Game on: Pooh sticks

I may be less sure of books turned into games, but on this one I am quite certain. With some flowing water, and a couple of objects to drop into it, you have a game.

People don’t seem to tire of Pooh sticks. New generations of junior players still enjoy it. And it’s the ideal distraction activity if a family walk is starting to feel a bit too long.

The origin

I hesitate on explaining Winnie the Pooh, but for those who need to know, Pooh invents the game.  He drops a stick on one side of a bridge, and goes over to the other side of the bridge to see it come out.

The reason it becomes a game is because of the opportunity to play with someone else (Piglet, in Pooh’s case), and see whose stick comes out the other side of the bridge first.

Finding your spot

You need to look for somewhere where the water is flowing fast. Sluggish or stagnant water is no good – which is why it won’t really work on a pond, unless there’s at least a little bit of a current.

If the water is high, and running fast, it can be particularly exciting, as it can feel like the sticks are also racing YOU – by travelling under the bridge really fast.

The more junior your players, the more you need to consider how easy it is to see over the side of the bridge – or at least through the side, if the bridge is slatted or has gaps you can see through.

If the river is fast moving, you may want to make sure that your junior player can successfully drop their stick in the water, without endangering themselves in the process. (There is also the story of Roo falling in the water, as part of the Winnie the Pooh stories, but you don’t really want to renact that one.)

Finding your stick

The notion is that it should be a stick, but it could also be something else identifiable that will float. Avoid anything too light that will get blown away as it goes down into the water (pieces of grass from junior players’ pockets, for example).

An advantage to the game is that it allows you both to collect sticks on your walk AND to leave them behind (grownups cheer at this point), by dropping them in the stream.

The more distinctive your stick, the easier it is to identify. However, you also need to caution your junior player against too big a stick – again, you don’t want them to hurl themselves in when dropping the stick into the water.

The real point of the game

The point is, of course, for your stick to come out first. But the real point of the game, as I remember it (and I observe it) is the fun of shouting ‘one, two, three, go!’ and dropping your stick on ‘go’ AND the rush across the bridge to the other side.

Being able to see your stick on the other side is good – but I often think that the launching the stick and the rushing is even better.

So, make sure you’ve allowed for more than one stick. You will, of course, want another go.

 

Game on: balloon tennis

There tend to be Rules when it comes to ball games indoors. But the quickest way round it is with a game of balloon tennis.

I say balloon tennis. It could be balloon football, balloon volleyball – even balloon golf, if you have a mini golf set about the place.

The point is that, with a balloon, and two or more players, you have the best chance of the game becoming whatever you want – which is part of the appeal. No breakages, and (if you set up the rules carefully) no need for grownups to rise from the sofa.

Add in the fact that it proves a great distraction on a wet day, and you have a sure-fire winner of a game.

Balloons – and where they come from

No matter how many and varied the toys are that your junior players know, they never fail to enjoy balloons. Best individual item in a party bag, as far as I’m concerned – and party bags are probably the most frequent source of balloons.

You can also rely on family fun events, as well as magic shows, a certain number of restaurants, and no doubt more. And if you get a helium balloon, they’ll last for months. (They also go pop less easily than regular balloons.)

Balloon sports: from the bed

This is ideal for weekend mornings when grownups are finding it hard to get out of bed. Junior player stands at the foot of the bed, adults stay in bed. Remit of where the balloon goes – mostly back and forward, but shots to the side of the bed are also permitted.

If the junior player is also the ball boy or girl, you’re sorted. (If they’re old enough to bring you a cup of tea in bed…well, one can but dream.)

Balloon sports: from the sofa

Similar notion. Adult stays sitting down as much as possible (or at least, this is the version I prefer). If you have a couple of sofas opposite each other, this is idea, but a sofa near an armchair can also be good.

If you play across the central space, you can also invent forfeits if the balloon touches the floor in the middle: imaginary crocodiles,  piranhas, and the like.

Balloon sports: over the tops of chairs

If you want a volleyball version of balloon sports, an armchair could work quite well as a net equivalent.  This encourages the play up and over, rather than just straight.

Junior players may also enjoy hiding behind the chair and popping up suddenly when it’s their turn to hit the balloon. Jack in a box meets balloon volleyball.

Balloon sports: doorways and hallways

If you have two doorways opposite each other, you can have fun using them as goals, and trying to get the balloon into your opponent’s goal. Make sure the doors are well back, so that you avoid players banging into the doors by mistake.

Alternatively, one player stands at one end of a hallway, and tries to see how far they can make the balloon go.  This is where those mini golf clubs can come in handy (as long as junior players can be relied on not to hit each other with them).

However, I could imagine other items that could work just as well: foam swords, possibly lightsabres, and even rolled up newspaper as a form of a bat.

Balloon sports: the static electricity trick

If your junior players are tiring of this, finish up with the static electricity trick.  Take the balloon, and rub it on some clothing – up and down a woolly jumper is ideal.

Once you think you’ve built up some charge on the balloon, there’s a couple of options.  If you or a junior player has reasonably short hair, pass the balloon over their hair to make it stand up. (This works particularly well if the person has quite fine hair.)

Alternatively, stick the balloon against the wall, and the static should hold it there.  You could make this into a game too – take it in turns to charge up the balloon, and time how long you can make it stick to the wall.

And if it pops? Well, in my experience, you won’t have to wait that long for another one…

 

Game on: Fleeced

It doesn’t matter who you like most – Wallace, Gromit, or Sean the Sheep. Or even whether you like Wensleydale or not.

If the Gruffalo game allows you to enact a story book, Fleeced is a board game where you play out the action of the third Wallace and Gromit animation: A Close Shave.

This time, the game takes one aspect of the story – sheep rustling – and turns that into a means to compete against other players.

Plus, there’s whistles.  And you are encouraged to use them.

The animation – and the characters

Wallace, the bumbling inventor, and Gromit, his faithful (and much more able) dog, are the stars of a series of animated films by British animators, Aardman.  Wallace loves cheese, particularly Wensleydale.

A Close Shave introduces a few additional characters: Sean the Sheep, Wendoline (owner of a wool shop) and Preston, her (robotic) dog. The board game also borrows a popular character from the second animation: the evil Penguin, able to disguise itself as a chicken by the simple addition of a rubber glove on its head.

This gives you six characters for use in the game.  The game pieces are little models of each character, with a nice weight and feel in the hand.

Junior Player knows the characters well – including the spin-off animated series for Sean the Sheep – so this works fine for us as a family. It probably does help to have seen A Close Shave first, but you could use the game as a reason to watch it, if you haven’t already.

The additional character: the setting

Part of the delight of the animations, for me, is the north of England setting. This is worked out to good effect in the visuals on the board.

The board resembles a map of where Wallace and Gromit live, with roads leading into the centre, at the village green. There are lots of puns too, in shop signs, adverts on the sides of buildings etc, in keeping with the many written puns in the Wallace and Gromit animations.

This will appeal more to the grownups, but as junior players’ reading skills increase, they are likely to enjoy these too.

Notion of the game

The players start at the edge of the board, in their respective locations: their homes, Preston’s factory, and so on. You have 2 dice to throw, meaning that you can move quite long distances around the board.

Everyone makes their way to the village green, and to one of the buildings around the green (shop, town hall, and so on). If you have a ‘key card’, you can open one of the buildings, and steal sheep.

Blow your whistle – steal some sheep!

Picking a sheep rustling card gives you a certain number of sheep – you pick little model sheep out of a bag. You line them up behind your playing piece, and lead them back to your starting point.

Other players are trying to do the same – and potentially to steal away some of your sheep, while you’re en route. The game ends when all the sheep have been led back to the edges of the board.

The biggest attraction, for Junior Player, is that everyone is given a whistle (like a shepherd’s whistle). Every time you start to move your sheep, you have to blow your whistle.

Each sheep piece has a number on the bottom.  By counting up the numbers at the end, you see how many you’ve scored – the person with the highest score wins.

Additional cards

Everyone gets some additional cards at the start of the game. These cards are a bit like chance cards in Monopoly – they can work for you or against you.

Some cards allow you to jump to a square with a piece of cheese on it (allowing you to pick up another card), others to particular buildings around the village green.

Some cards also allow you to multiply your dice score, so that you move around the board more quickly.

Notes on playing

When your junior player gets a bit more confident on counting above 10, and reading a bit, the game really works – because they can work their way round the board, and read the instructions on their cards.

For a less than eager counter, working out their final score proved to be a fun way of counting.

The quality of the board, and pieces, make this an enjoyable game to play – and the whistles really add to the fun. Junior players will particularly enjoy landing close to another player’s line of sheep, and leading some of them off to their own home square.

Even though sheep rustling is a villain’s activity in the animation, playing a game means that there needs to be a basis to win.  This can be a place to explore good and bad roles, in a low-key way.

We found our set second-hand, for the bargain price of £2, but as it seems to have been out for a few years, you may also find it at a good price elsewhere.

Best played with cheese and crackers to hand, no doubt – particularly Wensleydale.

 

Game on: the Gruffalo game

If your junior players are also fans of the Gruffalo, you might like a go at playing a Gruffalo boardgame.

It works best when you know the Gruffalo description quite well, but it can be a good way of introducing grandparents and others to the rhymes – as well as the opportunity to say ‘I’ve got a poisonous wart, but I haven’t got knobbly knees’, and other such leading sentences.

The book(s)

The Gruffalo is a picture book by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffer – the hero of the story, a mouse, invents a scary monster (the Gruffalo) to escape from other animals that might want to eat him.

All is going well when the mouse suddenly meets his nemesis – but who is the scariest in the end?

Donaldson’s verse sparkles, Scheffer’s illustrations have the right mix of accessible and a little bit scary. The book has been a huge favourite in the UK for over a decade, leading to a follow-up book, The Gruffalo’s Child.

Book to game

There’s been quite an increase of popular children’s books becoming the basis for board games – you’ll find the same with Going on a Bear Hunt, and I’m sure there’s more.

As a lover of children’s books, particularly picture books, I’m sometimes a bit unsure about all of this (and a lot of the other merchandising that goes with these books).  Can’t the book just be the book?

At the same time, a good story works in retelling – and where a board game allows you to retell a story, through playing out the drama, I can see the appeal more straightforwardly.

Premise of the game

The game is quite like pairs, in that you have lots of counters turned face down, and you need to remember where they are to pick the ones you need.

The way this works is that the pictures on the counters match the different elements of description of the Gruffalo – here’s where the poisonous wart, the purple prickles, and all the rest come in.

There are 9 elements of description, split into 3 areas (‘bases’) on the board.  You collect all 9 counters, and proceed on to the end of the game (where you can gain a nut – the reason for the mouse’s stroll through the woods in the first place).  The person to get there first wins.

Starting off

Everyone has a counter with a picture of the mouse – each counter has a different colour so you can tell them apart.

You move by using a spinner – the needle on the spinner points to numbers (1-4).  This makes it relatively easy to count, and move, for younger players.

The spinner is used both to identify how many spaces to move on the board, and how many counters you can turn over, when you get to on of the 3 ‘bases’.

All the counters are turned face down, and are in the middle of the board.

Picking your counters

Everyone also has a smaller board with a picture of the Gruffalo, and circles to indicate the different elements of him, matching the counters.

When you get to a ‘base’, you spin the spinner. If the spinner needle stops on 3, you can turn over 3 counters in the middle of the board.

If any of them match the ones you need for your smaller board, on this ‘base’, you keep the counter, and fill the space on your board. If they don’t match, you turn them back over again.

Moving around the board

It’s fair to say that the first base takes the longest – there are the most counters on the board, and therefore more ‘wrong’ guesses that you could make.

Once you’ve filled the first 3 circles on your board, you move on round to the next base, and try to collect the counters for those 3 descriptions.

Dependent on how well the guessing is going, some people may be ahead to the second or third base while others are still on the first.

The longer the game goes on, the fewer counters are left – and the more you may have seen them already.  This speeds up the identification of counters you need, so that it’s quite quick by the 3rd base.

You need an exact throw to land on the end square and win, so sometimes you can be going back and forth in the final section for a while, even after you have collected all the counters you need.

Notes on playing

It tends to be luck if you get the counters you need quickly – but if someone ahead of you turns over e.g. 2 counters the same, you could remember where the other one is, and pick that up yourself on your go.

This is where knowing the story helps – if you have the rhyme of the Gruffalo’s description firmly in your head (as many parents do), you can run through this, and help remind yourself what counters you’re collecting at this stage.

Try to make sure that junior players put the counters back in the same place (and don’t turn them over and back too quickly), so everyone has a chance at remembering where the other counters are.

As with pairs, junior players have a bit of an advantage, as they tend to find it easier to remember what counter went where than the grownups. (At least, that’s my experience of it.)

The rules also suggest that, with younger players, you can leave the counters face up after guessing.  This makes it much quicker to spot the counters you need, and cuts down on frustration in that first section.

Conclusions

All in all, it entertained both Junior Player, and both grandparents, and junior players may well enjoy the chance to recite the Gruffalo description to other players who know it less well.

As the counter positions are randomised, this is a game you could replay quite a few times. The quality of the board and pieces is good to play with. And the game element could mean that this would work for a range of ages, even where the junior players might have outgrown the books themselves.

If you get to the stage where the board game evokes:

‘Oh help, oh no,

It’s the Gruffalo!’

then it might be time to pass it on to another junior player of your choice…

Game on: Jenga

The memory that stands out, when thinking about Jenga, is of my great-aunt with her head on one side, tongue sticking out (unbeknownst to her), sliding a brick out of the bottom of the stack.

Like all the best games, Jenga is intergenerational, and has elements of skill without relying too much on an ability for strategy. It also happens to be a great game for those with steady hands.

What is Jenga?

Jenga is all about a pile of wooden blocks. They stack in piles of threes, first one way, and then the other, making a (hopefully) strong structure.

You have about 20 levels of bricks – they tend to come with a plastic sleeve that helps you with your initial tower shaping.

The next step is to remove a brick from lower down the structure, and add it to the top of the stack.  Each player does this in turn.

You have to remove a brick a certain number of layers down from the top – I think there need to be 5 or more complete layers between the top and the level you’re wanting to remove a brick from.

The game stops when someone’s attempted selection of brick means that the tower falls down. (It’s all about the crash, really.)

Strategy

So far, so good.  How do you decide which bricks to remove?

If you remove a brick from one side of a set of three, there is the potential for the structure to wobble.  It can be useful to remove the central brick of the three instead, to keep the structure stronger (and make the game last longer).

Part of the fun is in scaring your opponents with where you choose to remove a brick from.

It is perfectly possible to remove a brick from the bottom, or next to bottom, row – in fact, it’s often easier than taking one higher up, because the structure feels more stable lower down.

One hand behind your back

Jenga also works well when you only use one hand to remove the brick. (You might allow for one hand on the other side, to catch the brick as it comes out.)

With practice, you can use one finger to slide out the brick you want to move, and the other fingers on that hand to steady the tower as you do so. We also tend to allow for a certain amount of ‘tapping’ at bricks in the structure, to see which ones are easier to move.

Change over time

When you first buy a set of Jenga, the blocks fit well, and are stiff to move.  This makes for a strong tower, but it can be harder to get the bricks out without knocking down the tower.

Over time, the bricks get smoother to move, and the fit becomes slacker – easier to remove a brick, but also easier to knock the tower down, if the layers above aren’t stacked so well.

Buy wood

At one point, I spotted a plastic travel version of Jenga second-hand, and picked it up. Concept OK, but not half as much fun as playing with wood – particularly because the plastic is more prone to falling over.

A lot of the appeal of Jenga is the feel of the wood, the different grain patterns on different bricks.  It would probably be lovely to make your own version of, but your woodcutting skills would probably need to be pretty exact, to keep the brick proportions the same.

Large version

Such is the popularity of Jenga that you can get large versions of it too. Think large-scale chess games – why not play Jenga in enhanced size too?

I must admit, I’ve never had the chance to try a set like this, but I quite like the idea. Given time, I’ll see if I can find a picture of one somewhere.

But whatever size you play – whatever generations of family, or friends, you have with you – this is one game that Just Seems To Work.

And whatever your thoughts on winning or losing, having at least one game that works, whoever you play it with, is well worth the investment. Whether or not you stick your tongue out as you play.