In Lost Puppies, Peaceable Kingdom has delivered a move-pieces-around-the-paths game that will charm even the most jaded Candyland survivor, in part because there's a lot of complexity to when and how pieces are moved. This game was a massive hit with our daughter Zella, a wise old seven-year-old whose critical faculties melt to jelly at the mention of puppies, kittens, or anything else small and fuzzy and in need of hugs.

The goal of the game is to get a bunch of puppies home (they share the homes communally, and can travel to whichever one is convenient, as long as the one-puppy-per-household rule is respected). Puppies, as well as items to assist them (flashlights) and obstacles, numbered cards that must then be placed as barriers at set positions along the hub-and-spoke network of paths. Players take turns by turning over a card to discover whether it is a puppy, a mulligan, or a blockade, or moving a puppy along a path. Play is cooperative and it is quite possible to lose, although there are many ways to explain otherwise when your child is crying because you failed to get the puppies home and now they are wandering around lost in the park instead of in their nice warm beds.

You can pick up Lost Puppies on Amazon.com for about $13.

Win It! We're giving away a copy of Lost Puppies to one ZRecs reader. To enter to win, comment on this post and tell us about your favorite pet. This giveaway will end at 11:59 CT on Tuesday, December 13, we'll select a winner at random from eligible entries on December 14, and try to get the game to you by the holidays, although that's pushing it, isn't it?

The fine print: Giveaway open to U.S. residents 18 or older. One entry per person.

Disclosure: Peaceable Kingdom sent us this game to review. We will pass it on to someone else who can use it, or Z will pay us $13, which we will donate to charity. She doesn't choose to keep many review items, but this one could go either way. WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE PUPPIES?!

HABA's Hit the Throttle is among our favorite new games of the season. It's the first "head game" we've seen that is comprehensible to kids as young as four and delicious fun for them as they work on their "poker faces" and attempt to strategize their way to the finish line. As with all kids' games that are fun for adults, there's a wide range of strategies older kids and adults can employ, and best of all, our most complex machinations still can't guarantee victory. The balance of luck and skill here is pitch-perfect for a family game.

The concept is, well, not so simple: A series of cards form a track and colored wooden cars (heirloom quality as always with HABA) move along the track based on die rolls. But things get interesting in a few ways.

First, no player represents a single car. Every player draws a heavy stock card at the beginning of the game, on which are featured two cars of different colors. The player wins if their two cars reach the finish line before the two cars on any other players' cards do. In other words, if I hold a card with a blue and red car, I don't win if blue gets to the finish line first, and if purple comes in second, it only matters if someone else had a card with the blue-purple combo.

Second, players do not reveal the cars on their card. The winning combination for each player is their little secret.

Third, cars are moved through a series of die rolls strategically played each turn. The player begins by rolling three dice, each of which has the same six colored faces representing the cars' six different colors. The player chooses one of these colors and moves that colored car forward one space on the track. He or she then rolls the remaining two dice, picks a color and moves that car, and then rolls the last die and moves that colored car a space.

A few points of strategy make this game pretty interesting for kids learning to be sneaky:

• A car that has reached the finish line can still be selected as the color of choice on a die roll. That means if none of the cars are your two colors, you can "skip" a move by selecting the color of a car that has already finished the race.


• It is very valuable for other players to not know which cars you're rooting for, and if they do know, they are likely to brag about it. Selecting another colored car to move instead of one of your own can throw them off for a good portion of the game.

Meanwhile, players carefully watch each others' moves and try to figure out what colors others need to win. It's always a bit tricky because you have to move a car on almost every roll, which means you are often moving cars that aren't on your card.

Long story short, we love this game! You can pick it up on maukilo.com or at Amazon.com for about $11. A great stocking stuffer or gift in its own right!

Win it! We're giving away a copy of Hit the Throttle to one ZRecs reader. Email us at zrecsmedia@gmail.com with your favorite holiday game to play with the kids and you'll be entered to win! You have until 11:59 CT on Monday, December 12 to enter. We'll contact a winner in Dec. 13 and get you the game in time for the holidays!

The fine print: Must be 18 or older to win and a resident of the U.S. One entry per person. Must tell us about a real game that you actually like, because we might play it, and if it is terrible we will be sad.

Disclosure: HABA is participating in an event for which ZRecs will receive compensation. We'll be talking about this event on ZRecs soon, but be aware that as always, our views here are our own and are independent of any relationship we may have with the company.

Z and I are working hard on a tabletop role-playing game that teaches math skills for her grade level. (She's homeschooled but working on first-grade math topics.) Its material will be standards-based (we're designing around the Common Core initiative standards) and in addition to tweaking combat mechanics ( want them to be very simple but allow for some strategy), I'm toying with how to create an RPG environment in which multiple adventures are possible and the adventuring party is free to roam about and find challenges that interest them. The game is "sword and sorcery" based but fighting usually isn't the best option, and we'll have dice-based mechanics for non-combat actions.

Z and Jeremiah made up a game a few days ago during lunch using a piece of paper and a handful of large buttons, and Jeremiah handed me a copy of written rules the next day. After a bit more playtesting, the game took its final shape, and lo and behold, the man has now produced a two-minute video to walk you through the simple instructions video for Button Roundup.

The game for two to five players requires x*4+1 buttons to play (9 for two players, 13 for three players, and so on) and is played in a series of quick rounds, with rounds lasting anywhere from a few seconds (one perfect shot) to a few minutes in length.

Even if you have sworn off button-based games -- or even sewing-notion-based games altogether -- after too many nights of carousing, the soundtrack alone is worth the click. Did they play this game on Magnum P.I. or something?!



You can view and download a PDF of the rules here. That file includes one rule detail not in this video, which reduces the number of one-shot rounds.

Like it? Then Like it!

I guess I need to stop being surprised at finding cheap games with good gameplay. When I was a kid, games made of cardboard and paper pieces that had random sponsors, or that were junior versions of popular adult games, were always bad. Come to think of it, most games for kids were always bad. But after the success of Scrabble Junior in our household, anything's possible, and the fact that Wild Planet is the real name behind this game (they're the developers of the brilliant Wild Planet Hyper Dash) has ensured that this game actually works.

Crayola's (?!) Guess My Picture game is another dark horse. Using a collection of sometimes-useful, sometimes barely-relevant shapes to replicate photos of everyday objects is the young child's answer to Pictionary, as it encourages attention to detail and representational thinking in a way that drawing doesn't for kids of this age. It's also interesting that color is, if anything, a distractor in this game that players must learn to discount when selecting pieces (shape matters much more, as colors rarely match) or trying to guess what another player has created.

Here are a few examples of shape creations that were positively identified in our game.







Z made that last one. I'm inordinately proud of that shirt collar.

There's really no such thing as failure in this game, so everyone racks up points via cards with random point assignments on them, which could be a source of irritation for older kids, but this game really isn't for older kids. It's ideally suited for kids ages 4-6 or so, and it's simple, but it works.

My only complaint about this game is its $20 price tag. Briarpatch has been a pioneer in licensed cardboard-and-paper games over the last decade and they have proven that such games can be sold at under $15. We are simply not living in a world where this game should cost $20, licensing or no.

You can pick up the Crayola Guess My Picture game on Amazon for about $20.

If you have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, and you have a child, this playable Angry Birds birthday cake will need no justification.



Have an Anger-friendly device, but haven't picked up the game? Angry Birds is the best unproductive $5 (see correction) app we've ever bought.

(Correction: The iPhone/iPod Touch edition of Angry Birds is $0.99! The $4.99 version is for the iPad (it's an "HD" edition). We own the $0.99 version a couple times over and it works just great. Sorry for any confusion!)

An Angry Birds case, on the other hand (also available for the iPod Touch), will run you a helmet-cracking $35.