That Time I Made Everyone Play Senet With Me

The set we're playing is from the university library (because of course it is, lol!), but this is it.

This might have been my quickest speed-run through a Special Interest yet, but for a very little while my entire mind was fixed on learning how to play Senet, teaching everyone else how to play Senet, and then wheedling those people into playing Senet with me.

It was fed by a couple of other low-key Special Interests, that of Historic Games and of Reskinning/Redesigning Games. I just think it would be really cool to pick a historic game like Senet, reskin it to look more like something that would be a family interest or family joke, and then construct it and give it out for, like, Christmas or something.

Part of that is that I like the historical time periods of my favorite games, Ancient Egypt for Senet and Mesopotamia for the Royal Game of Ur, for instance, but also they're always so pretty! Look at some of the beautiful Senet games in the Met!

I also like how generally simple the games are to learn, and how satisfying they are to play. Do you, too, get weary of trying to learn new games with a billion fiddly rules? Senet is SO much simpler to learn, but there are all kinds of interesting strategies to figure out. Also, we don't really know the actual rules, so my family and I like to make up our own rules. 

Playing Senet in 2013 at the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California, and DEFINITELY making up our own rules!

Here's the most accepted way to play Senet, with a bonus link to a printable Senet board and instructions.

Here are some DIY Senet board games:

• 3D Senet. This one is the biggest score! This public library's website links to a pdf for a cut, color, and assemble cardstock Senet game. It's got the graphics printed on it, as well as helpful fingers pointing the directions you're meant to go at every turn. If you didn't want all that detail, you could use the pattern as a template and draw your own designs.
• cardboard and painted figurines. Cardboard is my favorite, most accessible crafting supply! I love the use of miniature figurines, all of which you could probably find in your nearest toybox or thrift store.
• chessboard Senet. This is such a clever idea! I LOATHE using the Dollar Store as a source of craft supplies, but a thrift store would be just as cheap and easy.
• kid-made Senet. I don't think the fabric worked out great, but otherwise it's a lovely example of how even younger kids can DIY board games. And they're all so creative!

I think I'd want to make one on a nice sheet of wood, perhaps woodburned and watercolor stained or full-on painted in acrylics. The traditional game only has a few decorated panels but I think it would be fun to decorate every panel, maybe keeping to a storytelling theme like illustrating the progress of our England family vacation or the travels of Frodo Baggins.

I also kind of want to make a 3D one, box and all, out of Perler beads, though. Or maybe a quilted one that could also work as a placemat? How about one that masquerades as a book until you open it to see the game, with room to store the pieces inside?

Brainstorming a project is my favorite part!

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Heaven Will Be an Eternal Game of Bananagrams

 

There's this unschooling tactic called "strewing" that I started to follow when the kids were little. Basically, if there's a material you'd like a kid to explore, you don't hand it to the kid, or direct the kid to it--instead, you just leave it temptingly out on a shelf or a table for them to discover for themselves. And it's supposed to be okay if it takes days, weeks, even months for them to pick up that material, because when they do, it will be self-directed and self-motivated, and following their interests is how kids best learn.

Until I really discovered the true dimensions of our local university's library (Hint: filtering for Three-Dimensional, Mixed-Media gets you all the puzzles and toys and manipulatives!), this was mostly just a way for me to waste my homeschool budget on stuff the kids didn't touch. I mean, sure, they became obsessed with the Geomags and the Kapla blocks, eventually they spent entire weeks with the Perler beads and the Sculpey clay, listened to so many books on cassette tapes that I worried they would never do anything else, but the 3D pen? Nope. Nope to the Zometools for free play. Nope to the crystal growing set and the build-your-own maze set and the Snap Circuits and the Turing Tumble and the balloon animals kit and probably over a thousand dollars more of awesome kid crap over the years that I would have given a year off my life to have played with when I was their ages, ahem.

Anyway, became much cheaper to strew when what I strewed came from my local university's library, and since then, over the years, we've had logic puzzles and board games and STEM toys and math manipulatives and scientific instruments all enticingly placed on our family room bookshelves ready to be explored and easy to return.

Thanks to the library's infinite renewals, I can't even tell you how long we've had Bananagrams. I think we got it around the time we also got the giant poster of the Greek mythology family tree and the giant map of the Moon, and those have both gone back to the library, but Senet and the leaf identification kit are also still here, so maybe it hasn't been too ridiculously long. Although I'm pretty sure several sets of tessellation puzzles have come and gone in that time, as have the Proofs of Pythagoras kit and the French vocabulary flash cards, sooo...

Now that the kids are grown or nearly grown, though, it turns out that the person I'm maybe actually strewing for is myself. I was wandering around the family room the other day, aimlessly tidying while the teenager and I listened to The Haunting of Hill House (it's not translating as well as I'd hoped to audiobook; we're going to finish it, but we don't love it, whereas I LOVED this book when I read it a couple of Halloweens ago), when I noticed, for the first time in ages, the Bananagrams game sitting on the shelves where we keep our library materials, and thought, "Huh. I should play that and see if it's fun."

So I rallied the teenager, and we did play it:

And it IS fun!

You know how Scrabble is generally really fun, but it's also boring waiting for other people to take their turns, and it's terrible when you have a terrific plan for an awesome word to play but before you can do it another person takes your spot?

Bananagrams solves ALL of that. There is never any downtime. You make your own crossword grid that's all for you, so nobody can ever mess it up, and when you see a better play you can rearrange your own crossword however you like:

Teenager peeled an "I" and decided to turn "DOPE" and "DAMN" into "DOPAMINE." 

So, everyone draws the same number of letter tiles (every time I've played it's been with 2 or 3 players, and we always draw 21 tiles), and you each work on your own individual crossword grid.

Matt, our college student home for Fall Break, and I are playing at the kitchen table on a Saturday night, listening to the drive-in's broadcast of the Taylor Swift concert like a good old-timey family.

When you've all of your own letters in your own crossword, you say "Peel," and everyone takes a new tile from the pile and continues playing.

Sometimes you get a new tile and it's like an S or something, so you can just pop it onto the end of a noun. But sometimes you get a Q and you realize that your only U is already busy, so you have to disassemble half your grid to get it back and then figure out how to rebuild while continuing to take a new tile every time someone else says "Peel."

The game continues that way, with occasional breaks to look weird words up as a family or neg someone else's word choice or lore dump about Scrabble games of old, etc., until there are fewer tiles left in the pile than there are players. At that point, we declare that the next person to use up all their letters wins, and then we get in everyone else's business to "help" them finish their own crosswords, but you could also go by Scrabble points.

I think you could also play Bananagrams as a solitaire game, going by how much fun the teenager and I had one time simply turning all our tiles face-up and using them all to make one giant grid. We started off just trying to build the most emotionally unhealthy words we could, as a "joke," so maybe it's also a little bit therapeutic, as well!

Or you could just build words representing the biggest thing on your mind these days...

I'm now officially on thrift store/garage sale lookout for a set of my very own, although I'm also toying with the idea of DIYing a set. They're literally just letter tiles in a zippered bag, and the only requirements are that the letter tiles have enough chonk to be able to pick them up easily, and that they have two sides for facing them up or down.

I think it would be fun to take a set of blank wooden tiles and handpaint each one, maybe with little background decorations like an illuminated manuscript. Think how pretty your crossword grid would be!

Stardew Valley is My Emotional Support Cozy Game

For Father's Day last year, the kids and I gave Matt the newest Playstation, and it has been the BEST TOY EVER! The local public library has an excellent selection of Playstation 5 games, and it took me about a week to build up a nice, long list of cozy games for my holds queue. 

The greatest of these games is Stardew Valley.

I happened to check it out from the library right before Matt and one teenager left for Peru, so there was nothing to stop the other teenager and I from becoming absolutely obsessed with it. After our first game, when I said, "Hey, want to try out this new game with me?" and then I swear the next time I blinked it was four hours later, I literally started to set a phone alarm when we sat down to play together.

When my other teenager had returned from her trip and was out of COVID quarantine and ready to hang out at the same video game console, we started our own co-op game together and she also became obsessed. And then all three of us each started our own individual farms, too...

Like, the only person in the family who doesn't live and breathe and dream Stardew Valley, weirdly, is MATT! The guy who plays every other video game so obsessively that we keep threatening to buy him a Witcher body pillow for his next Father's Day! I tried to start a farm with him one night, but he was... bored, of all things! I don't think there's enough murder and adrenaline in the game for him.

But, of course, the lack of murder and adrenaline is EXACTLY what I love about Stardew Valley!

So, the game. You start out having inherited a small farm adjacent to a small village. From there, you can do what you want. You can putter away on your farm, decide what to grow and plant and water it, harvest it and sell it, make improvements and unlock new things to build and putter around with. 

You can raise animals, and treat them nicely and improve their habitats and sell eggs, milk, and wool, or cook or craft with the products. You can fish, and try to catch different types of fish, and learn how to build crab pots, and build a machine that recycles the trash you fish out of the waters:

You can mine, and collect minerals and gems and ore that you can smelt and build with, kill monsters, explore the levels. 

You can play by yourself, but you can also start a co-op farm that you can share with as many people as you feel like can fit on the screen with you. Then you can both go off and do your own thing or work together. Here, I'm fishing at dusk while my teenager is exploring the mines. We'll share all our loot!

You can interact with the villagers, give them presents and go on quests with them, build friendships and unlock other secret missions. There's a Community Center that you can rebuild by gathering different items and unlocking new areas on the map:

The three of us LOVE trying to collect all the items to work towards rebuilding the Community Center. We are going to be genuinely sad when that challenge is completed!

 Days pass and seasons change, and the seasons bring new plants to grow and forage. You can earn money to improve your tiny little cabin--

--and you can buy and sometimes are given things to decorate it with. None of us have improved our tiny little cabins yet, but one teenager spends a LOT of time and money collecting floors and wallpapers, so it's only a matter of time.

There's a museum where you can donate your weird finds--

It was a mistake to donate that dinosaur egg. Apparently they're REALLY hard to find, and you can incubate an actual dinosaur from one!

--and earn rewards, or you can keep them and display them yourself, or sometimes you'll find that they're called for in future quests or builds.

All the villagers have drama, and when you start to get to know them, they'll involve you in their interpersonal messes. 

One of the teenagers is trying to get Abigail to fall in love with her. It's working!

All of that is available to do, but you don't *have* to do any of it! You can putter around and do exactly what you want. Want to farm and ignore the villagers? Totally fine! Want to put all your efforts into rebuilding the Community Center and ignore your farm? You can do it! You can't die, and you can't lose. You just putter happily away at the work you want to do, feeling like you're busy and making progress, but nothing is so urgent that you have to stress about it.

I know absolutely zero about how video games are created, so the other day I read Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, each chapter of which is about the creation of a different video game. It turns out that most games are build by huge teams, which are then broken down into smaller teams, who then have to figure out how to communicate with each other and work across their various specialties and just when they get something right, someone from the top comes along and changes the direction of the game or wants an entirely different character or just otherwise completely messes everything up.

Stardew Valley, however, was created and programmed and built from scratch almost entirely by one guy, ConcernedApe. For five years, his partner supported ConcernedApe financially while he by turns puttered casually or obsessed deeply, assembling Stardew Valley by bits and pieces according to whatever he felt like working on at any given time. Instead of relying on a team and its specialties, he taught himself all the specialties, all the programs, all the skills required to create a complete video game. This includes scrapping all his work on a section when he improved enough to do a better job. It's... psychotic, honestly. Misanthropic, even. But it IS a masterpiece.

Also? His partner is a hero and a saint. I do not think that I am constitutionally capable of supporting someone for 5+ years while they pursue their dream of single-handedly creating an entire video game from scratch. I mean, that's... that's bonkers! His partner was working and attending college, then working full-time, then working and attending grad school, and the entire time, this guy's in their bedroom fiddling around on the computer. Like, there is definitely a prize for being the Most Supportive Partner, and she won it. 

The kids and I played all summer and fall on the Playstation, and we enjoyed it so much that before we sent Will off to college, Matt bought the PC versions of Stardew Valley for each of us. So now a couple of times a week I phone her, put her on speaker, and then we log into Moonspot Farm for an hour of cooperative puttering while we chat. During that hour, I genuinely forget how far away she is, and how much I miss her.

It's my favorite thing.

Labor Day Weekend in Chattanooga: On Day 3, We Were Pinball Wizards!

THIS is the other compelling reason why I wanted to come to Chattanooga. Not only did they have a museum exhibit of fantasy art, but they also have a museum of pinball and arcade games, all playable with one single admission price!

Matt loves all kinds of video games, including vintage arcade games and pinball games, and I LOVE pinball. Although I owned Nintendo Pinball when I was little, and the movie theater where I worked as a young adult had a pinball game that I spent way too many quarters on, I had never, until this day, played my fill of pinball.

It was a GREAT DAY!

Happily, the rain that had mostly avoided us on the previous day was spitting down off and on all day on this day, which made it the perfect occasion to eat a hotel breakfast and then walk over to the Chattanooga Pinball Museum. I accidentally got into the line for the Maple Street Biscuit Company at first, because we turned the corner, I saw a long line, and assumed that obviously everybody else in Chattanooga would be standing there on a Sunday morning at 10:58, as well, waiting for the pinball museum to open. I mean, what on earth ELSE would you want to do on a rainy Sunday in Chattanooga?!?

Fortunately, Matt was all, "OMG stop standing in line for biscuits, we just ate, come over here and play pinball."

So we did!

The pinball games are set up in roughly chronological order, each with a little stand-up informational blurb sitting on it. The stands were a bit in the way, but later I saw someone hook the stand over the side of the game when they went to play it, so then I did that, too, so that everyone would know that I was an expert.

I absolutely loved the mechanics of these older games. The score physically ticks over as you play, and there are literal bells that the pinball hits that make a delightful musical cacophony. It is magical!

Some of the older games ARE pretty racist, though, which is a bummer:

I love these stylized stencils on the sides:

Move forward in time a decade and you're dealing mostly with sexism rather than racism:

And now you've got more colors and lights and digital effects!

This 1982 Haunted House pinball game was my second favorite game in the museum:

You can't really tell from my terrible photo, but it's a multi-level game, with an upper level at the back that is the haunted attic, but then, if you hit the ball just right, it will roll down into a hidden lower level below the main deck. A green light will turn on, allowing you to see that your ball has rolled into a haunted basement, with new obstacles and flippers that you can control, but the ramp is REVERSED so that it tilts down towards the back of the game! Such an awesome gimmick and very Upside-Downy.

Matt enjoyed the pinball games, too, but he was really there for the vintage arcade games:

He literally stood there and beat the entirety of Streetfighter II:

OMG 1991 me would have been just as impressed as I was on this day!

My favorite thing about pinball is all the millions of fun, creative themes every game has:

Each game always has a new and different creative theme, and new and different gameplay elements that you've never seen before AND that support the theme.

And check out how much of it is hand-drawn. It's like playing a vintage comic!

I don't always love a lot of sensory input all at once, but for some reason, being overstimulated by pinball is the BEST.

Check out the wings on top of this game!

Okay, the one sensory thing that I do not like, actually, is multi-balls. Ugh, two balls in play is TOO MANY BALLS IN PLAY! I can't watch them all, and I just end up losing all my balls quicker than if I'd only kept the one.

So even though I loved the theming of this pinball game (you KNOW how much I love space!), I actually loathed playing it, and I *only* played it something like four or so times before I was done with it for good:

Its multi-ball gimmick? Ugh, I can barely even stand to think about it again. It blasts you with THIRTEEN BALLS SIMULTANEOUSLY. Because it's Apollo 13, get it?

2/10, recommend playing only four times and then never again. That Star Wars: Episode I game to its left was surprisingly awesome, though!

For lunch, we walked through the drizzle to Burger Republic, where I ordered this spiked Nutella shake--

--and then complained to Matt for half an hour that I didn't think it actually had any alcohol in it. But just now, as I was forwarding their spiked shake menu to Matt via email and asking him to learn how to make me ALL of them, preferably this weekend, I noticed that there's also a regular, non-alcoholic Nutella shake.

The menu was one of those giant chalkboards on a wall that you had to look at before you ordered at the counter, so now I'm wondering if I saw the Nutella shake in the spiked shakes section and ordered it without specifying the "spiked" part because I didn't realize there were also virgin Nutella shakes on the menu...

Well, when Matt makes it for me it'll definitely be spiked!

Lunch hit Matt hard, so afterwards, he suggested walking back to the hotel for an afternoon nap. Since it was his birthday weekend, I told him that was an awesome idea, and was then all, "Do you want to just walk back to meet me at the pinball museum when you wake up? Because that's where I'm headed!"

While Matt napped, I discovered my 100% absolute favorite pinball game on the planet, 1999's Revenge from Mars:

It is SO FUN! There's a holographic video screen made possible via a Pepper's Ghost effect that hides the back area where the pinball can go, which means that the game can have all these video-based mini games where you shoot the ball at various holographic targets that are on top of ramps, so you get real-world effects as well as video effects. And the mini video games were SUPER entertaining, like saving the White House from a giant spaceship, or saving the Eiffel Tower from alien troopers, etc.

This 1973 game also had a fun mini game associated with it:

As you play, the pinball builds a game of tic-tac-toe in that central grid:

I was disappointed in this Star Trek: TGN pinball game, which had a lot of cool ramps and gimmicks, but it just wasn't as fun:

Eventually, Matt came back with a second wind--

--and we played pinball for a couple more hours--

--before at one point, just finishing a Hot Wheels pinball game, I kind of blinked and thought, "Huh, is this what it feels like to maybe be kind of tired of pinball? What time is it, anyway?"

Only 7:00 or so, which meant that I'd ONLY been playing pinball for, oh, let's say 6.5 hours. I could literally play another 6.5 hours of pinball right this second, but on that rainy Sunday evening, I reluctantly shook out my aching hands, and found Matt, who reckoned that he, too, could probably be done with pinball.

Instead, we went to go look at a giant waterfall under a mountain!

Compound Sentences against Humanity

After over a year and a half of constant complaining about it, I finally dropped First Language Lessons. It wasn't working for us, and by that I do not mean that it wasn't fun, because I don't personally feel that every school subject has to be the educational equivalent of a trip to the water park. No, I could handle First Language Lessons being dry and tedious.

What I couldn't handle was the eventual, slow realization that my kids weren't learning anything from it. That question and answer, rote-style, fill in the sentence diagram just wasn't getting anything into their brains. The kids weren't really able to identify or construct anything outside of FLL's scaffolding. They couldn't diagram a simple sentence of my own creation. They could barely tell the subject from the predicate! We dumped it, therefore, and I'm back to winging my own grammar curriculum. My goals are to teach grammar concepts as they come up, to continue to emphasize memorization (which FLL *was* great for, but the kids just didn't understand what they were memorizing), and to focus on identification and construction.

I want the kids to be able to identify all grammar concepts, of course, but that will eventually become pedantic. The true purpose of grammar education is gaining the ability to USE these grammar concepts, so that's what our goal should be, no matter where we are in the process.

Currently, I'm teaching compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences, beginning, of course, with compound sentences. You can learn this concept as soon as you've learned nouns, verbs, subjects, predicates, and the definition of a complete sentence, and it's actually a great place to go next, because you'll get a lot of practice in identifying and creating complete sentences, and you'll learn your conjunctions.

There's a good definition of the compound sentence here, and you'll also want to have the kids memorize the short list of coordinating conjunctions. The main point to make, however (and this is an important one, because it's both crucial to differentiating a compound sentence from a complex sentence, AND almost every other elementary resource that you'll find does not teach the correct way to identify a complex sentence, so you'll be relying on this difference when you teach it yourself the correct way), is that the two independent clauses do not rely on each other. They both have equal weight, equal importance in the sentence.

The kids won't understand that when you say it. They'll need examples--LOTS of examples. That's when you play Compound Sentences against Humanity!

Cards against Humanity is similar to Apples to Apples, but more user-generated, MUCH more irreverent, and much, MUCH more fun! I'm working on a Junior version, myself, but Cards against Humanity is otherwise very much for adults.

Compound Sentences against Humanity, however, is for everyone! This game is completely user-generated, since we're making it up, so you can include independent clauses about family members and inside jokes. Try to make all the independent clauses irreverent, as well, because that's way more fun for the kids than sentences that read, "The children pet the cat," etc. Blech!

To play this game, you'll make a set of independent clause cards and a set of coordinating conjunction cards. Make them using the Cards against Humanity template here. I did not include any "nor" cards, because the independent clause structure would have to be altered, and I also took out the "for" cards after the first game, because it was too hard for the kids to correctly structure an independent clause using it. They still memorized those coordinating conjunctions, but we'll deal with their structure another time.

Here are some of my independent clauses:

• Barack Obama is my favorite superhero.
• The Boy Scouts ate at Five Guys. (This is an inside family joke, stemming from an imaginary Boy Scout/Girl Scout rivalry that we pretend exists whenever we see Boy Scouts in uniform.)
• The Nazis invaded Poland.
• Do not swallow that magnet.
• The tiny horse loved baby carrots.
• Snakes do not fly.
• I caught fire.
• Silence is my favorite music.
• Daddy only eats "real" food. (Another inside joke, originating from the hot dog incident in Chicago)

I had some longer independent clauses that I removed after the first game, since the game requires copying them down onto your dry erase board, and it was taking forever.

This game works best with three or more players, because you'll go around the circle and have one player act as judge each time. Everyone else is a player, and everyone should have their own dry erase board and dry erase marker, with a cloth nearby to erase the boards between rounds.

The judge draws one independent clause card and one coordinating conjunction card (I marked the back of the coordinating conjunction cards with a C. Later, when we add subordinating conjunction cards, I'll mark those with an S):

Ignore the fraction on the back of that card; I'm reusing old cardstock.

 

The players will then copy that independent clause onto their dry erase board, add the comma and coordinating conjunction that are required to make a compound sentence, and then create their own independent clause to follow:

When the players are all finished, they turn their boards around and take turns reading their compound sentence:

All sentences will be admired, and the judge will award a unique prize to each sentence--Most Improbable Act to Occur Underwater, for example, or Stuffed Dinosaur the Size of Your Bedroom, etc. All prizes are, of course, imaginary. Rotate to a new judge, and play begins again:

This clause was too long, so I've since removed it from the game.

You really only need to play this game long enough for everyone to have a turn to be the judge. You don't want the kids to get tired of copying and writing, and even in three rounds, that's still two unique examples that they've created and four unique examples that they've read. But you'll want to play it again often, until you can see that it's a total no-brainer for the kids to correctly construct their compound sentences.

As extra practice, you can also have the kids work independently to write compound sentences using these cards, and then to mark nouns, verbs, subjects, predicates, and conjunctions on their sentences. They can copy just the independent clause cards and mark nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, subjects, and predicates. They can diagram just the independent clause cards. They can be in charge of creating a new set of independent clause cards.

Once that's a no-brainer, AND they've memorized a textbook definition of the compound sentence AND the short list of coordinating conjunctions, you can move on to complex sentences or to diagramming compound sentences.
 

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