Fun Dice Games for Kids

Playing games with young children can sometimes be a challenge. Chutes and Ladders gets old about halfway through the first game and 2-3 games later you are thinking of Chutes and Ladders variants trying to make the game interesting. In this post I want to share some of the dice games we play with our 3 year old.

These games will obviously be very simple and many of them will be purely luck driven to allow children to not only understand but be able to compete on equal grounds.

??Guess the Dice??

This game is a new house favorite, a dice rolling game that helps children with numbers, helps with focus and helps them with remembering.

Setup
Each player gets an equal number of the same dice. The child involved in the game should be familiar with all the numbers on the dice. For really young children a few D4 and work up to D20 as they get older.


How to play

1. Use a D6 to figure out who is going to go first.
2. Each player rolls their dice and use their hand to block the dice so no one else can see it.
3. Starting with the first player and going clockwise around the table each player gets to choose another person at the table and guess a number. If the person has any dice with that number on it they must remove all the dice of that number from behind their hand to the center. 
4. The last person with dice behind their hand wins.

Variants
Some optional changes that can help accommodate for kids as they get older/smarter.

• If you guess correct you get the dice and the player with the most dice at the end wins. 
• If you guess the dice correct you get the dice and re-roll it. The person that ends with all the dice wins.
• Each player can choose to take a die from the center instead of guessing on their turn. They can only keep the dice if they roll the upper 50% value on the die (ie 3-6 on a D6 or 4-8 on a D8). If they succeed they then re-roll it and hide it behind their hand.

~Lucky Rolls~

This is a pure random luck dice rolling game with little to no value to it. The simplicity allows for even very young children to play and feel included on game night.

Setup

Get dice equal to the number of players plus 1 with the same "D" value. For example if you are playing with 3 players you would get 4 D6 or 4 D20.

How to play

1. Each player roll their die and set it out in front of them.
2. The player with the highest value goes first followed be each player in ascending order.
3. You then take turns rolling the extra die, if the extra die roll matches anyone's die value in front of them they are out of that round. 
4. First to win 3 rounds wins the game

Variants

•  Instead of getting removed from the game the person must increase the value on the die in front of them by 1 and they are removed once they can no longer go to a higher value on the die. For example if they get to 6 on a D6 and then they must increase to 7 they are out of the game.

!!!Dice Battle!!!

This game is a competitive feeling luck based dice rolling game. This allows for some decision making to feel more interactive.

Setup

Each player gets 1 of each die type . ( D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, D20 )

How to play

1. Randomly choose who is the first player
2. The first player can then choose another player at the table that still has dice.
3. Both players secretly choose one of their dice. 
4. The player that rolls the higher value wins that battle. If there is a tie no one wins. Use some sort of tokens to show the winner.
5. Each player then discards the dice they just used then move to the next players turn.
6. Play continues till no more actions can be performed because of the number of dice available.
7. The player with the most victories is the winner

Variants

• The winner gets to keep the dice they used.
• Allow multiple dice to be used to work on addition skills.

I hope these games work as well for your family as they have ours.




As a side note I did want to mention a game that that I find is particularly great for young children called feed the kitty. I find this game to be exceptional for young children and still fun for adults.

Making my own game table Part 1

We decided we wanted a game table. We looked at our options and the prices where either too high or not what we wanted. I use to do some carpentry about 8+ years ago and I had the tools so I decided to go ahead and take on the task of making my own table on my own. Here is our journey into making our own game table part 1.

In part 1 I will go up to finishing the table top. I still need to make the legs for the table so right now we have it witting on top of a large folding table till it has legs.

Materials of course. I took a day or two to draw out the design then I went and picked up the wood. Here is a general idea of what we got. I had them cut down some of the pieces to my measurements so I could get them home and also it made it easier than having to cut it myself.

I cut the 1x6x8 down to fit with a 45 degree join on the corners. This all rests on top of a piece of oak plywood for the base.

We wanted to get the top done so we could use it till the table was finished. I went to the local cloth shop and got some velveteen cloth and some car head liner for the padding. We used some spray adhesive to put the padding on the MDF. We then used some spray adhesive to lay the velveteen down then a hand stapler to secure it down from the bottom of the MDF. This was easier than expected and worked out really nice. The white marks in the picture are part of the picture and not the surface of the play area.

We played with just this surface for last 2 months and I suggest using this technique even if you don't want to build a table you can at least have a nice surface to play on.

This is what it looked like before all the cuts when I put the pieces in place. I realized using this alone would make it so that the velveteen would stick up from the boarder and decided I would add another layer of wood to the outer edge to make a small card and dice wall. Another trip to the local lumber yard and I got 3 more sticks of select pine 1x6x8.

 Here I am in the middle of cutting out the  pockets on the 2nd layer of pine to have places to put all of our tokens. I routed out the pockets to give them a smooth round over feel.

This is a preview of the table clamped in place to make sure I was satisfied with the way everything fit together. 

 Next I used a trim-nailer and some 1" nails to put it all together. I also routed out the edge boards with a nice roman edge to give a nice look to the outside of the table. You will notice some holes in the center of the table, those are so I can push up the center play area if I ever need to replace it or fix it for some reason.

To make all the corners look nice and clean I added some stain-able wood filler and sanded the table down using 120 sand paper and a palm sander.

Here is the table sanded with 220 sand paper and ready to stain. I originally got a maple stain thinking I wanted a darker stain on the wood but decided to get a cabernet stain / polyurethane finish to offset the black better.

I used the cabernet stain/poly here. 

 This is my first time using a stain/poly mix instead of staining then using a poly and I put it on too thick and didn't like the way it looked so I sanded the table down to stain it again. We almost kept the table looking like this because of the unique antique grain look. We ended up deciding to stain/poly the wood again, we liked this look but not what we where going for.

This is the final stain and polish before we move it inside and drop the play area in the center.

and here is the top finished and in place on a folding table.

We played our first game of splendor on it tonight and I am pleased with the play area. It is 40"x90" total with a 29"x79" play area. It sits up to 8 comfortably with pockets for all at the table. The total cost for the top was around $350.

So far my total spent is around $500-600 that includes the lumber I will use for the legs, buying some tools I didn't have and re-buying some things like stain and brushes.

Some lessons learned

I have not done carpentry in 8+ years and I shouldn't get my feet back under me on such a large project. I made some amateur mistakes including cutting open a finger because I was routing with the spin instead of against the spin, something any carpenter will tell you never to do.

The 45s on the 1x6 where cut about 2-3 degrees off because my chop saw was not large enough to cut the 6" board at 45 degrees. I did a chop then finished with a jig saw and it didn't work out as expected. I fixed this by sanding it out and using a speed square to make sure they where correct, this ended up with me having to use wood filler on the corners which looks fine but I would have just done it right if I had to do over.

I would have plung cut the pockets instead of using a jig saw for the pockets. This would have made a clear line in the pockets and instead I had to spend a few days sanding them strait to fix it. I tried to use my router and a guide to fix 1 of the pockets but it ended up making it worse. It was a noticeably larger pocket but after it was finished it is not really too notice-able.

I will never use a stain/poly combo again. I have always used a stain then polyurethaned the surface after I got the stain where I wanted and it worked really well in the past. This stain/poly mix is more like painting than staining. You apply 1 coat and never wipe it off which was my original issue, I put too much on making it look more painted than stained. One thing I realized after sanding it is how easy it came off as well, I used some 120 sand paper and was able to get most of it off in about 1-2 hours time. This is probably my biggest issues with the table and something I may rectify some day if I feel it is needed. 


I hope everyone enjoyed the post and if anyone has any comments or adventures like this of their own please let us know in the comments. Look for post 2 when I finish the legs sometime in the future. I won't say when because that depends on me getting in the garage and away from my new table to play on.

Solo Splendor

 Hello Everyone and welcome to 221boardgames.

I want to share with you my solo rules for playing one of my new favorite games, Splendor. You should be familiar with the rules of Splendor before reading this post so if you are not please read them here (Splendor rules) then head back when you are ready.

The concept for solo play is to remove 1 token from the game every time you perform an actions. There are 4 levels of solo play, easy, medium, hard, and insane with 2 potential ending goals giving you options on how to play the best fits for you. Below is a description on all the steps to follow.

Setup

1. Setup the game as normal 3 levels of cards with 4 cards each
2. Set out the tokens based on the level of play you want to try at
• Easy : 6 of each color and all joker (yellow) tokens
• Medium : 5 of each color and all joker (yellow) tokens
• Hard : 4 of each color and all joker (yellow) tokens
• Insane : 3 of each color and all joker (yellow) tokens 
3. Put out 2 Nobles at random

Order of actions

1. Perform 1 of the 4 normal actions
• Take 3 gem tokens of different colors from the stock
• Take 2 gem tokens of the same color if there are 4 or more of that color in the stock
• Reserve 1 development card and take 1 gold token (joker).
• Purchase 1 face-up development card from the middle of the table or a previously reserved one.
2. If you have more than 10 tokens return tokens to the stock till you are down to 10
3. Remove 1 token from the game using the following order
1. If you have a token in the stock remove 1 of those back to the box
2. If no tokens are in the stock then discard one of yours to the box.
3. If there are no tokens the game ends or you must obtain all cards with the cards you have depending on the variation you decided to play. 

How to win  

You Can choose 1 of both of these conditions to win. I prefer to get 15 points before tokens run out but the ability to get all the remaining cards was fun as well.

Option 1. Get to 15 points before all tokens are out
Option 2. Be able to obtain all cards by building up cards while you have tokens then having enough cards to obtain everything else available. You can stop once you have 7 of each color as there are no cards that require more tokens than 7.

I hope you enjoy the post and if anyone has any comments or improvements please let me know I would like to implement them myself.