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Friday 31 January 2014

Flippin' Fruit - A Kickstarter Project

So, a Kickstarter project has recently come to my attention, that looks like a perfect game for a family setting.

It's compact, easily transportable, and doesn't require much table space to play, as well as being easily playable by very young children. Interested? I thought you might be!

Welcome to Flippin' Fruit - the fruit rolling, card flipping dice game.
The contents
As you can see from the contents, this is a very bright and colourful game - but let's look how it plays.

The game contains 5 12 sided dice. Each dice contains a cartoon like picture of a different fruit - but watch out for Rotten Tom the Tomato!
The dice
Here you can see the dice - I love the look of these and again the simple, bold, colourful pictures should certainly appeal to children (and adults!)

As well as dice, the game also comes with three sets of cards - Fruit baskets, Fruit Smoothies and Fruit Salads, but more on these later. 

The tube container also acts as a method for rolling the dice. The game takes place over 8 rounds, and on an round each player will have one turn.

The Cards:

There are three types of cards in the game:

Fruit Smoothies
Smoothies are the Green coloured cards that you can see on the right of the picture. These provide 'pips' (or points) - in the example card shown, 2 points are available. Three of these cards are set out at the beginning of the game, and once claimed, the card is yours to keep.

Fruit Salads
Salads are the orange cards shown above - these cards form poker hands - for example, a pair, 3 of a kind, full house etc, and again provide 'pips' for their owner. Unlike the Smoothies, these can be 'stolen' from their owner at any point in the game.

Fruit Baskets
These are the purple cards shown at the bottom of the picture above. Instead of providing 'pips' these cards provide special abilities, and they are claimed in a different way to the other two cards shown.

Gameplay:

A player turn consists of three actions. These actions can be made up of:
- Rolling any fruit dice
- Rolling all Rotten Tomatoes dice
- Taking a Fruit Basket card

Once a player has used 3 actions, they can try to make a Smoothie or a Fruit Salad, by matching dice to the symbols on the cards. If you take a Smoothie card, replace the card with the one on top of the deck. Any dice that have been used, together with any Rotten Tomatoes get returned to the cup. Any dice that were not used, get passed to the next player, and the turn is over.

Rounds 3 and 6 are slightly different - in these two rounds Rotten Tomatoes act as wild cards.

Initial Impressions:


I haven't had a chance to play the physical game yet, however I have had a couple of plays on their Flash version, which seems a decent enough conversion despite not having all the features switched on. It's a simple enough game, that probably takes 10-20 minutes to play, perfect for children who might have shortish attention spans, or for a quick calm game before bed.
I could even see very young children playing this - maybe with a little help (and maybe without the Fruit Basket cards), as the colourful fruits are easy to match. Plus the price of £17 seems reasonable enough.

Status of the Campaign:

At the time of writing, there are 8 days to run on the campaign, and there is just under £200 needed to get this project to happen. There are some interesting looking stretch goals too, so head on over to Kickstarter and get backing!

Further Information:

For more information on the game, check out these following links:

Wednesday 8 January 2014

The Birthday Trail

For my son's 6th birthday, he has one main present - and rather than just give it to him, we decided to make a game out of it.

So I created a treasure hunt for him which I thought I'd share with you all. - If anyone else thinks this is a fun way of giving a gift, then it took me about an hour to come up with the clues.

Clue 1:


The first clue was handed to Benji in an envelope and began the treasure hunt.
It was an easy clue to start with, in fact none of the clues were that difficult. After all, we wanted to make sure he actually found his present!




















Clue 2:



Clue 2 makes references to the place having been searched before. This is the second treasure hunt I have created for Benji and this hiding place was also used in the first game.

Where would you look?


















Clue 3:



Again a nice easy clue which required some hard searching though!






















Clue 4:



Back inside and upstairs for this penultimate clue.
Getting close to the end now!





















Clue 5:



And so we get to the last clue.

Benji managed to get this one right, how about you? Any guesses where the present was hidden?



















The Result.

And so, after all that searching, maybe the present was an anti-climax. Maybe he wasn't really impressed and thought it wasn't worth the effort?

Then again...........judge for yourself :-)

(Excuse the mess in the house, it gets a little bit tidier once the kids have gone to bed.......)

Happy 6th birthday Benji :-)

Happy New Year

So long 2013, thanks for all the fish

Happy New Year all!

Well, it's been a bit quiet on the "Boardgame With Family" blog over the holiday period, so I thought a quick update is in order.

Firstly, it was my son's birthday just before xmas - I've done a separate post on his present opening which I hope some of you might find enjoyable and maybe beneficial. That post will hopefully be online a little later.

Onto 2014

This year is likely to be quite busy at work, but I'm hoping to still find time to push this blog forward - to that end I'm in the process of creating my own website so hopefully I'll be able to manage content and comments more easily. I'd love to get a little community going if possible, and I might also attempt some video content (so yes, you'll have the chance to see my ugly mug!) - maybe I'll even drag Benji on camera to talk about some games.

My gaming resolution for this year, inspired by Rodney Smith's Table Talk episode, is to log all my plays - hopefully I can then use this data to more accurately share with you our gaming journey.

Purchases for this year?

Although I doubt I'll get all of these, here's what's currently on my radar:

Marvel Legendary Expansions:
Well, I'd love to et my hands on the Marvel Legendary expansions - it's suddenly taken off in a big way in our house, we've had 6 plays of it this year already. My wife and I even sat down for a game after the kids had gone to bed!

Rampage
I really wish this game was cheaper, as I think it would be a hit in our house

Mage Wars
Sadly I doubt I'd ever get it to the table, so this is probably not going to happen, but if anyone has it and fancies a game......

Gravwell
Now this game is really intriguing, I love how it plays - depending on it's price when it makes it over here, this could be a purchase - I'm a sucker for card games!

Paperback
Slightly cheating with this one as I'm just waiting for it to arrive via Kickstarter. I have plans to use this as a way of improving my son's vocabulary and spelling, but it look's a fun game in it's own right.

Lords of War
Another Kickstarter purchase, this one should be great to play with Benji

Selling?

But before I can buy, I need to thin my collection out a little as I'm running out of space. So what's on the trade pile?

Mage Knight Board Game
I love this game, originally rated it a 10 on the geek, but have come to realise that I am NEVER going to get it to the table. I bought it as a solo game, but it just takes too long to play

Luna
I'm a big Stefan Feld fan, but I just cannot get into this game at all.

Legends of Drizzt
Ok, this one won't get sold as Benji won't let me get rid of it - maybe it'll get 'lost' somehow

So that's me - what does 2014 hold in store for all of you?