Tag: board games

Rules of the Game

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This activity is somewhat of a repeat from when Travis created his own board game in preschool. But now that he’s older, we delved much more deeply not only into how to design a game from start to finish, but also talked about what made a game successful!

To start, we explored two classic games. First up was Dominoes, playing a round with the set we have at home. I had never actually read the real rules before, and when we looked them up online, they were so convoluted I confess even I didn’t quite understand! That was a good jumping off point to talk about what made a game fun and/or challenging.

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Next, Travis listened to a read-through of Jumanji, which is a fantastical game of course but a great way to talk about the rules, including what was similar to real-life games, and what was different. (Note: We also watched the movie, but there are scenes that are quite intense and I don’t recommend it for young children).

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After all that, it was time to design his own game! Raddish Kids had a lesson plan including an Inventor Inspiration Guide to help kids decide what to base their game around. This involved a ranking system based on likes (food, hobbies, favorite shows or books), but this was all too complicated for my first grader. Travis knew what he wanted to base his game around anyway: Star Wars!

We quickly came up with a game called ‘Race to the Death Star’. The shape of this iconic Star Wars base helped us decide how to configure the game, as a spiral of galaxies closing in on the Dearth Star in the center.

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I started gluing down squares of construction paper as the spaces on a large sheet of poster board, and we filled in the ideas as they came to us. Spaces contained events with either a boon (letting the player move forward) or a set-back (which required moving backwards). If a player landed on top of another player, that person had to wait in one of the corner planets until rolling the correct number on the dice.

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To make it through “hyperspace” between galaxies required an exact roll. All in all, it actually made for a great board game! Travis loved it so much that we immediately played 3 rounds. He decided on Lego figures as our playing pieces.

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As a final component of learning, we explored games that can be played virtually. Travis watched a suggested link of 20 games to play over Zoom, and then we really did Zoom his grandmother to play ‘Zoomed In’ (a game involving close-up images that players take turns guessing). This was such a neat bonding activity and the full video is worth a watch if your kids are currently Zooming relatives and friends.

There was lots more in the lesson plan from Raddish Kids, including suggestions to reinvent an old game with new rules, explore the idea of interactive books like Press Here, or learn the history of a classic board game. But my first grader was gamed out, so we’ll just be here busy playing ‘Race to the Death Star’!

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Foodie Family Dice Games & Game Design

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In conjunction with our latest Raddish Kids recipes, tonight was family “date night”! The activity: board games, charades, dice games, and a game of our very own creation!

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First, we did a little investigating; Travis and I talked about games in general, and the way they teach concepts of fairness, taking turns, and following the rules. More specifically, I then showed him a clip about the history of dice in this suggested video (Note: There are some bleeped out curse words, but they went right over Travis’s head). If you want to skip the video, just share some fun facts, like how dice have been around for 5,000 years (wow!).

Next, we cut out and folded up the two foodie dice provided in this month’s crate and played a round of “No Tomato.”

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The rules are simple: roll the dice and rack up a point for every food tossed except… if you roll a tomato you lose your points for that round!

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Travis loved taking a risk and giving one more toss on his turn, daring to inch his score closer to the 12 points needed to win.

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The game was also a great lesson in score-keeping. He loved being in charge of our tally sheet, and erasing when someone lost their points.

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Now it was time to design our own game! We settled on a few basics, using the helpfully provided Game Checklist as a guide. The theme of our game was Travis’s much-loved Spiderman. The goal was to reach the end of the path first. As he happily colored in decorations for the board, I drew the path and set up pitfalls.

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Oh no, Spiderman’s enemies could make you lose a turn or get stuck until you rolled a certain number.

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Lego men were our playing pieces, and we used a dice to move players around the board.

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We played so many fun family rounds!

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We followed up with another game using the Raddish dice, “Rad Yatzy”, a take on regular Yahtzee only using the foodie dice instead of pips.

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Cap off your family “date” with any other board games your kids love, or a round of charades.

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Update: We had to wait until we had a large enough group of family members (6 people or more!), and then we could play a final foodie dice game: Catch the Radish!

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Two people opposite each other toss the dice, but must pass it to the next player if they roll a radish. The first person to have both dice at the same time wins!