games | I Am Chris Nolan.ca

We started the week with some slightly crazed kids thanks to Halloween.

We also hadn’t gotten a lot of good video and me in my freaky tall blue creature halloween costume so we spent some time on the weekend putting it back on and trying things out.

Our circus school was closed last week so we missed our regular classes. It didn’t stop my son, as I found these videos he took of himself practicing the silks.

We stepped in to Kimberly Jackson on Queen Monday after our drop-in and we saw some really nice handcrafted wooden tables that they are having a sale on atm.

Tuesday I was trying to get the kids out of the house to play, but they just seemed to want to stay in. We ended up building some bridges out of Kapla blocks (beam and cantilever), and then put it into practice as I became a human beam bridge, and my daughter was the load.

They got some exercise by playing on their homemade trapeze they have in their bedroom.

We did get out of the house in the afternoon though and started raking our leaves — mostly to have a pile to jump in, and a few to add to our compost. Poor tree not getting fresh soil.

We discovered Richard Wiseman‘s Quirkology feed on Youtube and we proceeded to duplicate some of his puzzles and challenges.

Game wise we’ve been playing a lot of Mastermind.

Thursday we headed down to The 90th Royal Agricultural Winter Fair. We started out in the Spirit of the Horse area and watched the Toronto Police Mounted Unit, Elaine Ward demonstrate Western Style Dressage with her horse Maverick, and a Thoroughbred horse too.

We continued the horse theme as we ate our lunch in the Horse Palace watching some of the competitors for the horse jumping warm up. My son spotted a horse he liked the look of and we followed them into the Ricoh Coliseum to see them compete. It was Onisha and her driver, Olympian, Reed Kessler as they were competing in the Brickenden Trophy International Jumper Class.

The highlight of the Education Barn was the pig truck. The kids watched, fascinated, as the dozen or so piglets nursed from their mother, and as the two, 6 week old (and much larger), pigs cuddled each other.

I’m always interested in the over-sized vegetables. This year the corn-stalk was over 21 feet tall!

What did you do this week?

The kids have been enjoying playing The Kids of Carcassonne this week (thanks for the loan Karen!) so I’ve declared it the “Game of the Week” (something tells me I won’t have a post every week for other games though).

The game is part of the Carcassonne family of ‘German Style’ games, which I have had recommended to me a number of times, but always figured the kids needed to be a few years older to try. Not so with this simplified, but still fun, version that doesn’t require any reading and little more than some spacial work and a bit of space to spread the tiles around on.

The box says a game lasts 20minutes, we’ve been finding it’s probably closer to 10 minutes. We’ll play 3 or 4 times in a row — we just pick different colours to be. My daughter likes it when I pick a colour that’s a little girl on the box art.

For those that like non-competitive games, this one can be done with a flavour my daughter chooses to play in, which is to aid your fellow players roads over advancing her own.

Published in North American by Rio Grande Games.

I wonder if this means we’ll be trying The Kids of Catan next?

See the below gallery of images for an example of how the board can build during game play, as well as a few ‘artsy’ shots we took with the new camera and it’s filters.