teach the game and get everybody involved in maybe 5 minutes. Since it's so easy to learn, if you're old enough to play checkers, you're old enough to play, and to have meaningful fun while you're at it. Since there are so many complexities and possible goals, the game appeals to anyone who thinks of herself as a "real gamer." Since there is virtually no set-up - all you need is a flat, empty space - the game is wonderfully portable, and very likely to be something you bring with you wherever there are people with whom you like to play.

Labels: Family Games, Thinking Games

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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Go Nuts - press your luck, go ahead, go nuts!

Go Nuts is one more example of how much fun can be packed into a 12 Minute Game.

It's a dice game for 2-4 players. There are nine dice. Four of them, the Dogs and Houses dice, are distributed, one to each player. These dice have images of a house on five sides, and of a dog on the remaining side. We'll learn more about these dice later. The other five dice have three Squirrel sides, two Acorn sides, and one Car side.

On their turn, players roll all five dice. They get one point for every Acorn they roll. Then, if they wish, they can roll again. More Acorns, more points. Any of the dice that are rolled to their Car side are put aside. But the rest of the dice (squirrels and acorns) remain in play.

Towards the end of your turn, you may be rolling as few as one or two dice, because all the other dice have become Cars. This makes it increasingly likely that you will roll all Squirrels. At this time, you, well, Go Nuts. That is you shout "Go Nuts," lose all your accumulated points, but keep on rolling and rolling your remaining dice, scoring new points. While you're happily rolling and accumulating, the other players are all hastily and with great focus rolling their Dog and Houses die. Which requires a lot of hasty and focused rolls as, if you remember, only one side of the dice has a Dog on it. As soon as they roll a Dog, they stop rolling. When the last player rolls a Dog, you, too, have to stop rolling. You then take your total score (except for all the points you lost before you started to Go Nuts), and thus endeth your turn.

Needless to say, Going Nuts is in itself a moment of intense, and one might even be tempted to say, Major FUN, keeping everyone somewhat frantically, and most definitely hilariliously involved, no matter who's turn it is. Though it will especially appeal to kids, it's clearly worthy of serious adult consideration.

One more rule of note. If you have only one die left, and you roll an Acorn, you pick up all your dice, roll again and again (as often as you dare), and continue to accumulate points. On the other hand, if you have only one die left, and you roll a Car, you lose all your points, everything, entirely, the same way you'd lose them if you rolled a squirrel, only instead of getting to Go Nuts, you just stop going.

The rules of Go Nuts beckon you to roll just one more time, just in case. Gamers call this kind of game press your luck. I call it the kind of game that makes you, to coin a phrase, go nuts!

Designed by Brian Spence, Garrett J. Donner, and Michael S. Steer, Go Nuts is one more example of how much fun can be packed into a 12 Minute Game. It is one in a series of 12 Minute Games, as is a game called Thing-a-ma-Bots, which, as it happens, I happened to design. Though I can not claim to be entirely bias-free in this review, having Go Nuts and Thing-a-ma-Bots in the same game family is an honor for me, and a service to all playkind.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games

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Monday, May 18, 2009

Trapdoor Checkers adds new levels of strategic fun to a familiar game

Trapdoor Checkers is a new board for an old board game.

Flanking both sides of the board are controls for 4 different slides. Each slide opens or closes one of two trap doors (as the name of the game implies). Which slide you can use, and when, is determined by spinning one of two cylinders embedded on either end the board. When spun, the cylinders offer their players one of three options: slide either a green or orange lever to its next position, or move a checker. When the lever is moved to the left, a trap door is opened; to the center, the door is closed; and to the right, another trap door is opened. On your move, can only slide the lever to the next position.

Each time a trap door is opened or closed, the board is redefined. Though it seems most satisfying to open a trap door underneath one of your opponent's pieces (a rather delicious moment, I must say), it is at least equally satisfying to open a trap door so that when your opponent makes the obligatory jump, she jumps over your piece into the pit of vindication. Every open trap door adds an almost palpable sense of peril. Almost, but not really perilous. Just fun. From time-to-time, the kind of fun that makes you laugh. Often, Major FUN.

To get a better idea of the game, watch this marketing video (originally for game vendors) showing how the game is played.

Designed by David Mair, Trapdoor Checkers proves to be easy to learn, especially if you already know how to play checkers. It brings checker-players a welcome opportunity to re-examine their basic understanding of checker strategies. It adds elements of surprise and unpredictability, combined with a certain, highly graphic opportunity for vengeance, that create new levels of fun and engagement, and necessitate the development of new strategies. Almost any variation of checkers can be played on the Trap Door Checkers board (for more variations, see my article Ex Checkers). For anyone old enough to appreciate checkers, Trap Door Checkers is a reason to appreciate checkers even more.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Thinking Games

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Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Consensus®

Consensus® is a party game - the kind of party game to which you will eventually be comparing all other party games. If your kids are old enough, it's just that kind of family game - the kind you'd want your family to play. It's a game that makes people laugh, think, talk and listen to each other. Most of all, it's the kind of game that brings people together and keeps them together.

It's what you might call a "voting game," where "right" answer is the answer that receives the majority of votes. This shifts the focus from being "correct" to learning about the people you are playing with. Since players end up focusing on each other more so than on the actual content of the game, it creates the kind of fun that unites people, regardless of who wins or loses.

There are currently two versions of Consensus®, both of which function the same way.

In the Movie Edition, (the one we would recommend for adult groups) a "Movie Question Card" is read aloud. For example: "Which of the following movies best conveys the concept of: "Anything's Possible?" Ten "movie cards" are then arranged on the playing board, in the spaces numbered 1-10. For example: (Field of Dreams, Jurassic Park, Braveheart, Pretty Woman, Rocky, Back to the Future, The Shawshank Redemption, The Ten Commandments, E.T., The 40-Year-Old Virgin.) Using the "Voting Cards," each player privately votes for the movie title which he/she feels best answers the movie question. After all private votes are cast, the players reveal their answers. The majority answer is deemed the "correct" answer, and all players who chose that answer advance their pawns one space. The player who advances to the end of the scoring track first is the winner and is crowned "The Greatest Mind."

There are a total of 11 spaces to move before you can get crowned, so the game can take a while to play - especially if you're playing with the full complement of eight lovingly argumentative players. The game can be played with as few as three, but it's one of those definitely more-the-merrier kinds of party games.

The Original Edition (the one we would recommend for a broader audience, 12-Adult) uses the same mechanics as the Movie Edition, but the subject matter is far more generic. Here you try to select the "Noun Card" that most closely satisfies the "Adjective Card." And although Consensus® may share some aspects with the ever-so-deservedly popular Apples to Apples, you'd really be comparing apples to oranges here. Consensus® is a voting game. There are no judges. It's the majority that rules.

The Original Edition proves to be as much fun as the Movie Edition, and because the subject matter is even more subjective, so to speak, and more accessible, the game proves equally inviting to your pre-teens, who have probably watched even fewer movies than you, unless you're talking about cartoons, which, thankfully, the Movie Edition doesn't. Furthermore, in Consensus® each player is voting from a common set of nouns, which allows player to compare answers in a more discussion-worthy way.

There are many subtle aspects of the game play. The rules for determining what constitutes a Consensus (you don't score if everyone votes for the same or if everyone votes differently, or if there is a tie) encourage players to learn more about each other so they can better anticipate who might vote for what the next round. The "movie cards" or "noun cards" that receive no votes remain on the board for the next round. This accomplishes at least several goals: it keeps more cards available for subsequent rounds, it keeps good, but neglected possibilities still possible; and it gives players fewer new things to think about and more opportunity focus on the real fun of the game: each other.

All in all, our Tasters' consensus was that Consensus®, the game, is Major FUN.

Labels: Family Games, Party Games, Tops for 2009

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Thursday, May 07, 2009

Marrakech

Marrakech, some say, is a deeply strategic contest between 2-4 players, in which carpet-sellers demonstrate their cunning by claiming territory, and, with some Monopoly-like glee, collecting vast quantities of their opponents' Dirhams. Others, however, will feel equally justified in saying that Marrakech is ultimately a game of luck, where success or failure is determined by the will of Allah and the toss of the proverbial die. In truth, it is the blend of luck and strategy that makes Marrakech such an attractive game, and extends its range of appeal from kids to adults to the entire family (the youngest being older than 6).

The board (Rug Market Square) is a 7x7 matrix. Each player has a collection of carpets (rectangular pieces of fabric that cover two squares), and wooden coins equal to 30 Dirhams. When the game begins, Assam the market owner (the one large wooden playing piece) is placed in the center of the board. The first player positions Assam in the direction she wants Assam to move, and then throws the large, wooden die, which will cause Assam to move in the direction he is facing from 1-4 spaces. When Assam has finished moving, the player lays a carpet down at Assam's feet (vertically or horizontally adjacent to Assam's position in the Rug Market Square). And yes, carpets can be laid on top of other player's carpets.

The game continues this way, players taking turns, positioning Assam, throwing the die, and laying down carpet. If Assam ends his turn standing on another player's rug, that player gets paid one Dirham for every square covered by connecting carpets. When all carpets are laid, the player with the most squares covered, and the most Dirhams collected, wins the game.

Our Tasters (teens, ranging in age from 12-17) couldn't stop playing the game. The older players were determined to figure out how much of one's success one could attribute to fate, and how much to one's carpet-laying cunning. The younger were equally determined to walk away with the vastest riches, regardless of whether their superior fortune was a result of luck or skill. Despite all the other games they could have played, and my urging them to at least try something else, they played Marrakesh for the entire two hours of our 90-minute Tasting. They strategized. They contemplated. They advised. They chortled. And they played again.

The rules are easy enough to learn in 15 minutes. The game simple enough for people to play intelligently almost immediately after they learn the rules. The rule book is written in 9 languages, and illustrated clearly enough to answer any questions.

Designed by Dominique Ehrhard, Marrakech is available in the United States through Fundex Games, Marrakech proved most clearly to be Major FUN.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Thinking Games

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Sunday, April 19, 2009

PDQ earns KEEPER award

Every now and a Major Fun game proves to be the kind of game we want to keep in our permanent collection - something exemplary. PDQ is one of those games. Originally reviewed here, PDQ has proven itself to be just that kind of game: fun, flexible, easy to learn and teach, one of those games you just wouldn't want to be without. Here is the review again:

PDQ is a sweet little word game - easy to learn, quick (Pretty Darn Quick) as a matter of fact - a game you can play by yourself or with maybe one, or several or even many other people?

You get a deck of 78 letter cards - nice looking, good stock, big, easy-to-read letter cards. You deal out three at a time, face-up. And then you see who can make a word first, or, in case of a tie, who can come up with a longer word. TLP, for example. Tulip. Sure. Or perhaps Platitude. Platitude. Of course. Longer than Tulip. (Did I mention that you can use the letters backwards or forwards?) (Did I also mention that you can use any number of letters before, between or after the three letters that you draw?) (And, of course, the letters have to be in the same order?)

Designed by Jay Thompson to be played by kids as well as adults (kids use just two cards at a time, word game experts can try playing with four), PDQ is pretty darn close to everything you would want in a word game - 5-30 minutes of engaging, challenging, and frequently laugh-producing fun.

Labels: Family Games, Keeper, Kids Games, Party Games, Thinking Games, Top for 2007, Word Games

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Monday, February 23, 2009

Backseat Drawing, Junior

Backseat Drawing, Jr is at least as fun as its Major FUN Award-winning parent, Backseat Drawing. The rules, drawing boards, markers, card holders are all the same. The most visible difference is in the clue cards. Where Senior's clue cards have words on both sides (in three languages, even), Junior's have both drawings and words.

As the "artist" you most definitely have to follow the instructions as carefully and responsively as you do in the Senior game. On the other hand, when you're the "Director," though you still have to describe the object in terms of shapes (it's rectangularish, with rounded corners, only it looks like someone stepped on the middle of it), you have an actual drawing to guide you.

So the challenge, and hence, the fun of it, is similar in the excruciating delight of the grown-up version of Backseat Drawing. Having drawings to work from makes the game easy enough for barely-literate seven-year-olds to play (or, in the case of my granddaughter Lily, extremely literate 5-year-olds), which is all the difference you need in order to transform Backseat Drawing into a significantly laugh-producing family game.

There are two versions of the game suggested. The first, especially designed for younger children, is called "Everybody In." Here, the Artist is part of a team, with everyone on the team guessing at the same time. If the Artist succeeds, she and the Director both get a point (though you can have as much fun without keeping score at all). If not (both Director and Artist agree that the challenge is too hard), no score, no blame. The Director joins the Artist team. A new Director is selected. And the game continues. To further level the conceptual playing field, the yellow side of the challenge cards display more complex, "super challenge" images. The second version, "Team Play," is played the same as the elder version of Backseat Drawing, and is recommended for people 10 and up, giving the family something to continue playing after the giggly young'uns have been calmed into bed.

All in all, Major FUN for the whole family.

Labels: Family Games

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The "Anybody's Piece" Variation

Ya-Ya and granddaughter Esther are playing Chutes and Ladders. There are two problems we older folk have with that particular game: 1) it can get very boring, 2) it can only have one winner. The boring part can be endured. The winner part turns out to be the very opposite of why we want to play in the first place, especially when we're playing between generations.

Ya-ya and Esther are playing so that they can be together. Just having fun. Just doing something, anything, really, they both can enjoy. Ya-ya is probably enjoying being with Esther a lot more than she is enjoying playing Chutes and Ladders. Ya-ya is probably very bored with the game. Esther will probably cry if she doesn't win.

They need a variation.

Some of the best game variations come from playing with rules that aren't written down. Like the rule that says: "this is your piece. You can only move that piece. You really can't move any other piece because those pieces belong to other players. Other players can't move your piece, because that piece belongs to you. And, you can only win if your piece is the one that reaches the finish first."

I call my variation the "Anybody's Piece Variation." It works like this: "you can move any piece. Whatever piece you move is yours, for that turn." It's yours, but it's not you. You could call it Myrtle or Smunchnik or Pawn. You could even call it You. But it's not you. It's just a piece. Nobody's piece. And all that's important at the time is who moves it.

So, when it's your turn, you can move any piece you want. If you want to move the piece that's closest to winning, you can do that. If you want to help the other pieces catch up, you can do that, too. It's up to you.

Then the game belongs to all of you. And the winning belongs to anyone who wants to claim it. You can make the game as long as you all want to play it. If you want, you can play forever. And nobody has to be bored. And nobody has to lose. And the one who really cares about winning can win if she wants. And you all can focus on enjoying each other, which is what you're playing for in the first place.

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About the photo: I found it on a weblog called Tundra Topics. It was in a post about Ya-Ya's visit to her Alaskan family. It's a wonderfully personal website, by the way, giving us a clearly illustrated view of Alaskan living, written by someone who, it just so happens, was born in Indiana, my new home.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Labels: Family Games

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Thursday, November 20, 2008

Katamino

Katamino is based on a geometric puzzle called "Pentominoes." "Pentominoes," reports the Association of Teachers of Mathematics, "can be used to develop children’s understanding of the concepts of area and perimeter, transformational geometry including enlargement, congruence and symmetry, nets, volume and classification." Katamino takes the concept further, into a series of games and puzzles that can absorb the spatial reasoning faculties of children as young as three, and adults as old as they want to think they are.

The multi-language instruction booklet includes illustrations for hundreds of puzzles and several challenging games. At its simplest level, it is a building toy, which, like all good building toys, can become very challenging. Then it becomes a puzzle. The it becomes a more and more challenging as players attempt to put more of the pentomino pieces together in larger and larger rectangles. There's a very useful bar that gets placed in different positions on the board to limit the playing area. This same bar is also used to divide the board into two different halves so that two players can race each other to complete a rectangle. Another game variation involves using an 8x8 board (printed on the back of the instruction booklet). Players take turns placing the pentominoes on the board. The last player able to play wins. To make the game easier, or the constructions more complex, the manufacturers include one- and two-unit blocks.

The pieces and frame are all made out of wood. Though the colors of the wooden pieces don't precisely match those in the instructions, their shapes are easily discernible and the colors are close enough for players to figure out all the rules and variations as well as the two- and three-dimensional puzzles. Don't be misled by its similarity to other games. Fundex's Katamino is a unique invitation to a lifetime of challenging fun.

Labels: Family Games, Puzzles, Thinking Games, Toys

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Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Sorry Sliders

Sorry Sliders is what might happen if Parker Brothers hired a game designer who had a profound appreciation for how kids play, a deep understanding of the tongue-and-cheekily joys of the Sorry game franchise, and an equal amount of appreciation for games like shuffleboard and Crokinole.

Craig Van Ness is that designer, and Parker Bros. Sorry Sliders is, as one would expect, Major FUN.

The game comes with a lot of parts, and a similar lot of rules. But it turns out that the parts are relatively easy to assemble, and the rules similarly relatively easy to understand. Both require a certain amount of care, and young children (the game is recommended for kids 6 and up) would definitely benefit from adult partnership.

There are 4 shuffleboard-like tracks and plastic reflector rails that need to be installed. The tracks can be joined to each other, and ultimately joined to a target board. There are two target boards, each has two sides, each side offers a different variation. Each of 4 players gets a set of 4 special pawns that slide on a ball-bearing.

Each player also gets a scoring board and 4 scoring pawns.

Players take turns sliding (pushing, flicking, or otherwise propelling) their sliding pawns down their track towards the goal. After everyone has played, score is kept by moving scoring pawns on the scoring board. Once a scoring pawn reaches Home (by exact count), it is safe. Until then, if the sliding pawn goes into a Sorry Zone in one of the corners of the target board, everybody gets to say "sorry" while the player moves her scoring pawn back to start.

What makes the game of special interest, and of real play value, is that there are so many different ways to play it. Tracks can be joined to each other, they can be placed all around the target square or all in a row. Combine that with the 4 different target boards and you get hours of reasons to play together.

Having a choice of all these different ways to play allows families to customize the game to their own tastes for fun. Exploring the variations, discussing which is the most fun for everyone, result in a valuable opportunity for the whole family to gain a deeper appreciation for and understanding of how they can best play, and live together.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games

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Monday, November 03, 2008

Pictureka

If you are at all familiar with any of the myriad of I Spy games, you could very well leap to the uninformed conclusion that Pictureka is yet another variation of this familiar and most definitely playworthy theme. Fortunately, you'd be at least partially wrong.

With Parker Bros. Pictureka, designer Arne Lauwers has brought us a what might be easily considered a whole new twist, or spin, or flip on the game.

The game comes with 9 boards, three decks of cards, a colored die, a numbered die, and a sand timer. Players begin the game by putting the 9 boards together in a 3x3 array, and the 3 decks of cards somewhere on the side of the boards. Each of the boards is scattered with illustrations many different cartoon figures, positioned in all possible directions.

Each deck of cards is a different color, and each a different kind of game.

If you pick a card from the "Mission" deck, you'll find the name of some object written on the card. You roll the number die. This determines how many of those objects you have to find on the 9-board array. You then turn the timer over and look, really, really hard. If you succeed, you get to keep that card.

The Outbid deck contains more general descriptions of objects ("Things that fly" "Head coverings"). Before you turn a card over, you and your partners bid for how many you think you'll be able to find during the time limit. The highest bidder then turns the card and the timer over, and engages in focused scrutiny, pointing to each object that she thinks meets the description on the card.

The "Find it First" deck contains actual images of things to look for. All players compete to be the first player to find an instance of the pictured object.

On the back of some of the cards you'll find three different kinds of arrows. One arrow directs you to switch any two cards in the array. Another to flip over any card. And the third to rotate any card. These make the challenge just new enough to refresh the interest and excitement of the game.

When playing as a family, it is remarkably easy to tailor the game to meet the abilities of any player, the 6 year old, and, even though the game is not specifically recommended for preschoolers, with a little help from an older sibling or informed parent, using one deck or two or all three, everyone can be included.

For a more immediate feel of the game, you can find a sample online.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games

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Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Lucky Seven

Lucky Seven is a game of pure luck. No skill, and only a limited amount of intelligence required. And yet, like any good game of luck, it suckers you in. It makes you want to play. It gives you hope that this time you might actually win.

You get seven large discs that look and feel and are very much like beer coasters. Which is logical, given that its designer conceived the game "in a Zurich restaurant by writing numbers on and shuffling 7 coasters on the table."

That designer is Martin Samuel, of Games Above Board, and, oddly enough, this simple little solitaire-like game of just about pure chance proves to be Major FUN. It's a game you can play by yourself. It's a game kids can play. It's a game the whole family can play together.

Each of the seven coasters is numbered. Like all of Samuel's games, the coasters themselves are minor works of art. To play, the coasters are turned number-side-down, shuffled, and placed in a line. Pick any coaster. Turn it over. The number thereby revealed tells you what coaster (1 meaning the first on the left, 2 the second, etc.) to turn over next. The object: see if you can turn over all seven coasters before you reach a coaster whose position number has already been revealed.

Samuel suggests 3 different ways to play: "the most coasters turned wins the round, the most rounds won takes the game, or the number of coasters turned are accrued, and the first player to reach 50 (or 100, or....?) wins." Now, I'm not a gambling man, but I bet you can find even more absorbing, fortune-tempting, monetarily-rewarding ways to play this game, should you be so inclined.

Labels: Family Games

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Thursday, September 04, 2008

Backseat Drawing

Draw a rectangle. Wait. Draw it horizontally - you know, so it's wider than it is high. Make it a little smaller. Good. Now draw a kind of egg shape touching the upper right corner. Great. OK. Now make 4 straight lines, attached to the bottom of the rectangle, spread more or less evenly. Now draw a small arc, the bottom of the curve touching the top of the egg shape. Good. Good. Good. Still can't guess it? Try this: between the first and second of those lines you drew on the bottom of the rectangle, the lines on the left, draw smallish "W" shape. Feel free to guess what it is any time. No penalty for wrong answers. And if anything the other team draws or says helps, please, be my guest. What? Did you say "cow"?

Holy, mmm, cow, you're right! We get a card! Oh, the udder bovine bliss of it all!

The name of the game is Backseat Drawing. And, yes, in deed, it's Major FUN.

You need two teams of two or more players. Each team gets a dry-erase marker, board and eraser (the eraser comes in very, very handily). There's a deck of 168 "challenge" cards. The cards are two-sided. One side is easier. That's where you'll find "Cow." The other side is where you find words like "Soup," "Zipper," and, OMG, "Sea Horse." The cards fit into an open plastic box which also acts as a viewer - revealing the top card to the people who are directing while concealing it from the artists and their cohorts of fellow-guessers.

It takes maybe five minutes to learn. And a good 20-30 minutes before any team accumulates enough points to win. We played a couple rounds. In the second round, we changed partners and also tried the more challenging side of the Challenge Cards. We drew. We laughed. We lost.

The game is in four different languages (English, Spanish, French and German). There are four different rule cards, each in one of the aforementioned languages. The Challenge Cards are equally multi-lingual. What this means is that should one wish to elevate both the chaos and joylikeness of it all, one could conceivably backseat draw cross-culturally.

Labels: Family Games, Funnest for 2008, Keeper, Party Games

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Friday, August 29, 2008

Zenn

Zenn is a remarkably fun and inviting dexterity game for 2-4 players. What makes it remarkably inviting is how easy it is to play, even if you never read the rules. What makes it remarkably fun is how many different games there are to play.

Here are a few things you might want to notice: each corner of the playing field is at a 45-degree angle. This makes it possible for a player to achieve some remarkably impressive bank shots. Directly in front of each goal are two reflecting blocks. They are positioned just where you'd want them if you were trying to bank your chip off the corner into the cup. The space between these blocks is only slightly wider than a small poker chip. Thus, sliding a chip from one side of the board so that it passes between the two blocks on the opposite side (and into the goal cup) requires concentration and coordination that is, well, Zen-like. Then there are the various lines and numbers and letters - each of which lends itself to the formulation of yet further and more profound challenges.

Then of course there are the poker chips. Four each, of two different sizes and colors, inviting yet further possibilities of game-like engagement.

You might also notice that the instruction booklet that comes with your Zenn set describes exactly 101 different games you can play.

In sum, the game of Zenn is an invitation to chip-flicking at it's finest! Each different game described in the booklet takes advantage of some different aspect of the board and pieces. Each is an inspiration to invent your own.

This is what makes Zenn Major FUN - the elegance and subtlety of the design, the almost intuitive clarity of the goals, the many, many different ways to play; and the sheer delight of the game mechanics.

Yes, the rule booklet has a certain homemade look, and the poker chip pucks seem a little, well, common, but the game is anything but common, and the many different variations are positively inspirational, and the chip-pucks, available almost anywhere, slide and bounce ever so satisfyingly around the lifetime-guaranteed board (with added slipperiness provided by your readily available can of Pledge spray wax)(and a bag of replacement chips available for a nominal $1.75).

For kids, families, parties - like I said, Major FUN.

Labels: Dexterity, Family Games, Funnest for 2008, Keeper, Kids Games, Party Games

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Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Tastes Like Chicken

Tastes Like Chicken is a new family card game from Patch Products. It's especially good for a family with a strong sense of humor and a propensity for shared silliness.

The large deck of 58 cards comes in a plastic case looking very much lke a ketchup bottle (I guess to make it taste better). Most of the cards are illustrated with hybrid critters, composed of two different animals: half cow, half snake, for example, or half snake, half shark, for another example. A cow/snake can be paired with any a cow/anything or a snake/anything. Which makes for what one might think of as the significant part of the cognitive challenge. But that only partially explains the fun of the game.

See, whenever you put a card down, you have to name the card, like, for example, "Cow-Snake." Out loud, of course. If you don't have a match, you have say "Tastes Like (whatever)" before you draw another card. The (whatever) being something sufficiently distasteful - the more agreeably distasteful you make it, the more fun. Then there are the special cards, like part-chickens, which, eponymously, not only tastes like chicken, but also make the next player draw a card and lose a turn. Then there are the part-pig-tasting cards and the wild rooster card, each of which adds yet another tasty wrinkle to this often hilarious game.

Easy to learn. Not in any way to be taken seriously. Different enough to be a welcome addition to your collection of playful pastimes. Perfect for family fun.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games

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Monday, August 04, 2008

miQube

miQube is a lovely thing. All wood. Colorful. Sculptural. But that doesn't explain how playworthy it turns out to be.

Playworthy as in something fascinating, challenging, inviting. Like a puzzle, but like a game, too. Like a toy, even. Playworthy as in something that can be played with in enough different ways to make you want to make up your own. Playworthy as in something closely approaching Major FUN.

There are 13 different pieces, and a die. All but one of the pieces is a different combination of 5 cubes. Each is 6-sided, each has faces of different color, depending on orientation. The other piece is made out of 4 cubes. It also has 6 different colors. As does the die, which is made of one rounded-corner cube. All wood. All solid wood.

You don't have to use everything, but you can purportedly fit all 13 pieces into a cube with every face a different color. It's not quite as hard as solving a Rubik's Cube. And the instructions describe 4 different games you can play with your miQube and 1, 2 or even 3 friends. And once you've played all 4 different games and discovered their differences, you can't help thinking about making up a 5th game. Your own. Because of all the different ways you can play with the pieces.

Lovely, lovely thing. Most worthy of a position of honor on the family coffee table. Most conducive to several many hours of happily challenged playtime.

Labels: Family Games, Puzzles, Thinking Games

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Monday, July 07, 2008

Jishaku

Jishaku is at least as much a toy as it is a game. At least. It is fun to play. It is even more fun to play with.

It's those 18, lovely, polished, irregularly-shaped, powerfully magnetic hematite pieces - in a velveteen drawstring bag, no less. And then there's that appropriately cushy yet egg-carton-looking-and-feeling piece of foam to try to put them into. They invite curiosity. Just putting the pieces into their foamy homes, watching them almost evilly turn towards the piece you're hoping to place near them. Watching what happens when you turn your piece over. Getting shocked into laughter at the almost electric sound of the pieces suddenly coming together, just when, of course, you didn't expect them to move, or be so numerous in their sudden commingling.

The designers give you three different games to play. We played them. We laughed, and then a few minutes later we had kind of enough. We played. We figured out. We played again. And then we went to the next, and then to the one after that.

And when we ran out of games and laughter, we made up our own.

And therein, apparently, lies the Major FUN-nitude of Jishaku. It's a game that is such a fun thing to play with that you can't really judge it by any set of rules - something (a game, a toy to make up games for) you can play with your kids and your parents, and vice-versa. Hence the Family Games category.

You can play by yourself. You can play in teams. You can play a round in 5 minutes or less. You can play with the board and pieces for hours.

Labels: Family Games

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Woodchuck, etc.

There's a Swedish game called Kubb , which is quite similar to the Karelian game of Kyykka and clearly connected to the Russo-Canadian game of Bunnock, which was originally played with the ankle bones of horses. There's also the Finnish game of Molkky, which is a relatively close relative, but different. Which brings us to Woodchuck - a faithful reproduction of the Swedish original, but played with 4 Woodchucks instead of 5, and 5 throwing batons instead of 6.

Since Woodchuck is moderately priced and readily available here in the US through Simply Fun, let's talk Woodchuck.

Woodchucks are made of wood, which, from the Kubb-perspective, is quite traditional. You can play on a lawn, or in the sand, or any nice flat area, 12-feet wide and 25-feet deep. Four Woodchucks are placed at one end of the playing field, spaced evenly apart, in a line. The other 4 are placed at the other end. The King Woodchuck is placed exactly in the middle of the field.

There are two teams, which, for the sake of clarity (which, even though the game is quite simple, will soon prove most valuable), let's call one team the Beavers and the other the Otters.

Teams don't have to have the same number of players. You could have 6 Beavers and only 4 Otters. Or even just 1 Otter if things turn out that way.

Let's say the Beavers go first. They throw their Throwing Batons, one at a time, underhanded, end-over-end, at the Otters' Woodchucks. It's like throwing horseshoes, the idea being to knock over all of the Otter's Woodchucks while being extremely careful not to knock over the King Woodchuck. And let's further say that the Beavers managed to hit 3 of the Otter's 4 Woodchucks.

Now it's the Otters' turn. Remember, they only have one standing Woodchuck. Oddly enough, before they can throw any of their Throwing Batons at the Beavers' Woodchucks, they first have to throw each of their fallen Woodchucks into the Beaver's half of the playing field. Then they stand each of those Field Woodchucks on their ends. Then they use their Throwing Batons to try to knock over their Field Woodchucks. And then, and only then, can they aim for the Beavers' Woodchucks. Know what I mean?

What makes this all so difficult to understand is that the game breaks a central convention of most sports. The Woodchucks are more obstacles than targets, and the obstacles get moved around as the game progresses. There is only one actual target - the King Woodchuck.

Anyhow, once a team has managed to knock over all the Woodchucks on the other team's side, then they can go for the King.

Clearly, from a Junkyard Sports perspective, this game can be played with almost anything that you can stand up and knock over. And you can use tennis balls or tuna cans as easily as you can use Throwing Batons. In fact, the article on Kyykka points out that students frequently make their own sets using:

• 80 empty 500ml beer cans (330ml soft drink cans work as well)
• Sand
• Duct tape
• Plastic/aluminium piping

And one more thing that makes it especially worthy of our collective consideration, found in the Wikipedia article, is the observation that "sportsmanship and a sense of fair play...is a trademark of this unique game."

Labels: Dexterity, Family Games

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Thursday, July 03, 2008

Rules Rule

Blue Orange makes many beautiful games, beautifully made, beautiful to play. Specifically, recently, a game called Fundomino and another, Double Shutter. Both are available in last-forever plastic housed in life-long tins, as well as in an impressive selection of all-woody embodiments. And both are fun - uniquely, ingeniously, play-again-worthy fun.

Both are based on games of time-tested appeal. Fundomino is based on on Blue Orange's very successful Bendomio, which, in turn, is based on the even more successful and much older game of Dominoes. Double Shutter is based on a game known variously as Shut the Box, Tric Trac, Canoga, Batten Down the Hatches, or Card Sharks. But it's just different enough, because it adds, well, a whole new level, as it were, of things to flip.

If you don't quite understand what I mean by "things to flip" you'll understand why I decided, clearly, most reluctantly, not to give these games their rightful Major FUN due. It's the rules, see, of both games. See, if you don't know the games they are based on, the rules turn out to be just a little too subtle, which, in turn, turns out to be a little too frustrating. Like, for example, figuring out that you keep on rolling the dice, on your turn, over and over, until you can't roll them any more. And then it's the next player's turn. Simple, something everyone should know. O, it's in the rules, if you look hard enough, and you are ready for a radical change in assumptions. The same when you're playing Fundomino. Fun. Really. Until you try to figure out what connects to a Yellow Plus, for example.

But the games, in every way, are Major FUN. Really. And if you can't quite figure out the rules, you can make up your own. It's easy enough. And there's enough play value in the bended-dominoes-with-UNO-like-wild-tiles, or in the beautifully-crafted dice-box with two rows to, uh, shut.

Major FUN-wise, though, seal-givingly, if only the rules were just a tiny bit more obvious, written, illustrated a bit more directly for the casual American family gamer, the seal would be on both games, complete with the all the endorsement thereby implied.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games

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Thursday, June 12, 2008

ZenBenders

ZenBenders is a sliding-block puzzle, of the infamous 15 Puzzle ilk, with a twist, which is to say, a flip.

Each of the 4 puzzles in the ZenBenders series consists of 8 blocks that can be slid around inside of a 3x3 matrix. What makes the puzzles unique is that you can also flip the blocks over, so that a different face is revealed. After you play around with the puzzle for a while, you begin to discover that you can not only flip the blocks, but, by moving a block so that it is either vertically or horizontally adjacent to the empty square, you can actually reorient the blocks, almost as if you twisted them, hence the twist, as well as the flip.

The puzzles are designed to be played almost anywhere. They come in a compact-like case. The top of the case is a transparent lid. The bottom of the case twists off to reveal a collection of 36 different challenges, with three different levels of difficulty. There's even a slit in the case so it can hold and display your chosen challenge card, affording you something close to complete puzzle portability.

As you play these puzzles, you begin to appreciate the uniqueness of the concept (the intricacies of the slide as well as the flip with the conceptual twist) as well as the added perceptual challenges posed by each of the 4 different designs. This is reason enough to buy at least 2 of the series. If not all 4. Another reason for getting more than one is the extra game play potential of racing each other to the solution.

These puzzles are as fun as they can be frustrating (that's why there are different levels of challenge). It takes only a few minutes to learn how to work the puzzle. Most of the puzzles can be solved fairly quickly (the people at Out-of-the-Box claim that they can be solved in 2 minutes. This, however, was not our experience. But this also was where much of the fun came in. The puzzles can get really, really challenging. For adults as well as kids. Hence, the Major FUN Family Award.

Designed by Ariel Laden, ZenBenders is recommended for kids who are 8 and older. It is well-conceived, well-executed, and, well, to coin a phrase, Major FUN.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Thinking Games

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Sunday, June 08, 2008

Par Out Golf

We used to play a game called something like Paper Golf. I was a kid then, so that makes it a folk game, at least. It was a great little game - you draw something that looks like a golf hole. You take your pencil and try to get from tee to hole in the fewest number of strokes. If you hit something (a tree, a rock) or go into a sand or water trap, you lose strokes or have to start your next shot from that point. And that's pretty much it. Except you have to do it with your eyes closed!

It was such a good game that, ever since I first played it, I wondered why someone hadn't come out with a commercial version, one that takes the game as seriously as it deserves. I am happy to inform you that someone has. And it's called "Par Out Golf." And it's, as I might have imagined, most definitely Major FUN.

Par Out Golf is played on a set of spiral bound, laminated pages. Special "wet-erase" markers are used so the line is easy to draw, won't smudge, and very easy to erase. The rules are very, very close to the game of golf, complete with sand and water traps, obstacles and slopes. So close is it to "real" golf, you can play each of five classic variations of golf: stroke play, match play, tombstone play, and pro play.

Of the several skills you practice while playing Par Out Golf, a fascinating, and, to any golf player, significant challenge is learning how to visualize your shot. The more observant you are, the more capable you are at remembering the lay of the land, the more effectively you can imagine the exact amount of drive to put on the ball, the better you'll do. This, of course, is the essence of Par Out Golf. Like "real" golf, Par Out Golf challenges both mind and body. If you want to know more about the physical and cognitive aspects of the game, take a look at the thoughtfully included essay: Par Out Science 101.

If you want, you can practice on the Driving Range (on another page) or use the 19th hole (on yet another page) to design your own. You can add your own obstacles, changing the difficulty of each hole, essentially making the game something you can play for-just-about-ever.

Par Out Golf is recommended for 1 to 4 players (it comes with four different wet-erase markers). If you must try before you buy, you can download the first three holes here.

Labels: Dexterity, Family Games, Kids Games

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Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Triagonal

Triagonal will remind you a paper-and-pencil game you played when you were a kid. Maybe you called it "Dots and Boxes." You'll probably be at least somewhat enlighten-upped to discover that there are several fascinating variations like, for example, a game that combines Dots and Boxes with chess. All of which demonstrates that the strategic delight of our childhood memories has the capacity to delight us even whilst we revel in the throes of our grown-uphood.

But enough about Dots and Boxes. Because today we are talking about Triagonal, a new Dots and Boxes like game, only it's about triangles, and it's played on a molded plastic board with 120 plastic triangles (4 sets of 30, each of a different color), 84 Section Formers (little plastic rectangles that serve as the lines you would use to connect the dots, if there were dots to connect), and, oddly enough, two dice.

Players take turns (unless you're playing the solitaire version), placing Section Formers and hoping to complete a triangle, and claim territory. You can, of course, play the game with no dice at all, much in the manner of how you'd play Dots and Boxes if you had a lovely board upon which to play. There are a couple Triagonal-specific rules which add to the complexity and challenge of the game: you get extra points if you complete a hexagon, and if you complete a large triangle (made of nine of your markers) you win the game right then and there.

But that, you see, is only the beginning. There are 4 more optional ways to play, plus two meta-options (e.g.: play several games, using any of the 5 options, the player with the highest overall score being the winner). And that's just the options on the box. You can download an additional passel of options, for, of course, free (with registration).

Now these are not variations, but actually different ways to play, depending on your mood and on the people you're playing with. Some people need a certain element of luck in order to have fun - so you play the options that use one or both of the dice. So you have an already interesting game, with the added interest of a collection of options that allow you to add or reduce the elements of luck and complexity. (For more about the social and psychological implications of being able to change elements of complexity, see this).

There are many game designers who include alternate rules and modifications, but these are usually presented as afterthoughts to the "real" game. Triagonal takes a different approach, giving each different way of playing its place as yet another aspect of the "real game." This makes for a unique playing experience - one, given the alternate rules, that can be shared with anyone older than 4, and that can only be called "Major FUN."

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Thinking Games

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Key Largo

Searching for gold in the oceans is something many of us dream of doing, while few of us actually follow up on it. Key Largo is a game that allows players to simulate this in a silly, entertaining way. Players take turns simultaneously selecting what their divers are going to do during the ten day timeline of the game. Divers can purchase equipment, earn cash by taking tourists out to see the dolphins, dive for treasure, sell treasures, or hang out at the local tavern. Each of these actions is affected by the number of players who partake in them; for example, if two players both go to the store to buy equipment, the prices are higher. This adds an element of guessing and interaction to the game that keeps players intrigued with their opponent's choices.

Diving for treasure requires equipment, but divers must also beware of random monsters that may appear. Preparing to fight the monsters takes time and money, but a player attempting to skirt the costs may find themselves looking for a new diver! Players only have a few choices to make each turn, but everything fits into a nice, thematic framework that makes complete sense. The illustrations are outrageously ridiculous, the components are of high quality, and the development of the game keeps things moving at a quick clip.

The game offers a nice variety of strategic choices, but it really shines as a family game. Children will delight in searching through the stacks of cards for treasure, and watching their parents get gobbled by a monster (a large octopus). Outguessing opponents, trying to maximize one's money, and simply laughing at the funny pictures make Key Largo a tremendous family activity. Younger players will learn how to count money and how to make a profit when selling, although they may need some help with the mathematics. At the same time, they can remain competitive with their parents due to the vagaries of treasure finding. This treasure hunting is a great draw to the game and is one that will appeal to many new gamers.

A game that looks more complicated than it is, with a ton of Major FUN packed in the box, Key Largo is a great choice for casual gaming, with stunning components and simple, laughing game play. I'll be diving for treasure in Key Largo for quite some time - it might very well be one of the best games of 2008.

Tom Vasel
"Real men play board games"
The Dice Tower

Labels: Family Games

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Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Go Nuts!

Have you ever seen anyone go crazy when playing a game? Go Nuts!, a new entry in Gamewright's 12-Minute Games series, certainly seems to encourage this in the title alone! The frenzied activities of the game add a level of wackiness and fun not often found in dice games, and the "push-your-luck" aspect will keep players on the edge of their seat for the few minutes this game takes to complete.

On a player's turn, they simply roll five dice that have squirrels, acorns, and cars on their faces. Each acorn a player rolls scores the player one point, while cars are placed out of play. Players are allowed to re-roll all dice with squirrels and/or nuts on them; but they can stop at any time, taking the sum of points they have accumulated. Continuing to roll presents a level of danger. Because if the player ever rolls all cars at one time, their turn ends immediately; and any points gained that turn are lost. If the player rolls all squirrels, pandemonium breaks out. The player shouts, "Go Nuts!", and starts rolling the dice as fast as they can, attempting to score as many points as they gather. All the other players roll one special die that has a dog picture on a single face. When another player rolls a dog, they scream out "Woof, woof, woof!" and the player whose turn it is tallies up their points and passes the dice to the next player.

To add an even spicier element to the game, a player who has only a single die remaining gets all five dice back if they roll an acorn. Since the chance of causing a "nutty" round or losing all the dice because of cars is high, players have to assess the risks of doing this, although it may allow a player to come back into the competition.

Whenever "Go Nuts!" is shouted, it's hilarious to watch everyone rolling dice as fast as they can, trying to stop the player from gaining any more points. Rapid-fire dice rolling is amazingly fun; and when added to the simple probability choices, it gives the game a most definitely Major FUN feeling. I've seen groups of people literally shrieking in fun as they tossed the dice at the table, trying desperately to get a dog before Uncle Bob scores any more points; and no one is ever out of competition until the game ends. Add the fact that the game takes less than 12 minutes to play to the mix, and you have a wonderful choice for families and parties.

Tom Vasel
"Real men play board games"
The Dice Tower

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Party Games

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Monday, May 05, 2008

Boochie

Boochie, by Gamewright Games, is an obvious play and variation on the popular game Bocce. But while Bocce can become an intense affair, especially for adults, Boochie is more of a silly, fun game for the family. Really - can you even say "Boochie" without smiling? Additionally, the Boochie ball itself is not a sphere, but a foam dodecahedron that bounces in odd directions and feels like one of those items that every household should have.

To play the game, each player takes a large plastic ring and beanbag ball of their color, placing a matching scoring device on their wrist. One player tosses the Boochie ball a distance away, and then players take turns throwing their beanbag balls and/or rings towards it. The player who has the closest object scores two points, and the player with the second closest object receives one point. Players also score points for "ringing" another player's bean bag or the Boochie ball itself. Finally, the Boochie ball lists another requirement ("+2 for the players with hoops closest together", "+1 for the object farthest away", etc.) that gives out bonus points. Players mark their points on the dial, which is on their wrist, and begin another round.

But that's where things become deliciously interesting. As players gain points, they suddenly have to toss the ball in strange and unusual ways. One player may be forced to make loud noises as they throw, while another must toss objects backwards, between their legs. This accomplishes two things - it increases the silliness (and therefore, fun) factor of the game, while it allows players who are behind to catch up. The more points a player has; the more difficult their throw is.

And therein lies the joy of the game, as families with a wide range of players can effectively play a fairly competitive game and remain close in competition. Little Johnny may throw his ring in a completely different direction and yet gain a point for being the farthest away. Young Tisha might laugh at Dad, as he has to jump while throwing, which results in hilarious contortions. Boochie is simply a fun, entertaining game that can be played outdoors or in large, open rooms. The fact that any group of four players can play this game designed by Forrest-Pruzan Creative means that it is Major FUN. Boochie Boochie Boochie Boochie. See, I told you it was fun to say!


Tom Vasel
"Real men play board games"
The Dice Tower

Labels: Dexterity, Family Games, Kids Games

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Monday, April 14, 2008

Uptown

Uptown, yeah, that's right, we're not talking downtown here. You see, baby, it's like this, it'll fool you, this Uptown game. It's like that, with it's fancy 30's fonts and the sophisticated 30's night people on its cover. It's a game, all right, but it has nothing to do with guns, dames and booze, nah, not at all. See, that's the surprise. It's way more fun than that.

Uptown is almost as easy to learn as punching out pieces from a chadless die cut board. Which you do. Five boards worth. Each punch a small pleasure. The game board is a grid, 30's-font-labeled A-I on the right and left, and 1-9 on the top and bottom. The grid creates 9 small grids, each 9x9 cells, in a sudoku-reminiscent manner. The cells in each of the 9 inner-grids all have the same graphic symbol in them.

Each player gets 28 square tokens (the ones you had previously so pleasurably detached from each other) - all of the same color. There are 5 different sets, so up to 5 people can play at the same time, or you can play in teams, if you are of such a mind.

You take 5 tiles from your facedown tile pile and place them on your tile holder. The tiles have either a number, a letter or a graphic. This determines where you the tile can be placed on the board. But you still have choice, since there are 9 different squares that every tile can occupy - just enough choice to make you have to think.

The idea is to put your pieces down so that they are all in one cluster, all touching. Me, I think my cluster number was 4. There are other considerations, o yes there are. For example, there's a wild tile that can go anywhere. And there's the thing about the game ending when everyone has only 4 tiles left on their tileholders, thus giving you the chance to plan for 4 tiles you cannot play - which will probably come as a welcome relief! And there's being able to substitute a tile for one someone else already placed if that tile is by itself or on the end of a cluster. Thus the possibility exists that you might be able to join together two of your clusters or somehow manage to reduce someone else's chances to do the same. And then, for all you tile-taking fiends, there's this tie-breaker rule that gives the win to the player who has captured the fewer of the opponent's tiles at the end of the game.

So you play a tile and then pick a tile from your tile pile and wait your turn to play another tile, and, basically, whoever has the fewest clusters at the end of the game, wins.

Uptown is fun. Sometimes gentle fun. Sometimes surprisingly not. Kind of sophisticated. Not flapperish nor even flipperish fun. But just that combination of luck and skill to make you think that you won because you were better. Thinking fun. Major FUN.

(a new iteration of the game, and a new publisher, led to this updated review 11/9/09)

Labels: Family Games, Thinking Games

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Friday, April 11, 2008

Bucket Brigade

Bucket Brigade - another rather gently competitive game from the profitably playful mind of Renier Knizia - is a horse race game you play basically with cards, a scoreboard and wooden firepeople.

There are only 4 wooden firepeople - a red one, a green one, a blue one and a yellow one - even though 3 or up to 5 humanpeople can play. Each wooden fireperson is a different color. There are also 55 cards. There are cards with red firepeople and cards with blue firepeople, and there are cards with firepeople who are walking and worth one step, and there are cards with firepeople who are walking and worth one step and firepeople who are running and worth. So, if you play a walking red firperson, the red wooden fireperson goes one step higher (one space further) on the ladder-looking scoreboard. And the higher you make a fireperson of certain color go, the higher the worth of the firepeople of the same color depicted on your cards. Totally tally is not taken, however, until one fireperson makes it to the top of the conceptual ladder.

Thus, you see, you're not racing to get a wooden fireperson to the top as much as you're racing to make the firepeople on your cards worth more. Simple enough? Yeah. But kind of fascinating. You wanting the yellow wooden fireperson to get to the space that makes all the yellow card firepeople worth three times as much, her rooting for the blue wooden fireperson.

Kind a like those horse racing games. But different. Easier to play. More fun for the family. Gently competitive. Moderately strategic. Major FUN.

From Face2Face.

Labels: Family Games

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Thursday, April 10, 2008

Rage

It gives me great pleasure to introduce you to Rage. Being the mild-mannered Major you know me so well to be, it might strike you as uncharacteristic of me. But, you see, I'm talking about a game. A game called "Rage." A card game, for as few as 2, or as many as 8 players, all of whom know about trick-taking games. It will remind you, as a matter of fact, of that old trick-taking game, with the unfortunate, but evocative name "Oh Hell.

The Rage deck consists of 110 Cards of 6 suits of color cards each numbered 0-15. There are 14 "special" cards including: 2 Wild Rage cards, 4 Out Rage cards, 4 Change Rage cards, 2 Mad Rage Card. All those cards, and all those special cards might make you think of another card game. Not a trick-taking game at all, but the rather hilarious, and far less serious UNO game. Which makes sense, since the original publishers of UNO were in fact the same people who publish Rage. (In case you asked, Rage is now published by Fundex).

Trick-taking games. You know about those. The reason I am stressing that point is that we had one person in our Tasting who didn't know about trick-taking games, and it made the game less fun for all of us. If you know about trick-taking games, you can learn Rage in a few minutes.

First, there's the deal. The first deal, each player gets 10 cards, the next 9, the next 8, all the way down to the last round, with one card each. So each round is a little shorter, and the tension a little higher.

Then there's the bidding - everyone declares how many tricks she's going to win that round. Not bidding, really, since you're not trying to out bid anyone. More like, well, declaring.

Then there's the play. A card is thrown. You follow suit. If you can't, you throw anything, or throw trump. You know, like a trick-taking game.

Then there are the wild cards. There's Bonus Rage, which gives 5 points to whomever takes the trick. Mad Rage, which takes 5 points away from the she who took the trick. Out Rage, of course, there is no trump for the rest of the round. Change Rage, which lets you change trump to any color. And Wild Rage - allowing you to change the color of the suit being played.

So, no matter how card-countingly astute you are, anyone at any time can change pretty much everything. Which adds just that extra spice of fate-fickleness to make you laugh instead of scream.

Very Major FUN.

Labels: Family Games, Funnest for 2008, Keeper, Kids Games, Party Games

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Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Traverse

Traverse is what you might get if you combine chess and Chinese Checkers - what you might get, that is, if you're something of a relatively brilliant game designer.

Like chess, there are different kinds of pieces, each with its own way of moving. Like Chinese Checkers (which, actually, is itself a variation of a 4-sided game called "Halma"), it's a racing game, the object being to be the first player to get all 8 pieces to the opposite side of the playing board. No capturing, no killing, just moving and jumping and racing to be the first.

Again, like in Chinese Checkers, the flow of the game changes as it progresses. As more pieces are moved towards the center of the board, things get crowded, and the possibilities for making multiple jumps increase. And, as they say, how fun is that? So much fun that players often find themselves so excited by the possibility of a really, significantly multiple jump that they forget that they're supposed to be racing to get their pieces to the other side of the board.

And yet, it's not Chinese Checkers. It's Traverse. And the pieces don't all move the same way. Not at all. One kind of piece can only move orthogonally (the cube-shaped piece), another only diagonally (the diamond shape), another, the triangle-shaped piece, moves diagonally forward, but orthogonally back. And the fourth, the sphere, moves any direction. This means that there's an additional strategic implication to where each piece is placed - relative to the board, relative to other pieces. And if yet further strategic implications are needed, there's the additional wrinkle of how you set up your pieces at the beginning of the game. Since they can be placed in any order (as long as they are on your home row), how you arrange your pieces in the beginning of the game can affect your strategy for the rest. Thus, each time you play, the game takes on a slightly different wrinkle.

Traverse can be played by 2 to 4 players. With 3 players, one player gets less-encumbered access to the goal row, so the other 2 have to cooperate against that player while competing with each other. Each combination leads to a different enough game that you are most definitely going to want to try all 3 possibilities (2, 3 and 4 players).

Despite the strategic complexity of the game, it is easy enough for a 7-year-old to play. The design of the pieces (sphere, cube, diamond and triangle) are of great value in helping the players to remember how each moves.

Educational Insights has recently released its 20th year anniversary edition of Traverse. It's easy to understand why, insofar as it's Major FUN.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games

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Monday, April 07, 2008

Cheeky Monkey

Cheeky Monkey is what they call a "press your luck" game (similar in its pres-your-luckness to perhaps the archetype of all press your luckish games, the most significantly Major FUN Can't Stop, both of which, coincidentally, are published by Face 2 Face Games). It's easy to learn, and can be played with actually equal glee by both children (7 and up) and adults. Hence making it something like an ideal family game, but an equally good children's game and an even more equally recommended party game.

You get a collection of 52 poker-chip-like tokens, 8 "bonus tiles" (made of satisfyingly thick cardboard), and an even more satisfyingly thick cloth, drawstring bag. There are eight different animals depicted on the chips. Some animals are more numerous than others. For example, there are 10 monkeys but only 3 elephants. There is one tile for each animal, and the total number of of each kind of animal is indicated on the corresponding tile. The eight tiles are placed, face up on the table, and the chips placed in the bag.

On your turn, you pick and pick and pick chips from the bag, until you want to stop picking, or you pick an animal that you've already drawn. In the first case, you keep all the chips you drew. In the second, they go back into the bag - that's right, all of them. You are, of course, sorely tempted to keep on picking. Hence, the press-your-luckishness of the game.

When you have finished picking, you stack your chips, in any order you deem strategically beneficial. On your next turn, you add your winnings, again in any order, but you can't change the order of the chips you've already stacked. The relevance of stacking order becomes especially vivid during play, when you discover that if someone picks an animal that is currently on top of your stack, you must relinquish said animal to the aforementioned someone. This is a clearly less than desirable outcome for you, as the player with the most chips at the end of the game wins.

Then there are the monkeys, those cheeky critters, which, upon pickage, can also be swapped with any animal on top of anyone's stack.

As play progresses and stacks heighten, the strategic implications of stack order and animal distribution become ever more vivid. Seeing as there are only 3 elephants, for example, if you know that the other 2 elephants are already stacked, you can just about secure your stack if you place an elephant on top - that is, as long as no one picks a money and decides to employ it in a cheeky manner.

Yet another game by the prolific designer Reiner Knizia, Cheeky Monkey is further evidence of what good game design is all about. Major FUN.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Party Games

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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Incan Gold

Incan Gold is another "press your luck" game, different enough from all other "press your luck"-like games to be just as fun, and just as worthy of your seriously playworthy consideration.

It doesn't take long to learn, it takes only about 20 minutes to play, and the joyful luck-pressing can be shared by 3, or as many as 8 players. You do have to spend some time arranging the cards, but, after the first time you play, all that card arranging adds to the anticipation of a significantly fun experience of engaging each other in an intense exploration of the various wages of caution and greed.

The game is played in 5 rounds. A round begins by drawing a "Quest card" from the pile, turning it over, and placing it face-up next to one of the "Temple cards." The card that is revealed can either be a Treasure card, an Artifact, or a Hazard. If it is a Treasure, the players divide it between them, placing small plastic pieces in front of their personal treasuries (in front, and not inside, because the Treasure can't be claimed until someone has taken it safely out of the Temple). If it is an Artifact, it will be added to the treasury of the first player to remove it from the Temple. If it is a Hazard, there's no score. If a second Hazard of the same type is drawn later on in the round, all the potential treasures and artifacts are lost. All those little plastic, colored crystal-in-the-rough-shaped pieces... They go back. And nobody gets to keep them. Nobody. Not even you.

Once a card is placed on the table, players all have the option to go forward and reveal the next card, or to leave the Temple and collect the goodies indicated by the graphically rendered significance appearing on the card.

On the other hand, before the next Quest card can be revealed, you all, simultaneously, flash one of two cards on to the conceptual table. One card shows that you want to go forward, as it were, into the Temple, and seek greater fortune. The other, that you want to "leave the temple" immediately.

If one and only one of you flashes the card that symbolizes the decision to "leave the temple" already, that player, you, for example, get to take all the exposed Artifact Cards as your very own. Heh. Heh. Hey. If you're not the only one leaving, you and your fellow leavers share the pretty plastic pieces potentially accumulated and put them into a little tent you made out of a folded card. And nobody gets the Artifacts. Heh, hey. But you don't play any more for the rest of the round. Also hey, hey, hey.

Incan Gold is produced by Sunriver Games and is also available from Funagain. An earlier form of Incan Gold, Diamant, was published in Germany by Schmidt Speile, and was also was also available from Funagain.

Labels: Family Games, Party Games

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Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Hyper-Slide

Hyper-Slide, true to its name, involves sliding, and a level of activity which can accurately be described as "hyper."

There are 4 pucks. Each is a different color. There's a bridge which serves as a goal, as it were, and sometimes as a net, more-or-less. On top of the bridge are two buttons that light up. Go ahead, press one. Wait. First, put the batteries in. OK, now press one of the two light-up buttons.

The, shall we say, "Hypehost," filled with youthful, gameshowhost-like enthusiasm, says: "Hyperslide!" Then: "Choose the game you want, then press the button to get started."

One of the buttons is lit, so you press that one. "1)Fast Pass," says the Hyperhost, to gameshow-like musical accompaniment, "2) Add One," it continues, "3) Code Buster 4) Fast Pass Head to Head 5) Add One Head to Head." So you hit the blinking button.

"Fast Pass. The All Time Score is 52 Passes. Red begins." Says the Hyperhost.

And the light starts blinking and the music starts playing. So you throw a Yellow puck through the goal. And the voice says "Red Begins." So you throw the Blue through. And it says "Red Begins." So you throw the green one through. And the music is playing. And finally you throw the Red puck through. And the voice says "Red." So you throw the Blue through. And the music ends and the Hyperhost says: "You should have played Red: And it asks "play this game again or play another game?" And both buttons flash.

And then you realize that you really need two people to play. Unless maybe you install that "Cyber-rubber-band"ish thing across the goal.

The fun of each of the 4 games is greatly enhanced by the voice, musical timing, ability to know which of 4 pucks you slide through it, or don't, and very long memory of the Hyperhost.

You do what the Hyperhost tells you to do as fast as it tells you to do for as long as you can. And the Hyperhost creates the challenge, taunting you with its ability to rembember the score, forever, until you reset it.

Given only two flashing buttons and 4 different-colored pucks, a Hyperhost with a good sense of timing, like the one in Cyber-Slide, can put the proverbial partridge back into your conceptual pear tree.

This Hyperhost leads you in at least three games. Or five. Or ten. Depending on what you play and how you play them and how many people play - from one to probably four.

Fast Pass: slide the color puck the Hyperhost tells you to, and only that color puck, in maybe 90 seconds, as often as you can while the music gets faster and so does the Cyberhost.

Add One: like the game of Simon, you have to slide an ever increasing repeating series of pucks, puck-by-puck.

Code Buster - slide whatever works until you happen to slide the right ones across the goal. try to do it faster next time.

Fast Pass - Head to Head: Fast Pass for two. Hyperbandlessly.

Add One - Head to Head: Also Hyperbandlessly, Add One - for also 2. Or 4 especially even. Though playing by yourself is also fun, even.

Self-storing, with an almost intuitive game design, Hyper-Slide provides for many different levels of physical and cognitive challenge, featuring clear, but mild-mannered Hyperhost that acknowledges your success without rubbing your face in your failures. All-in-all, Hyper-Slide is Major FUN. For the whole actual family.

From: Hasbro.

Labels: Dexterity, Family Games

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Sunday, December 09, 2007

Chateau Roquefort

Caution, perspective owners of Chateau Roquefort, some assembly is required. Do not attempt to do this by yourself. Why, you ask? Because no one, not even those who buy games just so they can poke things out, can believe how unusually pleasurable it is to everso gently punch the many pieces out of their frame - lovely, thick, two-sided, brightly printed, silk-textured cardboard pieces so well pre-cut that seem to fall out on command. It is an indelible experience of something well-made. Something made for kids and parents and especially people who like to collect things.

And even more especially for parents who like to collect things who also like to play with their kids who also like to collect things.

Chateau Roquefort is another beautifully made, European game from Rio Grand Games. It's a game of strategy and memory. The board remains mostly covered during play. On your turn, you can uncover part of the board, and you just might reveal images of different kinds of cheeses. Also on your turn (you have 4 moves per turn), you can move one of your mice (you have 4 mice) onto the board, or from the entrance to one of the horizontally or vertically adjacent squares, or from a square to yet another similarly horizontal or vertically adjacent square. You can also slide a row or column of squares, perhaps to reveal new kinds of cheeses, perhaps to reveal an empty hole, perhaps to cause one of your opponent's mice (as many as 4 players) to fall into said revealed pit.

It is probably true that children as young as six can play the game. However, they would have to be exceptional - given that there are many, many pieces, the loss of which would pretty much significantly impair the replayability of a unique and expensively beautiful game.

The object of the game is to win cheeses. You win a cheese when two of your mice are on squares revealing the same kind of cheese. There are many different kinds of cheeses. And you can only win one of each.

This is an unusually intriguing play principle - trying to position two of your pieces so that they are both rest on the same kind of cheese. On a unique kind of board (sliding tiles, always only partially revealed). Conceptually, it's probably elegant enough for a six-year-old to understand. But we believe that it is best suited to kids who are old enough to appreciate the beauty of the game, the necessity for taking good care of it, and the complexity of the relationships between all the different kinds of moves you take on one turn. It's probably a little too cute (wonderfully designed little wooden mice) for most boys of that age. But, given all those caveats, for the right players, kids, adults, and especially families, the game is the kind you may very well treasure, for ever.

There are some concerns about storage - given that there are so many pieces, and that the board is actually integrated into the box. You'll find a thorough discussion of the ramifications of all this in this review. Our conclusion: despite all the caveats, the game is Major FUN.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games

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Monday, November 26, 2007

Gumball Rally

Ted Cheatham's Gumball Rally is another excellent card game from Z-Man Games. This one's especially for kids or for adults looking for a "filler game."

It's a race, all right, for up to 8 players. The game takes less than a half-hour to play, and probably less than half of that to learn. The manufacturers recommend it for kids 6 and up. We recommend it for kids who like playing race-type games, and especially for adults who enjoy playing light and quick.

You get 8 different Go Kart cards - that is, large, thick, well-illustrated, cardboard cards depicting different Go Karts. You also get a deck of playing cards - 4 different kinds of playing cards (Race cards - 4 suits, each numbered 1-10; Hazard cards (19 cards, no numbers), 10 point cards, and 8 small Go Kart cards to help you remember which Kart is yours. So there are several sorting moments required. And yet more sorting moments once you separate out all the Hazard cards: giving each player 3 cards, removing the Winner and two Checkpoint cards, shuffling the remaining cards, removing 4 cards and placing them in the box (without looking at the cards), taking 3 cards from the Hazard deck and shuffling them with the Winner card, then 3 more cards from the Hazard deck shuffled with one Winner card, and again - placing these all in a stack to form the bottom of the draw pile. All of which is very clever and logical once you actually play the game, because the Winner and Checkpoint cards, placed as they are near the bottom of the deck, force the game to some oft-delightful and generally timely conclusions. After the first game, all this shuffling and sorting seems to add both to the fun of the game and the fun of getting ready to have fun.

The large Go Kart cards are placed, in order of play, on the table - the first player in the first position, etc. Race cards determine which Go Kart is the fastest. If you play a Race card, and you are in, say, third position, and your card is higher than the Go Kart in the second position, then you move up one position. Then there are the Hazard cards which affect the Go Kart whose color matches the inner border of the Hazard card.

Oddly enough, despite all this apparent complexity, the game takes only about 15 minutes to learn and less than a half-hour to play. The pace is fast enough to keep everyone in play - even when there are 8 players. Which makes the game feel most race-like - especially as cars are constantly changing position, and even more especially when you pass the lead car.

The cards are vividly illustrated by John Donahue under the direction of jim pinto (who artistically spells his name in lower case).

A lot of big fun in this little game.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Party Games

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Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Nacho Loco

Nacho Loco isn't exactly a card game, actually. It's more of a tile game, played with triangles (hence "Nacho"s), made out of cardboard. And yes, it could very well remind you of Triominoes, though it plays more like a, well, card game - a bit like, perhaps, UNO.

You get 94 cards. If they were thick and made of plastic, you'd think of them as tiles. But they're cardboard. And not thick enough to stand up. Just thick enough to be impossible to shuffle. So you put them face-down on the table, smush them around until they're satisfyingly mixed, and give 6 cards to each of up to 6 players.

Each card is divided into three equal triangular sections. Some are different colors. Some have words on them. Some are black, and marked with an X. To play one of your cards, you have to match one of the sections of your card with one of the sections of a card on the table. The X-marked black sections can't be matched, by anything, even by other X-marked black sections.

The sections with words say "Skip Next," or "Go Again," or "Opponent Draws 3." If you have an exact match, then either the next player gets skipped, or you get to play again, or you can tell any opponent to draw 3 additional card/tiles.

The object of the game is to get rid of your cards. As soon as someone has played her last card, she gets one point for each card remaining in the other players' hands. The first player to get 20 points wins. And that's about that.

Visually, the game is quite appealing. As it progresses, colorful, three-dimensional-like patterns are created. And the back of the cards look like, yes, nachos. Rounds are relatively short, and the game has a fast-enough pace to keep everyone involved for the duration. Easy to learn. Mildly strategic. Fun to play.

Fun for kids as young as 8, the game should appeal equally to everyone in the family. Nacho Loco comes to us from Buffalo Games, makers of the Major FUN award winning iMAgiNiff.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Party Games

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Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Mother Sheep

Mother Sheep, from Playroom Entertainment, has 10, cute little plastic lambs, and 10 cute little plastic lamb cardboard, name-plated lamb-standing places. 80 fences, of different and oft-multiple colors, a deck of lamb cards and a lamb corral. There are 18 lamb cards. On each card there are five lamb names. Pick a card and be the first player to fence in your given lambs.

Since there are 18 cards, it is quite likely that you will end up with at least one shared lamb. If not several. That's quite fine. As long as the lambs are fenced, it doesn't matter actually who does the fencing.

As for the fencing: After you've placed all you lambs in some array, close to the mother sheep, but not too close, and not too close to each other, either, the rest of the game is about laying down fence rails. The array-setting is of course very important, since the position of each lamb relative to each other lamb is chock full of strategic significance. You can lay them anywhere in any angle (there's no board), but you have to make sure that they overlap another fence, and where they overlap, they match colors. Since the fence pieces can have as many as three different color bands, of any width, it can be quite a challenge to find an appropriately matching fence post.

You take three fence posts from the Fence Post Bag. These are your secret fence posts. Your secret fence post stock never gets replenished. So, even though you can use them any time during the game, you have to use them with care. You also get to draw three more fence posts for immediate play. Since you're trying to corral 5 different sheep, you'll always have at least one fence post that's worth playing.

As I said, there is no board. As I also said, the positions of everything - the lambs, the Mother Sheep, the cardboard fence posts - is of dire strategic consequence. This is not a bonus feature - especially if you are playing with the clumsy-prone. On the other hand, it's fun, not having a board while playing such a strategic, board-like game. And strategically speaking, it's complex enough to be worthy of pondering, but simple enough in principle to be understood and enjoyed, even by the younger player.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Thinking Games

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Tuesday, September 25, 2007

In a Pickle

In a Pickle is something you can get easily into, in Gamewright's party-like, family-worthy card game from for 4-6 players, especially. Especially players who like to play with words, and, amongst those, the ones who care more about fun than about winning.

You get cards, many cards, 320 many. Every card has a word on it. Every word is a noun. So you give each player a handful of nouns, and you take 4 nouns, place them in the middle of the table, head to head, in a plus sign, arrows out.

Arrows. Arrows help you remember the direction of the "fit-into" - for that is the key criteria by which one evaluates one's options - something that fits into something else. In the direction of the arrows. So like, if you had CHICKEN on one of the cards and someone overlaps BALLOON upon CHICKEN, one might be reasonably implying that a CHICKEN can fit into a BALLOON. Similar things could be said about underlapping WHISTLE with CHICKEN because a WHISTLE can fit into a CHICKEN, much to the chagrin of the aforementioned.

The fun makes itself especially apparent during "Pickle Rounds" which are initiated as soon as one of the arms of the plus (the array of cards, face up, on the table) reaches 4. After that, players may ONLY play cards on that arm, the last player to successfully add a card winning all the cards in that arm. O, both goodie and glee! All the cards in an arm!!

The success of this game depends a lot on the light-heartedness of the players, in the first place. But if you're a small group of friends, or an actually healthy family, and you enjoy arguing (who doesn't?) you'll probably find it Major FUN

Labels: Family Games, Party Games, Word Games

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Friday, August 24, 2007

Quartile

Quartile is a beautifully executed tile game for 2-6 players. According to SimplyFun, it is suitable for kids as young as 5.

It will make you think of dominoes. Which is a good start.

There are 49 tiles. Wooden tiles. In a wooden box. Just as lovely as a lovely set of dominoes. Square tiles. Not like dominoes at all.

Each tile has a number in the center, ranging from 2 to 14. The number is surrounded on 4 sides by domino-like pips, ranging from 1 to 7. To play a tile, you must match the pip-count of all adjacent tiles. The value of the tile is determined by the number in the center. The score for a play is that number, multiplied by the number of matching adjacent tiles. So, of you play an 8, and it is adjacent to 2 other tiles, and both sides match, you get 16 points.

The possibility of getting a higher score by matching more than one adjacent tile makes the game especially suited to family play. The younger player can derive satisfaction from making a simple match. The older players can find significant challenge by trying to make the highest scoring play possible (matching all 4 sides).

The artful distribution and configuration of tiles invites mathematically-oriented players to get even more engaged. There's only one tile worth 2 points, and all 4 sides have only one pip. There's also only one tile worth 14 points, and all 4 of its sides have 7 pips. There are 7 tiles worth 8 points. These tiles have anywhere from 1 to 7 pips on their edges.

Just enough complexity so that those who want to take the game seriously can find serious things to think about. Just enough simplicity to invite some significant glee.

Yes, Quartile is made in China. And yes, again, it has been carefully examined for lead and other bad things and as been found most consumer-worthy.

Labels: Family Games, Thinking Games

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Thursday, August 23, 2007

Zobmondo!! "Would You Rather...?"

Zobmondo!! "Would You Rather...?" is the party game for three or more players that asks your basically unanswerable questions - questions like "Would you rather be the circus person that the knife thrower throws knives at, or the one who puts their head in the lion's mouth?" It's the "conundrum-likeness" of the questions that is key to the fun of the game. There really are no correct answers. But they're fun to think about, and talk about, and maybe even argue over.

Zobmondo!! "Would You Rather...?" game comes in several incarnations. There's a version for people ages 12 and up and another for people 16 and up. There's Zobmondo!! You Gotta Be Kidding, a version designed for people 7 and up. And a travel version for 12 and up.

We'll talk about the travel version last, primarily because the mechanics are a little different.

In all of its manifestations, the game centers on your ability to predict which of the two choices most people will select. Since the choices are equally questionable ("would you rather be able to walk on water forever or fly for three hours on three different occasions in your life?"), you're more or less intuiting (all right, guessing) what everyone will decide. The real fun for everyone else is in the discussion (debate? argument?) over which of the two answers make the more sense (given that neither is actually more sensible than the other). There's a board and die that help determine who is closer to winning (the most intuitive/luckiest) of the group, what the category of conundrum will be ("Pain - Fear, Discomfort," "Appearance, Embarrassment," "Ethics - Intellect," or "Random"), or whether the player must select a "Challenge" card. (The 16-plus version has an additional category: "Food - Ingestion.")

Even though the basic premise of the game - arguing over basically absurd choices - is fun enough, the challenge cards add a valuable dimension to the game: variety. Some challenges can be won by any player (e.g., the "Best Reason" card which asks all the players to "compose the most creative, thought provoking, and/or funniest reason for your choice"), and some, like the "Would You Do It" challenge, where you win the challenge only if you do things like "demonstrate a pickle mustache by holding a pickle between your upper lip and nose for one full turn."), won only by the player who selects the card.

Of the three versions, You Gotta Be Kidding, the game for the 7-ups, is clearly the silliest. There are no categories. You get questions like "Would you rather eat a hair sandwich or an earwax omelet?" You have a game board which is actually much easier to use (we did have some minor problems interpreting exactly how to move from track to track on the other versions). And you get this really neat electronic "Red Chili Pepper" thing. It's only used for some of the challenge cards, and works kind of like a hot potato. And changes the pace of the game just about perfectly.

Then there's the metal-tinned travel version that comes without a die, or a board, or playing pawns, and yet is inviting and fun enough to help you bridge significant distances - geographically and socially. The key is the artful use of a write-on, wipe-off board. There are four spaces on the board: Contender, Dead-Ender, Limbo, and the Prediction space. At the beginning of the game, everyone writes their initials in the Contender space. There are category chips. The first Contender picks a chip, then a "Would You Rather...?" card, and the game proceeds as usual - the chip determining which conundrum gets read, the Contender writing her prediction on the board, everyone else having a semi-serious, consensus-reaching discussion. Guess right, you are still a Contender, and you pass the board to the next player. Guess wrong, you are a Dead-Ender. For the rest of the game, when it's your turn, you have to make up a new conundrum. If your prediction is correct, you get to move anyone else into the Limbo zone, which, in itself, becomes a source of further contention. The last Contender wins.

All in all, the game, in each of its various manifestations, invites many happy hours of contemplation, conversation, significant silliness, and Major FUN.

Labels: Family Games, Party Games

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Monday, August 13, 2007

Gemlok

Gemlok, from Pywacket Games is a board game for 2-4 players combining chance and strategy in some rather delicious ways.

The object of the game is to score points by occupying high value spaces on the board. To do so, you move your playing pieces according to movement patterns determined by the throw of a unique pair of dice. You begin the game by positioning your 8 pawns on 8 of the 14 spaces along one of the edges of the board. Printed on the board is a large array of gems of different value. The gems in the center of the board are of the highest value, thus attracting much of the action of the game.

If you manage to land on a space occupied by another pawn (your own, your partner's, or your opponent's), you can "bump" that pawn up to three squares in any direction. Though you might feel it more important to bump your opponent off of a high-scoring gem-square, you would be wise to consider the possibility of opportunities for you to bump one of your pawns on to a higher-scoring space.

The word "Gemlok" is printed on the sixth side on each of the dice. This allows you to make the placement of any one of your pawns permanent, which, with all that bumping going on, often turns out to be highly desirable.

Gemlok has relatively few rules, and takes maybe a half-hour to play. But it is an intensely absorbing half-hour, one that you'll probably want to repeat several times before game time ends. Though dice are used, Gemlok is much more a game of strategy than chance.

Recommended for 2-4 children as young as 7 and grown-ups who can stand losing to them, Gemlok should prove as successful as a family game as it is worthy of somewhat serious adult consideration.

Labels: Family Games, Thinking Games

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Wednesday, July 18, 2007

What's Yours Like?

Today's conceptual gift is a remarkably simple, and deeply fun party game from Patch Products called "What's Yours Like?".

Pick a card. The card has a word on it. Show the card to everyone except the person guessing, who asks: "what's yours like." Take turns answering the question, being sure to be accurate, and subtle. Too clear a clue, and it will be guessed immediately. Too subtle, and, well, it's just not fair.

For example, suppose the card reads "washing machine." Legitimate answers to such an innocuous "what's yours like" question might be: "mine is white," "mine has a lot of knobs," "mine is noisy," etc. However, given the age and nature of the people playing, the answers could just as easily become rife with double meaning, and I mean rife, like, for example: "mine makes my underwear wet."

For us, that was really the charm of the game - how much of it was really up to us - to our collective cleverness and naughty nuanciness. Which means that the game will be different, depending on who's playing with whom. Different when playing with family than when playing with friends, different with teen-agers than with seniors. Which makes the game even that much more successful, and fascinating, and Major FUN-worthy.

There are 188 two-sided cards "guess word" cards. One side is recommended for older players because they might include things that kids don't have (in-laws, ulcers, jobs). There are two wipe-off clue boards with markers. The player in the "Hot Seat" uses one, writing down each clue as it is given (the fewer clues, the better the score). There are 95 Challenge cards. These cards allow the Hot Seated player to share the Hot Seat, as it were. That's when the other clue-writing board comes into play. Now the two players with the Hot Seats compete with each other, the first to guess the word correctly gets to take two points (points are bad) off her score.

What's Yours Like is a game for 4 or more players. With 4 players, it takes maybe 15 minutes for a round. Figure 3 rounds per game. The art of giving just the right response, of being clever, yet accurate, actually outweighs the accomplishment of guessing what was on the card. It's a game that will make you laugh, a lot, even without keeping score. Like I said, it's Major FUN.

Labels: Family Games, Party Games, Top for 2007

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Monday, July 09, 2007

Spin-It

Spin-It puts a new spin on an old game. The old game I'm talking about is an American folk game that has been invented and reinvented so often that, according to this article, it goes under the name of: Arizona Golf Balls, Australian Horseshoes, Ball Dangle, BlongoBall, Bola, Bolo, Bolo Ball, Bolo Golf, Bolo Polo, Cowboy Golf, Dandy Golf, Dingle Balls, Flingy Ball, Gladiator, Golfball Horseshoes, Hillbilly Golf, Hillbilly Horseshoes, Horseballs, Ladder Ball, Ladder Game, Ladder Golf, Ladder Toss, Monkey Balls, Monkey Bars Golf, Montana Golf, Norwegian Golf, Norwegian Horseshoes, Pocca Bolo, Polish Golf, Polish Horsehoes, Poor Man's Golf, Rattlerail Toss, Redneck Golf, Rodeo Golf, Slither, Snake Toss, Snakes, Snakes & Ladders, Spin-It, Swedish Golf, The Snake Game, Tower Ball, Willy Ball, and Zing-Ball." Whatever name it goes by, you have a series of bars that serve as targets, and bolo balls that you try to wrap around the highest scoring bars.

Spin-It, however, puts such a big spin on the traditional game that the result is a truly new, unique bolo-tossing game - in fact, a small cornucopia of new games.

The, so to speak, "pivotal" innovation is a wheel of five different-colored bars. The wheel spins very easily, so that if you manage to wrap your bolo around any one of those bars it will add just enough weight to make the whole wheel turn, ferris-wheel-like, so that the wrapped-around bar goes towards the bottom, changing the position of all the other bars. Since each bar has a different point value, the strategic significance of every successful toss becomes readily, and often painfully apparent. This makes for genuine strategic depth, and at least ten different, but equally challenging Spin-It-using games, including Spin-It Golf and Spin-It Bowling, each of which is an inspiration for the development of yet more Spin-It variations.

Which makes Spin-It an invitation to play in the best and deepest sense. It invites participation, it invites creativity, it invites the entire family. Enough skill is involved to make you want to take the game seriously. Enough luck to make you laugh.

There's something about tossing a bolo that is inherently fun. There's something about Spin-It that makes bolo-tossing Major FUN.

The Spin-It set comes with two complete Spin-It goals, two sets of bolo-balls (each set has three bolos made of rubber balls held together by a rainbow-colored cord), in a cardboard carrying box. Once you figure out how to set it up the first time, you'll find it's quite easy to set up again and again. On the other hand, you might not want to put it away, ever. There are so many games to play with it. So much fun to be explored. We, for example, have been collectively wondering how much fun it would be if you tried using one Spin-It goal, placed in the middle of two players (or teams), standing about 20 feet apart, throwing simultaneously. This seems to engender the potential for sudden turns, and almost excruciatingly delightful agony.

Labels: Dexterity, Family Games, Keeper

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Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Igloo Pop

Igloo Pop, from Rio Grande Games is a family game requiring listening, estimating, and some deductive reasoning. The main component of the game is 12 plastic igloos, housing (thanks to you patience and care) from 2-13 tiny glass beads. If you shake the igloos, and listen carefully, you can actually estimate how many of those little beads they each contain. It is one of the few games that center on the senses, and, if only because of that, merits our collective attention. Especially when you think about how many games there are, designed specifically for children, that involve everything but the senses. There are guessing games, memory games, thinking games, drawing games, puzzles. But how many games can you name that involve auditory discrimination? My wife said it reminded her of a Montesorri activity. Only much more fun.

In addition to the igloos, you get a deck of 33 cards, and ten small wooden discs ("Thalers") of different colors, one color for each of up to 6 players. The cards have anywhere from one to 3 different numbers on them - each number corresponding to a quantity of beads. Nine cards are turned face up, and the game begins. Players take turns selecting and shaking the igloos.

If you think an igloo has a quantity of beads that matches one of the cards, you place it on that card, and put one of your Thalers in a tight-fitting slot located by the door of each igloo. If the card has 3 different numbers on it, you are correct as long as the count matches any of the 3 numbers. You might also notice that there is only one Eskimo pictured on that card. Remember, some cards have only one number on them. Those cards have only one matching igloo. But they also have three Eskimos.

After there are no more igloos, or no one thinks any of the remaining igloos are worth a Thaler, the round ends. Players determine who is correct. The correct players win the Thalers on all the igloos that are parked on that card. And the player who's igloo has the most beads in it wins the card. The next round is then played, and the game continues until someone has run out of Thalers. The player with the most points (Eskimos and Thalers) wins.

Assembly, as hinted above, is most definitely required, and adult participation is highly encouraged. You get a bunch of empty igloos, a bigger bunch of tiny glass beads (very cool tiny glass beads), igloo bottoms, and a sheet of stickers numbering 2-13. Into each igloo, you have to put the exact number of beads indicated on the sticker of your choice, sometimes rather forcefully press the igloo bottom into the igloo, and then put the sticker on. Fortunately, the effort required is relatively minor, compared to the fun you'll have from playing the game.

Some kids might have a little difficulty in refraining from looking at the number on the bottom of their chosen igloo. If it's too hard for them to refrain, it's a good sign that they are not ready to play this game.

Though the game seems to be designed for children, it's a good challenge for every member of the family, hence, Major FUN.

Labels: Family Games

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Monday, July 02, 2007

Can't Stop

Can't Stop is the Majorest FUN of one of the Major FUNnest game designers I ever had the honor to know. The late Sid Sackson was a passionate, modest, and remarkably accessible game inventor and collector. His expertise, his appreciation for an elegant design, his love of play is everywhere evident in this most accessible of his games. And, thanks to Face 2 Face Games, you, too, may soon find yourself delightfully unable to stop.

Can't Stop is a dice game in which players try to be the first to claim 4 of the 11 rows (corresponding to all the combinations of two dice) on the Can't Stop board. You have 4 dice. You throw all of them, and then combine them into pairs - however you want. So, if you throw, for example, a 3, 4, 5, and 6, you can move one space forward in the 7 and 11 columns, or one space forward in the 8 and 10 columns, or two spaces forward in the 9 column - thus giving you just enough decision-making power to make you feel responsible for whatever fate awaits.

Can't Stop is perhaps the ultimate fate-tempting games. Because, you see, your turn doesn't end with one throw. Oh, no. You can throw and throw again. Until, don't you know, you don't have a legal move. If you only had stopped right before that, you could have progressed significantly up the board, coming everso closer to claiming a row of your own. But you didn't stop, did you. Oh, you could have. You should have. But, no. O'ertaken, once again, by the sheer bravado of your unassailable hopefulness.

You have three white pieces to move, and a bunch of markers to plant. You throw the dice and move one or two of the pieces. You feel somewhat sanguine about your next throw, knowing that you'll have at least one more piece to move regardless. Of course, any column already claimed by another player can't be used. Which is good (because any move that you can't make is not counted as a possible move) and not so good (because you have fewer opportunities to win).

If you have the good sense to stop at the right time, you remove the white pieces, and use your markers to indicate your progress along those columns. If you have the bad luck not to stop in time, all the white pieces are given to the next player, whatever progress you might have made on your turn is obliterated, and the game goes on.

The game always seems winnable, until it isn't. As more and more columns are claimed, the temptation not to stop becomes evermore profound. And the likelihood that you should've when you could've evermore self-evident.

Can't Stop can be played by 2-4 players. Or by that many teams. For anyone old enough to play checkers and appreciate the value of profound chagrin.

Labels: Family Games, Keeper

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Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Sixteen

Sixteen is an original card game for two players, ages 8 and older. It is easy to learn (about 5 minutes) and takes about 15 minutes to play, though players will find themselves wanting to play again and again before they put the deck away.

Each player is dealt three cards. The remaining cards are placed face-down in the middle of the table as the draw pile. The cards are numbered 0-6. There are two of every card, but only one zero card for each suit. There are also two wild cards. Players take turns, picking a card, and then adding a card to a fanned-out, face-up play pile.

There are two ways to win a set: when the face-up cards total 16, or when the last three cards in the win pile are all the same color or number. So, you have to pay a lot of attention to what's in the pile, as well as what's in your hand, as well as make some educated guessing about what could very possibly be in you-know-who's hand. If the play pile goes over 16, a "bust" is declared and the other player gets the win. The player with the most sets when all cards have been played wins the round.

All of this results in some rather delicious strategic implications. The game can become quite competitive, but the elegance of the game, and the element of luck, keep the competition focused, and light-hearted.

The instructions describe four optional play variations, one of which extends the game play to younger children (perhaps as young as 6), but the game plays best with the recommended ages.

The card graphics are simple, yet very clear and functional. The cards of nicely shufflable stock. All in all, Sixteen is an unusually well-designed card game, unique, easy to learn, inviting, and with high replay value. In other words, Major FUN!

Labels: Family Games

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Monday, June 11, 2007

Thataway

Thataway is an easy to learn, quick to play, totally engaging addition to Gamewright's collection of 12 Minute Games. The card game, designed for 2-5 players, is a race in which players compete to build the longest chain of cards. Some cards point left or right, others up or down, still others point both directions (so you have a choice of either).

At the beginning of the game, the cards are divided into as many draw piles as there are players. Since players can draw from any pile, it doesn't really matter if the piles are equal. As soon as you have a playable card, you place it on the table, face up. When you draw a card that can be connected to it (if, for example, you've played a left-facing arrow, the only card that can't connect to it is a right-facing arrow), you place that card, face-up, and adjacent to the connecting card. There are also Gorilla cards. As soon as you play a Gorilla card, the game is over. The player with the longest chain of connected cards wins that round.

Cards that are played already are placed in a scoring pile. Cards that remain in a player's hand are passed to the player on the left, and added to that player's pile. The game continues until a fourth Gorilla is played.

Since, as soon as you draw a Gorilla, you have the chance to end the round, you have to pay attention not only to how many cards are in your chain, but also to everyone else's chains. This adds a delicious tension to the game. It's hard enough watching your own cards, having to watch everyone else's is just enough to distract you into losing - end the round too soon or too late, and someone else can score higher.

The game is more of a race than it is a strategic interaction. You're much more focused on winning than you are on making anyone lose. Consequently, the competition, as fierce as it is, is also quite gentle. You can lose without taking it personally. And, for all the tension, you tend to spend most of the time laughing. Thataway turns out to be a surprisingly entertaining little game, easy to learn, long enough to get significantly involved, short enough to want to play again next time. Major FUN for everyone 8 and over.

Labels: Family Games

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Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Highrise Dominoes

You know how every now and then you come across this beautifully packaged set of dominoes, sometimes in a tin, even, and the dominoes are in deed very nice - hefty, colorful, smooth - and sometimes there's even some kind of lovely plastic thing that sits in the center of the table or some place, and keeps score or turns around or even makes noise - and yet it's still dominoes? You know what I mean. Dominoes, in a nice package, but it feels like dominoes, and it looks like dominoes, and it plays just like dominoes. And you can't help feeling just a little disappointed, just a little like you were hoping maybe for a really different game, something new, something that maybe used dominoes, but was more interesting, more challenging, more, well, different?

Despair no more, my playful friend. For Highrise Dominoes is in deed a wonderfully different game. And the base that is included in the lovely tin is really functional, really central to the game.

The object is to build a tower of dominoes. First, a basement is built - 8 dominoes placed, face-up, in the bottom of the turntable base. From then on, players take turn building on to the base, the rule being that the domino has to match the numbers it rests on. And yes, you can lay your domino so that it rests on two different dominoes. And once that domino is laid, you can lay another domino on top of that. And the higher the level, the higher the score.

It's a completely different experience of dominoes. There's so much to look at. Which is why you're so happy that the turntable turns.

There are clear plastic blocks that are used when the dominoes you want to match are on two different levels. Which is fine, unless the dominoes are on two different levels that are more than one level apart. And then comes the joyous agony of having to maybe (gasp) draw another domino.

There are also wild dominoes, there's a double, with both halves wild. And there are others with only one wild half. But, boy, do you get to love those wild ones! Seeing as they are often the only ones that you can play. Which you really want to do. Because the first player to use all her tiles can get many, many points.

Labels: Family Games, Thinking Games

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Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Stack revisited

I am certain you recall that Stack received a Major Fun Award a little over 4 years ago. In fact, it was a recipient of several awards: the Party Games award, the Thinking Games award, the much-touted Keeper award, and even, oddly enough, it was found most Senior-Worthy. And you probably even recall why.

I, on the other hand, have been exploring the game in greater depth, especially recently as I work more and more with various groups of seniors hereabouts. And what I have been exploring, actually, is the, shall we say, "Super Stack" set - two different sets of the Stack game (the deluxe, jumbo, of course), each set having different color dice, thereby enabling me to play a game with 8 people.

The large dice that come with the deluxe version prove to be especially comforting for senior eyes and hands. Easy to read, even at a distance, enjoyable to hold because of their greater heft, and easier to stack because of their larger size. Having enough for eight people makes the game ideal for building a sense of community and friendship. Because the group is larger, people don't can play at a safe distance from each other (psychologically safe), but because they're all sharing the same set of dice, they feel connected. If we need to, we can easily divide into smaller, more intimate groups. But having all those dice means that each player has twice as many options to consider. On the one hand, it makes the beginning of the game that much easier and more inviting. On the other, it makes the endgame that much more dramatic. Stacks get built, options constantly get fewer and fewer, the need to play strategically gets more and more vivid.

Stack, even with only 4 colors, has never disappointed us as a game for almost all ages. But having twice as many dice turns out to be more than twice as flexible, twice as interesting, for at least twice as many people.

Labels: Family Games, Keeper, Party Games, Senior-Worthy, Thinking Games

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Monday, May 07, 2007

Qwirkle

Qwirkle is an elegant tile game, easy to learn and understand, visually inviting, and increasingly challenging as the game progresses.

There are 108 thick, wooden tiles - thick enough to stand on end, like dominoes. Each tile is imprinted with one of six shapes in one of six colors. Players take turns, adding to an increasingly complex grid of tiles, the rule being that to place a tile it must be either of the same color or shape as the adjacent tiles. You can place several tiles, as long as they are in one line.

Each player starts out with 6 tiles, and replenishes her hand after each play. The game continues until all 108 tiles have been played.

Your score for the turn depends on the number of tiles in the rows or columns adjacent to the tiles you've just placed. So, if one of your tiles brings the number of tiles in a row to, say, 4, and the number of tiles in a column to, for example, 3, you'd score 7 points for that one tile. If your tile is the sixth in a row or column of tiles of the same shape or color, you'd score twice as many points (12). As more tiles are placed, there are more choices, so the search for the high scoring play becomes more and more complex.

The challenge is both visual and logical, clear enough to engage a school-age child, and complex enough to invite serious, adult competition. Most importantly, though it is a competitive game, the competition is gentle and inviting. You win more by your ability to find the best possible placement for your pieces than you do by trying to keep your opponent from scoring.

In fact, so satisfying was it to get a high score in any single turn was that we really didn't need to keep a cumulative score. We could admire each other's genius (and luck), while more or less competing to see if one of our plays could score even higher.

Labels: Family Games, Keeper, Thinking Games

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Sunday, May 06, 2007

Rukshuk

Rukshuk, a.k.a. "The Game of Rock Balancing," is, as you might infer, a game about balancing rocks. Well, not actual rocks, but cunningly contrived, highly rocklike pieces, in 5 different colors. Highly rocklike - hefty, and irregularly shaped rocklike. There are long, flat white "bridge rocks" (each player gets two of these to be used as required). The collection of building rocks includes smaller white pieces, which only count for one point, but all have somewhat flat, and most accommodating surfaces. Thus one can easily imagine oneself building white rock towers and things. Whilst the blue rocks are only flattish on one side, so the idea of stacking one on top of another appears to be, shall we say, not such a good one. Then there are the green rocks (rated as "difficult"), and the highly irregular, 4-point-scoring red rocks (candidly rated "impossible") and of course the high-scoring, but extremely rare gold rocks. None of which is actually a rock.

Then there are the 25 challenge cards, each depicting rock constructs of various difficulty and geographic significance. The Pinnacle formation, for example, is purportedly found on the Galapagos Islands, whereas the Pigeon Rock configuration is somewhere near the city of Beirut.

Players each draw seven rocks from the rock bag, thereby randomizing the scoring potential and challenge, since you really can't tell what color rock you'll be getting until you actually get it. Got it? A Rukshuk card and the sand timer are then turned over to reveal the challenge for the round and to start the rocky contest. Players can build and rebuild their rock construct, attempting to place whatever higher scoring color rocks they have in their indicated multiple-point positions, or not. Once all the sand has fallen, all construction ceases, and the scores are calculated accordingly.

Rukshuk is a surprisingly well-balanced game, if you excuse the expression. It can be played as a solitaire, or with as many as five players. The pieces, the fantasy, the challenge cards all work together to make the game intensely involving, even for the nimble-fingered few, with just enough chance and strategic depth to entice the less-than-dexterous many.

Labels: Dexterity, Family Games

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Friday, May 04, 2007

Destruct 3

There's something primal about Destruct 3. My wife says it's a boy thing. If it is, it's a primal boy thing. Build. Destroy. Build again.

There are 12 small wooden blocks: three T-shape blocks, four L-shape, four longish rectangles, and one shortish. You can use any two of these for a base, upon which the remain ten are to be built. You assemble your construct somewhere in the center of the designated platform. After you've created your version of a stable structure, the enemy (all right, the other players), take turns trying to destroy it.

The are three destruction mechanisms, which one might call, respectively: the Ramp of Doom, the Pendulum of Destiny, and the Catapult of Catastrophe. Each of these is a large wooden structure, to which a ball-and-cord is attached. Which of these devices you get to use is determined by the roll a die. You take the appointed mechanism, position it in any of the 12 mechanism mounts, and do your best/worst.

The scoring is equally ingenious. You get two points for each block you've knocked over, as long as it rests in the center square of the building platform. You get one point for the blocks that remain on the periphery. And no points for blocks that are knocked completely and entirely off the platform all together. Thus, you must temper your destructive impulse, else you will knock the blocks too far from the high-scoring center of the building platform. And, as builder, you get to be both constructively artful and strategically cunning in devising structures that are prone to wide dispersal upon impact.

Destruct 3 is a maturely crafted, all-wooden, eco-sensitive, heirloom-type, self-contained, hinge-boxed play tool, made of rubber tree wood, because "rubber-tree wood is a by-product of rubber harvests and is a sustainable resource." You're kids are going to want to play with it, and you're just going to have to let them - as they are old enough to be clear about who owns what and why.

Labels: Dexterity, Family Games

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Friday, April 27, 2007

Froggy Boogie

Froggy Boogie is a beautifully crafted, all-wood, many-pieced, memory/race game. There are 9 frogs that are set up in the middle of the play area (table, floor, bed - any flat surface). Each frog has places for two eyes. There are two different kinds of eyes (small cylinders that fit into the frogs eye-holes): One kind has an image of a baby frog on the bottom. The other doesn't. When setting the game up, players put one of each kind of eye in each frog. The challenge, which turns out to be significant enough even for adults (or perhaps especially for adults), is to remember, for each of the nine frogs, which eye has what. Wooden lily pads are placed around the cluster of frogs - this becomes the race track. Players begin the game by selecting a playing piece (one of six differently colored "baby frogs"). Two wooden dice are thrown. Each of the "adult frogs" (the ones with the eyes) is painted in two different colors. The throw of the dice determine exactly which adult frog gets chosen. The player then selects one of that frog's eyes. If there's not a baby frog on the bottom of the eye, the player gets to jump to the next lily pad and guess again. If there is, it's the next player's turn.

If memory isn't your forté it's reassuring to know that you can always rely on luck (there's a 50/50 chance you'll be right). If you're a kid, or you're interested in challenging your memory, you'll find the game challenging enough to make you want to take it most seriously.

The game is very attractive, to children as well as adults. It's colorful and funny - all those cross-eyed frogs. Yes, it requires extra care to keep track of the many pieces. But, because children will find the game fun to set up, and as challenging as it is attractive, the extra care required becomes an additional attraction - the game is its own special "collection" of bright wooden treasures.

The game is a race. The first player to get her baby frog back to the big lily, wins. For older kids, this is great fun - an incentive, an opportunity to demonstrate and be rewarded for a superior memory. For kids who have trouble dealing with losing (or winning), it might be necessary to change the rules a bit.

Luckily, the game is interesting enough, and flexible enough, to allow players to adapt it to the way they have the most fun playing. Because there is no board, you can arrange the frogs in any way you want. In fact, you can even rearrange the frogs during the game - making it all that much more challenging, and making the game that much more of an invitation to play for the whole family.

My grandkids happened to have a problem with competition. So, we played with only two baby frogs: the "Happy Frog" and the "Sad Frog." One of us would throw the dice, and then all of us would select the eye. We pooled our collective memory. If we guessed correctly, we'd move the Happy frog to the next lily. If we were wrong, the Sad frog would advance. No one "owned" either of the frogs. We were like gods, cheering for the Happy frog when the Happy frog won. Cheering for the Sad frog when she got to move. Sure, sure, we wanted to Happy frog to win. But, in the end, it turned out that the Sad frog won. Which, of course, made her Happy. And us, too.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games

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Friday, April 06, 2007

Balanko

Balanko is such a straightforward invitation to fun that you almost don't need to read the rules. There's a ball on a string. There's another ball that rides a curved track. There are pits of various score values - the center and widest pit being, naturally, both the easiest to get the ball into and of the lowest value. There are sliding scorekeepers to keep track of your achievements.

One player releases the rolling ball. The other player releases the swinging ball, hoping that the swinging ball will hit the rolling ball into a high scoring pit. The only other thing you might want to know, suggested-rule-wise, is that the ball-roller, sitting on the opposite side of the game, can try to catch the ball-swinger's, uh, ball. Which is actually a good idea, given that if she doesn't catch the swinging ball, and the rolling ball is still rolling, her opponent can try to catch it and again take yet another swing.

If nothing else happens, sooner or later the swinging ball is going to hit the rolling ball anyway. On the other hand, it could make the rolling ball go into either the ball-swinger's or the ball-roller's pit. So, if one player doesn't catch it, the other player might consider it strategically sound to grab for the swinging ball as soon as it's in range.

Setting it up is a bit less straightforward, but the instructions are clear, the steps few, and it is easy enough to do (once you rid yourself of certain expectations about how it "should" go together) that you won't mind having to take it apart and put it back together. Though you'll probably want to keep it assembled and ready to play with for-practically-ever.

We've given Balanko the coveted "Major Fun Family Game Award" because it is the kind of game that will be as much fun for kids as it will be for adults and probably even more fun for kids and adults together. For similar reasons, it's also getting a Party Games award, even though only two people can play it at a time. And, if that's not enough to interest you, you should know that it is being seriously considered a Keeper.

Labels: Dexterity, Family Games, Keeper, Kids Games, Party Games

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Thursday, April 05, 2007

Poppo

Poppo is what you might call "educational" and what you might even consider a "reading" game, and what you more than likely would classify as a "competitive" game for "little kids." In all cases, you'd be absolutely correct, and, simultaneously, wrong.

Remember a game called "Trouble?" My guess is that what you remember best about it is the "Pop-o-matic" thingy in the middle of the board - a transparent capsule housing a die, that you'd press down, let go, and watch it pop the die to a new number. And that's what you remember so well because popping the pop-o-matic was probably the most fun part of playing the game. Well, that's what at the heart of Poppo. Only the die is 8-sided instead of 6. It has letters on it instead of numbers. And there are two sets of 4 different die-poppers, each with a different combination of letters.

In addition to the die-poppers of endless delight, you also get a a box of cards with 100 different 3- or 4-letter words (illustrated), and a one-minute sand timer. A card is drawn, the timer turned, and two players (or teams) race to be the first to get their Poppo-poppers to spell the word on the card. And that's just about it. You can play it as a solitaire, you can play it cooperatively, you can play it with kids from 4 on up. You read me right, 4-years-old and up.

I first "tasted" it with a group of junior high school kids in a special education class. We evolved the "cooperative" approach together, because it was more fun. Some of the kids just wanted to keep popping - even after they managed to pop their Poppo-poppers to one of the letters in the word we were trying to spell. Others were frustrated by the time pressure. Others had trouble figuring out what letters were available in which Popper. (Each Popper has a different selection of letters, but here's also a wild card on every Popper- so, even if you have the wrong Popper, you'll eventually be able to spell the word anyway.) So we played it together, using all the Poppers, trying to see how many words we could spell before the timer ran out.

Aside from the multitude of instructional benefits that so clearly qualify this game for parental purchase, the important thing is that it's something kids will want to play again and again. There may be faster ways to teach reading or spelling or word recognition, but I don't think there's a way that is more fun than playing Poppo.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Word Games

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Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Number Chase

Number Chase is a number-guessing game, involving some serious arithmetic skills (like understanding greater than and less than, odd and even, number range and properties). But you don't have to tell the kids that. The game is so clearly fun, so gently challenging and enticing, that it just doesn't matter to the kids that actual arithmetic skills that are being exercised. Who, besides teachers and parents, cares about all that number comparison and identification and deductive reasoning? The important thing is that the game is actually fun enough to play and play again.

Number Chase is one more Major FUN-award-winning game in Playroom Entertainment's Bright Idea series. Designed by award-winning fun-maker Rienhard Staupe, the game consists of 50 thick cards. I emphasize "thick" because it is a testimony to the wisdom of a good game manufacturer - knowing that cards, in the passion of play, get mangled, creased, and generally yucky. By having the good sense to make the cards thick, we are gifted with a game that will last long enough for the whole family to enjoy.

There are 50 cards, numbered, as one might expect, 1-50. To play the game, the cards are placed on the table, sequentially, in 5 rows of ten. One player (let's call her the "emcee") writes down a "secret number" between, as advertised, 1 and 50 (all right, between 0 and 51, if you insist on literal betweeness). The guessing player or players select any card. If it just happens to be the right number, that player wins the round. If not, the card is turned over. On the other side of the card there's a question about the number the players are trying to guess (e.g. "Is the number less than 42?"). The emcee answers yes or no. Then another number is guessed. Another card turned over. Another question revealed ("Does the number have a "5" in it?"). Etc., etc., until the correct number is finally chosen.

Everybody stays involved in the game, because every answer is relevant, even when it's not your turn. So, everyone is having fun, everyone is thinking, deducing, exercising what he or she knows about number properties. And as the guesses become more and more educated, so do the players.

In other words, if you were trying to help educators understand the nature of a successful learning experience, Number Chase is the very game you'd want them to know about.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Thinking Games

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Monday, January 29, 2007

PDQ - a game for all reasons

PDQ is a sweet little word game - easy to learn, quick (Pretty Darn Quick) as a matter of fact - a game you can play by yourself or with maybe one, or several or even many other people?

You get a deck of 78 letter cards - nice looking, good stock, big, easy-to-read letter cards. You deal out three at a time, face-up. And then you see who can make a word first, or, in case of a tie, who can come up with a longer word. TLP, for example. Tulip. Sure. Or perhaps Platitude. Platitude. Of course. Longer than Tulip. (Did I mention that you can use the letters backwards or forwards?) (Did I also mention that you can use any number of letters before, between or after the three letters that you draw?) (And, of course, the letters have to be in the same order?)

Designed by Jay Thompson to be played by kids as well as adults (kids use just two cards at a time, word game experts can try playing with four), PDQ is pretty darn close to everything you would want in a word game - 5-30 minutes of engaging, challenging, and frequently laugh-producing fun.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Party Games, Thinking Games, Top for 2007, Word Games

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Monday, January 22, 2007

Whoonu

Whoonu? Good game. Good question. As in "who knew." Or, "who knew, out of a choice between goldfish, sand castles, climbing trees and fried chicken, you'd like climbing trees the best. Sure, sure, those people who don't know you from Adam wouldn't know such a thing. But even me, your best friend?"

You get 300 cards (a significant amount, but one can't help wonder if there are even more cards waiting to be expanded thereunto), six stacks of six chips, each stack worth one more point, and a small envelope in case you want to be extra certain that no one can see who thought what about you. So, on this turn, you're the one. Everybody else gets four cards. And sure, given that there are only four out of 300 cards, it's just as likely that there'll be something or nothing that you'll really like amongst the four. You remove the cards from the envelope of secrecy, contemplate them for a bit, and then place them, face-up on the table, in order of what you deem to be least to most favorite. Players then claim their cards, and you reward them with the corresponding chip - the highest scoring chip going to your favorite.

The game is just short enough to keep it light, just long enough to keep it involving. The game mechanic of the chips (when the chips are all used up, the round is over) makes the game that much easier to play.

And that's pretty much that. Simple, elegant, just enough luck to keep you from taking anything seriously, just enough to make you want to know as much about everybody as you can. For sure, you'll be learning a lot about each other. For also sure, you'll be laughing a lot, surprised a lot, feeling somehow closer to each other, having had just enough fun so that you don't really care who actually won - because just getting to play Whoonu together is already very much like winning.

Thanks to Kevin and delightful daughter Kelsey Eikenberry for introducing me to Whoonu. Feel free to thank me for introducing it to you.

Labels: Family Games, Party Games

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Sunday, December 17, 2006

Cosmic Cows

Cosmic Cows - you gotta love them cows. Tiny little, doll-like, plastic cows. All ten of them.

And then there's the game. You know Yahtzee? OK. Think of it as Yahtzee with cows. And you're playing a Yahtzee kind of tug-of-war with your opponent, trying to get maybe all 5 dice the same so you can super beam the middle cow, as it were, all the way to your winning zone. Kinda like getting a Yahtzee in, uh, Yahtzee. Or maybe a full-house so you can move one cow three spaces closer to you and the other, two. Before, of course, your opponent, no doubt, pulls them back. Ten different cows to shoot for. Five different dice. The number of spaces a cow gets to move depends on how many dice show that number. Oh, and you get three rolls, like as in, well, Yahtzee.

But it's not Yahtzee. It's Cosmic Cows, and darn if those little cows and that dicey equivalent of tug-of-warring them back and forth across the board doesn't make it feel like something really different than Yahtzee. Not like a dice game at all. But a board game. And a sweet, light, semi-strategic board game it is. One that has very cute little plastic cows and is really easy to learn how to play - especially if you know how to play games like Yahtzee.

Labels: Family Games

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Friday, August 25, 2006

Chuckers

The people who've developed Chuckers like to call it a "family tossing game."

By "tossing game" they mean a game that involves, well, tossing things, as does, for example, horseshoes, and a variety of bean bag and target games, and of course washer toss, a game called, strangely enough, "cornhole," and most relevantly perhaps that quoits game where you throw rings around pegs.

So, in a way, if you know any one of these games, you'll know how to play Chuckers. In another way, because it combines different aspects of traditional games to result in a completely different, and, arguably, a far more majorly fun game - because it's a family game.

By "family" they mean a game that can be played by just about anybody - especially if you're kinda loose about the rules. Which you can be, easily. Because the game is almost self-explanatory. Because the game is so well made.

And because the game is as much luck as it is skill. Very interesting - how combining luck and skill, in just the right manner, so that you really half believe that you can master the thing, learn the right control, the precision positioning of finger and ring and foot and eye, while at the same time, you half know that it's really luck, not skill - sheer luck that your ring thing landed around the farthest peg or into the farthest target or wound up leaning on a peg, giving you exactly 21 points! Just enough luck so that anyone, regardless of skill, can win. Even you.

The rings you toss are made of rubber and steel. They've got, what you'd call, "heft." The things you toss them into are, however, way heftier. Thick, sturdy, and yes, what you could only call "industrial strength" plastic. They are connected by a rope which is exactly as long as the recommended distance between the two targets. It's a game you can leave out for a while, at a family party, in a playground, a park, a classroom...

Labels: Family Games

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Monday, August 21, 2006

Blokus Trigon

Blokus Trigon is a hexagonal version of the Major Fun awarded strategy game, Blokus, which you can now play online.

What's the difference between the hexagonal Trigon and the square Blokus? Well, there is an extra piece (22 vs. 21) in Trigon, and the shapes, though similar in variety to pentominoes, are built of triangles as opposed to squares.

But the rules are basically the same. And the play is basically the same. And both games have variations for 1-4 players (yes, solitaire versions, of significantly enticing challenge, I might add).

I can only think of one significant difference - a purely visual one, which, my friend, is more than significant enough. Since so much of playing Blokus depends on the ability to perceive shapes, changing from a square to a triangular unit makes all the difference. Even for a Blokus master, Blokus Trigon is a whole new game.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Thinking Games

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Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Luck of the Draw

Luck of the Draw is described as "a game for the artistically challenged." And I am happy to tell you that this turns out to be a remarkably accurate description of the very people who will have the most fun playing it: the people who don't like games that make them draw.

Which is exactly what Luck of the Draw does. It makes you draw. Things like: a monkey or a space shuttle or a bad hair day; a piranha, a used car or a dream date (there are three things to draw on each card, see, and the roll of the die tells you which one).

But the part of the game that makes the drawing actually fun and the fun actually Major, comes from another deck of cards, called "categories." Categories like: "most over the top," "most dramatic," "stands out like a sore thumb."

For it turns out that these cards, these "category" cards, serve as the criteria by which the drawings are judged, don't you know. So, pretty much despite my assiduous efforts at a 45-second 3-D rendering of the Eiffel Tower in perspective with enticing hints of a chiaroscoro-like Parisian dawn, if the category turns out to be "Best Example of Minimalism," I have no myopic critics to rail against, and nothing to show for my outstanding efforts but unrequited artistic angst. Whilst you, who only managed to draw a large, narrow, and somewhat crooked "A," bask in the applause of your peers.

And for those players who have professional artistic aspirations, Luck of the Draw is a preternaturally poignant experience, capturing, with unavoidable clarity, the famously fickle fortunes of those who stake their livelihood on the currentmost definitions of "good art."

Labels: Family Games, Party Games, Senior-Worthy, Top for 2006

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Friday, July 21, 2006

Combo King

Combo King is, from time to time, a game that makes you laugh. Sadly, what you are laughing at is someone else's failure.

A failure of very little significance in the scheme of things, mind you. Which, I believe, is precisely what makes this game as fun as it is.

You have these dice. A significant number, actually. Eight, to be precise. And you have these cards. And on these cards are somewhat Yahtzee-like tasks. A remarkable array of significantly different Yahtzee-like tasks. Like "Use three dice and up to three rolls to get a multiple of five." And if you succeed in this task as described on a card that was in your hand and is now on the table, you get to get rid of the card, and you get chips. You get more chips, wouldn't you know, depending on the odds, you see, against your success. The first player who is out of cards wins.

Amazing how different some of the cards are from each other, and how compelling it is to try to figure out the odds. Similarly intriguing is the fact that the chips you win can be used, don't you see, to purchase things like, say, another roll, or perhaps get another entire turn, or make one of your opponents pickup another card or trade a card with you or, well, you see, here you get to experience, in all its fullness, the "screw" if you'll excuse the expression, "you effect." Again, the oppressed oppress the oppress giving themselves totally over to luck and vindication. It's great fun.

Labels: Family Games, Party Games, Senior-Worthy

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Thursday, July 20, 2006

Giza

You get this board, see, with a map showing the location of three pyramids and the Sphinx. And all these easily punch-out-able (I mean, so easily punch-outable that it makes the punch-out ritual itself a delight of great sheerness), thick, cardboard tiles. You each get four. At a time. Some of the tiles aren't so good. Some of the tiles are explosive. Some are worth many more points. Some many less. And you try to build up your entire city, as it were, one card at a time. And perhaps the most shall we say "fascinating" aspect of this game is that, at every turn, you have the choice of of using one of your tiles to do something good for yourself or bad to any of the perhaps 5 other players who also have the choice, on their turn, to use their tiles do something good for themselves, or bad to you. While at the same time, you win just about entirely by the luck of the shall we say "draw?."

It is at least cosmic in its implications, and deeply revelatory of the human condition.

Giza as serious gamers might say, is a "filler." Relatively easy to learn (depending on who's doing the teaching) and fundamentally what one might call a "light-hearted" game. In fact, I'm going to call it that:

"Giza, the light-hearted game of mutual betrayal." - Major Fun, Himself

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games

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Monday, July 17, 2006

Tumblin-Dice

Think of perhaps shuffleboard with dice. Think, for example, of a shuffleboard that is on five levels, with, where there were once pucks to slide, dice to, well, slide perhaps or flick or shove. A shuffleboard looking pretty much exactly like this.

Think further of the role, or roll, of luck - how the dice, even though you try to slide them everso carefully, tend to change faces when they descend a level. There's an intimation of the possibility that one could control all of this, making the die land 6-up even by the time it reaches the X4 level after having knocked all the opponents' dice to off-table oblivion. On the other hand, there's an unavoidable element of luck which makes a 7-year-old often as successful as a 57-year-old. Think of this, and you'll understand, almost immediately, why Tumblin' Dice has received a Major Fun Family Game award.

If you know shuffleboard, you'll know how to play Tumblin' Dice. When I introduced the game at the Tasting, I asked my fellow Tasters to play the game without looking at the rules. With almost no discussion, they played almost exactly the way the designer had intended them to. Because the game was so easy to figure out, it is exceptionally welcome in a variety of settings, especially recreation centers, classrooms and my house.

Speaking of classrooms, the game requires enough arithmetical calculations to make it actually useful in almost any elementary school setting. When a die lands in special scoring sections of the board, the face value of the die is multiplied by a given factor. So, in figuring out a total score players exercise both additional and multiplication, and, one might argue, even algebraic skills.

But don't let its educational implications fool you. Tumblin-Dice is an invitation to minutes or hours of play, for kids, for adults, for the whole darn community. Did I mention adults? The kind of adults who might be interested in playing, um, professionally?

It's made as well as it plays - a big, polished, two-piece all wood, table-worthy game that you might never put away. Ever.

Labels: Dexterity, Family Games, Keeper, Kids Games, Senior-Worthy

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Thursday, February 23, 2006

Space Faces

"Space Faces" is what you call a game that includes 120 different (that is correct, different, as in no two alike) alien-like heads, printed, in full color, in six concentric rings on a large game board - a board full of Space Faces.

If you happen to look at the faces, eyes, mouths and noses of the 120 different Space Faces, you just might notice that there are 5 different colors of each. So, if you happen to be looking for, say, a Space Face with a yellow face, blue eyes, purple mouth and red nose, you'll find one, and only one.

Which one you're supposed to find is determined by the "Alien Identification Device" - a plastic saucer with a transparent dome, 5 marbles (each of a different color), and a concave surface for the marbles to roll around on, and 4 holes, one for each facial feature. So, you shake the saucer, and the marbles find their holish destinies. One of the holes is twice as deep as it should be, so that the first marble that falls into it is covered by the second. Thus, 5 different colors (marbles), 4 different attributes (holes). It's such an elegant device, and works so efficiently, and it's so fun to play with, that it, alone, is almost enough to make the game a strong candidate for Major Funhood.

Space Faces is a family game for 2-4 players. The challenge (matching, visual discrimination, speed) is enticing and complex enough to interest an adult, and yet well within the mental capacities of a kindergartener.

So now we do in fact have a game that is Major FUN award-worthy. Easy enough for a 4-year-old to understand, complex enough for an adult to enjoy. This is a major achievement in game design.

The game also includes elaborate, toy-like scorekeeping devices, that actually do make the process of keeping score easier. I, on the other hand, prefer not to keep score. It might have something to do with how embarrassed it might make me to reveal how visually inept I am. On the other hand, the game is so much fun that you don't really have to keep score at all. All the more Major the Fun, I say. Especially when you're playing with kids who don't really understand what winning is for or why you should be happy that you made the game end.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games

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Monday, September 26, 2005

Sitting Ducks Gallery

Sitting Ducks Gallery - it's like a carnival game. You know, the one where you shoot ducks. Plastic ducks. Floating in a row. Very much like that. Except there's no gun. And the ducks are printed on cards. And they don't move unless you move them yourself. Which, depending on what card you pick, you sometimes get to do. Other than those minor changes, it's really exactly like a shooting at those floating ducks in a carnival game. Except you're shooting at each other's ducks. And they're not exactly floating.

Playroom Entertainment's "Sitting Ducks Gallery" is at least as fun as the "real thing," and a lot funnier. A "quacky card game" by Keith Meyers, Sitting Ducks Gallery features two sets of cards, a set of 6 targets, and a folding board (the gallery). One set of cards (the deck with the yellow back) is full of ducks (six different colors - one for each player) and water (drawings thereof). The other deck (red-backed) is used to target and shoot and move the ducks, and to, well, duck, so to speak. Targeting is separate from shooting, naturally, which adds a definite strategic tang to the tension.

The game (for 3-6 players, ages 10 and older, with 20-30 minutes to devote to something significantly fun) is humorously illustrated and well-made. We loved the look and feel of the cards and were taken by the cleverness of the simulated shooting gallery. Each player selects a duck color. There are six ducks of each color. The remaining ducks are removed from play. There are 41 cards in the Duck Deck. The other 5 cards are water. The Duck Deck (I love saying that) is shuffled, stacked, and placed on the right side of the shooting gallery board. The top six cards from the DD are then placed on the board, one in each space. There are 52 cards in the Action Deck. Actions include things like: shoot and misfire, double barrel (targeting two adjacent ducks), bump left and right (moving the target marker), various cards that allow you to move the ducks, and two defensive cards: "duck and cover" and "bottoms up." Each player draws a hand of 3 cards. As the game progresses (depending on the action cards played), the ducks move off the board and back into the bottom of the deck - very much like the circulating ducks in a shooting gallery.

It's most definitely a competitive game. Basically, you're trying to shoot everyone else's ducks, hoping, in the mean time, to duck everyone else's shots. One of the things we appreciated most about the game was that even if all your ducks get shot, you still get to stay in the game, shooting merrily away at your opponents until only one player has any ducks left.

Despite all the different kinds of Action Cards, game play continues to be elegant, enjoyable, and essentially ducky. It is easy to learn, and remains fun to the very end. Major FUN.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games, Thinking Games

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Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Castle Keep - a Keeper

Castle Keep is a tile placement game of luck, strategy and significant fun, for 2 to 4 players, ages 8 and up.

There are 90 cardboard tiles (thick, colorful). There are three different kinds of tiles (corner pieces called "towers"), side pieces ("walls"), and central pieces ("keeps"). There are three different shapes of corner and side pieces (straight, zigzag and curvy), and three different colors. You start with any four of them. Your goal: build a complete castle of 9 tiles, with all the outside, adjacent tiles of the same color or shape, and a "keep" whose color matches any tile in the castle. Your other goal: destroy your opponent's castle. Accomplish either, and you win the game.

OK, so destroying an opponent's castle is a little harder than building your own. Well, it should be. You have to have a wall or corner tile that exactly matches (color and shape), and two Keep tiles of the same color as your opponent's Keep.

You might want to be careful about building a castle whose walls are both the same color and shape as their towers. Granted, it's a lot prettier. But there's a price for beauty: if one piece gets attacked, and adjacent pieces are the same color and shape, they are also, well, shall we say "obliterated?"

<The two-player version is just different enough (you only build one castle, and try to be the player to complete it) to make it, well, different - different enough to make you have to find a different strategy in order to win. Which makes it like having two different games. And then there's a solitaire version. And then there are variations.

Designed by Richard D. Reece, Castle Keep has just enough strategic elements to entice the serious game player, just enough luck to keep everyone, adults and kids, from getting too serious to know when they're having fun, and is just long enough (around 20 minutes) to keep people deeply and happily engaged.

A definite keeper of Major FUN proportions.

A claimer (I was going to day "disclaimer," but it seemed too negative): rumors have it that Gamewright, the manufacturer of this certifiably Major FUN Award-Winning game, has contracted with Major FUN, him- (and my-) self, to produce a new card game actually designed by the aforementioned. Though these rumors are rumored to be true, this exceptionally good news for all fun kind has in no way impacted the impartiality and integrity of this reviewer. Castle Keep is a game worth keeping, no matter who manufactures it. And that's the troof.

Labels: Family Games, Keeper

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Friday, April 29, 2005

Maask

Maask is a lovely game - easy to learn and understand, easy to play, and, most remarkably, as the game continues, it gets even more interesting.

It's a well-made, wooden game, of the quality we've come to expect from Blue Orange Games. There are 12 wooden pegs that come in 6 different colors. These "jewels" are hidden in 12 wooden cylinders, all of the same color, and placed around a board that looks like a crown. A pair of six-sided dice determine which colors the player is trying to find.

At first, it seems like a simple memory game. If you can remember which color is where, chances are you'll be able to find the colors you roll. Then it gets a little more complex. Once a color is correctly identified, the peg and cylinder become the temporary property of the player who guessed it, who then arranges her prizes in a line in front of her. If you can remember which colors she has where, then you have a better chance of winning when it is your turn, because you can take anyone's "jewels." Of course, this means you have to forget where the colors were originally.

As the game continues, and "jewels" change hands and places, the challenge increases. This goes on until the last jewel is taken from the playing board crown. The rules even encourage the players to help each other, keeping in mind that it is always a strategic decision whom to help and why.

Having two dice to play is an act of compassion on the designer's part, because, with two colors, there's always the chance that you might know where the next one is. If you know where both colors are, you, most deservedly, get another turn.

Maask is a genuine family-worthy game, of interest to anyone who has a memory, fun for anyone who likes to play.

Labels: Family Games, Kids Games

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