Episode 79: You Know, For Kids!
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79: You Know, For Kids! Release Date: May 24, 2009 Running Time: 105 min. Listen Now: Download: Enhanced Version - MP3 Version Subscribe via iTunes: Enhanced - MP3 See sidebar for other subscription options |
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Say goodbye, Candyland. No need to cringe on family game night. We review a slew of games aimed at kids that adults will enjoy, too, including Kayak Chaos and Duck! Duck! Go!
News & Notes: Spiel Foundation Logo, Magic Labyrinth, Ring-O-Flamingo
The List: Kayak Chaos, Duck! Duck! Go!
Back Shelf Spotlight: Super Farmer
Table Talk: Pictureka
Truckloads of Goober: Loopin' Louie
Game Sommelier: 5 games to play on a school bus
Mail Bag: Kris Burm writes in, Ninjas in MS, Restaurant Row Poll
Complete Show Notes continue after the break.
News & Notes
Spiel Foundation Logo and URL thespielfoundation.com
Thanks to listener Bran McMillin for his effort in bringing the Spiel Foundation logo to life!
Magic Labyrinth BGG | Official Site
A new memory game with magnets and hidden walls. Move your apprentice through the maze to try and collect treasures.
Ring-O-Flamingo BGG | Official Site
Dexterity game where you try to flip life preservers onto flamingos.
New Contest
Your Move! Link
New sponsor, new dice, time for a new contest. Introducing Your Move! Head over to the forum to see the format for the new contest. Over time, we'll have several varieties of Your Move contests and cycle through them. The emphasis in Your Move is on participation. Name That Game may burn your brain, but this one shouldn't. We'll pick a winner at random from all the entries and the winner will receive a set of coveted Spiel dice!
The List
Kayak Chaos Official Site | BGG
Play cards to move your boat down the river. Problem is, you don't know which way the river will bend since the boards slide and flip as the race moves on.
duck! duck! Go! Official Site | BGG
Bathtub rubber duck racing at its finest. Great introduction to programmed movement style games with cute customizable rubber ducks.
Back Shelf Spotlight
Super Farmer BGG | Official Site
Invented by Polish mathematician Karol Borsuk during the German occupation in WWII. Super Farmer is a dice game with custom 12-sided dice. You roll the dice to breed different types of farm animals, hoping to raise at least one of each type. There's also an American version (simplified) called Have You Herd.
Professor Borsuk was famous for Borsuk's Conjecture and the Borsuk-Ulam Theorum.
Table Talk
Pictureka BGG | Official Site
Nine game boards with crazy artwork are placed on the table. You draw a challenge card and try to find elements on the board that match your cards in some way.
Truckloads of Goober
Loopin' Louie BGG
Louie's bi-plane is headed toward your barnyard full of chicken tokens. press your lever to keep him from knocking your feathered friends from their roost. A game so ridiculously fun it should be illegal.
The Game Sommelier
The challenge: 5 games to play on a school bus
Apples to Apples BGG
Settlers of Catan - Travel Version BGG
Jishaku BGG
Backseat Drawing Junior BGG
Bongo BGG
Mastermind BGG
Scopa BGG
Cribbage BGG
New Challenge: 5 games to bring to a game convention
Donors - Pledge Drive 2009
Thanks to the following donors/subscribers:
Craig "Bread & Circuses" Kloosterman
Scott "The Shogun" Loeffler
Justin "The Toaster" Moore
"The Fury of" Matthew Fisk
Allen "The Praefect" Tabor
Mail Bag
Pre-orders are under way for Spiel-themed Game Journals
Thanks to Kris Burm for listening and commenting on the Gipf extravaganza
Scotty "Knucklebones" Dickey has ninjas in his house thanks to us.
Greg Lam at Pair of Dice Games has a new title coming soon: Restaurant Row. He wants more feedback on issues related to pricing. Give him a hand!
If any European listeners want to help us acquire Spiel des Jahres nominees for our upcoming special episodes, let us know!
Miscellany
The background artwork in the Episode Title is a clip from The Hudsucker Proxy. A quote from Norville Barnes is the title of this episode. :)
Music credits (courtesy of Ioda Promonet) include:
"Wild River" - by Matata - buy the mp3
"Here Comes the Ducks" - by David Yazbek - buy the mp3
"My Happy Kids" - by Jeff Berlin - buy the mp3
Errata
I'm sure there are some goofs in there somewhere. Let us know if (when?) you find one!
Comments
What if you tire before it's done?
I love the Hudsucker Proxy. "GooooooooOOOOOO EAGLES!"
And the show's a day early! Yay for holiday weekends!
extruded plastic dingus
"Does it have rules?
Can more than one play?
What makes you think it's a game?"
I taught a class on films of the Coen brothers last year and I think we had the most fun with our discussion of The Hudsucker Proxy. Makes me smile every time I watch it.
One nugget to chew on. Think about how authority is seen in all Coen films. A well-to-do white guy sitting at a big desk. Of all their films, Norville Barnes is the only one who sits at such a desk and escapes a punishing end. Even then, it takes a deus ex machina *literally* to save him.
"You'll be tattered, torn, and hurtin' once the Munce is done with you. Go... Eagles!"
Hope everyone enjoys the weekend whether it's long or short where you live.
Duck Duck Go
Here's a playtesting anecdote for you. The game was originally about hamsters running around. The publisher is the one who changed the theme based on the wealth of interesting rubber duckies available. At the time, it seemed like a decent idea. In retrospect, it was a GREAT idea. I think those ducks have done more to sell the game than anything else.
Quacking under the pressure...
I salute you on behalf of imperiled ducks everywhere. I feel slightly less embarassed about being informed last week that my copy of Hey, That's My Fish is "a little kids' game" now. Of course it is, I just hadn't noticed it before. While I think the superiority of current adult games to their predecessors is occasionally overstated, the conscious effort made to break kids' games out of the century-old "Goose" format is harder to deny.
Nice message from Kris Burm! He's impressed me no end with his fascinating creation, the best thing to happen to abstracts since 3M put out things like Twixt and Ploy, both of which I see echos of in the Gipf project. The downgrading of Tamsk is interesting. I understand the gameplay and marketing reasons behind Tzaar, yet Tamsk still seems a cohesive entry on a purely asthetic conceptual basis. Among other things, it sets off the increasing use of sand imagery in the boards and pieces of the subsequent games. The "Spiel effect" hit me worse than ever last episode, by the way. In addition to assembling the dizzying original GIPF project, I found myself buying two decidedly adult titles you've mentioned, the darkly comic The Club and an amazing thrift score of Kablamo! which I'd begun to give up on owning. I recommend them both highly only you know, not for kids.
So you could say that thanks to the world wide web, I can't duck out of putting more games down on my bill.
puns
I canardly believe those bad puns. They're driving me Daffy.
Well, I never!
Waterfowl thing to say... (grin)
(by the way, the plural of echo in my first post should indeed be echoes. For some reason, it won't let me edit that one though.)
No puns here.
No puns here.
Was listening to the show in the car / taxi driving the boys around today, and not only did my oldest say Kayak Chaos three times fast, but he did it while chewing gum and reading his book :)
I didn't even know he was paying attention, but all of a sudden three quick Kayak Chaoses came up from the back seat.
stealth spielers
That's a great story.
You'll know they're really paying attention when they start exclaiming "Truckloads of Goober!" :)
Weighing in on the School Bus Challenge...
Allright, I've been really busy with a lot of different things and I've been spending my time listening to other Indiana based podcasts (one has a memeber somewhere else in Indiana, and one has at least one guy right in your back yard) (both fitness based podcasts) so as such, I haven't listenend to the rest of the episode, but I had to skip ahead and listen to Dave's take on my challenge.
Apples to Apples - I will give Dave this one because it solves my biggest problem with Apples to Apples...the point where you're playing for no real reason, it's not fun anymore, you just haven't stopped. When people start leaving, the game ends. Awesome. Also I work in a rDenny's as an overnight server and just last week I was playing with a table whenever I walked their way. I just kept some cards in my pocket and whenever I walked by I'd see what the card was and play my own.
Settlers of Catan - Travel Version - This one gets another thumbs up, I like this version of the game because it feels a little different, even though it's just the same thing, plus it's pretty hard to shake it around. Granted it is possible to mess this game up...but you can mess anything up if you try hard enough.
Jishaku - This one I just can't give to you Dave. Thubs down. You get an A for effort though, I like the way you were thinking, and I understand why you picked the game. Heck I even really like this game. I think the reason this doesn't work is because busses shake in small ways very often, as opposed to large pothole movements less often. What I mean is you'll always have that kid that's like "We hit a bump! Do over!" This game is really just one little parlor trick over and over...which I still enjoy. But on the bus it will devolve quickly.
Backseat Drawing Junior I'll give you this one for everything mentioned, plus I'll even give you the non-junior version as well.
Bongo - I think Stephen really pushed all the right buttons on this one. But I will say one thing...I'm certainly willing to try. I like the way you were thinking on this one. I suggest you replace it with a different dice game maybe. I saw somebody on the geek that was trying to make a pop-O-matic dice cup with 5 dice. I immediately thought TRAVEL LIAR'S DICE. (that would be sweet)
Mastermind - yes, yes, a hundred times yes. This game was MADE for 1 on 1 bus battles. I am TERRIBLE at this game...or at least I was in grade school, but I used to play on the bus or in study hall.
Scopa + Cribbage - I have to give you these, I'll even add something like 5 card stud. When I was a kid 5 card was all we KNEW, and we could play that in a volcano if we had to.
*Will looks randomly about his game collection*
Here's a couple off the top of my head that you could try with varying degrees of success:
Pictionary (what was that Pictionary based team game show? use those rules) one person draws, a couple seats on the opposite side of the aisle guess.
Blue Moon - you don't really need the board for anything, and there are rarely that many cards out at any one time. use the box to draw out of and maybe another for your discards.
Cluzzle - I can scuplt badly ANYWHERE.
And if you guys are going to have a classic type of game as extra credit, so will I: Cat's Cradle, all you need is some know-how and some string. And for double super mega bonus points: Slap (not the card game). Two people face each other, one palms down, the other palsm up, person on the bottom tries to slap the back on the hands of the person on top. You can play that for hours with the right kids.
(also, twelve year olds kick my BUTT at Blue Moon.)
So it looks like Dave gets 5 up and 2 down. Meaning he got at least 5 to the good...we'll let him have the crown this time...after he finishes washing my car.
Will A. Carpenter "Owner" of The Spiel
owned
Looks like I wasn't too far from the mark with my judgements of Dave's selections.
Backseat Drawing and Pictionary would be tough to draw because of the bump issue. I think we may have underestimated how much this would mess up these games. Of course, that could add to the humor of the game as well.
Cluzzle worries me a little since I can see the clay bits quickly becoming missile weapons in a big buss free-for-all.
School Bus Adventure
So I ended up having to be on a bus for a bit of time...in fact it was a school bus...in fact it was a school bus from the school I went to...Since I'm 25 years old and I moved "close" to school in 7th grade... (close meaning I got to walk to school) I hadn't been on one in YEARS..but I knew a few days ahead of time and I remembered this challenge.
I was a chaperone on a bus full of 5 year olds...my lady friend is a preschool teacher you see.
So guess what? A group of 5 year olds...on a shaky school bus...can play a pictionary style game PERFECTLY FINE!
So, it works!
\/\/
Nice
That's great that you were able to try it out, and that it worked.
When I was on a bus for the first time in 17 years last year (parent helper for a school field trip) I was playing 'try not to get bus sick or a massive headache'. Why oh why do kids prefer to sit way in the back on top of the rear wheels.
smooth ride
Glad to hear a Sommelier challenge put to a real world test. Neat!
I grew up riding a bus for 90 minutes to school on bumpy country roads, so my imagination leaps back to those experiences when thinking of drawing games and buses. On my bus, you'd be more likely to stab your neighbor with the pencil than actually draw something on the paper. :)
extra components.
WOw, (i'm still listening) it is so cool that you guys are doing duck duck go. I haven't played the game yet. But I anticipate playing it greatly. My daughter was installed as teenage lady honcho of her sect of rainbows. Her mascot was rubber duckies. So being a game player as a gift I gave her duck duck go as an instillation present. We got way into it and my wife picked out specific ducks and specifick birddog online. She greatly appreciated it and she has played it. The cool thing is the ducks. Due to her mascot we went overboard on ducks. The good news is that Oriental Trading has ducks in varient themes which are the correct size for duck duck go. so you can get fantastical numbers of ducks online. the sad part is that you have to buy them in groups of more than 4. On the other hand I have found that party stores tend to use the oriental trading company. so for a slightly increased price (i think maybe 30 cents per duck) you can get themed duck at party stores. So I would totally say order online and customize your ducks for favorites then depending on how much you like rubber ducks either order online, or visit party stores and get thematic ducks for the season. (especially halloween lots of costumed ducks)
archie mcphee and devil duckies
Good point about Oriental Trading Company and the multitude of ducks available. APE Games offers a bunch of sets on their site as well if you want to mix and match.
Francie has a bit of a rubber duck fetish, so she also recommends Archie McPhee's devil duckies. A little more twisted than your average duck, but fun all the same!
Rainbow for Girls?
My daughter was installed as teenage lady honcho of her sect of rainbows. Her mascot was rubber duckies.
Rainbows and in Rainbow for Girls, the Masonic-related group? My dad was a state honcho in Job's Daughters and all four of my sisters were involved heavily. Heck, my parents still are active even though my sisters are all grown. My brother and I were in DeMolay, and we're both Masons now, too, though I'm not at all active.
Anyway, I just wanted to show that I knew that you were talking about. :)
Can you tell me what the
Can you tell me what the distribution on each die is for each animal in super farmer?
animal accounting
Here's the distrubution
red die: 6 rabbits, 2 sheep, 2 pigs, 1 horse, 1 fox
green die: 6 rabbits, 3 sheep, 1 pig, 1 cow, 1 wolf
Somehow, I always roll that damn fox!