Zooloretto is our current favorite game for our six-year-old. She's an avid game-player and it hits the sweet spot between games for young kids and more complex games for the 8 and up crowd. She probably crosses the gap so willingly because it involves animals, particularly baby animals.

Zooloretto involves building and populating a zoo, with animal types separated in different pens. The world of Zooloretto is filled with juvenile animals who cannot mate and produce offspring, with a mix of mature males and females who, if placed together in a pen, presto, produce the cutest baby flamingo/kangaroo/panda bear/cheetah/elephant/et cetera you've ever seen.


The game incorporates saving and spending coins, strategizing placement of animals and items on delivery trucks to maximize your own take, buying and selling animals to and from other players, and planning ahead. All parts are made of that nice thick cardboard or, in the case of the money and "trucks" that deliver the goods, wood.


Zooloretto is available on Amazon.com, selling or about $40, which is the going rate for a high-quality game like this. The company also offers some interesting-looking expansion packs, which require the main game to play and cost an additional $10-$30. Here are some links:

• Zooloretto game


• Zooloretto: Exotic


• Rio Grande Games Zooloretto Expansion
  (petting zoos, more pens, and more)


• Zooloretto: The Boss
  (deal with workers, charitable donations, and...?)

Disclosure: We bought this game, and have owned it for years.

Z has reached an age where we have the luxury of only playing games with her that are also fun for us, but work for her six-year-old mind. Dweebies is a great example of a game with just enough strategy to keep adults engaged while giving young kids a challenge to master.

In Dweebies, players take turns laying cards in horizontal or vertical rows, creating a crossword-style grid of character cards. The deck has a variety of entertaining and well-drawn characters who have a matching pair, or sometimes two or three matching pairs, so the frequency of cards varies dramatically, with some being quite rare (a single pair) and others with several identical cards in the deck.

A player collects a row of cards when they are able to play a "pair" across an end-to-end span in the grid. Here's an example of a set the player can take.


Since pairs have to bookend rows to successfully capture cards, this game has offense as well as defense. Often you will have a pair in your hand, and play one with a plan to grab some other cards with it. Adding a card to the other side of this strategically placed card nullifies its ability to claim a row, a move your opponent is certain to take if they realize what you're up to!

This is just one of the ways Dweebies engages strategizing, reasoning skills, and planning, and the "8 and up" label is off by at least two years. Z had no problem picking this game up very quickly at six, and its basic rules are really quite simple. We've enjoyed playing it with her and exploring the finer points of strategy together. One cool feature of the cards is that each card features a row of dots in the corner that indicates how common the card is. The fewer dots it has, the more rare it is, and knowing a card's rarity can inform your strategy both offensively and defensively. It's a nice touch of detail that is consistent with the consideration for detail put into the characters on the cards, which are sure to amuse young players.

That said, it's also a fast-paced card game that can just as easily entertain older kids, with or without younger players. One of the nicest features of this fast-paced card game is that hands run very quickly, in 10 or 15 minutes at the most. That means you can play a quick game when you just have a few free minutes with your child, or play several rounds and make an evening of it. Whenever we play this game with Z, she never wants to stop.

At $10 for a fat deck of cards in a metal tin, Dweebies makes a great stocking stuffer. Pair it with a card holder and enjoy some family time with a great card game this holiday season!

Have you wrapped up your holiday shopping? We're getting close, and thought readers might be interested to know what we bought Z this year. Here are the seven things she's receiving from us this year.

Babysitting Mama: This Wii game lets players interact with a baby doll by stuffing the Wii controller inside and then playing on-screen games. It's tailor-made for our daughter, who (a) enjoys playing our Wii, (b) does best with Wii games that recognize rough, simple movements, and (c) is obsessed with babies. Reviews of this very new game have been maddening -- they are all by adult/teen gamers (whom this game is clearly not intended for) who may or may not be making claims regarding whether kids "would like it." This game is an innovative idea for kids ages five to nine or so, and we're excited to experiment with it and the game system our family loves.


Hey That's My Fish: A game that got great reviews from parents who say there's enough strategy to keep kids and adults engaged.


Melodica: Z is going to rock this kid-friendly instrument. She has been very interested in the piano and keyboards (she plays the cello, recently switched from violin) and this is a fun, casual way for us to offer one, plus you have to blow to power it! Jeremiah looked and looked to find this one at a good price that has both a short reed and a longer one on a tube. The longer tube permits the keyboard to lay flat for playing, while the short reed makes you hold the melodica like a keyboard-saxophone.

Lego Headlamp: So cool. Each leg has an LED and they can be positioned independently.

DIY HexBug Nano tracks: Hexbug's Nano bristlebots are an obsession that has stood the test of time. We'd originally planned to get some extra pieces for the HexBug Nano Habitat set that she got for her birthday, but she and Jeremiah got so excited building Lego sets that we've decided to make a set of homemade tracks for her. They'll get a post of their own when he finishes them.

FurReal Newborn Dalmation puppy. This was the thing that Z consistently asked Santa for this year. (She has seen him several times.) I'm a little bummed that she didn't ask for a BunnyBear or a blue doll. It's hard to say if she'll really play with this much but what are you gonna do, she was pining for it and doesn't ever have many specific gift requests.

Zhu Zhu pets: A perennial favorite. Our only rule is that she plays with them in her room. They drive us crazy. She has a couple of "habitat" sets but they are bulky and we avoid adding more.


That's pretty much it. Oh, one honorable mention: Jeremiah's mother sent Z's gift unwrapped; it's a set of Snap Circuits, which we mentioned previously in our Amazon sale roundup. The sales aren't quite as steep now, at least on Amazon, but Jeremiah has been playing with Z's Snap Circuits a bit when she isn't home, mostly to familiarize himself with them so they can play together without a lot of instruction-reading time. He reports that they are really cool. He has put several different projects together quickly (they literally use snaps, like the kind you'd find on clothes, to lock the circuits together). We'll post about it when he and Z get down to business, but this early take is that Snap Circuits deliver on their promise to make electronics projects really, really easy for young kids.

I've been playing a lot of Words With Friends lately on my iPhone, engaging in verbal combat with my mother, father, and random strangers in spare moments snatched from my day. Z has been eagerly horning in on this Scrabble-like action, making it clear that she's ready for word-building games. Enter Scrabble Junior.

In a world where most classic board games have a nonsensical "Junior" version (Hasbro is a major offender in this category), Scrabble Junior is a surprisingly agile adaptation. One side of the board of this version of Scrabble for kids six and up features larger, fewer, blank spaces for building words in traditional Scrabble manner - wisely eliminating the special spaces and even point values for letters - and the other, the truly ingenious side, features a completed board for the placement of tiles to spell predetermined words. This training-wheels version works better than it might sound; the rules are challenging enough for a six-year-old just getting down the basics of word-constructing game (letters must be placed in left-to-right order, and play consists of placing two letters from your hand), and it's easy for older players to help younger kids figure out the gameplay. Z is thrilled to play yet another big person game and enjoys the challenge of putting some longer words together than she's used to reading or writing. We'll soon graduate to the other side of the board, no doubt, where we can construct simple words together in the semi-collaborative play mode we use to teach Z most games.

We also appreciate that this game consists entirely of cardboard pieces, not plastic. The board, letter squares, and point tiles are all cardboard, making the game both more affordable (it sells on Amazon.com for just over $13) and less wasteful.

This game was purchased by us at a store, not sent by a company for review. We highly recommend it for kids ages eight to ten or so.

Plan Toys' miniaturized, legless Foosball Soccer game probably looks like a lot of fun. You'd only be half wrong if sort of fun is half of very fun, but we'll leave the math to you.

Now, our six-year-old daughter enjoys playing with this foosball game as much as anything we encourage her to play with us. She really likes full-size foosball, and kids work well on teams on a full-sized table, against each other or against adults who are not competitive jerks. But foosball is a game that simply does not work unless each player meets at least one of the two following conditions:

1. You have the mental capacity to manage multiple controllers along two vertices as a small ball rolls unpredictably past them.


2. You have the emotional capacity and sense of self-preservation to restrain yourself from reaching into the game and grabbing the ball when #1 fails you.

So foosball has a lower age limit - nothing wrong with that. Trouble is, that pretty much leaves this really cute miniaturized version of the game without an audience. Kids over eight will be frustrated by having to use T. Rex arms to control their team on this roughly 15" x 20" field. The lack of a "roll-in" ball chute means that you actually have to place the ball by hand on the center field line; the big problem there turns out not to be getting your hand out quickly but being fair - if you try to place the ball right in the middle and leave it still, neither player's team can reach it, and if you give it a nudge, well, you're deciding who to give the start to. This may not matter too much to an adult playing with a young child, but to a couple of children, it's a recipe for disaster.


The table is made of the same natural rubberwood and non-toxic paints and finishes that are behind all Plan Toys.


Some of the figures block the ball even when they are in "bottoms' up" position. It comes with two wooden balls, and dimples to store them in. Some sort of closure or containment device would be helpful; we've lost one of the two custom-sized wooden balls already.

The toy also needs feet of some kind - its natural playing surface is a coffee table - but the little pads you can buy at a home improvement/hardware store work fine.

We love Plan Toys line in general and most of the toys of theirs we've used, including a one-of-a-kind building set one of our favorite early toddler toys ever. But we can't recommend this misguided product, which really doesn't offer much use life for its $70 price tag.

You can find the Plan Toys Foosball Soccer game at Kangarooboo.

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]