Games By 8 Year Olds

["pirategirl17" <phayze.spyder@...>]

My 8-year-old son and his best friend discovered my piecepack set
tonight, and between the time they got it out and asked what it was,
and I came back downstairs from putting the baby to bed, they had
invented two games of their own.  They're pretty simple games, but I
promised I would post them up here.

The first game is called "Chi Blast".  You use only the coins for this
one, and divide them up between the two players.  You play it
basically like War - Each player chooses one coin without looking at
the number.  After putting the coin in front of you, you yell "Chi
Blast!" and turn the coin over to show the number, and whoever has the
highest number gets both coins.  The idea is to get all the coins.  A
variation that showed up after a couple of games was the ability to
put out up to three coins at a time, and add them all up.  An element
to the game that doesn't really have anything to do with winning or
losing is that the person with the most black coins is "evil".

The second game, and slightly more complicated, is called "Dark
Duels".  In Dark Duels, red and black are evil, and blue and yellow
are good.  Each player picks a pawn to be, and each player has 10 hit
points.  We used 10 tiles to stand for hit points, but we only had two
players.  All the coins get put into some kind of container to be
pulled out of.  Each suit represents an element.  The elements are, in
order of precedence; Black is Dark, Red is Fire, Blue is Water, and
Yellow is Thunder.  So, Dark beats everything.  Good players can only
use Water, Thunder, and Fire, but only bad players can use Dark.  To
play, each player takes turn picking a coin out of the container and
laying it element-side (suit-side) up in front of their pawn.  If a
good player draws a Dark coin, just put it back and draw again.
Whichever element is higher on the order wins.  If both elements are
the same, flip the coin over and the higher number wins, nulls being 0
and aces being 1.  Used coins go into the Spell Graveyard and are out
of the game.  The winning player rolls a die, and removes that many
hit points from the other player, again nulls are 0 and aces are 1.  A
player has to be knocked out by exact count.

Each game only took about five minutes to finish a round.