And the cannons... mustn't forget the cannons. There are three of them: one for each ship & one for the fort. They fire small rubber-tipped projectiles at a very nice velocity - not "Red Ryder BB gun/you'll put your eye out" velocity, but sufficient to trigger the targets.

Let's start with Bob the Tomato:

Bob is simply expressing a bedrock truth - one of the time-honored themes of kid gaming is cats chasing mice: Cat & Mouse (there at least 5 different games w/this name in the BGG database), Pounce!, Cheese Chasers, Mouse Trap: The Card Game, So Ein Kase, Mause-Rallye, and the ever popular Mush Mouse & Punkin Puss Game. (OK, it's not ever-popular... but it was published the year I was born, so that oughta count for something.)

Seems the wolverines are miffed that the swamp vulture has kidnapped the baby gulo... so, in order to obtain his release, they begin stealing eggs from his nest. (Does this sound like a weird Jack Bauer-ish hallucination... or have I just been watching too much 24?) The first player to find the gulo and steal a purple egg wins the game.

I wasn't sure whether to include this game in the Kid Games 100 or not - one of my criteria from the beginning was that the games had to be as much or more fun with kids than they were with adults. (When we finish, I'll give you the list of "kid games" I think are better as adult games.) Then I got to watch my son play it with me & with his best friend... and I realized I couldn't cut the game out.

Granted, it's a lot more "tactical" when playing with adults... with kids, it's pretty random & the game usually ends with one player losing three of their mice into the dungeons. But it's not like that's a bad thing.

See, the ladybugs are having a costume party - so they've decided to trade colored spots. (Yes, kids, this happens in the real world all the time, as bugs often exchange their coloring with each other & hold tiny bug raves where they play remixes of Adam Ant and the Scorpions and dance the night way using glow sticks provided by their friendly neighborhood lightening bugs.)

Now, you'd think that my sarcasm about the theme would keep me from enjoying this cooperative memory game - but it doesn't. Maybe it's because I think that the wooden ladybugs with the magnetic noses are so darn cute... or because the idea of yellow wooden ants advancing up the vine to chow down on the picnic food is appealing to me in some way... or probably because after 63 games of this with my kids, this is such a playable & enjoyable game that I'm ready to play it again.

Let's get this out of the way: the worst thing about most Haba games is their English names. "Twiddle Turtle"? Is it a turtle who's twiddling his thumbs? Do turtles have thumbs? And if they do, are they opposable? Well, to bring it full-circle, I oppose the stupid English name of the game.

I do not, however, oppose the game. This game is an act of genius - and my hat is off (using my opposable thumb to grab it) to Herr Hofstatter for the brilliant design of the racing turtles at the 111th Turtle Olympiad.

The theme is pretty simple - the players are jungle explorers, searching for treasure in Mayan temples. Fighting through the jungle involves a variety of tasks: rebuilding ancient ruins, finding needed supplies and/or dangers, reassembling jeweled masks, and rushing to the help of other adventurers. (There's also a "throw a gem in the air & catch it" task that I just can't come up with a thematic reason for... but who cares?)

Each player has a small wooden ship with a cloth sail... and there's a pirate ship (call him what you will - I like to call him "the Dread Pirate Roberts" but then again I'm the guy who got a "Have Fun Storming The Castle" t-shirt for Christmas.) On your turn, you roll the die and either get to move your ship or the Dread Pirate.

The trick of the game is how you move your ship... and that's where the nose squeegee comes into play. Depending on which ship you're moving (player or pirate) and what you roll, you get 3 or 4 "puffs" to scootch the ship across the board. There are raised islands and a raised border - each island has a harbor area which is your objective. Park the ship in a harbor (even just a little bit) and you get all the gold that has accumulated on that island (also generated by a die roll).

But this is NOT a simple "roll'n'move." (For those of you who aren't steeped in gaming hobby lingo, "roll'n'move" is a derisive term for games that boil down to rolling the dice & moving that number of spaces - Chutes & Ladders, for example, is an infamous roll'n'move game.) At the start of your turn, you may roll the die of ANY player... thus slowing down a leader (if their die has a particularly good match) or helping yourself (if you're just drifting along).

Well, it certainly looks like a cute kid game, doesn't it? Pretty kid art, little wooden jockeys with interchangeable wooden horses, nifty little wooden fences... but don't be fooled. This game is "mummy, daddy, don't touch it's Ee-vil" in a box. (A very cute box, mind you.)

Small children are SCARY good at this game... I've watched kids lap the board just to prove that they can, while the adults they were playing with were still struggling to remember 1/2 of the tiles in play.

This is actually the fifth version of this particular game system:

* Kangaroo (1974)
* Generalowsky (date?)
* Pushover (1981)
* Die Heisse Schlacht am Kalten Buffet (1990)
* Monster Fressen (1998)

Give Alex Randolph credit - he managed to keep this baby afloat for 24 years & five different editions.

And here's why - the game play is simple to explain, there's a lovely push-your-luck dice rolling mechanic at the heart of the game, and it's just plain fun. Whether the theme is racing kangaroos, Soviet generals, odd little men riding on golems, scarfing the best food at a cold buffet or monsters sampling dinner from the kitchen, the heart of the game is the ol' "just one more roll" dilemma.

This is the game that "A Christmas Story" warned you about - "You'll shoot your eye out." Which explains, I think, why it hasn't been published in the U.S.

It's a little difficult to describe, but it's essentially a cooperative text adventure without a lot of text. Using circle-shaped "tools", the players attempt to find the best item among them to help solve the problem - whether that be avoiding a swarm of bees or trying to get out of an overstuffed chair. The notch on the tool card is lined up with the notch on the "problem" card and a small hole in the tool card reveals a letter - which corresponds to a result on the problem card. Many times, you defeat the card & get to claim a reward (which is a more powerful tool, usually)... though sometimes the problem causes the group some trouble. (Most of the group ended up asleep on the floor at one point; another time, they were all stuck to the walls of the room they were in.)

My older son enjoys this game more than Der schwarze Pirat, I think primarily because of the frenetic pace of each of the turns. I was surprised by this, as I thought that the pirate theme would beat the magic carpet theme - but evidently not. I'm good with either of them: Akaba if I'm up for high-charging silliness, The Black Pirate if I'm wanting more of a careful dexterity challenge.

This is one of those games where the old "how do you get to Carnegie Hall?" joke comes into play - you need to practice flipping discs to get to the second (memory) part of the game - your first games will be over (for the most part) before the memory element comes into play.

But Heinz Meister, the designer of Rein damit!, managed to take some of the basic ideas from these two games and mold them into a game that's been a hit with kids, families, adults & gamers (yes, I made "adults" and "gamers" two separate categories - sue me) over & over again.

Flicking games are tricky with small children... the fine motor skills required to play Carabande well don't kick at age 4 or 5. (A great game, btw, now republished as Pitchcar - but still better suited to the 8 & up crowd.) But your average little kid LOVES to flick stuff - they just need a confined play space in which to do it.

Which is where Mice Rally comes in...

24 small wood chips in the shape of a mouse (or, now, a hippo) and a polished wooden ring... that's it. That's all that you find a box of Maus nach Haus (Mouse in the House - the version from Haba) or Hula Hippos (the more recent reprint by Gamewright). OK, there's rules in there, too... but that hardly counts.

And yet, Heinz Meister (he's my hero!) milks more fun out of those simple game components than many games whose boxes are stuffed full of boards & bits.

So, I open the box, look at the great pieces (wooden camels & chunky tiles with a draw bag), and then begin pulling out the pieces that make up the board... and I realize that I already own this game. It was published some years back by Ravensburger as Up the River - not a bad game, mind you, but not something I figured I'd be playing a lot. Having a second copy with a different theme originally seemed like a mistake.

At closer examination, however, the games are not identical... and, much as I love Ravensburger, Haba did a better job developing & publishing this game.

Yeah, it's probably easier to sell a game named "Sherlock" - but I'm still in love with the absolutely trippiness of "The Awkward Bag Turns On" as a game title.

There have been a lot of editions of this game - in English alone it's had two different names (Midnight Party and Ghost Party). I think my favorite is Spöktimmen... I have no idea what language that is but it looks like Hugo (the ghost in the game) formed a Icelandic heavy metal band.

This is the Spiderman 2/The Empire Strikes Back of kid games... a game sequel that is much better than the game that gave it a chance at existence. In this case, the game that proceeded it is the 2004 Kinderspiel-winning Geistertreppe (Ghost Stairs), which I thought was an OK memory game that was likely (among equal players) to degenerate into a kingmaker situation. (The magnetic ghost thingee, however, was nifty.)

Once you start playing, you quickly find out that you've got a lot more here than nifty components - there's a wicked gambling/bluffing/dexterity game shoehorned into the box. (This, btw, is another one of those kid games that works really well with a group of adults - even with no kids in sight.)

This is probably as close as we're going to get on the Kid Games 100 to touting an "abstract" kids game. See, I'm not a big fan of abstracts (I'll give exceptions to Zertz, Siesta & Pyraos) so you'd think this nearly perfect information game wouldn't be my cup of tea. You'd be wrong.