Chalk and Cheese Chronicles

A Board Game for the Holidays: Blurt!

Board games give us family time. I love sitting at the table with my boys with nothing else to distract us. No TV, no video games, no homework, no play dates - just a board game and us. Sometimes we're joined by daddy and a bowl of popcorn. Lately, we've been playing Monopoly Jr, Camp, Guess Who and chess, which seems to be very popular among 5 and 6-year-old boys.

About a month ago, I was sent a complimentary copy of the board game Blurt which has quickly become one of our favorite board games.

I play this game with my 6-year-old twin boys. We all love throwing restraint to the wayside and just blurting out answers with abandon.

Set up is easy: there's just a board, one die and several colored game pieces. We roll, we read the corresponding question and we blurt!

I like this game because my boys can read the questions themselves, which is part of the fun.

We play the "easy" side of the cards, the one with the stars at the top. I admit to sometimes skipping over some cards in favor of those that might seem more interesting to my boys.

 

Some sample questions:

A mass of water droplets floating in the sky (clouds)

A food made from the solid part of milk that has turned sour (cheese)

White ice crystals that form high in the air and fall to the ground as tiny flakes (snow)

This game is simple to set up and play, and full of fast paced fun. It's rated age 7+ which I think is because players should be able to read well to play the game. But you can tweak the rules and let mom or dad or an older sibling do all the reading.

So if you have a 6 to 8-year-old child, boy or girl, this may be a great game to put on your Christmas shopping list. I say it's a perfect addition to family game night.

Looking to buy Blurt? I happened to see it at Barnes and Noble toy bookstores and at small, independent toy stores.

 

This is an original post to Chalk and Cheese Chronicles.

The Sony PSP 3000: Fun for the Family (and gift card giveaway!)

7/26/10 This contest is now closed. Congrats to the winner, megryansmom!

(You can skip my amateur video and scroll down for the giveaway.)

If we were to add up all the points my kids and I have accumulated playing games on the Sony PSP 3000, I would be the biggest loser.

Kids: 10,000 points   Mom: 10 points

I'm just not good at video games.

Way back in the early days of video games, my brother and I used to play Super Mario, Asteroids and Defender. My brother excelled at video games, while I struggled. My parents tried to keep things fair, making us take turns using the two player option. His turn, my turn. His turn, my turn. Only my brother's turn would stretch to thirty minutes or longer, before it was my turn again. I'd be so excited and then, three scant minutes would go by... and I'd lose and then it would be my brother's turn yet again. I did all that waiting around just to have to wait around again.

Not fun.

I bought two games for our new Sony PSP: Toy Story 3 and Lego Harry Potter (see a great review of this game on Who's the Boss). Before I showed the game to my boys, I tried out the games, starting with Toy Story 3.

Sony PSP Family Fun on the Road

We were on the road for 13 hours! We drove and drove AND DROVE from my brother's house near Portland back to the Bay Area, stopping only once along the way, in Ashland where I swear I left a piece of my heart because I just love that city.

As our boys nodded off in the back seats, I sat there, bored. I'd lost cell phone service, so I couldn't check in on Twitter or Facebook, but fortunately, I had my new Sony PSP 3000 with me and remembered that it had come to me preloaded with two movies, Tooth Fairy and It's Complicated.

I chose to watch It's Complicated. I plugged in my headset and settled in to watch the movie. It was a nice change of pace to escape the boredom of the road. The little compact PSP fit snugly in the palms of my hands and the screen was big enough that I didn't have to squint to it. I spent about two hours watching Meryl and Alec pursue and reject and pursue and reject each other on-screen.

The time passed very quickly.

Sony PSP Family Fun comes my way!

 

I am doing the happy dance to now have a new Sony product in my household. It's been years since I worked at Sony but I remember browsing through the Family store of the Silicon Vallley corporate office and how my friends would all try to get me to use my employee discount on B stock product.

I'm not a gamer and I'm sure I never would have bought myself a PSP with my employee discount. But that was well before kids. Now I'm all about keeping my kids entertained this summer so when I was invited by Sony Corporate Entertainment America to spend the summer with the Sony PlayStation 3000 as part of the PSP Summer Family Fun blogger program, I jumped at the chance. 

Follow along as we go through our summer with the PSP in hand. This week, we're on a road trip from the Bay Area to the Pacific Northwest. We left our Leapsters at home and instead brought with us our new PSP.

While our travels won't take us anywhere exotic (sure wish I had relatives overseas!), I think our road trip travels mirror that of many American families. How will will handle road trip fatigue? How will we get our boys to share and not fight? I might not have all the answers and I will surely make some mistakes along the way, but it will be an adventure.

I will have a PlayStation network gift card worth $50 to giveaway next week...so stay tuned!

LeapFrog Fails at Customer Service

 Oh, LeapFrog. You impressed me when you talked about the research that goes into the creation of your products. Solid products, solidly researched.

Then I got my hands on a Didj. You kindly gave me one; the other, I purchased from your on-line store. My preschoolers quickly became hooked on the simple Jet Pack Heroes game, a free download which they easily played at the kindergarten level. The premise of the game is to rack up points by shooting down what my kids called "ghost-es," it's an innocuous little game with a few educational components built in for good measure. We loved it. It was a perfect first electronic game, especially for long car rides.

But then I tried to spend the Bitz (points earned). I think my boys had somehow earned 150 Bitz which I learned we could spend on customizing their screens via the LeapFrog site. For Jet Pack Heroes, this meant we could use our earned Bitz to buy screen moods (chill, nightfall, strawberry) and keys which open secret rooms. I also spent about 20 minutes on the Didjerator and created 10 Didji characters for the screen hero. My kids loved the new customized looks of the Jet Pack Heroes game. All worked well for about a week.

Then everything disappeared in a poof. The custom moods and the characters - gone. Of course, my kids noticed right away. So off I went to sync up our units yet again. I spent about an hour spending Bitz on custom features (it was slow going) and thought I'd done everything correctly but when I turned on our Didjis after syncing, there was nothing there. I checked our account and the amount of Bitz in our account read a big fat zero, as if the Bitz economy were directly tied to the woes of the real economy. I went through the process again and again. But nothing I did on the LeapFrog site came through. I would have been fine with it, but my children refused to play the game without being able to select from different characters and micromods.

My boys put down their Didjis and refused to play without the added screen bling.

I emailed customer service, but eventually only received an automated reply telling me to check the product FAQs. I called customer service three times and they were absolutely useless. Calling LeapFrog's customer service (an overseas call center) was akin to throwing the user manual at a random person and having them leaf through it in an attempt to help me. Last May, I'd also tried calling them but kept getting voicemail even though I'd called within stated operating hours. I even lurked on the LeapFrog forums but saw no real solutions there. So, their customer service was horrible then and it's horrible now.

Oh and the Learning Path site is a maze to navigate. First, it welcomes me by name but then asks me to log in. I feel like I'm always logging and re-logging in - it's never clear whether the system has recognized me, even when I attempt to sync our Didjis. Finding my way around that site is confusing. I never feel like I know where I am or where I'm supposed to go. I think they need to re-design that site from scratch. I have never been able to use the Learning Path site to track my children's progress (not that I care to do so). Not sure why.

I wish our Didj had come pre-installed with Jet Pack Heroes, complete with the ability to customize the screen. But they strove to offer more than that by luring us to the Learning Path and they failed miserably. I want to talk to an informed customer service rep, one who knows the technical aspect of the games; not someone who is reading from the manual for the first time. I want you to email me when software patches are available. And psst, my husband suspects the software creation had been farmed out to contractors who may no longer be involved in the build.

LeapFrog, you really had my admiration up until I encountered technical difficulties. It's at the customer service level that your company fails. Why put so much time and money into the excellent research end of your products when you can't follow through at the customer service end? I really feel like I wasted my money on your product. I don't want to see you fail. You'd pumped up my expectations only to let them down with a thud. I think most of your customers give your products high ratings until they hit a glitch and have to work with LeapFrog customer service.

You have a problem, LeapFrog. It's floating around here and here and of course, here. Oh, and here. And also here. Wow, that was exhausting.

What next, LeapFrog?

Original post to Chalk and Cheese Chronicles.