My youngest loves to make up games and also manipulate existing games or pieces to create something new. When we were snowed in last week her and her Papa (who’s a big  geek) worked together to create an amazing game which she named “Dinosaur Smash!”.

They assigned various attributes and points to each of her various plastic dinosaurs (Life, Movement, Attack and Defence) which they wrote on a card that the dinosaur would stand on. Next they divided them further into herbivores and carnivores. For this game the “game board” was my living room rug which represented a huge field. The train track, which had been living on that rug for days, represented a lake, small plastic trees represented food for the herbivores and small rocks represented “meteors that can blow up”.  Each person then chose their dinosaurs and the game play started.

The rules were fairly simple before each round each player rolls a 6 sided die to see who goes first.  The person with the highest number goes first and moves all of their dinosaurs.  The dinos move the number of inches that corresponds to their Movement attribute (MEASURING!)

If on your turn one of your dinosaurs comes within 2″ of another dinosaur they can then attack. To attack you roll a die and add that amount to the dino’s attack points to get their total attack. The opponent does the same but with their defense points. The defense points are then subtracted from the attack points. If the result is negative then there is no damage done, if the result is positive then it’s subtracted to the Life points of the dino and if that number’s negative the dino dies (MATH!). It sounds way more complicated than it actually is.

In this case it didn’t work out too well for the yellow dinosaur.

The play continues until all of the other dinosaurs are no longer and only one person’s dinosaurs remain. This could be played with any kind of animal figurine and I could see how researching various animals as to determine their attribute points would add another dimension to the learning aspect of the game. Despite my husbands years of playing strategy games my oldest kicked his but.