The children have been fortunate to have received several games for review recently, starting with Mensa Academy on the Wii.
Both the big kids have had a go at this one, and they both seemed to enjoy it. I asked Small for a review, and in his own inimitable style, he provided one.
Pretty much, it’s a fun game. It thinks of enjoyable ways to produce each of the subjects, logic, memory, visual, numeracy, and language, however te backgrounds and music be a bit distracting. Ok, they’re REALLY distracting. But I’m guessing it’s actually intended to be distracting, so they did it right. For logic it had things like this:
Red+Blue=Green
Blue+Green=Red What does Red+Green + Blue+Green equal?
Red+Green=Blue
I am given some time to answer, and I select green.
In the case of that puzzle, anyway.
In other subjects it would have completely different activities, and other answers. Really, I have to compliment this game.
9/10.
He’s a star. Definitely one of a kind.
Next up, Tudor Brainbites.
This one wins on my account for being presented in a small tin, thus making it portable and storable! Accordingly it came on holiday with us camping, and was very popular amongst the gaggle of girls, ranging in age from 10 to 12. I asked Big for her opinion:
It looked nice, rather than boring. Even though the three of us who were playing had all done tudor reenactment, there were still questions we found easy and questions we didn’t know the answers to. We even got a couple of them wrong. (We didn’t know that men sometimes wear bodices!) We had a lot of fun playing it.
I think that’s a winner then. It has been played voluntarily a few times too, so that points to an excellent game.
And our final contender, a Mike the Knight memory game from Ravensburger. I can’t link you to Amazon for this one as it doesn’t seem to be on sale there, and Ravensburger have it listed as coming soon. But I’m looking at it right now, and it’s a memory game with 48 tiles, in the same range as this Ravensburger Hello Kitty Memory Game
. It suggests an age of 3 upwards and it’s for 2-6 players. We’ve played it several times with Smallest who is not 3 until November, and while she *can* do it, it works way better if you cut down on the number of tiles in play. So we’ve played with 10 pairs instead of the full 24 and it leads to a much more fun (and shorter game). The tiles are of good solid cardboard and the pictures instantly recognisable to any Mike the Knight addict fan or fan’s family member. I like games like this that can be played with a range of ages.
So there you go. A range of entertainment ideas for a range of interests and ages.
Disclosure: All products provided for review, all opinions remain my own.
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