Coursing Around is a recent book for encouraging physical activity and creative challenges in kids through chalk-drawn obstacle courses. We wrote about it back in one of our 2009 Gift Guides (you can find all five of them here) and it has served us ever since for ongoing inspiration in creative physical exertion.

For Z, though, it is just a starting point. Are you ever just stunned at your child's total commitment to making stuff up as they go along?











Other kids' games are all such a bore!
They've gotta have rules and they gotta keep score!
Calvinball is better by far!
It's never the same! It's always bizarre!
You don't need a team or a referee!
You know that it's great, 'cause it's named after me!

[The Calvinball Theme Song]

When working my way through the sea of board games offered at the 2010 Toy Fair this week, my philosophy is simple: If you can't explain it to me in 30 seconds, it's too complicated for my kid. With the best game design, gameplay should be easily learned and intuitive, but most of all, fun. Here are some of the best that I found.

Gobblet Gobblers (Blue Orange Games): It's a cross between tic-tac-toe and Blue Orange's hit game Gobblet. You need to get three in a row, but bigger pieces can gobble up the smaller ones. | $20, Amazon.com

Tsuro (Calliope Games): Place one card at a time to create your path to the center of the board, making sure your path never takes you off the board. $26, Amazon.com


Name 5 (Endless Games): Can you name 5 TV Dads? How about 5 pizza toppings? Female rap artists? Mollusks? Work your way around the board, and rattle off lists of five as you go.


Destruct 3 (Uncle Skunkle Toys): Build up pieces and then find the most efficient way to knock them down, with the catapult, pendulum, or ramp. This board is so lovingly crafted your family will be playing it for a long, long time. | $45, Amazon.com


Stop 'N Go (Talicor): In this speedy card game, place your cards as fast as you can by matching the color on your card to any player's discard pile, strategically using special cards along the way.


Kewbz (Family Games): Place your colored blocks to form corners on the board, trying to be the last person to place a block on a 5-block tower.


Blockers (Briarpatch): Place your tiles on the board according to their number, letter, or symbol as you try to create the fewest clusters of blocks of your color.


Zenith (MindWare Games): Place your colored tiles on the board in either an empty space or on a cluster of triangles where one has the same color as the tile you’re trying to place. Here’s a demo from game creator, Nicholas Cravotta:


Zenith has an MSRP of $30 and is on sale for about $25 on Amazon.com.

In other fun gaming news, Lego has announced that they will begin distributing ten Lego-based kids' games in the U.S. Lego has been selling games in Europe for over a decade, and their current offerings there look like a lot of fun. Word is they'll start distributing these games in the U.S. this summer.

Amy Kraft is an independent kids' media producer and publishes Media Macaroni. You can read her previous dispatches from the 2010 Toy Fair here and here.

For the young child, there is no aspect of life that cannot be explored through the playing of a game. At five, Z has been displaying a passion for what she calls mysteries. When she does not know the answer to the question, she describes it as a "mystery." When she and I take our dog on walks down the quiet country road near our house and she picks up unusual objects that she cannot identify (a bit of moss or plant detritus), this too, is a "mystery," used as a noun. "Look, Daddy, a mystery!"

This initiated a search for interesting games for young children that take up the "mystery" genre, of which there are actually very few. Clue Jr. seemed an obvious choice, and we may break down and buy it, but one of our primary epiphanies in child-rearing has been that there are many, usually much more enjoyable games, than those made by the Parker Brothers and Hasbros of the world, especially for those who haven't yet reached an age where wordplay and reading and writing are natural tools for expression. Could Clue Jr. be an exception? (If it is, tell us!)

One game that meets the basic requirements of the genre is one we've been playing as we prepare to make some final decisions for our upcoming 2009 Holiday Gift Guide. (All ZRecs Gift Guide items are based on our own product testing - no window-shopping allowed.) Haba's The Suitcase Detectives proceeds from the shocking premise that a pickpocket has stolen items from a wide variety of suitcases, and although the players are powerless to stop him from doing so, the least we can do is open up the suitcases and help the poor owners identify what has been stolen.

When I explain it that way, it's actually pretty strange. Fortunately, this all makes perfect sense to a five-year-old, and it does to us when we are playing it.


This is probably because the game's design is distractingly ingenious. The box itself is an essential part of the gameplay, because in addition to holding all of the components of the game, it is a "suitcase" with a translucent bottom that reveals silhouetted objects in a shallow "secret compartment" (leave it alone - the logic failed long ago, so this is all just gravy) where the owner's possessions are stored.


Each turn, the active player covers their eyes while the player to the left of them takes two items from the drawer and hides them in a cloth bag. The closed suitcase is gently shaken, the lid is opened, and the player has the length of an hourglass to match as many of the items he or she can make out from the jumbled silhouettes to the set of shape-identifying cards they hold in their hand (everyone has the same, complete set). This bit of organizational help allows a young child to eliminate possibilities from the set, and when they run out of time, the suitcase is closed and the active player looks at whatever is left in their hand (hopefully it is at least two cards!) and makes a final decision regarding what two items they suspect the thief ("Percy Pilferer" or some such nonsense) has stolen from the suitcase.


The player then moves one, two, or zero spaces forward along a path of suitcases (?!), depending on how many items they correctly identified.

Now, we enjoy a round of Candyland as much as anybody. But our favorite kids' games are those that are engaging for adults to play as well, beyond the vicarious giddiness of the child's enjoyment and the real pleasure of their company, both of which a bad game can seem to detract from more than contribute to after the initial novelty of the game wears off. Two features that make a game more enjoyable for parents to play with young children are (1) the easy transitioning between cooperative and competitive play (i.e. the game can function well either way) and (2) the presence of interesting ways to make the game harder for adults without drawing attention to the fact that there is handicapping going on.

The Suitcase Detectives has both. In the first case, it's easy to help a child pick out the edges of objects if they need a little push, to lengthen the time allowed or eliminate the timer altogether, and it's also easy to engineer the display so that shapes are fairly well-defined and easier for a young child to identify. As for handicapping, Jenni and I found it was actually really fun to see which of us could make the objects pile most horrifically in a sublime singlarity of necklace-bowlerhat-Tshirt-teddybear-pictureframe-hornrimmedglasses presented for head-scratching identification. To keep things topsy-turvey, there are also five more objects and cards than are used in any game - you select five from the pile to exclude each time, and remove those cards from every deck.

Our only quibble with this game is one aspect of its physical construction, which is otherwise very well-made: The drawer, which is cardboard and has double-thick walls folded over at the top, sticks somewhat in the suitcase, and is hard for a child to pull out and close without risking damage to the box or the fury of a five-year-old scorned. When we play, the adults handle the drawer. Otherwise, this game is pretty much the only "I've been robbed, but I can't tell what was stolen" game you'll ever need. Labeled for six and up, our five-year-old is an old hand after a only a few plays through, and we suspect even younger children can get into the spirit of it with parental assistance. A ZRecs Top Pick for the ingenious use of materials and a repeatedly enjoyable gaming experience.

You can pick up The Suitcase Detectives on Amazon.com for about $15.

This product, like almost all products reviewed on Z Recommends, was sent to us for review by the company at our request. We'll be allowing Zella to select one game to keep from those we evaluate for our Holiday Gift Guide, and donating the value to charity in accordance with our Keep No Stuff policy. Until we've played through the dozen or so games in our queue, we have no idea if this will be it, but we can tell you that all the other games will all be given away.

Here's a collection of current Editors' Picks in the Toys and Games category on PRIZEY. You can click through any of the images below to visit the giveaway's listing and find a link to enter the giveaway, or if you want the firehose, you can visit PRIZEY for all current Toy and Game giveaway listings (31 at the moment).



PRIZEY currently has over 1,000 members submitting giveaways for publication at a rate of 50-100 a day. That means that on any given day there might be 400-600 current giveaways listed, organized by category. (Today's count: 502.) We're working on ways of regularly showing off curated lists of our favorites, like the image set below and a similar one on The Tranquil Parent for our Green Living and Handmade categories. You can also browse through giveaway listings on the ZRecs.com homepage, where we have a widget in the righthand sidebar.

ThinkFun's What's Gnu, a three-letter-word spelling game for kids ages 5-8, is way better than you are thinking. It combines a great tile dispenser with the challenge of generating possible three-letter words by claiming letters that are passing through the game in rapid succession to add to word cards that have one letter already fixed in the first, second, or third position. The game is designed for up to six players, meaning access to letters can be pretty competitive, but there are a lot to go around.

Games like this help kids make sense of spelling in an opportunistic and creative way that is a nice reversal of the word identification most reading practice entails. They also foster a sense of overall success at reading as everyone ends up with something to show for their efforts, even if they aren't the winner. Creative parents can design any number of handicaps to allow older and younger readers to play together - older selects letters only after the younger has had their pick, or giving an older child several extra cards to fill to meet her quota.

Here's a demo of how the device at the center of this game works. In this case it's used for a far less successful game, Zingo, a Bingo spin-off that can only really justify its existence by the presence of the gadget. In the case of What's Gnu, though, it uses it in a constructive way that makes the gadget feel central to the game's design.


What's Gnu? and Zingo retail for $20 and are on sale now for $12-15 on Amazon.com. In fact, the whole range of ThinkFun kids' games appear to be on sale for 25-30% off.

That's Z's story, anyway. Lately for some reason she has been afraid of dinosaurs (like, nightly nightmares afraid) and seems to see sharks as her protectors. She has a shark stuffed animal she got at her recent kids' birthday party as a parting gift from the museum staff and sleeps with it sometimes.

Gamewright's Chomp, a simple battle card game that is at its most fun with several players, combines the alluring fearsomeness of sharks with the concept of a simple food chain. Big fish, little fish, plankton, and more are played as each player plays a card from their blind hand, and the first player to slap a creature who has something to eat gets everything that creature can eat. Sharks are at the top of the food chain. Electric eels are the wild card, just like in Jacques Cousteau.


If this food chain had been a food web, this game would have been much less fun. As it is, the slap-happy routine proves a basic rule of card games: If you're going to play cards with kids, physicality is the great equalizer.


The littlest card shark. Whoops, it's card sharp. There goes that pun.

Gamewright claims this game is for kids ages 6 to 8. Z had this game down pretty well at four, and hey, she's smart, but I think the issue really is Gamewright's underestimation of kids, or of parents' willingness to help train them up. I'd go with 6 to 8 if you are looking for a game that you can throw on the table in front of a group of kids and say, "Here."


Gamewright did a nice job with the graphics - they're sort of cute and rounded but also a little mysterious. Especially that ferocious-looking shark.

You can get Chomp for $10 on Amazon.com. We'll donate ours to a place where kids can sit around and play it.