Rainy Days & Mondays...

Are perfect for gaming (forget about getting me down).

We finally got some long awaited packages at the house (actually delivered to Nana's house).  I told Sadie that one of the packages was for her.  It was not the vitamin D and fish oils with omega 3 fatty oils.  It was the Chutes & Ladders the My Little Pony version.  I've been playing games with Sadie that are recommended for ages 4 & up.  Candy-Land is for 3 &Up and Monkey Dunk is for 4 & up.  For different reasons, I agree with both of these age ratings.  Chutes & Ladders is suggested for 2 & up.  This rating is spot on.  It's not that a three year-old can't play all of the games, but some of the movement concepts are trickier than others.  I've learned through observation that counting numbers (Chutes & Ladders) is easier than counting colors (Candy Land).  We played one quick game of Chutes & Ladders on Friday night to get the rules down. Rain was in the forecast for the following day.

The next day was Sunday and it never rained, but Sadie wanted to play games so I obliged.  As I said in my previous blog, I wanted to play Pandemic.  I haven't played it in quite a while and wanted to get the cobwebs out of my addled brain.  Pandemic is a cooperative game, so it allows for some fun solo play.  The object is to save the world from rapidly spreading epidemics.  The players are researchers searching for the cures. This game is lots of fun.  For fans of Risk, think Risk on steroids.  It teaches cooperation and high level strategy.  I've seen it being sold at Toys r Us, so it's not hard to find.


I re-read the rules and set up the game.  Sadie was in charge of the colored blocks.  These blocks represent different diseases that can wipe out life on the planet.  We separated them into the different colors (sorting & classifying) which took a while.  I let Sadie do this while I taught myself the game. After that, she was in charge of handing the blocks to me as different cities became infected.  She called it "The Block Store" and acted like a retail sales-person handing me the requested blocks.

She would play her own games until it was time to "infect" a city with the pandemic blocks.  I called for the "blocker" (her words not mine) and she'd run over, open a pretend door and close it.  She was wearing her new Disney Frozen schoolbag all day, so she would remove this and come over the the playing board and say "Can I help you?"  She counted out the blocks of different colors and went on her merry way, closing the door behind her. Needless to say, between my re-learning the game and the block store, this game took longer than usual.

At the point in the game shown above, it looked good for the researchers to save the world!

The game-play itself was quite good.  Although it took me a bit to get the hang of it and I had to refer to the rules often, it was an exciting game.  I was on the verge of finding a cure for all four diseases when a chain reaction outbreak occurred in the Pacific Rim countries.  All of the red cube were instantly placed on the board as country after country got infected.  When all of the cubes of any one color are used up, the researchers lose.  I was one move away from winning & I lost.  Sadie cheered; she cheered because the My Little Pony game was next on the bill.

An exciting game of Ups & Downs & RAINBOWS!

Mickey Mouse Yogurt - It's all about licensed product at our house!

We had a snack before starting up Chutes & Ladders.  Sadie always surprises me these days.  She remembered a lot from the one game that we played the previous night.  She remembered that ladders go up and chutes (slides) go down.  She even remembered how to get to the finish line.  The concept that is tricky for her right now is the winning spin: it must be the exact number.  So, if you're three spaces away from the end, you must roll three.  I could change the rules for now, but I decided not to.  Part of learning to play games is learning to play by the rules.  One thing I do is make the game about the characters and not about us.  What I mean is that when she or I win, it is Pinky Pie, Rainbow Dash or Princess Twilight Sparkle (The Ponies) who wins.  She gets excited when the character that she is playing wins, sure, but it's not terrible if another character wins.  I figure that this is a way of easing her into the concept of winning and losing.

We played two games before dinnertime.  Sadie loves spinning the spinner.  There's no dice in this game, so I have nothing to catch as they fly across the table.  Sometimes she spins it time and time again making it impossible to see the number.  What I do like about the game-board itself is that the spaces are numbered 1-100.  I can help her count and tell her which space to put her game piece on.  For example: 53 is "Five-Three" and "Fifty-three".  In the long run, it doesn't matter who wins.  To be honest, this is quite a good game.  The concept of ladders moving the pieces ahead quickly is balanced by the slides sending them back.  Theses are both varying lengths, so a player can be at the bottom of the board and be moved to the top and vice-versa.  As a game player, I love that.  It's not the ponies, I swear it's not.  This was followed by dinner: grilled chicken wraps.

Weekday gaming with Sadie & Daddy

Tuesday afternoon... well spent

Keri is working for a few days reviewing Global History with some of her students, so Sadie and I have some time on our hands.  On Monday afternoon, I picked up a box of X-Men, Days of Future Past heroclix game pieces.  Sadie helped me to open the game pieces that night and she got two Angels (I got one).  I promised her that we could play games the next day. Game playing is an important skill to teach children, and I'm not talking about video games  Board games and strategy games are important, skill based games that can teach logical thinking. I may be starting with some complicated games (see the next round for balance a being struck), but I love spending time with Sadie as she does with me.  I play her "imagines" (her word for stories) and she plays heroclix; a fair trade off I must say.  We ran an errand to Home Depot (I have to go back because, once again, they sold me the wrong stuff!) and then returned home to play and eat lunch.

I explain characters' names a lot

Anyway...  Sadie got some pieces of her own and I got to play a solo game.  I must admit that I am rusty at playing heroclix and playing with a three year old doesn't help.  Those are my excuses for getting Mystique killed very quickly.  The game was The X-men -vs-The Brotherhood of evil mutants.  For those of you who know the movies, the comic book line-ups are a little different.  In this version, Professor X is alive and Nightcrawler is a main player.  Mystique from the movies is part of this game, but most of the other villains aren't in the movies.  Destiny, one of the other villains can control the outcome of the dice roll by making the player roll again (once per turn).  I'd like to see her in the movies; clairvoyance is cool.

The Battle for The Savage Land

The X-Men

The Wolverine, who won a Tony Award, is on this team, of course, as are other characters who're in the movies.  You've got Halle Berry, who won an Academy Award, Patrick Stewart (too many awards to mention) and more.  The best piece on this team is Professor X; he can see through anything or anyone to shoot.  An awesome ability coupled with psychic blast and he can take out a villain single handily.

The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants

On this team we have very little star power. Jennifer Lawrence (Mystique) does have an Academy Award, but that hardly trumps the pure star power of The X-Men.  Sure The Blob and Pyro have been in the movies, but not Avalanche or Destiny.  The best piece here seems to be Avalanche (who?) who can special attack all characters within a range of five spaces.

Jennifer Lawrence is down!

As previously mentioned, Mystique was knocked out of the game pretty quickly.  It was my fault for the following reasons: I forgot her special power, I forgot her shape-change, I forgot Destiny's probability control and I probably forgot some other things as well.  The next time I play I've got to pay closer attention to detail (I'm funny like that).  It took me a couple of turns to figure out Wolverine's special healing power which is called regeneration in this game.  The Blob (in a black XXXXXXXXXLarge tank top) seen here is pretty formidable, but Prof. X wiped him up.  Avalanche (in the silver helmet) did do some damage, but the X-Men won.  Sadie got to play with her Angel figures and roll the dice.  She also loves the movement markers which are poker chips with pictures of characters on them.

Angel is flying high

The next round for the day is...

Monkeys don't wear pants

The set up is simple

We've got a spin on the classic game Ants in The Pants - Monkey Dunk!  Sadie is just getting the hang of it.  The lessons with this one are manual dexterity and patience.  The game is suggested for ages 4 & up.

The new version of the classic is called Monkey Dunk.  We call it "jumping monkeys" which is much more fun to scream at the top of our lungs.  The concept is the same, press down on plastic tiddlywinks type pieces and get them into the target. Instead of pants, as with ants, the monkeys jump into a swimming hole.  I guess this is more sensitive to the types of people who would have ants in their pants.  We don't want our children mocking anyone; mockery is not a lesson taught in children's board games (that comes later).

I agree with the age of 4+ for this one.  Sure, we have fun, flippin' monkey fun!  But Sadie doesn't have the strength in her fingers to make the monkeys jump very far.  It almost gets frustrating for her, but when we play together she cheers at the monkeys.  Whether I make them jump, she makes them jump or we work on it together she cheers when they jump into to swimming hole..  Once she gets the skill down we'll have plenty of fun.  My master plan is to teach her to play games and love playing games much as Keri and I do.

Games for all (especially me)!

The weekend of July 12th began on Friday for me when my daughter asked, "Can we play Hulk?"  You must understand that I've given her a good hand-full of Heroclix figures to play with.  These include a Valkyrie, a Polaris with a twisted head and an Incredible Hulk.  We usually put on plays with these, but I took the opportunity on this day to set up a solo game of Heroclix and let her play along.  I went with a Hulk-Themed game.  It took a while to set up, a three year old can ask a lot of questions, after all.  It was a battle for the moon: The Defenders vs The Intelligentsia!

The Defenders  (Classic Line-up)

The Defenders, with the help of The Silver Surfer, land on the moon.  They've heard that the moon's surface was under threat.  And it was!  The Leader and his band of villains are trying to take it over in order to strike the earth.

Sadie checks out the line-up

In hindsight, I should have lined The Defenders up along the side of the table where my daughter was watching.  Sure she loved the Robot Hulk, but he's not the real thing.  The thing that caught her attention was Doc Sampson's punch (indicated on the clix by a transparent swoosh).  The "bad Hulks quickly surrounded the real Hulk as would really happen in the Marvel Universe.  Namor went off on his own to attack the first human he saw and Doctor Strange and The Silver Surfer, as is their nature, helped The Hulk.

Notice the swoosh on Doc Sampson

The Hulk had a tough battle, but he prevailed.  The combo of the three Defenders was too much for the bad Hulks.  And the real Hulk, I soon discovered, can take a lot of close combat punishment.

Sadie rolls the dice!

The game was great for me, the Defenders are my favorite.  For my daughter it was an exercise in not grabbing, asking before touching and waiting her turn.  In those respects the game was a great success.  She got to play with the dice and got to play with game pieces and tokens as long as she asked first.  The gaming day did not end there...  We ran a couple of errands and moved onto the next round!

The next round of "gaming"

I couldn't make my poor daughter play Heroclix all day, or could I????  NO! NO!  NO!

We have the Disney Princess version of Candy Land at home.  For those of you who don't know, or don't remember, the movement mechanic of this game is based on drawing color cards, double color cards and special movement cards at random.  (It sounds really funny to talk about Candy Land in "game-speak" AND it is).  The challenge here isn't the colors, kids learn those pretty early, it's the movement!  The twisty, turny board is tricky for little players.  So we patiently count colors until we get the idea.  This can take a couple of games to get straightened out.

Cinderella!

Sadie chose Cinderella and I chose Belle from Beauty and the Beast.  I'd like to tell you that I chose this because of the old Jean Cocteau film of the same name.  The film was ground-breaking in terms of story telling techniques and special effects created with camera tricks.  The film... blah, blah, blah.  Sadie said "You're Belle."  So I was Belle.  It was actually a close game with Cinderella winning and getting to the Princess Party first.  My daughter was quite happy.

Quite Happy!

That would have been great, if that was the end.  Up Next....

This game came in the mail the same day.  It's a hide & seek type game based on Jack The Ripper.  I bought this because it appeals to my liking for games and my wife's interest in sordid crimes.  We played one round which she won.  The learning curve is big.  The set-up of this game can be daunting, but once you play it, it is simple and logical.  It took us about two hours to play the first game.  Subsequent games should take less.