Toy Tales – Part 1

So I sat down this afternoon, gave myself about four hours, and wrote up a starter rule set for a toddler role playing game.  I figured that if it took longer than four hours, it was already too complicated for a toddler.  It didn’t even take that long to do.  I wrote it and got in a short nap!  It all came together so nicely that after dinner we all sat down to playtest.
 
And we encountered the first challenge.  GeekBaby doesn’t name any of his toys.  When i asked what his Bear’s name was, he said “Bear.”  I rolled with this, and started the story with how the bear had no name, and it made him sad, so he decided to go out into the world and look for a name.  GeekBaby decided the grocery store was the obvious place to look for the bear’s name, and that the best way to get to the grocery store was to stow away in the car. But he needed a flashlight to see in the dark.  So the bear rolled to climb up the dresser and got a flashlight, and we hit the second challenge.
 
My child doesn’t know his numbers!  He can count reasonably reliably (he tends to omit 5) and add or subtract one from concrete items in front of him without recounting them all (again, reasonably reliably for three).  But he doesn’t know 1 is one, much less 14 is fourteen.  Right away, all the math teaching moments went on the back burner.  He still likes to roll the dice, and I’ll honestly be content with him enjoying the role playing aspect of the game.
 
Anyhow, the bear made it up the dresser with ease, but foolishly turned on the flashlight right away and the little boy started to wake up.  If the boy sees the bear moving around, it’s game over!  After some prompting, and some discussion of putting on coats to go outside and play, the bear turned off the flashlight and tried to climb down the dresser.
 
It was harder to climb down the dresser with the flashlight, and the bear fell, which also disturbed the boy.  But since it was still dark, the bear could creep out of the room unseen, and escape.
 
And in the hallway was a shadow beast with long sharp shadow claws and glowing red eyes.  We had a little battle, during which sadly the flashlight was knocked out of the bear’s paws.  Things weren’t going well for the bear when Maverick showed up, zapped the shadow beast by turning on the flashlight, and saved the day.  (Maverick is a beanie baby leopard in a flight jacket.)
 
Around the battle with the shadow beast, I realized GeekBaby was getting tired (very little nap time today) and losing interest in the game.  He showed a lot of interest at first, I thought, but things had started to go downhill, so Himself jumped in playing Maverick, retrieved the flashlight, and ended the battle, and then it was time for bath and bed.
 
Things I learned:

1. Roll with your toddler being a little uncooperative.  GeekBaby has no interest in naming his toys, so I made the bear’s lack of a name the point of the story.  And GeekBaby got into that. 
2. Don’t push the math.  Allow them to do it if they’re inclined, and remember that the creative play of the story is good for them too.  GeekBaby doesn’t do very much creative play, and what he does do is entirely reenactments of things he’s seen.  Sometimes it’s creative, and sometimes it’s just exclamations over how Woody and his friends are going to be burnt up by the fire.  Chiefly, my kid just wants to do whatever I’m doing, which means he wants to play role playing games too.  So I’m using that desire to sneak more creative play into his diet. 
3. Always have a narrative way to defeat a challenge.  It didn’t initially occur to me to use the flashlight to defeat the shadow beast, Himself came up with that idea.  But it’s a good one, and if GeekBaby hadn’t been so tired we would have tried to gently lead him to the idea instead of Maverick saving the bear.  From now on there will be at least one narrative method of defeating challenges. 
4. Always be gauging your toddler’s attention and enjoyment and stop when he stops enjoying the game. 

Gaming Night!

We finally had another Star Wars game session tonight.  The GM had a rough college semester this past fall and didn’t have either the time or the energy to devote to the game, so we’ve been on hiatus since August.
 
A few hiccups at first, but I found my character sheet in the end, and finally remembered her name.  Kira Lassiter, ship’s medic.  We borrowed a big laser gun for the ship from some pirates, tracked down a missing cargo of donuts and donut making equipment, and did some other stuff that I missed because I was trying to con GeekBaby into napping, or otherwise keep him from being too disruptive.  It was a blast.
 
GeekBaby is desperate to play any game that we’re playing – in the Pandemic marathons of the Christmas holidays we had to give him a spare pawn and let him fly to different spots on the map to keep him happy.  I’m thinking he might be getting old enough to do a very basic, heavy on role playing, light on numbers sort of game.  I like the concept behind Fuzzy Heroes, especially the use of real toys as minis, but it’s still too numbers-heavy.  I have some alternate ideas though.  I want to encourage him in more creative play and he wants to play games like the grown ups, so this has lots of promise as an educational tool if I can get the mechanism just right.
 
Besides, he already has his own set of dice.

Review: Mystery Express

We picked up Mystery Express, by Age of Wonder, from our friendly local comic book and game shop today. Even though it’s a game for 3-5 players we gave it a whirl with a dummy* hand. The verdict?

Himself thought it was okay, but required too much concentration to ever become a real favorite for him. But I grew up playing Clue, and so I loved it.

I may be predisposed to love it just because it’s just so well made. Everything is made to feel nice in the hand. Even the player detective score sheets, which are made of lovely thick paper, are a pleasure to handle. The board lays flat without issue. The cards are lovely, and matte which is different from every other board game I’ve played. There are some (very nice) cardboard tokens, but the rest of game pieces are cast resin, including wee busts of each player’s persona! The texture of the game is just as opulent as the artwork, which is reminiscent of fellow Age of Wonders game Ticket to Ride, but with lots more personality.

The game is Clue, with more complex mysteries and all the tedious rolling to move removed. (If you’ve ever inched from room to room because you are only rolling ones and twos, you know what I mean.) To Who, Where, and How, the game adds Why and Time of Death. One of each variable is selected and hidden beneath the board, then the first four decks are shuffled together and dealt, while Time of Death is handled separately. Every Who, Where, Why, and How is a set of two, and your goal is to find ways to look at the cards which aren’t in your hand, to determine which cards are missing their mates, and are therefore under the board.

There are five investigative personas to play as, which seem to be based off characters from mystery novels. We identified Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, and Inspector Poirot just off the tops of our heads. Each persona has it’s own special power, the use of which is optional, that gives you an extra method to peek at another player’s cards. We didn’t use this mechanism, but it has potential be a fantastic balancing mechanism for playing with children.

The game then proceeds in five rounds which are the stages of your journey from Paris to Istanbul. Movement along the train is free, but taking action in a train compartment costs time, and on each stage of your journey you have limited amounts of time for investigation. There are different things to do in each compartment that give you access to cards, for instance in the sleeping compartment you pick a player and try to find and rifle through their valise. There are new passengers that board in Schonberg and Wein, which make more cards available. You go through a tunnel and get to sneak a peek at your neighbors’ cards in the dark. And you can even run into and chat up the conductor,

When you reach Istanbul, the game is over. You make your final selections and guesses, then the truth is revealed. Ties are resolved by the telegrams sent by the players earlier from Budapest.

One big advantage is that the game has a definite ending. You’ll never have a game like we once did in Clue that dragged on forever and only ended when we gave up and looked in the envelope to find two weapons and no room!

Also, you spend all your time actually working on the mystery, not also trying to desperately get from room to room. The mystery is tougher, but that’s just fine with me. The actions you can take in different train compartments are all pretty balanced too… With the exception of the sleeping car. To rifle another players bag, you have to guess which hand they’re holding the little resin valise in, which is pretty easy to work out of you’re good at rock paper scissors. Himself was pretty frustrated with me by the time we reached Istanbul!

The only real fly in the ointment is the implementation of the time cards. First, they have no numbers, just numberless clock hand positions. This takes a little puzzling out while you look at them. Then, Time cards are gone through at three different points during the journey, using three different methods to reveal them. There are three of each time point, not two, which makes it even harder to ID the missing one. It’s tough! I got it, but this part is pure memory game and not deductive at all. That was disappointing. Maybe there’s an alternative mechanic that could be worked out.

Overall, I really enjoyed it. The game mechanism is fun, but it does have a gentle to moderate learning curve. Its nowhere near being the most complicated game I’ve ever played, but it required moderate setup and constant reference to the rules, at least for the first play, which made it drag a little. But I still really liked it. In my opinion, it’s the game presentation that really pulls it together, makes makes up for the flaws, and makes it work.

* It doesn’t play well at all with a dummy hand, but I got a good enough feel for the game to know I’ll enjoy playing it.