Gargadguous

Fiona just created her own board game.

It all started on our lengthy return trip car drive this afternoon. Now that she's outgrown naps, Fiona's discovered something about travelling to and from the Berkshires: three hours is a long time to sit in the car. This afternoon as we packed up, Fiona kept saying she didn't want to go home because the drive was too long. I told her we could play games on the drive to pass the time.

"We'll play Chutes and Ladders without the board," she said. I laughed; that wasn't exactly what I meant.

Fiona had some birthday money to spend, so we stopped at a store about 20 minutes into the drive and let her pick out a toy. She found a music set that included a harmonica and a kazoo, and she played those happily in the back seat for quite a while. One of the nice things about a harmonica is that even if the person playing doesn't know what she's doing, the natural harmonics on the instrument make it tolerable enough to listen to. Which is why we didn't let her play the xylophone that was part of the kit.

But eventually she got bored with her harmonica and asked to play a game. I suggested we go through the alphabet and name something that started with each letter (I figured that's about as close to an alphabet game as Fiona was ready for). We went from A to F before Fiona lost interest and wanted to play Chutes & Ladders instead. So we pretended to be rolling dice and climbing up ladders or falling down slides for a few minutes until Fiona announced that she'd won.

Bored by that, Fiona announced she was going to make up a new game about a butterfly who has to climb a ladder. If the butterfly touches the leaf, you lose.

Fair enough. What was impressive was that as soon as we got home -- about two hours later -- Fiona got out a piece of paper and drew the game board. Three different ladders with a leaf at the top of each one.

Then she got out another piece of paper and wrote the "rules". The rules looked something like this:

FIONA
MOMMY
FAO
LEBD

In other words, whatever letters she could write.

Finally she needed to make the game piece. Here's where things got really creative. She found two combs and her kazoo and put them together--each comb was a wing, and the kazoo was the butterfly's body. Impressed at her resourcefulness, I helped her attach the wings with a rubber band.

Then Fiona had me cut out a piece of paper in a circle, and she wrote the numbers 1-4 on the paper to act as a spinner.

Now, I'm not going to pretend this board game was remotely decipherable for either adult in the house. We would each take turns "spinning" and then climb the ladder to try to grab the prize (I'm not sure what the prize was). If you decided that you had grabbed the prize, you had to fly the butterfly up in the air and shout out "gargadguous!" If you decided that you dropped the prize, the butterfly fell to the ground and died. We all shared the same butterfly.

There was a trophy at the end of the final ladder. Fiona wound up winning (shocking, I know). I'll be sending the specs over to Milton Bradley later this week.