Okay, okay, a card game based on a line of nobles waiting to be executed by guillotine during the French Revolution may not be everyone’s idea of an appropriate game for a 5 year old. But yesterday during BabyGirl’s nap, JediBoy asked me to play “one of your games,” meaning something intended for adults rather than kids. (He actually asked to play Settlers, but wanted the full version and not the card game, and you can’t play the full version with just two people.)
I pulled out Guillotine because it is fairly quick and easy and works just fine with two players.
Before we started, though, we had to have a long discussion about what a guillotine was, and who used it, and why! But once we’d talked about all that, he was ready to play. I was glad he’d insisted on one of my games, because it hadn’t really occurred to me that one of the benefits of my 5 year old knowing how to read is that he can now play games where the cards have instructional text on them.
In Guillotine, you set up a line of 12 Noble cards who are waiting to be executed. You play the role of rival executioner, and on each turn you can play an action card from your hand, and then you take the first Noble in line and place it in front of you, earning points. Each Noble is clearly marked with a certain number of points from -3 to 5. Some, the Palace Guards, are each worth a number of points equal to the number of Palace Guards you have, and I was impressed at how easily JediBoy understood that and continued to correctly calculate the value of his pile of Nobles. (Aha! It’s educational! He’s adding positive and negative numbers and computing simple functions.)
The action cards contain text (which he could read easily enough, and he is reading at about a 2nd/3rd grade level these days) that tell you to move Nobles up and back in line, so you can reach the higher valued Nobles for yourself, or that take cards away from opponents or give extra cards to you. He followed the whole play of the game very smoothly from the beginning, and laughed with glee any time he drew an action card that was particularly nasty.
JediBoy played again at bedtime with PisecoDad, and loved it just as much then. Guillotine has been one of our friends’ favorite light card games for years, not only because the pictures and titles are amusing, but because the game plays very smoothly and there’s just enough strategy to be involving, without being so much strategy that you can’t be distracted.
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