Some games with the kids

Recently Melissa was sick and spent the day in bed, during the day amongst time spent in the cubby house, meals, reading (for Daughter the Elder) and the occasional DVD both the girls wanted to play games. Although there are some games that we all play together, this day was a day of two player games.

First up was the Stock Market Game. Daughter the Elder has been quite a fan of this for a while, I was when I was young too. She tends to hoard her cash a little too much instead of buying and selling, but still does quite well. For some reason she was getting bored after a while and called this game early, she was worth twice as much as me. Every game of this I have logged has been with her, we are rated #2 in plays for this game at about half the #1 player.

Daughter the Younger had been watching us play and she now wanted a turn, Color Clowns was her game of choice. To avoid the end game tedium of trying to roll a combination that you didn't already have, e.g. a purple triangle, we allowed three rolls to try and get something that allowed you to place a tile. This speeds the game up nicely. A win to Daughter the Younger.

We then played Marrakesh. As I have mentioned before Daughter the Younger pretty much learnt this by osmosis, just watching the rest of us play. She is now fully versant with the rules and plays it very well.

In our first time through the bag, all four sandstorms came out in a row which meant one camel lost to the sandstorms for me. Daughter the Younger still likes to take green and yellow goods from the market (the generally poor scoring ones), so she is also given a red or blue as appropriate for real scoring. She managed to get her fourth camel off the board whilst I still had two camels within reach of the end. Unfortunately two of the three tiles I drew were sandstorms so I only managed to get one of them to the market in time. A 22-15 win for Daughter the Youngeer.

Next was Daughter the Elder and Spy Alley. I have mainly only played this two player and occasionally three player and it may play a bit differently with more players but it really does feel under-developed. There seem to quite a few more Move cards than you are ever going to use and many many more times Free Gift cards than are ever going to be picked up. The quality of the components varies from excellent to mediocre. We have found that the lure of the possible $20 for going into Spy Alley and the likely hood of being hit with a $5 fine for avoiding Spy Alley means that it used around 90-95% of the time. Those comments aside, it is still a reasonable kids game and Daughter the Elder and I have logged more games than anyone else on BGG. We played three games and unlike any of the times we had ever played before a wild card was drawn from the Free Gift deck. No wonder they are worth $50 to "acquire" from another player, in each game that they were drawn that player won. In our other game Daughter the Elder guessed who I was. 2-1 victories in favour of Daughter the Elder.

After dinner and before Daughter the Elder's bed time it was time for Balloon Cup. We have been playing this since she was five. It was a closely contested game, but I grabbed my third third trophy the card before she would have picked up the other two trophies and probably the third as well.

After Daughter the Elder went to bed, Daughter the Younger requested one more game. This time it was Space Race. A simple roll and move game, but the spaces are well colour coordinated and you can learn the planets in the solar system as you play, although I am not entirely sure why the space ships are racing to reach the sun. A house rule we have implemented is that you do not have to roll the exact number to reach the sun, it can lengthen the game hideously. This was another win to Daughter the Younger.

There ended the day of games with Daughter the Elder and Daughter the Younger.