Board Game Strategy: Yahtzee Jr. Toy Story Edition

Board games are an excellent way to teach your kids critical thinking skills while having fun.  Your kids won't even realize that you're educating them.  My daughter and I have played many games of Yahtzee Jr.:  Toy Story Edition.  The Toy Story Edition is much simpler than the regular version of Yahtzee, but there are still several critical thinking opportunities.  The basic idea behind this version of Yahtzee is to roll five dice that have faces of the Toy Story characters.  You get 3 tosses of the dice to roll as many of one character as possible.  

Yahtzee Jr.:  Toy Story game board

Once you use that character, that character cannot be used the rest of the game.  The game continues until all five characters are used.  Then you count up the points and whoever has the most wins.  So where is a critical thinking skill needed?  Take a look at one possible roll below.

A roll of 2 Buzz's, 2 T-Rex's, and 1 Jessie.  Keep the Buzz's or T-Rex's?

In the roll above should one keep the T-Rex's or the Buzz Lightyears's?  It may seem like it doesn't matter (assuming you haven't already used one of the characters), but it does.  In this game one of the dice has a Zerg (sp?) character on it.  If you roll a Zerg, that die is taken out of your turn.  It can't be rolled again, leaving you with a disadvantage.  I'm competitive and don't like to lose, so I want to remove this disadvantage if possible.  So on rolls like this, I've taught my daughter to look for Zerg.  Choose the character whose die has the Zerg on it.  That way Zerg can't be rolled in any of remaining rolls of the turn.  This gives you a greater chance of keeping all 5 dice.  In this particular roll, the Zerg is located on one of the T-Rex dice.  Thus it is more advantageous to to keep the T-Rex's and re-roll the others.  

Zerg is bad.

My wife thinks this is cheating.  She doesn't think it's fair to look at the other sides of the dice, but I disagree.  This act is not forbidden in the instructions, therefore it is legal.  :-)

Even though this is a game for young children, there are opportunities to teach your kids critical thinking skills that will help them for the rest of their lives.  Look for opportunities such as this in other board games.  I'll post these on my blog as we play them at home.