Harry Potter Cluedo

My brother and his girlfriend gave Deed the game of Cluedo for her birthday. It's the same game as we played as kids but with a Harry Potter theme.

Gone are Captain Peacock and Miss Scarlet and instead we have the characters from Harry Potter. The players are the Gryffindor pupils, the suspects are various villains, and the crime is committed with either a magical object or a spell. Interestingly, he who must not be named is not named. Voldermort doesn't appear anywhere in the game. (Phew! I don't want that evil dastard [I said dastard] in my house.)

The board is divided into locations from the books such as Hogwarts, Gringotts, and Malfoy Manor. Other fun innovations include doors that can be blocked so that you are trapped in a location, Dark Arts cards that slow your progress but can be nullified by Help cards (spells, items or allied wizards), and floo powder counters that enable you to travel via the fireplaces in some of the locations - but only when they are lit.

Deed got the game on a Sunday afternoon at my sister's while we were in London. She was desperate to play and since you need three people (and we were going home to a two-person household), we roped my mum into a game that evening back at her place. We made the mistake of thinking the Dark Dark Arts curses applied to everyone every time (we didn't read them carefully enough) and so we forfeited all our floo powders before we had the chance to use most of them - which eliminated a lot of the fun and slowed down the game considerably. And we got preoccupied with collecting help cards instead of trying to solve the mystery.

My brother's girlfriend also wanted to play but she had a prior arrangement on the Sunday evening. So she decided that their date night on the following Tuesday would be to go and play Cluedo with Deed at my sister's where she would be staying the night while I went out with friends. (Who says romance is dead?) They played the whole game only to find out at the end that they had the wrong mystery cards in the envelope and so nobody actually dunnit. Deed admitted to me afterwards that it was her fault because she'd accidently picked from the location cards twice. They didn't start again as they'd already been playing for hours. Obviously as the game was unsolvable. Oh well, the game's the thing.

When we were starting to pack to come home, I insisted that my mum join us for one final game because I knew that the two of us would not be able to play unless we had a guest who understood English. This means that most of Deed's friends won't be playing it for another couple of years. This time we got to the end without incident. It takes a lot of practice to become a good wizard.

Today Deed's friend came round to play. She happens to be an English speaker so we of course grabbed the opportunity to play Cluedo. It was surprisingly easy to explain the game and we had fun.

Deed thinks this is one of the best presents she's ever had. I lie awake in bed trying to work out a way the two of us could play it together without a third.

Friday Night Is Games Night

Friday night has become games night in our house. We are not strictly orthodox about keeping Shabbat but we do celebrate by lighting candles and eating a festive meal; and we don't do ordinary things like work, laundry or cleaning.

You can see from the photo that tonight's games were Mastermind, TAKI (like Uno) and Rat-a-tat Cat!

Other options are Mancala, Kalooki, Backgammon (Shesh Besh), Rummikub, Frustration (though we are growing out of that one), Set, Othello (Reversi), and Triplica (I hate this card game but DD likes it).

We take our games night seriously. Whilst we don't have a green baize games table, we do have paper and a pen for keeping score and of course drinks and nibbles.

We need some good board games like Monopoly and other classics but we have a dilemma. If I buy them in English she can't play them with her Israeli friends. And I don't want to buy them in Hebrew. I think her friends are just going to have to be good at English if they want to play at our house.

As DD was looking for a game this evening she noticed that we also have some large (1500 pieces) puzzles in the cupboard. "When are we going to one of these big puzzles together?"
"In the winter on a rainy Shabbat when we don't want to go out all day," I replied. We are looking forward to it already.

What are your family's favourite games?

Playing Games And Other Reasons 2B Cheerful

Here are my Reasons 2B Cheerful for this week. Pop over to Mummy from the Heart for the Linky.  

1
Wall of fame
There is a wall of photos up in DD's school and I found DD on it. I think this one is from 1st Grade. I love it - including the wet patch on her t-shirt where she would chew it in times of stress.

2 
Up When We Like.
DD's Summer School has finished so we don't have to be up and dressed to get her there at 8 am for another six weeks! Hooray! We are not morning people. Although I'm thinking of trying some sort of Miracle Morning again. I can do all the stuff, it's just getting up to be there to do them is the problem.

3 
Playing Mancala with DD.
There were a number of rules she picked up at school and a number of rules that I half remembered from when the game first came out. We watched some You Tube instructions and settled on our own set of rules by picking and choosing. We had to try a few variations before coming up with the set of rules that makes for the most satisfying game.

I'm going to encourage some more Kalooki and Shesh Besh (Backgammon). It's a long holiday.

4
Homework
Without resorting to long lists of jobs that must be done or sticker charts on the fridge, DD has accepted the fact that we don't play Mancala, or watch a DVD, or have a chapter of her book until she has read a book or book chapter in English and done some maths workbook. So far so good.

5
Goodbye to Narnia
Having written my definitive review on the Chronicles of Narnia, I decided that there is no point in keeping the full set of seven books. Of course you can't keep the two books you like (The Magician's Nephew and The Lion et al.) and expect to get a good price for the others. A set is a set. So I put up the whole lot on our local Facebook Buy, Sell, Swap group and someone came to pick them up, paying me 100nis. Nice.