Favorite Games fall into three different categories: Puzzles, Serenity's Games, and Daddy's Games.
Daddy Games:
She discovered the rest of the game cabinets recently. Up until now, she’s just gotten into the one I designated as hers and filled with her books and games. It was on a different side than the rest, but now she knows them all and so Daddy’s Games know no peace. She has asked to play nearly every game in there, and as you know Eric has a lot of games! Here are some of the ones Serenity has the most fun with:
Set: This card game was the clear winner. She nearly plays it right =) The point is that there are cards with four variables, 3 different colors, shapes, patterns, and number of objects. You make sets with either the same attribute, or all different, like one of each color, but all with two solid diamonds. She loves to find sets! She’s always been big on matching colors, and she’s in heaven when she can dig through the cards to find matches. She even knows what she needs to look for, like if she has one green squiggle and the three green squiggle, she goes hunting for the two green squiggle. It’s great for color matching, shape matching, patterns, and so much more!
Dominoes: We have the colored set of dominoes, and the games we have come up with for this are hilarious. I tried to show her a basic Mexican Train, where you start with one domino and match the ends to make a long train. She loved that, and had me count how many tiles were in her train over and over. In Spanish, for some reason. Then she decided that “Catorce” (the fourteenth tile in her train, ironically the 10/3) was special. She pulled it out and said, “Oh no, my train is broken! It won’t go!” So we started doing a lot of role-playing with the dominoes, with Catorce as the star. We made bridges, rivers, paths, houses, and boats. And then she found the double seven, which we now call Pinky Pinky. She needed her diaper changed, and food. So much random, open-ended, creative playtime! It was great!
She loves all the card games we have, and even a regular deck of cards is great for matching. We also have chess, and Chinese checkers. Although I have to sit with her the whole time when she’s playing with the marbles, it’s great practice for hand-eye coordination, and she loves matching the colors to the diamonds. So far she hasn’t tried to eat them, but I am not about to leave her alone with them anytime soon.
She also likes the games with little figures, like our Star Wars game and X-Men. And all the things with tiny colorful wooden counters, like Steam.
The day she pulled Apples to Apples I figured that she would look at the cards for two minutes and move on. But no, she decided it was great fun to read the cards! She sounded out words like Wicked and guessed Octopus for Outrageous. So, Apples works as toddler flashcards as well.
I think I have the most fun when she pulls out the games with maps, like Ten Days in Asia or Pandemic. She really tries to read the names of the countries, and does a great job! And she likes matching the card to the country. So it’s great matching practice, a little reading and geography too! Plus it’s just fun to hear her say things like Kinshasa and Ho Chi Minh.
A later game discovery was Settlers of Catan. She started playing this online with John! He’d make a pattern with the board pieces and she’d match it! So much fun!
Hi-Ho Cherry-o: We actually started playing games with RULES! Eric and I are so excited =) The first one we tried this with was Hi-Ho Cherry-O. Serenity was willing, although when the buckets spilled she cried… and it wasn’t even her bucket that spilled! After a while she’d lose interest in following the rules, and we told her it was fine for her to be done playing, but that we just wanted to play with the rules. So if she wanted us to play, she had to follow the rules, and that worked for her. She is on a roll by the way, I think she’s won every game since we started following the rules. She does insist that Eric and I keep playing until everyone has filled their bucket.
Zimbos: This is a stacking game with cute wooden elephants. Serenity has pretty specific rules about which colors can go together. Sometimes we just play pretend with the pieces, and sometimes we actually stack them!
Uno Moo: Uno, except with a barn and cute animal pieces! We love this game, sometimes just to collect and sort the colors, but a few times with the actual rules. Once, we were missing a few critters, and I made it my mission to find them all as I’d kept them together for nearly a year, and we just don’t lose game pieces in the Wainright house. I eventually found them all, but Serenity certainly found some cunning hiding places. One was under the liner of her toybox!
Zingo: Veronica gave us this game, it’s Bingo with pictures, and it’s a blast!
Shape Shuffle: We got Serenity this for Christmas. Basically it’s tangrams, fitting the shapes into a puzzle. We usually do this together.
Puzzles: Puzzles are still a huge hit. She can do up to a 60 piece puzzle, although I usually help with those but putting together smaller groups of say 15 to 20 pieces that fit together. Her favorites are her Super Why puzzles, which came with a special magnifying glass to find hidden words, and her dancing floor puzzle. We get 25 piece puzzles from the dollar store on occasion.
