BenSpark Family Adventures

We received a free copy of Chicken War™ the Strategic Guessing Game from Think Fun to play with and Review. Opinions are our own. We’ve always been a family that enjoys playing board games. Now with the whole family home every day during the quarantine/isolation we have been playing a lot more. Thankfully Think Fun has supplied us with a new game to help pass the time and frustrate me to no end. Let me explain. Chicken War™ is a strategic guessing game where you battle other players to see if you can assemble a chicken army before the other players can guess your chicken leader. But there is a catch, there is always a catch. In order to have a full chicken army every one of the recruits has to share 2 and only two traits with the leader. I played this with Andrew and over and over again I thought I had everything right only to find that one of the recruits shared 3 things in common. When that happens you have to pick a new leader and then start assembling the army once again. I think t...

I seriously do not think that I am ready to say goodbye to She-Ra when the final season drops on May 15th. This has been a fantastic series to watch with the kids. It bridges the gap between the shows that I watched as a kid and modern shows of today. This series has been incredible and has been such a joy to watch. I got some goosebumps while watching the trailer for this season. The song is AJ Michalka’s cover of She-Ra theme song “Warriors”. There will even be a full series soundtrack available May 8.

Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00486 Back on April 17th Jakks Pacific sent me a HUGE box of The Last Kids on Earth toys for free. I could play with them and review them as I wished. Opinions are my own and these are fun toys. I know that they are fun toys because I got a kick out of them, Andy played for hours with them and continues to do so and the toys are very show accurate. It makes a big difference when care is taken to make the figures look like they do in the show. I do wish, however that there were larger figures of the kids. More like 3.5 inch Action Figures or larger. The size they are is great for imaginative play and use with the monsters and the playset. I guess if you want to have the right scale then if you make the kids bigger the monsters would be huge. The monsters have great detail and action areas. Each one has a weak spot so that they can be knocked over with a disk shooter. The different disk shooters are a hoot. They also take into consideration the show. Each disk has a feat...

We received a copy of Water Game from Adventerra Games for free to play and review. Opinions are our own. Being cooped up at home with the family has been a good way for us to spend time together. We also welcome distractions and play so when I was asked if we wanted to check out Adventerra Games’ new board game called Water Game I was, well, game. In Water Game each player is not only trying to win on their own but each player has to have a minimum number of gallons of water or everyone loses. It a cross between a competitive and cooperative game. The kids and I sat down to play. I read the directions which were very simple overall. It was simply four pages of information r rather one page folded in half. So, the instructions were very quick and straightforward. You don’t even know how many times just reading the directions of a game put the kids off wanting to play. However, we were able to jump right in. Each player gets a little fish character to use to swim downriver. They also ha...

Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00485 I helped my dad today. He called me last night and asked if I would help him put in some windows at a house he was working on. He’s replaced all the windows in this house over the years and was on the last two. We did uphold social distancing as the window was 7 feet wide and we each had to hold onto one end. Then when the window was in we were separated by the glass, plus our masks. It was good to see my dad outside of a zoom window. Our family has been having zoom sessions once a week and while they are great and nice to see everyone I’d much rather be able to see everyone in person. I don’t know when it will be safe to gather once more. I don’t put that much faith in early loosening of restrictions. We’ve got masks though and do the hand washing so at least there is that and that is more than so many other people are doing. Earlier this week I went to the supermarket to get groceries. I only do this once a week, alone and masked. I see so many people who do no...

Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00484 Today is National Superhero Day. Allison has been making masks and she found some great material that have the Marvel superheroes on it. She made this one for me that has Iron Man showing quite prominently. I wore it for the better part of the morning. First thing I did was take Andy over to America’s Best Defense because we could pick up our new belts. We both earned our green belts and also our first stripes on those belts. We continue to take classes every Monday and Wednesday via Zoom. I brought Andy back to the house and then went out again to the Post Office and then Stop & Shop. It is hard being out and about. Things needed to get done. Groceries needed to be picked up and masks needed to be mailed out. I could not believe how many people were not wearing anything over their mouths and noses or if they were wearing masks the masks were not completely covering their mouths and noses. Not very effective. I’ve been thinking on national superhero day and h...

Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00483 While we are homebound during the quarantine there are some things that we have been doing to pass the time. The kids have been doing some silly food stuff. They have been taking turns picking foods for each other to eat while blindfolded. For the most part I think it is another way to sneak in more snacks. They have been pretty nice to each other doing this although Andy did give Eva some cauliflower crackers to try. They are the size and shape of Cheez-Its but they are definitely NOT Cheez-Its. Such an aftertaste! I don’t think we’ve falen quite far enough from decent snacks to choose those if not blindfolded. It took a global pandemic but Eva has found that her personal workspace in the house was not cutting it with so much clutter. She has begun to take some really good steps toward having an organized and clean workspace. We have not even been harping on her about it. During April vacation we started working on an escape puzzle. The puzzle was called The Cur...