Beginner Dinner Games

Beginner Dinner Games, and its precursor, Dinner Games, are a cute concept - brief, interactive family activities designed for dinnertime packaged as cards in a recipe-box-style tin. We don't go much for cute for its own sake. We also don't go for gift items that are designed to be snagged while waiting to be checked out at the bookstore, gifted with good intentions, and never used.

But Beginner Dinner Games, which we've been playing occasionally for the last few months at our house, rises to the challenge of its cute concept. Card after card offers engaging ways to enjoy your three- to six-year-old's comany at the dinner table, and the mealtime context is not wasted. An "If I had three wishes" discussion centers around a "magic spoon" used as a wand; "The Royal Crown" invites family members to secretly pull a folded napkin from a person's head and hide it under the table. But they aren't all prop-based. A couple of recent favorites:

Face Off: Someone chooses an emotion or reaction (i.e. 'Ouch, I stepped on a bee'). Have a "Face Off" between two people to see who makes the best facial expression to go along with that emotion or reaction! Vote on the best expression. Whoever wins, they get to "Face Off" against someone else. For example: finding your lost teddy, getting kissed by a puppy, hearing a monster's footsteps, stepping on hot sand at the beach, losing your ice cream money, hearing a funny joke....

Silent Dinner: For about 1 minute, everyone must be completely silent. No talking or making noise, just eat, drink and listen to sounds. After a minute, let the youngest person begin by talking about what he/she heard. Go around the table to find out how many different sounds are heard. (i.e. refrigerator noise, washing machine, birds outside, plane overhead...)

Here's an example card, from the Family Time Fun Dinner Games website:

Z wishes she had "a mountain cupcake," a "cupcake of spoons," and "a kiss from daddy." The third I was able to deliver. The Beginner Dinner Games box has 51 different "games" for families to play, and there are very few with the air of filler; for a full deck of activities, it's an impressive ratio.

The box states these activities are for ages 3-6. One of the benefits of the recipe-box format is it discourages commitment to any single game idea. It is easy to browse and scan and pick out something that looks right for your child. Many of the question-based games were particularly engaging for us because we couldn't imagine what Z would say, or wondered if she was "ready" and would even understand the question. This is a great opportunity to let your kids surprise you with what's going on inside their heads.

We do wish a little something could be done about the $16 price tag. The recipe-box concept is, as I said, cute, and helps this product stand out on the bookstore gift table. But putting these on a standard card deck could have knocked the price down to $1o easily, and could be marketed as a "travel edition" for meals on the road. The bane of activity-deck writers' existence (haven't you been wondering what it is?) is that standard card decks come in sets of 54, and printing a smaller number would lead to expensive customization costs in everything from card printing to box design to the packaging process. You basically have to make 52 card-decks or have an underground wonderland full of oompa loompas to do your bidding. For those of us who are not Willy Wonka this means much narrower wiggle room on pricing than, say, book publishing.

There could be some interesting alternative ways to disseminate these games. The laid-off advertising exec behind the concept originally marketed them to companies to put on their packaging (of what type, I'm not sure). But their short-form design and the fact that they explicitly tie into the "family dinner" movement makes me think they'd do well with newspaper syndication - most larger U.S. papers these days have a Family or Lifestyles page; why not drop one a day into a box on the section front and promote it as a fun activity for families to use at that evening's meal? The real risk in these formats would be the risk of copycats diluting its value by parroting the concept without table-testing the games or really caring whether the outcomes are actually enjoyable or not, focusing instead on filling up that slot on a disposable restaurant menu.

The only real caveat we'd offer about this activity set is that these games largely presume a nuclear family with at least three members. This may fit their largest target demographic and likely customer base, and we aren't by any means saying they should plan to lose their shirts on a "single-parent" edition. But if you are going to be playing these games as a duet rather than a trio, quartet, or Partridge Family band, you should understand going in that many of these activities are structured with the assumption that there are three or more people at the table. If there are, this is a strength - the activities are well-designed to engage several family members with feedback, voting, turn-taking, etc. But if this presumption bothers you or you aren't comfortable editing out or having "less fun" with perhaps a quarter to a third of these games, this may not be the activity deck for you.

You can purchase both Beginner Dinner Games (for play with kids ages 3-6) and Dinner Games (for families with kids ages 5-12) directly from the company or from Amazon.com.

If you liked this review, you might also be interested in:

• A Family Meal From Three Kids' Cookbooks
• Z's Birthday Tea
• Bright and Beyond Activity Cards review
• Make Your Own Butter (with toddlers)