My husband and I are avid gamers, especially the recent trend toward family games, or German games, like Settlers, Carcasonne, Lost Cities, Elfquest (and a good cut-throat game of Wiz War). We got together with our nephews over the holidays and completely fell in love with blokus trategy board game - we're going to buy it for ourselves as soon as we can, and will probably also get the travel version to play together on airplanes. The game is a nice change from cards and dice. I really enjoyed the spatial nature of the game. Over time you'll learn that some of the shapes are better for offense and some for defense, and there are tricks to moving around the board and keeping yourself from getting trapped in a corner. The rules are extremely simple and can be learned in under 5 minutes. My 8-year-old nephew and I were pretty well balanced and took turns winning (maybe I'll have better luck next year when I've had more practice *grin*). My 6-year-old nephew did just fine in the game, and my 4-year-old nephew was happy to just take his turn putting pieces in his corner without keeping score. I also think this is a game that a child might pull out occasionally by themselves just to make shapes and patterns with the pieces (the board is very pretty when filled in). It is true that the blokus strategy board game is sensitive to lost pieces, since the challenge of the game is based on having a few too many pieces to fit on the board. However, I think you can easily recover from lost pieces by balancing the sets, and then making certain areas of the board off-limits. You could color certain squares with a marker or cover them with tape or cardboard to make the available space smaller. I've often thought that would be a great variation on the two-player game. Instead of playing two colors at once, you could each play one color but make the board smaller. You could make different shape overlays to turn the board into a rectangle, or a cross, or an hourglass, and then part of the challenge of the game would be working inside the new shape. (Do you hear me, Sekkoia? This would be a great expansion for the game.) The board has ridges for holding the pieces in place. While I found these ridges sufficient for adults and older children, younger children will still accidentally knock the pieces out of place. For us, this happened in small enough doses that we were always able to reconstruct the original position of the pieces.
