Ugly Doll

Ugly Doll is a kids' game, pure and simple. It's about speed and recognition and matching - skills that most adults have left far behind. It's also about Ugly Dolls, stuffed dolls that are simultaneously cuddly and ugly, and are consequently all the rage in toyland. Which makes it even more suitable to kids, and even less interesting to adults. Which, of course, makes it so kidworthy in the first place.

Designed by one of the chief Gamewright architects, Jason Schneider, the game is elegantly simple. The cards (all 70 of them) are placed face-down on the table and smooshed around. (It is suggested that "cards can and should overlap.") The first player (according to the instructions, "the player who most recently took a bath") turns over any card. The next player turns over any other card. And so forth and on until...no, not until a simple match is found, but until three identical cards are turned over.

Oddly enough, it's the threeness of the match-seeking that makes the game so interesting and so successful. It's significantly more difficult, visually and conceptually, to find three of something than two. Significantly. And, because players grab cards as soon as the third match is revealed, and the cards tend to be scattered both willy and nilly about the table, even if you're not fast enough to be first, there is a good chance that you'll be able to grab at least one of the three - much better, chancewise, than if there were only two of a kind.

For 2-6 players, ages 6-12. Not deep, not profound, but Major FUN especially for, like I said, kids.

Solitaire for seniors?

Dear Major Fun,

Do you have/know of any adaptive games for seniors to do on their own? My dear Auntie recently entered a nursing home at age 96 after having been independent her whole life. She now needs major assistance & can participate in very few group activities. Although they do have an activities director, that person does things like bring Auntie magazines. Auntie used to love to play Bridge; I was thinking that if she had a flannel board of some kind that could hold cards for Solitaire that would be one thing she could probably do in her wheelchair or in bed. I haven’t been able to think of other solo activities, nor have I been able to come up with anywhere to find a board like I’m describing for playing cards.

Major Fun replies:

I've been Googling around. I think magnetic playing cards might be your best alternative. I found them fairly widely available. The most often recommended seem to be these.

However, since you asked, most seniors I know really crave people to play with, a lot more than things to play with by themselves. The real, life-restoring stimulation that they so much need comes from, well, living things.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

The Play Pump

Forgive me, I needs must enthuse. All that talk about serious games and serious play and here we have someone who has sponsored the epitomical manifestation of purposeful play and functional fun - the Play Pump. As explained in the Frontline special, punfully subtitled " Turning water into child's play:"

"(Trevor) Field then teamed up with an inventor and came up with the 'play pump' -- a children's merry-go-round that pumps clean, safe drinking water from a deep borehole every time the children start to spin. Soup to nuts, the whole operation takes a few hours to install and costs around $7,000. Field's idea proved so inventive, so cost-efficient and so much fun for the kids that World Bank recognized it as one of the best new grassroots ideas."

Yes, and of course yes, the Play Pump is only part of the solution to the rest of the world's crying need for an accessible supply of potable water, and my focusing on the use of a children's playground device doesn't begin to do justice to the seriousness of the problem. But, see, fun is my passion, my purpose. Fun, the kind of fun that is central to human growth, essential to the evolution of the species, is what I'm here for, what I'm working for. And the Play Pump, and the similar "Power Wheel" (which also generates electricity) are the very embodiment of that very thing. And, though I haven't actually played with a Play Pump, it is clear that it embraces everything I ever thought was major about Major Fun. Functional fun. Lasting, liquid laughter. Purposeful play.


suggested by Shael DeKoven Weidenbach, funspotter

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith