Child’s Play: Top 5 Games for Young Children

The juvenile stage of human growth known as childhood is a brief and fleeting one. Parents, guardians, teachers, and people who support children are overwhelmed with a rush of options on what to do with the children they share their lives with. To make your life easier, I present my top 5 picks that I have observed being an uncle to four wonderful children in no particular order.

Go Fish

Go Fish and other classic card games like Crazy Eights and Memory are great teaching tools for children. They are quick to play, cheap to buy as most dollar stores have cards now, and teach things such as memory, sportsmanship, strategy, and the importance of weighing risks.

What’s more it can also teach the importance of rules and how to look them up. For example, think about getting yourself a Hoyle’s Rules of Games from your local bookstore. Beyond having hundreds of games to play, you can teach good reading and comprehension. Win-win!

Skipbo

Yes, it’s another card game, but it uses a specialized deck so I’m keeping it off the list as Go Fish, et al.

Skipbo is game that involves counting, sequences, and chance. The rules are simple to pick up as it largely just involves counting. For additional challenges, try throwing in different languages you want to teach and are interested in.

Catan Junior

I’ve done my best to try and keep away from branded games here, but Catan is just a classic resource management game to teach children that it is worth looking into.

It functions very much like regular Catan where you build resources to try and earn victory points, but the game play is a lot more simple and streamlined. Think of it like Catan Light!

For more information on the rules and playing, I highly recommend checking out Geek & Sundry’s Tabletop.

Checkers

Another classic game that can be played with minimal cost effective pieces is checkers. Checkers involves strategic moving of pieces with a simple mechanic: you move diagonally.

Easy and quick to play. This is definitely worth a play with the young children in your life, especially if you want to start leading them into chess.

Monopoly

One of my favourite games growing up was Monopoly Jr. It inspired me to want to become a landlord when I was younger, and taught me hard lessons in my teenage years about the roll of capitalism in the land markets.

What this game teaches is the importance of wise decision making, the scarcity of resources (like money and time), and how to lose gracefully. After all, the game is about bankrupting your fellow players and putting them into difficult financial situations. This game is all about conflict and how to handle it (along with your money) which is why I put this often hated game into my top 5.

Thank you for making it this far. I’m glad you have visited our fair site, and hope that you’ll continue to come back for more!

Game Review: The Game of Meme

Ages: 14+
Playing Time: 30 min
# of players: 3-6 players

Meme (n.) /miːm/

1. An element of culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other-genetic means.

2. An image, video, piece of text, etc,; typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users, often with slight variations.

Source: The Oxford Dictionary at OxfordDictionaries.com

It should come to surprise to no one that I spend a lot of time on the Internet. I spend 8 hours at work using the Internet and then come back home, eat dinner, spend time with my family, and then go back at it for another 2 hours to work on the website. That’s at a base minimum. 10 hours out of my 24 hours (41.67%) In that time, I’ve come across a fair number of memes. Heck, we even make memes on the odd occasion! They’re fun and light-hearted which makes me feel good when others like them.

Imagine my delight when a card game came out that allowed you to play to see who had the best memes! When my good friends pulled out this game, I was positively giddy with the thought of destroying them with my previous meme-generation experience.

The goal of the game is simple: make a meme that the judge will think is funny and relevant to the theme. Themes are decided upon by a random card deck in the middle of the table. These memes consist of two types of cards – an external frame with text and pictures sized to fit within the middle of the frame. By presenting these two together, you compete with other meme-generators to win over the judge and claim the theme card. The first to 5 cards wins!

The flow of the game is a little counter-intuitive for some players. The first part of the round includes a card management round where the player to the left of the judge picks up a picture card, chooses whether to pass it or another picture card on to the player to their left. The last player discards their picture card. The same is done with the frame cards in reverse (right to left). We started with this rule and with a vote of 2 to 1, it was changed.

I would recommend this game for a quick game or as an alternative to a light game of Cards Against Humanity. It’s better with fellow Net-ophiles since they are more likely to understand the pairing, but previous knowledge is not necessary.

For more information, ask your favourite gaming venue for The Game of Meme.

Review: Personally Incorrect

Players: 5-10
Time: Variable
Recommend Ages: 18+

My sister-in-law gave this game to our freshly turned 18 sibling. Little did we know what this little box held.

Personally Incorrect is a crass, delightful game that works best when you have similarly inappropriate minds working to the common goal of insulting one another. The play is very similar to Cards Against Humanity – a card is read and then you submit your cards for judgement. The differences here are that it uses a voting system – the group decides not one person. Additionally the last vote doesn’t count. There’s no waiting to see if there are going to be ties to break up, you just vote.

I cannot describe in words just how crude the answers on this game are. If you’re squeamish around the words fart or butt – you’re probably going to want to sit this one out lest you learn a new set of vocabulary that you weren’t intending. How bad is it? It felt weird playing it with my in-laws kinda bad.

Despite the emphasis I put on how disturbing the cards were, I had a lot of fun playing this. The shock value of the cards mixed in with the right combination of players meant a great time was had by all.

Looking for more information, ask your local gaming venue!

The laminated game box is a Pandora’s box of hilarity

Game Review: Bears Versus Babies

Age: 14+
# of Players: 2 to 6 players
Game Length: 20 minutes

From the makers of Exploding Kittens comes Bears vs. Babies. Babies may seem cute and innocent, but in their core is a desire to ruin all humanity. Their ceaseless crying has driven humanity to manufacture all sorts of monsters in order to preserve themselves.

Bears vs. Babies is a card laying game where it’s up to you to create random and zany monsters to defend against the Baby armies that will be coming up against you by way of land, air, and sea. Play involves drawing or laying cards. If you get a card that with “baby” written anywhere on it, you place it into the appropriate legion. Once you feel you are strong enough, or you fear your opponent is getting too powerful, you can provoke one of the baby armies into a fight. If the sum of your monster is greater than their sum, the highest power army eats the babies for points. If the sum of the babies’ army is greater, than the monsters have been defeated and all corresponding armies are destroyed.

The combinations for this game are truly odd, but fit well with the storyline. It also comes with cards that are not safe for work (NSFW) that certainly ramp this game up to the 18+ plus crowd.

Great for killing time, I’d make this a play at least once to see how your Mantis Shrimp with fire coming out of nipples can handle the Sea Baby Army. (I strongly suggest the party hat.)

For more information or to purchase, please see your local gaming venue!