Games!

We play a lot of games around here! Some of are the make-believe variety and many are card games, but we also have some favorite "box games" as Ani calls them.  Prompted by the give-away over at Ordinary Life Magic (go there! leave a comment! win a game! the drawing is in two days!), I thought we'd share some of our favorites...I did a quick poll of the girls, and they have a few that they agreed upon!

Wildcraft   This is a beautifully illustrated cooperative game; you and your friends are on a mission to pick buckets of huckleberries for Grandma, and on the way you run into trouble (headache! hunger! scraped knee! bee stings!) that you collectively address with the wild plants you collect along the way.  Each plant card has a nice illustration and the trouble cards have little icons that let you know what plants could be used to help.  The girls love to get very dramatic about their troubles, and as they are discarding they usually say something like "thank you, plantain, good-bye scraped knee!"

Mancala - All of us love this ancient game...

Katamino - This game is made up of differently shaped and colored blocks. The idea is to fit the shapes into prescribed spaces, which you can do alone or racing another person. There are hundreds of games and challenges in the accompanying booklet, and the blocks are satisfying to play with.

Shut the Box - This is a quickie - we'll sometimes play if we are just waiting for Dan to come home for dinner.  You could play this alone or with a partner; great practice for adding and subtracting numbers on a dice, and a good math tool for a more visual learner.

Secret Door

This is a cooperative game from Family Pastimes, and works like a matching game with a bit of mystery.  Ani looooooves this game.  We also got Princess for Christmas, which both girls enjoy playing; it involved a bit more cooperation and storytelling.

Uno Attack and regular Uno - Uno Attack is a jazzed-up game of Uno, which leaves things up a bit more to chance. There is a contraption that shoots cards out at you when you push a button - sometimes this means you get no cards, and sometimes you get LOTS.

SET - Dan and I have played this for years, and the girls are really enjoying learning it. It is a game of patterns.

Blokus - Ani can't quite sit through a whole game, but Eliza really enjoys this strategic game.

I'll also add Quiddler, which both girls will "help" us with when Dan and I play, and Eliza is ready to start playing with me.  Dan and I go through cycles of addiction to this wonderful word game!