It's A Good Thing...

...my natural "coolness" compensates for the fact that I'm posting the results of this silliness on my blog.

What?! You say I don't possess natural coolness?!

Ah, heck... you're probably right.

I Guess I Shouldn't Be Surprised...

...but what kind of moronic nutball do you have to be to give the Origins Award for best card game of the year to Zombie Fluxx instead of Tom Lehmann's brilliant Race for the Galaxy?!

Look, I'm not saying that people don't enjoy Zombie Fluxx - heck, I like Sequence, which is almost as random. It's just that years from now a new zombie-fied reprint of an 11 year old card game is going to look like a pretty silly choice. (There are now, btw, 7 different versions of Fluxx, not counting the expansion sets.)

OK, it's not "years from now" and it looks like a pretty silly choice. Sigh. Hard to expect better from the folks who thought Stephensons' Rocket was a sci-fi game.

#78: Das Störrische Muli

Das Storrisches Muli

• designer: Hartmutt Kommerell
• publisher: Klee
• date: 1999
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: not ranked/6.3
• age: 8+
• # of players: 3-5
• print status: OOP
• cost: I could not find a copy of this for sale online from a trusted source... sorry.

The two dashing gentlemen in the picture are Ted Cheatham (designer of Silk Road & Gumball Rally) and Greg Schloesser (head of the IGA & well-known gaming figure)... and it was taken in my game room in Nashville, TN, about 7 years ago. This was our late night silliness - and "The Intractable Mules" (that's how the title translates) was perfect.

What I've found out over the years is that DSM (I'm not typing that name again - no way) works just as well with kids as it does with adults. I'm not sure where Klee (the manufacturer) came up with age 8+ recommendation... I've had kids as young as 5 play it and play well.

The game itself is simple - each player is a mule with a blanket that matches one side of a color die. Any missing colors are filled in by neutral mule driver tokens. On your turn, you roll the 2 dice & move the respective pieces one space forward. (If you roll doubles, that piece moves 1 space backwards.) Then you pass the dice to the next player. They may choose to "hold" one of the dice (keeping it on the same face/color without rolling it) but they must roll at least one die. When the first piece (mule or mule driver) reaches the end of the path, Ted shouts something unprintable (OK, that's only when you're playing with Ted) and all of the pieces are turned around and begin racing back towards the ranch (start place).

You win in one of two ways:

1. If you're the first mule to arrive at the ranch, you win IF the last piece remaining on the board is a mule driver.
2. If your mule is the last piece on the board, you win.

So, at some point in the game, you have to decide what your "strategy" (and I use the term loosely) will be:

• pushing all the other mules & drivers toward the ranch in order to be the last mule standing OR
• racing to the finish while pushing the other mules forward & leaving the drivers alone OR
• just rolling the dice & hoping for the best (this happens more often than you'd think)

With the silly mules & fast play, it generates a lot of fun in a short time... and works well with groups of kids (w/an adult to referee), mixed groups of adults & kids, and (as you can see from the picture) is a great closer for game groups.

Interestingly, the game was re-published in 2002 with some small tweaks as Trampelfanten. The theme now is stampeding elephants, the pieces are wooden rather than cardboard, and the only rule change I could see is that players who are finish second or worst can still roll even though they're off the board. (In DSM, only the first mule home & mules still on the board can roll - which I think prevents kingmaking.) Sadly, it's also out of print & hard to find.

I'm Your Television Evangelist

My buddy Zion Red (hi, Paul) and I don't always agree on politics, but we both are horrified at the garbage that floods cable channels and radio waves that masquerades as biblical Christianity. He's made a couple of posts recently that are worth your examination: the crisis in christianity & money, its a gas (with the requisite shout-out to Pink Floyd).

His posts reminded me of an amazing rap/dance piece I saw at Mosaic last year - and so I hunted it down on YouTube for y'all. (BTW, as cool as it is here, it was stunning live.)

And, because one thing always reminds me of something else... some extra special Steve Taylor wonderfulness - Cash Cow: A Rock Opera In Three Acts. (Best line ever: "The golden cash cow had a body like the great cows of ancient Egypt And a face like the face of Robert Tilton ...without the horns.")

Wall*E is... wow.

I'll write more on this later - but for now, get up off your duff and go see Wall*E on a big screen. Not only is the animation amazing, but the story is intriguing & beautiful & thought-provoking. (And ignore the hyper-conservative whining about "political undertones" - sheesh. Go find something real to blog about already.)

From the review at Robert Wilonsky:

Many will attempt to describe WALL-E with a one-liner. It’s R2-D2 in love. 2001: A Space Odyssey starring The Little Tramp. An Inconvenient Truth meets Idiocracy on its way to Toy Story. But none of these do justice to a film that’s both breathtakingly majestic and heartbreakingly intimate—and, for a good long while, absolutely bereft of dialogue save the squeals, beeps, and chirps of a sweet, lonely robot who, aside from his cockroach pet, is the closest thing to the last living being on earth.

#79: Mein Lieber Biber

Mein Lieber Biber

• designer: Heinz Meister
• publisher: Goldsieber
• date: 2000
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: not ranked/5.0
• age: 6+
• # of players: 2-6
• print status: OOP
• cost: EUR 9,95 (Amazon.de, approx. $14.00)

Take a dash of Bambeleo (the tilting board), add some card-based movement of common pieces (in other words, every player can move every piece) and give it a whimsical theme (beavers taking apart a raft in order to build a dam)... and you've got Mein Lieber Biber. (BTW, that literally translates "My Lovely Beaver" - but the idiom is better translated as "My Friendly Beavers".)

On your turn, you play one of your color-coded cards to move one of the beavers along a series of life rings - if you manage to land one on a life ring that matches his color, you get a "log" (brown Settlers road). If, as happens once in a while, you manage to get a beaver off the raft, you get a log as well.

Of course, you don't want to make the raft capsize - if moving the piece you've chosen cause one or more beavers to go sliding off, the round ends & you lose all your logs. (BTW, this is usually how a round ends when playing with kids.) Play three rounds & find out who has the most logs.

The game as published is not quite tippy enough... you have to get the beavers scattered way across the board to see any real tilt. After trying a number of different ways to fix it, I finally discovered a simple & inexpensive way to make the game work like a charm - put a small piece of felt underneath the wooden pivot piece... the added cushion gives it a little more tippiness without making the game too difficult.

#80: Monte Rolla

Monte Rolla

• designer: Manfred Knapp & Ulrike Gattermayer-Knapp
• publisher: Selecta
• date: 2003
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: not ranked/6.6
• age: 4+
• # of players: 2-4
• print status: in print
• cost: $29.75 (TimeWellSpent.org)

Monte Rolla is an object lesson in how to take the same basic elements as a supposedly "classic" game (Chutes & Ladders) and turn them into a game people (esp. kids) enjoy playing. You've got your dice rolling, your pieces moving forward or backwards due to the design of the board, and it's basically a race to the finish.

But Monte Rolla gives you two men (marbles) rather than one - so every turn you can decide which piece is the best for you to move. Roll a "6" and you get to roll again and add the rolls together, speeding up the game a bit.

The real act of design brilliance, though, is the thick board which is elevated in the middle, making river paths that take the pieces backwards (in the first & third sections of the race) and forwards (in the second & final sections of the race). Every kid I've played this with has been utterly fascinated by the process of letting their marble go cascading down the river - even when it hurt them! There's a couple of places in the first section where your marble getting knocked downstream can even knock other marbles back.

The first player to get BOTH of their marbles to the sea (finish line) wins... which leaves you with an interesting problem. If you finish one marble quickly in order to keep it safe, you are now at the mercy of the die roll - while the players who balance their marbles' movement always have options.

I know it doesn't sound like much - I can hear some of you shaking your virtual heads at this one. But it is one of the games that's consistently requested by kids who've played it at our house... and that counts for a bunch in my book.

When I Went To Santa Clarita...

...which, btw, wasn't this last week. (I know some of you are wondering what happened to the blog - I was posting at least once a day from early June and then suddenly, poof, no posts. For some of of you, it was like your local Starbucks refused to put caffeine in your coffee.)

Anyway, when I went to Santa Clarita (in January of 2007, I think), I took the train - and, as often happens on the route south out of Fresno, we got shuttled to a siding as a bigger train went by.

That's roughly what happened to the blog this last week - my mom & dad & sister all came to visit, which was wonderful but not conducive to blogging. At the same time, we were finishing up our Vacation Bible School here at NewLife, which is also wonderful (lots of kids expressing an interest in knowing more about being followers of Christ) but also a giant time sink.

So, the blog has been on a siding. I realize that I need to play "catch-up" on the Kid Games 100 (my intention was to be to #70 by the end of June) and there's been some great questions in the comments (Jeff & Jon, I'm talking about you) regarding the Framing The Conversation series that need meaningful answers... plus family is giving me a hard time about not putting up more pictures of the boys.

So, I'll work over the next few days to get off my virtual duff & put my nose to the grindstone (aka fingers to the keyboard). Meanwhile, a quote about postmodernism from a book about physics & social scientists I've been reading:

Nowhere is this more evident than in the perversely influential "postmodernist" school of thought, which insists that there isn't actually a real world "out there" with objective properties that we can try to understand. Instead, truth is completely arbitrary and "constructed" in a social manner by tacit agreement. Another common assertion is that because our thinking & communication are so intimately linked with language, everything can be viewed as a text, and social theory becomes more or less equivalent with literary criticism. Nothing that anyone has ever written has a fixed or true meaning; readers make up the meaning as they go.

The British historian Geoffrey Elton referred to the postmodernist trend as "the intellectual equivalent of crack" for its seductive, anything-goes style of theorizing that essentially frees the author from any responsibility to think coherently. (Mark Buchanan, The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You)

Don't Abandon the Cookie Agenda!

For the record, I'm pro-cookie. Especially those cookies Anna Campbell makes...

Thanks to Jason Bennett for pointing this out over on Facebook...

#81: Powerpuff Girls: Saving the World Before Bedtime

The Powerpuff Girls: Saving the World Before Bedtime

• designer: Craig Van Ness
• publisher: Milton Bradley
• date: 2000
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: 2866/6.0
• age: 8+
• # of players: 2-4
• print status: OOP
• cost: $6.94 or more (Amazon.com)

There aren't a lot of TV/movie tie-in games on this list... though if you go to Wal-Mart or Target or Toys'R'Us, you could easily be fooled into thinking that this is the main source of new kid games. Thankfully, the Powerpuff license inspired some really nice design work from Craig Van Ness, one of the gurus behind the development of Heroscape.

The three super heroines zip about the city (game board) at the player's direction - and that direction is provided by cards which specify which piece (or pieces) is moved. Players choose their cards simultaneously and reveal them. The order of play is determined by a time stamp on each of the cards - a nifty design element that gives this game a bit of kick.

When they encounter a villain, the player rolls the appropriate dice (one for each girl present) and sees if they got enough "hits" to vanquish their foe. Defeat enough evildoers & you win the game.

There are re-roll cards as well as traps (which knock out the girls who land in the space for the rest of the turn)... and the card deck has ways to move the girls en masse and to block another player's card. As befits a game about superheroes fighting villains, it jumps along at a very nice pace - a lesson that should have been taken by the guys who designed the Marvel Heroes game.

Although my son & I don't know the Powerpuff Girls TV show, the humor on the cards is cute. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my lack of knowledge about the show didn't diminish my enjoyment of the game one bit.

Proof of Predestination?

Two of my favorite online authors, Linda (Things What Things?) and Jon (Stuff Christians Like) both published blog articles about couches... and not just any couches, but ones they don't like. For those of you Calvinists in the blog audience, you know this wasn't a coincidence.

Linda: Death of a Couch

Furthermore, this couch has been the bane of my moving-related existence for quite some time. I don’t like it that much, it really wasn’t chosen (in 1997) for any reason other than low price, and it has absolutely zero appeal other than functionality. So I decided, as I sat on my couch in my otherwise unpacked apartment on that first day, “I am not moving that couch again.” I thought, “That couch is going out of here in pieces.”

Big talk, of course. That couch was built like a TRUCK. It had a HIDE-A-BED. It weighed about ten thousand pounds (approximately). Heavy, heavy thing, and never a whisper of an interruption in its structural integrity. It was one of those couches where you think, “After nuclear war, it will be just cockroaches and this couch.”

Jon: #303 - Donating Junk To The Church

I'm not sure if satan makes furniture, but if he does, I've met one of his couches. I found it when I was living in Birmingham. I was fresh out of college, working at a Christian advertising agency and I had roughly $40 to my name. Fortunately that is about what the couch I found in the paper cost. Back before Craigslist and Ebay, you didn't get to see 22 photos online for the couch you were going to buy. You read two sentences in the paper and then showed up an an old lady's house that may or may not have had a full size grocery cart in the kitchen.

Framing the Conversation: Elaine & Puddy

The following quote is from Dan Kimball's blog... he was NOT talking about same-sex marriage or even homosexuality. This is from a blog post on preaching about the reality of hell.

I started the sermon giving some examples from pop culture of how we generally portray or think about hell today - from Far Side cartoons with a red devil and pitchfork, to AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" song and then showed a clip from an episode of Seinfeld which is the one where Puddy (Elaine's boyfriend) becomes a "Christian" and listens to Christian music on the radio but then he emotionlessly makes comments to Elaine how she is going to hell and he isn't. He then asks her to steal his neighbors newspaper and he says something like "you're the one going to hell not me, so you might as well steal it". And then she explodes and starts whacking him with the newspaper and says:

"If I am going to hell, you should care that I'm going to hell."

I addressed that when we talk about "hell" it should not be done out of Christian trivia interest or curiosity - but as Elaine stated - if we believe in "hell" then we should be caring about people as why we study this. I specifically stated that only God knows people's eternal destinies and that we cannot say who is or isn't going to hell. It is not a subject to treat lightly or something to ignore. The subject of hell and judgment is written in many places in the New Testament, so I really don't see how we can be skipping it or ignoring the exploration of what these Scriptures and teachings mean. I am not sure how pastors or churches can't address the topic of hell and judgment because of its frequency of being mentioned in the New Testament. I feel odd blogging about hell. But if we do believe in hell, and we believe that people are created in God's image who would then be experiencing judgment and hell - it should make us grieve, and hurt, be in great concern, care, praying, and doing whatever possible we can to be on the mission of Jesus living out and communicating the gospel to people.

Here's the deal... the reason I'm still writing about same-sex marriage is the same reason Dan was writing about hell. If I truly believe that any kind of sexual behavior outside of one man/one woman marriage is sinful & destructive, then if I love people, I'm going to speak up about it.

You may not like what I have to say - you may disagree violently. Heck, you may agree with me but wish I hadn't brought it up because you don't want to think about it or deal with it. But you need to understand that the motivation behind this is NOT hating homosexuals but loving people (hopefully with Christ's love) and wanting them to have the best possible shot at holiness, happiness & wholeness.

I want to paraphrase Dan as a challenge to those folks who are campaigning for the Protect Marriage amendment: if we do believe in marriage, and we believe that people are created in God's image who would then be experiencing judgment and hell because of the choices they make regarding sex & marriage - it should make us grieve, and hurt, be in great concern, care, praying, and doing whatever possible we can to be on the mission of Jesus living out and communicating the gospel to people.

#82: Steinbeisser

Steinbeisser

• designer: Hajo Bucken
• publisher: Schmidt Spiele
• date: 1999
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: not ranked/5.5
• age: 7+
• # of players: 2-6
• print status: OOP
• cost: EUR 12,50 (Amazon.de, approx. $16.00)

Have you ever seen The Never-Ending Story? (I haven't - but I know about the movie.) The great stone creatures from the film are the featured players in this very odd game of moving rocks (represented by wooden discs) around the woods.

Players take turns rolling a die & moving one of their rocks (discs) around the board - then one of the StoneBiters (that's the literal translation of the name of the game) moves one space on the stone track, eating up any rocks adjacent to their position.

But the StoneBiter not only eats those rocks - he also lumbers into the grass pathway of the players and waits for other rocks to drop into his jaws. (A new StoneBiter is placed on the stone pathway to replace him.) Of course, there's more to the game than that - there's a color die (that determines which StoneBiter will move) that sometimes allows you to shift a StoneBiter on the grass pathway & enables you to free the rocks that he's eaten.

The game ends when one player runs out of rocks or when all of the StoneBiters are on the grass pathway. You win by having the most stones left - in other words, not in the StoneBiters' bellies.

It's really an abstract game of risk management - but it's hard to see that when the nifty plastic sculpted StoneBiters sit in the center of the board. (BTW, this is one of the few games on the Kid Games 100 that the suggested age really is pretty darn appropriate.)

Framing the Conversation: NPR Says It Better Than Me

I know that many of you who read this blog - esp. those of you who are bothered by my stance on same-sex marriage - are sure that I've been watching too much Fox News & O.D.ing on re-broadcasts of Focus on the Family.

Please read the following story, Gay Rights, Religious Liberties: A Three-Act Story, at NPR.org.

The defendants' attorney, Jordan Lorence at ADF, says that of course a Christian widget-maker cannot fire an employee because he's gay. But it's different when the company or a religious charity is being forced to endorse something they don't believe, he says.

"It's a very different situation when we're talking about promoting a message," Lorence says. "When it's 'We want to punish you for not helping us promote our message that same-sex marriage is OK,' that for me is a very different deal. It's compelled speech. You're using the arm of the government for punishing people for disagreeing with you."

#83: Sorry! - Pokémon

Sorry! - Pokemon

• designer: uncredited
• publisher: Hasbro
• date: 2000
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: not ranked/4.0
• age: 6+
• # of players: 2-4
• print status: OOP?
• cost: $15.40 (Amazon)

Sorry! is one of those games it has become "cool" to crack on... and one of the comments you hear that drives me nuts is "Winning is purely the luck of the draw." I'm sorry (intentional pun!) but that's just not true - it's kind of like people saying that backgammon is all about getting good rolls. There are decisions to be made - decisions that affect your ability to play... and, if you roll that way, you can do a bit of card counting to assess the probabilities.

But that isn't why Sorry! - Pokemon is popular at our house... it's the special power cards for each of the colors that add some extra randomness to the game while also speeding it up. The cards work as "normal" number cards unless the correctly colored player draws them - and then they help that player move their pieces faster or even teleport a piece into the finish area.

Now, you may wonder why I'd think that more chaos is better - while I'm known for loving fluffy games, I'm not a big fan of chaotic games. In this case, the increased game speed from the special power cards make the game accessible to a wider number of kids & family members... which is a good thing.

Framing the Conversation: How To Get Yourself Fired From An Ultra-Traditional SBC Church

I'd originally titled my first draft of this as "This Is The Post Your Mother Warned You About"... then I realized that I would write with more clarity & grace if I broke that monster into smaller bite-sized pieces. Mind you, this is not my author-ish equivalent of cutting up your steak for you. This is the author-ish equivalent of me deciding I didn't want to try and stuff a 10 oz porterhouse in my mouth all at one time.

And now that we're all longing for some A-1 and a baked potato, here's the first in a series of posts to discuss same-sex marriage I'm calling "Framing the Conversation." I don't intend them to be the Last Word on the subject - but I do hope they will help direct the dialogue into some new territory.

I've actually been fired from a ministry position. OK, that's not the way the Personnel Committee phrased it - they favored the weenie dodge of "we're eliminating your youth minister position in three months for financial reasons" which had the equivalent effect. Either way, I don't have a job & you guys just spent the last 45 minutes telling me about all the mistakes I've been making as youth minister while my senior pastor sits there like a bump on a log. (Table ready for Bitter, party of one... we can seat you right now.)

One of those "mistakes" (if you want to hear more of the story, you can check out How The Heck Did I End Up Here?) was some teaching I'd done about sexual sin. I'd explained to the youth that adultery (a husband or wife engaging in a sexual relationship outside their marriage) and homosexuality (a man or woman engaging in a sexual relationship with someone of their own sex) were both sins - and that one wasn't more or less sinful than the other. BTW, the "mistake" wasn't the content what I taught - it was that the teaching itself cut a little too close to the bone for one of the committee members.

But that teaching is at the heart of anything else that I write about same sex attraction & marriage. I really do believe that:

• pornography
• heterosexual sex between two unmarried people (fornication)
• prostitution
• heterosexual sex between a married person & someone who is not their spouse (adultery)
• polygamy
• group sex
• homosexual sex

...are all sexual sin of equivalent weight, regardless of the orientation and/or inclinations of the person(s) involved. They may have different consequences in a temporal sense - what effect they have during our lives on this earth - but they all have the same spiritual consequence. A quick example to clarify: someone who downloads pornographic pictures is less likely - at least at the early stages of the behavior - to have less emotional & physical health consequences than a prostitute. But both the streetwalker & the upstanding businessman with a hard drive full of downloaded videos are in the same boat spiritually - they've sinned.

Sin, btw, is not simply "doing bad stuff" or "doing stuff Mark doesn't like" or "doing stuff that is distasteful to someone/thing who has set themselves up as a moral authority." Man, I wish it was that easy - we could just change authority figures & get a new set of rules to live by.

According to Ephesians 2:1, you were "dead in your trespasses & sins." The two Greek words are paraptoma (trespasses) and hamartia (sins). The definition of paraptoma means "to go off the path, to wander," while hamartia means to "miss the mark or target." The implication is that sin is failing to be the people we were designed to be - people of purity & honor & integrity.

I'll get into this in more detail in another post, but God created man & woman and the marriage relationship not only for our pleasure & for procreation, but also to act as a picture of His love for us... and same-sex marriage warps that picture just as surely as adultery does. We've missed the mark... we are, as the old hymn writer put it, "prone to wander."

This means that we have to approach the conversation in a different way - this is NOT about "homosexuality vs heterosexuality." It is about marriage between a man & a woman vs a plethora of lesser & more destructive options - one of those being same-sex marriage.

#84: Snap - The Interlocking Dragon-Making Game

Snap: The Interlocking Dragon-Making Game

• designer: P. Joseph Shumaker
• publisher: Gamewright
• date: 2002
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: 3776/5.4
• age: 6+
• # of players: 1-4
• print status: in print
• cost: $8.44 (ThoughtHammer.com)

Snap is not a single game - it's a "game system" that allows for solitaire play as well as 3 other games of varying difficulty. It looks like dominoes... but with only four possible connections.

What makes the game work for younger kids (5+) is that the pieces lock together - and each color of dragon will only lock (puzzle-style) with another piece with the same color dragon. (Blank sides can also lock to each other.)

I'm not sure I understand the low rating on the Geek, except that the games work better with 2-3 players because downtime increases with each player. (This is one of the curses of connection games - the bigger the board, the more possiblities you have to play... and the more possibilities you have to play, the more potential for "analysis paralysis.") I'd suggest trying the game with 2 players first.

18 Years Ago Today

On this day back in 1990, Shari Jo Becknal walked down the aisle of Shady Oaks Baptist Church in Hurst, TX, and pledged her love & life to me... and I pledged the same to her.

I've never regretted it.

Happy Anniversary, baby!

Collin Made Mommy Another Card

This time it "read":

Dear Mommy,

I'm depressed. I did not obey God.

#85: Sandwürmchen

Sandwürmchen

• designer: Peter Lew
• publisher: Drei Magier Spiele
• date: 2004
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: not ranked/6.1
• age: 6+
• # of players: 2-6
• print status: OOP?
• cost: $13.98 (cardhaus.com - this is a clearance price!)

Six baby sand worms have hidden themselves in their native habitat - sand. The folks at Drei Magier Spiele were kind enough to put it in the box - a lot of it! - so that the baby sand worms would feel right at home. Your job is to find them & remember where they have hidden themselves.

Yes, it's a pretty standard memory game (remember where the worms are hidden) but with some nice little twists. First, there's the sand. While some of it inevitably ends up on the table & on the players (it's very fine sand), it's really cool to dig with your finger for the worm, looking for a bit of color that says "I was right!" Second, there's the two-sectioned structure of the game:

• In the first part (the majority of the game), players flip over cards that tell them which worm to search for... if they're wrong, they leave the worm they've found on the surface & the next player gets to search. If they're right, they claim the card, re-bury the worms, and then have the opportunity to turn the game box in order to confuse the other players.
• The second part of the game occurs when all the cards have been distributed... the final six cards (one of each worm) are given to players in order (starting with the player with the least cards) - they place it next to the spot in the sand where they think that particular worm is hiding. When all the players have placed cards, the answers are revealed - and players who are correct get both the card & the worm!

The final score is the number of cards (1 point each) + the number of worms (2 points each)... and there's a tiebreaker, but I don't remember what it is. (Buy the game & read it yourself.)

As you've probably guessed, this is an "adult supervision" game... the combination of a box full of fine sand & small children is a recipe for disaster. (The rules suggest placing a towel beneath the box so it doesn't grind sand into the table surface when it's being turned.) Don't let that scare you away, however. My three-year-old begs to play this game - he loves digging up the worms & actually can play it pretty well.