- Like
- Digg
- Del
- Tumblr
- VKontakte
- Buffer
- Love This
- Odnoklassniki
- Meneame
- Blogger
- Amazon
- Yahoo Mail
- Gmail
- AOL
- Newsvine
- HackerNews
- Evernote
- MySpace
- Mail.ru
- Viadeo
- Line
- Comments
- Yummly
- SMS
- Viber
- Telegram
- Subscribe
- Skype
- Facebook Messenger
- Kakao
- LiveJournal
- Yammer
- Edgar
- Fintel
- Mix
- Instapaper
- Copy Link
Playing games is one of my favorite family memories from growing up. Somehow though, I managed to marry a man who is not as excited about games. This year, I am hoping to spend a few afternoons (or evenings) a week enjoying some game time with the kids and finding games that we can all enjoy together (or without my hubby – grins).
This past month, we’ve been playing Blokus – a game that is new to us. If you haven’t heard of it, here’s a quick little recap.
How to Play Blokus:
There are four different colors in Blokus, and each player has 21 different shaped pieces. Players take turns placing pieces on the board, one at a time. Pieces of like color can only touch on the corners of like-colored pieces. During the game, players try to get as many of their pieces on the board, while using strategy to block their opponents from spreading across the board.
Skills Blokus Works On:
There are a few things that Blokus has been great in working on with the kids (and me too!)
-
Thinking strategically – while you want to get your pieces on the board, you definitely have to plan and think ahead to keep areas open for your own pieces and to block your opponents.
-
Spatial thinking – kids have to picture how pieces are going to fit together on the board, either as they work around opponents pieces or in building their own pieces. Each piece is shaped differently, making it a fun challenge.
Recommended Ages:
Blokus is recommended for ages 7 and up, but those closer to the 7 year old age may need a little assistance. Overall the rules are simple, so kids catch on quickly!
We haven’t kept a running score of our Blokus games, but usually play on a game-by-game basis. All of our kids (ages 7 to 13) have enjoyed playing this together and the 7 year old has been getting fairly competitive lately! It’s been great seeing them each develop their own strategy to make the game work for them!
This game may be new to you (as it was to us), but I love hearing about different games, especially when there is an added learning twist in the game.
Have you ever played Blokus before?
Do you have a game recommendation for our family to try next?
The printables shared on this site are FREE of charge unless otherwise noted, and you are welcome to download them for your personal and/or classroom use only. However, free or purchased printables are NOT to be reproduced, hosted, sold, shared, or stored on any other website or electronic retrieval system (such as Scribd or Google docs). My printables are copyright protected and I appreciate your help in keeping them that way.
If you download and use some of my printables and then blog about them, please provide a link back to my blog and let me know - I'd love to see how you are using them! Please be sure to link to the blog post or web page and not directly to the file itself. Thank you!
We have a small travel version, which my boys love! I think I need to look into buying the full version, so we can all play together! We love to play games as a family – this week we’ve played Aggravation and Sequence!
Sequence is another one of our favorites too – I need to pull out our geography version to use instead!!
We have Blockus at our house after my former work (a preschool) had it in their regular rotation. All the kids loved it.
We also like Spot-It, for all ages. It’s a great family game, easy to travel with and cheap.
A more expensive game is “ticket to ride” but it is tons of fun as well.
A balancing game called “suspend” is a new favorite here as well. Probably for kids 5-6+, but also great fun for adults.
Oh! How could I forget my all-time favorite?! We grew up playing “Mille Bornes” (sounds like meal-born), which is a French card game.
The premise is that each person or team is a race car, trying to travel 1000 miles by laying down ‘mileage’ cards.. The opposing teams can give you ‘red lights’ or ‘car accident’, for example, hazard cards to hamper your trip. You need ‘green lights’ or ‘car repair’ or other helpful cards to get back on the road.
It’s really a lot of fun. My son is almost 7 now, and he frequently kicks tail when he plays. He’s probably been playing with us for two, if not three, years. It’s very easy to learn and is one of those games that is better played with at least 4 players/2 teams, but can be played with just 2 people as well.
It doesn’t take as long as Monopoly, but not as quick (or boring) as Candy Land.
So, I definitely recommend Mille Bornes!!
Adding that one to our Amazon cart!! Thank you for the suggestion!
We love that game! Check out the game company “Out of the Box” games. They make incredible games that are fun and educational. We realm love their 10 Days in. . . Series. Word on the Street is great too!
I’ve seen those, but we haven’t picked one up yet! Thanks for the suggestions!
This is one of our favorites! My husband and I both have pretty good spatial reasoning skills (his are better), so this game is right up our alley. Now our 8 y.o. plays too. We also have the 2-person travel edition and Blokus Trigon, where all the pieces are made up of triangles instead of squares. The other big favorites here are Settlers of Catan (regular and junior edition), Sequence, and the LEGO Minotaurus game.
oh, the Trigon one sound fun too!! I’ll have to look into that. We love Sequence too!