Gangsters and Win-A-Lot Game

Craziest sight ever!!!  I walked out of my office to find these characters had taken up residence in the family room!
For some reason, some of my girls decided to dress up rather like gangsters from the 20’s, complete with fat bellies and moustaches.
(Hope you put all dad’s clothes back girls!)
One of our gangsters looks rather like a hippie!
The reason for all this?  My eighth grader was learning about the Stock Market and wasn’t quite getting how it worked.  So my older girls decided to help her out by playing a Stock Market game called “Win-A-Lot”.  It’s similar to “Stock Ticker” but I like it better.
My mom had her old NZ edition of this game which was very ancient.  I don’t even know if this game even exists anymore, but one Christmas my talented sister made us our very own version.
The game is pretty simple.  There are four commodities – Silver, Cotton, Pearls and Zinc – which you buy and sell each round, hopefully at a profit!
At the start of each round, you are each dealt one of these cards:
So the card you are dealt will determine your actions, and by watching what others players do, you can follow their leads too.  Obviously if I have a Zinc Up 4 card, I’m going to buy Zinc now and sell it later (and hope someone else doesn’t have the Zinc Down 4 card).
Notice in the top left corner there is a Bear card and a Bull card, which either make everything go up or down.
After everyone has done their transactions each turn, the cards are turned over and the little tokens on the board are moved up and down.  Then on to the next round.
The homemade money.
Here are the rules:
So at the end of the game, our gangsters have dressed down a little!
They’re holding up their fingers indicating which place they finished in.
So the eighth grader finished last, but at least she understands a little better how the stock market works!!!  Oh, and this is a good math game too – lots of buying and selling at different prices!
Now I feel like playing!  Any one up for a game?

 

Board Games

I made my guy a Sequence game for Christmas this year.  We had good memories of playing it with friends in our pre-children days, so I thought it would be fun to have our own game in the house.  And I knew I could make it for way cheaper than I could buy it!  It was funny when he opened the gift because I had wrapped it in two parts.  The first part he opened was a bag of playing cards and poker chips.  His only comment was “Odd!”  I think he thought I wanted him to take up gambling or something!!!
Sequence is the game where you try to be first to get two rows of five chips (see the blue chips above have one row).  Fun and easy to learn, and you can play with 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10 or 12 players – either as singles or teams.  All you need to buy are two decks of cards and a bunch of poker chips in three different colours.
I Googled Sequence and it showed me exactly how the cards are to be placed on the board and what all the rules of the game were.  Notice there are no Jacks on the board.  The Jacks all go into the playing deck and they are the wild cards:  one-eyed Jacks remove a chip and two-eyed Jacks place a chip.  My board is a 19″ x 19″ square with the cards mod podged on it.  You could even do it on cardboard.  The size doesn’t really matter as long as the squares on the board are big enough to hold your poker chip – you just need to be able to see the number and suit.  You chop your cards in half and use each half of the card on the board.  The Joker cards in the corners are free spaces.
 This game sits out on the coffee table all the time, but usually the Sequence side is down and the . . .
. . . checkerboard side is up because it’s much prettier!!!  I painted on the light squares and then stained the board to make the dark parts.  I love these playing pieces!!!  Of course the poker chips would work just fine for checkers, but my oldest daughter who has since left home made these for me when she was about twelve.  She chopped a wooden dowel on the chop saw – I love all the different widths of the pieces!!!  And then she painted each side red or blue so they’re great to play – what’s that game called?  Othello? – where you flip your pieces over to get the board in your colour.  Love that game!
And if you get bored playing board games, you could always . . .
. . . stick poker chips in your eyes!!!