Play the Game

We've started playing board games with T lately. I was hoping for like Risk, or Monopoly, maybe a hearty game of Scrabble. But instead we've decided to keep it more on the level of a pre-schooler and made it Chutes and Ladders and Candyland. Of course in my house, we don't have any games that are just the games. They all have themes. Our Chutes and Ladders is Sesame Street Chutes and Ladders, with the game pieces being played by Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Elmo and Zoe. Our Candyland is the Walt Disney Parks version, where the end goal is to make it to Cinderella's Castle.

Candyland isn't to bad, it's obviously a very simple game, flip a card and see a color, move your guy to that color. Get to the end and win. The nice thing about this it that it's pretty quick. T-ster gets the game and realizes that he won't win every time. (we're not the parents who suck to let the kids win. . .we're too competitive) . He will always finish the game, even if he's not first, so I suppose that's a good thing, right? Not a quitter. But the best part of this game is that it doesn't take to long to play, the longest game so far has only taken about 10 minutes. It's perfect for my short attention span.

Chutes and Ladders, or Chicken Ladders as he called it yesterday, is also fairly simple, spin and see your number. The problem arises when he has a hard time following the direction of the game board. He doesn't always head the right way, so that can take some time. But the worst part of this game is the chutes. If you remember your formative years playing this game, the ladders take you higher in the game and the chutes take you lower. So you can spend plenty of time trying to finish the game because as soon as you get close, you start hitting the slides and getting further and further away from the goal of beating the game. We played it last night and it took almost 30 minutes to finish the game. It really sucked. So we're trying not to play Chicken Ladders to much anymore. Maybe we'll just stick to baseball. That's starting in a couple months.