You can play Super Shooter Basketball any way you want. You can play by yourself. You can play with a friend. You can play with a couple of friends. You can play for score. You can make it easy on yourself and put your shooter close to the basket. And, because, when smartly struck, that little super shooter can shoot one of those little balls, what, 15 feet, you can make it a shot worthy of both peer and parental praise. You can shoot from the side. You can shoot from the other side. You can print out a Super Shooter Basketball court and see how many different places you can shoot from.

So, OK, so the balls are a choking hazard if you’re, like, 3. And so kids like it, and some kids really like it, and some of them can probably get really good at it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t play it, too. Maybe after they’re in bed. (My wife, who was captain of her high school basketball team o so many years ago, played with it for a half-hour before I took it away from her.)

There’s some assembly required, but everything snaps together, and the picture on the box is all you need to guide you through the few steps needed. And after you’re finished playing with it you can fold the backboard down, if you want, and store it away, if somebody tells you you have to.

There’s a lot of fun here. Some of it major. You can spend a lot of time practicing, developing skill and maybe even a trick shot or two. It’s made well enough to take all that play. And if you loose one of those well made, durable, but light little balls, well, there’s still two more.

Super Shooter Basketball is one of a series of Big Little Games from Patch Products.

Major Fun ribbon for using pirates to rescue an old soggy game.

I’ve mentioned before how Go Fish is one of those games that kids of a certain age find irresistible and adults often equate with that sound an amplifier makes when you walk up to it with the microphone. But small changes make big differences and ARGH! Uses the Go Fish mechanic to create an engaging press-your-luck game. Players collect treasure cards that are spread face down on the table. On your turn you draw until you decide to stop OR you find one of the 8 pirates (in which case you lose all your cards). If you stop before a pirate you can score sets of three or more.

Special cards keep things interesting. Treasure chests are worth 3 points all by themselves. LOOT cards allow you to steal treasure cards from your opponents. And that’s it. When the 8 pirates are all discovered then all cards not face up in front of a player are shuffled and spread out on the table. Play goes until someone reaches 40 points. Games are quick and get very tense as the number of revealed pirates approaches 8. Players take more risks when there are fewer pirates in the game.

Pirates (like zombies and ninjas) prove once again to be the chocolate of gaming tropes. They usually make most everything a little bit better. In this case, Go Fish becomes MARRRR-velous ARGH!

ARGH! Is for 2 – 6 players, ages 6+

© 2011 by Fat Brain Toy Company

Game design by Nicholas Cravotta and Rebecca Bleau.

Major Fun ribbon for most excellent slapping game.

Rapid Reflex is a card game that encourages the players to slap the table as hard as they can. The game consists of 8 colors of Reflex Cards (4 cards of each color) and 80 action cards. The action cards tell the players what color card to slap and with what hand. BUT, to borrow from Emily Dickinson, they tell the color slant. Instead of saying “Right hand BLUE,” the action card will say “Right hand JEANS.” Instead of saying “Left hand RED,” the card will say “Left hand STRAWBERRY.” Players race to slap the color with the correct hand. Once a player has a color they may not slap that color again. If they do, the player is penalized.

The game is played until one player has all 8 colors. An interesting twist is that slapping a card with the wrong hand does not result in a penalty. If the first player slaps a card with the wrong hand, no one gets the card. In this way you can prevent other players from getting the cards they need, but thinking that fast is quite a challenge.

Major Fun but watch your fingers!!

Rapid Reflex is for 3 – 4 players, ages 6+

Game design by Peggy Brown. © 2011 by Fat Brain Toy Company

As with all games that receive the Keeper award, Rhino Hero has already been singled out as Major Fun. Read the review to find out why. Now to explain why it is a Keeper.

Before you read the rules, look at the picture. Then, get together with the child of your choice and together and use the Rhino Hero cards to build the highest tower you possibly can before everything falls down due to your local cat or stray child or breeze. Now, we don’t have to explain why Rhino Hero is Keeper.

Maybe for a next step, you can draw your collective attention to the two different kinds of cards: there are the folding cards (the wall cards) and the non-folding (the roof cards). If you look at the roof cards, you’ll notice that on one side of each card there are lines, a bit like the lines you’d find in an architect’s drawing. So, just to make the building part a little more challenging, see if you can make the wall cards fit the lines.  Maybe spread all the roof cards on the table, plan-side-up, and take just the card that you think would be easiest, or most interesting. See if you can use all the cards, or estimate how many cards will be left over when the tower falls. You can take turns if you want.

And then, maybe, read the rules. And learn about what those beautifully foil-stamped symbols mean. And what you are supposed to do with the Rhino. And then discover that there are, in deed, strategic implications, adding to the challenge, and the fun. And then play again. And again.

Rhino Hero is as much fun to play with as it is to play. That’s why we call it a Keeper.

It’s always good news when we find another Keeper. And Bug Out  is very good news, in deed.

This simple matching game turns out to be remarkably flexible – suitable for kids as young as pre-school age, for families and even for a party full of grown-ups.

You get two decks, each with 36 cards. One deck is round. The other square. The round Bug cards are two-sided, each side showing the same bug. The square Leaf cards are also two-sided, but only one side shows the bug. In the beginning of the game, you put all the Bug cards out and distribute all the Leaf cards equally between players. Then everybody races through their Leaf cards, looking for the matching Bug card, slapping it down, and on to the next, and on, racing to be the first player to run out of Leaf cards.

Now here’s the thing. Sure, you can play it on a table. And sure, you can have everyone sitting down. Or you can have everyone standing up. Or you can play it on the floor, with people standing up or sitting down. Since the Bug cards have the same bug on both sides, you can just drop them anywhere and they’ll be right-side-up. And you don’t have to keep all the Bug cards together. There’s a variation called Big Bug Out that tells you to play with the cards spread out on the floor, but you might as well plant them all around the room and down the hall and into the other room so that people wind up running around and amok, generally screaming.

And each way you play, on the table or on the floor or in the whole house or outside or in school is different.

And the game is strong enough and simple enough that you can change the rules, if you want, and play in teams so that people with limited abilities or very different skill sets can help each other win, or all play in one big team and everybody can help everybody beat the record for how long it takes to get all the bugs cozily covered by their matching Leaf cards. Or a relay race maybe? Or if you’re playing with the back-bending-challenged, you could arrange the Leaf cards on the floor and have them drop the Bug Cards onto them (easier, because the Bug Cards are the same on both sides).  Or what about giving some players Leaf cards and others Bug cards and have them try to find each other? Or take one Bug Card or Leaf Card out of play and see if you can figure out which one is missing.

You get the picture? Flexibility. Adaptability. Variability. Fun for everyone, anywhere, again and again.

And it comes in a travel case, too!

At first, Sifteo seems like some kind of IQ test from the future: a set of three high-tech cubes, each a small computer with a color screen, each knowing when it is pressed, tilted, turned over, turned around, or near another cube. All together providing an apparently endless variety of surprisingly deep puzzles and investigations of the universe of sound and reason. And then you realize it’s a more of an IQ toy than an IQ test, inviting you and your children to hours of, as the manufacturers describe it, “intelligent play.”

Sifteo is a computer peripheral that communicates via a “dongle” (a small device that plugs into the USB port). To begin play, you must first download an application called “Siftrunner.” Through this software, you connect to the Sifteo cubes, your own personal library of Sifteo games and activities, and an online collection of yet more games that are available for a most modest fee (the Sifteo itself is somewhat of a significant investment, and you’ll probably rationalize yourself into purchasing at least one more $50 Sifteo cube).

Sifteo is a frame-breaking toy. Even though you need your computer nearby, the players are interacting solely through the manipulation of the three (or more) Sifteo cubes. When a game is selected, it is downloaded to the cubes. The computer provides the sound effects – which results in a richly immersive soundscape for each game.

Currently, there are 19 different activities available from the Sifteo store. Some are free. Several are included with your initial purchase. Though the majority of Sifteo activities are best played as a solitaire, many can be played with more than one player.

Peano’s Vault is one of the included games. It is more of an exercise than a game, offering a collection of mathematical puzzles where players arrange cubes to equal a target number. Each cube displays a number. Surrounding that number are different arithmetic operators (plus, minus, multiply, divide). By connecting the cubes in the correct order to the correct operator, you arrive at the correct solution. The game demonstrates the unique benefit of the Sifteo device – rearranging cubes provides a new and inviting way for interacting with number puzzles. Even with three cubes, the puzzles can get deeply challenging. With four, even moreso. Five or six and you border on merry mathematical masochism.

Chroma Shuffle (available for 300 points) exemplifies the more recreational uses of Sifteo with a series of visual logic puzzles. Each cube displays a collection of dots of different shape and color. By positioning two cubes next to each other, dots that are adjacent and the same color/shape disappear. By tilting a cube that has lost some of its dots, you can rearrange them. There are a variety of puzzles, most of which have something to do with making all the dots disappear. Again, the opportunity for challenge (this time, visual and logical) can get quite profound as you progress through the games. (Chroma Lite comes free with your set. Playing with it for a half-hour or so should be ample evidence of why you should consider purchasing Chroma Shuffle.)

Planet of Tune (a 300 point investment) transforms the Sifteo cubes into a tool for exploring and composing music. Each cube becomes one of 14 different instruments. Standing the cubes on edge makes each instrument continuously play. In this way, by selecting which cube to stand up and which to lay down, you can actually play your cubes, creating your own musical performance. Shaking a cube makes the instrument play according to whatever tempo you create. You can “record” each instrument so that the sound you make keeps repeating.

And on and on, each activity demonstrating a sometimes significantly different way of interacting with the cubes, and each another invitation to use your mind, senses and fingers.

All the activities exercise the mind. The games center on logic, and the activities, like Peano’s Vault, focus on exercising knowledge. Though the games are engaging and entertaining (like good puzzles), currently the most significant contribution of Sifteo is educational – encouraging thinking and learning. The arithmetic and linguistic exercises demonstrate how the simple act of shifting cubes around adds a new and playful dimension to what in other manifestations is dull and routine. Sifteo even includes two activities that the user/player can edit to focus on particular learning objectives.

For players who may not appreciate the fast and near-chaotic pace of the majority of arcade-like computer games, Sifteo is a welcome alternative. It provides a rich and comparatively gentle invitation to electronic gaming that is removed (by up to 20 feet) from the computer. For parents and teachers who want to encourage children to use their minds and exercise their creative and intellectual skills, Sifteo offers ample and entertaining opportunities.

In sum, Sifteo proves to be an innovative interface to computer technology, inviting mind and fingers to many hours of deep, intelligent, and often major fun.

Sifteo was originally developed at the MIT Media Lab by Dave Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi and introduced to the world in Dave’s 2009 TED talk.

Humans love their stories. Especially those that feature animals. As soon as someone recognizes something vaguely human in the way an animal behaves, you can bet that story will make its way into our collective unconscious in much the same way that beach sand always makes its way into our collective sandwiches.

A few animals, the ones that have a lot in common with their human cousins, get a lot of stories: monkeys, dogs, cats, wolves, pigs, crows, horses, mice. Some get only a few passing words. The lemming has one story but it is a doozy.

I won’t be the one to go all Mythbusters on the story (you can find that here). Instead, I’m going to warmly embrace the over-the-top, absurd twists supplied by Mayfair’s Lemming Mafia.

So everyone “knows” that lemmings jump off cliffs. And everyone “knows” that mafiosos love to gamble. Add some dice and you have Lemming Mafia!

The game consists of a board with a twisting linear track (start to finish), a regular die, 2 “Lemming” dice, 36 betting cards, 18 mission cards, and 6 lemming figurines. Each lemming is color coded and these colors are used on each side of the lemming dice. At its most basic, the game consists of rolling the 3 dice and moving one of the lemmings (shown on the 2 lemming dice) a number of spaces equal to the number on the regular die. As the lemmings move toward the finish line at the end of a pier, the players bet on the finish order. Points are scored after one lemming leaps off the pier. Successful bets score points. Most points win.

Of course it’s more complicated than that. Each space on the track can help or hurt the lemmings as they race toward the end of the pier. When players roll the dice they have to decide which lemmings will help the bets they have made. The betting cards are used to predict the finish order of the lemmings. The mission cards give players special conditions that must be met to win points (for example: “Green finishes before Red”). If you want Green to finish before Red, you will move Red so that it lands are spaces that hurt the lemmings—maybe give Red some concrete boots—and you will move Green to spaces that will zip it toward the finish line. Needless to say, your opponents have different ideas for the lemmings. Despite all the choices and complications that emerge from the betting process, the game is very intuitive and the rules are clearly illustrated.

Silly? Yeah. Major Fun? Are you kidding? Lemmings! In fedoras. Jumping off a pier. And there is no saving the lemmings. Only betting on their watery demise. So limber up your best wise guy voice and get yourself fitted for concrete galoshes.

For 3 – 6 players, ages 8+

Lemming Mafia game design by Michael Rienick. Art and graphics by Joscha Sauer. © 2010 by Joscha Sauer and distributed by Mayfair Games, Inc.

In the quest to get from point A to Point B, the individual must contend with two transformations: the wanderer must move and the path will change. In many board games, this second truth is neglected in favor of wanderer’s transformation. The board remains static and players manipulate the pieces in order to reach some final destination.

Mine Shift by MindWare deftly utilizes both transformations to create a game that is strategic, easy to learn, and fun. Very fun. Major Fun.

But a little difficult to describe.

You and your opponent have 4 colored gems (red and blue). The object is to move the four gems from your home tile to your opponent’s home tile. In addition to the 2 home tiles, the game board consists of 8 tiles arranged in a square (imagine a 3×3 grid with the middle tile missing). Each tile is divided into 4 spaces and most tiles contain at least one wall. Walls can block edges of the tile or divide the spaces from each other.

On your turn, you take a total of three actions. You may do any combination of the following: move a gem one space, rotate a tile 90 degrees, or slide a tile into an empty space. Gems cannot move through walls so rotating and moving tiles is often the best way to get your pieces into position. Or mess with your opponent. And as I have said in many other reviews, messing with your opponent is always fun.

The game rules are wonderfully illustrated. In the time it took you to read this review you would have already been well into your first game. There are 27 tiles, each with slightly different wall configurations so each game is different. MindWare also suggests adding more tiles to the starting grid—yet another way in which the path can change.

I would love to see a version for more than 2 players, but as it stands, Mine Shift is a clever, engaging, and surprising strategy game. Excellent pieces, clear rules, and Major Fun.

For 2 players, ages 8+

Mine Shift game design by John A. Forte. © 2011 by MindWare.

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.

Rhino Hero is a kids’ game, unless they allow their parents to play. And then, when the kids are asleep, it’s party time.

It’s a direct descendant of playing house of cards. But it’s a game instead of an exercise in masochism. And an innovatively fun game it is.

Of the 59 cards, 31 of them are “roof cards” and 28 are wall cards. The wall cards are scored down the middle so they can fold. The cards are much thicker than playing cards, which you might consider innovation number one. The folding wall card, which, as you might expect, stands upright much more easily than a standard playing card, and is far easier to build on top of, is innovation number two – a much more significant innovation, especially in the eyes and hands of younger players. The wall cards are also illustrated, so that one side looks like the outside of a house, and the other, the inside. You could consider this innovation number three, as it adds a constructive fantasy element which playing cards lack. But it doesn’t actually affect the playing of the game.

The Roof Cards are most definitely significant, innovation-wise and game-play-wise. Hence, we shall consider them innovation number three and four. Number three because on every roof card is an outline determining where the wall cards are to be placed – there may be only one wall card in the middle, or two wall cards in a surprising variety of positions. Clearly, roof cards that call for only one wall card result in a far less stable construction and hence more tension-filled game. The fourth innovation comes from the foil-embossed symbols on each of the roof cards – symbols which add truly gamish mayhem, resulting in a) direction of play being reversed, or b) the next player skipping a turn, or c) the next player drawing a new roof card, or d) having to use two roof cards on the same turn, or e) or having to take the small wooden Rhino of purportedly super significance from wherever it is, and place it on that card, without, of course, knocking down any of the surrounding or supporting cards.

In the beginning of the game, each player is dealt a hand of roof cards. The first player to get rid of all her roof cards wins. This card-game-like aspect is what you might easily consider the fifth innovation in this innovatively fun game.

The overall design is so effective that you can disregard the rules entirely and still have a grand old time, either by yourself, or cooperatively with your friends and family. Or, you can follow the rules, and have an even grander time, filled with tension, surprises, laughter, and much hilariously sudden toppling.

Rhino Heroe is for 1 to 5 players, as young as five and for older folk of steady hand. A round takes maybe 15 minutes. Cleverly designed by Steven Strumpf and Scott Frisco, with fanciful art by Thies Schwarz. From Haba, available in the US from Maukilo. Not just fun, mind you, but Major Fun.