A new stage gaming with my son?

While our son has been interested in board games for a long time (not surprising since he has grown up kind of surrounded by them) but watching me play games with an out-of-town friend made him even more interested.

10 Days in Africa was what really caught his interest. I really, really hope that someone picks up the license for this series. I have two of the games but I can see myself wanting more of them as our son grows older.

The actual Racko-style mechanics are still a bit beyond him so we just went through the country cards and found them on the map, as well as name them. He was entertained and hopefully some facts slipped in.

Since then, I’ve pulled out other games to see how he’d interact with them. 10 Days in the USA was an obvious choice. ZERTZ also came out, although that was just stuff for him to mess around with. Shuttles interested him but the full game couldn’t keep his interest. 

I had almost gotten rid of Cheeky Monkey but now I’m glad I didn’t. Our son asked specifically for it. We’ve gone over the actual rules a couple times but he hasn’t been that interested. However, inspired by 10 Days, I had him count and then sort the animal tokens on the bonus discs.

The biggest success so far has been Tantrix. I’ve always liked it better as a puzzle system than as a game and using it as a puzzle system with a four-year-old has worked well. We’ve spent a fair bit of time with it and I think that will continue to be the case.

I’m obviously adapting games into other activities but he’s having fun and I’m hoping this will lead to playing by the rules :D

A belated good-bye to Out of the Box

I just learned that Out of the Box went out of business back in 2015. Man, am I behind the times.

I'm sad to see that they're gone. When I first started collecting and playing designer games, they were a company that I paid attention to. Along with Playroom and Gamewright, Out of the Box seemed to approach family games and kids games with a designer touch. (To the best of my knowledge, both of those companies are alive and well)

Part of their mission statement was that their games would take five minutes or less to learn and a half an hour at most to play. Which certainly doesn't work for a lot of games but it isn't a bad rule of thumb for casual family games. And there's no denying that, even compared to Playroom or Gamewright, that was their intended audience.

While I think that the best thing they did was publish the 10 Days lines of games, which combine good game design with high educational value, I don't think I can get around their most significant contribution to gaming was Apples to Apples. 

It's not my favorite party game and I know folks who utterly despise it but there's no denying it changed the face of party games. Admittedly, by being so accessible/accessible that you don't have to be creative to play. No need to know trivia or be able to improv or draw. For better or for worse, it was an ideal family reunion game. And it went to influence other game designs, Cards Against Humanity being the most obvious.

Heck, when they sold it to Mattel, I seriously had doubts for Out of the Box's future. And they did hang out for another seven years but they never had another hit like that. Still, twenty years from now, Out of the Box is going to be remembered for letting Apples to Apples loose on the world.

Looking over their catalog, they actually released fewer games than I remembered. And many of them frankly never interested me. But there were some gems in addition to 10 Days. Basari bridged the line between casual family and euro pretty well while I have had a lot of fun with Cloud 9 and Easy Come, Easy Go.

Yeah, the fact they've been out of business for close to two years and I didn't notice means Out of the Box stopped being important to me. And the games from them that have stayed in my collection are some of their older ones. But they did put out some fun games.

Why is 10 Days important?

RI have never played Racko and, thanks to the 10 Days series, I probably never will. The 10 Days games takes the sorting mechanic of Racko and marries it to geography. This change makes a game that is more visually interesting, educational and engaging.

In every game in the series, you are trying to create a sequence of contiguous countries/states/provinces while different vehicles like planes or cars  can help make connections. There have been seven games in the series, although some of them weren't in English. I think. And, actually, it doesn't matter since place names are the only words in the games :D

About twelve years ago, I wrote a review of 10 Days in Africa: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/89054/light-enjoyable-game-geography Rereading it, I'll still stand by that review.

The 10 Days series is not Alan Moon's best game design. (Or Aaron Weisbaum's, for that matter) BUT I do think it's one of their more important designs.

Rule wise, the 10 Days series is very, very simple. They are games that you can teach to just about anyone, children and teens and adults. They are accessible enough that non-gamers can be competitive while tense enough that seasoned gamers can enjoy them.

If that's all the 10 Days series had to offer, that'd still be pretty good. However, in addition to teaching cognitive reasoning skills (which hopefully most games will teach), the 10 Days series also legitimately teaches geography. Pulling that off while being fun is a pretty impressive feat.

While Edutainment has come a long ways in the last few decades (What can I say? Bubble Guppies impressed me when our son went through a Bubble Guppies phase) but a game that really works as a game that is very educational is still no mean thing. The 10 Days series can work as a standby in most game libraries and classrooms.

At the moment, it looks like the US map is the only one available in the US. Which is a shame and I hope that changes. I am glad, though, the series is still out there.