Race to the Treasure is the fourth cooperative board game from  Peaceable Kingdom to have received a Major Fun award. Everything that we noted about previous games applies to their new Race to the Treasure game. It’s fun. It’s intelligently packaged. The rules are easy to understand. No reading is required. And a whole game can be played in 20 minutes or less.

Like all their cooperative games, in Race to the Treasure players are working together, competing against chance. There’s a collection of 37 cardboard tiles. They are mixed together and placed in a face-down stack. Ten of the tiles are “Ogre Tiles.” These are the very tiles you don’t want to find. The rest are “Path Tiles.”

There are also 4 “Key Tokens” and one “Ogre Snack.” Players use two dice, one lettered A-F the other numbered 1-6, to determine where the Key Tokens are Ogre Snack are to be placed on the board. Once that is accomplished, the first player selects the top tile on the stack. If it’s a Path Tile, it’s placed face-up on the Start space on the board. If it’s an (heaven forfend) Ogre Tile, it goes into the top space of the Ogre’s Path. The goal is to use the Path Tiles to build a path that connects, from the Start to all three keys, the Ogre Snack, and ends at the End space.

The Path Tiles have different designs on them, so the key conceptual part of the challenge of the game is to figure out how best to position each new tile. This decision is made collaboratively, regardless of who’s placing the tile. So, as with all the games in the Peaceable Kingdom collection, turn-taking is just for fun. The real play centers on deciding where to place each tile, and how it should be oriented. This makes the game a bit more conceptually engaging than the other games in the series, and, hence, worthy of our collective notice.

What makes it worthy of a Major Fun award is how fun it is to play. Even when you all lose, you all lose together, and not because you weren’t “good enough.” It was your combined cleverness that made you win, and if you lost, it was luck what did you in.

Race to the Treasure can be played by 2-4 school-age children (the manufacturers recommend the game for children 5 and older). A single game takes 20 minutes or less. Designed by CALICO, LLC, with art by Kelly Murphy, Race to the Treasure is © 2012 by Peaceable Kingdom.

Have an iPad, perhaps? Love to play on it, except getting a little tired, maybe, of playing by yourself?

So, there you are, at, I dunno, a coffee shop, maybe, with a friend – maybe a good friend, or someone you’d like to have for a good friend – and you just happen to have your iPad with you, as always, ever since you got it. And you turn to your friend, saying “care to Fingle?”

“Fingle?” asks your friend, quizzically.

And, without another word, you whip out the old Pad, launch your brand new Fingle app (which, for a limited time only, is only 99-cents and includes four, count them, puzzle packs), and you Fingle. Together. Laughing at the sheer delight of engaging in something quite similar to a game of Twister, only with your fingers. Challenged, ever-increasingly so; entertained, ever-more deeply so.

It’s Fingle. A game for two co-present players sharing an iPad. A cooperative game. A game that, from time to unavoidable time, makes you laugh together.

You have your squares. Your friend has hers. You put one finger on each square. Your friend puts one finger on each of hers. And, without losing contact with these squares, you attempt, simultaneously, to slide your squares into your targets, and hold them there, until your friend has managed not only to slide her squares into her targets, but also to hold them there long enough for the game to decide that accomplishment has been achieved. And then you go on to the next challenge where you have to use four fingers, each. And then the next, where you have to use your four fingers, each, to move into moving targets.

I first encountered Fingle at the DiGRA conference. I was excited about the potential of the game even before it was completely actualized. And now that it’s available, and finally on an iPad near me, I am even more excited to share this surprisingly innovative, paradigm-shifting, touchingly cooperative iPad game for two players even.

Designed by Adriaan de Jongh & Bojan Endrovski, from Game Oven Studios. Major Fun? Oh, yes. Majorly so.

Tell Tale is a story-building game using a deck of 60, two-sided, circular cards. There’s a different, evocative drawing on each side of each card.

To play Tell Tale, you use some or all of the deck, turning cards over one at a time, weaving each image into something like a story, or a dream, or maybe a myth or a fable, or a joke or riddle, or a stream-of-conscious dadaist work of near art.

You can play by yourself, you can play together, you can play with kids as young as five, you can play with as many as eight, and maybe even more.

There are two things that contribute to making this game so much fun. OK, maybe three.

First, the art. Hervé Gourdet’s drawings are clear and easy to interpret, and, whenever possible, humorous; but the colors are often dreamlike, conveying a hint of emotion.

Then there’s the two-sidedness. Some cards have related, but opposite images on each side (a heart on one, a broken heart on the other); some are just related (a rainstorm on one, lightning on the other). And then there’s one side of one card that simply says “the end.”  This not only gives you twice as many images, but also everlasting surprise. All of the games that you play (there are four of them described in the rules) involve turning cards over one at a time, so you have no idea what image you’re going to get until you get it.

Then there’s the roundness of the cards and the wonderfully colorful tin they can be so easily carried around in, which have nothing to do with the game play, but help make the whole thing more endearing, more like something you want to carry around with you everywhere.

Count your Chickens is yet another significantly fun cooperative game from Peaceable Kingdom. It is the third of their cooperative games earning a Major Fun award (see Stone Soup and Hoot Owl Hoot). Like all of the five games currently in this collection, it is sensitively designed – sensitive to the environmental costs of producing a boxed game, sensitive to the way children play together best.

Of all their games, this one is designed for the youngest age group (children as young as three). It also has the very thing that many parents and teachers seem to need in order to justify letting their kids play games – an educational component.

We don’t give Major Fun awards because a game has anything to do with learning something. We give them because we think the game is fun, unique, inviting, easy to learn, easy to play, over and over again. A game that’s fun and also somewhat educational – well, there aren’t many of them at all, at all.

The educational component? Counting. Hence the name of the game. Hence the appropriateness for a 3-year-old. And the counting part is beautifully integrated into the game, adding a unique element to the excitement of the whole play experience.

When you open the clearly illustrated board, you see a windy path leading up to the chicken coop. There’s a large green field surrounding the path where you put all your chicks (small, round, chick-illustrated tokens). On the path are various animals and farm implements, with one exception the very farm animals and implements depicted on the spinner. That one exception is a cute, but pesky fox.

On your turn, you spin your well-made, freely-spinning spinner. When the spinner is all spun out, you look at the picture it is pointing to, and move to the first space on the track that shows the same picture. While you move, you count the spaces you travel. That number tells you how many chicks you can take off the field and put into the chicken coop. What a sweet connection to make, conceptually, and for the fun of the game. You can’t tell how beneficial a spin will be until you actually count out the spaces on the board. And, while the correspondence between the spaces on the track and the number of chicks further reinforces your understanding of the property of counting, there’s something magically fun about experiencing the connection.

O, and then there’s that pesky fox on the spinner. Land on it, and you have to evict one of your chicks from its happy place in the henhouse, and place it back in the wilds of the field. O, pesky, pesky fox.

So, you might not actually win. Despite your collective efforts and gathered wisdom, even if your parents are playing. So you might have to play the whole game all over again for yet another 15 minutes of gentle, cooperative fun.

Count Your Chickens was designed by Peggy Brown of Creative Consulting, LLC, with illustrations by David Walker. It is played peaceably, with 2-4 players.

Hoot Owl Hoot is a cooperative game that is easy to learn, quick to play, and accessible for even very young children. Any one of these qualify Peaceable Kingdom’s game for a Major Fun Award. Like the Major Fun award-winning Stone Soup, Hoot Own Hoot is thoughtfully manufactured and packaged to conserve resources but remain functional. Major Fun likes the Earth and therefore approves. But none of these things will win a Major Fun Award for a game unless it is fun—especially for its target audience.

And Hoot Owl Hoot delivers. We played the game with a group of kids, age range 5 – 12 years, and it was intoxicating to witness the planning and predicting and anticipation that accompanied each play and each new card.

Depending on how difficult you want to make the game, the object is to get 4, 5, or 6 owls home to their nest before the sun rises. The game consists of a board (inscribed with a colorful, spiral path that the owls must follow), a sun token, 6 owl tokens, and 50 cards. The cards are printed with a sun icon (14 of them) or a color (yellow, green, orange, blue, violet, and red). The sun cards move the sun toward sunrise and the color cards move the owls toward their nest. A row of boxes along the top of the game board indicates the position of the sun (using the sun token). If the owls reach the nest before the sun reaches the final space, the players win.

Players draw and reveal 2 cards. Cards are kept face up in front of each player so that the players can talk about what they could do each turn. Play rotates around the board. If a player has a sun card, that card must be played and the sun moves one space. If a player has a color card, the player may choose to move one owl to a color space that matches one of the color cards. When a card is played, it is discarded and the player draws a new one from the deck.

Each decision had to be carefully weighed and the kids really took the task to heart. They analyzed the colors available to them and strategized about the order in which to play the colors. They groaned when the sun rose another notch and they clapped when the owls were able to leap-frog over long distances. They cheered when the owls made it home. Cooperative games exercise cognitive muscles that often go undeveloped in our society. And that, my friends, is Major Fun.

Hoot Owl Hoot is © 2010 by Peaceable Kingdom. Designed by Susan McKinley Ross, who coincidentally is the designer of three other Major Fun award-winning games, and illustrated by Betsey Snyder.

You know the card game “concentration“? Of course you do. It’s that game where you turn all the cards face-down and then try to find matches. There’s got to be at least a hundred versions, mostly for kids, often for purported purposes, such as: memory training, image recognition, sight recognition, and on, and, of course, on.

Stone Soup is yet another game very much like the card game “concentration.” There are cards. You turn them face-down. You try to find pairs. But there are some significant differences of significant enough difference to make this game noteworthily Major Fun.

The most significant of these differences is that Stone Soup is a game you play cooperatively. If you win, so does everybody else. If you lose, you are most definitely not the only one. And this makes the whole concentration idea much more fun, especially when people of my age are playing with people of my grandchildren’s age, because, frankly, the minute I turn a card back over I pretty much can’t remember what it was that I had just seen. And three turns later, I absolutely can’t remember. And the kids can. Which means that they have at least as much to contribute to our winning the game as I do. OK. They have more to contribute. But I’m not talking about that.

There are a couple of other significant differences that make Stone Soup so much fun. Mixed among the pairs of yummy vegetable cards there are also “Fire Out” cards. Whenever someone turns over a card that says “Fire Out,” that card goes into the fire space. There are 10 fire spaces, and 10 fire cards. Now, as you so well know, in order to make a kettle of Stone Soup, you have to have a big kettle, full of water, and a big fire to heat everything up. And if the fire goes out, well, so much for the whole soup thing.  Fill in the last fire space, and the game is over.

Fortunately, there’s also a Magic Stone card. If that gets found, it can be used to turn a Fire Out card back over before. So, if you do find a Magic Stone, you’ll want to save it. And once you use it, you’ll want to be absolutely sure to remember exactly where you put that Fire Out card you just turned back over.

So, it turns out that losing isn’t really anybody’s fault. There’s no blame. And winning is everybody’s win. And playing together, taking advantage of what actually is the shared memory, of what you might call the “group mind,” everybody gets to feel a little smarter, and rightly so.

Stone Soup, as all of the cooperative games from Peaceable Kingdom, is designed to be attractive to children. The theme is based on a familiar children’s story, the illustrations are bright, easy to understand, colorful. The equally colorful board sits on a cardboard platform in the box. There’s a hole in the middle. Stick your finger in, lift it out, and there are all the rules and promotional stuff, and an envelope full of pieces. Tear the envelope open, spill out the bright, stiff, cardboard pieces, and let the game begin. When the game is over, you have almost instant storage – just pour everything back into the box. The instructions are brief, and printed on the lid (printed on the lid! o, the sheer brilliance and non-losability of it all). The game can be played in maybe 15 minutes. Six people can play at the same time. And kids as young as 5 can easily grasp both the mechanics and fantasy of the game.

But as fun and valuable as it is for kids, it is even more fun and valuable for the family. Playing together, sharing memory, debating strategy, supporting each other, as equals – well, this is the stuff of love, the foundation of community, the very definition of family.

There’s a lot to be said for playing competitive games. Probably, too much, already. Clearly, there’s not been enough said for cooperative games. Unless you happen to be listening to Jim Deacove, founder of Family Pastimes, the inspiration for Peaceable Kingdom‘s cooperative game line, who’s been on my Admired Designers list for more than 40 years.

Peaceable Kingdom’s cooperative games are made responsibly. The paper used to make their games is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, the ink is soy-based, plastic parts, when used, are made of recycled plastic and are phthalate- and BPA-free, even.

Art by Laura Huliska-Beith. Award by Major Fun.

Cooperative board games such as Forbidden Island present a special problem for us at Major Fun.

In order for a co-op game to really engage the players, it has to present a challenge more than once. This means that the game has to change at least a little each time you play. The game must also present a real challenge. Maybe the game throws lots of obstacles at the players. Or the obstacles get more difficult as the game progresses. Or the goal of the game changes. Whatever the case, cooperative games generally thrive on the principle that the players have only a few actions but a wide variety of tasks. Much of the struggle is in how the group decides to spend their limited actions in the face of escalating difficulty.

In short, cooperative board games are generally complex, and one of the criteria we have for our prestigious Major Fun Award is that the game rules must be easy to learn from a cold start. Someone who has picked up the game with no previous experience should be able to read and remember the rules in just a few minutes.

So, after much discussion, I could not give Forbidden Island a Major Fun Award. BUT, I’m gonna take some virtual real-estate to praise it because it is fun and worth the extra time investment.

You and your teammates are on a strange, unstable island. In order to escape you must recover the island’s four treasures and make it back to the helicopter landing pad before the waters rise and the island sinks. The island is composed of 24 beautifully illustrated tiles with intriguing names like “The Crimson Forest” and “Phantom Rock” and “The Howling Gardens.” As the game progresses, the tiles begin to “flood” and many will be lost completely as they sink into the Abyss. When tiles are lost, it becomes increasingly difficult to navigate the island and recover the four artifacts. The players have only three actions on their turn and they must decide how to split those actions between moving, trading resources, recovering artifacts, and shoring-up flooded sections of the island.

Each player has a role with a special ability. The special abilities make things like movement and trading easier for that player, but there are still many sacrifices that have to be made. I was surprised the first few times I played how quickly a game can go from “It’s no big deal. We can save those tiles next round.” to “Oh my god! Get the treasure get the treasure get the treasure. Marines, we are LEAVING!!” One of the best things about this game is the analysis at the end. Every time I’ve played and lost (a fair number), there is a period where we just want to talk about what we should have done differently. Fortunately the game is quick and you can shuffle the island tiles and play another to see if your strategies work on the next round.

This is an excellent gateway to other cooperative board games. The rules are very simple (especially in comparison to most other co-op games) and it has a lot of replay value. The game is very compact and the artwork is beautiful. This is well worth the investment.

Forbidden Island was designed by Matt Leacock, with art by C.B. Canga. © 2010 Gamewright.

Will Bain, Games Taster