When the goal is to participate ...

There's an interesting thread on the Geek this week about playing games with children, questioning whether the "my two year old can beat me at World in Europe" claims are quite what they are cracked up to be.

Earlier this year, I posted about playing Cluedo (Clue) with both the kids. We dealt cards to me, Fraser and Biggie, and played what was really a 3-player game, except that Otto rolled dice and moved her person, occasionally sucked one of us over into whatever room she was in, and was shown cards when she did. As I said at the time, by no stretch of the imagination was she playing Cluedo, but she was engaging in a family gaming activity (and loving it).

Over the past year and a half, I have been asked several times about games that a much younger child (or a disabled child) can join in and play with the family - even if they are playing by different rules.

Here are some that I can think of.

Carcassonne - this one stands out as obvious. The younger child can enjoy the 'co-operative jigsaw' aspects of the game, while the rest of the family plays. Add a random element by giving the smallest player Meeples to play with and making the rest of the family comply with the 'one meeple per area' placement rules, or just ignore their Meeples and keep going.

The Bucket King - we actually tried this yesterday, by request. "I want to play the Buckets game." Build your bucket pyramids, then each play cards in turn. But only the cards you play on your turn count. We played with hands of 7 cards and allowed play of 2 cards together to beat an 8. All stacking (and especially collapsing) rules applied. (This is a little different to the other games on the list, in that we weren't playing by the "real" rules either)

Make 'n' Break - children are surprisingly adept at building things with blocks. Don't worry about the time limit, of give your youngest one a little longer - depending on the child, they may just be happy to build and knock down structures of their own devising until the timer rings.

Ingenious - more pattern matching - don't bother keeping score, just take turns matching the patterns. Again, in a multi-player game, a very young child represents a random element but that can add attraction.

What other games can you think of? Remember, participation is the goal here.

-Melissa

Day tripping - with games

A friend recently told me my posts here (and elsewhere) were very 'suburban'. Here's another one for you, Jon :)

Winter School holidays are here and that meant it was time for me and Biggie to have a Big Outing somewhere. This week, it was Sovereign Hill - a recreation of an 1850s central Victorian goldfields town, and a favourite place for us all to visit.

Unbeknownst to the Bigster, though, the attraction these holidays was not the opportunity to go down t'pit and into the mines, but SNOW! The operators trucked in snow from Mount Buller, some 200 kms away, to create a giant snow slide and to give some snow play opportunities. In addition, snow machines created "snowfalls" every hour or so up and down Main Street. (This wasn't 'real' fake snow though - it looked like teeny tiny bubbles).

The drive up was peaceful - Biggie speculating on how many mine tours we could squeeze in, while I listened to the most recent Metagamers podcast - featuring Gerald and Jim (Linnaeus and ekted) discussing my favourite game ever, The Princes of Florence. Biggie would intervene every so often to ask why they said something, or to complain (sorry guys) that it was boring and she wanted to listen to the Winx Club soundtrack songs instead. Now there's intellectual stimulation for you.


We arrived just in time for Biggie's first snowfall, followed by a visit to the "snowfields". Cold white and fluffy was definitely the order of the day, and we didn't get down the mines at all.

Biggie's favourite moment? The Giant Snowslide.
My favourite moment? Hot chocolate - inside :)

The volunteers were advertising a show of "parlour games" - 19th century boardgames - in the Mechanics' Institute, so we hurried to get there. Now I'm a big fan of Sovereign Hill, and I'm a big supporter of volunteer effort - but I think this little exhibition could have had a bit more thought put into it. The volunteers were able to describe how to play two of the five or so games that were laid out, although their knowledge of knucklebones (which we called jacks when I was a little girl) was a tad shaky. The other games? No idea - and they looked strangely at Biggie when she wanted to fiddle with the pieces and try to work out how to play.

No matter though - one of the games was dynamite. I cannot imagine why no-one is (as far as I know) producing a commercial version of Shove Ha'penny - it's one of the more interesting dexterity games I have played.


The wooden board features a barrier/built-up section at one end, and a series of (9?) sections along the board, each just a little wider than the eponymous penny/ha'penny.

To play, players hang three pennies (or ha'pennies) off the end of the board and then give them a shove. The object is to get your penny to stop between two of the lines - that is, completely within one of the sections and not overlapping at all. There is a blackboard/slate section along each side, and the goal appears to be to get a mark in each of the 9 delineated sections along the blackboard.

Biggie and I played this until we felt we were expected to stop, and we had a great time. I was trying to bounce my pennies off the backboard and back onto the rows, while she was trying to score some of the earlier rows.

I would love to get my own copy of this game - and I think my mum still has a tin of old pennies at home, if we get tired of playing with 20 cent pieces.


Back home at the end of the day, we headed out to the local malaysian restaurant for dinner. Otto coloured in, while Biggie entertained me and Fraser with a description of what she knew about Princes of Florence.

Here's what she had to say today when I asked her to recap:

There are three main strategies. I can only remember two.

• Cheap – he or she always buys cheap things. The cheap player may also get Jesters, but cheaply.


• Mad Jester – loves to get Jesters, to get works and from that he gets points that you can transform into money. The Mad Jester player would willingly give up at least 1000 Fluoros, so that they can get a Jester. The player that is using the strategy of “Mad Jester” has an advantage in the game.

Three types of landscapes:

• Forest is the cheapest but more people tend to use forests. The two smallest buildings in the game have forests.


• Park has the most value though not many people tend to use that landscape
• And lake is in the middle.

Buildings may not touch each other.

In your hand, you have types of personalities. When you choose artists, you try to get an artist with those kinds of personalities.

There are seven rounds in the game. In the first round, there is the number 7 involved. In number 5, it’s 15 and in round 7 it’s 17.

The least you can get anything for is 200 Fluoros.

Usually it would take at least one round to get money out of the works.

Mum was mentioned because she plays Princes of Florence a lot on BSW.

Each player has one courtyard to build in.

You try and get as many people into your hand as possible.

Mum, do you get GeekGold for blogs? Because if you did, that wouldn’t be fair, it should come to me if I wrote it.

In fairness, she did call them Florins on Thursday night. I just used Fluoros cos she said it today and it was cute. And her BGG ID is - apparently - DaughterTheElder (Fraser set it up, and Biggie was already taken).

Do you think I should tip her?

---


Happy gaming!

- Melissa

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.