The object of the game is to build single color dragons with at least one head and one tail on every dragon and no open ends. The longer the dragon, the more points you earn. There are three special tiger tiles. Lay down a tiger and you rescore any finished dragons the tiger tile borders. Build a new dragon that borders a tiger and you score double points.
The first game I played with Bentley was slow going. I played my tiles and his tiles. At the end of that game, I thought I'd be stashing the game away for a couple of years. However by game three Bentley was beating me without any help.
We've played quite a few games since Christmas. Bentley is usually the scorekeeper and he needs only a little assistance.
Recently Bentley asked opa to play with him. Bentley had taught opa the game a few weeks ago. I offered to play with Bentley instead and he rejected me. I pressed the issue. Bentley told me that I had lost the last seven games to him. Really?! Seven. I think not. Maybe four. Or five. Definitely not seven.
I was insulted so I suggested that we all play together. Bentley likes to follow the rules, so he questioned whether a three player game was kosher. I pulled out the instructions and looked it up. "2-4 players. Ages 10 and up."
"Did you hear that B?" I asked. "You're too young to play. You can't play again until you're 10 years old." I almost had the boy in tears before I relented.
Bentley is good at the game. He's competitive and feels no guilt at stealing my half finished dragons. I hate it when I start a dragon and he completes it. When he's busy stealing my dragons he's not creating his own dragons for me to steal. So annoying!
Also, Bentley is very lucky. He almost always draws at least two of the three tiger tiles. One game he had all three tigers after his second turn! (You draw three tiles to start and so always have three in your hand.) Three tigers was too many, even for Bentley, so of his own volition he threw one back in the draw pile. It's hard to build dragons when you don't have any dragon tiles.
Having been challenged by the five year old I was determined to win the game with Mark and Bentley. With a little luck and a tiger tile and some serious begging (please don't steal my dragon!), I won! Take that B boy! (He was a good sport about my win.)
Of course, it's taken me too long to get this posted and now Bentley has moved on to a new favorite game, Rat-A-Tat Cat. It's a card game that requires you to remember four face down cards while you swap them out in an attempt to get the lowest scoring hand. You can Rat-A-Tat Cat at any time and challenge the other players to show their cards and beat your score. Mostly we have fun with game, but once in a while Bentley gets really upset if I don't give him enough time to discard his high point cards. B boy tends to trade out only for 0s and 1s which can be a mistake. Of course, B does have above average luck, so he often pulls it off. There's only four 0s in the deck and he usually has at least two of them.
As a grandma I'm not above manipulating a game now and then to help out a preschooler, but I don't usually need to because Bentley is good at games and, as I've mentioned, quite lucky with his draws.
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