A family joins us with a little monkey!
With the start of the Easter school holidays we welcomed one of our youngest ever visitors, along with his Monkey!
When they arrived Oliver and Martin were already warming up their flicking skills on the Crokinole board (a full review of this game and the work necessary to fix it can be read
here). Oliver had played this a couple of times at a previous meeting and Martin was frankly appearing to make a real mess of it during the warm up period. He claimed never to have played it before and we could all well believe this. Thankfully there was no money riding on the game because as soon as the warm up was over he was a man transformed playing a skilful game that saw Oliver’s disk being sent repeatedly into the surrounding well. Suffice to say that Martin emerged the victor and left the rest of us a little suspicious about his early apparent inability to flick the disks!
With this game over we moved onto
Straw where the combined forces of monkey + son + dad proved too much for the rest of us completing a strong win having led the points from the halfway stage. Straw is an excellent game for adults but is a great way of getting kids doing mental arithmetic and having a laugh doing it – sadly Oliver didn't do that well in this game either.
As an aside, a couple of other other games good for helping youngsters with maths are
Take It Easy! This is especially good for times tables and is surprisingly popular with one of our 8 your old great nephews, whilst
Zeus on the Loose offers a simpler mathematical option but still with a good dose of fun.
At this point the family split off to give our youngster and his monkey a chance to play Crokinole whilst the rest of us played
Ra. Described by one of our group as fiendish, it is a very simple game but with lots of possibilities to weigh up in what is ultimately a simple open bidding game – a game Oliver fared much better at, coming in as a convincing winner. No great surprise that although it came out 1999 it is rated highly on boardgamegeek or that it was designed by that most prolific of designers
Reiner Knizia. The only surprise is that in the year it was released that it didn’t win the
Spiel des Jahres losing out to
Tikal. If you would like to know more about this excellent game check out this
video.
Robin suggested a collaborative game next time so maybe one of the following will get a run to the table,
Castle Panic,
Forbidden Island,
Pandemic or
Panic Station?
With another small turnout we didn’t raise much money for
CAFOD, however every little helps and I know they will appreciate the contributions.
More photo's from the evening can be seen
here.
Our next event at the
Blue Anchor, Crowborough is in two weeks time on Sunday 15th April starting at 7pm - £1 per head. More details can be seen on our Facebook Page
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