LOONEY LABS GAMES
Take a look! They are fun!
A lot of the games are card games. Regular playing card sized cards.
Our favorite is ECOFLUXX There are GOAL cards, Keeper Cards, Action Cards and Rule cards. Keeprs are cards with a single picture (like bear, rabbit, dirt, water). Goal cards tell you which keepers to collect to win. A GOAL of MUD says to collect WATER and DIRT. A goal of MAMMALS will have you collect 2 cards with mammals (like bears and rabbits). Action cards will tell you what to do. the POLLUTION card eliminates AIR,WATER, DIRT,SUN keepers. RULE cards change the rules. Maybe a new rule will tell everyone to draw 4 cards (instead of one) or will make a keeper limit (of 1 or 2 or 3....) so everyone cannot have more than the specified amount of keepers. The goals and rules are constantly changing. So it's not always easy to collect the keepers needed. But next thing you know someone wins, it's almost never the pesonb who thinks they are ahead.
We use the game to review science words. Pollution, extinction, composting (this is one of my favorite cards!) and other things. I can have the boys draw cards at random and give me a science report.
I just learned how to play CHRONONUATS
It's fun! And has so much potential for teaching history! In the game, each player is a time traveler from an alternate universe. Players have to colloect artifax (Like General Tso's Chicken or a pair of Dodo birds), they also work on altering the time line to make it line up with their own alternate universe. This creates paradoxes which need to be 'patched'. And these can be reversed as well. What one person needs to change to get home, another needs to remain the same to get home. we can learn history as we go through the tiime line and additional research can be assigned. It looks like it would be good for Role Playing of people in histoty.
And for the Literary geek in me, there is NANA fictionary
It, too, is a card came. (I like card games, they are easily portable and I just love shuffling cards.)
In this game, players collect differnet cards. SETTING cards, PROBLEM ards, CHARACTER cards and RESOLUTION cards. Mixed in with these are ACTION cards (switch settings with someone, choose a card from the discard pile, add an extra problem to your story, ...etc). This game seems so easily adaptable for many levels. A complex came of actual writing stories as you go along, or a simple game of collecting a few cards and each player makes up a quick story for the group.
What I really like about these games is that they are easily adaptable (to levels and for school) and I can buy BLANKS, so we can make our own cards for the games. And, of course, the boys like the games.
LOONEY LABS GAMES |