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Board games
For awhile we were playing games quite regularly but then they seemed to become a bit of a burden so we didn’t play very often even though they seemed to be collecting in the house. Games Fanatic has been buying then quite regularly, mostly through Kickstarter campaigns he funds. Anyway, we have started playing again and have tried a couple news ones lately.
Last weekend and this we played a game called Root, which was one of the Kickstarters that has been sitting around for a few months. It’s an interesting game because each player plays in a different way so it takes a while to get through how to play. We spent about three hours last weekend and I was just starting to get my head around what I was doing. So this weekend I played the same role and did better. But it still took longer than the playing time listed. There are expansions with more roles to play which we hope to get to eventually but we need to learn to play all four roles of the base game before we try that. Unfortunately Lego Lover got a bit bored waiting between turns (plus there were other issues that exacerbated the situation) so it’s not likely he will play with us the next time. We’ll have to change to three player rules, whatever that means. I’m hoping it goes well though.
There was another game we played recently called Five Minute Dungeon. The nice thing about it is the short game time. The five minutes isn’t really the length of the game but the rounds you play. We got through a few of those the one time we tried it and it was pretty good.
After we played Root for the first time we were looking through all the board games we have and it is apparent we need to weed out the collection. We have quite a few that have hardly ever been played and aren’t likely to get more play. Some of these are games that were/are popular but we just never got into them all that much. Some of these are old games that don’t interest us. We also have a few oldies to keep due to sentimental reasons, e.g. my first Monopoly game which is missing a couple of deeds and has an almost flattened box. Maybe once we clear out some games we will have more space and be able to organise the collection better.
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The trouble with some Facebook applications…
What has been one of my favorite applications on Facebook has had a major overhaul. It’s almost a completely different game now. I don’t know what to make of all the changes just yet. So far, I’m finding it almost impossible to play and I’m not even being affected by some of the glitches being reported by many others. It certainly doesn’t feel like it will be as much fun now. I’m going to wait for the major fallout from all the changes to try to make up my mind.
I do have big concerns about one issue though. Before the new version came out, my only friends that showed up on the application were those that had installed it as far as I know. Now, all my friends seem to be listed and I clicked on some cards for the application listed under a few of the friends to see what was up with it. I didn’t actually do anything with anything but now those people are listed as particular friends for this application. I’m hoping this is a glitch and will be cleared up because to use this application requires going through sets of cards for all the “friends” on the app and I would hate to be involving non-users in the application unknowingly.
While I’ve not run across the same situation on other Facebook applications, there are others that have similar issues where I’ve discovered I’m “playing” with friends who aren’t actually using the applications. This is even worse than the expectation of so many applications that you will invite all your friends to join in so that you can progress further in the game.
As much as I have been enjoying Facebook for nearly a year, this particular aspect is one of the unappealing ones.
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Finished, but not completed
Two year ago, we bought the Wii console when it came out as a family gift for Christmas. We bought the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess with it and started playing on Christmas Day. Yesterday we finally finished the game after clocking at least fifty hours of game play. Obviously we took rather long breaks from the game, which necessitated backtracking several times to figure out where we were. It was a fun game for all of us and even Lego Lover joined in some of the time. Game Fanatic eventually took over almost all of the controls, just because he’s much better at them than we are. The rest of us just helped out solving puzzles and watching the game play. While the game is technically finished, there were several quests that we didn’t complete. Game Fanatic saved a copy of our game before the final battle so that we could go back and try to finish everything. So it may be a while until it’s completed.
Meanwhile, we have moved backwards in time to the previous incarnation of Zelda this evening. Surprisingly, Lego Lover decided to take over controls for a while and did quite well. It’s interesting to see how his skills on the games are evening out with his brother’s, and sometimes surpassing him.
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Constraints
This month marks the second anniversary of our home education experiment. I really shouldn’t call it an experiment since it appears to be the norm for the foreseeable future.
This was our third attempt at home education. The first attempt goes back to Game Fanatic’s second formal year of schooling when we made a temporary move to Canada. My plan was to home school while there so we could keep him up to speed with our local curriculum. That didn’t work out and when September arrived, he started at the primary school. The second attempt followed our return from Canada in the middle of the following year. By late October, he was back in the classroom at a new school.
The reasons the first two attempts failed were many but ultimately, it was due to trying to emulate school in a home environment. For some children this might work but for Game Fanatic it definitely didn’t. By the time we pulled the boys out of school, Game Fanatic was in year seven. It was clear that a classroom learning environment was never going to work for him. We spent four years trying to work out problems that couldn’t be fixed. Actually the first year back went pretty well for him with a brilliant teacher who really “got” him from the start. Teachers like that are rare, and even this teacher was limited by needs of many of the thirty other children in the class.
Lego Lover started formal schooling a couple years into the schooling experiment and all went seemingly well the first year. The second year was a different story and it’s still not completely clear what changed. In retrospect, I think the problems were already there and we were blinded to their effects.