First appearance of the Probe that was Broken. (Although it didn’t actually get broken until the next chapter.)
Life in Galaxion Central is finally back to normal after the long school break! I admit to taking an actual break for most of it, so I now have to work work work to make up for it!
This holiday turned out to be the season of games. It started with me listening to the audiobook version of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (most excellently read by Wil Wheaton). Having spent my teen years as a geek girl in the ’80s, I swear that book was written just for me. I am recommending it to every Gen X-er I know (but I’m not so sure how it well it would go over with anyone much younger). And then there were the board games. One of my son’s gifts was Settlers of Catan, which is an award-winning game I’ve heard great stuff about for well over a decade, but only this year finally got around to purchasing. All of us, including our 8-yr-old daughter, got addicted to it pretty quickly. It didn’t take long before we started thinking about expansion sets and fancier playing pieces! (I bought some Fimo clay to make them.) With a gift certificate I had leftover after the holidays, I also purchased another equally-recommended game, Carcassonne. We’ve only played it a couple of times so far, but it certainly seems we’ve got another winner. A weekly Family Game Night is one of those things we’ve always talked about wanting to do, but with these great new additions to the house it looks like it might actually happen. Or maybe our delight has more to do with the kids finally being old enough to a) be able to handle more complex games, and b) not throw a fit all the time if they lose. Anyway, with all the expansion sets and tons more similarly-marketed board games, I expect we’ll have lots to entertain us for a good long while.
(Actually, I should also mention that we got a bunch of LEGO Heroica games as well, which we thought our son would love since he’s a LEGO nut. We played them, and they were interesting… but I have to admit, they didn’t enchant us in nearly the same way!)
I wanna know what Aria is laughing at… Did Zan leave something silly on the screen?
Yeah, it’s pretty much like Niall says below. The absurdity got to her. Although Zan’s also in your shoes, wondering what’s so funny!
Ah, being so tense that the slightest bit of the odd becomes incredibly funny, getting some tension out of sore muscles. At least that’s my reading.
Congratulations on starting your modern boardgame collection! (Trust me, you will get more.) Those two are pretty much the inevitable choices.
They are great for older children as they have just the right mix of strategy skill-building and luck (dice for Catan, random tiles for Carcassone) that even if the children lose, they still feel they’ve accomplished something. This holiday I played Sorry with my 6 year old nephew; I had not played that since I was a kid myself, and I realised why – it’s entirely based on luck of the cards, and is pretty much a good conduit for snit fits.
I’ve replaced the screen upside down before now when doing an “improvement”. Difference is, I couldn’t get it to work!
Both Catan and Carcassonne are excellent. We have the Seafarer extension to Catan, which solves the problem of everyone having too much wool.
I wonder about the wisdom in sending detectable radio signals from the hidden base.
It depends on how on-the-ball these alien overlords are, I guess…
For a moment, I thought you wrote “delectable”. That would be a delicious technology…
How old is the lad? Ticket to Ride is also well worth a look, though it might seem a bit much for an eight year old.
I’d agree on holding off – plus, it has the same frustration elements to the random card luck draw as I saw in Sorry. Players must be able to handle frustration well and be good losers.
Our family has really enjoyed Ticket to Ride and I have a 10 and 12 year old. The only thing is we got the Nordic Version and trying to find the place names is very difficult, even for the adults. I would suggest a version with more fimilar names.
We got Ticket To Ride for our 8 year old this year (She already loves Carcassone and is getting pretty decent at Settlers)
She really enjoys it, and it is one of those games that’s fun to play even when you’re losing. We’ve had a lot of luck with german-type strategy games with her. If you play Sorry! or Life with her she bawls her eyes out because it’s JUST NOT FAIR! but with the strategy games, when she loses she sees things she could do differently so she can improve. The pure luck aspect of traditional American games just leaves her feeling as if the whole game is rigged against her.
She picked up the basics of Ticket to Ride almost instantly– and she makes a really good third player!
Ah, Settlers of Catan… Every game inevitably has one resource that never seems to get produced. I haven’t played Carcassone; no one in my gaming group ever expressed any interest in it.
Beyond these two, the next “usual suspects” would most likely be Fluxx and Munchkin. Along similar lines, I’d also recommend Frank’s Zoo.
My friends and I used to play RockBand until one of us bought a zombie deck building game. Now the computer games sit idle in their jealousy of Empire Builder, Illuminati, Dominion, Tigris and Euphrates, Arkham Horror, Puerto Rico, King of Tokyo and the like. I’m so happy to leave the flashing lights behind. My eyes were hurting.
For what it’s worth, I like both. I have as much, but a completely different type of, fun playing an 8-hour long game of 1830 as an evening of Rock Band with friends. They’re just rarely the same friends… This said, great games all around there.
I have a copy of the boxed version of Illuminati (which I preferred to the later collectible-card version) which was always hilariously fun to play. I talked about bringing it out, but David suggested waiting another couple of years until our son (who is 11) will be better able to appreciate the, er, silliness.
Heh! I knew if I started talking boardgames I’d get a whole bunch of further recommendations. You guys are awesome!
The Seafarers expansion will be next on our wish list.
I’ll definitely second the Fluxx recommendation – there are various themed sets, and many of them are hilarious. That game is almost all luck – it’s hard to employ strategy in it, but it’s so silly that it doesn’t get frustating.
Another thing that’s useful to avoid worries about losing is cooperative games. We’re big fans of a game called Pandemic, where the players are all working for the CDC, trying to stop various diseases around the world.
This may be old fasioned, but that’s about the age I started teaching my kids Canasta. We didn’t have many good board games when they were small so we fell back on the harder card games that could be played away from the house if necessary. Another interesting game would be Parcheesi, easy compared to the two you have, but still complex enough to interest them.
NOW kiss him!