The Family Gamers Podcast

We’ve brought Andy back on the show to talk about two new games he has coming out now from FunWiz (a division of FoxMind), Brew Dice and Sports Dice: Baseball. Andy’s first game was Maze Racers (we interviewed him about it back in 2015), but he didn’t want to stop there. He’s been continuing to design new games! Despite the theme, Brew Dice is a family-friendly game. It started as a rainforest-themed speed-rolling game, but once he came up with the craft brewing theme, he decided to run with that instead. Roll your 3 dice to be the first to match the shapes (coaster, snack type, beer container) on the current card. Snatch the card before someone else can match it, too! It’s fast and fun. Sports Dice: Baseball was a big hit at GenCon. Two players take the roles of a pitcher and a batter, simultaneously rolling 6 dice to score hits or get outs. There is a tie-breaker chip available (Andrew calls it the “power chip”) to resolve ties; the chip can be used strategically to give an advantage to the player holding it. Andrew waxes eloquently about different ways to use the chip to give leverage over your opponent. What’s next? Sports Dice: Football is in the works, as well as a possible soccer dice game. Andy says he would rather spend time developing new games rather than trying to self-publish. Find more information about Andy’s games at BrewDice.com and CerealBoxMaze.com. The Brew Dice website includes an option for custom cards – if you are a craft brewer or hobby brewer, you can easily order a version of the game with your beer(s) on it! Andy is giving us one copy of each game to give away to our listeners! If these dice games sound good to you, enter the giveaway on our website. Lastly, we announce the winners of the Card Caddy giveaway. Did you win? Listen to find out! Don’t forget to review us on iTunes and until next week, play games with your kids!

We are all about teaching our kids (and others) to play games. But how do you teach skills that are integral to good game-playing: concepts like logical deduction, planning ahead, and making strategic choices? With games, of course! We highlight our top 5 games to teach game-playing skills. Games we’ve been playing: Purrrlock Holmes: Furriarty’s Trail Kingdomino (update: Kingdomino did win Spiel des Jahres this year!) Macroscope Sushi Go Party! Bärenpark Catan Junior Mall Madness Littlest Pet Shop Edition (ugh) Cube Quest Rummikub Rack-O More from the Klutz book – 3D tic-tac-toe, Mancala, an asymmetric game called Dalmatian Pirates and the Volga Bulgars (variation on the ancient Fox and Geese) Lots of Dance Central 3 – we’ve created a dancing monster! Gangam Style, in particular, has been played so many times, we feel like we’ve gone back in time to 2012. Andrew bought the DLC for Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Awesome: Hero’s Path Mode (highlights the map for where you’ve played) Less awesome: Trial of the Sword. 45 levels, with only your wits and whatever equipment you can find within the trial. So hard! We introduce a new segment: Backtalk. We don’t want backtalk from our kids, but we do want it from you! Don’t forget you can contact us on Twitter, Facebook, or on our website. Don’t forget to enter our giveaway! We are giving away the original Card Caddy to SIX lucky winners. Games To Teach Game Skills Common elements in our favorite teaching games: Hidden information or poorly-hidden information. Little math. Simple strategy. * Purrrlock Holmes Furriarty’s Trail: Semi-cooperative; give clues to each other’s secret information. Use this to teach logical/deductive reasoning. * Castle Panic: Cooperative gameplay to defeat the monsters. Use this to model how to plan ahead. * Battle Sheep: competitive, but with no hidden information. Can still talk through how to plan ahead. * Press Here, The Game: semi-competitive pattern game. Teach pattern-recognition as well as planning ahead. A small element of strategy since there are usually several “good” spots to place your colored dot. * Bärenpark (or Patchwork): competitive, but no direct interaction between players, and no hidden information. Teach planning ahead, both to fit pieces and to possibly block out other player(s) from resources.   Do you have a game that you prefer for teaching game skills? Tell us in the comments! Don’t forget to rate and review us on iTunes or your podcast app of choice.

It’s an odd-numbered show, so that means we have a guest! This week, it is Chris Nichols, inventor of The Card Caddy. The Card Caddy was born of necessity; when Chris’s son was younger, he wanted to play Uno everywhere. The cards were always getting mangled by rubber bands, or slipping out of the crummy paperboard box to scatter everywhere. We discuss the features of the Card Caddy. It is a hard plastic case that protects your deck of cards, but once opened, it converts to a discard tray. There is a hole in the center, with a bevel that will hold a poker chip. You can keep a first-player token there, and also use the hole to see which game you are keeping in the case. The goal of the Card Caddy is to make it easier to play cards anywhere you want. Andrew and Anitra relate the struggle of playing a card game (Anomia) while waiting in the airport. At the beginning of 2017, Chris ran a Kickstarter campaign to begin producing a double-capacity Card Caddy, as well as accessories: * A storage box to store dice or tokens with your cards * The connector / scorepad – keep two Card Caddys together in your bag. Open it up and use the Cribbage-style pegboard to keep score. * Dice tower (still in design) * Card shoe (still in design) The Card Caddy is designed to be very sturdy and heavy-duty. Chris dragged one behind a golf cart to help demonstrate the kind of abuse that it can take! Find The Card Caddy single-decker for sale on Amazon, or on their website. Double-deckers and accessories will be available soon! The Card Caddy is also on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. If The Card Caddy sounds interesting to you, we are partnering with Chris to give six away! Check out the giveaway on our website.

On this episode, we discuss what makes a board game good for playing outside, like at a picnic! Notable games from the last two weeks: Bärenpark Problem Picnic Sports Dice: Baseball (in stores late summer)   Good games to bring to a picnic Requirements: * quick to play or easy to drop in * heavy duty pieces (no cards, not much cardboard). Little to blow away or get jostled. * light difficulty. Something most ages can play, won’t be so heavy you can’t talk to each other. Ideas: Scattergories Digit’y Do (previously reviewed) Celebrity (see episode 35) Trivia games that don’t require a board, like Parent Quiz or Box of Rocks light games with heavy-duty pieces: Can’t Stop, Battle Sheep, Chinese checkers What about Hanabi Deluxe? One of our favorite mind-bending card games, now with heavy domino-style tiles instead of cards. Downside: the tiles get scratched easily, not good in a game where you shouldn’t be able to tell what you’re “holding” by looking at the back of the tile. Dice games, as long as you have a flat surface to roll on: Tenzi, Batman Dice, Zombie Dice, Go Nuts, Qwixx More tactile games, like: Maze Racers, Cube Quest, Dr. Eureka Kingdomino, possibly. “Think outside the box” – really! What does your favorite game look like while it’s being played? That will help you determine if it is a good outdoor, “picnic” game.   Any of your favorites we missed? Let us know in the comment section, or on Facebook.

We interview Marc Specter, the man behind Grand Gamers Guild, and their games Pocket Ops, Unreal Estate, and Stroop. Their game Pocket Ops is finishing a Kickstarter today! Pocket Ops is a strategic deduction game based on tic-tac-toe. It is very simple to learn, with two extra layers that make it much more interesting to play. The main mechanic is predicting where your opponent will place their tiles – if you guess correctly, they may not place. The secondary mechanic involves special units, each of which has a special power. We learn about Marc’s 50% funded philosophy for Kickstarter games. Marc mentions games that are in the pipeline: “Colonies of Venus”, a dice-placement game; and “Endangered”, a co-operative game where players work together to save an endangered species. Published games Unreal Estate is a card game in which players compete to build the best fantasy town by drafting and collecting sets of cards. Currently shipping out to its backers, Unreal Estate will be available for sale soon. Stroop is a empty-your-hand card game based on the stroop effect – your brain has to work harder against interference; eg. if the word “red” is printed in blue ink, which color does it represent? In the first round, the word on the table describes what you can play; in the second round, you describe the word on the table. Convention Unpub (a free convention to bring game designers, publishers, and play testers together) is coming to Michigan! The first Unpub Midwest is coming November 3-5.   If you liked this interview, don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes and leave us a review!

Summer is on its way; some of the larger board game and video game events are happening this time of year. We talk about the news that interested us from Origins Game Fair and the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). School is out, summer vacation has begun. So many games are being played! Anitra shares how she is using a list of other activities like this that children must do before having screen time. We tried the gourmet s’more combination described on a previous podcast: Ritz-like crackers, peanut butter cup, and marshmallow. Yum! Games the kids have been playing: Hisss – a simple domino-like game where players match colors to build snakes. Simple enough for our oldest to play with the toddler! Ticket to Ride Bonbons (a variation on the typical Memory game. It’s out of print.) Dragonwood Castellan Tournament of Towers (which we reviewed last week) – we needed to return the prototype that we had for review purposes, and our kids were very sad to see it go. Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small (temporarily out of print) Machi Koro Potion Explosion The Mysterious Forest – a contender for the Kinderspiel des Jahres (Children’s Game of the Year), and we can see why. Andrew talks about how the game is played. Dance Central 3 Claire is trying Forza Horizon, and more Rocket League Captain Toad Treasure Tracker – puzzle game with just the right difficulty for young kids. The adults also played: Tournament of Towers Kingdomino – a contender for Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year). Combines terrain-building with a domino-matching mechanic. Easy to learn but hard to master. Andrew also loves that the space inside the game box is used well. Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst. A sequel to the popular Mirror’s Edge, it’s basically parkour + violence. (Rated T for Teen. We’d agree that it’s not good for kids.) Type: Rider – more interesting to play than to watch. lots of Jaipur on iOS – fun, but the interface is overly fiddly and annoying. Spy Chameleon: RGB Agent ($5 on most platforms – PS4, PS Vita, XboxONE, WiiU, Steam, we got it for free with PS Plus) Thanks again to our sponsor, Date Night in a Box. A self-contained date night at home, cheaper than a babysitter,

Donovan Eberling and Jeff James are the founders of Iron Hippo Games and co-creators (or maybe “architects”) of Tournament of Towers, a dexterity game now on Kickstarter. Iron Hippo Games has its seed in the “bro-cathalon” that Jeff ran for Donovan’s bachelor weekend. They’ve been working on other games, but Tournament of Towers is the first one to come to Kickstarter. Tournament of Towers was inspired by a German dexterity/auction game called Bausack, in which players build towers but try to force the other players to take the hardest pieces. Donovan realized that he wanted to flip the game on its head: instead of trying to avoid the interesting pieces to win, why not make a game that rewards making something beautiful? We discuss the base rules for Tournament of Towers but also a few of the many variations that are possible. It’s more of a system and a basic idea of what to do. We want to inspire people to create with this. We don’t want to tell people there’s only one way to play this game. Andrew and Anitra both mention that we hated this game the first time we played, in part because we did not expect a simple-looking dexterity game to be so hard. But that’s part of the point; it’s a hard game but so rewarding! And not too hard for a three year old to play, as Donovan’s son shows us. We discuss the two philosophies that tend to show up: “Queen Structura” players that just want a sturdy stable tower, and “King Curvanimus” players that want all the gold. “They flame out like Icarus,” says Donovan. First time players tend to fail (tower falls down) about 50% of the time. But failing should be encouraged, because it’s the best way to learn how to be better! As we often do on the podcast, we explore rule-shifting; ways to keep the game fair among players of differing abilities. Find Tournament of Towers on Kickstarter. Read our review of Tournament of Towers. If you liked the show, (or even if you didn’t), don’t forget to leave us a review on iTunes!

Welcome to episode 50! We’ve been doing The Family Gamers Podcast for quite a while, and thought we would take an opportunity to look back, especially at a few of our early episodes. What we’ve been playing Silly Street (we put pictures of the silliness on Instagram) Barnyard Roundup (see our review) Extraordinaires Design Studio at the kids’ school (we mentioned this in our interview with Rory O’Connor last week) Legendary: A Marvel Deck-Building Game Zeus on the Loose Dimension Mmm! (Still the best game with the worst name in the history of boardgaming.) Tesla vs. Edison with the Powering Up! expansion The Klutz Book of Classic Board Games – so many people had this as kids. It’s a great overview of historical two-player games. (find it on eBay for $10-12) Epic Card Game Pocket Ops – coming soon to Kickstarter. Troke (also found on eBay)   Sponsor Thanks again to our sponsor for this episode, Date Night In. Go to thefamilygamers.com/datenight for more information.   Giveaway We are giving away a set of original Story Cubes! Enter the giveaway on our website. New feature upcoming Our daughter Claire is starting a video series. “What’s in the Desk?” What game(s) would you like to see her review? Reflecting on the past Episode 2 – We’re still trying to find the right balance between too much video games and none at all. The weather is not cooperating. Back then, we complained about “the toddler” grabbing controllers and making people die… now he grabs his own controller and pauses the game… or makes people die. :P Episodes 3 & 4 on screen time – Anitra has heard good things about Circle (Google “Circle with Disney”) for basic filtering and time monitoring. Andrew suggests setting up a second wireless network specifically for the kids’ devices; that way you can turn off access without affecting other devices in the house. Episode 8 – Andrew still loves his Broken Token organizer for Lords of Waterdeep. We quit Marvel Puzzle Quest and didn’t go back. We tried Greek Gyro potato chips FOR SCIENCE. Let’s do more food taste-tests FOR SCIENCE! Episode 12 – We still like Kiwi Crates, but we’ve had a few (minor) issues. Their customer service was great about replacing missing parts. Claire has migrated to Tinker Crate, but it is difficult and doesn’t mesh well with her interests.

We are so excited to interview Rory O’Connor, of Rory’s Story Cubes fame! We start by discussing his company The Creativity Hub. They have just launched a Kickstarter for a new game, Untold: Adventures Await. We love their design toy/tool The Extraordinaires Design Studio. The purpose of The Extraordinaires is to get in a designer’s mindset – being curious and empathetic about what is actually needed in the world. It works equally well as a child’s toy or as a way for a professional designer to “play” and stretch their creativity. Rory says: “A good designer should always be really curious and challenge their assumptions, so the questions we included in The Extraordinaires are ones a designer would use, but we hoped that by playing the game, children would internalize that thought process and bring it out into the world.” Story Cubes was launched on similar principles – getting people to tell stories in a free-form way. The nine dice provide just enough structure to guide the storytelling; Rory tells us that “every time we tried to add rules … it always detracted from the heart of the experience, which is just telling these totally random stories.” Rory discusses his big news: Story Cubes is being sold to Asmodee. This allows Rory, Anita, and the rest of The Creativity Hub to concentrate on being creative and come up with new designs, rather than continue to manage the Story Cubes brand. Back to Untold! It’s on Kickstarter right now and uses the Story Cubes as a tool to facilitate role-playing without needing a large manual or a lot of set up. It’s styled like a madcap adventure TV show; combine it with a licensed set (Batman, Dr. Who, Scooby Doo, Looney Tunes) and create your own new “episodes” of your favorite show.   Stay tuned for a Story Cubes giveaway, starting next week!

Waiting around at a restaurant is so boring. What do you do to pass the time with your hungry children? Well, if you are The Family Gamers, you play games, of course! What is your favorite game to play in a restaurant? First, we announce a new winner of the BattleGoats giveaway, since Spencer Williams (marriedwithbg.com) gracefully declined. The new winner is Harley Winfrey. Congratulations, Harley! What we’ve been playing: Pirate Ships Mmm! Tumble Tree Parent Quiz more Box of Rocks Rare Replay – R.C. Pro-Am, Snake Rattle & Roll, and Conker’s Bad Fur Day (Note: Conker is DEFINITELY NOT for children. College-level humor.) Overcooked Special mention this week for our toddler’s current favorites: an interactive storybook for “Green Eggs & Ham”, and iWriteWords ($3) – if it sounds interesting, try iWriteWords Lite for free. Sponsor Our sponsor for this episode is: Date Night In Go to thefamilygamers.com/datenight for more information.   What Makes a Good Restaurant Game? It should be small and easily portable. You can use the tabletop, so it doesn’t have to be handheld like a car game. You want it to be something that won’t delay your meal once it arrives, so the best choices either have short rounds or an undefined endpoint. If you want to play a game that is slightly more involved, it should be very easy to quickly pack up in a “saved” state and re-open to finish later. Our Top Ten (ish) Games to Play in a Restaurant Story Cubes (this is, without question, our #1 choice) Zombie Dice and/or Batman the Animated Series Dice Knot Dice (with a few caveats; these games are quick but most play best with only 2 players, as stated in our recent review, but the puzzles are good for co-operating) Pass the Pigs The Parent Quiz, Box of Rocks (in a noisy restaurant), or a similar lightweight trivia game Zitternix – not as small as the other games, but still small enough to fit in a pencil case or quart sized zip-top bag Scattergories – easy to stop the round when food arrives. Digit’y Do would work well, as long as you bring an extra bag as a way to “save state” if the game gets interrupted. If you didn’t come prepared with a game in your pocket, but you have access to a pencil and some paper, you can play Dots, also known as Dots and Boxes (Wikipedia has instructions) If you do want to play a card game, the Card Caddy could help with transportation and saving state.

On this super-short episode, we talk Mother’s Day and reveal the winner of our BattleGoats giveaway. What did you do with your Mom (or mother-figure) on Sunday? We played Castle Panic with our kids (and called/visited our moms, of course). We found out what happens when we pick a giveaway winner “live” instead of doing it before the show… Spencer from Married with Board Games, you are the winner! Have you check out our Facebook community page? How about leaving us a review on iTunes? We’ll be back next week with a full-length podcast episode, in which we will also read feedback from you, our listeners!

MMO and RTS and FPS, oh my! What is a platformer? Should my toddler play a sandbox game? We define a few common video game terms and abbreviations. What we’ve been playing T.I.M.E. Stories – We enjoyed this RPG, although we haven’t beaten the base game yet. We can understand why it tends to be a love-it-or-hate it game. There are currently 4 other stories available: The Marcy Case, A Prophecy of Dragons, Expedition: Endurance, and Under the Mask. Anitra played as many games using Knot Dice as possible, in order to write this week’s review. There are co-operative and competitive puzzle games, pathfinding games, racing games, an abstract storytelling game, and even a semi-cooperative building game. Box of Rocks – a silly and fun trivia game. The group competes against the box of rocks! It would make a great icebreaker. Andrew beat Zelda: Breath of the Wild, to no one’s surprise. Overcooked, the co-operative cooking game. Fun, high-adrenaline. You have to communicate with your co-players in order to complete orders through the challenging layouts, which makes it an excellent couch co-op. Type: Rider, a beautiful and compelling platformer based on typography and fonts. We got it as one of the “free” PS Plus games for May, but it is available for under $5 on just about everything: Steam, iOS, Android, and PlayStation. Our kids are still playing the ever-present Disney Infinity, and are branching out from the sandbox (“toy box”) mode to a few of the themed adventure options. Video Game Terms FPS (first person shooter): first person perspective, your only indication of the player is a gun or hands. Can lead to motion-sickness. Examples: Goldeneye, Wolfenstein 3D, Marathon. TPS (third person shooter): third person perspective, showing the body (or at least the head) of the player character. Platformer: basically Mario. Jump around, get to the end of the level. A recent example of 2D platformer: Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze, or Type:Rider as previously mentioned. Puzzle Platformer: Navigate in the same platforming way, but with puzzles you have to figure out to get through the level. There is a special sub-genre called “Metroidvania” (after the first 2 of this type, Metroid and Castlevania), where you re-tread the same ground several times, discovering new things as you gain power or weaponry. Shmup (Shoot-em-up): a scrolling battlefield with limited movement; kill waves of enemies and receive power-ups to kill more enemies. Examples: Gradius, Ikaruga, Sine Mora, maybe Geometry Wars? 2D and 3D are self-explanatory, but there’s also 2.5D. This is a game that is primarily two-dimensional but still have a depth component. Turn-based game: I take a turn, then you take a turn. Action pauses in some way between turns. Synchronous gameplay: everyone playing at the same time. No pausing. Asynchronous gameplay: players do not have to be online at the same time to play the game together. Turn-based games lend themselves to asynchronous play. AAA game: the big name, big budget games, the ones that are heavily marketed and available in Target. Gears of War, Halo,

On this short podcast, Andrew talks to Tucker Smedes at CardLords, the creator of the game BattleGoats and their new game, Take the Gold. We have previously reviewed BattleGoats – it’s a combination of War and Memory. Interestingly, BattleGoats was originally conceived as a computer game. Take the Gold is designed to be even more accessible and casual than BattleGoats. Most games play in 3-5 minutes, and can be played with up to 10 players. Steal gold from other players while protecting your own. The first player to 4 gold, wins! The artwork is very cute, with corgis and cats. You can back it on Kickstarter for about $12. Don’t forget about our BattleGoats giveaway! Enter to win a copy of the Kickstarter version of BattleGoats, sponsored by CardLords.

What do you do if you have been trying to get a group together to play boardgames, and suddenly you have more players than one game can fit? Host a game night, of course! Video games we’ve been playing: Zelda, Zelda, Zelda… also Disney Infinity and Pokemon. We are excited to start playing some more couch co-op soon: Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime (free for PS+ members in April!) and Overcooked. Check out the Ubongo puzzle challenge app – free on iTunes Store and Google Play but only Friday 4/28 – Sunday 4/30! Board games we’ve been playing: Gruff: here’s the full version (recommended), and here’s the “starter pack” called Clash of the Battle Goats. Fight for Olympus Dr. Eureka Battle Sheep Clear for Takeoff Barnyard Roundup Kingdomino And we revisited an old favorite, Quarriors See our Facebook page for the story about Lanterns. Playing games isn’t always about winning. It can just be about a beautiful experience, or watching a game come together in a satisfying way. Tips for hosting a game night If your group is not made up of “gamers”, explain that this is to have fun and socialize – a dinner party where the entertainment is games. Pick games that are short (under 1 hr) and easy to teach. Encourage your friends to bring games! Examples: Battle Sheep, Monopoly Deal, cooperative games like Forbidden Island, Castle Panic; party games like Duple or Apples to Apples; or lighter Euro-style games that are easy to teach like Ticket to Ride and Catan. Have a person prepared to teach each game (G2S handled this with developer alley and “Teacher wanted” signs). If you are doing this with children, be prepared to put on a bit of show and get them into the theme of the game. We digress briefly: Gamewright Game Nights are an awesome way to fundraise for your school. Run a game night, sell the games, keep half the profit! Everyone wins. How to handle the problem of game-has-ended-but-no-new-games-to-join? Depends on the size of the group. Our recommendation is to keep everyone in the same room as much as possible in a home-based party, or for larger groups, have a continuously running party game that encourages drop-in, drop-out gameplay.   And that’s the show! Don’t forget to rate and review us on iTunes, and until next week… play games with your kids!

Jeff Johnston designs games as a hobby. He is the mind behind Pair of Jacks Games, and Anitra sat down with him at Granite Game Summit 2017 to talk about 3 of his published games: MoonQuake Escape , Flashlights & Fireflies, and Toasted or Roasted.   MoonQuake Escape is published by Breaking Games. Plot your escape from an alien prison. Bluff your fellow players and use special powers to uncover their character card, but beware! If your character card is uncovered, you’ll be stuck back with the rest of the prisoners, too! Flashlights & Fireflies, published by Gamewright, has a similar bluffing mechanic, in a much simpler game for children. You and your fellow players are playing flashlight freeze-tag and racing to get to home base first. Toasted or Roasted is published by Education Outdoors. Toast your marshmallows and get your fellow players to “roast” (burn) theirs.