February 25, 2015
OK, here we go… this is the first of many posts that it will take to show you all the classic games that are here in the Wunderland game room! Here’s how this will work: I will periodically post a new section of the shelves for you to see. If there is anything you would like me to open up and show the contents / rules / etc. just post a comment to that effect and I will do so in an upcoming post. Enjoy! 🙂
So many different Masterminds! I played a lot of that myself as a kid. And I’m guessing that Word Mastermind is like a game we played on napkins at restaurants where one person thinks of a word and the other has to guess only real words and gets markings for correct letters and correct orientation. Othello and Stay Alive were also heavily played in my childhood. Which did you play?
View from the Elf 
I have been a big fan of Mastermind since childhood but have never played those variants! Mastermind is a perfect game for demonstrating the two big transitions in cognitive development (summarized in the “Field Guide to Children” I wrote for Looney Labs long ago) : A pre-operational child may enjoy placing the pieces and guessing but cannot apply the scoring information toward making her next guess. Around 7 years old, as concrete operations kick in, the child makes progressively better guesses as the game moves along but typically fails to look back more than one row. It’s not until formal operations, 11 or 12 years old, that kids apply the information in a really logical and thorough way. It’s fun to watch someone who’s right on the edge of a new stage cracking his brain against this game!
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Thanks for the great link, ‘Becca! I loved reading it, and am now looking forward to playing Fluxxentration, which I had never heard of until now. Woo-hoo! I hope you don’t mind that I reblogged it over on my educational website, lauriemenke.com. And yes, I, too, played a lot of Mastermind as a kid, but didn’t know of the variants. I’m hoping to get to play them sometime soon. 🙂
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