 Hey everybody, welcome to Waldoch Way. I'm Jessica, and today's video is a game school video. So we are coming to the end of our game school series. In case you have no clue what I'm talking about for the past four days here on my YouTube channel, I have been sharing our games, our game school favorites off of our game school shelf based off of subject. So today is day five, which means I've already shared four days' work. So if you've missed them, I'll link them up here. What I've shared already has been our favorite math games, our favorite language arts games, our favorite geography and history, and our favorite science. Today, I'm gonna be sharing our favorite logic and critical thinking games. So these are gonna be all the games that kind of fire your brain up, train your brain a little, make you think a little, maybe a little digital discrimination. They're the ones that I have on our list of things that we do during our brain training time, which is what we do kind of during breakfast in the first of the morning to wake Emily up and really get her brain firing. I've been screwing them a lot lately too because Emily's really, really been enjoying them. Now I'm gonna split these up. I haven't split any of the other series up, but I am gonna split these up. The first set of games that I'm gonna show, you're all gonna be single player logic or critical thinking games, because if you are like me and you're homeschooling and only, sometimes having single player games is a necessity. You need to have something that you can hand them and say, here, go do this and you don't need me for it. So I'm going to share those first. Then I have a small stack of ones that can be played with one player, but also can be played with multiple. And then I have ones that are multiple players. So we're gonna start with the single player logic games. First up, we're gonna share some of our think fun ones because they are some of our favorites. Some of these I only have the bag for, so I'm gonna share the cards. The first one I have is balanced beans. This is a fun game where you have this little balance board and you have these cute little beans and the challenge cards that they give you will set it up and then you have to try to balance it with the other beans that you have left. Now, what I love about most of the think fun games is that they have these cards, like I mentioned, and they range with 40 to 60 and most of them and they always range from easy to super hard. So you can buy one game and it can grow with your kid if you buy it when they're young or you can buy one game in multiples of your kids and different ages can play them. In fact, this one, I'm gonna show you this one next, is called Sweet Logic. I think if they rebranded it Chocolate Fix Now is what it's called, but it's pretty much the exact same game. This one I actually asked for for myself for Christmas one year because I loved it. It is essentially Sudoku with little pink, white, and black chocolates with some type of Sudoku kind of thing. So you have like all these different puzzles and you have to try to solve them. And again, they range from easy to expert in this case. Emily can play it, I can play it. It's fun for both of us. A lot of times if she wants me to play with her, which doesn't happen often, but occasionally she will, she'll play a card and then I play a card and we just kind of alternate back and forth like that. The other one, sorry, they're a little loud, I apologize. The she really loves is rush hour. I happen to pull the rush hour junior deck out of here. We have rush hour junior, we have rush hour and then you can actually buy subsequent decks for rush hour. So I think we have rush hour two and three, the decks of cards because you can play it with the same things. But basically, this is a little board and you have all these little cards and each card gives you a different set up and then you have to move the cards back and forth to be able to get the ice cream truck out. Or I don't remember, it's not the ice cream truck, it's a different truck I believe in the rush hour, but it's the same game. It's just not an ice cream truck. And next up we have Think Fun. This one is called Hoppers. This opens and it has all the little frogs and the cards inside it. So it's a really great one for traveling. We almost always throw this in my purse for restaurant. It is very similar, at least it reminds me of the Cracker Barrel little peg jumping game because that's basically what you're doing. So the card shows you where to put your little frogs and you set your little frogs up on here and then as a frog jumps, you take that one out and you're trying to get only one frog left, that's how you solve it. Again, there's 40 cards and they range from easy to super hard. Next are some of the IQ games. These are great for traveling because they come in these nice little cases. We have quite a few of them. They all are very similar as far as they come in a little case. They have a little booklet that ranges from easy to hard and you are trying to solve the puzzle basically. So this one is the IQ arrows. This one is the IQ stars. This one is IQ love. It's got like a little heart. And then this one is IQ digits because the little things that you use are actually the numbers. I'm gonna be honest with you, Emily enjoys them all. She doesn't really have a preference. I would just buy whichever one's the cheapest. Like I think that's how we've gotten so many is they go on, one specific one goes on sale and I buy it to add to our collection. So I would just look up IQ single player games and whichever one is the cheapest, that's the one I would add if I was being you. Next up we have logic links. This one is very simple but fun. So you get just a simple card. There's 160 puzzles in here but you get a card that's gonna just tell you kind of like a puzzle. And so it tells you that you're gonna use three green chips and two orange chips. So you pull them out a little chip bag and then the clue is no chip touches another chip of the same color. So you would have to arrange them. Obviously for me that's easy because it would be green, orange, green, orange, green. But anyway, but they're not always that easy. So example for number 10, you would get two blue chips, an orange chip and a green chip. And then it tells you clue number one, the blue chip touches another chip. Clue number two, the orange chip is directly on the left of the blue chip and clue number three is a blue chip is directly on the left of a green chip. So you have to try to solve them by putting the little chips where they go and yes their answers are included. Hey stacks, we have all of them. When you look the stacks games up, there's cat stacks, dog stacks, hay stacks, sea lye, some sort of ocean based stack game. But basically it's kind of like Tetris. So you get a card that has like a little outline and you have to use the animal pieces to fill that line, not go over it and not have any of it still all brown. So it's like Tetris with these little animal pieces. We have them all just because I like to vary it to give only something new. But again, they all play very similar. So I would literally buy, unless your kid is like obsessed with ocean animals with them by the ocean one. But if they don't have a preference and they just love all animals by whichever one's cheapest because it's all the same gameplay and they all have about 30 to 36 puzzles within them. Next we have logic dice kind of like the logic links. It's dice, dots and deductions. So this is kind of a pain to open. So I'm just gonna show you the back. You get these cards and you're trying to arrange the dots to solve that puzzle. We have dog and cat crimes. These both play the same. It's the exact same gameplay. If you have a cat lover, then get cat crimes. If you have a dog lover, get dog crimes. If you have one who loves both buy whichever is on sale or whichever one's cheaper. But basically you have this little game board and you have all these cats or all these dogs and there is something that they've done. So one of them spilled the food or they ate the bird and you're trying to figure out who it is based off of their placement on this board. Again, that's think fun. So there's 40 different challenges and they're gonna range from easy to hard. And then the same with all four of these. They're also think fun. And so they're gonna have those challenges that range from easy to hard. I think these have a few more. I wanna say they have maybe up to 60 challenges. Yeah, 60 on these. This is laser maze. So again, it's gonna give you a card. You're gonna set it up and then you're gonna try to solve it to make the laser be able to shoot between all of them and not have a stopping point. Very similar with circuit maze. You're gonna have a card or a challenge. You're gonna pick which one. You're gonna set it up and then you're gonna try to complete the circuit. And there's 60 cards in that one as well. Gravity maze is very similar. You have 60 cards. You're gonna pick a card. You're gonna set your puzzle up and then you're gonna try to finish it. And this one, you drop the ball in the tallest one and it should roll through them, almost similar to the roller coaster one and it comes out the other side. And then roller coaster challenge is one that only has 40 but this one is probably one that's gotten the most play and absolutely loves it because it gives you a card and it gives you a few starting points but then you are putting all the pieces together. And it even has like the little tiny roller coaster and you have to try to get it all the way to the end of the roller coaster line once you've completed the puzzle. So that's another one that she really enjoys. Okay, so that's all the single player games. Like those are ones that are made for one player. Again, if Emily wants me to play with her we just take turns with any of them. Like she does a challenge, I do a challenge. The next few games I'm gonna show you are ones that could be played with one player but can also be played with more. The first one is Canoodle Gravity. This is another Tetris-like game. It's made for one to two players. So as one player, you would just dump all of these little pieces out and you would challenge yourself to get them back in. You know, obviously without pieces sticking out. As a two player game, you're taking turns putting pieces in. Let's pretend she put this one in like this and then whoever is the last player to put something in it, stick out and there not be another choice is the loser. So you're trying to force them into a spot where they can't get their schoolie in but also make sure that yours are already already in. So that's Canoodle Gravity. And then Brain Waves. There's actually a third kind of Brain Waves but it hasn't gone on sale so we only have two. We have the Astute Goose and the Wise Whale. They're both fun memory brain type games for the whole family and this one can be played with one to four players. This one can be played with one to five players and they both are about a 15 minute game so not very long at all. Then we have Puzzle Match. This is a game that can be played with three year olds and up which is kind of fun. It can be played with one player although with one player you wouldn't be racing and you wouldn't get to ding the really cute bell. They give you varying difficulties but basically there's a match puzzle type of thing and you have these blocks. Everybody has five blocks and their blocks have two pictures on each side and you're trying to arrange them to match whatever the card is and whoever does that first rings the bell, gets that card, whoever ends up with the most cards wins. This is one that's been pulled off the shelf a lot lately probably because it has the little bell and lays obsessed with games with bells. Maybe it's all kids. If it's all kids and your kids are obsessed with them too let me know down in the comments. Okay so all of the rest of these games are going to be multiplayer logic games. You could probably get creative and play them single player but they're not meant to be played that way. So first up we have Spot It. This is hands down the most played game in our house. Period ever, not just home school but it's the most played game. We have regular Spot It, we have Harry Potter Spot It, we have Christmas Spot It, we have Halloween Spot It, we have Easter Spot It, we have Star Wars Spot It, you name it, camping, ocean, whatever. If they make it, we own it. There is probably at least two different Spot It in my purse at all times. There's almost always one in our morning basket or on our table or somewhere. It is one of those quick games that plays very fast that you don't have to know how to read that anybody can learn to play. Like it's the one thing if somebody comes over and they're like, hey, you wanna play a game and it can be anybody and was like, yep, Spot It because she knows she can teach it to them in less than five seconds and they can be playing a game and it's not complicated. It's just one of those games. And then it really, really works on her visual discrimination and her speed. And to be honest, she's gotten really good. Like really, really good. This is what it looks like. Every card has one and only one match and you're trying to find it in case you don't know what Spot It is. I will say, when Emily and I first started playing and it was just her and I, she knows this now. She didn't know this at the time. When I would deal the cards, I would be very, very quick and I would deal one to her and two to me. One to her and two to me. That way I was starting with the stack twice as big as her. So even though I was faster, I was giving her a chance because I didn't know how to play the game and slow myself down. Like it's just a fast game. I physically could not slow myself down. And so that's what I did when we started playing when she was three or four because at the time I didn't realize that there were junior versions of Spot It. The junior versions have like six pictures and they're larger. The regular Spot It have about nine and they're smaller. So if you are playing with, I would say three to five year old, maybe you get the junior. Anything older, you get the regular or if you're gonna play the regular with a younger kid, just give yourself more cards and then it makes it a little more fair. Another game that is probably right up there with Spot It for how much it gets played in our house is Blink. Like I think it's advertised as the world's fastest game and it has got to be the world's fastest game. Basically, you have two piles laying on the table in front of you. Everybody, as in the two players, has an equal amount of cards. When they flip their first card, like if these are the two laying on the table, this can go here because it's green or because it has one. This can go here because it's three. This can go in either because it's green. I'm trying to see the cards. This can go here because it matches the shape. So basically you can play a card based off of it matching the color, the shape, or the number on it. So it's really, really fast. Again, when we first started playing it, I would give myself more than I would give Emily because the first player out of cards is the winner. Now I don't do that. Like she can kick my butt nine times out of 10. I'm not taking it easy on her. Another one that I love and it fits really nicely in my first, this is GoTrio. So if you've ever heard of the game, O-Trio, which is normally a larger plastic or wooden. If you have the wooden ones, those are the nice ones. Boards, they can be played with up to four players. GoTrio can only be played with three. It works really well with two because you just take a piece out to make it more fair. But this is small. Let's see, it's the size of my hand. We play this a lot at restaurants. Normally a Spotted, a GoTrio, and probably one other type of thing. And then a single player game or in my purse all the time for one more on the go. This is fun. It's like Tic-Tac-Toe, but it's three-dimensional Tic-Tac-Toe because if you can see, you have a small, medium, and large ring. And so to win, you either have to have all of the same size, so like all large rings, or small, medium, large, or yeah, small, medium, large, all the same size. I think that's it. I think that's the only two ways. So you guys have to be all the same size are like from biggest to littlest, or they can all be inside each other. Like if you get one hole with all three colors. Anyway, it's a lot of fun. It's like three-dimensional Tic-Tac-Toe almost. Okay, because we like Spotted type games so much, those fast-paced games, speedy words has been a lot of fun because you basically have a stack of cards. So this is gonna be your stack and that is a symbol of a world, which there's a little cheat sheet right here that's gonna tell me that's a country. So when I flip this over, you have to think of a country that starts with one of those three letters. Same thing like that's a chicken, so that's an animal. So when I flip this over, you have to think of an animal that starts with one of those three letters. So it's fun and it's like really fast-paced. So it's logic, but I also find that it's more educational than that because then there's been countries that I've said that then we've ended up going down a rabbit trail on one is like famous people. So I think I said, I don't remember who, but a famous person once and then we ended up going down a rabbit trail on that later. So it's been a lot of fun because there's a lot of like side things that you can do with that one. Brain flip is basically you lay the cards out in a three by three square and essentially one person picks one of those cards and like keeps it in their head and then the other person asks just or no questions, trying to figure out which card they've picked. So it's kind of like a guess who, but the flip part of it is you're answering opposite. So if your thing that you picked is an animal and you're asked, is it an animal? You have to say no, which then the other person is supposed to know is the opposite and it means yes. So you're like flipping your brain and it still sounds like that would be easy, but it's so not because you're like, oh wait, no, okay. Well, wait a minute, no, it's opposite. It's really like a brain trip. It's crazy, but it's really fun and it stretches your brain in a good way. Okay, next we have Quick Pucks. This one is a lot of fun. You have these cards. Actually, I can probably take this one. This one's not too difficult. And guess what? It has a bell, you guys. I told you, Emily loves bell. Let's see if I can get all the pieces out to make this make sense. I can't get that one out. Okay, you have a card that looks like this and then you have these little pucks in a disc and you can't pick the pucks up, but you can slide them. So you have to slide them around in the thing until you make it match the card. Whoever does that first rings the bell and then whoever gets the most cards wins. And there's two different levels on the cards. There's orange and red, the orange, I think the red are the easier and the orange are the harder. But there's two different levels. So not all the cards are as hard as the others. So this one on the front right here is one of the easier ones. And then the one I showed you guys was one of the harder ones. Okay, next we have Sherlock Express. This is, you're helping Sherlock find Moriarty's accomplice. Basically, you have a card in the middle that is the bad guy and then you're throwing these type of cards down that's like, okay, he's not wearing a hat but you don't just have this in the middle, you have them all the way around. So there's six, I believe, out at a time and you're throwing these kind of things down, like, okay, he doesn't have this, he doesn't have this. And then eventually, whoever figures out the quickest, okay, it's out of this six here, process of elimination, it has to be this one, they slap that one. And then if they've rolled all of them out, you slap the deck that's left, making it this guy. It reminds me, if you know Outfoxed, that's a game that we love when Emily was younger. It reminds me a little bit of Outfoxed but a little older and quicker pace. It's for ages seven and up, but it plays really fast. It plays in less than 10 minutes. So I really like those quick win games sometimes, especially ones that are quick wins, we can play fast and that happen to work or brand at the same time, like I'm all for that. All right, next we have Canoodle head to head. We have regular Canoodle somewhere but we can't find it anywhere. It's similar to these IQ games that I showed you that's a single player. This one is a two player. So it's basically the same thing as Canoodle as far as you have the little ball pieces and you are trying to solve a puzzle. So here's one of the challenge cards. It gives you two or three different pieces to put down but the difference is that you're racing your opponent. So for example, this would stand up in the middle Emily and I would both be able to see it and we would be racing to get all of our little pieces that I just threw on the little grid, the fastest and whoever does that is the winner. So here's the little grid that you're trying to fill up. So if you've played regular Canoodle just think about that competing with somebody which technically you could do that with regular Canoodle if you had two but this is probably cheaper than mine too. And you could turn this into a single player game because you could just put the card up and have them do the puzzle on their side and it not be head to head. Emily will do that sometimes if we play it and I win multiple times in a row she'll be like, go away, I wanna play by myself to kind of practice and try to get faster at it. That one comes with 80 different cards so quite a few different puzzles to play through. Mastermind kids, this is not a whole lot different than the original mastermind. The only reason we bought this one is because the little pieces are like these little animal things and Emily loves animals but basically you are as the code maker you're creating a code using these different pieces. So like green, I'm sorry, blue, yellow, orange and then the other person keeps putting the pieces on here trying to guess what your code is and then you are putting the red and the white to tell them like that's the right color but in the wrong place or that's the right color and it's in the right place and they're trying to break that code. That one is a lot of fun. It's a code maker versus a code breaker type of game. I'm gonna call this blockus, you might call it blocus. However you say it, it's the same game but this is the duo version. So that original blockus is four different colors and four different players which was fine but it typically is just me and Emily playing and trying to remember to play two different colors was just frustrating. So I just bought this for us. So it's just a smaller board and it's just two colors so it's black and white. It's a Tetris style game but you're trying to lay more of your pieces. You can lay corner to corner and they can do the same and you can start kind of overlapping when you want basically to lay more of your pieces than the other person laid of theirs. So you wanna get them into a position where they can't lay any more pieces. So it is a very, very strategic. Next up we have Sero. I may not be saying that right. It is one of those games where you create your own journey. It's a path laying game. There's a ton of cards in here so I'm gonna try to show you back here. So it's a board where you're laying all of the different pieces that have lines on them essentially trying to keep yourself on the board by doing the lines. Eventually other people are laying their lines down and you're moving your little stone on their lines. If you run off the board, you die. So the goal is to be the last one standing basically. It is a lot of fun. That one is two to eight players. It's one of the few logic games we have that can play up to eight players and it gets played a lot on family game nights here. I'm gonna try not to make too lot of a mess when I do this. Cubits, which is a visual dexterity discrimination game. So you are flipping over a card right here and then you're all racing to move your little block pieces to match that card. Up to four players can play this but and there's 80 puzzles but they do sell individual add-ons. So for example, the colors that come in here are blue, green, red and purple and they sell like an orange and I believe even a yellow that you could add on so that you could have more players like if you had a family of six. So if you really like that kind of game and you want more, they sell individual ones. That's another one I think you could really play as a single player. You would just use your own board and your own thing. Emily's done it a few times to try to get faster at it just with the cards and her own little thing and nobody else playing with her. So it says two to four but you could make it work as a single player. Clue is one of those classic games that is definitely a brain thinking logic critical type of game. You're trying to figure out who did it. This is the, well, I guess the most original clue that we have. We also have Disney villains clue, Dun Dun Dun Dragons clue, Harry Potter clue. We have some sort of Christmas type clue like the Grinch or something. We really, really like it. It's something that all of us will play and enjoy. So we tend to play it a lot. I think because we loved Outfox so much when Emily was younger and clue was the next kind of logical step for us and it's just become one of those things that we enjoy doing as a family. Normally it's funny because we have a thing whoever wins clue normally gets to pick our movie because we do a movie night and it's hilarious to me because we could play this game tonight and tomorrow night and the next night and if Emily wins she's gonna pick the clue movie every single time, look, every time. She loves it. It's hilarious. That was loud, sorry. The next one I have is No Stress Chess. Not because I think that this is like the perfect chess but I think chess in general belongs in this video and we have multiple versions. I just think that this is a great version to start with which is why I'm sharing it. If you want to add chess to like your home school to your game school and you're like I don't know how to play it, this is what you want. No Stress Chess is super easy because basically you have the board set up and you have cards and you're drawing cards and so it's gonna tell you, you're gonna move a rook and this is how you move your rook. Now you can pick whichever of your works you wanna move but it's like this is what you're gonna do. So the next card is a bishop. This is the piece you're gonna move. This is how a bishop moves and so you move a bishop. So it's really, really helpful for learning how to play chess because it basically walks you through it. Now there's not as much strategy because you're picking a card every time so that you don't get to pick which piece you're moving each single time but it's still just chess pieces and a chess board. So once you know what you're doing you could just play regular chess. You don't have to play with the cards anymore. And then you have all of the strategy of chess that you would have in the original game. And then the last game I have is Labyrinth. This is another one of our favorites. We have so many versions of this. This is the original labyrinth. We have this one. We have Harry Potter. We have Oceans. We have Disney Villains. We probably have five or six different versions because it's so much fun. Basically the board somewhat moves. You're laying tiles and every other row can move and you've picked cards and you have to get your little piece to each of the cards. So you can only look at one card at a time so let me see if I can find one on here. So you can see that one needs to get to this little thing. So once it gets to that little thing it can look at its next card. Whoever gets to all of its cards first wins but you're using, it's constantly shifting. So the Harry Potter one makes the most sense to me because I'm like, oh look it's like the stairs shifting in the movie. And to me it just makes more sense. But anyway, it's a really, really fun game. There is also a labyrinth, Junior. I'm not sure what's different with the Junior because we never had the Junior. We just automatically started with the regular one. Maybe I couldn't find it, maybe it didn't exist. I don't know. But if you have younger kids there is a junior version of this that you might wanna look into. So that's it, that is our top logic and critical thinking based games off of our game school shelf. They get played the most in our home school. Now I would love it if you would leave your favorite logic and critical thinking games in the comments for me because I'm always looking to add more to our game school shelves and we'll play more games. Now I have been sharing our top five games from the category at the end of each video so that you would kinda know what our top picks are. Well, five to six, some videos I've shared six. And that's what I'm gonna do in this video because I feel like there was categories in this video. So I'm gonna try to share a few of the most played single player games, one that could be single or multiple player and then some that were multiple player because you might be looking for different things. So the top single player game, one of the tops, this is in no specific order would be rush hour. Again, it doesn't have to be junior, that's just the one I happen to grab. So rush hour, cat or dog crimes, whichever your cat happens to get played more in our house because it lays a cat lover, but either one would work, okay. For the one that could be single or multiple player, that would be the match puzzle one. This one has been getting a ton of play lately. Again, it could just be because of the bell, but she really does love it. And then for the multiplayer ones, Blockus, this is my personal favorite. I'm going to pull this every single time Emily asks me to play a game like every time if it's just the two of us. Clue, because it's one that the entire family loves and the same with labyrinth. We all really love both of these and that's hard sometimes for us to find. So that is my top six logic and critical thinking games.