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.

Teaching kids to appreciate where food comes from and how it comes to be will play an important role in raising a generation able to live more sustainably than ours does. Haba's In the Country links farmyard activities, simple recipe building for kids, and the company's time-tested use of high quality yet simple wooden game pieces to create a captivating game that helps kids think about how their food gets to the table while helping them to develop some complex "habits of thought" at the same time.

Like many Haba games, In the Country can function along a continuum of cooperative or competitive play. Players collect recipe cards which show a series of ingredients needed to produce a meal or dish, ranging from the simple (a snack of carrots, an egg, and a glass of milk) to the complex (a piece of carrot cake). Here's where things get interesting: Each recipe card shows not only the cookbook-level "ingredients" for the dish, but the chain or process that brings that ingredient into being, and that's where the farm comes in.

The farm features a cow pasture and a chicken pen, each supplied with wooden animals; a vegetable garden, wheat and grass fields each supplied with thick cardstock supplies (rows of carrots, bushels of wheat, and bales of hay); plus a dairy area to make cheese and a mill to grind wheat into flour, all surrounding a farmhouse that serves as the players' home base and harvest drop-off area.


Rolls of the die allow players to move around the board in pursuit of raw ingredients, their steps measured in lengths of a cardstock tractor (rolling a "3", for example - the highest roll available - allows the player to move three tractor lengths, and three tractors are provided so the player can string them together to define their path). That's an interesting feature of the game in itself, as it allows players to roam freely over an open 2-D space in measured steps rather than moving along designated "spaces." (It's this kind of small, unassuming innovation, one or two of which can be found in almost any Haba game, that makes games produced by the company so interesting to us as reviewers, and make it clear these games are designed on an individual basis, rather than applying a predefined formula.)

Some die rolls result in animals moving around on predefined spaces of their own, rotating around in their pens and moving closer and further from the reach of the approaching players. Wheat and carrots can be collected from their positions on the board, and the wheat taken to the mill to be turned into flour. To get a small wooden bottle of milk (which can be used in its original form or taken to the dairy to be turned into cheese), a player must go to the hay field, collect a bale of hay, and then bring it to the cows, who are moving around in their pen based on a die roll; to get a wooden egg, a player collects wheat from the fields, carries it to the mill to grind it into grain (an end ingredient in many of the recipes in itself) and then takes it to the chickens, who are similarly mobile, to exchange for an egg.

It's funny to write out because it sounds complex. But unlike some kids' (or adult) games with overly complex actions that keep players returning to the rules to figure out what comes next, gameplay in In the Country is very simple; its complexity lies in planning one's activities, guided by the simple diagrams on every recipe card that show all the steps necessary to produce the final dish. And this is a very good and interesting kind of complexity for young children; independent of the fact that they are being invited to think in a far more comprehensive way about where their food comes from, they are also asked to think of approaching a goal in stages and putting multiple parts together to achieve it.

Z has enjoyed this game very much since sometime in her third year. Interestingly, it taps into the natural thrill children have in cooking food, despite the fact that the collection of ingredients is never physically transformed into a representation of the final dish; none of that seems to matter, and Z seems almost as proud to be "baking bread" in the game as in real life. We played In the Country for several months in our own home and then donated it to a local cafe, where we occasionally spend a long, relaxed lunch eating hearty, simple organic meals in the perfect setting for this game!

In the Country sells for about $36 on Amazon.com.

Mosaics and learning to recognize and repeat patterns are important for early math literacy, and I haven't seen many games that introduce the concept more beautifully than Haba's Mosaik Puzzle Game.


Most of pattern games I've seen include various shaped pieces and a picture that you are supposed to recreate with your pieces; this is fine for some children, but Z doesn't like to be confined to those images so she usually discards the suggested images and goes with her imagination. She did this to some extent with this game - incorporating it with other blocks for play - but she also started to grasp the concept of repeating images to form a visual whole.


The inclusion of a box to frame it and to contain it is important. We have puzzle toys from other companies that didn't have a box and if we didn't store the pieces in a bag, they'd be scattered to the four corners of our house. The beech frame measures approximately 8.5" x 8.5" and has 28 brightly painted pieces. As with all HABA toys, paints are non-toxic, and the beechwood is well-sanded. Z spends some time at her grandmother's house and they really enjoyed playing with the set.


Grandma reports: "This toy was challenging and fun for both Z and I. And I have to admit I used up more than my fair share of time playing with it. I loved the beautiful and vibrant pieces that fit together to form mosaics." We love games that intrigue adults and compel adults to play and interact with the kids. I mean, let's face it, there's only so much fun an adult can have with Polly Pocket, right? But these kind of games, where the adult is capable of making a more complex arrangement can teach the kid and also expose the child to more complex arrangements - allowing for subtle learning possibilities in the context of play." This would be an excellent addition to a block set or to a family coffee table - something fun for everyone to tinker with.

Last year, this lovely game sold for about $50 most places we looked. It has been a few months since we checked, but it's currently selling for about $37 on Amazon.com.

Jeremiah, Z and I played Haba's "The Black Pirate" board game a few times before gifting it to an eight-year-old cousin, and enjoyed it thorougly. The game features little wooden ships with cloth sails that you blow around with a "bellows" (i.e. nasal bulb syringe) to collect gold and, if you're lucky, to steal other players' gold with the pirate ship. Arrr!

While Jeremiah, Z and I had a great time playing the game, you should have seen the ruckus that commenced the day after Christmas. The scene at my grandfather's house saw my father, my uncle, his 8 year old son, a 14-year-old, my 18-year-old brother and his girlfriend playing a game that got louder and more riotous as the stakes grew, with another half-dozen family members wandering in and out to see what all the whooping and hollering was about. Once Jeremiah taught them how to play the game, they were off - and I've seriously never seen a game draw such a diverse crowd and have everyone either playing or enjoying watching the play. It was the hit of the party.



Unfortunately, we were so caught up in our own enjoyment of this spectacle we forgot that we are on call for a little blogging prep work at all times, and it was only in the last turn that we thought to pull out our Flip to record the action. It would have been the best way by far to show you how much fin this game is, or at least how much fun it will be for the 6- to 10-year-olds in your life. We only caught the tail end of the excitement so it's not a very impressive video. Instead, here are a few shots we took at home during our family play with The Black Pirate.


Islands are stocked with gold based on die rolls, so the quantity of gold in various locations around the board is always changing. The bellows really do blow these ships around, but it's best to blow at the base of the ship, not the sail, unless you're trying to jump over one of the islands (a nifty trick any experienced buccaneer should be familiar with).


The full game board.


The light blue area is where you have to successfully blow your ship, in a die-roll determined number of puffs, to claim the gold.

One clever element of game play is engaged when the pirate comes calling. The victim of the pirate attack takes three of their collected coins and places them in some arrangement in their two hands - in other words, all three in one hand, or two in one and one in the other - and then holds out their hands for the attacker to pick from. It would have been easy to assess a simple penalty for being attacked - "victim pays three dubloons" - but instead it becomes an element of strategy, suspense, and flair for a young player - will they minimize their losses, or go for the gold, so to speak? Our favorite children's games are filled with little details like this.

You can pick up The Black Pirate for about $35 on Amazon.com. As with most Haba games, it isn't cheap, but it's more fun than your average "board game" and it will last - we'd never seen cardboard this fat until we bought our first Haba games.

It is an endless source of entertainment to me to watch how well cooperative games work with young children. A preschool-age child who is not culturally trained to see all games as competition can get excited about finding out which car will win a race even if cars are not assigned to players.


Z had a great time with HABA's "Rev Up" game, which combines a "memory" backbone with chance elements to propel cars through a race.


The only vaguely competitive aspect is whether a player will achieve a match and thus be able to move a car and contribute to the overall racing activity. The penalty for a mismatch is that one is "sitting out" the round as far as advancing the race is concerned.


I was always a pretty competitive game player growing up, and in some ways still am. But as with anything we do to try to help our child develop skills beyond our own, sincerity pays off.

I once thought that by furnishing cooperative games for Z and playing them with her, we'd be teaching her to have a cooperative task orientation in later life. In fact, by playing them together we're all meditating on the value of cooperative play, where the focus becomes the challenge posed by the game to us. This is unavoidably a learning experience for everyone, perhaps especially for those of us who have surrendered to the real world and its often abrasive daily competition.



The real "trick" that the young players don't get (or care about) is the one thing that makes it truly a "kids' game": there is no limit to how long you can work to achieve the goal. This is a kind of magic, as it preserves the possibility of success and, barring disaster, assures it, but children still feel a sense of suspense as they clamber towards their goal. This is probably fundamentally linked to a child's wild imaginative abilities, and whenever she grows out of it I will be sorry to see it go.

On that note, I've noticed that Z is only now just beginning to enjoy playing a game that has a time element involved - previously, whenever we've played a game with a timer (Cranium's Balloon Lagoon, for example) she has begged to do it without the time pressure. Unfortunately, when you're dealing with a game designed to be timed, time is often the only natural limiter on activity, meaning that without a timer she could go on flipping frogs into a volcano (pond, whatever) for...ever....


HABA's "Rev Up" game ($15), as well as a broad range of other cooperative games by HABA, Family Pastimes, and others, are available at Amazon.com.