Card games are great fun for kids, but sometimes the standard packs just don’t have enough, well, whatever it is that your kids happen to want that day: orgres, soldiers, knights, princesses, etc.

Here’s an easy way to help them make their own cards. I’ve made a Microsoft Word template that looks like this:

You can download the template here. Get the kids to go on to Google Images (remember to turn on safe search first!) and download images for the theme that they want, and replace the images in the template with those. Then they can change the numbers to whatever powers each card should have. Maybe the top number should be offense and the bottom defense–it’s up to them to figure out their own game rules. They can print the sheet out on photo paper (which is thick enough to serve as card stock) and cut the cards out.

My boys decided that they wanted to update the card game War, so they created a deck they call Modern War:

We hope that you and your family will find this a fun and innovative way to kick off the new year!  Merry gaming!

Source: http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/ || Written By: Chris Anderson

Something of a paradigm shift is occurring: play is no longer what children do when there is nothing better organised for them at home or school! People, especially professionals, are beginning to see the virtues and benefits of play. One obvious example is the realisation that the decline of outdoor play is one of a web of factors that contributes to the problem of obesity in the lives of so many children. Another is the growing awareness that children need to be able to take risks and make their own assessments in the natural environment: it will not do to make everything so safe that they lose the precious and vital ability to explore and where necessary learn from their mistakes and mishaps.

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Coming in at number three is a 1999 Mensa Select winner. We are proud to present: QUIDDLER.

Wait… you don’t know who or what Mensa is? Well, allow us to digress a bit and offer you this tidbit of information.

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Chess players play chess. Go players play Go. Scrabble players play Scrabble (and sometimes Anagrams). And so on. Rummikub. Bridge. Poker. Magic: the Gathering. Backgammon. These games attract single-game game players. These players are not playing a “game”. I think that, generally speaking, they don’t even like games. This is a hobby, a devotion. They play it because they like THIS activity; it just happens to look like a game to other people.

In a little more broad category are the multi-game genre-only players. RPG players may play a few types of RPGs. CCG players may move between a few types of CCGs. Wargamers, or “grognards”, may play a catalog of Avalon Hill titles and maybe some newer titles. Some people will only play party games. Or abstracts. And so on. Genre players like THIS activity, and they can only immerse themselves in the activity through a certain set of tools. Anything outside of the genre is some other activity. It can be fun, but it doesn’t fill the belly.

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From an evolutionary perspective, the main purpose of play is education. Play is nature’s way of ensuring that young mammals will practice the skills they need for survival. You can predict what a young mammal will play at by knowing what it must learn. Young carnivores, such as lions and tigers, play at stalking, chasing, and pouncing. Young zebras and other animals that are preyed on by lions and such play at running, dodging, and escaping. Young monkeys play endlessly at chasing one another and swinging from trees. Young humans–who have far more to learn than do the young of any other species–play in far more ways than do the young of any other species.

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