Mind Games

I’m taking a short break in our posts from our NYC trip to talk games for a moment.

First, I wasn’t able to spend any time last week spreading the word about the giveaway from Looney Labs, which is lucky for the 8 of you who entered!  According to Random.org, the winners this week are #1 and #6, so based on your comments, Meg, you’ve just won Martian Fluxx, and Michelle has won Aquarius!  Congratulations!  Please get in touch with me and I’ll get those out to you as soon as I can.

Today I get to review two more great games, this time from Out of the Box Publishing, and I get to give away a copy of one of them!

Over at The Homeschool Classroom, I just talked about some great games for working on visual spatial skills, including Pictionary, Claymania, Squint, Listen Up!, and Backseat Drawing.  If you’re interested in reading more about those games and the skills they use, stop over to The Homeschool Classroom and check them out!

Out of the Box sent us copies of Squint Junior and Backseat Drawing Junior to try out, and opening that box was like Christmas!  JediBoy, at 7, is sometimes frustrated by grown-up drawing games, and he was thrilled to get two that were at a perfect level for him.  We had to open them and play right away, just the two of us.

In Squint Junior, as in the regular version of Squint, players are trying to use cards with various kinds of lines on them to build a picture.  The junior version gives a suggested build of each picture on the clue card, so that kids don’t have to think forever trying to figure out a way to build the object, and the building cards are printed on clear plastic, so they can be set on top of each other to create a continuous picture.  That’s a huge help because it lets the kids show clearly if two lines are connected or not – in the regular version of the game, the lines are printed on white cards and so there is some ambiguity when two cards are placed together.

JediBoy adores this game, and in the back of my head I’m delighted to keep track of the skills he picks up by playing it.  Looking at the picture and breaking it down into the composite pieces he’ll need, sifting through the pile of line cards to find those pieces, fine motor control as he lines the pieces up just so.  And when he’s on the guessing side, he has to learn to pull back and look at the big picture – sometimes even literally squinting, to see what is being built, as well as learning to make good guesses based on an incomplete picture.

Backseat Drawing Junior is just as much fun.  In this game, one player instructs the other player on exactly how to draw a picture – using technical, precise and objective terms, such as ellipse instead of egg or two perpendicular diagonal lines that cross at their centers instead of the letter X.  The junior version includes a card deck much like Squint Junior – with pictures of the objects so that the kids can work to describe what they see – though JediBoy often doesn’t like the picture on the card and describes the clue in a completely different way, which is great too!  When the time is up, the drawing player has to guess what it is that she has drawn.

Our only complaint with this game is that the dry erase markers that came with the set don’t seem to work very well – but it’s very possible that we got a bad batch, and it’s easy enough – especially in a homeschooling household! – to replace them with regular dry erase markers from the white board.  Once we made that switch, this game has also been one of JediBoy’s favorites.  Sometimes he’s on a roll with describing and wants to instruct me for a dozen cards in a row.  Other times he wants me to give him the instructions so he can draw and make guesses along the way.  It’s a fantastic game for language skills – learning how to be precise with language – as well as the fine motor skills of making the drawings and the artistic skills of breaking down a picture into its composite lines and shapes.

To find out more about both of these games, click over to Out of the Box Publishing.  Does Backseat Drawing Junior sound like something your family would enjoy?  Just leave me a comment telling me about a game your family already loves.  Next week, one of you will win your own copy of this great game, courtesy of Out-of-the-Box!

October 7: This contest is now closed!  Congratulations to Brandee, who likes to make a game out of listing things in alphabetical order with her kids: “A is for alligator.  A is for alligator, and B is for balloon.  A is for alligator, B is for balloon, and C is for computer.” Sounds like fun, Brandee!  I hope you and your family enjoy Backseat Drawing Junior!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 7:59 am and is filed under board games, giveaways, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.