Thing 1 saves the game

We have a Wii. My son would spend most of everyday playing on the Wii, if possible. As such, ever since we got the Wii--and more so now that he also has an iPod touch and all of the games thereon--we have made a deliberate effort to emphasize games that we can all play together (on the Wii and otherwise) and games that we can not play on the Wii.

Like most things, we go through phases of interest. For a while we were playing Sorry all the time. Then we were on to Lego board games. By the cosmic accident of an Amazon.com recommendation, I discovered Castle Keep, which led indirectly to a recommendation from someone in a toy shop in Saratoga Springs, New York, that we should play Spot It. We played Castle Keep and Spot It to death last year, adding Sleeping Queens and Loot from Castle Keep maker Gamewright.

Now board games are best taught in the playing. Few games of any kind have so elegant a set of rules that you can explain the flow of play beforehand. (Checkers, maybe? War, but that's a card game.) In teaching new games to kids, you notice that they grasp the goals and mechanics of new games far better in the playing--so much so that one wonders why you don't start like that in the first place.

So we have tended to play games first and ask questions later. Typically, an adult reads the game directions to get a general sense of what's going on and then we dive in, referring to the rules as necessary. In this spirit, I gave a cursory examination to the rules of Duck Duck Bruce, an interesting card game from Gamewright that was a Christmas present to my kids. We played with my parents and my kids, six of us, all playing for the first time. It was a neat game, but one that I lost miserably because I couldn't keep any cards for points. Oh, well. You win some, you lose some, right?

The next day, Lera and I went to see a movie, leaving my kids and parents to their own devices. They decided to play games, including Hedbanz, a guessing game that they also got for Christmas, and Yahtzee. They also played Duck Duck Bruce. My son, the compulsive reader, snatched up the game instructions to pass the long moments between things that entertain him, and discovered that I had taught them the game incorrectly. In my haste to get going, I had misinterpreted one of the directions, the one that saw me lose so many cards and points. The correct rule makes the game much more enjoyable and makes all of the other game features easier to execute.

This tells me many things, foremost among them pay attention to the instructions. Or, beware children who can read. It also suggests that we may be ready for more complicated games. Probably not Axis & Allies, but maybe Ticket to Ride or Scotland Yard.