104 games or 51?

We went to a store called Five Below today and it turned out they had a really good selection of basic games; mostly smaller editions all priced at $5 apiece. Let's see ... we got Uno Minecraft edition, Sushi Go, a small box version of Jumanji, a box of 100 games in one, and a cheap edition of Candyland. That was a pretty good haul.

Candyland is a kid's game without any of the normal appeal of a kid's game.  It's so simple it's hardly even a thing. You just draw a cards -- the cards have a color or two colors or a piece of candy on it -- the color cards you move either the one or the two spaces of that color forward, or if you get a cake or candy card then you have to move to that spot whether it's before or behind you. That's pretty much the whole game ...  just race to the end. There are a few shortcut spaces but that is literally all there is in that particular game.

We tried to make it a bit more fun by dealing out three cards and then instead of moving ourselves forward we handed the other player their move. So essentially we tried to prevent the other player from getting there first.  Either way there's not much of a game, just candy and colors and the first player to get to the end wins.

 

Next we looked at the box of 100 different games. I'm always curious how they come up with 100 different games in these packages. Sometimes it's like 20 different types of checkers and backgammon.  This box four big thick mat boards which were actually pretty good quality with one game on the front, another board on the back.  The rest of the games were about 25 dice games (including Yacht, of course) followed by about 50 match puzzles (just moving matches around, totally not games).  That was a lame selection, almost cheating on their part.  We did not get 100 games.  If you end where the matchstick puzzles begin, it only lists 47.  The ones that were there were pretty good. But heck, getting 47 games for five bucks is a deal.

One of the board games in the pack was the classic Game of the Goose which I will cover in an upcoming post.

 

There was a board for crokinole, which was played by flicking the checkers toward the center of the board.  It didn't seem like that was a good choice at first, but the friction between the discs and the playing mat was just right.  Trouble was,  half the rules seemed to be missing. The rules just said if your first shot makes it in the middle, you score 25 points. Otherwise, the next player has to knock your disc away from the center.  it didn't say whether to score that second shot or whether to remove both discs or how the shots were scored overall.

So what we ended up doing was just simply shooting towards the center.  If your disc crossed the yellow circle  then you put it in a scoring pile, if it went outside the outer circle you put it back in your shoot pile, and as soon as somebody is out of shooting discs the game's over.  just count the disks in your score pile.  much simpler that way, but it's still strange it half the rules are missing. 

I will try to revisit this pack and check out some of the dice games they talk about.