Security Blanket: Lego Harry Potter for iPad

Well, I had intended, in advance of our family's recent vacation in western Ontario (where, I was warned by my in-laws, Internet service might be spotty at best), to bank a number of posts to be automatically posted while I was gone. But amid the frenetic planning that always precedes family vacations, those intentions fell by the wayside, and the result has been a long gap between posts, even by my fairly laid-back standards.

So I'm going to be posting a little more frequently than usual for what remains of July, to try to make up for that (as well as to get my total posts for the month in the column on the right to a slightly less embarrassing number). I'll plunge into the new stuff—of which there's plenty to catch up on—a little later this week, but today I'd like to simply express my gratitude to a video game.

You see, thanks to the joint efforts of our original major airline (which canceled our 6 a.m. flight at about 11 p.m. the night before, well after we'd gone to bed in preparation for a very early trip to the airport, and thus too late to notify us in time to prevent us from getting up at 3 a.m.) and the other major airline we were then transferred to (which, after several hours of weather-related delays, boarded us onto a plane that, as the pilots discovered while taxiing to the runway, had a mechanical problem that required another couple of hours to fix, and apparently had no other planes on hand that could be substituted for it), we spent a bit over 10 hours in the Minneapolis airport before finally taking off in a functioning aircraft. (I leave the major carriers nameless because, let's face it, these days it could have happened—does happen, routinely—on any of them.)

All of which, with a seven-year-old and a three-year-old in tow, could have been a complete nightmare—but for my iPad and the LEGO Harry Potter game I'd loaded onto it a while back, for just such occasions. It kept our older son mesmerized for most of those hours, and our younger one (mostly just watching!) for a decent number of them as well. It was still not exactly a fun day, of course, for any of us, but it could have—and not that long ago would have—been far worse. And for that, makers of Lego Harry Potter (ooh, I see the second game in the series has come to iOS now as well!), we cannot thank you enough.

[Image courtesy of TT Games]

Posted with Blogsy

New Games: Pixy Cubes

It's tempting, especially when parenthood is brand-new, to jump at every beautifully designed kids' toy you see. Then, after a few months (or, uh, years…), you realize that your son hasn't touched that gorgeous recycled-wood horse since the day it was unwrapped, and that what you have here is a very small piece of shelf art—and a present you bought, as it turns out, for yourself.

And hey, that's fine. But we do want to get toys and games our children actually enjoy, too—and yet, it would be nice if they weren't all Lightning McQueen-themed, wouldn't it? That's where Blue Orange Games comes in. For years now, the company has been making board games with lovely design and craftsmanship that are also a lot of fun to play. Most of them to this point—like most really good board games, period—have been for older kids, tweens at the youngest. But its latest, which is not, in fact, a board game, is happily for ages six and up.

One of those simple-yet-complex sorts of games, Pixy Cubes are a set of 16 cubes featuring varied designs (solids, diagonal halves, crescent shapes) in various colors (red, green, yellow, blue) on their faces. There are various ways to play, too: In the "speed" game, players race to match their cubes to a pattern on a "Challenge Card"; in the "memory" option, they have 10 seconds to memorize a card's pattern before trying to become the first to reproduce it with a combination of cubes. There are scaled levels of difficulty, and nearly endless possibilities. (The less competitive-minded may well enjoy the creativity of designing their own patterns and combinations with the cube faces.)

There's a developmental/educational aspect here as well, of course—Pixy Cubes are aimed at helping with young kids' color and shape recognition, and, obviously, memory skills and creativity. But those feel more like side effects than the main agenda. And since Blue Orange wisely made the cubes not merely attractive and fun, but also small, light, and extremely portable (not to mention quite reasonably priced at $16), Pixy Cubes are really a perfect travel game, too.

[Photo: Whitney Webster]

Security Blanket: In-the-Car Games

We just got back from our first road trip of the summer—the first we'd ever attempted with the aid of a backseat DVD player to get our boys through the long stretches. And for a few low-on-scenery parts of New York State, they turned out to be a godsend—but we discovered that they do have their downsides. I suppose I should have known that introducing screen time to car journeys would also mean introducing the tedious tug-of-war over screen time; our six-year-old, Dash, started begging to plug in the moment we climbed into the car, and got petulant if we denied him. Two-year-old Griffin was a bit less insistent, but that was probably only because sometimes the watching seemed to be giving him motion sickness. (Thankfully for everyone, he was aware enough of the problem to say something before it was...too late.)

So we also leaned heavily on music, both the kids' variety (a lot of Recess Monkey, natch) and not (we had the Civil Wars' Barton Hollow on heavy rotation, the title track in particular). But this was also the first long car ride we've embarked on during which everyone in the vehicle is old enough to participate in traditional passing-the-time games, like I Spy, the Alphabet Game, and 20 Questions. And they were a big hit—especially the latter, which we at first thought was a little over Griff's head (he had a tendency to repeat the same question after it had been answered, always with strangely perfect comic timing) until one of his supposedly random guesses ("Is it a camper?") was exactly right.

Now, it's no news to anyone that these kinds of games are fun for family car rides, I know; there's a reason they've survived as long as they have. And God knows that sometimes parents need something, anything, to keep the "Are we there yet" refrain at bay. (Seriously, that phrase must be an innate developmental human trait, like standing upright, because both our sons started using it almost before they could say anything else.) But in our age of endless distractions and stimuli, it was a nice reminder to me, at least, that simplicity is not only still possible—sometimes it's more fun, too. I think even Dash would agree.

[Photo: Whitney Webster]

New Games: Loopz

I remember my own parents looking at the early-computer-technology games I had when I was a kid and commenting, a little uncomfortably, about how much games had changed since their youth. Of course, they were talking about Mattel Electronic Football and Merlin, so by now I know exactly how they felt.

But every now and then I see a toy or game that magically melds parental nostalgia with somewhat more modern technology. Mattel’s new Loopz has something in common with one of my generation’s old favorites, Simon, but—as a good modern toy should and must—goes way beyond it, too. In several different directions.

As you can see in the image above, Loopz looks sort of like a set of plastic horseshoes stuck together (well, plastic horseshoes from the rec room of the starship Enterprise). Within each of the four arches—I suppose I should really call them “loops,” huh?—there’s a pair of small sensors, one at the top and one at the bottom. When you break through the invisible line between them, you trigger a light and a sound. (After a little practice, I found that the most effective and efficient way to do this was to stick my hands in each arch with a little lift, like a magician or someone playing water glasses. That may just be me, though...the chipper kids in the demos on Mattel’s site use a more direct style.)

That’s the basic concept, but Mattel has found a variety of ways to turn it into game play and ... just regular play. The first is the old Simon one, a memory game: Loopz plays an ever-increasing series of sounds and lights, and the player has to repeat after it. Then there’s a reflex game, in which you try to put your hand in the loop with the flashing light before it goes out, at accelerating speeds. And there are several music games, including one called Freestyle DJ that lets kids “mix” the preprogrammed songs on the Loopz machine by using the loops to turn tracks on and off. Finally, kids can just play their own music in a 10-note scale on the machine. (I was wondering at first how you get 10 notes from four loops, but of course the answer is combinations—for each of the higher notes, you simply trigger two loops simultaneously.)

Both my five-year-old and my two-year-old were instantly fascinated, in that way only young kids can be, at their first sight of the modernistic-looking machine with flashing lights that was making weird noises. But a lot of toys create that effect initially, and then the novelty wears off. Loopz, with its variety of options, and particularly with the freestyle music one, is proving to have real staying power, which makes the investment (the machine retails for about $30) seem worthwhile.

I don’t, however, quite think we’re going to reach this stage of expertise for a while yet:

[Photo courtesy of Mattel.]

New Games: Sound Bingo

This time of year, vacations loom (pleasantly, of course). And so does the need for portable entertainment, both for use during travel itself and for whiling away the hours spent at houses not one’s own. A few favorite books and videos used to suffice for us, when our oldest child (now five) was still very young, but these days, the need for a wide variety of options becomes ever clearer. Since my younger son is not quite two years old, though, it can be hard to find games we can all play together; for the most part, I think, we’ll just have to wait another year or so.

But we have found one game that’s simple enough for Griffin to at least be engaged in (with extreme parental help, but hey) and yet not too dull for Dash to enjoy: Sound Bingo. The concept is, well, bingo, and the execution is simplicity itself: The boxes you fill with your bingo chips contain images that correspond to sounds on the included CD. Each player gets a board and some chips, then stick the CD in the player and put it on “Random.” You then hear a series of sounds—a rooster crowing, an alarm clock ringing, a train whistling, etc.—and if your board contains the image the sound goes with, you put a chip in it.

From there, it’s regular old bingo rules; first one to fill four boxes in a row, in any direction, is the winner. It’s a really easy game to teach very young kids, and while Griff is really too young to learn any game yet, he enjoys following along and hearing the sounds. (The little chips are considered choking hazards, so parental involvement is a definite necessity when he’s involved.)

Dash, meanwhile, is thrilled to be able to really master all the rules of a game. Board games in general still being pretty new to him, we’ve also been using Sound Bingo to teach him good sportsmanship. I must shamefacedly admit, however, that watching him actually get upset at losing a round of such an entirely random game forced me to suppress some laughter for a moment. (I got my serious teaching face on quickly, I promise.)

It did occur to me that this game is so simple that you could create a version for yourself pretty easily…but it also occurred to me that that’s one of the many, many wonderful ideas Whitney and I are extremely unlikely to ever get around to, especially right before a vacation. Being able to pick up a prefab version for $15 or so that we can use for the week we’re away from home is well worth it. I suppose if it turns out to be a favorite, we could create add-on versions, but the boys would have to be almost alarmingly enthusiastic about the game for that to happen, to be honest. In the meantime, I’m grateful to have a play-ready game served up to me on a platter.

[Images courtesy of Chronicle Books.]

Lost in Candyland

I loved board games as a kid, and as a parent I’d been looking forward to playing them with my kids. Typically, though, I forgot that most board games for young kids rely mostly on chance rather than skill.  This makes a lot of sense, of course—they have to walk before they can run, even in two dimensions—but game after game of Candyland or Chutes and Ladders can be mind-numbing for adults. So far, I’ve come up with two kinda-solutions:

1. Indulge and self-delude. My five-year-old loves these games, so let’s face it, it’s incumbent on me to hide my boredom during the 29th consecutive trip through the Peppermint Forest and just enjoy his enjoyment. I console myself with the thought that sometime amid those 29 games, Dash will lose. So he’s learning how to lose gracefully (no, I'm not that competitive!). This, I continue to myself as I flick the spinner somewhat harder than necessary, will help him be a good sport in more involved and complex games later on.

The other benefit is that Dash’s 20-month-old brother, Griffin, can play Candyland with us, too. Sure, I’m spinning for him and moving his gingerbread man for him, and he may have even left the room for good after the first turn, but it’s nice to disregard all that and think, Aww, the boys are playing together.

2. Stretch the boundaries. Dash wants to play every board game he sees. He’d become fascinated with an old Monopoly game we had in the basement, and so one day I decided to break it out and see what happened.

What happened was pretty predictable—the rules were way too complex. (Attempting to explain to a five-year-old what a mortgage is, let alone why it’s relevant in a board game, tends to expose the holes in one’s own knowledge in disturbing ways.) In short order, I was playing for both of us, mainly passing play money back and forth among three piles. Dash was interested only in moving around the board. He also found jail fascinating, but I’m hoping that’s merely a phase.

I soon realized that without the money and real estate, Monopoly is an awful lot like Candyland. Time to backtrack; Dash had also expressed interest in our backgammon set, so I got that out. This was better. While he wasn't ready for the game’s nuances, he was able to grasp the strategy involved—that you had choices of how to move your pieces, and that one choice might be wiser than others. He did win the first game we played (I admit nothing), and heavily coached or not, his delight was multiples greater than it is after a Candyland victory. He was beaming.

Of course, we’re won’t be ready to play “real” games of backgammon, or anything like it, for a while yet, though I’m sure my superiority is ripe for a fall soon enough. But until then, I get the fun of teaching my son something that delights him. I have a feeling I may miss that when the “real” games begin.

Anyone have any other strategies for making the combination of board games and young children more interesting and/or satisfying?

[Photo: Ptkfgs, via Wikimedia Commons]