Gaming With Grandma - 2

My mum dropped by this morning for her weekly visit. After a cup of tea and a chat we were joined by my elder daughter, 5, for a few board games.

My daughter first requested the 'house game'. "What's the 'house game'"? I asked her. She pointed to For Sale. Ahhhhh, good choice, I thought. Card games like For Sale are often difficult to play with children, especially when there are a lot of cards that have to be held in their little hands. I was browsing in a game shop last year and noticed a card-holder that can be held both in the hand as well as left sitting on the table. Here is a picture of the card-holder we bought for my daughter to help her with card games. It is called Card Holda and is manufactured by Einstein Design.

As there were only three of us playing For Sale I discarded 6 each of the two, 30-card decks according to the rules. The reason for this is that it makes it difficult to 'card count' and thus there is always a bit of uncertainty over what property or cheque values will be revealed.

We played one game which consisted of 8 hands of purchasing property cards and 8 hands of attempting to sell them for the highest cheque values. I secretly scoffed at my daughter's strategy of almost always passing and taking the lowest value card. The way I saw it, the only competition was between my mum and I.

At the end of the game neither Grandma nor I had any cash left but my elder daughter had $15,000 of her initial starting amount of $18,000. That meant when we added the values of the cheques together to calculate the final scores my daughter would get to add $15,000 to her total.

The final scores were Grandma winning on $77,000, me on $75,000 and, surprisingly, my daughter on $69,000. I'm going to have to keep my eye on her in future.

My daughter's next choice was for Madeline which is a memory game in which we are searching around Paris for Madeline's five missing puppies. We played three games. Game 1 was tied between my daughter and Grandma with 2 puppies each and me with 1. Game 2 it was my daughter and I sharing the win with 2 puppies each and Grandma with 1. In Game 3 I took the win with 3 puppies, my daughter with 2 and poor Grandma was left wandering around the Eiffel Tower still looking for puppies that weren't there.

We gave my daughter another choice of game and as the title of the game came out of her mouth I cringed. We were going to play Bratz Passion For Fashion. I choked back the scream in my throat as I helped her set up the board. In Bratz Passion For Fashion, which is basically a memory game, we are the Bratz girls trying to get ready for a night on the town. The problem is that our wardrobes are all mixed up with each other's clothes hidden in the revolving closets of all our rooms.

My daughter, at 5 years of age, is a huge Bratz fan. She has the dolls and DVDs of course and this is one of her favourite games. She picked Chloe, Grandma was Sasha and I was Yasmin. Woohoo. I endure these kids games because I know my daughter enjoys them and I'm secretly training her up as a future opponent for games I like to play.

Finals scores were my daughter first with all 4 items and back to her room, myself also with all 4 items but not making it back to my room, and Grandma with 3 items.

The final game we played was Amazing Labyrinth. In this game we were each dealt 8 item cards. These match the items on the ever-shifting square tiles of the maze. This is a really great game for adults and children to play together because you can easily introduce a handicapping system to ensure relatively equal play. For this game, as the adults, both Grandma and I could only ever look at the top card of our deck. Therefore we could only attempt to collect one item at a time. However, we allowed my daughter to always look at the first 4 of her 8 cards. That way she had an advantage by having more options for collection than we did.

The handicap system worked very well and it was an extremely close game. Although I was always in the lead by a few items, I had a lot of trouble getting the last one. This gave both my daughter and Grandma a chance to catch up. In the end we all were able to collect the 8 cards and I only just got to my home base to take the win before they did. Here's a picture of the game as my daughter is about to move her yellow wooden playing piece.

So that was our gaming session. My wife arrived home from shopping about 11.00am and we all had a lovely morning tea of Tasmanian Pickled Onion Cheese with crackers which Grandma had thoughtfully brought with her. A nice way to end off the morning's gaming.