When my daughter was five years old, she was introduced to this game by her older cousins and loved it. Then she taught me to play, and as I got to understand the complexity of this card game, I was astounded by the strategy one needed to win. And she won a lot against older players.
So, over the years, I got in the habit of picking this up whenever I see them (my favorite place is Target because I could pick it up for $5.99 or so), and give them away to my friends who had children of similar age or older.
The rules are somewhat similar to the classic monopoly game in that players are asked to collect properties. The player who collects 3 suite of properties (3 of 4 properties in each suite) fastest wins. Simple enough, right? But no. It gets very complicated because you can steal properties, take property from another player in exchange of one of your unwanted properties, demand rent from one or all of the players, depending on what kind of rental card you hold, use "wild" property cards to augment your property holdings, etc. The possibilities are endless!
We have two packs of this game - one to leave at home and one to keep it in the car (but we keep forgetting to do that).
I guess I love this game because it's shown me what a strategic thinker my daughter is. At age five, she'd set me up, give up some excellent cards to me, only to take them away from me just when I thought I had won the game.
I'm not sure everyone would agree, but I think it's great for teaching children strategy. And I love this game especially because the game could finish very quickly (we've finished a game in five minutes because we've tweaked the game and created our own family's rules). So, if you have little time, but your children are asking you to play with them, this is a great one to play.
Enjoy!
My grandchildren would love this! We should talk soon.
ReplyDelete