Glad to have gotten to know a sweet very fun mummy recently, who has her own home-based Board Games business. She generously hosts trial loans of board games for mums so that they can figure out whether the kids enjoy the games before a purchase. (Which is so important!) For this round, I managed to try out Pengoloo (penguin+igloo!) and Wooly Bully with K whilst B was napping.
Pengoloo ($49.90)
I was really taken with this when I saw the well-crafted (okay, incredibly CUTE) wooden penguins with their little eggs.
Am a sucker for wooden toys (think wooden dollhouse – my dream! wooden play kitchen, wooden rocking horse, wooden fruits and food, which i have oops…). Plus, I love the “penguin daddy” idea, where they waddle around sooooo cutely with the eggs, and are such involved fathers.
So yup, this is what the game is about! Very simple premise – find the eggs with colours that match the dice colours you rolled. Plonk them on your iceberg if you get it right. You can also “snatch” from others if you remember what colours the penguins on their iceberg harbour… heh heh *evil smirk*
K gamely helped to set the penguins up.
We started playing, but before we even each had a proper turn, K suddenly wanted to take over the reins. Nooooo, she said, this is how you play. You must open up first, then see what colour, then make the die show that colour. HUH?! I was like, no no no, we take turns, play it mummy’s way first, then your way ok? Nope. No go. Nada.
She then showed more interest in checking out the series of other games this manufacturer had to offer.
Whilst my penguins languished.
I made a valiant effort to re-interest her in the game, playing both her turn and mine. She humoured me by casting glances as I whooped enthusiastically, but nope, she wasn’t going to be drawn into playing anymore. After I got six penguins on one iceberg (love the iceberg idea!) I decided to take a shot at the next game.
Wasn’t too hopeful, since it was for ages 7 and up, and had such a great number of tiles. But… K was in a contrary mood that day… she loved it!
Wooly Bully ($35.90)
The aim of WOOLY BULLY is to match tiles (a bit like dominoes) and fence up the maximum number of sheep in your colour. There are deeper facets to the game, like strategising how to close off other colours’ sheep before they accumulate, or send wolves to eat sheep that border a forest (redeem them by playing hunter tiles)…
First, find these cards from the big bag of tiles – they allocate your “colour” and the village well tile starts the game.
Players take turns to lay down cards of their choice (each hand comprises 4 double-sided cards – 8 choices, which make plenty). I personally loved the artwork! (Ok, sucker for cute sheep and rainbow colours and DID YOU SEE THE LEETLE HEARTS on the red sheep? oh, LOVE! *swoons*)
I helped K look at her cards, and since there were so many options, I could just ask her, which colour sheep did you want to put down? and see, this can go here because these two sides match. Or that doesn’t fit here, cos only two sides match and you need three. We didn’t go into the greater strategising, since I figured it might confuse / daunt her. It was nice just turning this into a simple matching game.
Halfway she chanced upon Aunty Pam’s (really pretty) business cards and started pretending to read them, all adult-like. She wanted to place them into the game!
I told her, urm, these are special cards. You can keep one. Or hold it up. Mummy will take a picture (more free ads Aunty Pam! how am I doing as child model huh huh huh?)!
At the end of it, I repacked the tiles one needs to identify at the start, to cut down the time required for the next trial user to get started on this game. *angelic beam* (p.s. K even tried to add on a sub-game after we were done. She wanted to use the name cards like a knife to “cut up” the “cake” that all the tiles represented. I humoured her for a while, “cutting” along straight lines… *zzz*) We had so much fun, and mummy can’t wait to play this with mean clever adults who can sabo each other, so mummy is going to buy this game!!
This session also brought me back to my younger pre-mummy days when my cell group would play board games for long hours. Upon reading Pam’s site I realised that the games we played were more “euro games” (as opposed to the US-type which involves more chance (think PayDay, Monopoly I guess) and drama) that are heavily predicated on strategy. We used to enjoy Saboteur, Settlers (interminable!) and stuff like Munchkin if memory serves me right.
At the workplace, it was amazing how some junior colleagues “true colours” emerged after a board game retreat. The erstwhile sweet sweet types morphed into psycho-competitive UGLY UGLY UGLY (doll – a game) screaming wraiths, with no regard of seniority (ahem! snatching from your boss? hello??) and their betters.
These days I usually reach for Blokus at game cafes since the rules are easy to explain and grasp, and one doesn’t need to think too hard and can still have a good conversation over playing. So I’m more than happy to induct the kiddies (ok B is probably too little and can only cope with memory flip the card type games) to the world of board games, and hope that they gain hours of pleasure and family bonding through these games.
In my own youth my mummy played loads of scrabble with me, leading to my love of the game to this day which has seen me enter company and almost nation-wide contests. 🙂 These days, there are quite a few adult games but the preschool market is rather wanting. Hence, I think this is a really good shop that plugs the gap! Head-on over to myfirstgames if you’d like to find out more!
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