The game will fair better with gamers as you have some multi-tasking to do.  You need to avoid attacks while getting numbers for your equation.  I love that sometimes you need to fill in one of the multipliers or addends instead of just answering equations.    Sal’s addicted to saving his guy and evolving himself.

Which takes me to the practice mode.    I was immediately sold to see that it is a very customizable practice mode – choose your operation, choose your factors, speed, duration, and your good to go.  Get one wrong in practice mode?   The practice pauses till you can figure out the answer and move on.   How great is that?

There is even a player history that parents can check in to to see how their kid is doing, what they’ve been doing and what equations they can work on.

I guess there is a lite version as well – although I have to say to have all the operations, all the customization and visibility into what your kid is doing, AND have it be something your kid loves? The $0.99 for the full version was a no brainer for me. I’ve been disappointed lately with some of the stinginess of some of the games that keep making you pay for each new operation or lesson.

Cost: $0.99

Maxwell, the main character, often finds himself in situations where he needs help.  That’s where you come in.  You create objects (by describing them) and they magically appear in the world.  Then you help Maxwell achieve his goals with those objects.  In this screenshot we took, Maxwell is trying to help out his friend fill up an aquarium with a variety of animals.  I’ve put in a “giant green octopus”, a “tiny blue whale” and a “puffer fish”.  I’m 3/5ths of the way to our goal.

The fact that it handles a ton of nouns is fantastic.

That you can add onto those nouns a large assortment of adjectives makes the game truly fun.  We’ve spent hours playing around in this little world seeing what we could come up with and challenging ourselves to come up with new solutions too.  Partly just to see how the game would handle it sometimes. And the vocabulary matters.  A “dinosaur” isn’t very aggressive and looks like a t-rex.  A “T-Rex” is a lot easier to type, so when I tried that shortcut with Sal one day, he was upset that the dinosaur quickly ate Maxwell.  Of course, a “friendly T-Rex” is much nicer to Maxwell.

It’s one way to try and teach the importance of precise wording.  I think it’s a great game and I’m constantly impressed with its open ended flexibility, but we probably let Sal play it on his own a little to early.  See, I had been playing levels before he had, just to check them out.  And there are some that have zombies and there’s a horror movie set level. Needed to skip those with him (though we were surprised that zombies are a popular topic at school).  Anyway, you should be aware that those are in the game and check them out before letting a little one play it on their own.

But for the levels that we were comfortable with, we let him explore the world on his own.  Then he shouted out some frustration one day and we asked him what was going on.  He said that he was trying to get Maxwell a friend, but he got the opposite instead. I love the way these little ones talk.

We talked about it some more, probing what’s the opposite of a friend and found out that it’s a little red mean devil.  That was quite the opposite!  We had to think about it for a moment and then realized that he had typed in “fiend” instead of “friend”.  So, again, another learning experience and I think he’s very familiar with the similarity and difference between those two words now.  But it was a little more traumatic of a spelling lesson than I think we expected. (This second screenshot is us riding a friendly T-Rex, which protects us from the fiend that’s looking for a fight.)

Overall, it’s a great game.  When we play together, we get to talk about how to help Maxwell and explore potential solutions together.  It’s a fun way to expose him to more vocabulary and concepts (one level needed the 3 things essential for a city government and that sparked a nice conversation about the way cities work).  And on his own, it’s an app that he’s encouraged to practice his spelling with, without really knowing it.

Though he usually gives Maxwell a gun for self defense right away now a days…

Available as a universal app for iPhones or iPads:

Think Pictionary with some word unscrambling and you end up with Draw Something. You connect with other people’s accounts and take turns drawing and guessing each other’s words. We’ve gotten our friends and family in to play so that the kid is only playing with people who we know and who know him. You get to take turns, first choosing either a 1,2, or 3 coin word for you to draw and have the other person guess. They will watch a recording of you drawing and will have some letters and blanks (depending on how long the word is) that they can use to guess the word. If they get the word – you both earn the coins.

I love that it has elements of creativity, trying to come up with how to best capture and draw your word, a bit of vocabulary, spelling, and art. It’s interesting to see how the kid decides to represent words like “justice” or “victim”. There’s a unique joy seeing him guess words early, knowing you’re on the same wavelength, and seeing his spelling coming along! The game also doesn’t take up a lot of screen time as he’ll do his guesses and drawings at night before he goes to bed and wait till the next night to harvest his new batch of drawings from our family and friends.

You have 2 options, a free one with ads or pay $0.99 to have one without ads. We shelled out the buck but earn our coins in the game to earn new colors. It’s definitely worth at least trying out the free one, especially if you know some others with iOS devices that can play with you too.

Cost: Free (with ads) or $0.99 without ads and 400 coins in your account.

This is more of a guitar playing tutorial than a game.  But it is the type of tutorial that shows what learning with the iPad can be.  They have basically taken the Guitar Hero style gameplay, but mapped it use your own real guitar.

Using the iPad’s microphone, the app listens to your guitar playing and uses that as input to the game.  So you start by tuning your guitar, then you become the guitar equivalent of the Pied Piper, walking down the street, strumming chords, to get the animals to follow you back to the zoo.

A second mode of play is more traditional guitar hero style, where there are six power lines (one for each string on the guitar) that have birds sitting on them.  As your character flies by the birds, he must play that bird’s favorite fret on the appropriate string.  So it’s like reading guitar tablature if you’re familiar with that.  But again, introduced in a fun, friendly manner.

Soon, without you knowing it, you’ve picked up a few chords and improved your finger picking confidence.

This game also encourages the good habit of not looking at your fingers while playing the chords or picking notes.  Since you need to be looking at the iPad to see what chord/note is next.  It can be frustrating a bit at first (as I witnessed first hand), but really helps build up confidence quickly.

When you play, you also feel like you’re part of something bigger, as your notes and chords fit into their soundtrack.  It’s not just you flailing away at the guitar by yourself.  This also helps get you fully engaged in the timing and rhythm of the music.

Full disclosure: our little guy has been going to classical guitar lessons for a year now.  So we already have a 1/2 size guitar and he’s comfortable with his fingering.  Chords are new though. We’ve run it by our teacher and he supports using the app – anything that makes guitar playing more fun and entertaining.

The first levels are free – and cover 4 chords.  Additional levels are in app purchases that you can make when your guitar playing gets advanced enough.  We’re not there yet, but are excited to be trying.

However, I’ve got a little kid that’s always spying on me and my iPad, asking what the new icons he doesn’t recognize are.  And since I hadn’t deleted it, he asked about it, and we booted it up to get his reaction.  He really liked it.

Just a couple of kids, going out in the snow, playing around.  As each “chapter” ends, you get to interact with the app to help the kids out.  Digging in the snow for buried treasures, putting the face on a snow man, etc.

There isn’t much replayability, but when we were done with this story, the kid’s interest had been piqued with these characters and he wanted to do more with them.  This story is free and seasonally appropriate, so it is a great way to add to the winterish mood.

Other Stella and Sam adventures can be purchased in a story pack for a discount (instead of buying each of them for 3 bucks).

Into the Snow (free):

Stella and Sam story pack($6.99):

Swampy just wants to take a shower, yet the other alligators have broken the water pipes to his shower.  Your job is to get a water flow into Swampy’s pipes, so he can get that shower he so desperately wants.

Good messaging for the little ones too, huh?

It starts off pretty easy, getting one comfortable with the concept of water’s fluid dynamics and gravity.  As you get further along in the game, other fluids are introduced (shampoo?  slime?  both of which Swampy doesn’t like so much), other objects are introduced (sponges absorb the water you need to get to the pipes), and new mechanics are added too (levers and such to make the puzzles more complicated with a distinct order that you much perform the tasks in).

Our little guy has been pretty engaged with the game, without too much frustration.  The puzzles are at the same level of challenging as say Cut the Rope, but don’t require as much timing.  You can let your water pool up as you think about what to do next, which makes it more accessible for the younger set.

It’s an entertaining game, where the kids learn problem solving and some of the properties of fluids, while having fun.

Note: If you “like” their page on Facebook before Dec 15th, you can get a free copy of the app here.

The idea is simple enough – lead your cute little dude through a maze.  The maze is interesting in that it doesn’t all fit on the screen at once, so you need to pan around through the maze to figure out the right direction to go.  Solving it backwards is pretty easy because it only branches from the start point.  From the end point of the maze, there are few decisions that need to be made to solve it.

But that tidbit is lost on a 6 year old.

The 6 year old enjoys the challenge of solving a maze that’s too big to fit on the screen at one time!  And they are delighted when they get a gem that you couldn’t see from the starting point!  And even happier when those gems are turned into coins and then they can buy a hat or backpack for their cute little dude with the coins!

Until one day, when they upgrade their cute little dude to the green cute little dude and find out that now they need a whole new set of accessories for the green guy.  The yellow guy’s hat and backpack don’t transfer over to the green guy.  This realization lead to a lot of tears and pleading to go along with the upsell.

And by upsell, I mean, about 50% of the UI leads you to a page where you can spend real money for their pretend coins. We’ve stayed away from Smurfberries and other types of these apps, because we want the screen time experience to be about exercising the mind, instead of fueling an addiction in a virtual world.

I had warned Sal about how the game wasn’t that much fun, because they are trying to trick us into giving them money.  And he was very unthrilled about the extent to which they would try and push your patience over the edge and get you to spend money instead of doing 15 more busywork mazes.

So we switched apps to try and get in a better mood.  Battleship didn’t sound appealing.  Neither did Casey’s Contraptions.  I think he didn’t want to have to think any more since that side of his brain was frustrated.  So we went back to Draw 1-2-3 and drew some robots.

And things were right again.

So, I think this validated our aversion to the freemium add-on type games, with heavy upsells that prey on people lack of patience/need for instant gratification.  Which is a little sad, cause the guy was cute and the mazes could be more fun with a couple of tweaks.  And the multiplayer aspect of it was really interesting, because there were some dramatic chase scenes between our two characters, even though they were walking relatively slowly…

But with all the upsells, it sucked all the fun out of the game for us.  I’ll link to it so you can try it out, but I’m doing it without high expectations.

The book isn’t an early reader book, but it’s not too advanced either.  2nd grade level maybe? It is a very entertaining bit of fiction about a group of dogs out to get some hamburgers. But what stood out for me, was how great the voice was for the story.  Right now, our little guy is trying to find his voice/perspective for stories and this book has a very casual, comfortable tone, which also breaks that imaginary barrier of fiction, by directly addressing the reader.  Even if the reader is a dog!

The tone has gone over very well with Sal, as he actually gets the jokes.  And since the book starts out discussing why the dog is drawn as a stick dog, due to a lack of drawing skills, it instantly created a common bond between our little artist and this book. The way Stick Dog has to address the plans the various dogs comes up with also has a nice emotional IQ aspect about them.  There was a lot of subtle touches in the book that made it wonderful overall.

Even the page breaks in the story are also done so that we can discuss/evaluate the plans the dogs come up with for getting hamburgers (biting is dangerous!!!) before continuing on with the story, so there are lots of great, natural talking points in the book. Though, when I reading through the book on my own before sharing it with Sal, I felt the page breaks in iBooks were awkward, because the pictures discussed by the text weren’t always visible at the same time.  Though when we read together, we switched to portrait mode, which made the page larger and eliminated the page pairing issue.  It then became an exercise to remember what the text was saying while we looked at the pictures.

So this isn’t an iOS interactive book, but was a great little free pickup that I was happy to find.  And it’s encouraged me to browse the free book section more often…

Very little educational slant I can put on it for Mom.  But the kid jumps around with excitement and tension while playing.

The basic version of the game, involves your frog on a spinning lily pad.  Tap the screen to get it to jump in the current direction.  If it lands on another lily pad, good for you!  If not, well, you might get another try.

Goal is to get as far “up” the pond as possible.

Works on, timing, coordination, reaction time.  A little strategy.  A little patience.

Working on achievements gets you new frogs, with new color patterns.  More on those color patterns in a future review of their Pocket Frogs game.

In the iPad version, you can buy a 2 player game.  The screen doesn’t scroll.  But there is an assortment of spinning lily pads for you and your opponent to jump on.  Each of you gets your frog to jump by tapping on your side of the iPad.  First one to land on the other one’s frog wins that round.  First one to land on the other one 3 times, wins.

This is the one that gets really exciting for the little guy.  It’s helped us deal with gracious winning and losing…still more to go though…

For the iPhone/iPod Touch -

For the iPad -

The scenery/context of the game is more kid friendly.  Remote controlled cars, balls, books, the side of the house, etc. all makes it easier for a child to relate to the game vs the more adult physics setting of other games.

The game play is more or less the same though – get missions from Casey and use various objects from around the house to solve his puzzles.  There are gold stars scattered through the screen as extra credit.

The game’s interface is a lot more accessible to Sal than Crazy Machines and seems to be because it was designed as a touch interface game from the get go.

But even better, you can design your own levels. This really unleashed the imagination.  Things get a little crazy at first, till one learns about making the challenge realistic, solvable, and challenging.  We haven’t there completely yet, but when we do, we’ll be sharing them.

That’s right, with the ability to share the levels you create, you basically have a game with loads of extra re-playability.  Not only do you get to design your own levels, but you can always pick up more levels from their website.  Over 1,500 customer created levels so far…

Given the attractiveness of the game’s graphics to the younger set and the almost infinite replayability, this game is a definite steal at only $2.99.

Bartleby, the main character, goes on an adventure looking for a mysterious new button to add to his collection.  The text is stylized, but it wasn’t that much of a challenge for Sal to read.  Not sure if it was just easy text to read, or if he’s become too good of a reader, but it wasn’t as bad as some of the other “book” apps we’ve bought.  His biggest challenge was the name Bartleby actually.  But it’s cute when they muff up some words, right?  So I think the readability was fine, yet that wasn’t the main draw of this app.

Because, throughout the story, Bartleby comes across some challenges that end up being mini puzzles for the reader.  They aren’t logic puzzles, as one doesn’t really need to think much to solve them.  They are exploration type puzzles – push the buttons, find out what they do, maybe piece together that you need to do things in a particular order, maybe just get lucky after trying things out.

In the screenshot I took, you can see he’s got a key to start up his car that will drive along the very basic maze, a horn just for kicks, you control the train guard rails, the arrival of the train, the street signals, and the turn signals.

I found that Sal enjoyed horsing around with the buttons more than was necessary to complete the challenge on the page.  Some pages we would “read” over again to because he wanted to try out just one more thing, regarding the buttons/switches on the page. The depth of the interactions with the “page” is pretty engaging

Partially because the story is a bit light.  I think that Sal enjoyed the book quite a bit, but he was left wanting more because the story was a little short and because he was having so much fun with it.  Which is convenient enough, because there is a volume 2 on its way soon.  Just not soon enough for Sal’s tastes.

Anyway, because they are teasing Volume 2 right now, the initial book is available for free, to whet your appetite for the sequel!

Turns out, the game is a lot more fun than I thought it would be when described to me initially.  You get mission cards, where you need to connect two cities with your train cars.  To place train cars, you use similarly colored train cards.  You pick train cards from the displayed cards or randomly from the face down stack.  You can do one type of move per turn.  There are a limited number of train cars each player has.  Game ends when people get down to 2 or fewer cars.  Points are scored by placing trains on the track (longer trains get more points) and by completing mission cards.  Incomplete mission cards are subtracted from your score.  Depending on the style of game you play, there might be bonus points for longest train or most missions completed.

Educational points:

• You pick up some geography.  The default map is of the US, but your can buy add-on packs for Europe or Switzerland.  For Switzerland, I’m not sure I’m picking up so much geography, but if you’ve got relatives there, I’m sure you’ll impress them with some knowledge after playing that add-on pack for a while.
• You try and do some basic route planning – adjusting as the game plays on and people block you.  Picking routes that are similar and can re-use trains of yours is a big advantage and skill to be learned in the game.  Easier for adults to pick up on, but simple enough that kids can learn it after a few games.  As the game plays out and people block your route, you need to get a bit creative about how to still accomplish your goals.  Very good for that.
• You learn to balance many simultaneous needs.  A great skill to be used daily as one grows up and gains more responsibility.  Basically, the game hinges upon balancing whether you should use cards now or gather more cards for play later.  Consider how many other cards your opponents have.
• You learn to manage risk/reward scenarios.  Turns out, Sal’s pretty “against risk” as he likes to put it.  He’s content with completing his initial missions and not taking on additional risk.  Which is fine for our home games – as I figure he’ll grow more comfortable taking on more risk as he gains confidence with the game.  Taking on more missions can be more lucrative or it can penalize you quite a bit.

It was a simple enough game that he was able to teach a friend of mine how to play.  But now he’s beating us.  So Sal’s motivated to teach more people how to play, so they might start to beat his first student.

The game can be played as a pass and play, where up to 5 people can share 1 device.  Or it can be played via Game Center (how our friend is beating me – really easy to start up a casual couple of games after the kids go to bed), with your friends around the world (even on desktops).  Or strangers – so watch out for that if you’re letting your little one play.  Sal doesn’t play unsupervised – so it’s not an issue for us right now.

$6.99 in the store, with some add-on in game purchases to expand the game –  more mission cards or other maps, like Europe and Switzerland.

Anyway, suppose you’re completely disheartened by Hasbro’s sell-out and want to relive some of the fun of Battleship with your child.  The EA implementation of it is pretty good on the iPad.

They have a variety of single player modes – Classic, Salvo, and Super Weapons.  Classic is just how you remember it as a kid – taking turns taking shots at your opponent’s naval fleet.  Salvo gives you as many shots per turn as you have ships remaining – helps the game go a little faster.  And Super Weapons introduces, well, super weapons.  Play more games to unlock more super weapons even!

Multiplayer mode works great too.  You can pass and play, or if you’re lucky enough with two iPads in the house, each of you can play on your own iPad over wifi or bluetooth.  Doesn’t seem like random people on the internet are able to be chosen as opponents, which is fine by us.  Don’t really need Game Center matching here.  Again, the different modes of Classic, Salvo and Super Weapons are available.  And you can play 1 game, or best of 3 or best of 5 for bigger bragging rights.

How to make it like the real game (making it a bit more taxing mentally):

• Settings: Turn off cut scenes (takes too long and exposes which ship was hit – in the real game you don’t know what you hit)
• Settings: Turn on hidden targets (again, you don’t know what you it in the real game – only works in Classic and Salvo mode)
• And mom likes it better if you do the coordinate calling out and lookup verbally instead of just tapping the screen.  I can see how that is fun at a younger age, but gets in the way of the strategy later on.

Overall, I liked it as a way to talk about some basic head to head strategy and search patterns.  Fun conversations about what kinds of conclusions are valid and invalid as one plays the game.

And, the AI is pretty decent.  I didn’t win every game…but I did want to try and unlock more super weapons.

On sale now for $.99 (normally $2.99)

Grab it. Even easier to love now.

But, after watching me play once, he wanted a shot.  And after a couple of requests to head on out to dinner, he almost got himself into real trouble playing Super 7.

It’s a fun game, simple enough at first, then getting more complicated without really getting more complicated.  It is a line drawing game, similar to Flight Control.  But instead of landing planes, you’re mixing numbers to get to the sum of 7.  Go above 7 (or below -7) and your game is over.

That’s it.

Until they start adding negative numbers (that’s how you get to -7…) and then they start adding multipliers.  Then the handy fact that 5×2 is 10 and that’s greater than 7 becomes it’s something you’re scared of.

Though it’s not drilling a lot of math, it’s getting the math in there at a pretty low fundamental level.  You can string together a chain of numbers too, so 4+1+2 will take care of itself, as long as other numbers don’t get in the way.  Good for doing some rote math drills without the feeling that you’re doing some rote math drills.

There is a local leaderboard and stats, in case your family is competitive like that.  And the universal app, when on an iPad, has an XL version, where there’s a lot more space to play the game.  Good simple fun.  Sal even agrees.

Free for a limited time (unknown how limited) for the iPhone/iPod/iPad -

Everyday Mathematics Tric-Trac – Addition game, 1 – 2 players
Description:
Players take turns rolling two dice, finding their sum, and then matching the sum to one or more numbers in their hand. Every match eliminates that number or numbers from a player’s hand and reduces their score. Players try to eliminate all the numbers in their hand. Play continues until no more sums from the dice can be matched to a number or numbers in a player’s hand. The player with the lowest score wins the game! Visual and audio reinforcement of correct and incorrect answers help players master addition facts and comparison skills.
iPhone/iPod:

iPad:

Everyday Mathematics Addition Top It- 0 to 10 addition game
Description:
Players take turns drawing two cards, finding their sums, and then comparing the sums. Players score points for correctly finding their sum, identifying the greater sum, and for having the greater sum. The player with the most points at the end of 8 rounds wins! Visual and audio reinforcement of correct and incorrect answers help players master addition facts and comparison skills.
iPhone/iPod:

iPad:

Everyday Mathematics Subtraction Top it: 0-10 subtraction game
Description:
Players take turns dealing two 2-digit number cards to each player, finding their differences, and then comparing the differences. Players score points for correctly finding their difference, identifying the greater difference, and for having the greater difference. The player with the most points at the end of 8 rounds wins! Visual and audio reinforcement of correct and incorrect answers help players master subtraction computation and comparison skills.
iPhone/iPod:

iPad:

Everyday Mathematics Baseball Multiplication 1-6 Facts
Description:
Two players, representing 2 teams, play a 3-inning baseball game as they practice their 1–6 multiplication facts. The players take turns at bat. On most turns, the player at bat is pitched a pair of numbers. The player multiplies the numbers and then enters the product on a keypad. If the answer is correct, the batter hits a single, double, triple, or home run. On some turns, the pitch will result in an out instead of a pair of numbers. After 3 outs, it is the other player’s turn at bat. After 3 innings, the player with the most runs wins!
iPhone/iPod:

iPad:

Everyday Mathematics Name That Number – Calculate values and practice following the orders of operations
Description:
Players use five number tiles to build number sentences that equal a target number. Players can name the target number by adding, subtracting, multiplying, and/or dividing the numbers using as many tiles as possible. The more tiles the player uses, the more points he or she earns. There are a total of 5 rounds in a game. Visual and audio reinforcement of correct and incorrect answers helps players master math facts and order of operations.
iPhone/iPod:

iPad:

Everyday Mathematics Monster Squeeze: Number Line Game, 1 or 2 players – try to guess the number
Description: Players take turns finding the secret number on a number line. In each round, the monster designates a secret number on a number line. Players try to guess this number by clicking one of the numbers. If the number chosen is larger than the secret number, that number and all larger numbers on the number line are covered by the monster. If the number chosen is smaller than the secret number, that number and all smaller numbers on the number line are covered by the monster. Players take turns clicking numbers until one of them identifies the secret number and wins the round. There are a total of 5 rounds in a game.
iPhone/iPod:

iPad:

Everyday Mathematics Beat the Computer – Multiplication Game
Description:Players have 20 seconds to answer multiplication fact problems and beat the computer. Players score points for correctly finding the product. The amount of time left on the timer after each correct answer is added to the player’s score. Solve 20 problems to score as many points as you can! Visual and audio reinforcement of correct and incorrect answers helps players master multiplication facts.
iPhone/iPod:

iPad:

Everyday Mathematics Equivalent Fractions – Solitaire with fractions
Description:
Players try to match equivalent fractions on cards showing halves, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, eighths, tenths, and twelfths. When cards are matched, they disappear and points are awarded. As cards disappear from the array, the cards behind them become accessible. The game ends when all cards are matched or no more matches can be made. Players earn extra points for making two or more matches in a row. To earn all possible points, players must clear the board!
iPhone/iPod:

iPad:

Everyday Mathematics – Divisibility Dash – Learn to recognize multiples
Description:
Players try to match equivalent fractions on cards showing halves, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, eighths, tenths, and twelfths. When cards are matched, they disappear and points are awarded. As cards disappear from the array, the cards behind them become accessible. The game ends when all cards are matched or no more matches can be made. Players earn extra points for making two or more matches in a row. To earn all possible points, players must clear the board!
iPhone/iPod:

iPad:

K-12 eFlashcards – flashcards cover math and science
Description:
McGraw-Hill’s eFlashcard app gives you a quick and easy way to study your key vocabulary terms for a variety of titles. More titles are on the way so check back soon if you don’t see yours!
The cards allow you to study the key terms from each chapter in the textbooks. You can start with terms or definitions. It even keeps track of which ones you mark as correct or missed so that you can keep trying until you get it.
iPhone/iPod:

iPad: no specific iPad version found

Whats new:

- We’ve added a leaderboard within the game, since we found out families like to compete. Sort by best time, average time to solve a puzzle, or most puzzles solved. Also let’s you choose your favorite sticker to be your icon.

- Added a reset button so you can “erase” your stickers if you get too stuck.

- Removed the Ostrich and the Giraffe from the iPhone/iPod version since they were a little tough to grab.

- Added more puzzles!

Hope you’ve enjoyed this game – it’s free and a great introduction to Sudoku for kids. We’ve been hearing a lot of great feedback and kids that love the game and couldn’t be prouder. If you have the game, would you mind leaving us a review in iTunes? We love the feedback and helps us to determine whether we should do more work on this app or not.

Cost: FREE!

iPhone/iPod:

iPad:

But whatever.  It’s a puzzle game, with some physics/interaction riddles. There’s a few different ways of solving each screen and sometimes when I get home and I see that Sal’s a few levels ahead of me, we talk about the ways he solved the screens and the ways I solved them.  Each of us building up a library of “moves” to use on later stages.  I think that one’s actually encouraged to experiment and exercise a lot of trial and error in this game, because just looking at the initial state, I’m often not sure of how to approach it. As you piece together the situation through a couple of experiments, then the plan comes together.  So, I guess it can be a good introduction to the scientific method…

It’s fun, entertaining and mildly educational.  Just a little dark.  Sure, the little angels are cute when the critter falls into the lava, but I’m not sure what Sal’s really taking from that messaging, beyond the fact that he’s gotta restart the level.

Try out the lite version and see if it’s your style -

His reasoning for not liking Dr. Seuss was the nonsensical made up words.  Sure, he’ll see a few songs from Seussical after we went to see it, but when it comes to reading, he wants his words to be sensical.

I tried to get him to bring up What was I Scared of? since he liked the version we read on the iPad, but it was too late.  He had already set his mind on being the kid that doesn’t like any Dr. Seuss book.

Though I found this story helpful to calm him down when he is scared of things.  We talk about how whatever he’s scared of is really like a pair of green pants.  The silliness of it all helps him relax and put things into perspective.  So even though he’s not admitting it, the book has been effective to us.

And it is a bit more sensible than others, both in its simple, direct story and its vocabulary. This is another great Oceanhouse Media treatment to a book.  They’ve got their recipe down and are just cranking these books out.

Cost: $1.99 – universal app for iPhone/iPod/iPad

Basically this is the peg game – but with chess pieces. You are trying to eliminate every piece except one on your board. Only legal moves are the ones that have a chess piece legally taking out another one.

This is a really fun way to master the different movements of each chess piece for chess newbies. Unlike RushHour, I don’t have the physical game on this one to compare – but right off the bat I’ve got to say that the app version with an option to see the legal moves for your piece is helpful for newbies (and it’s nice you can turn it off if you find it unnecessary). It also, like chess, forces you to think ahead, remembering longer and longer chains of events to get to your end state.

Sal and I spent a lazy saturday morning in bed knocking through the easy challenges. Again, I don’t have the physical version of this – but I found it handy that it automatically didn’t allow moves that didn’t take out a piece. Sal knows the chess piece movements, but he was tempted to get to a piece in 2 moves, where the intermediary move would not have taken out a piece. The game just brings the piece back. It took Sal a bit before he got the hang of this rule, and I think the app version made it easier for him to get it. It’s also fun to just power through the puzzles without delay of setup, reset the board automatically when needed, and when you’re really in a pinch, get a hint.

Sometimes the moves can seem a bit counterintuitive, needing to take out a queen early in order to get to the end state and relying on the other pieces. Kind of forces you to think a bit outside the box. There are some reviews I’ve seen where parents are concerned on how it adds up to chess strategy. Does it map up completely – no, you are not playing another player – but it does have you plan out your moves and I think this is a critical element to playing chess.

Puzzle games. We love them.

iPhone/iPod
Free Lite

Cost Full – $2.99

iPad
Free Lite -

Cost: Full $2.99