Great Games for Typical Families (Christmas 2014)

A good game can be a great Christmas present that gives your family hours of face-to-face time around the table throughout the years.  Sadly, many better-known stores tend to stock lots of  mediocre games that will only be played once or twice before being put on the shelf to never come down again. So here is my family’s list of FUN games – games that children and parents alike will keep asking to play throughout the year.  Some of these games have made their way to the shelves of national chains. Others you may have to order online or find in a specialty game store.  Games are like movies or books – I’d rather have two good ones then ten bad ones.  So in no particular order, here is our family’s list:

 Incan Gold  -  Explore an ancient  ruin and try to earn the most treasure in
this push your luck game. Every turn you decide whether to turn around and keep your loot, or keep going to try to earn more. But if you are still in the
ruin when two matching hazard cards are revealed, you lose all your treasure from that round.    (3-8 Players, 20-40 Minutes, Ages 8 and up)

     

Gravwell – Pilot your spaceship around a spiral path to be the first to escape the gravity well. Every turn you choose a card that will move you a number of spaces either towards or away from the nearest other ship.  However which ship is closest is constantly changing as other players move. So if when you choose the wrong card to play, you’ll send yourself in the wrong direction. This game is easy to learn, yet hard to master.

2014  Mensa  Select Game
(2-4 Players, 20-35 Minutes, Ages 15 and up, although in our family's opinion 12-year olds have no problems learning this game)

 Monopoly Millionaire Deal – Unlike its namesake, this is a quick card
game. The cards are a mix of cash, properties, actions to either make
others pay you rent or take other players’ cash or properties. Gather a
million dollars’ worth of cash cards to win.  Watch out, the tide can turn
quickly in this fast-paced game.
(2-5 Players, 10-20 Minutes, Ages 8 and up)

Fill The Barn- Play your cards to plant & harvest crops to earn the most money. Except the barn is not big enough to store all the crops, so make sure you harvest before your opponents. Use droughts to prevent harvests, junk to fill valuable barn slots, or mice to eat a harvest and make more room for your harvest. (Full disclosure, this game is one of my creations).
(2-6 Players, 30-40 minutes, Ages 8 and up)

         

  Ticket to Ride – Connect railroad routes across a map of the U.S. and Canada. It’s fun watching your railroad spread, just beware that your opponents don’t spread first onto tracks that you need to complete your routes.

2004  Spiel des Jahres  winner 
(2-5 Players, 60 Minutes, Ages 8 and up)

       

     

 Forbidden Island and/or Forbidden Desert – These are both cooperative games where players work together rather than compete against each other. In Forbidden Island the challenge is to gather the cards to retrieve treasures from an island before it sinks beneath the waves. In the sequel Forbidden Desert, you must find the parts to assemble a flying machine before they are buried by the desert sands while keeping all members of your party properly hydrated. Forbidden Island is the easier of the two challenges.
(2-5 Players, 30-45 Minutes, Ages 10 and up)

Qwirkle – This is very simple game with very simple rules, yet still has strategic depth. Make lines of tiles that share either the same color or same shape. Six in a row is called a Qwirkle and earns extra points.

2011 Spiel des Jahres  Winner
(2-4 Players, 30-45 Minutes, Ages 6 and up)

 For Sale – This quick property flipping  auction game plays in two rounds.

During the first round, players bid on different-valued properties. Beware opponents who drive up the bid and then pull out and stick you to overpay. The properties bought during the first round are sold off during the second round, with players jockeying to secure the  best offer prices available. The winner is whoever has the most money when the dust clears.

(3-6 Players, 20-30 Minutes, Ages 8and up)

For other great gift ideas, we highly recommend Casual Game Revolution’s list of recommended casual games.   While I have not played every game on this list, I can tell you that I have never bought  a game from this list that turned out to be a dud. There are a few dud games I have bought for my family, and those mistakes could have been avoided had I checked the CGR recommended list first.  My final word of advice: a $25-$40 game that is played over and over again is a far better deal than a $8 game you only play twice.

HoopCAT Games - 2013 Year in Review

January 2013 started big with Unpub3, where Attatat was well received by the play testers. One of the players who sat down for a round was Dan Yarrington of Game Salute.  His constructive suggestions to our Attatat prototype led to a longer face-to-face discussion that ended with a request for a copy of our self-published Fill The Barn for evaluation for a distribution agreement. Needless to say, I drove home in a great mood Sunday night. And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, I hadn’t been home from Unpub3 for 12 hours when we received the Monday morning email notifying us that Casual Game Insider magazine was reviewing Fill The Barn in their Spring 2013 issue and would add it to their list of recommended casual games. The hardest part when you get that kind of news from a quarterly magazine is staying quiet the next 3 months until the publication.

Three weeks later Game Salute formally offered HoopCAT Games a distribution agreement for Fill The Barn, opening the door to distribution channels and a trade show presence that previously had been out of our reach as a two-person husband/wife home business.

April brought the South Jersey Unpub, and the debut of our new cooperative prototype game FireBreak. I was extremely nervous about the first play of this game anywhere other than our friendly family game table. While our sons really enjoyed game, that was no guarantee that anyone else would. I prepared myself not to be disappointed if FireBreak received a cool reception. Instead, we were genuinely yet pleasantly surprised at the enthusiastic South Jersey play test response and further Unpub Minis into the spring.  As had happened with Attatat, it was the Unpub response that caused us to realize that Firebreak was actually a better game than we gave it credit for.  Ever since, we have been working to get the balance right.

April also brought the long-awaited Spring 2013 edition of Casual Game Insider with its review of Fill The Barn.  While we already knew the thrill of positive online reviews, there was still a feeling to hold that shiny magazine in our hands and see page and ink given to our game in the review column.

In May I paid a visit to Washington DC and the Labyrinth Games & Puzzles middle school game club along with fellow Unpub designer Matthew O’Malley for an experiment in junior play testing.  It was truly a fun afternoon, as well as an opportunity to see how children would respond to FireBreak. My favorite quotes of the afternoon were the references to “barbequed elk” as those middle school play testers worked to save the wildlife preserves from the spreading flames.

We had more fun with child gamers in August with a Fill The Barn championship as part of the Juniors Events at the annual World Boardgame Championship.  We had no idea what type of participation to expect, so imagine our surprise when 25 children filed into the room! We had a two-hour window to teach them how to play, play the opening round of five 5-player games, then the championship round. Aiden with an “e” from New York won the trophy (we also had an Aidan with an “a”, so that’s how we distinguished them). The children had fun playing; we had fun hopping between tables to referee.  Will we do it again in 2014? Absolutely! 

Our one letdown of the year came as Autumn approached and we realized that we would not publish Attatat in 2013. Fill The Barn had taken us only 10 months to self-publish from first test play to when the first copies were on a store shelf. However, being the first game we made, its production received 100% of our attention during that period.  With Attatat, that could never be the case, since some time still had to go to Fill The Barn marketing and sales, and other portions of time were going to FireBreak. Harder still, Attatat did not fit a mold of run of the mill components of game board and cards, adding a slight extra challenge to figure out the most cost-effective way to manufacture. Slowly, we arrived at the conclusion that despite our inclination to self-publish, our games might be more successful if we focused on the game design and looked to more-experienced publishers to worry about the just-as-important details like art, manufacturing quotes, and marketing.

The Unpub Zone at the Congress of Gamers in September was a chance to put the latest version of Firebreak back on the table, as well as a revamped version of Attatat that replaced the numbers with Egyptian-themed pictures. The FireBreak feedback from the late spring Unpubs had been that it was too easy. Sometimes a designer can over-correct, and the version we showed at Congress of Gamers made it overly hard with a win rate of only 30% for the day. This was the day that Bruce Voge of The Party Gamecast made his valiant last stand using his yellow meeple to defend the airport from the flames. And yet the amazing thing about that day is that the more our players lost, the more they wanted to play again to try for the win.

Our October good news came when we learned that an article I had submitted to Casual Game Insider magazine had been accepted for the Winter 2014 issue. It was thrilling, yet once again we had to mute our public enthusiasm for the 3 month wait until the actual release in January.

Our efforts to get Firebreak properly balanced by Unpub4 took a slight pause for Dice Hate Me Game’s announcement of the 54-card design challenge during Unpub4. I had already been toying with an idea for a 55-card game to launch on the Unpub circuit in Spring 2014.  After an emergency meeting of the executive leadership of HoopCAT Games (my wife and I), we decided to accelerate the next idea to meet the challenge deadline. And thus Lady of the Diamonds was born in November.

In contrast to Firebreak which has undergone 9 months of endless playtest-adjust-repeat, Lady of the Diamonds came together faster than any other game idea I’ve worked on.  The mechanics worked with very little adjustment from almost game one, while the scoring system fell into place (with some excellent suggestions by my wife and younger son) after only a few test plays.  The HoopCAT family loves this game. My go-to gamer play-tester wants a chance to play it more, while some non-gamer friends we squeezed a play test from described it as “fun”. The design challenge has some pretty stiff odds with over 40 submissions.  Yet even if it does not rise to the top of the competition, expect us to keep Lady of the Diamonds on the playtest circuit in 2014. This one is a keeper.

Just as 2013 began on a positive note, so it also ended well…with an offer to regularly contribute guest blogs to Casual Game Revolution! So starting in January 2014, the Casual Game Revolution blog is where we will be posting any thoughts on family & casual gaming.  We’ll still use the HoopCAT blog for posts that focus more on our games or our company.

We move into 2014 with 3 strong prototype games: Attatat, FireBreak, and Lady of the Diamonds.  This makes us very eager to see what our 2014 end-of-year blog will say 12 months from now. Until then, Happy New Year, and remember throughout 2014 that often what you play is not so important as whom you play with. 

Our Move away from Self-Publishing

This blog is for the benefit of any who are wondering why we haven’t published Attatat yet.   Or why we as a proclaimed self-publisher are submitting an entry to the Unpub4 54-card challenge sponsored by Dice Hate Me Games. Or why we are excited about the number of publishers who are attending Unpub4.

After much careful consideration, thought, and prayer, HoopCAT Games is moving in a different direction.  We are moving away from self-publishing and seeing whether we can publish our designs through other game publishers.

We will enter 2014 with 3 unpublished prototype games:

-          Attatat - This path-building, tile-removing abstract has fared extremely well in Unpub playtesting;

-          FireBreak - Our cooperative game where players work together to save a park from a forest fire has been rating even higher with Unpub playtesters, and;

-          Lady of the Diamonds  - Our entry to the 54-card challenge entry is good enough to make the rounds on the Unpub circuit in the Spring if it doesn’t catch the eye of the competition judges first.

Our goal as we move into 2014 is to find publishers for these games.

The self-publisher must be good at a lot of things, then well-connected and adequately-financed for those things which they are not personally good at.

Having a great game is important, being willing to work tirelessly is essential, yet those two things are not enough to guarantee success. Art and graphic design also matter. You must pay attention to the production and shipping and warehousing details.  Marketing is just as important if not more important than the quality of the game itself.   Self-publish a fun game and you will receive positive reviews, yet good reviews alone are not enough to ensure your game will fly off the shelf and onto game tables.

We realize that there are other small publishers out there who are far better than us at picking the right artist, arranging the production details, running a Kickstarter campaign, using social media effectively, and marketing on a limited budget.  Attatat, FireBreak, and Lady of the Diamonds are all great games.  We want them to be all they can be. And allowing those games to reach their full potential probably means our letting go of some of the control and letting others with different strengths than us publish our games.

We do not regret self-publishing Fill The Barn.  It was an accomplishment that we will continue to treasure in our family memories many years from now.  We developed the idea, found playtesters, worked with the graphic designer to get it ready for commercial publication, coordinated details with the manufacturer, arranged the freight shipment from the Michigan factory, arranged for the warehousing, contacted reviewers who wrote positive things about our very first game, visited area stores who put our games on their shelves, then found a distributor who had the national & international reach to get our games places far beyond where we could go. It was a huge task with a myriad of smaller individual tasks, and we pulled it off to self-publish our first game. We also learned first-hand some valuable lessons along the way. 

Yet if our next games can do even better in the hands of others who are stronger in other key areas, we don’t want to hold our games back from reaching their full potential.  Our HoopCAT logo may not appear on the next games we help to create.  Yet while our name may no longer be on them, trust us when we say our hearts will always go in them.

Help the Yellow Meeple Raise Money for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals with Extra Life

Photo courtesy of Dr. Wictz's Board Games

Our Yellow Meeple is in Indiana right now with his other meeple fire ranger friends to help Jim & Adrienne Jones of Great Big Table raise money for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals during their October 25-27, 2013, Extra Life game-a-thon.  The meeples need your help too!

Last year, Jim & Adrienne reached out to us with the story of their young daughter, asking if we could support their 2012 game-a-thon. It was an easy decision for us. When they asked, they had no idea that our family had its own children’s hospital experience a decade earlier.

We sent a copy of our newly published Fill The Barn game along with our donation last fall. This year we have no new (published) game to accompany the donation, so instead we offered up a prototype copy of a cooperative game that had earlier caught Jim’s & Adrienne’s interest.  And while game designers always have spare meeples here and there, we were very careful to send a specific meeple to Indiana.

This specific yellow meeple gained a slight bit of notoriety when it was used for some Firebreak play testing at the Unpub Zone during Congress of Gamers at the end of September.  Bruce from The Party Gamecast committed early to using the yellow meeple to save the airport from the spreading wildfire. And what a valiant effort it was – we lost the game, but by golly the airport was still standing.

That same yellow meeple has also been used by our younger son Thomas during at-home testing of Firebreak. Thomas always plays yellow during family game time. Thomas is also an alumnus of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia NICU.

I originally had a different blog written to promote Extra Life. That first blog told much more about the story of Thomas. Yet when I checked with Thomas, he wasn’t really comfortable with us sharing those details of his early life.  As his parents we respect that.  Ask Thomas about the first several weeks of his life and he will simply tell you that his lungs were too small, he was in the hospital, and God made him better. And if you are reading this blog, it means Thomas is comfortable with this shorter version of his early life.

Whether our yellow meeple and his friends get any prototype play time controlling wildfires during the Jim & Adrienne Jones game-a-thon isn’t what’s really important.  There are some things that are far more important than my game designer ego…like raising money for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.

 Jim & Adrienne Jones are using their game-a-thon to raise money for Riley Children’s Hospital (Indiana), the hospital that helped their young daughter. Clicking on their names will take you to the donation page. Even if you can only donate $1, those dollars add up.

I will also mention Matt Morgan and Team Explanation Point. Full disclosure, I don’t know Matt or anyone one his team.  All I know from a recent Boardroomers podcast is that Matt & his team are using their Nov 2^nd Extra Life game-a-thon to raise money for Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. While the yellow meeple may not be at this Extra Life game-a-thon , CHOP will always be near and dear to our hearts.

There will be Extra Life game-a-thons occurring all over the country this fall to raise money for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. You can donate to any participant from the top right corner of Extra Life’s web page.  Search for #ExtraLife in your Twitter feed and you will find several game players participating in various game-a-thons for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.  Please pick one to support.  Whether you can give $20, $5, or only $1, it will all go to a good cause, one that benefits real children in real families.  If you ever see me at an Unpub playtest event, I’m happy to share more about our very real story of what one Children’s Miracle Network Hospital did for our family.

Keys to a Good Family Board Game

Our goal at HoopCAT Games is to create fun family games – games that parents and children can enjoy together. So we have had to give some thought to what characteristics are important to a good family game.  There are lots of good games out there, yet only some of those good games work well with a family. So what qualifies a good game to also be a good family game?  Here is our list: Length, Complexity, and Balance.

Length –Family games must consider how much time the average family with children (and school, youth soccer, baseball, and who knows what else) has in their schedule for a family game.  Also, what is the attention span of that family’s children? There can be such a thing as too long. Children will most likely tire of a too-long game before the parents do.  While our HoopCAT family (2 sons, ages 11 & 15) can stick with an engaging game for as long as 90-120 minutes, our family schedule often doesn’t permit more than 60 minutes for a game.  When we design family games, we aim for 30-60 minutes to fit the busy family.

Complexity - As a teen, I loved Avalon Hill games, and would study the lengthy rule books even between games.  While a hardcore gamer may enjoy repeated readings of a 10 or 20 page rulebook, it is a bad idea for a family game.  For a family game, the rules must be easily grasped, even by a child. We believe that at least one player reading the rule book once before the first play should be mandatory for any new game. However, our rule of thumb for family games is that you should almost never need to refer back to the rule book after the 3^rd play.  If a family has to frequently keep going back to the rule book even after the first few plays, that game might not be a good family game.

The topic of math also needs mention under complexity. Light math has a place in family games. Games can be a great way for children to practice basic addition or even multiplication facts while having fun. However, we feel that calculator math has no place in a family game. I have played games where you had to add 32+40+12, divide the sum by 4, then four separate  further calculations to divide that quotient by 7, 12, 6,and 8, dropping the remainder and rounding down. Some can keep that straight in their head, others cannot.  And while hardcore gamers may enjoy that kind of math as part of their gaming experience,  excessively complex math calculations are not a good fit for a fun family game. 

Balance – For a family game, this can be one of the toughest design challenges.  When designing adult games, a designer can make some presumption of equal ability. That same presumption does not hold when designing a game that an 8 year old will play with a 13 year old.  A younger brother that has no hope of ever beating their older sister may quickly lose interest in that game.  The most common solution to artificially balance the differences in player skill is to add some element of randomness (often through either dice or cards).  This randomness will sometimes work to hinder a more-skilled player and help a less-skilled player. Yet, as designers, we still want the game to reward good player decisions and have consequences for bad player decisions.   So the family game has to strike the right balance in how much the random effects the gameplay - too little, and lesser-skilled players will feel it is impossible for them to win, but too much, and skilled players will feel they have been cheated.

A game must have the right length, complexity level, and balance to qualify as a good family game.

There is one more important element–fun.   But how to make a family game “fun”  is a much harder and far less tangible topic.

The HoopCAT family loves family game time! We continue to enjoy our own family games after many plays (Fill The Barn, AtataT, and some new prototype ideas we play test as a family to find the winners). Other family games that we find ourselves often playing as of late include Apples to Apples, Forbidden Island, Qwirkle, and Ticket to Ride.

HoopCAT Games Looks Back on 2012

It is 12/31, here are just some of our many thrills from the first year of our small family business.

The first game - We will always remember opening the package from Michigan with the very first Fill The Barn game to come from the factory.There was the thrill that we had pulled it off, as a husband and wife we had actually managed to publish our family's first board game.

The first store - For us this was a gift shop ten miles up the road called Brown's Orchards.  There is a certain feeling to walk in and see your family's game on the shelf.

Our first review - Sending your game off to a reviewer can be a bit scary.  You believe in your game, but what if the reviewer doesn't, and then they tell everyone they don't like it. Fortunately, Fill The Barn got a great first review, by one of the best family reviewers out there, none other than Father Geek!

Getting on the table - We have been fortunate to find game stores who not only put Fill The Barn on their shelf, they put Fill The Barn on the table to play with their customers. The first to do so was That Game Place outside Harrisburg, PA. A game does not come to life until somebody takes it out of its box. We are thankful for game store owners like Charlie & Jasmine who take games out of their boxes to play with thier customers.

Our first Unpub - To think that when 2012 started we had no idea the Unpub movement existed - what a find this group has been! Playtesters (who aren't family & friends) who want to try new games - that is every game designer's dream. Our second (unpublished) game AtataT made its debut at an Unpub Mini in May 2012 in Washington DC at Labyrinth Game Shop. And after the response, we knew that AtataT will have to be game #2 from HoopCAT Games.  A huge thank you to John Moller for providing this service.

Our first TV coverage - We were pleased that game store owners put Fill The Barn on their shelf and on their game tables. But Kathy Stroh of Our Game Table in Dover DE really surprised us when she took Fill The Barn with her to an interview for the Delmarva Life TV Show.

Sandy's Toy Shoppe - This was a very different memory from the others on the list.  Working a day in Sandy's Toy Shoppe was not about promoting our company or product.  Rather, it was a reminder that there is so much more to life than games. Christina will tell you that one of the nice things about having games in a warehouse is that it gives our family the freedom to give some away whenever we want to.

As a family, we have enjoyed our first year with a product to sell.  It has been our first chance to hear of other families who enjoy our game enough to play it again and again.   Being a game-making family, we sometimes can't tell whether it is work or play when we gather around the table to try a new rule variation or prototype.  I'm nowhere close to quitting my day job (the one that pays the mortgage, pays the bills, and puts food on the table).  Yet we are enjoying the ride of our little side venture that we call HoopCAT Games.

A Day at Sandy's Toy Shoppe

Weeks after Hurricane Sandy, electricity has been restored, gasoline available, and the television cameras gone. Yet there are countless families who remain displaced, whose new normal is no longer living in the house they used to call home.

Yesterday (Sat 12/15/12) I had the opportunity to go work a day in Sandy’s Toy Shoppe, helping to hand out new toys for  Christmas to New Jersey families whose homes were damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. During those 6 hours, I met some incredible families with some incredible stories. I wanted to write about yesterday while it is still fresh in my mind.

Several weeks earlier, we also had prepared for Hurricane Sandy in southern PA. We heeded the warnings of extended power outages, filled up the cars with gas, filled the water jugs, got the coolers, flashlights and supplies ready and anxiously waited. When we woke up the next morning, we turned on our lights, looked out the window, and asked “That’s it?” And then we turned on the TV news, and  over the next hours and then days, we learned  what had happened to those in NJ and NY who had received the full punch of the storm.

Our small involvement started when in the aftermath, a New Jersey toy store owner solicited an ASTRA bulletin board for vendors who would be willing to donate toys to storm relief.  This toy store owner had made the decision to focus her upcoming Christmas season not on her own store’s holiday sales, but instead on how she could brighten the Christmas of all the families in the area who had lost much of what they owned to the storm. 

Well how does anybody say no to that?  We didn’t think twice about shipping a carton of games for the effort. Yet it didn’t feel like enough, and we began to wonder if there was a way to do more.  We looked at the map and realized it wasn’t that far of a drive from our south central PA location to the Jersey shore.  Maybe they could use an extra pair of hands for a day to help out.

When we told our two sons of the plan, our younger son went up to his room, pulled out  $20 that he had been holding back for some undefined charitable cause, and  announced he wanted to contribute to Sandy’s Toy Shoppe.  The older son agreed to contribute some unused gift cards to the cause.  As we shared our proud moment with friends and family, they started adding funds to the donation. We again emailed the organizer – would they prefer the money, or that we use it to shop for toys to bring. She asked us to go shopping. Our younger son had the duty of picking out the Hot Wheels items, and he took it very seriously, making sure to avoid expansion items that required other sets.

And so yesterday (Sat 12/15), I woke up early to make the 3 hour drive to NJ. And I’ll never regret it. I met some incredible families with some incredible stories. Here were a few of the more memorable moments.

-          The family who had their basement flooded, went without electricity for 14 days, and sustained $25K of damage to their home.  Yet they described their circumstances as fortunate compared to other families.

-          The mother who was excited to find new wooden blocks for her 4 year old son. Building with blocks had been his favorite activity, but they got soaked in the flood and had to be thrown away.

-          The family whose home was damaged beyond repair and scheduled for demolition the day after Christmas.

-          The mother whose young children were asking what was happening as they watched their flood-damaged possession be loaded onto a truck for the dump. The mother had no idea how to explain, so she told them their toys were being taken to be cleaned. (It was so uplifting to see her walk out of Sandy’s Toy Shoppe with some new clean toys for her children.)

-          The mother who was delighted to find a hippity hop boy for her autistic son to replace the one that was lost.  (as a parent of two sons with Asperger’s, I could certainly empathize with how much harder the disruption in routine can be on such a child)

-          The family whose home is uninhabitable and will not be livable again for a year.

-          The families who chose their toys carefully, not wanting to add to the imposition to the family or friends who have taken them in until they can repair or replace their homes.

Needless to say, it was a day that I will never forget.

And if anyone reading this ever finds themself anywhere near Fair Haven NJ someday, there is a toy store there called Distinctive Toys.  Think about stopping in. The owner is named Margaret. While I’ve only met her once face-to-face, I will tell you that she is a very kind person. Any toy store owner willing to spend December weekends giving away toys instead of selling them is worth the time to pay a visit to.