Shave a Sheep Lego Game (image:lego.com)
Our family has for sometime had a tradition of creating our own board games. Not only is it great fun to make up the rules, but we can theme them around people and places that are specific to us.
I recently discovered that Lego has for some time been creating a range of brick-based board games. For some, the novelty of Lego and gaming would be the main draw here. For us though it’s the ability to customize each game that has got us excited.
I recently got together with a friend of mine (Ed Stephens) to play Lego’s Shave a Sheep. As he later wrote on his board game blog, “it’s a game that essentially consists of rolling the dice to add wool to your sheep. Once it’s full or you roll a pink Shear square, you can harvest your progress. Before then you are in danger of losing it to other players or the wolf.”
Playing the game with our families we found that all the kids (ranging in ages from four to seven) were more than able to play.
But, again as Ed highlighted in his board game review, “the real genius of these games is the customizable dice. It comes in the pack blank, and part of the instructions is to configure the dice for a particular game. But if you find your kids are rolling too many wolf pieces and the game is taking too long you can simply adjust the dice to speed things up. So simple but so effective.”
We spent a happy afternoon dreaming up a handful of variants of the basic Shaving Sheep game. This started with the pieces in the box, but soon escalated as we introduced other Lego pieces to make proceedings a little more tactical.
Find Lego’s full line of games on their site.
