BKR Family Game Night When: TBD Where: The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Chappaqua $10 per family,  FREE for Members call for more information 914-589-4749

Family Game Night

Parents and kids come and play some of the most exciting and interesting board games at BKR.   We’ll provide cookies and milk for the kids and coffee or tea for the adults!   Our Family Game Night will have a variety of games including ancient board games from Sumeria called The Royal Game of Ur and from Egypt called Senet. See how ancient games are similar and different from what people play today. We also have lots of other tantalizing and exciting board games you can’t always get in the toy store. See the descriptions below.  Come and learn some new exciting games for bright kids! If you’d like you can purchase some of these hard to find games from BKR at Family Game Night.  We now accept credit cards. For more information call 914-589-4749 or email info1@brightkidsresource.com

Senet
Senet is a 4,000 year old Egyptian race game.  We know of this game through ancient Egyption boards that have survived to this day. Instead of dice, Senet uses sticks which are nearly flat, and have one black side and one white side. The white sides count up as numbers. One white side is one, two two and so on until four. However, if all sides come up as black, it will count as a six. The oldest known representation of Senet is in a painting from the tomb of Hesy (Third Dynasty circa 2686-2613 BCE).  Players race to move their pieces around and off the board, using strategic offense and defense as they go.

The Royal Game of Ur - from Ancient Sumeria (Mesopotamia)
The Royal Game of Ur refers to two game boards found in Royal Tombs of Ur by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s. The two boards date from the First Dynasty of Ur, before 2600 BC, thus making the Royal Game of Ur probably the oldest set of board gaming equipment ever found. One of the two boards is exhibited in the collections of the British Museum in London.
The Royal Game of Ur was played with two sets (one black and one white) of seven markers and three pyramidal dice. The rules of the game as it was played in Mesopotamia are not known but there is a reliable reconstruction of game play based on a cuneiform tablet of Babylonian origin dating from 177-176 BC. It is universally agreed that the Royal Game of Ur, like Senet, is a race game.  Both games may be predecessors to the present-day backgammon.

Tantrix
Perhaps you’ve seen this at one of our Thinking Fun Sessions. This is a really cool puzzle that is very easy to pick up but challenges your mind and your visual spatial creativity.  You simply connect the loops by color.  We’ll have a 56 piece set at our Family Game Night!

Blokus is a fascinating strategy game for the whole family based on very simple rules that take less than a minute to learn. Yet it challenges both experts and beginners. Players take turns placing pieces on to the board, each starting from the corner of their color. Each new piece must touch at least one other piece of the same color, but only at the corners! Pieces of the same color cannot be in contact along an edge. The goal is to cover as much of the board with your pieces as possible. The winner is the player for whom the total area of pieces remaining is the lowest!

DaVinci’s Challenge

Studied in depth by Leonardo Da Vinci, the patterns of circles on this game board form the ancient symbol called the Flower of Life and were inscribed on pyramid walls by the Egyptians over 6,000 years ago.  These intersecting circles form wheels, snowflakes, eyes and other secret symbols. Players use their pieces to create 9 different patterns and score points based on their pattern’s shape complexity.

Equate
This board game like Scrabble except with numbers and mathematical operators instead of letters.  Tiles may be single digits, fractions, plus, minus, times, or division.  Players take turns adding tiles to the grid such that they form mathematically correct equations. Each player can participate at their own level.

Quarto!
This game challenges players to create a line of 4 pieces that share a common characteristic - tall or short, round or square, light or dark, solid or hollow. The trick is your opponent chooses which piece you will play.  It is very simple to learn yet is fascinating and addictive!  The challenge comes in seeing the common characteristic in the shapes you can make in a line to win!

Heximoes - This is dominoes with 6-sides! This skill-building game is as easy to learn as ordinary dominoes, but six times the fun! With each move, you must match at least two sides of your Heximoes to game pieces that have already been played. This fast-paced game builds visual discrimination and strategy skills—and can be played at different skill levels.

Puzzellations and Fractallations are foam tessellation puzzles that were designed by a mathematician. Children can’t help but be attracted to these puzzles. The puzzles combine art and math to stimulate creativity. Most of them are simple enough for five-year olds, but can also challenge older kids and the brainiest adults. These puzzles have many different solutions, allowing them to be used over and over again.

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