Game On!

We've been playin' a lot of games this past month and a half!

I tried really hard to keep Christmas gifts to a reasonable minimum this past year. I find with each child's birthday or Christmas season that passes, we have so many new toys/games to play with that it may be months (or in some rare cases, a year!) before we even open the box! That just makes me sick to my stomach, honestly. There's no reason that a child should have so many play things that the level of appreciation for each is diminished to next to nothing because nothing is really special any more.

So a little (mental) benchmark for me this year has been to try to play a round of every game and spend some time with every gift by the end of January. And then we might know how well we did on scaling back. I have another post of play time with our Christmas toys and books coming soon but this post is just for GAMES. And actually, there are a couple games from past celebrations (birthdays, I think?) that we finally got to this month. That's kind of embarrassing... but so much of our play time is typically not structured around a single toy or game. It's more often learning activities, crafts, imaginative play and reading books. But we do love playing games when we actually make the time for them!

This was back on New Year's Eve. I would say the most played "game" since Christmas has definitely been Guess Who. I had a feeling it would be when I made the purchase. This is our friend Jill that Will is playing with.

Hungry Hungry Hippo was a HUGE hit immediately after Will opened it on New Year's Eve and we played it every day for many days. It's a very loud, crazy, chaotic game... And they loved it. ;-)

More Guess Who. Sophie always wanted to play too, but isn't quite old enough to play by herself. So I'd whisper to her the questions to ask Will and then she could close all the little doors each time.

Animal Yatzi

Much the same as regular Yahtzee but with animals on the dice and you try to get so many of the same (or combinations) of animals instead of numbers. Again, Sophie "helped" me shake the dice in the can to roll for our turn.

Writing down his scores.

Cat in the Hat I Can Do That Game. This is an older gift we'd just never gotten around to opening and playing but decided to give it a try after we reorganized the new play room. It's pretty comical and the kids laughed a lot at each others challenges.

It's a three-part action game... i.e. walks backwards... around [that yellow arch]... with a [foam] book on your head.

I think he was standing on one foot here.

Sequence for Kids. An older birthday gift for Will. We've played this a handful of times, but Will loves it and we just need to make time to play it with him more often.

A new Christmas gift for Will from Santa: Qwirkle. An extension of Dominoes.

You build off of each row either by color or shape.

Super fun.

I think the only "game" we never got to was Sophie's "Bug game" that's like a toddler version of Jenga?

But we actually did pretty good, I think.