A five-year-old’s experience with Go

I recently took a crack at introducing our five-year to the basics of Go. 

And while I have heard Go described as having five rules with one of those rules being that you play it on a board, quite a bit of it didn’t sink in. Go is theoretically simple in theory but it is ridiculously complex to understand in practice.

But it was his idea so I ran with it.

The one thing that he really clicked on was the concept of eyes and that having two eyes makes a group of stones safe. Which, to be fair, is a very important idea.

I wonder if he will ask for Go again and what he will learn if he does.

2019 holiday card planning

Ah, it’s that time of year. The Boardgame Geek Holiday Card exchange.

And, yes, I’m going to participate. While I bowed out of the Secret Santa awhile back because, frankly, I’ve cut my my game budget to the point  that I rarely buy games for myself, let alone other folks, making homemade cards to send out to strangers is a lot of fun.

However, while I’ve participated in the Mini PnP Secret Santa for the last two years, I’m bowing out of that as well. And that’s due to budget as well.  While actually crafting the games I sent out didn’t take long and cost next to nothing, I always drew international recipients and the shipping was prohibitively expensive :(

Still, I’m thinking of including a one-card game in the cards I send. That way, I’m still sending out some PnP love. And there are options out there other than Coin-Age, which everyone already has, or Bonsai Samurai, which isn’t very good.

It’s not quite the same but it’s a hint of Secret Santa.

Dunsany Dreams 6

The Business Man and the June Bug

The business man regarded the June bug that buzzed around his head.

‘What have you done to fly around me and bother me so?’ he asked the June bug. ‘I am a man of means and wealth. I have leveraged trades and bought and sold companies. My decisions can be the ruin of thousands. I can make the markets dance at my command. What have you done?’

‘Me?’ asked the June bug. ‘I have lived.’

My October PnP

Okay, here’s my October list:

Loot Boxer 

Xscape

October was a crazy busy month and I wasn’t sure that I was going to get any Print and Play crafting done. In fact, I printed out one of the play sheets for Loot Boxer and laminated it just to make sure I made something in October.

However, at pretty much the last minute, I threw together a copy of Xscape, which had been on my list to make sometime or another. i had already printed and cut the pieces so it was a quick and dirty project to get done at the eleventh hour.

And I have to admit that the biggest drive to make Xscape was so that I continued my plan of making one ‘big’ project a month. Sometimes that been at least one a month but as life has gotten more hectic, it’s really bee making just one.

I made the black and white ashcan version (It takes a lot more for me to decide not to make the simplest version of a game. Toner is precious) At three pages of components with fifteen tiles and four cards, Xscape is pretty much the bare minimum for what I’d consider a ‘big’ project. Still, it just barely squeaks in.

Frankly, I’m more likely to  play Loot Boxer than I am Xscape. But I am glad that I made it. Sometimes, just the act of making something is good.

Dunsany Dreams 5

The Business Men and the Cat

In their stuffy board room with their overstuffed bodies sitting in overstuffed chairs, the great men of business looked over their plans for the markets and the stocks and all of the other things that they could control with their money.

And they nodded, very pleased with their wisdom, and said to one another ‘The future is ours.’

At the same time, in the alley behind the building, a mother cat gave birth to a litter of kittens. As she gazed at her feral children, the cat knew the future.

A kid’s game can just be an activity but it can’t be boring

Okay. I’m sitting down to do something that I really don’t like to do. Bash a children’s game. Because, in so many ways, it’s unfair and too easy to do that. You should not hold a game for someone under eight under the same scrutiny you’d give to a game for an adult. A kid’s game has different requirements but expectations.

But not only did Rivers, Roads and Rails from Ravensburger not work for us, I’m not sure how it would work for almost anyone.

R3 is a tile-laying game made up of 144 tiles that have segments of rivers, roads and railroads. The object of the game is make a continuous line of them with all the edges matching, just like just about any tile-laying game you care to mention.

But part of the problem is that on almost every tile, the paths are straight lines. So you’re building a single line of tiles and either a tile fits or it doesn’t fit on one of the two ends. There’s no room for choices or decisions.

A problem with the game is the rules. At least in the copy we got, the rules are printed on the back of the box and actually contradict themselves. If they were a little longer, they would actually being describing variations and not be contrary. The rules describe the game as cooperative and as competitive. You either all work together with all the tiles available or you compete with your own pools of tiles.

The problem with the game as a cooperative is that it’s really just a boring jigsaw puzzle with a definite picture. There isn’t the joy of discovery you get with an actual jigsaw puzzle. And the problem with the game as a competitive game is the lack of choices. You might have no choices, which is even worse in a kid’s game than having the game play itself with only one choice per turn.

Rivers, Roads and Rails is very pretty. I really liked the art. And I’d have really liked a fun activity, not even necessarily a game, attached to that set. Unfortunately, it just bored all of us.

Dunsany Dreams 4

The Perfect Rose

Old Man Memory took down a heavy book from a shelf in his library. Both the book and the shelf are covered in dust. The light of a single candle on his desk cast dancing shadows about the windowless chamber, making it seem darker than it would have been with no light at all.

Opening it up, Old Man Memory took a perfect rose, cut from the garden, and placed it between two pages. He firmly shut the book, pressing the flower as flat as the pages it lay between.

Old Man Memory put the book back up on the shelf with its new treasure. He knew that the perfect rose, now pressed, would dry and remain for many years before becoming dust.

Meanwhile, Youth danced outside in the sunlight in a field filled with hundreds of dandelions.