Saturday 5 March 2016

Challenged!! Day 5

Today The Girl did some maths - this will be an everyday occurrence between now and exams. They decided on maths-free weekends (as in Curriculum not life maths) a good while ago now, but needs must and all that....

My lovely Number 1 Son and his equally Lovely Girlfriend took them both shopping. Both sons went off on a train in one direction to shop for games and comics, while Lovely Girlfriend and The Girl went off on a train in the other direction to shop for clothes and general girly teenager stuff.

Game & comic shopping is a much quicker mission than clothes, so I got to spend a large chunk of the afternoon playing games with my boys :) Number 1 Son loves games and regularly introduces us to new and interesting ones. Today was no different.

We played two co-operative games - Codenames and Hanabi - both challenging in different ways.

Codename is listed as a party game at IQ Gaming and is the no. 1 Party game at Board Game Geek, ranking no. 19 overall. Basically, you have a 5x5 grid of word cards laid out and the clue-giver has a card with a grid on that tells him which words he has to give clues for. Each word card represents one of your operatives, the enemy agents, innocent bystanders and an assassin. The guesser has to try and correctly identify the words without revealing enemy agents and innocent bystanders or, most importantly , the assassin. It's not as easy as it sounds, but it was good fun.

Hanabi was even more fun. Again, it's a game where players give clues to each other. This time the aim is to build a firework display by playing cards of the same colour in rising numerical order. Sounds easy? The twist is that you can't look at your own hand and have to deduce what you have from the clues that other players give you on their turns. Only one clue can be given per turn and some turns, you can't give a clue because all the clue tokens have been used. It's a good game and I reckon that because there is no reading involved it's a game that can be played with younger players. In fact, younger players would probably find it easier than I did because I kept forgetting what I knew about my cards :/ I would really recommend this as a family game. Hanabi is rated no. 21 Family Game on Board Game Geek and no. 173 overall. It's a compact game that you could slip in a bag for travelling, although I really like the look of the German version in a tin for that purpose :) There is no text on the cards so the only problem would be that the rules would be in German but you can find the rules in English here



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