Home School in the Woods now offers many of their hands-on history projects Á La Carte. We received War to end all Wars file Folder Game. The game question that runs through our house now is “Mom, you want to play the game we made?” “Dad? Are you busy? Want to play a game? Do you want to be the Germans or the French?”
Who is Home School in the Woods?
The Paks are a homeschooling family who saw a need and decided to fill it. 🙂 You can read more about their journey here. Starting with timelines and then broadening out to whole units of study and games as well. They are an interesting company and puts out excellent materials. 
How did we use it?
The War to End all Wars came as a PDF. I found that printing off was easy to do. Though admittedly… I messed up but my lad took charge and got it all sorted out easily enough. Handy to have a smart 12 year old around (even if he does shake his head at his mother). 🙂
We liked having the option between colour and black/white, a suggestion from my son was to have some of the images with colour, or at least a variation that can still be seen in black and white. He had a specific idea but I can’t recall exactly what that was. Our printer is black and white so it was great to have that option, and colouring in the flags was a nice time to chat with my lad. THOUGH we found out after I coloured half of them in that I had done them wrong (see the above). The lad told me not to bother colouring them in again as he liked them in black and white. 🙂 (and didn’t want me to think I had wasted my time … he’s a kind lad)
The lad took two days to put the game together. Cutting out the pieces, tapping them together, and gluing down the pages to the file folder. The game was enjoyed by all members of our household, the lad likes playing. He wins against me, but his dad is prone to win against him. So it all evens out quite nicely.
I printed it out on regular paper as opposed to cardstock for two reasons. Our printer can be finicky with cardstock AND before we played the game I wasn’t sure if it would be enjoyed by my lad. This thinking led to me going with the cheaper paper. KNOWING full well that if we enjoyed the game a lot and wanted to play it more often, it would be easy enough to print off the parts we needed to have in cardstock. By then I would be willing to play around with our finicky printer. 🙂
My son enjoys this game so much that he made weights to go on the bottom of the game pieces and has plans that as soon as the playing pieces look too banged up he’ll print them up on cardstock and we’ll play even more. 🙂
Our thoughts:
In case it hasn’t been readily apparent in this review, let me state it very clearly. My son LOVES this game and is so glad we have it. He really like strategy games and pitting his wits against another person. He thinks through what he wants to do and this game allows him to do that. I foresee us playing this game often, particularly next year when he wants to study the world wars. But for now.. Fridays will be a good time to keep playing eh?
The only thing I would change if I could figure out how to do it, would be to make it a three or four player game, then all of us could play at once. But I don’t know how to make that happen, and just thinking about it makes it feel way to complicated so having it as a two-player game is probably the best option.
One of the things my lad did was to make small clay discs to weight each of the playing pieces down. He says the game is very fun and he loves the strategy involved.
We had a hard time choosing which of the a la carte items we wanted. This one on the 95 theses intrigued as did the timeline of World War II. I may end up picking that course up for my son’s studies next year on the wars. I have also been looking at their other war related items.
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Home School in the Woods. A la carte items. War to End all Wars File Folder Game. File folder game, World war 1 game. Digital product. |
100 members of the Homeschool Review Crew were looking at the various ala carte items. Click here or below.
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