Maddie is my 6yo (less one week) daughter, and Patience is the card game Americans call Solitaire. Looking through my collection of board and card games, she found a pack (deck?) of regular playing cards and asked to learn “this game.” As I explained, there are hundreds of games that can be played with a pack of cards.
I had to choose just one, for the moment. I decided on Patience. Maddie caught on fairly fast, although she currently lacks the patience required to really enjoy Patience.
More her speed is Star Wars: Episode 1 – Clash of the Lightsabers. It’s a card game, but the cards in question are specific to the game: it’s not played with a regular pack of cards. It’s a pretty good game for a movie tie-in. I’m relieved to say that it’s way better than the movie with which it ties in.
Clash is a card game simulating a lightsaber fight. The theme is pasted on, but pasted on pretty well with images from the movie on some of the cards, and figures for the two fighters. Most of the cards represent attacks of differing strengths. They are played during a series of duels. Some of the more interesting decisions concern when to concede a particular duel in order to preserve quantity and quality of cards for future duels.
Maddie’s good guy defeated my villan, although I think it’s fair to say that our discussions of the game as we played helped her more than they helped me. She asked to play again the next day, and again won; I’m sticking to my story about helping her.
She did get the strategy of conceding the current duel in order to be stronger later. So perhaps she has more patience, or at least ability to defer gratification, than it seemed when we were playing Patience.
Clash is out of print, but available via sites including Amazon and BoardGameGeek. I bought my copy years ago, when it was going out of print and available very cheaply.
I’m glad I hung on to Clash. It’s similar to Battle Line (that’s another link to BoardGameGeek, and here’s another link to Amazon), one of my favorite card games. While I hope that Maddie and I will play Battle Line in a few years, Clash is better for her now: it has simpler rules, and well as a theme she likes.