New Games!

The Kid has developed some new patience and strategizing, and so we've been adding to our game shelf! It's so exciting, because the games themselves are much more interesting for an adult to play.

Some of favorite new games:

Ticket to Ride:Europe: This is definitely at the top end of her ability to manage, but so much fun. The board is massive, you have to manage a zillion cards, and you have to really play with strategy and alternatives. But there's cute little trains. And a bit of geography. And the Europe game has the city names written in their native languages.

Qwixx: Simple dice game with a bit of probability thrown in. Take turns rolling and try to mark off numbers in order before others can. From Gamewright, one of my favorite game makers.

Crab Stack: Simple game where you can move your pieces in limited ways, trying to be the last one still able to move at the end of the game. Minimal strategy (unless I'm missing something), but a game takes maybe ten minutes and it's fun.

Double Shutter: A newer twist on the classic Shut the Box games, adding a tiny bit more strategy. The numbers some in a double row, and you can't play the back rown until the tile in front of it is shut.

Gobblet: This is a twist on tic-tac-toe in which the pieces can gobble each other up by playing a larger piece on top. Who knew tic-tac-toe could be made fun again? We had Gobblet Gobblers, which uses a 3x3 gameboard, but The Kid was ready to upgrade to the usual adult 4x4 gameboard recently.

Dixit: You have a handful of cards with generally surreal pictures on them, use a phrase to describe one of them, everyone else finds a card in their hand that might also fit the description, then everyone tries to figure out which card was the one originally being described. In order to get points, you're best off if some people (but not all) can correctly choose your card. Or if someone chooses your card when it wasn't the original one. It took some getting used to, but is now among The Kid's absolute favorites on our shelf.

Dr. Eureka:  Fun, quick visual perception and speed game. You have three "test tubes" and two little marbles of each of three colors. Flip a card and it will have the marbles in various configurations within the tubes and you have to rearrange your setup without touching the marbles with your hands. We've learned for The Kid to play over an empty box lid so we don't spend our time searching for runaway marbles.

Monopoly and New York:1901 have arrived from Amazon, but we haven't even had a chance to break them open yet.