One of the most entertaining games I played with my girls when they were very young was Statue. I would sit absolutely still and they would move my arms and legs and face into whatever position they desired. Sometimes we would name some pose that they would have to make: guy-on-bicycle, stinky-socks, spider-in-your-hair.

You Robot (available from Asmodee) has that similar vibe. A partner game, You Robot requires that one partner act like a mindless robot and the other, the teacher, must get the robot to assume a specific pose. The trick? No talking and no touching.

A posture card is drawn and all the teachers gather around to look at it. The robot partners sit on chairs, eyes forward, and hands on their laps. The teachers then proceed to instruct their robots using 6 Remote Control cards. Two cards depict the robot’s body. The teacher can use these cards to show the robot what body part to move. Two cards have arrows that can be used to indicate how the robot should move the body part. The last two cards either tell the robot to pick up something in its vicinity or to think for a second (the sort of oh-come-on-it’s-so-obvious message that always occur in games like these).

In many ways, You Robot is like a variation of Charades that does not allow acting.

Fortunately, it does allow laughing. Which makes the tasks that much more difficult. And the teachers’ job is TOUGH. It is tough to keep from talking. It’s tough to just use the Remote Cards. It’s tough to keep from gesturing. It’s tough to refrain from reaching out to strangle your robot when it doesn’t understand the ever-so-obvious gesture you are trying to communicate.

Asimov needed a fourth rule of robotics: A robot will only make small, careful movements (instead of wild flailing movements) or risk injury at the hands of the human teacher.

The pairs race to see who can strike the pose first. Teacher and robot change for the next round and the process starts over. First pair to win 5 poses wins.

After the first few rounds, robots and teachers figure out that small moves work best and the arrows can be turned in very useful ways. It’s not cybernetic neural science but it is major fun.

For 4 – 10 players, ages 6+

You Robot game design Alain Rivollet. © 2010 by Repos Production.

I moved 12 times in my first 6 years of marriage. Many of those were short skips across town as we jumped from one cramped box of graduate student housing to another, but they all involved packing and repacking all our belongings into a truck and then emptying said truck a few miles away. Under those conditions you either gain a knack for the packing process or you learn to save up for a professional.

We could never afford a professional.

Those skills came in quite handy as I went up against Major Fun in a friendly game of Quadefy.

Maranda Games has released several handsome abstract strategy games and Quadefy is their entry into the realm of three-dimensional tiling games. 2 players take turns placing their wooden blocks within a 4X4X4 cubic grid. The last player to make a legal move wins. Each player has 8 game pieces that resemble three-dimensional Tetris shapes. An illegal move is any placement of a piece that extends out of the 4X4X4 grid.

The pieces are composed of attractive, solid wooden blocks that are designed for play and display. All 16 pieces fit together to form a perfect cube which means Quadefy serves double duty as a competitive strategy game and an engaging solo puzzle. Like the other games in Maranda’s line-up, Quadefy is visually striking and is meant to be left out for guests to see and touch and covet.

Games are fast, even when some players are *AHEM* deliberative [significant look in the direction of Major Fun…], but there are so many ways to start that re-playability is high. Patience and spatial awareness are handy traits, but that goes for most games.

And as fun as the game is already, I heartily recommend an alternative condition suggested by Major Fun himself: play with your eyes closed. Try it as a solo puzzle and then in competition. It’s a great twist on an engaging and well designed game.

For 2 players, ages 6+

Quadefy game design by Mark Fuchs. © 2011 by Maranda Games.

Look Look (a.k.a. The Monstrously Speedy Seek and Spot Game) is what you might call a “seek and spot” game, or almost just as rightly, a “shape-matching” game, or even a “perception” game. It can demand, perhaps not monstrous, but often excruciating seeking/spotting speed. It is neither the first nor the only Major Fun award-winning game to require speedy spotting, but it is the first to stretch the mind in so many deliciously different ways.

There are eight frames, each with a different color border. There are also eight different, two-sided cards that fit in the aforementioned differently-color bordered frames. Each of these cards displays twelve different images on each side – nine of which feature silhouette-like depictions of strange, but clearly silly-looking monster-like creatures; the other three displaying a numeral, a symbol, or a muti-colored target.

There’s also a deck of 68 cards. The backs of the cards are marked with a single letter – that letter being either an L, O, or K. The front of the cards offer one of 6 different challenges. There’s your Question Mark card – a question mark surrounded by two frames, each of a different color. The challenge here is typical of most shape-matching games: to find the same shape on cards in two different frames. Then there are the Creature cards which demand that you find the one creature (in any frame) that is the exact match, the Symbol card which asks you to find the match to that abstract shape, and the Target card where you have to find the one bullseye-like target one the one card that shows a bullseye with the identical sequence of colors. Finally, there are Plus and Minus cards. Each is surrounded by frames of two different colors. Here you must find the number on each of the matching cards in the indicated frames, and be the first to announce the answer (the two numbers, either subtracted from or added to each other).

The first player to collect cards whose backs spell LOOK LOOK is the winner. Which means that you might actually win a particular challenge, but not the card that you need. Ah, luck. So comforting for some. So frustrating for others.

The variety of challenges adds a great deal to the fun of the game – not just unpredictability, but also engagement. To play the game well, you have to be more flexible, visually and intellectually. Not too much more flexible, but just enough to make the game a unique contribution to your collection of family games.

The frames are sturdy. The large board tiles are thick enough to withstand long bouts of repeated play, and fit well into their frames. Because the cards are two-sided, and placed into different frames each game, there is a welcome unpredictability. The cards in the playing deck are also large, but thinner, making them easier for the large-of-hand to shuffle.

Designed by Peggy Brown, and produced by MindWare, a company that has produced several many Major Fun award-winning games, and with Look, Look, yet one more.

Drawing games are often polarizing events because lots of people will say, “I’m not an artist. I can’t draw to save my life!” The games also turn the screws by putting a timer on the contestants. And then comes the sharing of the pictures: all that judgment and ridicule and justification that ensues.

Blue Orange’s elegant drawing game Sketch It! takes all of these frustrating aspects of other drawing games and doubles down on it all. Your pictures? They need to communicate specific items so that ANYONE at the table can identify your subject. Time limit? You have to be faster than the others to get the most points. The guessing process? Every single line will come under scrutiny and the inner workings of your mind will be laid bare.

Fun? Oh yeah.

The game is simple. Each player has a card with 6 items, a pencil, and a piece of paper. The game comes with 6 numbered chips (1-6) and these sit in the center of the table. Someone rolls a die and everyone sets to drawing the item that matches the rolled number. The first to finish grabs the highest numbered chip from the center of the table and the other players grab chips as they finish. The drawings are shuffled and passed out randomly so each player has a drawing made by someone else. They write what has been drawn and then reveal their guesses. If a player guesses correctly, the artist and guesser get the points on the artist’s chip. Incorrect guess means no points for either.

This mechanism of awarding the guesser and the artist works well to balance the game for those who do not feel so confident in their artistic skills. Being a good guesser is as important as being a good sketcher. The task of grabbing the numbered chips also adds a great deal of pressure to the better artists because they can’t keep their attention strictly on what they are drawing. A quick sketch that hints at the object can be more effective than a detailed depiction because the time for fine detail costs the artist the most valuable chips.

But part of the fun is the explanation and evaluation of the drawings created under such stressful conditions. How a creature with five legs, no ears, and a serious under bite (not over bite) can be a “donkey” is one funny conversation. That, more than the accumulation of points, is the aspect of Sketch It! that makes it Major Fun. I haven’t laughed so much at my own ineptitude as I did playing Sketch It!

3 – 6 players. Ages 10+

Sketch It! by Gregory Detrez. © 2011 Blue Orange Games.

Table top games saw me through middle school lunch. I’d throw down whatever dreck they had uncanned for us (elapsed time: 30 seconds) and then I’d set about the serious business of playing quarter basketball or pencil football for the remaining twenty-nine-and-a-half-minutes. A couple of props, a flat surface, an opponent—I had it made.

I would gladly bolt through my favorite meal (a thai peanut-sauce dish called pra ram long song thanks for asking…) in order to spend a bit more time with Gigamic’s table-top racing game, Regatta.

Now Regatta is a bit more complicated and prop driven than the games I played at school, but the conceit is the same. In this case, players race wooden sailboats across whatever flat surface they have handy. The game comes with four sailboats, four course buoys, and 54 movement cards.

The cards really make the game. Players hold five cards. Each card has an arrow that curves from one side to another. Sometimes a card will have multiple arrows so that the player has some choice. In short, players move their boats from one side of a card to another. When it is a racers turn to play, that boater places a card in front of his or her yacht so that the arrow starts at the bow of the yacht. The player moves the boat so that its aft quarters are on the tip of the arrow and the boat is facing the arrow’s direction.

The cards also serve to show where sailboats cannot go. Each yacht has a no-go region in front of it (so that another boat cannot block its turn. This no-go region is the size of one of the cards. You can move anywhere on the board as long as you do not move into the no-go zone of another player. There are also some special cards that allow double movement, extra turns, and an especially nasty one that makes an opponent miss a turn, but these just spice up the game’s elegant movement mechanic.

There is a surprising amount of strategy that goes in to placing the cards. Most cards do not move your boat in a straight line. Most curve to the left or the right so you have to set up a series of moves that play out over your next few turns. Saving up special cards for the right moment is critical.

The racing is clever and fast, and best of all there is no deep water!! Racing yachts in the comfort of my dining room? Major Fun.

2 – 4 players. Ages 5+

Regatta  by Emmanuel Fille and Martine Moisand. © 2010 Gigamic.

So, it’s like this: there are two decks of cards, almost identical, except that one deck is square, the other round. And on each card, in each deck, there are John Kovalic’s gently humorous, cartoon-like drawings of bugs, each card a different bug, each bug in one deck having a corresponding bug in the other. Now, you’d think that matching a square card to an identical round card – one with exactly the same cartoon-like bug on precisely the same color background – would be mere child’s play. You’d, of course, be right. All except for the “mere” and the “child’s” parts.

Yes, yes, the game could easily be played by five-year-olds. The cards are just the right size for little hands. And, with a little patience, even littler hands. And, with a little more patience, big, clumsy-handed people as old as I am. Sure, there are only 36 different bugs to deal with, but as soon as the bug cards are all out on the table, and you find yourself frantically shuffling through your hand of square cards (the “leaf cards”) while everyone else is shuffling and scanning, covering the round cards (the “bug cards”) with the corresponding leaf cards, racing to be the first to get rid of all their cards – the challenge becomes vividly evident.

Bug Out is easy to learn (maybe 5 minutes) and very fast (easily less than 5 minutes). But you’re going to want to play it again and again. You can even keep score, if you’re that kind of player. Speaking of kinds of players, it’s true that Bug Out is as fun for little kids as it is for grown kids (sometimes known as “adults”), but when playing together, as a family, discrepancies in recognition and reaction time might prove to be a bit too unavoidable to keep everyone in play. However, as Gamestaster Erin was quick to point out, that can be easily ameliorated by adding a handicapping rule, like: the winning player gets extra cards the next round. Whether or not you decide to invent some kind of rule to keep everyone equally in play, it’s a good idea, as the designers are quick to note, to let the game continue until everyone has finished, just so all the players can experience something akin to satisfaction.

The designers and refiners (Brad Ross and the many wonderful folk at Out of the Box Games) also make a distinction between Bug Out and Big Bug Out. In the latter, the bug cards are placed on the floor. How widely the cards are spread out on said floor determines the amount of frenzied physicality you wish to engender. Needless to say, physical limitations and proclivities need to be taken into account. But the fun, o, the sheer, manic, major fun!

Growing up, I had small set of Lincoln Logs. Enough to make a small cabin or a tall, skinny watchtower. I’m sure I tried many of the suggested structures, but the resultant building was only a step in a process. You see, I wasn’t all that interested in the structure per se, because I knew that whatever architectural masterpiece I created would be situated at the terminal end of plastic race track that curved up a flight of stairs where the other end was held in place by a few volumes of Collier’s encyclopedia. Within the bumpers of this track, a heavy red fire engine perched at the edge of the stairs awaiting only a nudge from my sister to send it hurtling toward a satisfyingly violent collision with whatever I had been able to construct at the other end.

Construction toys are never more fun than when you blast them apart, a fact that is wonderfully exploited by Gamewright’s Knock Your Blocks Off.

In short, each player builds a wall to hold up a crown. Once the walls are built, players try to knock off their opponents’ crowns. You score points for successfully knocking off a crown or when an opponent FAILS to knock off your crown.

I could stop right there and the game would be pretty sweet. Matter of fact, that would define a large percentage of my childhood games. Knock Your Blocks Off gives each player 6 blocks of wood for the wall, one block of wood for the crown, and a special DESTRUCTION DIE! The DESTRUCTION DIE (I just like writing it in all caps…) is the weapon each player uses against the other walls and it tells you how you will attack the walls. When it is your turn to attack, roll the DESTRUCTION DIE and check the result: Boulder = flick the die at the wall; Ogre = underhand toss; Dragon = Drop the die from a great height.

Did I mention the special powers?

Oh yeah. I thought that might get the attention of the nine year old boy in you. There are six kinds of walls you can build and each has a special power. The Fort is immune to Boulders. The Gate gives you bonus points for a successful attack. I won’t reveal more, but suffice it to say that the strategy of wall construction runs much deeper than “My wall is strong!!”

Much much deeper. The first to finish building their wall gets to grab the DESTRUCTION DIE. So speed is of the essence. BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE!! Each block is painted so that only certain edges can match up. When you build your wall, the edges of the blocks must match correctly or you don’t get your special power.

To recap: you need strength, you need speed, you need smarts, and you need strategery.

I could generally muster two of those four attributes which probably explains why I lost as much as I did; however the game rekindled that sense of glee I had with my tube of Lincoln Logs and my red Hot Wheels fire engine. The game is fast and easy to learn. The rules (in English and Spanish) fit on a slim accordion fold booklet.

Build it and break it. It’s Major Fun with seven blocks of wood and a colorful die. What more could you want?

2 – 4 players. Ages 8+

Knock Your Blocks Off  by Rebekah Bissell. © 2011 Gamewright.

There is an elegance of design to many Gigamic games that is impossible to ignore and Kabaleo keeps up the tradition. The conical pieces are simple, colorful, and they make a satisfying clack when stacked. This is not trivial because clacking and stacking are what you will do a lot in this game.

The elegance of the pieces underscores the elegance of the game. There are six colors. Each player has a different color, and the winner is the one whose color is on top of the most stacks once all the pieces are used.

So not only is the design of the pieces unique and striking, the design is also functional.

There are 24 Bases (cones with a single stripe of color) and 36 Pieces (cones with a double stripe). There are also 6 Target cones which are not colored on the outside but are colored INSIDE the cone. Players draw a Target at the beginning of the game and this becomes their color—a fact they keep secret during play. The number of colors with which you play is always two more than the number of participants. This makes it very difficult to guess exactly which color any player has.

Before play begins, the bases are scattered in the middle, and each player draws a certain number of Pieces from a bag. The Pieces may not be kept secret.

On each player’s turn, you take one of the Pieces and place it on a Base in the middle of the table. Pieces may not be placed on Bases of the same color, but you may place any Piece on top of any other Piece (say that 5 times fast). So a blue Piece could go on a pink Base and a green Piece could go on top of that blue Piece (making a 3 stack of cones). A green Piece could now be played on the previous green Piece BUT instead of stacking higher, you remove both green Pieces.

Different colors STACK. Same colors REMOVE. Piece on Base must be different colors.

That is some elegant game design.

Planning ahead is maddening. You don’t want to reveal your color so misdirection and blocking are good strategies; however as your opponents and you are running out of pieces, it becomes very important to free up your color in such a way that cripples an opponent.

Kabaleo is incredibly intuitive and gameplay is quick. The rules take up two very small pages in a rulebook that covers maybe 2 dozen languages. The rules also include wordless, pictorial directions that show what moves are allowed and what are not (especially handy for you anthropologists, semiologists, and sociologists studying cultures with no written or verbal language). Kabaleo is Major Fun because it feels fun to play and feels GOOD to play.

(Although I bet anyone of the Cold War generation who opens the box will think “Missile silo.” Go get the game and you’ll see what I mean.)

2 – 4 players. Ages 8+

Kabaleo concept by Jean Luc Renaud and is © 2010 by Gigamic.

Adult gamers know: kids are HORRIBLE with games. Children should never be allowed to play board games without adult supervision. They lose pieces. They sit on the box. They don’t read the rules and even if they do read the rules they are likely to change them. Mid game. They always want to play something else, and worst of all, they mix games together.

Madness!!

Fortunately, Gamewright shoved aside the inner curmudgeon that rises up on such occasions and embraced the creative mixing and matching of eight-year-old Emily Ehlers. In the course of her family’s travels, Emily brought the world the card game Mermaid Beach.

When you play Mermaid Beach (and you will want to play it a lot when you learn it) you will recognize some classics: Go Fish! and Old Maid and Crazy Eights. But Mermaid Beach is greater than the sum of these parts. There is a great mix of strategy and chance in this game, as if the best parts of each were grafted together. Much like the merfolk themselves: part human, part fish, part magic, and all so delicious in a light butter sauce—er, I mean wondrous and whimsical.

The game consists of two decks of cards: 51 Beach Cards and 26 Shell Cards. The deck of Beach Cards is comprised of beach gear, merfolk (men and women), seaweed, waves, and one sea monster. In short: players are dealt 5 Beach Cards and try to gather the Shell Cards for points. When a player matches two beach items (sun, umbrella, sailboat, etc…) that player can turn in the pair for a Shell Card. Merfolk allow players to draw cards from the Shell Deck, take an extra turn, or (in the case of the Mean Mermaids) steal shells from other players. Waves wash away your opponent’s shells and seaweed forces them to draw an extra card from the Beach Deck.

A player can also “fish” for a match by asking an opponent for a type of Beach Card. If the opponent has the card, it must be passed over. If not, the opponent says “Go to the Beach” (or some other similar, fishing related phrase) and the player must draw from the Beach Deck.

There are other special cards and everyone tries to get rid of the sea monster. For all the different kinds of cards, the game moves quickly from the moment you deal out the cards to the moment you turn in your shells for a score. My daughters and their friends (aged 6 – 12) grasped the game almost entirely from looking at the cards and intuiting the game mechanics. There is a lot of luck but there are strategic choices to be made and it all happens so quickly and smoothly that I found myself eager for another round.

The Major was funner when the game had begunner, under the sea!!

The artwork is fantastic. The mermaids and merdudes shimmer and strike engaging poses. Especially the Mean Mermaids—they took center stage at my house. You can tell you have something special when you have one of the merfolk in hand.

Mermaid Beach is a fun game, Major Fun, and a great reaffirmation of the creative process. There might not be anything new under the sun (or the sea) but the combinations are multitudinous and magnificent. I’m glad that Emily mashed all these games together.

2 – 5 Players. Ages 6+.

Mermaid Beach was designed by Emily Ehlers (aged eight) and is © 2011 by Gamewright.

Connect 4 Launchers is a two-player, disc-flinging, two-level, three-version, four-in-a-row variation of Hasbro’s highly successful Connect 4 brand.

Each player has 21 lifesaver-like checkers, and a launcher. The game board requires minimal assembly – there are four pillars (made to look like stacks of checkers) and two transparent target boards. The target boards (which, at first, seem rather flimsy, but prove to be more than sturdy enough to withstand many rains of checkers) fit snugly into the notches at the top and bottom of the pillars.

The launchers are very sturdy, and work flawlessly. The lifesaver-like checkers rest securely on the top of the launcher. The forward part of the base of the launcher is angled so that you can more easily aim for the upper or lower target board. A slide on the base of the launcher allows you to keep score (should score need to be kept).

If you look at your entire collection of checkers, you will notice four different kinds of “power checkers.” Distinguished by the patterns on the inner ring, the powers of your power checkers will allow you to: 1) go again, 2) remove all the checkers from every space that is connected to that checker, 3) remove all the checkers in that row (horizontal or vertical), or 4) remove the checker in any one of the next to that in which it lands.

Now you know more than you need to play the first two variations, and all you need to play the last.

The first two are most appealing to the younger, and/or frenzy-seeking player. Both players launch checkers at the same time, and keeps launching until a) someone has managed to get four-in-a-row, or b) there are no more checkers to launch. This version is appropriately called “Basic Frantic Launch.”

Then there’s the second version, “Championship Frantic Launch.” This game is played very much like “Basic Frantic Launch,” and is most definitely equally frantic, but here, instead of the game being over when someone wins, you play a series of games, scoring each (this is where that scoring slide comes into play), and then playing the next. You get two points if you score in the top tray, and one for scoring in the bottom.

Finally, for the more strategically-minded, the “Advanced Power Launch.” There’s no franticity here. Instead, there’s turn-taking and something significantly akin to strategery. There’s most definitely an element of luck, no matter how strategic your intentions. But there’s also an equally strong feeling that you might very well have developed the control and aim and all the inherent affordances to get a checker to land exactly where you think it should be. And then there are the power checkers, which, depending on their power, can wreak significant havoc on your opponent’s planfulness. And also an interesting wrinkle where the player who has the majority of checkers in any space gets to claim that as her own, whilst should there be an equal amount, the space belongs to neither.

The rules are easy to learn and very well-written, covering every possible gameplay event (what happens if your checker completely misses the trays, or if you have no checkers but the other player still has his, or if a checker lands in a tray, but not in a space.

And, yes, of course, you can play as teams, passing the launcher back and forth, adding significantly to the sense of inner- and inter-team franticity.

All in all, Connect 4 Launchers offers a surprisingly wide range of opportunities for merry mayhem. It is very easy to learn how to play, easy to build and store, the games are short and engaging, the range of variations creating a game that’s rich enough to play again and again. It appeals equally to the 5-year-old, elder siblings and the playfully-minded parent. Major Fun for the whole family.