I’ve had a lot going on this week. Some of you may remember
that I had a massive stack of board games piled up in my spare room. Well, it
was never going to take long for my daughter to take an interest in it, and
suddenly I found myself having to find some games within that collection that
are suitable for a three-year-old to play. We found four in the end, all of
which she enjoys to a certain extent but for entirely different reasons…
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| This is the version of the game we have. |
The first game we tried was Jenga, where you must take a
block from a tower of 54 blocks, putting the piece you took off onto the top
creating an increasingly unstable tower. Strictly speaking, you’re only allowed
to use one hand, but we weren’t too pedantic about that as Jessie only has
small hands. She showed a surprising amount of dexterity and care as she
checked for loose blocks and put them on the top of the tower. We’ve had a few
goes with this and I generally win, but for one round I deliberately decided to
go for the harder blocks – more to make me feel like I deserved it if I won again,
as much as anything else – and after a long and tense match, Jessie was
delighted to win one!
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| Fun fact: I pulled this picture from the Taken 2 Movie website - which now links to gambling. |
Then we had a go at Dominoes. This one was probably the one
she took the most from in terms of her own development, as she was identifying
how many dots were on her dominoes and matching them up on the board. It reminded
me of the first time I played this game as a child, where the dominoes were
pictures of animals rather than the usual dots; that probably would have been
preferable, but Jessie still had a good go. She tends to win by luck rather
than judgement, as she usually has the smaller number of dots by the time we
run out of moves, but she enjoys it. Probably as importantly, I’m encouraging
her to keep her eye on both sides of the board, which should train a sense of
situational awareness!
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| Picking things up and moving them around. What could be better? |
I bought Snakes and Ladders from the Black Country Museum
with the intention of introducing it to Jessie at some point. This was an odd
one: The debate about whether theme or mechanics are more important can fill
entire books, but with both snakes and ladders being something Jessie can
recognise, she finds the game a lot more engaging than the abstract puzzling of
Jenga and Dominoes – at least initially. But the thing about Snakes and Ladders is that there’s no skill involved – you roll the dice and you move, and if
you land at the bottom of a ladder or the top of a snake, you move to the other
end. The first to get to the 100th square wins, and that’s all there
is to it. Without truly realising why, Jessie gets bored of that long before
the game has finished. Still, it’s a simple enough game for us all to play and
that’s probably main benefit: It’s a nice game to play with your family.
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| Absolutely mad, but a great game! |
Finally, we had a go with an absolute gem of a game I picked
up at the UK Games Expo a few years ago: Happy Salmon. I haven’t played this
yet as you need two things: At least three people, and a safe environment to
make a lot of noise. I almost always fall short of at least one of these
things. It’s basically a mad version of snap: Everyone has a coloured deck of
the same twelve cards with an action on them for two people to do. You
frantically search for the person with the same card, do the action then drop
the card. The first person to drop all their cards is the winner. We had a great
time playing it, and me and Kirsty recognised that this is probably one of the
most accessible games I own. That’s worth an entire blog at some point, but for
now I’ll say that the fact that Jessie can’t read yet didn’t hinder her
enjoyment at all!
So, a nice week of board games, in all!
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