The Tavern

Hello, everyone!

Let's begin from afar.
I have a younger brother -- he is, say, six or seven years old. =)
Every time he visits us (my grandparents and me), we either fight (which is too loud, and this makes him overexcited) or play/watch something at my computer (which is not nice too -- he is just a young boy, and manipulating with real objects is always funnier!).
Our parents do not like it, and I agree to them.

I tried finding some nice table-top games for us to play, but most games I saw were either as complex as Nemelex Xobeh decks or attention-sapping (and since he is young, elaborate action like that of DnD won't hold him for long -- it did not hold me when I was of his age).
Of course, these were out.

Are there any nice tabletop games of choice you could recommend to us? =)

Requirements:
- fairly simple (no multi-part rulebooks, no complex Attack-Defence-rAcid-rCorr-rSpam stuff, please!)
- easy to set up (without a lot of chips or figures; max. 1-2 decks of cards)
- quick (no boring hit calculation, no boring preparation)
- sturdy (the items important for the game should NOT be easy to destroy or lose)

What I would also like to see in suggestions:
- "Print & Play" version(s) of a suggested game (keep in mind that we are living in a fairly small town in Russia -- I can't even find a set of D&D dice here!)


I know about a few games that pretty much suit my requirements.

101, or Crazy Eights
+ can and should be played with regular cards
+ I have TWO custom decks for this game
- quite hard to learn

Uno
+ can be played with regular cards
+ similar to Crazy Eights for me

En Garde
+ Print and Play version available, but not required
+ a few cards required -- can be played with regular cards
+ simple rules, simple game board -- can be literally drawn on a piece of paper and played with a few pebbles
~ reminds me of cribbage somewhy

Yahtzee
+ five regular dice required; simple rules
+ can be literally drawn on a piece of paper
+ no game board required -- use a shoe box if needed


Can you recommend me a few more games of this class, please? =)

Up the size of the bracketed text, please.

Can't Stop http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/41/cant-stop
A old, but great dice game by Sid Sackson. Has recently been reissued. It involves decisions; my 4 and 8 year olds like to play it.

Mondo /http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/91523/mondo
You can easily even out age handicaps with different timers (say seven minutes vs five minutes). English rules available at /http://www.mondo-game.com; not sure if there is an English (i.e. US) edition already.

Have you tried any of the munchkin games? They have two decks, one die, are easy to set up and are a good deal of fun.

My little brother (7 yrs) and I have fun with the Lego boardgames.

It's fun to build them (everyone has fun with Lego), and they are simple enough for children of that age.

Munchkin series is quite heavy; it can also be called "MtG: Mockery Introduction Layer".
Besides, they are expensive, and printing and laminating all the cards by myself will be expensive as well. =) I don't want to spend more than, say, $6 on a game (that's enough for printing and laminating three A4 pages full of content). In my town, each Munchkin pack costs around $16-20.


C'mon, don't mention the obvious, dk! =)
He likes planning battles of plastic figurines more than Lego, as far as I understood, and I have almost no Lego pieces in my house. So this is not the choice.


Bracketed text will be normalised in a few minutes!


Please, no table-top RPG-s like D&D, Munchkin or Magic: The Gathering, please. Or he will try to sneak some robots in and will blast my units into pieces with 5d6 brutal attacks.

Phase 10 - card game where you try to make 10 different card combinations (generally sets/runs of various sizes) in order

Khet - Chess with lasers! REAL lasers! Kids like lasers, right?

Fish Eat Fish - Take turns moving fish about the sea, and attacking the other player's fish; battles are resolved by adding the size of your fish to a card you play face down (similarly to Cosmic Encounter)

Just go Hangman/paper football/Battleship. Don't outright nerdize your brother. If that was your intention from the start, just go for chess.

Introducing PC to an underage person is destructive, indeed. I've got a lil brother here, too - he's 13 and he's darn obsessed with Minecraft and pretty much any game in which you can cheat/install mods. He'll play 10 hours straight and still fight when I try to switch places with him at the computer.

Not really on the topic, but buy your bro a yo-yo. Not the 1500 roubles models, just some metal Chinese stuff. Guaranteed, as soon as he gets the gist of the "gameplay", boredom will rarely be a problem.

The Board Game Geek website is probably a better place to ask this sort of thing.

That having been said, I play board games with a four year old on a very regular basis.

He is a huge fan of the Blue Orange line of games that might be beneath your brother's range (Pigzup, Zimboos, CooCoo the Rocking Clown, Pengoloo, Gobblet Gobblers).
In the same line but slightly more advanced are the Haba games "Animal upon Animal". We recently picked up the cooperative game "Max", but that might also be beneath. "Orchard", also from Haba, is good, I hear, but I don't own it and it is expensive to purchase,

We have "Flush!" which is a strange action game cross between tiddly winks and hungry hungry hippos and spelunking; it's both LOUD and fun and frustrating. We haven't put water in it yet for the last 30 seconds of horror.

I have a set of Robo Rally upstairs that I haven't yet broken out for him, but it is a beautiful looking game and available and fun. I plan to use it to help teach programming skills.

Recently, the laser game of Khet has made it to Toys r Us and is great, but painful to the wallet and might also be dangerous if someone doesn't like you and takes the laser.

Another option might be Polarity, which is dead simple (40 rare earth magnets), but tough to store (40 LARGE RARE EARTH MAGNETS), so I keep it in the garage near the toolbox, away from my PC.

I list the game names because you can search engine them up easily.


- - - -

You can also go check out anything from Cheap Ass Games: http://www.cheapass.com/
Or stuff from Tom Wham: http://www.tomwham.com/twg&b.html

I tried searching through BoardGameGeek, Xua -- since this is where I downloaded my En Garde! board layout from. =)
Sadly, most family games are quite complex, and the list of "games that don't require special boards" is small and, in my opinion, not too interesting.

Oh well. We've got two full card decks, so I guess I shall start using them. =)

Good Lord, guys, we're in Russia here! How do you think we are going to get Khet, in example? Make it by ourselves?
We don't have photoelements. -.-

Phase 10 looks quite easy to imitate with a single full deck. =) Thanks for the suggestion!


Hm, I had a thought about something like that, Hinafag. =)
Actually, he already knows how to play chess -- not well enough, though, because he still thinks chess can walk diagonally without attacking anyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farkle

Farkle is really fun, much like yatzee, only (IMO) better because there is more ups and downs.

With that said, I think it gets better with a few more people. 3-5 is better than just 2.

I remember this one. =) It really was not that good for two gamblers.

Cheapass has some downloadable games.
http://www.cheapass.com/

You can also check RPGNow! for printable pdfs of games.

If you want a really simple game, try this one ("Don't be angry" in rough translation). It's in Czech, but the rules are quite simple (the board is a part of the linked article):

1) Every player throws one die in turn. Upon the result of the throw, they choose their action.
2) Four of each players' tokens start in the corner areas of their respective color ("home area")
3) The goal of the game is to get all of the player's tokens into his goal by passing all the playground clockwise.
4) A player can only set up his token on the same-coloured starting field when they throw a six. Then they get another throw.
5) When a player already has a token on the field, he always moves any single one of his tokens (whichever he wishes) around the playfield the number of squares he throws on his die. This has a few details:
6) When a player who already has a token on the field throws a six, he has two options - either to move one of his existing tokens by six fields, or to set up another of his tokens from the home area to the field. Either way, the player then gets another throw to go on (and if it is a six again, he again gets the options and another throw, until he throws anything else then a six).
7) Kicking out opponents: This is probably the most fun part . Whenever your throw would allow your token to land on a square occupied by an opponent's token, and zou choose to move this way, you kick this token out, sending it back to the home area. The opponent then has to wait for another six-throw, before he can set the token to the field again.

Hope I didn't forget anything .

^ Sounds like a variation on Parchisi, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachisi

somewhat like Sorry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorry!_%28game%29

Those are all pretty much the same game.

Sorry, I completely missed the fact that you won't be able to purchase anything. No big deal for one of the games I suggested: for Can't Stop you need four regular die, a sheet of paper and some counters. It's worth it; if you cannot figure out the rules/setup from BGG and are interested, please contact me by email.

Are Sorry! and Pachisi similar to each other? If they are (as far as I can tell), then it is one of my favourite childhood table-top games! =)
Really good with four players, a bit boring with a single opponent.
Glad that somebody else likes it. =)

Can't Stop has a print & play version, Dpeg, so I guess it is not much of a problem. =) Thanks for the suggestion. =)

MyO: Well, then I guess you didn't play the MatFyz version of this game (called after the Mathematical-Physical Faculty of Charles University in Prague).
This is a true pub game .

Chess? Have him learn the basics and give him some mate puzzles.

There are freebie games at Atomic Sock Monkey: RPGs and Board (Monkey Ninja Pirate Robot, RPG and Board Game):

http://www.atomicsockmonkey.com/freebies.asp