Patrick Matthews's Blog, page 5

Potato Pirates!

Publisher: ThinkFun
Players: 3 – 6
Ages: 7+

Looking for a game that’s not only silly fun, but surprisingly strategic? Check out Potato Pirates, by ThinkFun.

Read my full review at https://www.playineducation.com/post/review-of-potato-pirates

Goodbye Games for Educators

Back in 2006, Mary Couzin asked me if I would be interested in running a newsletter for her. After getting a bit more information, I realized that I wanted to do way more than that. Sure, I’d run the newsletter, but I also wanted to build a web site, edit the newsletter, and write articles.

What was it that had me jump in so enthusiastically? The mission. Mary wanted to encourage the use of games and toys in education. I did, too. For us, education didn’t just mean classrooms. It means every...

Getting emotional on the new year

Do you have anything that you celebrate simply because it’s a celebration?

The New Year is like that for me. I’ve always thought of my birthday as the new year, but I still love the excitement of the calendar new year, and I’m more than happy to celebrate it with everyone and anyone who is interested.

Cinco de Mayo is the same way. It’s a great party, but I have no personal connection to Mexico defeating France. I just celebrate it because it’s a party.

I’m guessing that St. Pat’s day is prob...

Enter the Shadows

Looking for a completely new board game experience for the upcoming holidays? Check out Shadows in The Forest, by ThinkFun.

You play Shadows in the Forest in the dark. In fact, the darker the room, the better. One person plays the Seeker. The others play Shadowlings, cute little mask-wearing creatures that hide in the shadows.

If you’re the Seeker, you roll the glow-in-the-dark die, and then move your LED lantern around the board, looking for Shadowlings. If you spot one, you steal its mask....

Ship of Treasures

Every year, the Chicago Toy and Game Fair hosts a Young Inventor Challenge. One of the 2016 award winners was recently published, and I wrote a review of it for Games for Educators. [I don’t publish that site anymore, but I still write for it]

Here’s an excerpt of the review:

Ship of Treasures is an incredibly well-produced game of piracy for kids ages 8 and up. In it, players take the role of pirates searching a pirate ship for treasure.

Instead of using a traditional game board, Ship of Tre...

Getting back in the world

It’s been a couple years since I was published, either as a writer or as a game designer. This quiet period hasn’t been due to any sort of writer’s block or lack of desire. It’s simply been a fact of life. Family comes first, and when family health issues arise, sometimes we have to scale back.

In my case, I had to scale back quite heavily. I stepped away from publishing Games for Educators, stopped going to game conventions to license my games, stopped pitching new writing projects, and drop...

Surviving the news

The news these days is so dismal, with story after story of harassment (and worse). Everywhere we look, it seems that some person in power is taking advantage of someone not in power.

It’s opened our eyes to what seems to be an epidemic of bad character, and we’ve learned that we need to be both more aware and more sympathetic. People are being victimized, and not finding the help they need when they are at their most vulnerable. In the halls of power, we hear excuses for the victimizers and...

A surprise poem

My mother passed way a few months ago, and it has fallen to me to review the decades of paperwork she had accumulated.

I started out ruthless, glancing at files and tossing them. That didn’t last long. A sense of obligation crept over me, a feeling that I was not fulfilling my duties. Some of these papers were dated from before I was born. Who was I to just toss them aside? How could I not give each one at least some consideration?

So I’ve spent the past months flipping page-by-page through t...

Schrödinger’s Millionaire

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the lottery. On the one hand, the odds of winning are so ridiculously small that it feels very much like a tax on people who don’t understand probabilities.

On the other, a non-zero chance at becoming obscenely wealthy is significantly different than a zero percent chance.

For a while, I settled on occasionally buying lottery tickets, then ripping them up after I lost.

The problem with that process is that the disappointment of losing far outweighs any fun...

Feeling brave?

I recently came up with a family game (of sorts) that scared me so much, it took me a solid week of preparation before I was willing to pitch it to my family. After two weeks of playing, I’ve decided that I’m ready to share. Be warned, though: this is different than any game you’ve ever seen me write about.

It doesn’t have name.

It doesn’t have a winner, either, or a loser. It’s neither cooperative nor competitive.

Setup

Bring a die to the dinner table. I like an eight-sided die, but you coul...