In addition to designing Parents & Kids issues, I also wrote a monthly column on games and toys.
Resolve to Play as a Family
It’s the holiday season and things get hectic at this time of year. So much so that I might have forgotten to look for toys and games for this month. Because of my oversight, I thought it would be good to reprint my January column from 2013 –wow, from almost 10 years ago! Please consider the tips below in making a family game night a regular occurrence in your home and I’ll be back next month with more games you can play.
Each month for a couple of years now, I’ve set out to find toys and games that your children would love. But the excitement over the new always tends to die down, and excitement over the next replaces it. So this month I’m taking off with introducing the next toys your child will ask for and instead proposing a resolution to add to your list for the New Year. This year, resolve to play as a family with the toys I write about. Here are ideas to help make this resolution stick.
Schedule an hour each week to play as a family
With work, school, extracurricular activities, and driving from place to place, a lot of the week is spoken for. The best way to ensure that there is family playtime is to wedge it into your schedule. Maybe after lunch on Sunday works for everyone, or maybe Tuesday night right before bed is best. Pick the time that works for your family and plan to stick to it. Being specific not only makes the chances of it happening better, but also may give everyone something to look forward to.
Organize the storage of your games
One way to waste time is by trying to find a game to play. Cut out this waste by finding ways to organize your games so that they are accessible and easy to find. Get a chest or trunk to store them in. Maybe display a couple of the family favorites in your living room and play from those. You can even have someone cycle them out. Also think about the storage inside each box. Some games come with great storage for each piece, while others seem to include a sorting “game” that comes before the real deal. An organizational system can be as simple as a rubber band around the cards or a bag that collects all the pawns. But don’t let the tedious task of setting up a game take away from the family playtime.
No game or toy is off limits
The whole point of family playtime is to interact with your family, so you may think video games are out of bounds. It’s true that watching television is a passive activity, but video games by definition are interactive. Most games have some sort of multiplayer mode in them, and even if it’s a single-player game, everyone around can enjoy the experience of going through the game together. This is also a great way to make sure the game is age appropriate for your child.
Family playtime doesn’t have to be just board games. Get out that dollhouse or R/C car and play with these toys together. Even if you know how to play with a toy, get your child to teach you how he plays with it. Interaction is the key, not what you’re actually playing with.
House Rules
House rules can add excitement to a game that’s been played several times, even though it does spawn the “this is how I’ve played with it since forever” argument. It’s also important to enact some house rules for family playtime itself. Having a way to decide who gets to choose which game to play can cut down on wasting time and save you from having to settle an argument.
The More the Merrier
Family playtime doesn’t mean that everyone in the family always has to do the same thing. There are several games out there that can be played by 2-6 people, so split the family up and have two different games going on at the same time (this may also save you from settling an argument). If you have a small family, invite extended family members, another family, or even just a couple of friends to get in on the fun.
M Scott Anderson resolves to make 2023 more fun than 2022.
Grownup Games
I have something to tell you. I’m an adult. I know it’s shocking, but it is very much true. I have the car note and the housemortgage to prove it. Despite aging, I still love playing games and at this time there are many different games being produced. Each month, I try to find games that families can play together, but some great games might have themes that aren’t always appropriate for the whole family. So put the kids to bed. Here are some games for just us grownups.
Red Dragon Inn
All the fun of a drinking game without the drinking. In this game players take on the role of an adventurer, hanging out in a tavern between adventures. Each player gets their own deck of cards based on the character they are playing, a player board, two markers (one red, one clear) to denote how drunk your character is getting, and a starting sum of 10 gold pieces. A drink deck, a deck of cards filled with different kinds of alcoholic beverages, is placed in the middle of the table where everyone can reach, and the extra gold is placed together as the Inn’s gold. The goal of the game is to be the last one standing and players get out by either losing all their gold pieces or passing out from being too drunk when the red fortitude marker (which counts down on their character board) and the clear alcohol content marker (which counts up) cross each other on the path. One each turn players begin by discarding cards they don’t want and drawing up to 7 cards in their hand. Then they play one of their cards which might help your character, hinder another player, or start a game of gambling, which is a mini game inside the game. After the card has been resolved, the player orders a drink for another character by taking a card from the drink deck and placing it face down on another player’s board. Lastly the player has to drink, by revealing the top card on his character board and moving the alcohol content up on the character board. The best thing about this game is that you can have as many players as you have character decks, although the more people you have the longer the game can be. Red Dragon Inn 1-7 each comes with 4 characters and drink decks, so any of them can be purchased and played alone. There are several Red Dragon Inn Allies decks that come with one or two characters, but don’t include drink cards, so they can’t be played alone. The cost varies. They can be found on Amazon.
Betrayal at House on the Hill
The Betrayal series is interesting because it’s a cooperative game until it’s not. At the beginning of the game everyone is on the same team, exploring the house, finding items, and experiencing creepy events. The table is set up with three starting areas, the Entrance Hall (which is a combination of three rooms), an upstairs landing, and a basement Landing. Characters can change their speed (indicated on a character dial) and add new rooms to the board as they pass through doors. In this version of the game, the entrance hall connects to the upper landing through the grand staircase from the beginning, but there are only a few ways to get into the basement and only one way to get out. On most of the room tiles there are one of three icons on it, either an event will happen or players will find an item (or omen). These cause players to draw a card from the respective deck and your character stops moving. Events are creepy things that happen in the house. They either help or hurt you. Items are things that can help you out and omens are just like items but when they are drawn there is a chance that the second part of the game, the Haunt, might be triggered. When the Haunt is triggered, one of the players is revealed to be a traitor. The traitor is chosen through a table and depends on what omen was found in what room when the Haunt was triggered. There are 50 different Haunts it could be and a few of them don’t even have a traitor. Both the traitor and the rest of the players will take their respective journals and each read their side of the Haunt. Both sides will get information about the Haunt that they need to know and each side will get an objective they need to complete to win (which is usually opposed to the other side). Betrayal at House on the Hill is the first game and Betrayal at House on the Hill: Widow’s Walk adds 50 new haunts to play. Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate is a stand-alone game that takes place in a fantasy setting. Lastly, Betrayal: Legacy is a Legacy version of the game, which is a cool game I’ll be exploring in a future column. Cost of the different versions varies, but they can all be found on Amazon.
What’s Your Role?
Back in March, a group of friends and I started playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). We try to get together when the majority of us can make it and it has quickly become one of my favorite parts of the week. On the surface, D&D can be a bit daunting since all that you need to play are several dice, about 4 people, and 3 books. But like any game, once you either see others playing it or start to play it yourself, you’ll get the hang of it. I feel that the 5th edition (known as 5e) is a great place to start. This month’s toy box is all about D&D and role-playing games (RPGs) including how they are played and how to get started playing as a family.
Games in which a player takes on the role of a character in the game are known as RPGs. D&D happens to be one of the most well known ones. A person called the Dungeon Master (DM) creates and controls everything except the characters being played by the players. They are in charge of the world in which the characters live in, the quests and journeys the characters go on, and the monsters and dangers they face. To be a good DM, it takes a bit of planning but also the ability to adapt and improv at moments in the game when players do the unexpected. The main focus of the DM is to make sure that everyone is having fun playing and to make decisions on things that might be unclear. The other players take on the role of individual characters. They choose who the character is and what kind of skills they have. They can make them good or evil, characters that follow the laws or like to cause chaos, bear knuckle fighters or magic users, a person who is claustrophobic or agoraphobic, your imagination is the limit. Everything you need to know about your character is stored on a character sheet and 5e gears you towards who your character is. They have personalities, ideals, flaws, and bonds, that you decide for your character to help you get to know them and shape their background as well as help the DM create a story that draws your character in.
Once your characters are made (which is way easier in 5e than it was in the 4th edition), there are basically two types of phases the game moves through. The first phase is role-playing. Your band of characters will go into villages and talk to townspeople (played by the DM) to find out if there are any problems that need to be fixed. It can be as simple as defeating a bandit who has taken over a building outside of town or as complicated as moving the moon back to where it’s supposed to be. A good DM will offer clues and try to help steer the group into what he has planned but never force the group to go in a certain direction (which is called railroading). Once the group comes into danger they are in the 2nd phase, combat. Combat starts when the DM tells everyone to roll a twenty-sided die (d20) for initiative; this decides the order of the fight. Starting with whoever rolled the highest, that character can move and do an action. Typically your action will be to fight. When that is the case, you’ll roll the d20 to see if you roll high enough to hit the monster. If you do, then you roll to see how much damage you inflict. If you don’t, you miss and your turn might be over. All the while the DM is playing the monsters that have also rolled for initiative and trying to defeat the players. When damage is done, the amount of damage is taken away from the monster’s or character’s hit points (HP). When all the monsters in combat drop to 0 HP, the combat is over. When the characters drop to 0 HP, they have to roll a d20 to stay alive. In 5e you have to roll 3 successful death saving throws to stay alive before failing 3 death saving throws. If you fail 3 times your character is dead, but you can always come back playing a similar or completely different character, so a character’s death might be bittersweet.
These are just the basics. The best thing to do is to just dive in but since there are three books to read, where do you start? Wizards of the Coast (the producers of D&D) have come out with the D&D Starter Set. The Starter Set contains everything you need to start playing D&D. This is great when no one interested has any experience playing the game. There are characters that are already made and an adventure book that a DM can use to run an adventure. This is perfect for getting your feet wet. After playing a bit with the Starter Set you might want to graduate to the books and make your own character and adventures. One of the best ways to figure out how to play is to watch or listen to other people playing. You can find podcasts on iTunes where people play the game by searching for Dungeons and Dragons, although most of them are probably not suitable for children to listen to, so be cautious. One of my favorites is a show called Critical Role on GeekandSundry.com. It’s a video stream that can have really long episodes (3+ hours each) and I would say is PG. They do a wonderful job of showing every aspect of the game just by playing it. Just remember the most important part of D&D is to have fun using your imagination.
M. SCOTT ANDERSON plays a Half Elf Rogue who is very busy trying to keep the moon from crashing into the Earth just about every Saturday night.
Create Your Own Game
This month in the Toy Box I decided to do something a bit different. As I was looking around online I ran across a website called The Game Crafter. Through The Game Crafter, I was able to create my own personalized board game, and you can too!
Thegamecrafter.com sells self published games and game crafting supplies. They offer a variety of game pieces and parts that can be bought independently so you can create the exact game you want. They also sell blank cards and tiles in many different sizes. For those of you who are computer savvy and know how to work Photoshop, you can prepare files and upload them to thegamecrafter.com and they will print out a copy of your game. Prices vary depending on the number of parts and which parts you get, but the system is easy to understand and it’s easy to see which part is costing you the most incase you want to remove it. Now that you know where to get the parts for your own game, let’s talk about the kinds of games there are and how to create your own.
When starting out, I suggest buying the pieces and a number of blank cards or tiles; basically anything you think you’ll need for your game and then use sharpies to write on them. This will help if you’re not sure what kind of game you want to create. Thegamecrafter.com has a template for writing directions that is excellent for getting you to think about what is needed for your game and I highly recommend using it when creating your game. You might already have a favorite game and you might just want to personalize it. For example you could take Clue and make it your Family’s Clue and have your sister be the murderer in the living room with your family pet or take the game of Apples to Apples and make cards based around your life with people you know, places you’ve been, and things you love. But if you want to make something more original then here are some things to think about when creating a game.
In general, games always have a goal and obstacles that get in the way of achieving that goal. The differences in games come from the types of games, like card games and board games, and the ways to play them, like cooperative or competitive. Card games are games that just use cards and their goals are typically to get rid of all the cards in your hand or collect a certain set of cards. Typically the barriers in card games are cards that add more cards to your hand or not having enough sets of cards for all players to have a set. Board games have a board that you play on and use pawns, dice, and/or cards to play with. Some boards are stationary and the same every time like Clue and Monopoly but some games allow you to create the board like Settlers of Catan. Board games can have a wide variety of goals like racing from start to finish, accumulating the most number of points, and defeating all your opponents. Barriers for board games will be based off the goals so barriers for my examples would be a card that makes you go backwards, a number when rolled with dice causes you to loose that number of points, and your opponents having special abilities that you have to overcome with your dice rolls or your cards to beat them.
You also need to think about if the players play against each other (competitive) or with one another to defeat the game itself (cooperative). Most games are competitive and the challenge comes from other players where in cooperative games the challenge comes from how difficult it is to win the game. If you’d like to look into cooperative games check out Castle Panic, Pandemic, and Treasure Island which I wrote about a couple of columns ago.
Remember it’s best to start simple then add rules or exceptions to the game as you see fit. It’s also fun to play a couple of rounds of a game you created to see what works and what doesn’t.
M. SCOTT ANDERSON lives in Jackson and is already trying to come up with a new game.
Rolling With It
I love playing with dice. They are the oldest gaming implements known to man. Britannica.com says that archaeologists have found evidence that dice have been around before even the Ancient Greeks. Dice were made out of all types of material: marble, bronze, and even bone. Today dice are mostly made from plastic and the most common are the six-sided dice (referred to as a d6), although a basic set of dice for roleplaying games includes a d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20. This month in the Toy Box, I found some games where dice have a prominent role and I even made one up myself.
Sagrada
In this game, players attempt to build the best stained-glass window out of dice. After following set up, the first player will draw out 2 dice per player, plus one, and roll them. Then players will pick one die to add to their window. The first die has to be placed on the edge and every die after has to be adjacent either orthogonally or diagonally. Dice must follow any restrictions on spaces of the window and also can’t be placed orthogonally next to dice of the same color or number, but diagonally is ok. Once everyone has chosen a die, players get to choose another in reverse order. The leftover die gets placed on the round tracker to mark the end of the round, and after ten rounds the game is over and points are counted. There are private and public objectives that will yield you victory points, but empty spaces on your window will subtract points from your score. There are also tool cards and favor tokens that will help you as you build. $36 | Amazon
Can You Roll Doubles
In this word game, it’s a race against the dice. To set up the game, players sit in a circle with one player taking a sheet of paper with categories on it and the next player takes two dice. After spinning a dial to pick a letter, the player with the sheet of paper has to write a word for each category that starts with the word. They have to write as many as they can until the player with the dice can roll doubles. Once doubles have been rolled, the dice are passed to the next player as the player with the paper passes it to the person who rolled doubles. The game ends when all the categories have been filled out and the player with the most words wins. $20 | Target
Scott’s Dice Game
What is great about dice is just by having them you can make up your own games. Here is a game that I made up recently. First you need to have 16 dice, 8 of one color and 8 of another (I use red and green), and a bag to draw them from. Place all 16 dice in the bag and shake them. The first player pulls out 5 dice and rolls them. For my game, the green dice are positive numbers and the red dice are negative. Add the 5 dice together to get your total (you might end up with a negative total). Then the player may pull out more dice (one by one) to roll and add (or subtract) to their total. If you draw a die you must roll it. The player must stop when they have drawn 5 of one color dice (including the dice that are initially drawn). Once the player gets a final total, the dice are all put in the bag and given to the next player. After everyone has gone, the person with the highest total wins. It’s as simple as that. Not Sold in Stores
M Scott Anderson needs a name for his dice game.