Children's Game

Tales & Games: The Three Little Pigs

As a little pig, your dearest wish is to build a strong and beautiful house in which you can spend your long winter evenings. But you won’t need trowels nor scaffoldings, as only dice will allow you to construct your dream home. Beware the wolf prowling around, whose only thought is to literally blow down your comfy house!

The Three Little Pigs is an easy and fun dice game for the whole family. On your turn, roll the special pink dice up to three times and try to generate symbols to trade for doors, windows, and roofs made of straw, wood, and brick. The more beautiful and voluminous your house is, the more points you will earn at the end of the game. If you generate two wolf symbols, take a huff and puff and blow someone's house down!

This original game comes in a box decorated to look like a storybook and includes an illustrated version of the famous tale of the Three Little Pigs.

Labyrinth (formerly The aMAZEing Labyrinth)

The aMAZEing Labyrinth has spawned a whole line of Labyrinth games. The game board has a set of tiles fixed solidly onto it; the remaining tiles that make up the labyrinth slide in and out of the rows created by the tiles that are locked in place. One tile always remains outside the labyrinth, and players take turns taking this extra tile and sliding it into a row of the labyrinth, moving all those tiles and pushing one out the other side of the board; this newly removed tile becomes the piece for the next player to add to the maze.

Players move around the shifting paths of the labyrinth in a race to collect various treasures. Whoever collects all of his treasures first and returns to his home space wins!

The aMAZEing Labyrinth is simple at first glance and an excellent puzzle-solving game for children; it can also be played by adults using more strategy and more of a cutthroat approach.

Game of Life

This game attempts to mirror life events many people go through from going to college, raising a family, buying a home, working and retiring.

The intent of the game is to have the most assets at the end of the game, assets are earned primarily by working and earning tokens with dollars amount on them. Additionally the first person to complete the course gets additional money tokens.

There is a very linear board that you move along by spinning a wheel or landing on spaces that tell you to move to a specific space or forward or back. There are a handful of intersections where you can choose to go one direction or another but they ultimately have similar spaces and meet back up quickly. There are a handful of choices regarding insurance and investments but for the most part it is a game of luck.

Sorry!

Slide Pursuit Game

Race your four game pieces from Start around the board to your Home in this Pachisi type game. By turning over a card from the draw deck and following its instructions, players move their pieces around the game board, switch places with players, and knock opponents' pieces off the track and back to their Start position.

Slides are located at various places around the game board. When a player's piece lands at the beginning of one of these slides not of its own color, it automatically advances to the end, removing any opponent's piece on the slide and sending it back to Start.

Game moves are directed exclusively by cards from the play-action deck. If one plays the normal version in which one card is drawn from the deck each turn, the outcome has a huge element of luck. Sorry can be made more of a strategic game (and more appealing to adults) by dealing five cards to each player at the start of the game and allowing the player to choose which card he/she will play each turn. In this version, at the end of each turn, a new card is drawn from the deck to replace the card that was played, so that each player is always working from five cards.

A player's fortunes can change dramatically in one or two rounds of play through the use of Sorry cards, the "11" cards (which give the player the option of trading places with an opponent's piece on the track), and the fact that it is possible to move from Start to Home without circumnavigating the full board by making judicious use of the "backward 4" cards.

Black Sheep

Designed by Reiner Knizia and illustrated by the incredibly talented Ursula Vernon, In BlackSheep, players try to corral the best combination of cows, horses, chickens and more while avoiding the mischievous black sheep. BlackSheep is perfect for two to four players ages eight and up. -From the FFG website.

There's a lot of randomness here, but also room for elementary strategy. Players make poker hands from two shared cards (figurines of ranked animals) and three of their own (these are actual cards). There are three such hands playing simultaneously, with players adding one or two cards at a time to any hand on their turn. When all players have played three cards onto a hand, a winner is chosen, based on the poker ranks. The winner takes the two shared cards (animal figurines), and new shared cards are added. At the end of the game, scores are calculated by summing numbers printed on the bottoms of the figurines they captured and some bonuses. The black sheep figurines are worth negative points.