Cataan junior is surprisingly good. Jenga. Dixit
Yeah, I can’t personally speak to Zooloretto, other than I know it is a popular pick for those with kids older than mine. Animal upon Animal and Monza were considerations for my son, but ultimately opted for Sorry Sliders instead as my son loves Cars, so… yeah. But it looks like a fine take on the Pitch Car style.
The problem for me is my kid is younger, so many of the kid friendly games skew more to the 5-7 up range. Like I looked at The Magic Labrynth and figured it’d be too hard, Go Away Monster as too simple and barely a game, and a bunch of Haba games that were of varied interest.
Which is kind of the trick. So many of the ‘childrens’ games are horrid non games. Candy Land, Mouse Trap, Life? Boring, terrible, not even games. So that sweet spot where the kids can play, but it is something that is worth playing as a parent? Yeah, I feel you on the difficulty.
As for playing Bohnanza with adults, I’ve played it plenty, and as a simple filler have always enjoyed it. Never my first choice, but a decent end of night we have 30 minutes before out brains stop working because, oh god, it is way past our normal bed time, game.
Ugh… surprisingly good is a low bar when talking about Catan.
Signed
Avowed Catan hater
(if you are going with junior versions of classic board games, I’d much rather go for Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne Junior)
I don’t like adult Catan either.
Heh, fair enough. I just have far too many memories of turn after turn of doing nothing because everyone is rolling 3s,10s and 12s, while you are sitting on 4,5,8,9 and haven’t drawn a card in several goes around the board, followed by inevitably having 3 people in a row roll your numbers, only for you to roll a 7 when you finally get your turn and the first chance to build something in about 20 minutes, and now have to discard half your cards so fuck this game.
I second that list of games. My son really liked Fish Eat Fish. As Nightgaunt mentioned Forbidden Desert is good. We also enjoyed Castle Panic played as co-op at first.
Tom Vasel reviews a lot of kids games so might be a good reference. He did a video recently on 12 Kids Games for Christmas. May also be worth looking at his 12 Family Games for Christmas for more potential options.
Castle Panic was also a hit at our house for a while.
If your kids are more coordinated than mine, PitchCar can be a lot of fun.
I agree with this. Or if you want to start with something marginally simpler, Forbidden Island.
Which Sorry Sliders seems to be aimed at being the kid/ family version of this.
Small World is a good one also.
Whooowasit has been a good time for my kids. Cooperative mystery with electronic talking toy thing and an actual “magic” ring in the box = gold. I introduced it to my twins at 4, which was probably a little too early, but they still got a kick out of it with Dad helping to keep the tension up (“Oh, no! We only have an hour [of in-game time] left! Come on!”). You’ll wish that Reiner and Co. would have sprung for a couple more voice actors, but it’s still somewhat charming. And there’s also the fact that there are three difficulty levels, so you can make it harder as they grow.
The kids are warming to King of Tokyo, again with Dad helping to lay out their options each turn as clearly as possible. They don’t entirely get the strategy of it yet, but they love the energy cubes and the cards that they can buy for special effects. And it’s dice rolling so the base mechanics are pretty easy to grok. The version linked above is actually a recent revision and apparently has some small differences from the one we play. Still, it should be pretty much the same experience. And it’s on sale today at Amazon.
Speaking of sales, Battlelore is apparently on sale for the lowest it’s ever been at Amazon: $31, which is apparently around 50-ish% off.
EDIT: Annnnnnd, it’s over.
12.25 is a Prime Member Price
Thanks, Nesrie. That’s a deal I can’t pass up.
Finally got Scythe to table again, this time with four. We had a pretty sedate, resource-gathering intensive game with no direct conflict until the very last moment of the game. I ran the Nordic faction w/ Agricultural player board and upgraded into very cheap Enlist actions at a high coin payout and between that and Bolster being on the same space, ended up placing the first star of the game (for four recruits) and then rapidly a second (for 18 power). Nobody much wanted to tangle with me between my maxed power and pile of combat cards, so I then gradually parlayed that into cash, structures and control of the Factory, complete with a Factory action to turn combat cards into popularity. From there, I rapidly chained my objective (end the turn with $20), then max workers, and then realized that attackers win ties so the next time my turn came around (and I purely didn’t expect it to seeing as the Rusviet player could easily have ended the game and had way more mechs than I did to contest the Factory and get a combat star to close things out), I used that Factory action to max my popularity (star 5), then run my character at a solo Polanian mech sitting on their Monument. He turned out not to have a good enough combat card to beat my 5 + 7 power spend, but all I had to do was tie, and that was guaranteed. And bam. Star 6. I ended up with a 30-ish point lead. I think it could easily come off as a little dry and it’s a fair amount to keep straight, but it’s very cool.
13 Days, the Scythe expansion, Tales of Arabian Nights, and Kanagawa (thanks, Nesrie!) showed up today. Turns out one of the new heroes in the Scythe expansion is a Japanese chick (cool!) with a monkey (not cool!), and they can lay traps (cool!). So she’s a net cool +1.
Also, my friend’s 12-year-old got a copy of Imperial Assault for his birthday, and he couldn’t be less interested in boardgames, so that’s been laying around the house. I went through it today. Hmm. I can’t tell if I’d hate it or not. I’m thinking I might hate it! I am intrigued by how much there is for the Imperial player to do over the course of a campaign. I had the impression that he’s just a gamemaster setting up pieces and reading flavor text from behind a screen, but he’s much more an active participant with some distinct tricks.
Dude. That’s kind of an important rule to be forgetting for half the game. There’s a reason those two stars are up there. In the handful of games I’ve played, those combat stars have been decisive in winning and/or ending the game.
The Nordics are the ones whose workers can swim across the river, right? I thought that was a pretty cool advantage, at first, but then realized there’s only so much you can do when only your workers can swim across the river.
-Tom
They are, yup. It lets you expand and produce a lot more easily in the early game before mechs come into play, but it does feel a bit limited past that. They’re also the folks who get artillery, though (and are one of two factions that can move onto/through lakes), so they still have selling points afterwards.
So this is a pretty big month for tabletop games for me. I have Polis and Guild Ball coming in the mail, two Quartermaster General games being shipped hopefully soon, Blood Bowl arriving next week at my local game store, and a couple new Infinity models to round out my first 300-pt force.There is so much stuff coming this month, that I don’t even think I will ask my wife to get any games for Christmas!
As far as games I’ve been playing, Sekigahara has continued to really impress us. The game is just so damn clever. It, combined with the other block war game we’ve been playing, Napoleon: The Waterloo Campaign 1815, has made me interested in other war games. My next war game (excluding Polis, which is really more of a hybrid) will be Combat Commander: Europe, which I have ordered but won’t be arriving until January.
Looks like I have a boardgame-filled winter to look forward to!
My daughter loved Dixit when she was 5 (and still does at 7). It works well with kids and adults together, and the kids can actually win. (We even played it when it was 4, but had to skip her turn when it was time for her to pick the clue). Because it’s a game related to pictures (someone picks a clue to describe a picture, and others supply pictures that they think also fit that clue, and everyone had to guess which one was the original picture), it’s great for pre readers.
I have Mechs and Minions coming so I can TRY and get my11 year old to play some games with me. The expansion to Merchants and Mauraders, Robinson Crusoe, Warfighter, Comancheria all on their way.
I wish it was 14 years in the future and I could retire and play all these games.
I went from 5 games 4 months ago to 32 games now. When I get into something, I really get into it…wish my only gaming buddie was closer than 60 miles away!