For weeks now, we have been wanting to have a game night. Thanks to the Littlest Gamer, we had one last night. It started off innocent enough as she wanted to play one card game. When we finished, she took it back into her room and brought out another one. In total, we played three new card games last night and had a lot of fun.
The three card games we played were all from Gamewright. Gamewright is known for their short card games. Most of their games take less than 30 minutes to play. These card games make a great choice for when the Little One wants to play a game but we just don’t have a lot of time. Besides when you’re dealing with a 4-year-old’s attention span, the faster the game the better.
The fastest game we played was Too Many Monkeys.
. It’s ironic because it took the longest to read the instructions for the game. Each player starts off with six cards that are laid out in front of them face down. On your turn, you draw a card and then place it on one of the face down cards. Then you can turn over that card. The object of the game is to turn all of your face down cards over and have the number sequence 1-6. There are specialty cards that will either help or hinder you in this quest. Too Many Monkeys was a lot of fun and fast. Plus it’s a card game that the Little Gamer could easily play and enjoyed, too.
The card game This Big
reminded me of Go Fish but instead of asking for cards, a player plays a lure card that shows what color fish he is after. Each player plays a card face down in front of them. It either has to be a fish of the lure color or river garbage like a tire, trombone, etc. If you have neither of these, then you can say “No Catch” and don’t have to play a card face down. The first player to 10 wins the game. The Little Gamer smoked us on this game. She had three lunker lures that meant we had to play our highest scoring card. She had seven points after round 2! Needless to say, she really liked this game.
The most controversial game of the evening was King Toad.
King Toad is most related to the card game Rummy. Cards are played in sequence. There are King Toad cards that allow the player to call which numbered card they want the next player to play. The round ends when one player has no more cards. Then they earn a token. The first to earn three tokens wins the game. Well, guess who didn’t win the first token and had a meltdown about it? That’s right. JoeGamer. Just kidding. It was the Littlest Gamer, of course. This was the longest of the card games as we all eventually had two tokens. The final round I won – which was not the outcome the Little Gamer had wanted. This game is meant for older kids, so this one goes back on the game shelf for a few more years.
All in all the impromptu game night was a success with everyone in the family having a good time. It’s so nice to see her interested in card games since she loves her video games. And as parents who love card games, it makes us so proud that the Little Gamer loves them as much as we do.
© 2010, Lynn Little. All rights reserved.
