I've seen grown adults throw tantrums while playing this game.
Keep on editing and adding, please! I can use all the help I can get. I played a lot of card games when I was growing up, like blackjack, clock solitaire, and gin rummy. My husband only seems to remember the video games he played.King of Tokyo, Ticket to Ride, Killer Bunnies, Settlers of Catan, Castle Panic are all games I play with my 7 year old. I'm sure there is more. She adores watching Tabletop. ALSO, Qwirkle, Get Bit, Lemonade Stand....
Sorry I keep editing this as I poke around the game closet.
That and the Robber is a jerk
A kickstarted kids game that follows similar mechanics called Robot Turtles can be found in some places. It is a limited run and may not ever see a wide release. I pledged so I could get a copy even though my two year old is too young for it yet.
Tell me more of this variant.
In my house, playing cards are constantly lost. Once they go under the entertainment center they enter a vortex from which they may never return. We had a Go Fish deck (specifically that game with fish pictures on it) and an Uno deck, but Go Fish got lost when we moved and Uno is missing several cards though the deck has been in my desk for four years. We do better keeping game pieces together.
Especially with a few expansions....But again, the complexity of the game goes way up - depending on which expansions you use.
Ok, so my two suggestions are both card-based games, so not ideal.In my house, playing cards are constantly lost. Once they go under the entertainment center they enter a vortex from which they may never return. We had a Go Fish deck (specifically that game with fish pictures on it) and an Uno deck, but Go Fish got lost when we moved and Uno is missing several cards though the deck has been in my desk for four years. We do better keeping game pieces together.
Just played Takenoko for the first time over the holidays, and it was a lot of fun. I can see kids having fun with it.
Really? I think it's the weakest board. The American, German and Swiss boards are all more evenly distributed, and they don't suffer from the "only 6 long routes so after playing 3x you know them all" problem. Plus, Europe's got annoying bottlenecks. It's ridicuously easy to know "oh, he's making the long route to Edinburg, let's screw him by blocking Paris (or whatever, haven't played the board in a few months for this very reason). On other boards you can choose more routes, short and long. In Europe each player gets just one long route, and blocking that one off is usually a game killer for the player involved.
Hm, I haven't played the Swiss version. You make some good points about Europe. I like the fact that each player is guaranteed a long route -in the American version, you just get random routes and I've definitely won a few games just through the luck of getting three really high-value cards and my opponents netting 5s and 9s. But you may be right about Europe's too-limiting long route system, and the bottlenecks (I can't recall that problem myself).
True about long routes/short routes - though that's fairly easily solved by using the German solution (that is, "do it the way it's handled in the German version") - separate long and short routes in separate piles, and everyone can choose how many from each they want, with the limit that, amongst the original 3 routes, at least one has to be a "long" one. On subsequent draws, you're free to take all short, all long, or whatever.
That would be a rule easy enough to incorporate into the America version. We should figure out how to make the world's greatest ticket to ride map.
