Come and play, everything's A-OK

Now that I've got a toddler, it might be about time to start thinking about games for a lower age range. I have to admit, I don't really know much about kid's games, how they work, or what little ones are looking for in a game.

My son has had a little Sesame Street themed Memory game, 2 cards with each of 8 characters. Other than really liking Elmo, he's showed almost no interest in it so far. Recently, he got some hand-me-down figures of 5 Sesame Street characters, and it just so happens, they are all represented on the cards in that Memory game. Looking at that, I thought "there MUST be a game I can make out of this!"

I solicited some thoughts on Twitter, and I got some interesting responses. One of them sounded really promising, so today I gave it a shot...

Basically, it's a Rondel Memory game:
Components:
10 Cards (2 per character)

5 Figures (1 per character)

Setup:

1. Shuffle the 10 cards and deal them, face down, into a circle

2. Place a figure on every other card

Game play:
Take turns moving the characters around the circle as they look for cards with their own picture on them.

On your turn:
1. Choose any figure and move it 1 or 2 cards clockwise

2. Reveal the card it lands on. If that card matches the moving figure, keep it! Otherwise, put it back face down

When the last card is kept, the game ends -- whoever has kept the most cards, wins!

This could be made easier by removing characters (and their corresponding cards), or by setting a character aside once both of its cards are found and kept, and it could be made harder by using additional cards (for characters that don't have figures).

We actually played thorough a whole game, and Corbin even seemed to sort of follow the rules for the most part! As playtests go, I'd say it was pretty successful :)

So that was pretty cool, I can't wait to try it again some time.

Afterwards, I was thinking about other possible mechanisms that could work with those cards and figures, and I came up with a racing mechanism. It's not so much a <i>game</i>, but I could actually imagine the mechanism in a euro-game or something:

1. Shuffle the 10 cards and discard 5 of them without looking

2. Line up the figures in a row

3. One-by-one, flip a card and move the matching figure forward 1 "space"

4. After flipping all 5 cards, reshuffle the 10 cards and repeat

The first figure to move 5 spaces (or any number, really) wins the race!

This could be made into a simple game by guessing which figure will win the race, or a more complicated game by betting on it each time you shuffle (like the bets in Downforce). Either way, the mechanism certainly seems to work well and give some tense and exciting races!

I'll keep thinking about these components and games we an play with them. Until then, at least we can try the Rondel Memory game again :)