Looking back to 2001, and forward too

Here's the introductory paragraph from the old Games for Kids website that I wrote back in 2001:

Kids are capable of playing and enjoying a lot more than most game companies seem to give them credit for. Unfortunately, there are far too many games on the market for kids that are simply no fun for an adult or, sadly, even for kids. But there are some games out there that are simply great games to play with kids. They are challenging and fun without being too hard for a child to play. This site is dedicated to reviewing those "good" games that you can play with your kids. Not necessarily "educational" games, because some of them can be pretty mindless. These pages are a compilation of some of our family's favorite games and a collection of suggestions from interested readers of the pages.

After that short introduction, there was a simple link to an index page, and from there a reader could bounce from game to game alphabetically. There was also a way for people to suggest games that had worked in their family, and I had a few reviews written by friends of mine in place too.

In the five years since I first wrote that paragaph, our family has grown, we have moved, and our game collection has continued to be an important part of our family relaxation time. We've gone on several family trips to Gulf Games, where the kids have played games with people from all over the world. We've introduced games to family friends, and also to extended family members. Please bear with me as I continue to work on building this blog. It has been a long time since I've had the time to write reviews on a regular basis. I'm not promising any degree of regularity here, but I expect to be able to pull together the reviews from the old site and get them looking good soon. Stay tuned!

Some background information...

Several years ago I put together a set of pages reviewing games for kids. I've got four kids, and as an avid gamer, I was interested in making my hobby a family activity. When I bought a game, or considered buying a game, one of the things I wanted to know was whether it was something my kids could play with me. I looked over the net for reviews that focused on how well a game worked with kids, found one or two sites that were not regularly updated, and ended up writing my own reviews.

I still get email from people asking me whatever happened to the Games for Kids website. And even though my site has been offline for a while, I've always planned to revive it. Life being busy, I decided to start by setting up this blog. A blog is easier to update than web pages, and, to put it bluntly, I'm pretty much incompetent at doing much with HTML. So this should be a way to keep things flowing at a bit more of a regular pace.

My plans are to dust off some of the old pages and post them here. Then I'll start working through reviews I've written but have never posted. Eventually, I'd like to recreate a full-fledged website. Maybe I'll end up taking stuff that gets posted here and archive it on a website somewhere. I guess that is a goal to shoot for. Let's see how well I do at posting regularly to this Blog.

One thing I've learned is that the busy-ness of life with kids will cut into my plans to write and publish things on the web. I now know why the sites I found with reviews of games for kids were not regularly updated. I ended up just as busy as the parents who wrote the reviews before me. Before you know it you are no longer gaming with kids, you are gaming with teens. On the plus side of things, it opens the door to a totally different set of games. Now I'm playing Ticket to Ride with my youngest daughter instead of Chicken Cha Cha Cha. However, it also means I don't have much incentive to buy the latest Haba game, other than for the sheer joy of what comes in those yellow boxes.

So to make sure that the content here stays up to date with the latest releases for younger kids, which I don't have any more, I plan to invite reviews of games for younger kids by several of my friends who do have younger kids. Hopefully it will work to open this Blog up to submissions by a group of reviewers. I suspect there will be a way to take submissions from just about anyone...but more on that as this site develops.