Speaking Out on Nate

Family game night has become a semi-stable, semi-regular event around here.  There was the “I don’t want to do that” cancelation and the “the table is a mess” cancelation, but other than those bumps in the road we as a family have sat down several times to play board games together.   We have not been playing traditional family games such as Monopoly, Chutes and Ladders, or Texas Hold’em Poker.  In an effort to get the kids to think more, pay attention more, and in general keep them engaged, which is a problem when trying to get video gamers to sit down and play board games: “This isn’t exciting” was commonly heard at first from one child or another, but eventually they learned to enjoy the slower pace.

The key to choosing games was something that the adults would find complex enough to hold our attention, yet easy enough that the kids could get the basic concepts without getting overly frustrated.  Given the age difference 4 and 7 I spent awhile searching for games.  Thankfully many companies allow you to download the rules before purchase.  Many nights were spent reading rules and deciding if I could explain how to play the game to both children.  Slightly before rules was concept the game had to appeal to the kids, which thankfully since my kids are full on cartoon and video gamers I was able to find several games that covered the “pick a guy, explore the cave, world, dungeon, and get the treasure or rescue the princess.”

With those requirements out of the way came the fortune that is The Big Bang Theory.  The kids love watching the show and they are always wanting to know what games they are playing which for isn’t that hard to identify.  Thus I went out and found Talisman, Dungeon Quest, and Descent.  All of the games are made by Fantasy Flight Games.  The rules for each of them are complex enough for adults, but can be broken down for children.  The components are visually appealing and very durable, no flimsy cards or boards, we are talking thick cards with a liquid proof coating which is great when you have children or the clumsy around.  Even better is that all of the games have several female pieces that can be played which was very important to my daughter.  She wants to play the “hero girl” not the “boy.”

Talisman is the game that the guys on The Big Bang Theory can be seen playing several times.  They are playing an early version of the game, the new version has plastic figures.  Simply put the goal of the game is to take your figure around the outer ring of the board gathering equipment until they are strong enough to move to the middle ring, gather more equipment, and then the final ring where they can win the game.  A simple concept, simple to explain, the players do not have to cooperate at all which did lead to a couple of conflicts, but overall the main problem with Talisman was that the game was LONG to play.  Our first game took 4 hours with several breaks for the kids because individual turns can be long leading to them having a lot of free time to get bored.

Dungeonquest was an old Hasbro game that was a lot of fun to play and cooperative.  The new version is complex as all hell, not cooperative, and as we discovered not slanted in the player’s favor.  The goal is to take your hero into the dragon’s dungeon, get to his room, steal his treasure before time runs out and you die.  There is NO cooperation, every player for themselves.  While the game concepts and rules were easy to explain to the children, the actual game play seemed to only revolve around killing off players.  Nobody won the game, everyone was not happy with how deadly the game was.

Descent Journeys In The Dark is the most visually appealing of the games, everything is represented by a miniature, the board is actually puzzle pieces that can be assembled as you like or following scenarios in a book.  The players work together against another player who controls all of the monsters and traps.  Players cannot die, they are only knocked out, and as I mentioned before cooperation is not only encouraged cooperation is rewarded.  The rules are easy enough that the kids knew how to play after one short example.  Even better, to me, the game encourages replaying because you can grow your character, making choices as to their skills and equipment to make them ready for each new adventure.  Descent was well received by everyone.

Finally, while in Meijers I chanced upon Forbidden Island by Gamewright which is a simple game, the players are adventurers and explorers on a sinking island where working together they try to get four treasures before the island sinks.  The game is hideously simple to play, but as we discovered complex to master, requiring that everyone work together, talk, and make plans together otherwise the island sinks.  To encourage cooperation either everyone wins or nobody wins.  While the island has sank on us repeatedly Forbidden Island has been the game played most often.

I highly recommend a family game night for anyone with kids and is looking to do something with them.  Gamers will have a lot of fun with this, as this has lead to renewed interest in the Pokémon Card Game, RoboRally, and several other games that haven’t seen the light of day in a while.

Tomorrow is family game night; we try to sit down as a family and play a game or two together.  This tradition started before we moved in with her parents and was the one tradition that allowed all of us to survive that 8 months of hell and come out on the other side closer.  Originally the idea was to play a video game together.  Why a video game?  Well the kids couldn’t read very well at the time, and neither of them had an attention span that could be accurately measured with a watch.  Video games kept them interested.

Our first family game was Castle Crashers, an four-player co-op game on the Xbox each player plays a different colored cartoonish knight in a side scrolling adventure.  The goal to rescue the five princesses and defeat the evil wizard who kidnapped them.  Castle Crashers kept us occupied as a family for a year-and-a-half.  That is how long it took us as a family to beat the evil wizard.  Much whooping and joy was heard that day.

However, playing Castle Crashers and other four-player video games showed me something, while we were playing together we were not necessarily interacting together as much as I had hoped.  Still it was a start.  Since the whole family is huge into Legos we started playing the various Lego board games, finally settling on Heroica.  The great thing about any Lego board game is that they are made out of Legos and if the game sucks and some of them do, you can tear it apart and add the pieces to your Lego collection.  Heroica was where the children started to learn how to take turns, how to work together, some functional basic math, and organization skills.  While Heroica is no longer played here, primarily due to the fact that the game can take a while to set up, play, and tear down we still talk about the games we played.

From Heroica we moved onto Pokemon, both the video and card games.  Alas that experiment died on the vine.  The video game was a bit to complicated in the end for the boy and the card game just didn’t have the same visceral experience that the video game had.  His mother and I still play the card game, but we have been huge CCG (Collectible Card Games) players forever.  Remind me to share some of our better CCG game moments later.

Thus we have been without a reliable family game for about a month and a half now.  I didn’t really want to go back to the video game well again, especially after discovering that while Kinectimals are cute they just don’t appeal to me at all.  Why can’t I have my Bengal Tiger maul things?   Ugh…cutness factor.

Not to be deterred, and determined to raise two gamers, I have been searching for games that I know would appeal to every member of the family and be easy for the kids to get into.  Barb started with RoboRally, which Big Man might remember and he might also remember how much that game frustrated me.  Turns out that my boy understood the game better than I did.  Enough so that he will be giving it another try along with me.  I hope I don’t flip the board.   Still I kept searching and finally found two; Descent: Journey into Darkness and Talisman.  Both of them are board games, both have the fantasy elements that the kids like, both have equal representation of male and female characters which makes my daughter happy AND after trying out a tiny bit with the kids both games are understood by the children.

I am looking forward to playing one of the games at the table with the kids.  Should be fun.