Santa was good for family cohesiveness this year — he brought
us lots of things to do together. Delphine got a build-your-own-catapult kit,
Cordelia got a giant puzzle of Toronto, and we got three board games.
We haven't opened the catapult or the puzzle yet, but the games have
already seen a lot of use.
Apples to Apples, Jr.
Apples to Apples, Jr. is one of those games that makes you feel slightly stupid
for having paid for the game and all the packaging, because there's nothing
special about the game parts that you couldn't fabricate yourself. The
creator's genius is in coming up with the game and getting it into production.
And in this case I don't feel too bad about paying for it, because it's a
really fun game.
What you get in the box are two sets of cards: red (nouns) and green
(adjectives). Each player gets five nouns, and one player is the judge and
selects an adjective. The non-judge players have to select from their
hand the noun which most exemplifies the chosen adjective, and submit
it without revealing which noun is theirs. Then the judge chooses—using
criteria of their own choosing—the winning noun. Players are
encouraged to advocate for their cards, and the game is more fun if
the judge deliberates out loud.
We've enjoyed this game every time we play it, with every age group.
It's best for readers, but even Cordelia can play if she has someone to
help her with the words she isn't sure of. There is an adult version of the
game which I can only imagine is extremely fun.
Lego Champion
We have Lego Creationary, which I kind of like but I'm not really good
at Lego, so I don't love it. I wasn't sure about Lego Champion, but we
all like it way more.
The board is a track made (by you) of Lego, and each turn adds another piece
to the board. Each turn also involves a challenge, a game the whole team
plays to determine who will move forward a bonus amount.
There are five possible challenges which vary wildly in difficulty. In
On Target everyone throws a Lego brick and tries to hit
a target. Bluffing Bricks is a guessing game where
everyone takes three blocks and then players take turns guessing how
many of a particular colour there are, or calling the previous player's
bluff. In Topple Tower players take turns balancing a
successively larger Lego creation to the top of a tower: the first player
plays one piece, the second player plays a two-piece object, the third
plays a three-piece object, and so on. The trick is that you can't interlock
your object to the tower. The last player to add to the tower without
toppling it wins the challenge.
In Codebreaker, the challenger (the person whose turn
it is) makes a three-brick code, and then other players have to figure it
out by asking yes-or-no questions. And finally, in Speed
Builder the challenger builds an eight-brick structure in secret,
and the rest of the players race to duplicate it exactly.
Our favourite challenges are Topple Tower and Speed Builder. Bluffing
Bricks is a little hard to understand, but once you've worked it out
it can be a clever and fascinating exercise. I think you have to be quite
a big of a game theory nerd, though; last night we played it with some
friends and it was so confusing we ended up substituting Lego bowling
when Bluffing Bricks came up on the dice. (Lego bowling is surprisingly
challenging, it turns out, because the bowling ball (the dice) is cube-shaped
and bouncy.)
The game play for Lego Champion is fairly quick and we've played it successfully
with ages from six to adult. (Although Cordelia tends to amuse herself between
turns by building things with the extra blocks.)
Trivial Pursuit Family Edition
For a long time I've imagined that it would be really nice if there were
a trivia game with different questions for kids and adults. I looked here
and there (although not on the Internet) for such a game with no luck.
At the local games shop (which is admittedly really nerdy, catering
mainly to the Chess, Go and D&D crowd and only reluctantly carrying
a selection of mainstream board games) they had Nickleodeon and Disney
Trivial Pursuits which depressingly advertised, "DVD Included! No reading!
No adult participation required!" Well thank goodness for that.
Imagine my surprise when I found Trivial Pursuit Family Edition at
Toys! Toys! Toys!, the second tackiest toy store in town. It is exactly
as I imagined it, Trivial Pursuit with two sets of cards, one for
kids and one for adults. The board is changed slightly to speed up
game-play: half of the "roll again" spaces are now shortcuts to
pie spaces, but even so Delphine and I have found that our two-person
games drag on a little.
The kid questions are pitched perfectly for a well-read eight-year-old, so
Delphine really enjoys it and gives me a run for my money. I am not
sure how well this game would go over for a kid who doesn't read a lot
or watch a lot of education TV. Cordelia basically can't play
because there's too much reading and she doesn't know enough yet,
although she has a nice time being on someone's team, for a while
at least.
My only problem with this game is that it's American and the
questions are heavily skewed to American history and geography. I
suppose it's too much to ask that there be a Trivial Pursuit Canadian
Family Edition...
The other day I was reading 
The easiest way to figure this out, I believe, is to cut the circle in half,
and then figure out what line divides the semicircle into a 2/3rds to 1/3rd
ratio. So let’s do that, and label the points A, B, C, and O (for the origin),
as shown on the left. We’ll also label the angle AOB as ɣ, because we'll be
using it a little more later.